The Jewish Divide on Israel (Page 3)

Charney Bromberg, executive director of the peace and civil rights organization Meretz USA, an affiliate of Israel's left-wing Meretz Party, calls this phenomenon "the Israeli disease," in which a handful of far-right ideologues dictate policy for the moderate masses; he warns that it has now taken root in American Jewish politics. Palestinian suicide bombers and the war on terror, he argues, have increased the right's leverage. "You get this sense in the Jewish community that we're under siege and anyone who challenges the consensus is a traitor who has to be purged," Bromberg says. "The right has the capacity to instantly inflate any expression of civil discourse, doubt or questioning into an act of disloyalty." Historian Michael Staub, author of Torn at the Roots: The Crisis of Jewish Liberalism in Postwar America, says this split in the Jewish community between an institutional mainstream and a liberal/left alternative dates to the early 1970s, when young Jews, who disproportionately populated the New Left, challenged the major Jewish organizations over Vietnam, urban poverty and assimilation. The difference, says Staub, is that then, when dissidents picketed a synagogue or stormed a meeting of the Jewish Federation, the mainstream leadership scrambled to set up meetings. Now, with dissent centered around Israel, mainstream communal leaders attack anti-occupation protesters as self-hating Jews or take steps to shut them out of the debate entirely. "There is a silencing going on at the local level by American Jewish institutions that is very unhealthy," says Brit Tzedek's Freedman.

New to Jewish religious practice and even newer to Israel/Palestine politics, University of Richmond junior Jilian Redford, 20, quickly discovered the Jewish establishment's line in the sand. The elected president of her campus Hillel, she tried to pull together a balanced panel discussion on the conflict, but soon butted heads with her supervisor at the local Jewish Community Center, Lisa Looney. Looney proposed a particular professor as a speaker, and Redford declined, calling the professor "racist" for private comments she'd made that Palestinians, unlike Jews, have an inherent capacity to kill people in cold blood. "Lisa was extremely taken aback by me using such a strong word," Redford recalls. Redford's second strike--there wouldn't be a third--was her angry response in February to several e-mails she had received from the Israeli Embassy: "Could you please stop sending me email after email about radical Zionist propaganda?" she wrote, adding that it was wrong to "encourage us to hate our Palestinian neighbors in Israel." Three weeks later, after a hostile meeting where Looney insisted that Redford apologize to the embassy, Looney dismissed Redford from her post. "I felt that all of my hard work had been completely overlooked because of my political views on Israel," Redford says. "It was like I revealed that I was from some other planet."

Redford's experience follows a familiar pattern. Liz Harr, an activist with Jewish Students for Palestinian Rights at the University of Texas, was denied space at her campus Hillel in spring 2002 when she sought to organize a study group on the history of the conflict. Hillel program directors at UC Santa Cruz and Ithaca College resigned in frustration after being reprimanded for publishing articles supporting Israeli and Palestinian activism against the occupation. "We think the campus is a great place for there to be very open and contentious debate," says Wayne Firestone, director of Hillel International's Center for Israel Affairs. "But that doesn't give people unconditional rights to attack Israel in any manner or any fashion." In fact, Hillel distributes materials that offer "reactive strategies" for responding to "anti-Israel" events, such as a report from GOP pollster Frank Luntz that details how to better market the "pro-Israel" message to Jewish youth.

Hillel is hardly the only enforcer of a narrow "pro-Israel" orthodoxy. After a four-year battle to gain entry, two dovish organizations, Meretz USA and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, were rejected for membership in the Conference of Presidents in December 2002. Some of the conference's most significant organizations, including the Reform movement, supported Meretz's application, but on the Conference of Presidents, it's one organization, one vote, and executive vice president Malcolm Hoenlein (who likes to refer to the West Bank as "Judea and Samaria") had stacked the committee with right-wing groups. When Jewish Voice for Peace applied for a booth at the Bay Area's biggest Jewish community event of the year, Israel in the Ballpark, its application was rejected; the local Jewish Community Relations Council told JVP's program director, Liat Weingart, that JVP didn't sufficiently support Israel. When Drorah Setel, a Seattle rabbi affiliated with the local Jewish organization Pursue the Peace, showed up at a local pro-Israel rally in April 2002 carrying a sign supportive of both Palestinians and Israelis, a representative of the ADL, one of the rally organizers, insisted to police that she was a counterdemonstrator who should be removed; she ended up under arrest. Michael Bernstein, who led the young-adult program at the American Jewish Committee's San Francisco chapter, was dismissed from his voluntary post after he organized a panel discussion on the prospects for peace in Israel/Palestine in which two out of three speakers reflected a left perspective; according to Bernstein, chapter director Ernest Weiner charged up to him at the event and accused him, in profane terms, of bias (Weiner insists that Bernstein left of his own accord).

The consensus is manufactured in more subtle ways as well. For that right-wing pro-Israel rally in Washington, buses at many Jewish federations and Hillels were free, memos about it went out on organizational letterhead and attendance counted as a workday. Employees of such organizations report being strongly discouraged, on the other hand, from sending out notices about peace vigils from work e-mail accounts. "We hear from people constantly, staffers at mainstream Jewish institutions, reporters at Jewish papers and rabbis who say in hushed tones, 'I agree with you, but I can't say anything,'" says Cecilie Surasky, a spokesperson for JVP. "A rabbi will say, 'I totally support you, but my congregation is too conservative'; then a synagogue member will say, 'I can't say anything because my rabbi is too conservative.' There's an incredible amount of fear." Marcia Freedman of Brit Tzedek says that when she speaks to Jewish audiences, the room is typically split between supporters of the Sharon government and supporters of a negotiated peace, "but the pro-Israeli-government half has no idea about the other half."

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