Panel of “Jewish Perspectives on Gaza” engages in dialogue with audience

January 30, 2009
by Christine Yeres

On Saturday, January 17, WESPAC Foundation led a demonstration on South Greeley Avenue in Chappaqua to call attention to the suffering of the people in Gaza. See “Chappaqua hosts respectful demonstration for peace,” NewCastleNOW.org, Jan. 10, 2009. 

Eager to continue talking about this issue, even though a cease fire had been declared in Gaza, the pro-Palestinian WESPAC Foundation organized a panel discussion at the Chappaqua Library last Saturday entitled “Jewish Perspectives on Gaza.” The discussion was sponsored by the Friends of Turtle Island, a Pleasantville-based member organization of WESPAC. 

Moderator Khusro Elley, a resident of New Castle and board member of WESPAC, opened the panel discussion by emphasizing that the purpose of the gathering was educational, to present a forum in which to explore “the great diversity of opinion within the Jewish community.” Characterizing the panelists as “all moderates,” he then added, “there may be extremists in the audience, but not on the panel.” 

Elley set the terms of the forum as a discussion rather than a debate, expressing the hope that the audience of about 45 had left any anger at the door, and suggesting that they engage the panel rather than one another. Each of the four panelists, Elley announced, would speak for ten minutes, then take comments and questions from the audience after all four had spoken. Bob Miller and Rabbi Douglas Krantz sat on Elley’s right; Suzanne Ross and Alan Levin, on his left.  They spoke in that order.

Bob Miller  

First to speak was Bob Miller, a 78-year-old retired chemical engineer and member of Bet Torah synagogue in Mt. Kisco. A resident of Chappaqua since 1972, Miller has visited Israel twice, once before and once after 1967, when Israel’s borders were redrawn to include the Golan Heights, Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Sinai Peninsula. 

Raised in a Zionist household with strong ties to Israel, Miller said he had longed “if not for peace, then at least for accommodation with the Palestinians.” He believed after 1967 that some measure of accommodation was gradually being reached through increased commercial relations with West Bank residents, but that the Intifada of the late 1980’s had hardened Israeli attitudes.

Miller expressed his amazement at the offers that Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel from 1999 to 2001, made toward the Palestinians during the Clinton presidency, and found the subsequent eight years, during the Bush administration a great disappointment, this past year particularly so. Considering Hamas’s aim of driving out Jews, “What is Israel to do, what would you have done,” he asked, scanning the audience, “when one-third of Sderot [a town in Israel] fled, and children were sent to bomb shelters?” He responded, “Israel decided to take military action.”

Alan Levin

Next, Alan Levin, a practicing “licensed marriage family therapist” for 25 years, spoke. “My political analysis is that what Israel did was a crime.” He found it difficult to believe that “progressive, compassionate and intelligent people” could accept a narrative that supports Israel’s position.  He told the audience that “from early on, we are all married to Israel, another nation. We sing its anthems, gather money for it, learn its traditions.” 

He acknowledged that anti-Semitism is “real, a powerful force of evil,” that Jews had “a very real fear of it,” but that that fear sometimes bordered on paranoia. He said he believes that the majority of Jews want peace. But, he continued, “when people fear there is an enemy that wants to kill them, they tend to believe a narrative in which Israel first wanted peace and fights only in defense. They also become willing to destroy the infrastructure of an entire people, denying political rights to 20 percent of people [the Palestinians] in Israel, in order to destroy an elected political party [Hamas].”

Rabbi Douglas Krantz

Rabbi David Krantz of Armonk’s Congregation B’nai Yisrael began by announcing “Hamas has fired 3,000 rockets into Israel,” and asserting that the obligation of Jews is to defend themselves, to live rather than to die, and learn to live “in a world that is predatory.”  Twice he characterized both sides in the dispute as “not angels and saints.” 

Hamas leaders, he said, build tunnels to smuggle weapons, build no schools but, instead, tunnels for their members to survive counterattacks.  They also require police to wear civilian clothing so that they are indistinguishable from civilians. “I have supported a two-state solution since 1974,” Krantz said. He told the audience that he does not believe in collective punishment, but does advocate “proportionality,” as advocated in the ancient lex talionis, which seeks to limit retribution,  “an eye for an eye,” said Krantz, “never an arm for a finger.” 

“None of us fully understood the magnitude [of the consequences] of the failure in 2000 of Clinton, Arafat and Rabin,” Krantz continued. “We had agreed it was important to talk to our enemies, and we did. Each setback disturbed us and we on the left have been discredited. This is not a war between saints and angels; we share failure and success. How will we get ourselves out of our prisons?”  The neglect and blunders of the Bush administration were enormous, he asserted, and then added, “A few words about tragedy: people are not wholly good or wholly evil. This is a tragedy for which I believe we share responsibility. We live in a world that’s full of color, but we want to see black and white.” 

Suzanne Ross  

Born in 1937 in Belgium, of a German father and Polish mother, Suzanne Ross described how, in her early years, she lost the majority of both sides of her family in the Holocaust. She fled with her parents to Mozambique, then to Palestine, where she lived several years in the leftist Bet Alfa kibbutz. She has visited Israel many times over the years and two relatives who survived Auschwitz live in Israel still. 

She said that she believes that since 9-11 the Muslims have been isolated and looked upon with suspicion, treatment she found reminiscent of Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews. An admirer of Rabbi Marshall Meyer and Abraham Heschel, leaders in the tradition of Jewish activism (Heschel had marched with Martin Luther King, Jr., she reminded the audience), Ross stated that the lives of these leaders influenced her greatly, as did reading Herman Wouk’s Warsaw Ghetto.  She understood, she said, “the need to fight back.” 

For her, the tragedy at Jenin, a town near her former kibbutz, in April 2002 [called by Palestinians “a massacre,” and by Israelis “a battle,”] posed special difficulty “for those of us who remembered what it was like to be oppressed.” Quoting Rabbi Hillel, a scholar and theologian who lived from 30 B.C to 9 A.D., Ross asked, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?  If I am not for others, what am I?” 

She recounted that in her early years, before 1948, on the kibbutz, “I never met any Palestinians or Arabs. Israel was declared a state. Although she later realized that in 1948 there were twice as many Palestinians as Jews there at the time, she was never taught that there Palestinians with a history and culture. 

She said that racism and ignorance led to what happened in Gaza. She recalled that before Hamas was demonized, Fatah had been also, and grew passionate in her narration of the conditions under which Fatah’s leader, Arafat, had died. “I disagreed with him,” she said, but she believed that it was wrong to have prevented Palestinians to go to his funeral.  “Arafat died besieged, isolated, humiliated.”  Ross closed with a call for “a real cease fire, open the border so that food and medicine can go in and out. A blockade is an act of war.”

Audience comments

Addressing Ross, a woman from the audience said that she, too, had lived in Israel in 1945.  “I did know about Arabs,” she asserted. “Arabic was compulsory in my high school.” In her town of Hadera, Jews and Arabs mingled and had good relations. “In other parts of Palestine, too, we lived together.” 

Referring next to Krantz’s concept of “proportionality,” she told him that she found it perplexing. “Would the Israeli response,” she asked, “have been acceptably proportionate if rockets had first killed more Israelis?” 

Ross answered that “we were taught that it was empty land, meaning ‘these are not people we are displacing.’” Ross felt that recent world attention on Gaza had resulted in more information about what has taken place in Gaza. 

Krantz cautioned that people should be “careful about painting people in one color.” He had lived in Israel in the 1970’s and traveled a great deal.  The concept, he said, of “a land without a people for a people without a land” was a distorted one. He said that there exist many narratives of life before and after 1948, and asserted that “a single strand is not a whole narrative.”  He defended the proportionality concept again, saying, “If someone takes your finger, you don’t take their arm; if someone hurts a member of my family I do not have the right to wipe out their entire family.” 

Levin, reminding the audience that he believed that the Hamas rocket fire into Israel had not been the initial aggression, said, “This was a population being strangled, and they fought back.  What would you do if your home were surrounded? Fight back.” 

Nada Khader, executive director of WESPAC Foundation, asked Krantz, “Israel has an existential problem. The one million Palestinians in Israel will be a majority in 2050.  Tzipi Livni, Acting Prime Minister of Israel, has said that Israel must start denationalizing Palestinians in order to maintain Jewish purity.  Do you approve of this ethnic cleansing?”

Krantz replied, “I don’t know that that is her view; but I’m not here to talk about Tzipi Livni. I support two states. I am not for the transfer of anyone. I am opposed to the settlements; they should be evacuated and those who built them should be removed. If Israelis want to stay in the West Bank, stay and be citizens of a Palestinian state,” concluding, “ It’s not simple on either side.” 

Ross added, “Ethnic cleansing is a major subject in Israeli newspapers. It used to be a big topic among right wingers, but now a lot of leaders talk about getting rid of Palestinians. There is constant discussion of it.”  She added, “We, as Jews, must stand against ethnic cleansing. No victim can use victimhood to justify victimization of others.”

A woman from the audience who identified herself as Jewish said in an agitated voice, “I came here to hear and learn more…. [but] a lot of what you say is no favor to Jews or Palestinians. I have friends in Gaza; you are not helping them. They are afraid of the Hamas. The beauty of Hamas is that you can go to the internet and see that its charter is plain: they don’t [only] want the West Bank and Gaza, they want to eliminate Israel.” 

Levin began to answer her, but she interrupted him, saying, “I don’t want a response from this man.”  Levin apologized to her if she found his position offensive, “But,” he said, “let me agree with you about something: I don’t defend Hamas. But Hamas is not all black and white. There are Israelis who want to transfer [Palestinians] and there are Hamas who want to eliminate Israel.” But, he maintained, “we have only heard the Israeli narrative.”

From the audience, Mazen Kalifeh suggested that people bypass “this blaming and shouting” and find a way forward. Another woman concurred and added, “I hoped for more talk about a way forward, to try to find moderates and move forward,” but said she was disturbed that Levin had called Jews paranoid and accused them of turning a blind eye to diplomacy possibilities. Israel had made peace with Sadat of Egypt and the King of Jordan. She asked him, “What do you need to see? Jews leaving Israel?” 

As moderator, Elley begged panelists and audience to remain focused on possible solutions of how to move forward. 

Levin suggested that Israeli settlers withdraw and stop building settlements; Israel should “stop trying to control the lives of Palestinians.”

Krantz concurred. “If the U.S. is a friend to Israel, then make good on its statements that settlements have been an obstacle to peace. Dismantle them. We need to restore credibility on the Israeli side.”

Ross advised that Israel should recognize “that Israel is an occupying nation and stop the blockade. It is not right to deny medicine and food, according to the Geneva conventions,” which were developed, she said, because food and medicine were denied to Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. “You can go back to the statement of Hamas [that its objective is to eliminate Israel], but Hamas has indicated over and over that they will guarantee a cease fire for ten to twenty years if the blockade is stopped. Israel must recognize Hamas as representatives of Gaza.”

Miller answered, “I can’t figure out what’s in the mind of Hamas, but what can Israel do? Israel made a mistake to not assist in developing the West Bank and showing how good life could be there. There was hope a couple of decades ago, that an increase in commercial relations was leading to ‘OK, we do business’ and the economy was developing. What Israel can do is support the West Bank.”

A young Muslim woman from the audience asked, “Why a two-state solution?  Why not live in harmony, in one state?”

Krantz answered, “I can’t answer what will happen in ten or 12 years; I’m not that kind of seer.  But we can’t forget the history of the past 60 to 70 years. After the European Holocaust, Jews’ perception was that we needed to have a state. A single state is no longer a Jewish state.”

Levin characterized one-state as an ideal, just as one-world is an ideal.  But, he said, there is “a lot of tribalism, chauvinism and fear” that will make it very hard.

Miller spoke again. “Unfortunately, we’re all trapped by our histories and can’t see the future too well. This is the 61st year of Israel as a state, and you’re into a third generation of refugees who are using textbooks that teach hatred of the Jews. It would be very difficult to combine the two people. Two states provide physical protection, at least.” And he suggested that someday more might be possible, citing the example of Germany and France, once enemies, who now freely associate with one another.

Ross offered: “I understand why, after the Holocaust, a Jewish state [was desired]. But any Jew can show up and claim the right to return.” This and other rights are given to Jews and not to others, she said, concluding,  “I want one state, but it’s not possible now.”