Arguing about Israel: a response to Donald Wagner

Christian Century, Sept 20, 2003 by Ira Youdovin, Donald Wagner

AS A JEWISH religions and political liberal for whom the Presbyterian office in Washington was a lodestar during the Vietnam war, I share John Buchanan's sadness over the rupture in Jewish-Protestant relations ("Estranged," June 28). Buchanan attributes the estrangement to Jewish overreaction to mainline Protestant criticism of Israeli policy. In fact, the situation is far more complex.

While there are Jews who reject any criticism of Israel its anti-Semitic, Jewish liberals are generally not in this category. We ourselves criticize Israeli policy when we believe criticism is warranted. Yet we are the ones who feel most alienated from Protestant counterparts who were once our comrades in the great and sacred struggle to create a more decent world for, all God's children.

The issue is not criticism per se. What rankles is relentless condemnation that is so strident and one-sided as to give the appearance of going beyond expressing support for legitimate Palestinian aspirations.

Donald Wagner's article "Marching to Zion" (June 28) is a case in point. He conjures a phantasmagoric conspiratorial theory which has Israel's Likud government annexing the entire West Bank with assistance from the American Christian right, which views Jewish sovereignty over all of biblical Palestine as a precondition for the Second Coming. This will happen as the 2004 election approaches, because President Bush is loathe to alienate Christian fundamentalists, who are among his core supporters. Or so goes the scenario.

When the facts get in Wagner's way, he simply ignores them. Likud's official opposition to Palestinian statehood stems from a gambit staged by Binyamin Netanyahu as the party was preparing to nominate candidates for the 2003 national elections. As prime minister, Ariel Sharon had endorsed the creation of a Palestinian state on condition flint it would not threaten Israel. Netanyahu sought to undermine him by including opposition to Palestinian statehood in the party's platform.

The Likud Central Committee backed Netanyahu, but the party went on to nominate Sharon, who won re-election in a landslide. When his cabinet endorsed the "road map" for peace in May, none of the Likud ministers voted against it.

Since then, the prime minister has fleshed out his position. He recently characterized Israeli presence on the West Bank and Gaza as an "occupation," and committed himself to a Palestinian state with "contiguity"--a code word for uprooting settlements. On May 26, he said: "Maintaining three and a half million Palestinians under occupation is a bad thing. One and a half million are in the care of international organizations. Do we want to take over? Can we? We have to let the occupation go without compromising our national security. It is not possible for us to stay forever in Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah and Bethlehem."

Ralph Reed may want Israel to annex the West Brink. Ariel Sharon does not.

Wagner's thesis is not merely wrong. It is deliberately misleading in a way intended to generate ill will toward Israel. This thinly veiled animus is apparent in innuendoes and distortions of fact that run through his article.

He writes that in April 2002 "the Israeli army was demolishing several cities and refugee camps in the West Bank." This repeats a long-discredited lie about the dimension of Israeli force at the outset of Operation Defensive Shield. Journalists at the time joined a United Nations official in parroting Palestinian allegations that genocidal acts were being committed in Jenin. When the dust cleared, Human Rights Watch, hardly a pro-Israel lobby, set Palestinian losses at 52 dead, at least 27 of them armed terrorists belonging to Islamic Jihad, Hamas and the al-Aqsa Martyr's Brigades. Even the UN retracted its wildly exaggerated verbiage.

One bristles also at Wagner's clumsy defamation of liberal rabbis. He writes that "many progressive Reform rabbis have expressed public support for the Christian Zionists and the Christian right, knowing full well that the Christian right's theological and political agendas are contrary to the Reform Jewish community's progressive stance on civil liberties and human rights."

The accusation of selling out will come as a surprise to the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the 1,800 member professional association of North American Reform rabbis, which, at its recent national convention, adopted strong resolutions reaffirming the Reform rabbinate's longstanding commitment to defending the First Amendment's separation of church and state; opposing direct government funding or voucher funding of houses of worship; recommitting itself to protecting the religious rights of social-service beneficiaries; and supporting genetic research using both adult and embryonic stem cells, not limited to the existing lines currently approved for funding by the Bush administration. Reform Judaism's unequivocal pro-choice stance remains undiminished, as does its advocacy of gay rights. That's not Pat Robertson's kind of agenda.