Gershom Gorenberg
One of the bizarre ironies of Israeli politics is revealed once more in a response by NGO Monitor* to Nicholas Kristof’s recent column on Hebron and the price of occupation.
Kristof wrote of the particular burden imposed on Palestinians – and on Israel itself – by maintaining Jewish settlers inside Hebron:
The security system that Israel is steadily establishing is nowhere more stifling than here in Hebron, the largest city in the southern part of the West Bank. In the heart of a city with 160,000 Palestinians, Israel maintains a Jewish settlement with 800 people. To protect them, the Israeli military has established a massive system of guard posts, checkpoints and road closures since 2001.
For anyone who has visited Hebron with open eyes, Kristof’s description will appear accurate, even understated. (My own account of a recent trip to that town is here.)
However, NGO Monitor was not happy. NGO Monitor is an Israeli group that claims to promote “critical debate and accountability of Human Rights NGOs in the Arab-Israeli conflict.” In practice, that means a stream of criticism against B’Tselem, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other such organizations.
On the NGO Monitor website one can find a letter from the group’s executive director, Prof. Gerald Steinberg, to the New York Times attacking Kristof. Ostensibly, Steinberg’s complaint is that Kristof extols B’Tselem and Machsom Watch. But his real complaint appears to be that Kristof failed to give the proper context in describing Hebron, apparently because he gullibly listened to human-rights groups:
Kristof repeats the simplistic statements of these NGOs regarding Hebron – a city of immense religious and historical importance to the Jewish people – without mentioning the impact of the 1929 massacre and expulsion of the entire Jewish community. A limited return to this historic city was only possible after 1967.
Attacking journalists for not giving context is a favored tactic of rightwing groups. A superb American correspondent who was here in the 1990s once explained to me how the attack-dog group CAMERA would really want him to begin every news article: “Fifty years ago, Israel arose from the ashes of the Holocaust. Yesterday in Gaza…” The missing context is always supposed to show that Israel is 100% in the right.
But look at the context Steinberg wants: Jews have a historical tie to Hebron, and the settlers are reviving a Jewish community that existed there before Israeli independence. The refugees have a right to return.
Never mind that the actual settlers in Hebron are not descendants of Jews who left the city, and that many of those descendants actively oppose the settlers’ presence. The mother of dovish ex-Knesset member Avrum Burg was from Hebron, for instance. The settlers who arrived in 1968 were led by Rabbi Moshe Levinger, who was looking for a way to assert Jewish sovereignty over the West Bank and exploited the fact that Jews had once lived in the town. Previously he’d wanted to join the settlers at Kfar Etzion, who claimed the right to settle at that spot because a kibbutz had stood there until it fell to Arab forces the day before Israel declared independence. (There, at least, the settlers were children of the fallen kibbutz.)
So the long-running status of Kfar Etzion and nearby settlements as “consensus settlements” – accepted by much of the center-left – is also based on the right of return of pre-1948 refugees. People who fled or were driven from their homes in the conflict between Arabs and Jews must be able to go back, and if they can’t return, or their descendants aren’t interested, others should go in their place.
I submit that this is not only sloppy thinking, but dangerous thinking. It is self-destructive for Israelis to validate the idea that everyone who lost homes in 1948 should return, because that means affirming the right of all Palestinian refugees to return to Israel proper. There lies the end of Israel. Using return as justification for settlement is a strategic assault on the state of Israel.
Of course, Steinberg et al don’t see it that way, because they can’t imagine the comparison. Why should the same right apply to both Jews and Palestinians? Why should moral reasoning be reciprocal?
Just as an experiment, let’s imagine that Kristof or someone else at the Times wrote about, say, a Palestinian from the West Bank stabbing a Jew in Jaffa. Let’s say that in covering this imagined incident, the columnist or reporter included context: “Palestinians feel a deep historical tie to Jaffa, a city known as the ‘Bride of Palestine’ before 1948. Many refugees who left at the time of Israeli independence assert their right to return.”
In that case, what letter would Steinberg write to the editor?
For the Israeli right, the right of return is sacred, and the danger of that position is invisible.
*Corrected text. The original incorrectly said “NGO Watch.”
Interesting, your comments about couching stories with historical accounts that pull the reader away from the issue at hand.
Today I spoke with my nephew, just returned from a trip to Israel with Birth Right, a group that pays for young Americans who are Jewish to go to Isreal with the intent of strengthening the tie to the country (at least this is my understanding of it).
I asked how the trip went and what he did while there. Then I sounded him out about the occupied territories. He told me that he didn’t visit them, it wasn’t part of the itinerary. Part of the trip did include time in the company of young Israeli soldiers for the purpose of building friendships. As I sounded out his thoughts on the settlements and the occupation, he agreed they were a problem, it wasn’t a good situation and the conditions for the Palestinians were bad, but he immediately referred back to Jewish history, the Holocaust, Europe and that there were Israelis who are Arab.
I approached the subject from a couple of different angles: is the occupation worth the trouble? Wouldn’t the security fence work to protect Israel if not on occupied territory? Isn’t it difficult to imagine peace when the Palestinians have been evicted from land that was theirs, where they cannot even use roads that run across it? But present issues always were answered with accounts of historical wrongs. It was questioned if the Palestinians are even a people. I was reminded that there are Arab Israelis.
I’ve always considered Aaron a thoughtful fellow, concerned with issues and unwilling to jump to conclusions. I wanted to see how his trip affected him. But I heard well worn responses that did not sound like they came from him, less an indication of who he is than what others would like him to be.
Next time he visits Israel, may I suggest he go visit certain bloggers in south Jerusalem?
Steinberg Replies to Gorenberg – B’tselem’s Political Agenda vs. Universal Human Rights
Gershom Gorenberg’s criticism of NGO Monitor [www.ngo-monitor.org] would have been interesting if he had avoided the errors (beginning with the mistaken reference to “NGO Watch”) and lowered the ideological volume. Instead of contributing to the important and substantive debate on the moral issues related to the exploitation of human rights, he simply makes this situation worse.
Gorenberg’s vehicle is the debate taking place in response to Nicholas Kristof’s recent column in the New York Times extolling the role of Israeli NGOs like B’tselem [http://www.ngo-monitor.org/article/b_tselem] and Machsom Watch. Quoting selectively, Gorenberg asserts: “Ostensibly, Steinberg’s complaint is that Kristof extols B’Tselem and Machsom Watch. But his real complaint appears to be that Kristof failed to give the proper context in describing Hebron…”
Gorenberg is entitled to his political agenda, but not to distort my clearly formulated views by claiming to know the “real complaints” lurking behind them. As I wrote in my analysis,[http://www.ngo-monitor.org/article.php?id=1969] (and as quoted in the New York Jewish Week and elsewhere), Kristof’s oped was a blatant example of the “halo effect”, in which journalists blindly repeat the claims of political NGOs (generously funded by European governments and anti-Israel church groups claiming to promote peace and Palestinian development) that use the façade of human rights. The narrow Palestinian version of history that he quotes, based on the “tours” provided by B’Tselem, is based on a particular approach to politics and ideology – and has nothing to do with universal moral principles.
Instead of dealing with the destruction of human rights resulting from the NGO Durban strategy, Gorenberg goes on to present his own private views on Hebron, Zionism, and the history of the conflict, while condescendingly claiming to know “the context Steinberg wants”, or that “Steinberg et al [who is el al?] … can’t imagine the comparison.”
In contrast, the main issue is the damage done to the credibility of universal human rights when this language is exploited for political gain, and wrapped in the “halo effect”.
Gerald Steinberg
Executive Director, http://www.ngo-monitor.org
Mr. Steinberg,
What you apparently consider to be bias on Gershom’s part, is, in fact, honest, clear-eyed analysis which allows him (and his readers) to better understand some of the complex problems facing Israel. Such analysis (in stark contrast to yours, for example), also implies empathy for both sides of the conflict.
Ironically, your above response reveals your own deep-seated bias, as this single excerpt underscores:
“…when you journalists blindly repeat the claims of political NGOs (generously funded by European governments and anti-Israel church groups claiming to promote peace and Palestinian development) that use the façade of human rights.”
You chastise Gershom for “claiming to know the ‘real complaints’ lurking behind [your publicly expressed views]”, then immediately launch into a vitriolic attack based on precisely that approach.
For future reference, the next time you hope to find sympathy for your views amongst those who are actually paying attention to all sides of the issues, you might want to try to avoid transparent hypocrisy.
Tony Cobitz
Gershom wrote:
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Never mind that the actual settlers in Hebron are not descendants of Jews who left the city, and that many of those descendants actively oppose the settlers’ presence.
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Gershom, can you prove that you are decended from Jews who lived in South Jerusalem? Otherwise, why would you have moved there?
Hevron, Jerusalem and all of Eretz Israel belong to ALL the Jewish people, not just those who happen to own land there at any given time.
You seem to be in a bit of a cleft stick here Gershon. The whole of the zionist enterprise is based on a perverted, one-sided and racist take on the right of return to ones homeland. The long discredited myth is that the Jews of today are the ethnic descendants of Jews who were exiled from Israel during or after the destruction of the second temple. The issue of non-Israelite Jewish communities is completely ignored or played down, though in fairness even the WZO has a page on the Khazars as an “experiment in Jewish statehood” and that “experiment” was more recent than any Jewish state in the Middle East, even if we take Yemen’s two “experiments” in Jewish statehood in the 5th and 6th centuries into account.
Further, the issue of the ethnic descent of the Palestinians tends to be overlooked as well.
The problem here is the conflation of the individual with the collective. Palestinians have the right to return because on an individual basis they can establish as individuals that they come from what we now call Israel or the occupied territories. On that basis, the descendants of the victims of the Hebron massacre should have the right to return or to compensation, just like Jews from Arab countries and Arabs from what we now call Israel.
Where the Right is confused is in its racist conflation of individual and collective rights. And in its racist belief that rights are the preserve of Jews and only Jews. But the Right is only extending a principle established by the Labour zionists back in the day. Further, as a more recent article by Gershon demonstrates, the Right isn’t so different from the zionist Left in its aims. It’s the “justifications” that differ or possibly, but only possibly, the size and shape of the territory they want their racist doctrine applied to.
Gerald Steinberg clearly doesn’t like contextualisation, still less anyone or anything which has the temerity to criticise what is happening in Israel or the Occupied Territories, still less Hebron. Why he even has a sideswipe at ‘anti-Israel church groups’ . I assume he has not problems with anti-Semites like John Hagee.
Having seen footage of settlers attacks on Palestinians in Hebron and spoken to those who have personally witnessed them, then there is only one context that matters. It’s the same context that led to pogroms in places Kishinev against Jews. That Steinberg tries to rationalise it with his sophistry shows what a moral cesspit he inhabits.
I always find it interesting that those who would be the first to praise ‘righteous Christians’ for having risked their lives to save Jews during the period of the Nazi holocaust are unable to apply the same lessons themselves. Instead they find any and every excuse for justifying house demolitions, pogroms, torture etc.
It is fortunate that not all those who lived in Poland during the war were like Steinberg.