“American Jews Isolate Themselves from Palestinian Experience,” Says Peter Beinart

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.” •