Jews themselves are torn by Israel’s behavior. Many have predicted for decades that Israel could not be Israel and swallow the West Bank. Israel’s “solution” has been to repopulate the West Bank with Israelis and push Palestinians out. Many of us never bought into that “solution”. From what Israelis have told me, Israel made no effort to integrate the populations, to school them together or share space. Israeli policy has been to separate the populations and squeeze the Palestinians out.
That approach has been coming home to roost. Israel appears to be turning itself into an “illiberal bastion of zealotry.” It’s threatening the survival of democracy, quashing the Israeli Supreme Court’s ability to enforce rules, expelling and leaving Palestinians stateless, vulnerable to both settler and official violence, and increasing attacks on civilians. Israel’s been thumbing its nose at American demands to respect Palestinian settlements and preserve a two-state solution. It doesn’t help that Netanyahu’s head of the Office of Jewish Identity doesn’t think most American Jews are Jewish. These policies are very troubling to a large segment of American Jewry. I don’t know whether another solution would work but this has painful consequences.
When I was young, I was outraged by Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians. Tit for tat didn’t seem like smart policy but it seemed understandable. Nevertheless, attacks on civilians are absolutely inexcusable. Collective guilt, blaming or penalizing all Palestinians for the violence of some, makes everything worse.
There’s a bigger issue. If tribalism justifies anything for one’s own tribe, and if might makes right, which of our tribes will survive? Only if we can find ways to unite behind justice, equality, and the Golden Rule, loving and respecting our neighbors and fellow human beings, can any of our tribes, ethnic, racial, or religious, survive intact.
The American Founding generation tried to bequeath us that lesson. Their answer to the religious wars that shredded seventeenth century Europe and would again shred the twentieth was the philosophy of the Enlightenment, of universal principles of justice. They sought a road to peace through tolerance and community.
In the great words of the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
“All” people have those rights though it took a civil war to enshrine those principles in the text of the Thirteenth Amendment, ending slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment, attempting to protect life, liberty and property with equal protection and due process of law, the Fifteenth Amendment attempting to guarantee voting rights to the descendants of those brought here as slaves, and the Nineteenth Amendment finally recognizing women’s right to vote.
We’ll always have vicious people who care nothing for others’ rights, but our defense and attractiveness to the world has always been those universal human rights. We and Israel ignore those rights and support countries which ignore them at our peril and at the peril of our moral responsibility to honor and respect all God’s children.
Having been the victim of Hitler’s Nazi racism in the Holocaust, later euphemized in other contexts as ethnic cleansing, Israel has been engaging in a deal with the devil by trying to swallow the West Bank. It’s a bad deal and the devil is winning.
Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.
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