Israel’s 50-Year Occupation Is Challenging Judaism’s Moral Integrity

As the world marks 50 years of Israeli control of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and the construction of settlements housing approximately 700,000 Israelis in violation of international law, many believe that the Israeli government intends that the occupation be permanent.

On August 28, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attended an event celebrating the settlements deep in the West Bank. He assured Israelis that Jews are never leaving the area that was meant to be a Palestinian state. According to Ynet, Netanyahu declared: “This is the inheritance of our forefathers. This is our country. We came back here to stay forever. There will be no more uprooting of settlements in the Land of Israel.”

It is clear that Israel’s current government has abandoned any effort to achieve a two-state solution. In a column entitled “Netanyahu’s No-State Solution Marches On,” columnist Roger Cohen writes in The New York Times (Sept. 9, 2017) : “Members of Netanyahu’s right-wing government outdo each other with obscene schemes for annexation of large areas of the West Bank, or the expulsion of Arabs from Israel proper. Attacks multiply on a free press, and pro-peace nongovernmental organizations and the ‘left’ in general. The Knesset voted this year to legalize settlement outposts on private Palestinian land in what was called the application of Israeli sovereignty … The no-state solution advances. This is unsurprising. No democracy can be immune to the damage that comes from running an undemocratic system of oppression for a half-century in territory under its control. Israel was conceived as a state of laws. It is not. It betrays its 1948 founding charter.”

Peace Process Ended with a Whimper

Geoffrey Aronson, a scholar at the Middle East Institute, believes that the Middle East peace process “ended with a whimper in 2014. Today, there is less interest in a solution … than at any time since Israel’s creation almost 70 years ago … During the golden years after the Oslo agreement in 1993, diplomats and politicians alike contented themselves with the lazy analytical argument that the parameters of a deal were self-evident. Since ‘we all know what the endgame looks like,’ the goal was simply to establish a mechanism that would produce a peace treaty … conditioned by an agreed upon Israeli withdrawal from most (and as time passed, decreasing percentage) of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.”

In Aronson’s view, “Such silliness passed for statecraft during the Bush and Obama years, and empowered a more determined and hard-headed set of diplomatic priorities. Donald Trump’s sympathies on Palestine are clearly with Israel’s revisionist right-wing. He and his aides have little idea and even less interest about how to approach — let alone solve — the conflict. As a consequence, Netanyahu has abandoned any pretense of interest in or commitment to the evacuation of West Bank territory in order to make room for the creation of a Palestinian state … Israel’s longest serving prime minister has resurrected an old-fashioned orientalist view of Israel’s international role as the long, militant, if civilizing, arm of the West. At the American ambassador’s residence in celebration of the 4th of July, Netanyahu declared: ‘Israel is also an aircraft carrier. It’s an aircraft carrier for Western civilization; for the civilization of freedom.’ Netanyahu is not the first to declare such sympathies. His predecessor Ehud Barak famously described Israel as ‘a villa in the jungle.’ … Greater Israel as a valued defender and enforcer of the West … pushes the prospect of consequential Israeli territorial concessions in the West Bank off the table.”

In September, at a right-wing conference featuring members of the Knesset from the ruling government coalition, a plan was set forth to deprive Palestinians living in the West Bank of any political rights. According to Mondoweiss (Sept. 14, 2017), Bezalel Smotrich, an MK from the Jewish Home party, presented “The Decision Plan” to the conference: “It lays out a way for Israel to annex Palestinian territory and to coerce the population to live under Apartheid, explicitly relinquishing ‘national aspirations’ or be expelled.”

Two Options for Palestinians

Under this plan, Palestinians would be given two options: (1) “Anyone who is willing and able to relinquish the fulfillment of his national aspirations will be able to stay here and live as an individual in the Jewish state.” (2)”Anyone who is unwilling or unable to relinquish his national aspirations will receive assistance from us to emigrate to one of the Arab countries.”

Haaretz correspondent Yotam Berger called this a “surrender-or-transfer ultimatum.” Earlier, Smotrich set forth his ideas in the Knesset. Writing in a +p972 Magazine article entitled “The Right’s Plan to beat Palestinians in submission,” Samah Salaime reported that, “It’s as racist as you think.”

Open declarations of racism are increasing in Israel. Following reports that there is a de facto policy of racial segregation in maternity wards, Smotrich tweeted, “It’s natural that my wife wouldn’t want to lie down (in a bed) next to a woman who just gave birth to a baby who might want to murder her baby twenty years from now.” His wife Revital supported his view and told Israel’s Channel 10 that she had “kicked an Arab obstetrician out of the delivery room. I want Jewish hands to touch my baby, and I wasn’t comfortable lying in the same room with an Arab woman. I refuse to have an Arab midwife, because for me giving birth is a Jewish and pure moment.”

Contempt for Palestinians

Contempt for Palestinians and their rights is regularly expressed by those currently in power in Israel. Israel’s top diplomat, Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotavely (Likud), in her inauguration speech in May 2015, declared, “The land is ours. All of it is ours. We did not come here to apologize for that.” Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked (Jewish Home), stated that, “Zionism should not continue, and I say here it will not continue, to bow down to the system of individual rights interpreted in a universal way.”

Haaretz (Sept. 10, 2017) columnist Roger Alpher published an article, “Israeli Minister Shaked Takes After Mussolini.” He wrote that she was literally a fascist, referring to a speech where Shaked said, “Zionism should not continue, and I say here, it will not continue to bow down to the system of individual rights …” In Alpher’s view, the minister’s announcement of a “moral and political revolution” aimed at strengthening national principles at the expense of universal individual rights was comparable to Mussolini’s “doctrine of fascism.” He cited Mussolini’s “revolutionary negation” of individualism and liberalism, in which the nation “was a superior, super-personal reality … a moral law, a tradition, a mission binding together generations past, present and future and all the individuals.”

Another Haaretz journalist, Gideon Levy, thanked Shaked for “telling the truth” and for “speaking honestly.” And that truth, Levy declared, is that, “Zionism contradicts human rights and thus is, indeed, an ultranationalist, colonialist and perhaps racist movement.” He notes that, “Zionism is Israel’s fundamentalist religion, its denial is prohibited in Israel. ‘Non- Zionist’ or ‘anti-Zionist’ aren’t insults, they are social expulsion orders. There’s nothing like it in any free society. But now that Shaked has exposed Zionism, put her hand to the flame and admitted the truth, we can finally think about Zionism more freely. We can admit that the Jews’ right to a state contradicted the Palestinians’ right to their land and that righteous Zionists gave birth to a terrible national wrong that has never been righted: that there are ways to resolve and atone for this contradiction , but the Zionist Israelis won’t agree to them.”

Minister of Education Naftali Bennett (Jewish Home) compared Palestinians to “shrapnel in the butt” and boasted of having killed “many Arabs.” Upon Donald Trump’s election, he said that, “The era of the Palestinian state is over.” He coined the term “auto anti-Semitism,” referring to Jews who express concern for the rights of Palestinians.

Zionists Want the Land, But Not the People

Commentator Jonathan Ofir points out that, “Zionists want the land, but not the people. The whole point is to get rid of whatever is left of Palestine by annexing it. The only problem is what to do with the Palestinian population.” He cites a statement from the late Israeli Minister and Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan, “When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.”

While Israeli settlers enjoy protection from the Israeli army and subsidies from the government, Israel keeps 3 million indigenous Palestinians in the West Bank under military rule with restrictions imposed on nearly every aspect of their lives. While Palestinians live under military law and cannot vote, settlers have the full rights of Israeli citizenship.

Dan Ephron, author of Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel, describes it this way: “… it includes separate legal systems — Israeli law for settlers and much harsher military law for Palestinians — and separate courts that mete out wildly unequal penalties … On Israel’s Independence Day in May, the government’s Central Bureau of Statistics published a report with updated population figures … A map in the report depicted the West Bank as just one more region of Israel, labeling it ‘Judea and Samaria District.’ The population figure, 8.68 million, included settlers who live in the West Bank. But it left out their neighbors, the Palestinians.”

The Israeli government is promoting the idea that the occupied territories are really part of Israel. The Green Line, the border which separates Israel proper from the occupied areas, no longer appears on schoolbook maps or newspaper weather charts. In an article, “How Israel Won the War and Defeated the Palestinian Dream,” Newsweek (Aug. 29, 2017) writes: “By many estimates, Palestinians are now the majority between the river and the sea. A civil rights struggle would have unmistakable echoes of the fight against apartheid. And a single state would likely never have a Jewish majority — an argument the Israeli center-left uses to push for a two-state solution … Liberal American rabbis who visit Jerusalem fret openly that their younger congregants no longer feel an attachment to Israel the way their parents did.”

Subjugation of Palestinians

The Economist (May 20, 2017) declares: “… the never-ending subjugation of Palestinians will erode Israel’s standing abroad and erode its democracy at home. Its politics are turning towards ethno-religious chauvinism … The government objected even to a novel about a Jewish-Arab love affair … To save democracy and prevent a slide to racism or even apartheid, it has to give up the occupied lands.”

Israel’s abandonment of the two-state solution, argues Daniel Levy in The National Interest, leaves the field to those who advocate a single state, some of whom call for the expulsion of Palestinians, and others who seek equal rights for Palestinians: “If the logical endgame of the Netanyahu paradigm is expulsion, then the logical alternative to partition will be equality. National liberation may be a hard sell in the 21st century. Equality over expulsion not so much. The damage Netanyahu has done to the partition paradigm is increasingly irreversible.”

It is Levy’s view that Netanyahu could not have solidified the occupation and destroyed the two-state solution without establishment American Jewish organizations supporting him: “The very fact that these supposedly most liberal of Jewish communal groups have gone to the mats on narrow parochial concerns while failing to speak out on the ongoing denial of the most basic rights of the Palestinians can be notched as another win for Netanyahu.”

In June, Israel’s government backtracked on a decision to create a space at the Western Wall in Jerusalem where men and women could pray together and non-Orthodox rituals could be practiced. American Jewish leaders expressed outrage. Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, said: “We are not going to accept this. It is so insulting. I know there will be a series of responses. The decision delegitimizes the overwhelming majority of Jews on the planet.” Jane Eisner, editor of The Forward, wrote: “Netanyahu has turned his back on pluralistic Jews and that fundamentally changes the relationship between Israelis and the Diaspora.”

Blind Support for Israeli Policies

Eisner admits that the Jewish establishment has almost blindly supported Israeli policies and only laments that Israel has reneged on establishing religious freedom for non-Orthodox Jews in return: “Israel asked Diaspora Jews to ignore the half-century occupation of the Palestinians, to spend millions trying to defeat the Iran nuclear deal, to lobby for billions of American taxpayer dollars for Israel’s military and to send more billions of dollars its way to pay for every sort of charitable fund imaginable. And in return, the American Jewish leadership … asked that non-Orthodox Jews be recognized as Jews, too …”

More than 600 Conservative rabbis wrote a letter to Prime Minister Netanyahu expressing “dismay, anger and a sense of betrayal” over the official discrimination against non-Orthodox Jews. The letter speaks of Israel being a democracy, but only for Jews: “The time has come for Israel to embrace Jewish pluralism as a positive value to ensure the Jewishness of the Jewish state and its democratic values.”

According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the letter was delivered to the Israeli Consul in New York, Dani Dayan, by two Conservative rabbis. It said, in part, “The status quo is no longer tenable or tolerable.” Mondoweiss (Sept. 13, 2017) provided this assessment: “Usually those words, ‘the status quo is untenable,’ refer to Israel’s occupation and treatment of Palestinians. Not for these rabbis. They promise to continue to talk up Israel from their pulpits but, ‘We will speak about Israel as an ideal as portrayed in our liturgy and as reality. We will encourage our community to purchase Israel bonds, to visit, to make Aliyah.’ This letter is a reminder of how four-square the American Jewish establishment stands with Zionism and has for 80 years, and the double standard on human rights for Jews and non- Jews that is today obvious to anyone who considers the American Jewish stance towards Israel.”

Moral Integrity In Question

Judaism’s moral integrity is called into question by the outrage expressed by the Jewish establishment at Israel’s denial of equal rights to non- Orthodox Jews, but total silence when it comes to the treatment of the Palestinians and Israel’s 50-year occupation.

Rabbi Brant Rosen, who serves Tedek Chicago Congregation and also serves as Midwest Regional Director of the American Friends Service Committee, wrote an article in The Forward (July 2, 2017) with the headline, “The Real Wall Problem: When Will Diaspora Jews Fight for Palestinians?” Rabbi Rosen notes that, “While Israel’s oppressive occupation now marks its 50th year and the cause of a just peace remains more remote than ever, our Jewish leaders are still more concerned about the rights of Jews than the rights of all who live in the land … We will willingly violate our own values for you. Just give liberal Jews rights and we’ll remain silent on your unchecked militarism and oppression of the Palestinian people. The silence is all the more egregious given the humanitarian crisis Israel is currently inflicting on the people of Gaza. Now, 11 years into its crushing blockade, the government announced this past month that it would start cutting electricity to the Gaza Strip, a move that could cause 21-hour blackouts just as the heat of the summer is gearing up. Surgeries have already been canceled … Medical equipment is rapidly degrading due to constant fluctuations in electrical currents. The effect of the Israeli blockade upon children is particularly tragic.”

He concludes: “Almost 50% of Gaza’s population is 14 or younger. According to UNICEF, the 2014 war took a heavy toll on children: ‘More than 500 were killed, 3,374 were injured … nearly one third of whom suffered permanent disability, and more than 1,500 were orphaned. Hundreds of thousands were left in trauma.’ I can’t help but ask: where is the moral outrage in liberal Jewish establishments over these cruel human abuses? While I certainly believe in the cause of religious freedom, I find it stunning that so many liberal-minded members of the Jewish community are more concerned with Jewish rights in a Jewish state than the basic human rights of non-Jewish children who live under its control. Such are the sorrows of Jewish political nationalism — even the more ‘liberal’ among us seem only to be able to express their tolerance selectively.”

Violation of Jewish Moral and Ethical Values

While establishment Jewish leaders and organizations remain silent about Israel’s occupation and the treatment of Palestinians, more and more Jewish voices are heard challenging what they believe are serious violations not only of human rights and international law but of Jewish moral and ethical values. These range from J Street to T’ruah to Jewish Voice for Peace to IfNotNow and a host of others.

Writing in Tikkun (May 16, 2017), Rabbi Michael Lerner states that, “I now believe that the best way to reach a two-state solution is to advocate for a short term solution: inclusion of all of the Palestinian people inside the West Bank and Gaza in the democratic process of those who rule over them. Simply put: one person, one vote … If Israel is not prepared to end the blockade of Gaza and help Palestinians create an economically and politically viable state of their own, then it must give all Palestinians a vote in the Knesset elections, since de facto all Palestinians are living under the control of the Israeli state … Although we claim to be for democracy, we are supporting the denial of democracy for the Palestinian people.”

Beyond this, Lerner calls upon Israel to, “End the occupation and the daily violence against Palestinians that is an intrinsic part of almost every attempt by one nation to dominate another by force. Acknowledge Israel’s role in creating the Palestinian refugee problem … Stop calling Israel a ‘democracy’ when it rules over two million Palestinian and does not give them the right to vote in Israeli elections or otherwise participate in shaping the decisions that impact their lives. Stop the building of illegal Jewish settlements on Palestinian land and stop the displacement of any more Palestinians. Accept the validity of U.N. Security Council Resolution 2334 which ‘reaffirms that the establishment by Israel of settlements in Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law and a major obstacle to the achievement of a two-state solution and a just, lasting and comprehensive peace.’”

Voices of Jewish Dismay Are Growing

The voices of Jewish dismay with Israel’s continuing violation of Jewish moral values is growing. It can be seen in the pages of Kingdom of Olives and Ash, an anthology about the occupation edited by husband and wife Jewish novelists Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon. It has been rendered in the film Norman, and in the plays Oslo, If I Forget, and To The End of the Land. Samuel G. Freedman, a contributing editor of the Forward, notes that, “Every one of these works shares a common aesthetic: a profound melancholy, an arching regret, at the peacemaking chances missed. That moment comes at the end of Joseph Cedar’s Norman when, in a kind of dreamy, fantasized sequence, the character of a politician clearly based on Ehud Olmert strikes a peace deal with the Palestinians and is awarded what seems to be a Nobel Prize. In Steven Levenson’s If I Forget, an American Jewish family in the early 2000s argues our Middle East politics in the depressed hangover from the failure of the peace process. Levenson dared to make a sympathetic character — not uncomplicated, but sympathetic — out of an anti-Zionist professor seemingly based in Norman Finkelstein.”

Marcel Ophuls, now 89, is the French Jewish film-maker best known for The Sorrow and the Pity, his nearly 5-hour 1969 examination of Nazi collaboration in France. Ophuls has always been concerned by the question of how ordinary people succumb to madness. For him, that question remains as urgent in 2017 as it was in 1933, the year Hitler came to power. His latest project is a film about Israel and Gaza, tentatively titled Let My People Go. As he puts it, “The thought of Jews bombarding what in my mind is nothing more than a huge concentration camp seems to me unbelievable — and that is Gaza.”

Richard Falk, professor emeritus on international law at Princeton who, in 2008, was appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council, to a 6-year term as U.N. Special Rapporter on “the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967,” points out that the peace process has come to an end. Dr. Falk, who is Jewish, points out that, “Israeli internal politics have been drifting further and further to the right and seem on the verge of producing a consensus that will favor a unilaterally imposed solution that will leave Palestinians squeezed either into barren Bantustans on the West Bank or incorporated into an Israeli one-state solution, in which the best that they can hope for is to be treated decently as second- class citizens in a self-proclaimed Israeli democracy. Beyond this, even these diminished democratic elements in the Israeli reality would be threatened by the prospects of a Palestinian majority, leading many prominent Israelis to throw their democratic pretensions under the bus of ethnic privilege.”

“Jewish Selfishness”

Israel is “a failure,” the Zionist dream has “curdled into Jewish selfishness,” states Rabbi David Gordis, a former executive at the American Jewish Committee, former president of Hebrew College and a former Vice President of the Jewish Theological Seminary. “After a life and career devoted to the Jewish community and to Israel, I conclude that in every important way, Israel has failed to realize its promise for me … Israel is distorted by a fanatic, obscurantist and fundamentalist religion which encourages the worst behavior rather than the best.”

Rabbi Gordis, now a Senior Scholar at the State University of New York at Albany, argues that Israel’s 50-year occupation violates basic Jewish values: “Present day Israel has discarded the rational, the universal, and the visionary. These values have been subordinated to cruel and oppressive occupation … Most depressing of all, is that I see no way out, no way forward which will reverse the current reality. Right wing control in Israel is stronger and more entrenched than ever. The establishment leadership in the American Jewish community is silent in the face of this dismal situation … Israel has failed to realize its promise for me. A noble experiment, but a failure.”

Haaretz columnist Chemi Shalev decries “the deafening silence of most American Jews in response to the waves of chauvinistic anti-democratic legislation and incitement in which Israel is increasingly drowning. The authoritarian campaign includes legislative assaults on free speech, incitement against dissenters, the withholding of government funds for regulatory measures against and greater government control over television and other media, compulsory changes to school curricula, reinforced Orthodox hegemony over religious affairs, and repeated attacks on the Arab minority.”

While Israel proclaims itself a “Jewish state,” more and more Jewish voices are being heard in Israel, the U.S. and throughout the world saying that its treatment of Palestinians violates Judaism’s humane ethical tradition. Prof. David Shulman of Hebrew University declared: “No matter how we look at it, unless our minds have been poisoned by the ideologies of the religious right, the occupation is a crime. It is first of all based on the permanent disenfranchisement of a huge population … in the end, it is the ongoing moral failure of the country as a whole that is most consequential, most dangerous, and most unacceptable. This failure weighs … heavily on our humanity. We are, so we claim, the children of the prophets. Once, they say, we were slaves in Egypt. We know all that can be known about slavery, suffering, prejudice, ghettos, hate, expulsion, exile. I find it astonishing that we, of all people, have reinvented apartheid in the West Bank.”

What It Means To Be Jewish

Speaking to the J Street annual conference in Washington in February, 2017, Tony Klug, a special adviser on the Middle East at the Oxford Research Group, said that support for Israel’s “never-ending” occupation is changing the nature of what it means to be Jewish. “We used to be people devoted to justice,” he said. “Now we have become enablers of Israel’s injustices.”

Klug told J Street that, “If Israel does not end the occupation sharply, and if organized Jewish opinion in other countries appears openly to back it, there will indeed almost certainly be a further surge in anti-Jewish sentiment … Israel’s never-ending occupation of the land and lives of another people, is not just seriously endangering Israel, not to mention deepening the despair of the Palestinians. But it is also making the situation of the Jews around the world increasingly precarious … Time honored Jewish ideals — justice, freedom, equality, peace, mutual respect — have made an extraordinary contribution to human civilization. They lie at the very heart of Jewish identity … We now face the major reality of a state that describes itself loudly and often to be Jewish as … withholding fundamental human rights from millions of people indefinitely. A standpoint that is in total defiance of quintessential Jewish principles … When all is said and done, the bottom line is that the conflict with the Palestinians has dominated and distorted the Jewish world for too long. It is time to bring it to an end and stop the infamy of a half century of military occupation of another people and allow us all to get back to the business of being ourselves.”

If American Jewish organizations persist in embracing Israel’s 50-year occupation and in promoting the Zionist idea of Jewish “ethnicity,” rather than Judaism’s genuine essence as a universal, prophetic religion, and if they continue to make Israel rather than God and the moral values set forth by the Prophets “central” to their idea of Jewish identity, their future seems precarious at best. Judaism’s moral integrity is under attack. Let us hope that its defenders will prevail. •