“American Jews Isolate Themselves from Palestinian
Experience,” Says Peter Beinart
Allan C. Brownfeld, Editor
Special Interest Report
December 2013
The American Jewish community has, argues Peter Beinart, the author of “The
Crisis of Zionism,” largely isolated itself from the experience of Palestinians
living under Israeli occupation and live in what he calls “the American Jewish
Cocoon.”
Writing in The New York Review of Books (Sept. 26, 2013), Beinart declares:
“Speak to American Jews long enough about Israel and you begin to notice
something. The conversation may begin with Israel, but it rarely ends there. It
usually ends with ‘them.’ Express concern about Israeli subsidies for West Bank
settlements and you’ll be told that the settlements don’t matter because ‘they’
can’t accept Israel within any borders. Cite the recent warning by former Shin
Bet head Yuval Diskin that ‘over the past 10-15 years Israel has become more and
more racist’ and you’ll be told that whatever Israel’s imperfections, it is
‘they’ who teach their children to hate and kill. Mention that former prime
minister Ehud Olmert has called Mahmoud Abbas a partner for peace and you’ll be
told that what ‘they’ say in Arabic is different from what they say in English.”
Beinart reports that, “This spring I watched the documentary ‘The Gatekeepers’ —
in which six former heads of the Shin Bet sharply criticize Israeli policy in
the West Bank — with a mostly Jewish audience in New York. Afterward a man
acknowledged that it was an interesting film. Then he asked why ‘they’ don’t
criticize their side like Israelis do. I used to try clumsily to answer the
assertions about Palestinians that so often consume the American Jewish
conversation about Israel. But increasingly I give a terse reply: ‘Ask them.’
That usually ends the conversation because in mainstream American Jewish
circles, asking Palestinians to respond to the endless assertions that American
Jews make about them is extremely rare. For the most part, Palestinians do not
speak in American synagogues or write in the Jewish press. The organization
Birthright, which since 1999 has taken almost 350,000 young Diaspora Jews —
mostly Americans — to visit Israel, does not venture to Palestinian towns and
cities in the West Bank. … The American Jewish Committee’s Global Forum earlier
this year, which advertised sixty-four speakers, did not include a single
Palestinian.”
Guidelines adopted by Hillel, the group that oversees Jewish life on American
college campuses, Beinart points out, makes it almost impossible to invite
Palestinian speakers. These guidelines, he writes, “codify the de facto
restrictions that exist in many established American Jewish groups — make the
organized American Jewish community a closed intellectual space, isolated from
the experiences and perspectives of roughly half the people under Israeli
control. And the result is that American Jewish leaders, even those who harbor
no animosity toward Palestinians, know little about the reality of their lives.”
One consequence of this isolation from Palestinians, Beinart believes, “is a
lack of information, the other is a lack of empathy. Because most American
Jewish leaders have never seen someone denied the right to visit a family member
because they lack the right permit, or visited a military court, or seen a
Palestinian village scheduled for demolition because it lacks building permits
that are almost impossible for Palest¬inians to get, it is easy for them to
minimize the human toll of living, for forty-six years, without the basic rights
that your Jewish neighbors take for granted.”
The lack of familiarity with Palestinian life, Beinart argues, “also inclines
many in the organized American Jewish world to assume that Palestinian anger
toward Israel must be a product solely of Palestinian pathology. … By walling
themselves off from Palestinians, American Jews fail to understand the very
behavior they seek to prevent. … Ignorance is dangerous. I recently spoke to a
group of Jewish high school students who are being trained to become advocates
for Israel when they go to college. They were smart, earnest, passionate. When I
asked if any had read a book by a Palestinian, barely any raised their hands.
Even from the perspective of narrow Jewish and Zionist self-interest, that’s
folly. How effectively can you defend Israel’s legitimacy if you don’t even
understand the arguments against it? But the students are simply reflecting
their elders. … ‘Who is wise?’ asks the Jewish ethical text Pirkei Avot. ‘He who
learns from all people.’ As Jews, we owe Israel not merely our devotion but our
wisdom. And we can’t truly provide it if our isolation from Palestinians keeps
us dumb.”
Of all people, Beinart states, Jews “can relate to stories of dispersion and
dispossession … In strange ways, encount¬ering Palestinians — the very people we
are trained to see as alien — can reconnect us to the deepest parts of
ourselves. Tommy Lapid, the late father of Israel’s most recent political
sensation, Yair Lapid, was a hawk. But one day in 2004 watching an elderly woman
in Gaza’s Rafah refugee camp searching on hands and knees for her medicines in
the ruins of a house destroyed by Israeli bulldozers, he blurted out something
astonishing. He said she reminded him of his Hungarian grandmother.”
Beinart concludes: “By seeing Palestinians — truly seeing them — we glimpse a
faded, yellowing photograph of ourselves. We are reminded of the days when we
were a stateless people, living at the mercy of others. And by recognizing the
way statelessness threatens Palestinian dignity, we ensure that statehood
doesn’t rob us of our own.” •
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