Foxman blasts J Street on Palin, questions its ‘pro-Israel’ slogan
The head of the Anti-Defamation League says J Street's attack on Sarah Palin's defense of Israeli settlements was "over the line" and questioned whether the group should be calling itself "pro-Israel."
In a call to JTA late Thursday, ADL national director Abraham Foxman called "the height of chutzpah" J Street's statement Wednesday which said "Palin's pandering to her right-wing base comes at the expense of the security of the State of Israel" and her remarks "reveal a glaring ignorance of damaging facts."
"Who authorizes them to detemine what the security of Israel is?" Foxman asked of J Street. "Israel determines its security."
"They're attacking a celebrity for supporting Israel, but not in the way they want her to support Israel," he said referring to the former governor of Alaska.
As for the charge that Palin was pandering, Foxman said that "all politics is pandering" and that one could say the same thing about the members of Congress who spoke at the J Street conference last month.
Foxman acknowledged Palin's remarks -- in which she said Jewish settlements "should be allowed to be expanded upon" because "more and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead" -- were a "simplistic effort to be supportive of the Israeli government," but also "clear and well-intentioned" and "didn't put any lives at stake."
The ADL leader added that this was the latest of a series of actions by J Street which raised doubt about whether both parts of the organization's slogan of “pro-Israel, pro-peace” is accurate.
Foxman said that J Street's criticism of Israel's invasion of Gaza, its opposition to new Iran sanctions at the present time, its failure to support last month's congressional resolution condemning the Goldstone report and now the reaction to the Palin statement raise a “question mark” about the group's “pro-Israel” bona fides.
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Mr."Anti-Defamation" knows perfectly well how to defame people he doesn;t agree with. To say “Israel determines its own security” is both false and unethical. No state can “determine its own security:” if it is violating international law, using disproortionate force to defend itself, etc. Not the USA , not the nascent Palestinian state, not Syria, not the USSR, not Israel. The Goldstone report brings serious evidence that israel went over the legal and moral line in its attack on Gaza, the report urged Israel to convene its own independent judicial investigation. Why Not??
Rabbi Arthur Waskow
The Shalom Center
http://www.theshalomcenter.org
I should have made clear --- the Goldstone report ALSO provided serious evidence that Hamas had committed war crimes and called for Hamas as well to convene an independent investigation. Goldstone specifically demanded and received an expansion of the original Commission mandate, which focused on Israel only, and said he would do this job only if it included a clear-eyed look at both warring parties. --- Rabbi Arthur Waskow
Did Abe call you specifically to discuss this point? Did you ask why, of the many statements put out by various Jewish groups in the course of a week (for example, Americans for Peace Now also critiized Palin’s remarks) did he feel it necessary to put his and ADL’s weight behind countering J Street? (It’s not as if J Street was wading into some big piece of legislation—they were criticizing a celebrity whose actual political future and influence is at this point unknown. Why, for that matter, did J Street feel it necessary to comment on Palin?) On whose behalf is Abe worried exactly—that Palin will think less kindly of the Jews? That people will think more kindly of J Street?
Abe’s “authorization” comment is also interesting-- who authorizes any non-governmental group to have an opinion about anything? Who “authorizes” ADL to monitor anti-Semitism? Every Jewish group’s “authorization” is really just the sum total of its constituency, fundraising ability and media savvy. Why does the ADL feel a need to go head to head with J Street, in this or any issue? I’m genuinely curious.
Abe Foxman speaks for that part of the traditional Jewish establishment for whom bringing in folks like me (I’m 59) would constitute a youth movement. He, and they, are dinosaurs, unable to adapt to changing times and conditions. (No offense, Arthur--I recognize that folks even older than I can summon the wisdom of their years and remain connected to changing realities, unlike those I am talking about here.)They continue to roar, and are infuriated that fewer ears are inclined to listen. Hence they bellow louder, and nurse their sense of “lese majeste”. So sorry, Abe--we hereby revoke whatever “authorization” you may feel to confer, or withhold “authority” on others.
Re the substantive points at issue in Palin’s Pander of the moment: There is plenty of room for thickening and additional Jewish population centers in the Galli and the Negev--parts of historic Eretz Israel (and traditional destinations for Zionist pioneering) that somehow don’t appeal to those previously drawn to Gaza. Not to speak of luxury enclaves now expanding the existing footprint of Jewish settlement in Jerusalem and along the Mediterranean coast. The notion that any foreseeable American Jewish aliyah (which I would encourage, including in my own family) requires “living space” in territory critical to the creation of a Palestinian state living in peace with Israel is simply absurd, and should not be encouraged. I agree with the decision to call out Palin, and others spouting out such wrong and uninformed gibberish, on such counterproductive nonsense.
Shabbat shalom, The Wise Bard
Also see commentary in The Magnes Zionist [excerpt]:
“Dr. Marsha B. Cohen has pointed out privately that Palin’s remark has a lot more behind it. Indeed, maybe you have to be a religious Jew or a Christian evangelical – or, for that matter, somebody who has studied those groups, like Dr. Cohen – to understand that Palin’s remark came from her deepest convictions. Because as has already been pointed out, her version of Christianity preaches that very soon now (or as Chabad says, be-karov mammesh) there will be an ingathering of all the Jews to Israel as part of the final eschaton. And then the Lord Jesus Christ will return after Armaggedon, etc.
As an orthodox Jew who respects – well, at least understands – religious belief, I take Sarah Palin seriously. She is motivated by an ideology that is almost indistinguishable from that of the West Bank settlers, who also see that the Messiah is just around the corner. True, they disagree over the details – like the identity of the messiah and the message – but they are both motivated by a fundamentalist religious ideological.
Under these circumstances, the most natural organization to call out Sarah Palin on this religious interference into the Middle East would be the Anti-Defamation League.
Think again. Abe Foxman went out of his way to defend Palin against J-Street’s attack. According to Foxman, who the hell is J-Street to tell Israel what its security needs are. Foxman, whose loyalty is almost always to whatever Israeli government is in charge (one remembers how he left his shul during Oslo because his rabbi was dissing the Rabin government), sees no problem with questioning J-Street’s “pro-Israel” moniker and defending a position which any person with a grain of sekhel would understand as problematic at best, or benignly anti-Semitic at worst. . . . “
____
http://themagneszionist.blogspot.com/2009/11/second-coming-of-sarah-palin.html
Give me a break, Abe Foxman! How much longer do the majority of Jews in this country have to wait for the right-wing leadership of mainstream Jewish organizations like yours to retire? Goldstone was considered a highly regarded member of the Jewish community and a respected Zionist when he was trustee of Hebrew University etc and played a pivotal role in addressing human rights abuses in former Yugoslavia, but when he levels substantive criticism against Israel’s role in Gaza (and Hamas’s role, by the way), all of a sudden he becomes persona non grata in the mainstream Jewish community. Continue your right-wing grandstanding while you alienate young Jews, but then don’t whine about intermarriage and assimilation rates in the Jewish community. J-Street’s arrival on the scene is a breath of fresh air.
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Yisrael Medad
11/20/09 01:13 AM
And add to Abe’s criticism the possibility that J Street is also anti-Aliyah. If Palin’s support takes into consideration a factor that Jews are and will be continuing to move to Israel, for all sorts of reasons, and that the state is still in a dynamism of being created and fulfilling its purpose as the Jewish national home, and that room is needed, then the conclusion is that J Street is anti-Aliyah. Its message is ‘heck, Aliyah is dead’ and that Israel should do with what it has. Security is also a large Jewish population. A small population aids J Street’s demographic demonology screed.