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David Horovitz: Lerner�s Virus
Its aim, Rabbi Lerner e-mails, is "to deal with a difficult issue: the Denial (he uses a capital "D" for added emphasis) rampant in the Jewish world about the role that Israel is playing inflicting pain and violating human rights in Palestine and the way Israeli policies are starting to generate all kinds of anger against the Jewish people." Israelis and American Jews, he goes on, need "to acknowledge what is actually happening on the ground." People have to be able, he argues, "to say, �yes, I see we are killing x number of Palestinians each day, and they are civilians who were not engaged in terror attacks, and we are doing y damage to their society� -- and then evaluating it and saying whether this is smart or not."
Ideally, I�d have fumed briefly and deleted the invitation -- as we all do those unexpected e-mails that pitch up in our "inbox" and prompt virus warnings. But Lerner�s e-mail contains a more virulent virus than those that would destroy our software; it would destroy our moral legitimacy in this existential conflict with the Palestinians.
Shortly before Lerner�s invitation landed, I addressed a Shabbat service at Bnai Jeshurun, a vibrant Conservative congregation on Manhattan�s Upper West Side. I spoke briefly -- there were two bat mitzvot that day, and we were heading past the three-hour mark -- about the appalling reality we confront in Israel, the relentless attacks on our civilians, and the systematic incitement and financing of such attacks by Yasser Arafat and others in his Palestinian Authority. I explained that by blowing us up throughout our sovereign land, they are explosively persuading Israelis that even the most dramatic territorial compromise will not sate them, and prompting the inescapable conclusion that their goal is to terrorize and, ultimately, overwhelm the Jewish state. I went on to say that Israel had proved its desire for peaceful coexistence -- by electing Ehud Barak in 1999, for instance, and by its readiness to consider negotiations on the basis of the deeply problematic Saudi initiative -- but explained that most Israelis no longer held out the slimmest hope of accommodation with the unreformable Arafat.
I am a passionate but not a deliberately stirring speaker. Yet these remarks were greeted with a prolonged standing ovation, and at the end of the service numerous congregants earnestly thanked me for "finally" telling them "the truth" about what was happening in Israel and how Israelis felt about it. Observing my genuine bafflement, several explained that they had been so battered by inaccurate representations of the situation, on TV, in their newspapers and from some visiting speakers, as to have begun to wonder whether Israel was truly the victim rather than the aggressor -- whether the army�s preventive measures, rather than the bombings, lay at the root of the violence. Put down in black and white, that may seem inconceivable. But what with the various boycott initiatives, the diplomatic assaults, and the small but vocal groups of Jews and Israelis endorsing them, even some of Israel�s committed supporters are evidently having trouble keeping track of right and wrong.
Which brings me back to Rabbi Lerner. As a would-be spiritual leader and a Zionist, who says he wants Israel to survive as a Jewish state and notes that his own children have served in the army, he shouldn�t have much trouble establishing the facts and charting the moral line. And yet as we bury still more innocent victims each day, he, in his missive, insultingly asserts that "the people of Israel � really are not as vulnerable as they perceive themselves to be," and seeks to formulate "a strategy to break through the levels of Denial so that we can help the Jewish people acknowledge what is wrong in what Israel is doing."
I understand the temptation, in defiance of all evidence, to argue that the orchestrated terrorism employed against us is somehow our fault -- because then we would have the power, unilaterally, to create the conditions for its cessation. Would that it were so. While Lerner patronizingly claims that Israelis are broadly supporting current government policy because of their refusal to "look at the facts," they are actually fully aware of the extent of the Palestinian leadership�s betrayal; aware that Arafat has never halted terrorism; aware of the hysterical climate of anti-Israel hostility that Arafat has fostered, and deeply aware of all the complex implications of the army�s efforts to minimize the consequent daily bids to kill us. In democratic Israel, with its free press and people�s army, we have all the facts at our disposal -- unlike the Palestinian public, manipulated by its Arafat-controlled media, fed inflammatory lies, never told of the partnership toward independent statehood that Arafat rejected in its name.
Still, since Lerner thinks, in his condescension and self-deception, that Israelis and their supporters don�t know what�s going on, let him hold his get-together not, as planned, at a "retreat center" in the San Francisco area, but in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv or in a tent at Megiddo junction. Let participants visit the roadblocks to witness the daily humiliations imposed upon ordinary Palestinians. But let them also visit those whose loved ones have been murdered by Palestinians attackers, and hear briefings about the innumerable bombings thwarted by those roadblocks, and about the bomb factories destroyed and the lifesaving intelligence information obtained during the army incursions. Let them be reminded that the stringent security measures were not in place 20 months ago, when Barak was trying to make peace with Arafat, and that they would end, and tens of thousands of Palestinians could return to jobs inside Israel, the moment the attacks on our populace cease. Let them be reminded, in short, that the way to stop the futile deaths on both sides requires a simple end to terrorism, not a complex formulation of strategy.
Best of all, I�d hope that Lerner, on reflection, will recognize that his planned gathering may be interpreted by those who dispatch the bombers as a victory -- Jews buying into the vile falsehood that depicts their terrorism as a desperate resort to violence by a people denied statehood. I�d hope he�ll send us "special people" a letter of apology (and then kindly remove my name from his mailing list). Failing that, I hope he�ll convene his strategy session in Israel and risk a bleeding body, as we all do each day here, for the sake of his misdirected bleeding heart.
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