Hawks and doves

Anti-Israel Jews converge on CU; Critics say they’re dangerous, unrealistic - - - - - - - - - - - -
by Wayne Laugesen (Editorial@boulderweekly.com)

Rabbi Menashe Bovit remembers the first time he met Rabbi Michael Lerner, the controversial publisher of Tikkun magazine. Both men were in Boulder for a rabbinical convention in 1999, and Rabbi Bovit sat down with Rabbi Lerner for lunch. It quickly turned into a shouting match.

"Lerner is sitting there with a rabbi from BJ, which is a far-left congregation in New York," Rabbi Bovit recalls. "This was at a time when money was being paid to Holocaust survivors as reparation for slave labor. Some had died, and there was a dispute as to what should be done with their money. Lerner and this other rabbi had a plan that the money should be used as reparations to Palestinians, because of what the Jews had done to them. As the son of a Holocaust survivor, I was tongue-tied at first. Then I got into it with them."

Bovit insists that Lerner took a hard-line stance, insisting that Jews owe Palestinians at least as much as Nazis owe Jews.

"Michael Lerner sat there laughing at me, telling me that Jews are the same to Palestinians as Nazis are to Jews," Bovit says. "I couldn’t believe what was coming out of this man’s mouth. I said the money should be put into a fund that would be controlled by living holocaust survivors. He laughed and said, ‘What more right do they have to this money than the Palestinians?’"

Today, Bovit is dismayed that Lerner will highlight a workshop Oct. 19 and 20 called "Perspectives on Peacemaking," in which prominent Jews who are critical of Israel will discuss the possibility of peace between Palestinians and Jews. Bovit is outraged at the message–which portrays Israel as a brutal aggressor–and at the fact that the conference opens on the Jewish Sabbath. On Sunday, the second and final day of the conference, Bovit will join other pro-Israeli Jews in protesting the workshop. The conference is sponsored by the Tikkun Community, a San Francisco-based organization dedicated to social change through spirituality, and by the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center, a progressive activist organization in Boulder.

"In the Holocaust concentration camps, there were Jews known as Kapos," Bovit says. "These individuals, for an extra crust of bread, and in order to feel they’d be more secure from being immediately murdered by the Nazis, were willing to beat and oppress fellow Jews. They would help Nazis herd Jews onto cattle cars. There have always been, throughout history, a small number of Jews who side with Jewish enemies, and they are known as Kapos. Michael Lerner is the chief Kapo of American Jewry today. He’s nuts."

Lerner says he doesn’t remember his run-in with Rabbi Bovit, in which he supposedly argued for turning over Jewish reparation money to Palestinians.

"I don’t remember ever holding any such position, and it sounds a bit illogical and crazy," Lerner says. "Furthermore, I don’t know the context of the conversation he’s claiming we had. Maybe I thought he was an asshole, and I was trying to ridicule him. But I’ll tell you that I never held that position, and I’ve never written that position."

Lerner, whose Jewish magazine is sharply critical of Israel and pro-Israeli Jews, says he has become accustomed to critics who call him a "self-hating" or "self-loathing" Jew.

"Almost any Jew today who raises any criticism of Israel at all is described as self-hating or self-loathing," Lerner said. "But I’m a rabbi with a congregation, and I spend a lot of my time trying to be as close to God as I can get. I’m an observant Jew, so this is just part of the political propaganda that people put out to discredit their opposition, rather than putting forth political arguments. It’s a loathsome tactic."

If the rhetoric spewed toward Lerner by his critics seems harsh, it’s probably because Tikkun magazine exercises little restraint in criticizing pro-Israeli American Jews.

In a recent Tikkun article titled "Seven Pillars of Jewish Denial," author Kim Chernin argued that Jews overlook the persecution of Palestinians because of a mass pathology that results from a history of Jewish persecution. Jews, Chernin explains, feel endangered.

Because of a sense of endangerment, Chernin writes, "We keep a watchful eye out, we read the signs, we detect innuendo, we summon evidence, we become, as we imagine it, the ever-vigilant guardians of our people’s survival. Endangered as we imagine ourselves to be; endangered as we insist we are, any negativity, criticism, or reproach, even from one of our own, takes on exaggerated dimensions; we come to perceive such criticism as a life-threatening attack... with our attention focused on ourselves as an endangered species, it seems to follow that we ourselves can do no harm."

Chernin goes so far in her writing as to call Jewish Holocaust stories "propaganda" designed to cover up for and distract from the struggle of another people. A struggle Jews cause.

In another recent Tikkun article, author Joel Kovel argues that Jews in Israel are imprisoning Palestinians in a giant concentration camp–a.k.a the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Why do Jews, Kovel asks rhetorically, "rally about a state that essentially has turned its occupied lands into a huge concentration camp and driven its people to such gruesome expedients as suicide bombing?"

Kovel refers to Jewish Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and former Prime Ministers Begin and Shamir, as "world-class terrorists and mass murderers."

"How have Jews, immemorially associated with suffering and high moral purpose, become identified with a nation-state loathed around the world for its oppressiveness toward a subjugated indigenous people?" Kovel writes.

It’s nonsense, says Matt Finberg, to suggest the Jews are oppressing an indigenous tribe.

"Jews were the indigenous culture, and many efforts were made by Europeans as well as Middle Eastern and Asian cultures to drive every Jew out of that land," says Finberg, a Boulder attorney and a Jew who strongly supports Israel. "Jews have lived in the land of Israel for thousands of years. The Jews are the indigenous people. Jews were put into exile, and the problem came up when the Jews came home."

Lerner says he’d like to impress upon people at the workshop the idea that both Palestinians and Jews need to understand that they’re equally responsible for the violence and killing that has come to characterize Israel.

"Both sides need to understand that the path to peace is a path of peace," Lerner says.

That’s wonderful, but unrealistic, says Finberg.

"Pacifism doesn’t work when those opposed to you desire to exterminate you," Finberg says. "Jews will never again be pacifist. If we’re passive, we’ll be driven into the sea, and that’s never going to happen again. Jews are becoming Second Amendment (gun rights) supporters in droves. They are probably the biggest wave of new members in the NRA (National Rifle Association). Jews are realizing the government and the police may not be there to support us someday, and the people who will be there to support us are the private militias, Gentile and Jew."

Finberg says Jews listened to the advice of Ghandi during the Holocaust, when he told them to hold their heads up and proudly walk with a sense of God into the gas chambers. The result: some six million dead Jews.

"The fantasy of safety from guns is the opposite of what Judaism and the Jewish people have stood for throughout our history," Lerner argues. "He may be right, that more and more people who were born Jewish are worshipping the idol of power, rather than the God of love. But it’s a sad development for the world and for the Jewish people."

Among about a dozen speakers slated for the workshop is Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, founder of the Jewish Renewal movement and World Wisdom Chairman at Boulder’s Naropa University. Schachter-Shalomi takes a far more moderate stance on Israel, but strongly defends Rabbi Lerner, whom he ordained.

"I don’t see that he’s anti-Israel," Schachter-Shalomi says. "People have simplified the fact that he finds some things Israel is doing are subject to criticism, on human-respect issues. That kind of criticism some people don’t want to hear."

Some pro-Israel Jews are so angry with Tikkun magazine that they’ve asked Schachter-Shalomi to revoke Rabbi Lerner’s ordination.

"I don’t know whether he can do that, or not," Finberg says. "He has told me that he won’t do that."

"Revoke my ordination?" Lerner says. "That sounds a little like restoring my virginity. Whatever people come up with to attack me personally, the substance of it is that they don’t like what I stand for, and they don’t like my ideas. So instead of keeping it a political debate, they attack me personally, and I think it’s loathsome."

Schachter-Shalomi says it’s nearly impossible for American Jews not to support and protect Israel.

"When we pray every morning and every evening, we’re connected to all the people who are there," Schachter-Shalomi says. "I have two daughters there and grandchildren as well."

At the conference, Schachter-Shalomi says he’ll ask people to look inside themselves, and not go into "reactive mode" regarding Israel and the Palestinians.

"In reactive mode, hardly anyone spends time in grief, so this conflict just perpetuates," Schachter-Shalomi says. "I feel there’s a real amount of grief that hasn’t been allowed to come in the open and be expressed by Israelis and Palestinians. Grief is repressed and people rush too quickly into anger. I can’t imagine that a parent who has lost a child in one of those pizza joints doesn’t grieve. But with the heating up of tempers, and everything else, you leave the grieving soon and get into anger and retaliation. In order to grieve, however, you have to have time away from pressure. And when the next day there’s another suicide bombing, you hardly ever get a chance. Those people who go out and pick up parts of bodies, can you imagine the toll it takes on people? People never have a chance to sit and grieve over that."

Schachter-Shalomi believes great strides toward peace could be made if grandparents of dead Israeli children would sit down with grandparents of dead Palestinian children to share their pain and grieve mutually.

"The fact is, if you got the grandparents to sit down like that, the only one left standing would be the first one to the gun," says Finberg. "We’ve hated each other forever. This is not a new age situation where we should just sing ‘Kumbaya,’ sit around praying a lot, look at crystals and smudge the room. The issue is, do you want a nice lifestyle, and do you want to get ahead in life, or do you want to die a martyr...

"History has proven that the more Israel gives, the more it is punished. Israel unilaterally withdrew from Lebanon, and it did so because of the pleas of mothers and wives of soldiers serving there, trying to police the situation. I don’t know how we could have been more generous in the past."

Although Schachter-Shalomi defends Lerner as a loyal Jew, he’s somewhat critical of the stand American progressives have taken regarding the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

"On our side, we have hawks and doves," Schachter-Shalomi says. "There are also doves on the Palestinian side but the Hawks there kill them and call them collaborators. But you live in Boulder, you have a very low crime rate, and nobody steals the batteries and tires from your car when you park it. Most people living in our situation don’t understand how parents send their kids out, and then go around collecting 10,000 bucks for having a martyred kid. It’s beyond the ken of the people who are the doves here. What people don’t realize is that when you talk about Palestinians, you have to talk about Palestinians who want to live and work in Israel and have a decent life, and those are the ones who come out in the Arab propaganda. The people who are pushing the propaganda are the people who have factories that make bombs you can strap on."

Rabbi Bovit goes further in his criticism of the left’s opposition to Israel. It’s downright naive and stupid, he says.

"These people have so-called progressive beliefs," Bovit says. "They’re for all kinds of liberalism in one’s personal life and in social and moral matters, but they side with the Arab world consistently–a society in which there are no rights, there are no rights of expression, and woman are not even considered human in much of this society they are supportive of.

"So-called American progressives see Israel as part of a colonialist enterprise representing the Western world. These people hate the United States, they hate western culture. They see Israel as the colonialist outpost, and therefore anything that is Third World, or not part of the Western world is good, and anything that is part of the Western world is bad. That’s where Michael Lerner and all of the so-called self-hating Jews are coming from."

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