Israeli pop star Yehudit Ravitz sings: “Dvarim sheroyim misham, lo royim mikan” – “things you see from there, you don’t see from here.” How right she is.
From there, I see an interfaith iftar, a breaking of the Ramadan fast, with more than 100 Jewish and Muslim students eating and studying together texts on repentance from both the Torah and the Qur’an. From here, I see deep antagonism between Jewish and Muslim students at our universities.
From there, I see a rally of 20,000 Israelis speaking out after a tragic murder at a Tel Aviv lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered youth centre. From here, I see Queers Against Israeli Apartheid politicizing and polarizing Toronto’s gay Pride Parade.
From there, I see women’s groups denouncing “honour killings” – murders by men (let’s call them what they are) of female family members they suspect of doing something, or more likely having something done to them. From here, I read “feminist” author Naomi Wolf claim that the burqa – a full veiling of a woman with only a slit to see out of – as a kind of new “feminist” statement.
From there, I see Israeli film festivals showcasing sensitive and soul-searching films about national identity, ethnicity, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. From here, I get an orchestrated protest at the Toronto International Film Festival.
From there, I see honest, hard-working folks on both sides; beggars on both sides; dishonest politicians on both sides; schoolchildren being taught to hate on both sides; people trying to make ends meet on both sides, and youth groups trying to bridge the gaps on both sides. I see women in headscarves from both sides giggling at the freedom of learning to drive a car. I see fear and misunderstanding on both sides, and anger, loss, pain, stubbornness and closedmindedness on both sides.
What I see there is extremely layered. It’s not the lazy caricature of slogans that emanate from the mouths of those confined to ideology – on both sides.
What I saw at TIFF was a calculated attempt to divide Jews from Jews on the subject of Israel – to divide Jews who support Israel, even with critique and discomfort, from Jews who don’t support it at all, as if to say, “Oh, I’m Jewish too, but I’m oh-so-much-more-moral than those Jews, I’m not like those Jews, those non-thinking zealots who blindly sing Hatikvah and therefore obviously feel no pain at the suffering of others.”
It was an attempt to separate Jews who work for a two-state solution from Jews who would have Israel be anything but a Jewish state, to separate Jews who critique out of love from Jews who critique out of anger – so that those of us who ever call Israel to account are reticent to do so now for fear of being associated with the “anti-apartheid” crowd. Progressive Jews are powerfully silenced into toeing the “party line” for fear of being misidentified with a vocal group of left-wing, Jewish anti-Zionists.
Today’s new morality police – people who condemn without ever once questioning how they can support freedom for everyone except Jews in Israel, who trivialize the pain and suffering of a people that has never wanted anything more than peace in a small corner of the world, in their ancestral homeland – are confined to a version of morality that totally disregards those of us who seek real change.
We must not let our tikkun olam get hijacked. We must not fear being thrown together with strange bedfellows and therefore stop working for the kind of just peace that we know is possible. We must not let the Jewish “anti-Israeli apartheid” left stand in the way of our hope, our longing, our vision, our commitment to dialogue and our proactive work for peace.
We must not be intimidated into believing that the evil is so large and so one-sided and so onerously ours alone.
“Dvarim sheroyim misham, lo royim mikan” – “things you see from there, you don’t see from here.” We must see clearly the things from there that can be reflected here.
Read Rabbi Goldstein’s blog from Israel at http://jerusalemofgoldstein.blogspot .com.
