Ubiquitous Dissent
The chairman of Peace Now in France, David Chelma, has been instrumental in a new Jewish effort to dissent from Israeli policies. The initiative is dubbed JCall, a term explicitly intended to evoke the Washington-based organization J Street. Over the past weekend, the group issued a web-based petition, entitled "European Jewish Call for Reason," denouncing Israeli settlements as "morally and politically wrong" and seeking to promote a movement in behalf of "the voice of reason." The 3,000-plus signers include such pro-Israel luminaries as the philosophers Bernard Henri-Lévy and Alain Finkielkraut. Israel's former ambassador to France, Elie Barnavi, is also a backer.
The campaigners say they are exasperated with the "monolithic" Jewish mainstream. Not only should it be legitimate for Jews to criticize Israel's policies, according to the multilingual petition, but such criticism is both necessary and praiseworthy. To the contrary, what is "dangerous" is the prevailing situation: namely, the mainstream's "systematic support of Israeli government policy."
The Israeli broadsheet Haaretz has been quick to endorse the JCall initiative, applauding its healthy rejection of "automatic support" for Israeli policy—especially when it comes to Jerusalem neighborhoods over the Green Line. Others are being heard from as well. In a rebuke to the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel, who in a recent newspaper advertisement urged that the fate of Jerusalem be dealt with at a later stage of peace negotiations, an open letter signed by 100 "Jewish Jerusalemites" asserts that Israel's "crafty politicians and sentimental populists" are engaged in a "frantic" drive to "Judaize" the city and foreclose its being "shared by the two nations residing in it." In U.S. Jewish newspapers, J Street chimed in with a similar retort to Wiesel by the former Meretz-party leader Yossi Sarid.
The notion that dissent within the "monolithic" pro-Israel community operates under severe constraints is axiomatic among the dissenters themselves. In fact, criticism of Israeli security policies by the country's Diaspora friends, including the most prominent, is commonplace. Nahum Goldmann, the venerable head of the World Jewish Congress, publicly broke with Israeli policies in 1967. In 1973, he reportedly helped finance an organization, Breira ("Alternative"), whose rabbinic advisory council advocated the creation of a PLO-led state alongside Israel—this, decades before Yasir Arafat ostensibly recognized the country's right to exist. Goldmann also appealed to U.S. decision-makers to pressure Israel into withdrawing from the West Bank and Gaza. Philip Kluznick, Goldmann's successor, adopted an even more sharply dissenting profile.
In American terms, perhaps the closest predecessor to the JCall petition was the 1978 letter signed by thirty-seven prominent U.S. Jews—writers, professors, theologians—demanding that Israel show greater flexibility in negotiating a peace treaty with Egypt. In 1980, the New Jewish Agenda took up the work of the by-then defunct Breira. Also in the early 1980s, Rabbi Alexander Schindler of the Reform movement asked: "Must we indulge in annexationist fantasies in order to prove that we are passionate Jews?" This year, his successor Rabbi Eric Yoffie said he stood with Obama and against Netanyahu on the matter of a construction freeze in east Jerusalem.
On the matter of settlements, the roster of Jewish figures who have campaigned against Israel's policies includes a leader of the Conservative movement and former chairs of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations. If anything, opinion on Israel's approach to the settlements issue has become institutionalized, with more members of the Presidents Conference dissenting than supporting.
The one constant—from Nahum Goldmann's day through JCall—has been the absence of any countervailing call from anyone, anywhere, to pressure Fatah, Hamas, or the Arab League into adopting less intransigent policies toward the Jewish state.
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