My latest column is up at The American Prospect:
“He’s lying! He’s lying!” the man at the back of the hall shouted, in a tone as desperate as it was angry. “He hasn’t read the Geneva Conventions. You haven’t read them, so you don’t know he’s lying.”
The primary object of his rage was me. The secondary object, it seemed, was his fellow congregants, who’d allowed me to lecture at his New York-area synagogue. I’d spoken about threats to Israel’s democracy, including those posed by ongoing expansion of West Bank settlements. This was the first time, I’d been told, that the congregation had hosted a speaker on Israel from outside a spectrum running from right-wing to very right-wing. During the question-and-answer period, I was asked about my statement that the legal counsel of Israel’s Foreign Ministry had warned before the first West Bank settlement was established that it would violate the agreement of the Fourth Geneva Convention. That’s when the man in the back came unstuck. The congregation’s rabbi, who was moderating the Q&A session with the trained calm of a psychologist running group therapy for fractured families, slipped to the back of the room and talked him down.
The incident stayed with me, demanding to be decoded. True, the particular synagogue was Orthodox, and more Orthodox Jews espouse hawkish views than do members of other Jewish denominations. But I’ve been lecturing around North America for three weeks, and the experience fit a pattern. I’ve been told repeatedly that it’s a breakthrough for a congregation to invite someone with my views, which back home in Israel register as well within the political mainstream. On previous trips to America, I’ve faced similar outbursts in non-Orthodox synagogues and on college campuses.
High-pitched as Israeli political disputes are—and as eager as the Israeli parliamentary right is to restrict dissent, an Israeli dove visiting Jewish North America can still feel that he’s stumbled into a constricted, out-of-joint alternate universe. The moderate Israeli left’s argument that West Bank settlements undermine democracy and peace efforts is sometimes greeted in the U.S. as treasonous, sometimes as daringly unconventional. Ideas that have gone extinct in Israel still wander the American landscape, as if it were a Jurassic Park of the mind. What’s going on?
Part of the answer is that Jewish politics reflect general American politics, where conservatives hurl forged-in-Fox, counterfactual cannonballs rather than discuss ideas. And the minority of American Jews who are devoted to the single issue of defending Israeli policy, and who can dominate discussion within the Jewish community, inhabit an echo chamber that may be even better sealed than the conservative separate universe in domestic politics. Golda Meir—remembered in Israel as the prime minister who failed to see signs of oncoming war in 1973—is still regarded as a hero in America. (Imagine visiting some distant “pro-American” island where people put up busts of James Buchanan and Herbert Hoover.)
Inside the echo chamber, advocacy groups provide “facts” on key issues. Press reports or historical accounts that tell a different story are seen not only as mistaken, but as deliberately false. …
Read the rest at The American Prospect.
To their credit, the American diaspora loves to help and defend Israel.
I think the tendency to right or right-wing speakers and views in congregations has been because these have been the staunchest defenders of Israel , in tone and verbiage, for the past ten years.
Sometimes, though, when I hear people talk, I wonder “Did you know that Arafat is dead?”