Numerology

Nearly three decades ago, a new Israeli protest group was launched, calling itself “The 21st Year” and declaring in its founding covenant that:

I joined the 21st Year while I lived in Israel and I remember the urgency we felt to act after two decades of occupation. When the first Intifada erupted in 1987, we committed ourselves to resistance that would make clear our refusal to collaborate with the Occupation. We refused to call the territories Judea and Samaria; did not enter the Occupied Territories without an invitation from Palestinian residents; boycotted goods produced by Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories; supported acts of protest and peaceful resistance by Palestinians; and refused to do army service in the Occupied Territories. Many of us were arrested for peaceful protest and spent time in Israeli jails.

In the waning days of the Intifada, I went to work for B’Tselem, joining my friends who believed that if Israelis only knew more about what was being done in their name they would oppose the Occupation. Since then, I have made my work in the world of progressive philanthropy, seeking to strengthen Israeli peace and human rights organizations. These organizations merit our moral and financial support. And yet, despite the many efforts of individuals and organizations alike, the Occupation of over three million Palestinians continues. As Israel celebrates its sixty-ninth birthday, it has been an occupying power for fifty of those years. And the count continues.

At least two generations of Palestinians have grown up in the reality of occupation. I think of my friend Mohammed who was twenty when he taught me Arabic in Jerusalem in the late 1980s. He now has children older than he was when we met, and they still live under the rule of a military occupation. Today, the majority of Israelis were born after the Occupation began and know little of the Green Line and the injustices across it.

As progressive American Jews, we often affirm Dr. King’s adage that the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice. But it does not bend on its own. It must become our most urgent priority to speak and act against the Occupation. We can start by being more specific with our language. For many, the word “occupation” has become stripped of its lived meaning, of what it really means for people to live under military rule. Almost thirty years ago, Israeli civil rights attorney Avigdor Feldman wrote in Tikkun about the denial of the intimate rights of Palestinians to “plant a tree, get married, have a child, and build a house.” Let’s describe the Occupation for what it is: the subjugation and dehumanization of human beings, and the denial of their rights to dignity and freedom.

We must also become bolder in action. We must out our communal institutions for blurring the distinction between Israel proper and the Occupied Territories. We must challenge the Jewish Federations for their new policy of including trips over the Green Line on their study tours and the granting of their funds to projects over the Green Line. We must push back against a growing stance within our synagogues and Jewish centers that the Occupation is too sensitive and explosive an issue to be debated and discussed. We must not allow the voices of political orthodoxy to demonize Jewish supporters of Israel who believe that BDS is the best way to end the Occupation.

Proactively, we can support the efforts of a new generation of young American Jews. Organizing efforts by groups such as J Street U, Open Hillel, and IfNotNow, are newly challenging all of us to hold the American Jewish community and its institutions accountable to our deepest values of justice and compassion. Our support of them includes joining their actions, amplifying their work, defending them when they are attacked, and giving them our financial support.

I know how easy it is to feel dispirited. When I despair, I remind myself that we have no other choice, that our ideological adversaries continue to vigorously organize and mobilize their forces, and that our action is most critical when the political horizon looks bleak. We must take to heart the words of Hagai El-Ad, the Director of B’Tselem who is also featured in this issue and who, in explaining why he spoke about the Occupation to the UN Security Council last fall, said:

On the fiftieth anniversary, here at home within our own Jewish communities, it is our challenge and our responsibility to answer that call.