Tag: Israeli-Palestinian conflict

My Israel/Palestine Learning Curve Is a Zigzag

~ The Accidental Rabbi ~ Leave a comment

Part 1: My Moroccan-Israeli family

I am the child of a family of Moroccan Jewish refugees who found refuge in Israel. My mom was 16 on the day in 1956 when her entire life in Morocco abruptly ended — the day that her father was tipped off by an Arab friend that he was marked for death by the Moroccan liberation fighters (who were trying to oust their French colonizers) because he was discovered to have assisted other Jews to emigrate to Israel. She and her many siblings and their parents packed what they could take with them in suitcases and left their home in the middle of the night, taking their place in steerage on a ship loaded with livestock and other Jewish refugees. They headed to a refugee camp near the southern French coast, penniless and waiting to figure out their future.

Israel gave them that future. The Israeli government settled them, at first, in a small town just south of Tiberias called Poria. After some years, they moved to Shkhunat Hatikvah, which at the time was a heavily Mizrahi Tel Aviv neighborhood known for poverty, rat infestations and street gangs. The family grew — a new baby almost every year until there were 12 siblings in all. My grandfather rebuilt his furniture-making business in Tel Aviv. My mom, who had avoided being married with kids by age 20 like many of her sisters, valued her independence and ventured to America in 1961, eventually marrying my Midwestern American Ashkenazi father in 1966. He helped her parents finally move out of the slums and into an apartment in Bat Yam. Over the next two decades, most of the rest of the family made similar treks, moving into apartments in Bat Yam, Holon and Azor, residential enclaves of southern Tel Aviv. Today, the Elkouby family is a classic Moroccan-Israeli clan, a multigenerational web of 80-plus people mostly still centered in Holon and Bat Yam, but with branches in Rishon Letziyon, Herzliya, Eilat, Los Angeles and Miami. The reigning matriarch of the family is my Aunt Soulika,[1] now in her 80s, who lives on the second floor of a house in Azor above her daughter and son-in-law, and their young-adult kids below.

My maternal grandmother of blessed memory, Messouda Elkouby, attending evening classes to learn Hebrew in Israel along with other new Jewish immigrants – taken in the late 50s or very early 60s.

Part 2: Azor

Since my high school days, I’ve spent lots of time at my Aunt Soulika’s house. Many of my happiest memories took place there — afternoon al ha-esh (barbecue) gatherings, late nights eating fresh fruit on the balcony with chain-smoking cousins, the first time my wife came to Israel with me. I’ve walked all around the neighborhoods of Azor, past the mini-grocery stores that are open at night, past the schools and community center, and along narrow streets with cars half-parked on sidewalks. It’s not a particularly beautiful part of Tel Aviv, but I love it, and it is one of the places on earth where I have felt most loved.

The name Azor has its origins in antiquity. There is an archeological tel (hill or mound) at the town’s center and a layered history, including battles between Crusaders and Muslims. The town’s current name is the Hebrew version of its pre-1948 Arabic name, Yazur, a Palestinian village of 4,000 residents that was attacked by Irgun forces and forcibly depopulated in April 1948, about two weeks before the British Mandate formally ended and Israel declared independence. In 2000, the Israeli historian and political scientist Meron Benvenisti published Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948, in which he noted that at the time, a synagogue in Azor was meeting in a building that was a former Muslim shrine, and that an adjoining Muslim cemetery was in disrepair and was being used as a garbage dump for local yard waste.[2]

This is the intersection in my life where my growing awareness of the Nakba meets my own family’s story of survival. I struggle to hold this dual consciousness and these competing emotional impulses every day — in my conversations with my relatives, in the Israel-related parts of my job, in my activist choices and in my private thoughts.

TO CONTINUE READING THIS ESSAY, VISIT https://evolve.reconstructingjudaism.org/my-israel-palestine-learning-curve-is-a-zigzag/

Israel / Palestine Bogus Argument #1: “Settlements aren’t really an obstacle to peace”

~ The Accidental Rabbi ~ 1 Comment

This is a new series of posts I’m going to work on, in which I debunk BA’s (bogus arguments) that are often made, on one side or the other, about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (or the wider Arab-Israeli conflict, etc.).

Today’s Bogus Argument: “Settlements aren’t really an obstacle to peace,” often claimed by AIPAC supporters and other apologists for the Netanyahu gov’t. Actually, even though the argument often gets stated the way I just phrased it, what those making the argument usually mean when they say this is that Israeli announcements of plans to build new housing units within the large settlement blocs abutting Jerusalem are not really an obstacle to peace.

Let’s consider this argument.

Usually it is supported by two claims: one, that Palestinian complaints are disingenuous because both sides already know that a final status agreement would preserve the major Jerusalem settlement blocs within Israel and there would be compensatory land swaps to the Palestinian state; and two, that the Palestinians had previously engaged in negotiations w/o too much fuss despite periodic new Israeli building in the blocs.

Therefore, the argument goes, these Palestinian complaints (and those made by groups like Peace Now, J Street, and various Knesset members in the opposition) are disingenuous. The Palestinians, according to this theory, only complain over this for strategic and negotiating purposes, not because they are actually upset about new Jewish housing being built in neighborhoods that everyone knows will eventually be part of Israel. No, they press these complaints fully knowing them to be without merit, because they are actually not interested in going back to negotiations with Israel, and because they are not serious about accepting Israel’s right to exist as part of a two-state final status agreement. By insisting that Israel cease and desist from new construction in all the settlements, the Palestinians are, supposedly, making an unreasonable demand they know Israel won’t accept, and by doing so they are deliberately sabotaging peace talks and building up global animosity towards Israel as part of a long-term plan to one day get back all of what was British-ruled Palestine.

This line of reasoning, and its dismissal of Palestinian objections to new settlement construction, is, in my humble opinion, completely bogus. It’s wrong.

Continue reading “Israel / Palestine Bogus Argument #1: “Settlements aren’t really an obstacle to peace”” →

The new kapos (i.e. Jews like me)

~ The Accidental Rabbi ~ 3 Comments

In the aftermath of Trump’s decision to nominate David Friedman to be the next U.S. Ambassador to Israel, we’ve learned that Friedman has had some choice words for Jews like me, who support J Street, and other progressive Jews. Specifically, he’s said that we’re worse than kapos, who, if that term isn’t familiar, were the Jews the Nazis assigned to supervise other Jews in concentration camps and in forced labor.

Image result for kapo ww2When one Jew calls another a kapo it means “ultimate traitor.” To have Friedman calling other Jews kapos, when he’s about to go to work for a man who has retweeted anti-Semitic Twitter accounts, and who has won the high praise of American neo-Nazis, is so ironic that … well, it’s just really ironic, that’s all.

Anyway, one of my FB friends – someone who has critiqued left wingers many times for their blindness to anti-Semitism in progressive circles – just posted today, with alarm, that he is receiving messages calling him a kapo for opposing the Friedman nomination.

I believe this is probably the shape of things for American-Jewish politics for the next few years, possibly more. I also suspect that it is connected to Steve Bannon’s strategic thinking about how to best deal with the American Jewish community. Do things that widen the acrimony and divide. Tie up the energies of the progressive political American Jewish community, and its often quite effective political organizing and influence, with having to fight the right wing of the American Jewish community. Meanwhile, take the American Jewish right off the table as a potential obstructive political force by emphasizing how RW / anti-Muslim / pro-(greater)-Israel Trump is. This makes it easier for some of Bannon’s anti-Semitic and truly fascist circle to be able to take their places in Trump’s inner circle.

Friedman is a great example. He has no experience as an Ambassador, and he’s a loudmouth. He can’t make policy – he’ll have to take orders from Trump – but he’s perfect for a divide & conquer approach to minimizing the political power of different parts of the American Jewish community.

My guess is that Bannon sees himself as a major player in Trump’s inner circle, but that he sees himself as in competition, to some degree, with others who have different agendas. Bannon may not care that much about Jews himself, but what we know from his previous work is that he’s interested in bringing to the table people who are quite serious about their anti-Semitism. (That’s a generous reading of Bannon, BTW.)

Anyway, I just think we’re likely to see Trump work some kind of strategy like this vis-a-vis the Jewish community. I think Trump’s promise to move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem is perfect as their first gambit of this nature. In terms of really changing the dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or the ultimate shape that a viable agreement to end the conflict might take, moving the embassy to (West) Jerusalem is not really that substantive a thing to do. In an ideal world, with a permanent peace agreement establishing two states, Israel and Palestine, each with a capital in different sections of Jerusalem, the American embassies to both states would proudly take their places in their respective parts of Jerusalem. But for all kinds of practical reasons that make good political sense, U.S. policy under Republicans and Democrats for decades has been to hold off on moving the embassy to Jerusalem until a final status agreement is reached.

Image result for divide and conquer

But the decision to move the U.S. embassy is a great wedge issue for the American Jewish community and it will suit Trump’s team perfectly. It’s highly symbolic and highly emotional. The tweets and one-line talking points to be offered in a tone of moral superiority and “can you believe these politically correct idiots?” contempt easily write themselves.

Trump announcing the embassy move will send the various Jewish political organizations into their various corners, firing away at each other. AIPAC, ZOA, RCA, the Conference of Presidents, and possibly JCPA and even maybe Reform & Conservative organizations will support the move. J Street, APN, Ameinu, maybe the Reconstructionist movement will dissent or offer qualified dissent. In the Islamic world, the announcement will probably ignite extremists’ passions and increase the likelihood of terror attacks, either in the US, Israel, or elsewhere. It’ll also lead to a big UN showdown. And then, while we in the American-Jewish community are all consumed with this unnecessary shit storm, all of our energies and resources are tied up and largely unavailable to be a useful force against any/all other Trump agendas.

It’s so smart I’m surprised Putin didn’t think of it himself…