When I received a flurry of death threats in the past few weeks in
response to my stance advocating an end to Israel's occupation of the
West Bank, I remembered a lesson we had learned in the 1960s: If your
people are involved in brutality on the outside, the cruelty and hatred
is certain to reverberate on the inside of your community as well.
"You subhuman leftist animals should all be exterminated" ran one
threat that was titled "Die Die." Another began, "Someone will come to
kill you--you should rot in hell." Well, this is par for the course when
you are critiquing Israeli policy, but what changed my attitude was when
a Web site went up last week that identified me as one of the three major
self-hating American Jews (others were linguist Noam Chomsky and director
Woody Allen), went on to call me a "traitor" to the Jewish people and
then published my home address plus the driving instructions on how to
get there. At that point, the Anti-Defamation League called the FBI.
The climate of hostility toward dissenters in the Jewish world has
risen to new levels of verbal abuse. Tikkun is the only nationally
distributed Jewish magazine to challenge the assumptions of the
occupation, to urge dismantling of the settlements in the West Bank and
to insist that Israel must acknowledge some (not total) responsibility
for Palestinian refugees. Just as we in the anti-Vietnam War movement of
the 1960s saw our opposition as flowing from the highest values of
American democracy, so we in the Jewish peace movement insist that it is
Jewish values that lead us to insist that every human being is created in
the image of God and that the brutality done to the Palestinian people is
as much a tragedy as the brutality being done by Palestinian terrorists
to Israelis.
It is this kind of moral equivalence that infuriates some Jews, who
insist that "no suffering is like our suffering" and that past suffering
warrants present insensitivity to the Palestinian people. Many Jews are
unwilling to acknowledge that Israel is the only side in this struggle
that has an army, that Palestinians have had 10 times as many deaths as
Israelis and that this time it is the Palestinians who are closed in to
small areas and prevented from getting food, education and medical care.
It seems so much easier to blame the victims and become furious at the
messengers who are raising serious moral objections to Israeli behavior.
And the same dehumanization used against Palestinians now begins to
emerge against peace-oriented Jews. Never mind that my son served in the
Israeli army, that I am a strong supporter of Israel or that I lead a
Jewish renewal synagogue in San Francisco. For these right-wing
extremists, I am nothing but "a self-hating Jew."
In the months before Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was
assassinated, there were similar charges against him. In Israel it is now
against the law to make that kind of charge, because people have come to
realize how easy it is for hateful language to become violent action. But
even when it doesn't go to violence, this kind of language scares many
people and makes them feel reluctant to speak out. Our magazine has lost
subscribers and donors as people feel scared to identify with an
outspoken voice on these questions.
When people ask me what to do in response to all this, I have two
answers: First, the best way to fight hate is to put out more love into
the world. Even the haters are people who are severely wounded, and those
wounds can best be dealt with by compassion rather than by hating back.
Second, speak out yourself on these questions. Many non-Jews have feared
expressing legitimate criticisms of Israel, thinking that they would be
interpreted as anti-Semitism. Last week visiting Syria, the pope stood
silently when President Bashar Assad uttered standard anti-Semitic
tropes. Only a Christian world that aggressively challenges all remnants
of anti-Semitism can have the legitimacy to critique Israel. What the
Jewish people need is for Christians to denounce anti-Semitism, but
nevertheless to join with progressive Jews in criticizing immoral and
self-destructive policies of the Israeli government.
In the past, I have called for Palestinians to renounce violence and
follow the path of Martin Luther King Jr and Gandhi. It's time to ask the
same of Jews--not only toward the Palestinians, but toward their fellow
Jews as well.
Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun Magazine and author of "Jewish Renewal: A Path to Healing and Transformation" (Harpercollins, 1995 ) E-mail: Rabbilerner@tikkun.org.
Copyright © 2001 Los Angeles Times
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