• This thought deserves fuller treatment than I'm giving it
here, and I mean to expand on it, but still: Just as Weatherman helped
incapacitate the campus based movement against the War in Vietnam — no one has
better documented this than Mark Rudd, who recounts it in his pained and rueful
description of how proto-Weathermen gleefully and fanatically tore up mailing
lists of anti-war students — who needed mailing lists since the revolution was
coming? — so JVP is helping to
hinder or incapacitate a consensus among Jewish students that Israeli policy
towards Palestinians is simply unconscionable.
Just as Weatherman did, JVP inserts division ahead of unity, disfiguring debate.
Just as Weatherman did, JVP massages itself about utopian
solutions far more than urgent possibilities.
I was in Weatherman and hate seeing some of its blind and
stupefying fervor recapitulated into debates about the Middle East.
• Letter to Mark Rudd, who had adopted a JVP position, and thinks
I oppose JVP as I would any thing to the left of my position.
First of all, I don't think of JVP as to the
"left" of my position. I'm not sure those terms apply. I think of JVP
as mischievous and dishonest.
In brief, there's the mass line: apply BDS to products from
the settlements — cool. Behind it, there's the cadre line: Israel is the first
and foremost of illegal settlements; Israel is a colonial settler state —
Leninist lingo lives on, don't it — and the oppression of Palestinians can
only be resolved by annulling Israel and replacing it with a binational state,
Jews and Palestinians, one person one vote.
The mass line — BDS as applied to the settlements is
appealing, to me and others, and draws people to JVP. But the cadre line —
abolish the Jewish state — is the driving and guiding force, the leadership. If
you like I can establish that this is so with ease, as you can too, simply by
going to Omar Barghouti's site.
What did it for me about JVP — as perhaps tearing up
the mailing lists on reflection did it for you — was learning that Barghouti
flipped out when the Pope, on his visit to Israel, paid respects to Herzl’s
grave. The Pope visited with Abbas to show clear Vatican support for a
Palestinian state. That didn't satisfy Barghouti, who saw the Pope honoring
Herzl as a hideous violation of Palestinian rights; for him, for JVP, the Pope
had no business honoring Herzl, because, after all, ZIONISM = RACISM.
Some of problem with JVP stems from this dishonesty. If JVP
could be clear about its support for a "one-state" solution that
would be to its credit, and allow for honest debate. (We can discuss: I'm
against but understand why many at this point are for). But JVP is not honest;
it fudges. At least we were honest about our admittedly
meshugenah
belief in world revolution guided by marxist-leninist-maoist parties.
That's not all of it: I do think Israel is pushing Jews, except
for the religious right, to a consensus sharply critical of Israel. That would
be more obvious on campus were it not for the way debate is being distorted and
hijacked by whether or not you are for JVP. It's nice to think JVP/BDS is at
last a practical way to push Israel to change its policy. (Ah, another parallel
with W'man, for would not armed struggle compel the United States to disengage
from Vietnam the way mass protests on their own would not?) But the truth is
JVP drains energy more than lends it to critique of Israel. Were it not for the
exhausting and dumbfounding debate about JVP I think liberal Jews would be
finding all sorts of ways to press their point, ways more integral than West
Bank goods, maybe, who knows, pertaining to United States military/financial
aid.
(As an aside: of course there is such a thing as liberal
Zionism. Take me: As a liberal, both vis a vis the United States and Israel, I
oppose much of Israeli policy, and have for decades. But do I believe Israel
has a right to exist? Yep. Must be the Zionist in me, the elemental Zionism I
do not disown. Could be how impressed I was by "Exodus" when I read
it as a kid. Could be my memory of how my maternal grandmother, with personal
memory of pogroms, speaking Yiddish, her first language, would mutter that
Israel [my transliteration] hut gerativit — had saved menschen.)
Could be how badly the left now as ever contends with
anti-Semitism.
I think you [Mark] came through the Weather experience
uniquely — self-critically and sanely, with enough political grey matter
remaining to make you worth hearing.
But I think with regard to JVP you are — out of
frustration with Israel, violent impatience for it to change — going through
the same thing twice.
I am often asked in these discussions how I propose to stop
Israel on its awful course. I answer something to the effect that, I write,
arthritis permitting I demonstrate, I read, I talk. I support J St because it
educates and works so far as it can toward a 2-state solution, which is still
the only solution, assuming there is any solution short of war.
And there's the thing, this thing about solution. Why do I
have to know the solution? There are many dire situations on earth that hurt to
think about it. I don't feel in each case I have to know the answer. I've
shrugged off that kind of arrogant global responsibility long ago.
But about the Middle East, I don't think JVP is anything
like a solution, being neither left or right, being just mostly wrong.
There'd be more, and more effective, criticism of Israel, and
more channels for expressing it if JVP had not deranged the debate — yes, much
the way W'man did, when it substituted a debate about armed struggle and global
revolution for a debate about the Vietnam war and civil rights.
Don't tear up sthe mailing lists, Mark. Not again.
