Anthony McIntyre's Blog, page 1142
May 24, 2018
May 23, 2018
Memo To Labour. Let’s Have Energy Systems Integration For The Many
Gabriel Levy discusses the need for radical change in the UK electricity system. The article featured in People And Nature,
“A whole systems approach is required, in which one single party has responsibility for optimising technical performance across the system”, Richard Hanna and his colleagues say in the paper, entitled Unlocking the Potential of Energy Systems Integration (see p. 24).
The briefing paper outlines the technological potential for moving away from fossil fuels by integrating and decentralising energy systems, using, mainly, smart computers and cutting-edge methods of switching between forms of energy. It summarises, in language comprehensible by a general readership, the findings of a big pile of technical reports and research articles by engineers.
An integrated system will make it practical and possible for solar panels to go on many roofs
I hope the Energy Futures Lab’s findings will be read by everyone interested in putting together socialist approaches to the transition away from fossil fuels: trade union militants in the energy sector, climate campaigners, eco-socialists, and so on. In particular, I hope they will be taken into account by those discussing energy and environment policies for the Labour Party in the UK.
Only by putting the technological transformation of energy production and consumption at the centre of our discussions will be able to work out how we can best change the ownership of, and control over, the system. We need to challenge the corporate control of the technologies, and make them work for the whole of society – which includes working for the speediest possible decarbonisation – and not for the corporations.
Conversely, if those corporations are left in control, the technologies’ potential for society will never be fully realised.
It’s difficult to summarise the paper’s summary of where the technology is going. But imagine a city where the primary method of producing energy is from renewable sources, such as wind and solar power. These resources would supply a host of local micro-grids, linked with each other through
larger-scale grids (in electricity, low-voltage networks linked by high-voltage lines). As far as possible, energy would be produced near to where it is used.
Possible areas for integration between different energy systems. From Abeysekera, Wu and Jenkins, Hubnet position paper on Integrated Energy Systems
Moreover, grids for different types of energy – electricity networks, district heating systems, gas networks for cooking, and transport networks – would be interlinked. When there is too much of one form of energy, other networks can be used to store it, and smart internet-type technology used to manage the process.
So surplus electricity would be converted into heat, or hydrogen to be used as fuel. Surpluses of other energy types might be used to produce electricity, which could be stored, for example, in the batteries of electric cars. Combined heat and power technologies, already in use for the best part of a century, would be developed to become more adjustable, integrated with cooling systems and adapted to run from multiple energy sources.
The Energy Futures Lab team argue (p. 6) that the technologies that matter can be placed in three groups:
■ “Smart operation and aggregation of energy systems”, using “automation, communication and storage technologies”;
■ “Cross-vector integration”, i.e. the adaptation e.g. of electricity, gas and heating networks to complement each other; and
■ “Power-to-X technologies” that use electricity to produce “an energy carrier (mainly hydrogen) as an interface among different energy vectors”.
All these technologies exist now, and some of them have existed for many years. What the Energy Futures Lab paper hammers home is that technological potential can only be realised if holistic approaches are adopted. (If you have read the paper and have the appetite for more, I recommend Integrated Energy Systems, by the “Hubnet” research group.)
As for the control and ownership of the system, the Energy Futures Lab researchers say, in guarded language, that the “challenges involved in realising the potential of greater energy systems integration” include “a need to overcome the fragmented nature of institutions and market structures in different energy sectors” (p. 29).
Such fragmentation is inevitable when different aspects of the energy system – e.g. the provision of electricity, gas for cooking or heat, or fuel for transport – are all controlled by companies motivated by profit, in my view.
The Energy Futures Lab paper calls for “coordinated and integrated planning across supply and demand and centralised and distributed resources” (p. 24). The labour movement can and should develop an argument that such coordination and integration can only be realised with a shift to forms of public and social ownership.
Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, made the link between forms of public ownership and the fight against climate change in a speech in February. He spoke about the transition to a decentralised electricity network managed by smart technology, and said:
Corbyn also spoke about “actively devolving power to local communities, by giving community energy practical support and encouragement”, and about changing the rules governing supply to the electricity grid by small-scale generators.
Such strong support for devolved community energy projects, using renewables, is welcome indeed. The potential of such projects has been convincingly explained by Alan Simpson, the former Labour MP and renewable energy campaigner, in his pamphlet The Transformation Moment – and I dare say his work has influenced Corbyn.
So far, so good. But what the Energy Futures Lab paper tells us is that, to realise fully the technological potential available, a holistic approach needs to be adopted.
Up to now the discussions around Labour’s energy policy have focused almost entirely on electricity, and have assumed that the organisational and corporate separation between generation, transmission, distribution and supply will remain.
The problem of how the system is organised is obviously related to the problem of ownership. Corbyn made very clear in his speech that transmission (i.e. the National Grid) would be front of the queue for a return to public ownership, that local distribution would be overhauled, and that community energy would be strongly supported – but he did not mention specific types of ownership for electricity generation assets or supply markets, where the “big six” corporations are dominant.
Labour’s election manifesto commits the party “to ensure that national and regional grid infrastructure is brought into public ownership over time”, but only to small islands of public ownership of generation and supply; an Energy and Environment document launched by Corbyn in 2016 takes a similar approach.[1] As far as I understand, debate continues in the Labour Party about the extent to which it intends to commit to extending forms of public and social ownership there.
The realities of the technological transition, set out clearly in the Energy Futures Lab paper, mean the discussion has to go further.
The energy systems integration envisaged by the Energy Futures Lab implies that:
(1) the organisational divisions between electricity generation, transmission, distribution and supply would be scrapped; and
(2) the development of electricity networks would be closely coordinated with gas, heating and cooling, and transport networks.
Moreover, the “single party” that, according to the Energy Futures Lab, needs to take responsibility for optimising technical performance, would surely have to be a public body, not a private one.
Those in the Labour Party who want far-reaching policies to make the energy system work for people and not for profit could pick up these arguments and run with them. So could trades unionists in the energy sector who want to break with the false dichotomy of jobs vs climate justice, and want to play a part in the transition to an energy system that doesn’t contribute to global warming.
There are transformations of infrastructure that are more social and economic than technological – shifts towards energy-neutral buildings, away from car-based urban transport systems and away from carbon-intensive industrial production – that are outside the scope of the Energy Futures Lab paper, but would also form part of a serious socialist approach to energy.
Let’s be ambitious. When James Connolly wrote, “Our demands most moderate are, We only want the earth”, he didn’t have this particular discussion in mind. But a similarly bold approach is needed now. GL, 15 May 2018.
More on Labour’s energy policy
■ Will Labour’s climate policy rely on monstrous techno-fixes like BECCS? March 2018
■ Let’s take Corbyn’s climate proposals seriously September 2016
===
[1] Labour’s manifesto currently commits to “taking energy back into public ownership”: (1) regaining public control of supply networks by altering operators’ licencing conditions; (2) supporting the creation of publicly owned local energy companies and cooperatives [i.e. for electricity generation, distribution and supply]; and (3) legislating to allow publicly owned local companies to purchase regional grid infrastructure. The publicly owned companies in generation and supply would “rival existing private energy suppliers” – which presumably means they would compete with, but not replace, the “big six”.
“A whole systems approach is required, in which one single party has responsibility for optimising technical performance across the system”, Richard Hanna and his colleagues say in the paper, entitled Unlocking the Potential of Energy Systems Integration (see p. 24).
The briefing paper outlines the technological potential for moving away from fossil fuels by integrating and decentralising energy systems, using, mainly, smart computers and cutting-edge methods of switching between forms of energy. It summarises, in language comprehensible by a general readership, the findings of a big pile of technical reports and research articles by engineers.
An integrated system will make it practical and possible for solar panels to go on many roofs I hope the Energy Futures Lab’s findings will be read by everyone interested in putting together socialist approaches to the transition away from fossil fuels: trade union militants in the energy sector, climate campaigners, eco-socialists, and so on. In particular, I hope they will be taken into account by those discussing energy and environment policies for the Labour Party in the UK.
Only by putting the technological transformation of energy production and consumption at the centre of our discussions will be able to work out how we can best change the ownership of, and control over, the system. We need to challenge the corporate control of the technologies, and make them work for the whole of society – which includes working for the speediest possible decarbonisation – and not for the corporations.
Conversely, if those corporations are left in control, the technologies’ potential for society will never be fully realised.
It’s difficult to summarise the paper’s summary of where the technology is going. But imagine a city where the primary method of producing energy is from renewable sources, such as wind and solar power. These resources would supply a host of local micro-grids, linked with each other through
larger-scale grids (in electricity, low-voltage networks linked by high-voltage lines). As far as possible, energy would be produced near to where it is used.
Possible areas for integration between different energy systems. From Abeysekera, Wu and Jenkins, Hubnet position paper on Integrated Energy Systems Moreover, grids for different types of energy – electricity networks, district heating systems, gas networks for cooking, and transport networks – would be interlinked. When there is too much of one form of energy, other networks can be used to store it, and smart internet-type technology used to manage the process.
So surplus electricity would be converted into heat, or hydrogen to be used as fuel. Surpluses of other energy types might be used to produce electricity, which could be stored, for example, in the batteries of electric cars. Combined heat and power technologies, already in use for the best part of a century, would be developed to become more adjustable, integrated with cooling systems and adapted to run from multiple energy sources.
The Energy Futures Lab team argue (p. 6) that the technologies that matter can be placed in three groups:
■ “Smart operation and aggregation of energy systems”, using “automation, communication and storage technologies”;
■ “Cross-vector integration”, i.e. the adaptation e.g. of electricity, gas and heating networks to complement each other; and
■ “Power-to-X technologies” that use electricity to produce “an energy carrier (mainly hydrogen) as an interface among different energy vectors”.
All these technologies exist now, and some of them have existed for many years. What the Energy Futures Lab paper hammers home is that technological potential can only be realised if holistic approaches are adopted. (If you have read the paper and have the appetite for more, I recommend Integrated Energy Systems, by the “Hubnet” research group.)
As for the control and ownership of the system, the Energy Futures Lab researchers say, in guarded language, that the “challenges involved in realising the potential of greater energy systems integration” include “a need to overcome the fragmented nature of institutions and market structures in different energy sectors” (p. 29).
Such fragmentation is inevitable when different aspects of the energy system – e.g. the provision of electricity, gas for cooking or heat, or fuel for transport – are all controlled by companies motivated by profit, in my view.
The Energy Futures Lab paper calls for “coordinated and integrated planning across supply and demand and centralised and distributed resources” (p. 24). The labour movement can and should develop an argument that such coordination and integration can only be realised with a shift to forms of public and social ownership.
Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, made the link between forms of public ownership and the fight against climate change in a speech in February. He spoke about the transition to a decentralised electricity network managed by smart technology, and said:
The future is decentralised, flexible and diverse, with new sources of energy large and small, from tidal to solar. Smart technologies will optimise usage […]. There will be much more use of local, micro grids and of batteries to store and balance fluctuating renewable energy. We will still need a grid to match energy supply with demand and import and export renewable energy abroad because the wind won’t always blow where energy is needed. But it will be a smart grid, radically transformed.
Corbyn also spoke about “actively devolving power to local communities, by giving community energy practical support and encouragement”, and about changing the rules governing supply to the electricity grid by small-scale generators.
Such strong support for devolved community energy projects, using renewables, is welcome indeed. The potential of such projects has been convincingly explained by Alan Simpson, the former Labour MP and renewable energy campaigner, in his pamphlet The Transformation Moment – and I dare say his work has influenced Corbyn.
So far, so good. But what the Energy Futures Lab paper tells us is that, to realise fully the technological potential available, a holistic approach needs to be adopted.
Up to now the discussions around Labour’s energy policy have focused almost entirely on electricity, and have assumed that the organisational and corporate separation between generation, transmission, distribution and supply will remain.
The problem of how the system is organised is obviously related to the problem of ownership. Corbyn made very clear in his speech that transmission (i.e. the National Grid) would be front of the queue for a return to public ownership, that local distribution would be overhauled, and that community energy would be strongly supported – but he did not mention specific types of ownership for electricity generation assets or supply markets, where the “big six” corporations are dominant.
Labour’s election manifesto commits the party “to ensure that national and regional grid infrastructure is brought into public ownership over time”, but only to small islands of public ownership of generation and supply; an Energy and Environment document launched by Corbyn in 2016 takes a similar approach.[1] As far as I understand, debate continues in the Labour Party about the extent to which it intends to commit to extending forms of public and social ownership there.
The realities of the technological transition, set out clearly in the Energy Futures Lab paper, mean the discussion has to go further.
The energy systems integration envisaged by the Energy Futures Lab implies that:
(1) the organisational divisions between electricity generation, transmission, distribution and supply would be scrapped; and
(2) the development of electricity networks would be closely coordinated with gas, heating and cooling, and transport networks.
Moreover, the “single party” that, according to the Energy Futures Lab, needs to take responsibility for optimising technical performance, would surely have to be a public body, not a private one.
Those in the Labour Party who want far-reaching policies to make the energy system work for people and not for profit could pick up these arguments and run with them. So could trades unionists in the energy sector who want to break with the false dichotomy of jobs vs climate justice, and want to play a part in the transition to an energy system that doesn’t contribute to global warming.
There are transformations of infrastructure that are more social and economic than technological – shifts towards energy-neutral buildings, away from car-based urban transport systems and away from carbon-intensive industrial production – that are outside the scope of the Energy Futures Lab paper, but would also form part of a serious socialist approach to energy.
Let’s be ambitious. When James Connolly wrote, “Our demands most moderate are, We only want the earth”, he didn’t have this particular discussion in mind. But a similarly bold approach is needed now. GL, 15 May 2018.
More on Labour’s energy policy
■ Will Labour’s climate policy rely on monstrous techno-fixes like BECCS? March 2018
■ Let’s take Corbyn’s climate proposals seriously September 2016
===
[1] Labour’s manifesto currently commits to “taking energy back into public ownership”: (1) regaining public control of supply networks by altering operators’ licencing conditions; (2) supporting the creation of publicly owned local energy companies and cooperatives [i.e. for electricity generation, distribution and supply]; and (3) legislating to allow publicly owned local companies to purchase regional grid infrastructure. The publicly owned companies in generation and supply would “rival existing private energy suppliers” – which presumably means they would compete with, but not replace, the “big six”.
Prevent Trump Style Voter Suppression
Advice from Solidarity Times - Free the Media, Be the Media, reminding voters to have proper ID when they turn out to vote on Friday.
Valid ID includes (i) a passport; (ii) a driving licence; (iii) an employee identity card containing a photograph; (iv) a student identity card issued by an educational institution and containing a photograph; etc.
Voter suppression though demanding ID is a major tactic used by the right in US election, often accompanied by the sort of scare stories that No leaders have been putting out during the week. The method is to target polling stations which they know would have a large Yes votes in the hope that a couple of percent of voters may only have brought voting card presuming it counts as ID (it doesn't).
Obviously if this is only done at stations with large Yes votes and not at those where a No majority is expected it can tilt the overall vote in a very close election.
As we currently understand things while they can appoint observers these people are not allowed to have campaigned in the referendum and are not allowed challenge voters themselves, they can only observe to confirm that the presiding officer does so.
Valid ID includes (i) a passport; (ii) a driving licence; (iii) an employee identity card containing a photograph; (iv) a student identity card issued by an educational institution and containing a photograph; etc.
Voter suppression though demanding ID is a major tactic used by the right in US election, often accompanied by the sort of scare stories that No leaders have been putting out during the week. The method is to target polling stations which they know would have a large Yes votes in the hope that a couple of percent of voters may only have brought voting card presuming it counts as ID (it doesn't).
Obviously if this is only done at stations with large Yes votes and not at those where a No majority is expected it can tilt the overall vote in a very close election.
As we currently understand things while they can appoint observers these people are not allowed to have campaigned in the referendum and are not allowed challenge voters themselves, they can only observe to confirm that the presiding officer does so.
May 22, 2018
That Woman
The Uri Avnery Column focuses on Golda Meyer.
Ben-Gurion said about her: "The only thing Golda knows how to do is to hate!"
Golda Meir did not hate me. That would be an understatement. She detested me.
The way I speak, the way I dress, the way I look. Everything.
Once, in the middle of a speech in the Knesset (I believe it was about allowing the Beatles to appear in Israel) I interrupted myself and said: "Now I want to answer MK Golda Meir…"
"But MK Meir has not said anything!" the chairman objected.
"I am not answering an interjection," I explained. "I am answering her grimaces!"
And indeed, Golda was grimacing, every muscle of her face proclaiming her detestation.
The Third chapter of Raviv Drucker's interesting series about Israel's first Prime Ministers was devoted to her.
Levi Eshkol died in February 1969 of a sudden heart attack. Jokers insisted that it was the result of the 74 year old leader marrying a woman 40 years his junior.
There were plenty of popular candidates to succeed him, but – what a pity! - none was a member of the ruling Labor Party (Mapai). So, out of nowhere, Golda Meir was chosen. She was not even a minister at the time.
Then a miracle occurred. On the eve of her coming to power her popularity rate in the polls was near zero. Overnight, it rose to over 80%.
During the following years, her authority was unlimited. There was no explanation for it. She had no personal power base, no personal political organization. She dominated the state with the sheer power of her personality.
I vividly recall one scene. In 1973, a new president of the state had to be elected. Golda was intent on having her candidate, a worthy university professor called Ephraim Katzir, elected. The opposing candidate was a worthy person, too.
At the same time, the Knesset was about to enact a new law concerning the method election results were translated into the actual size of the factions. Called by us "the Bader-Ofer conspiracy", it was designed to benefit the largest factions and hurt the smallest, one of which was mine.
I succeeded in forming a coalition of all the small parties – left, right, religious and secular – and together we had the power to decide who would be president. So we presented an ultimatum to the Minister of the Treasury, Pinhas Sapir, who was the strongman of the Labor Party. Annul the proposed law and we shall vote for Katzir, otherwise we shall vote for the opposing candidate.
Sapir took out his legendary little notebook, added up the numbers and decided that we did indeed have the power. "Wait here," he told us. "I am going to Golda."
What followed was astounding. We saw him enter Golda's room. After 10 minutes he came out, a changed man. The almighty Sapir, nicknamed "the director of the state", came out like a dwarf, avoided our eyes and went straight to the telephone. He called an ultra-orthodox religious faction, promised them a bank and got their votes. Golda had told him: "I will not let Uri Avnery decide who will be the President of Israel!"
But These are small episodes, compared to the biggest event in her life and the life of the nation: the Yom Kippur war.
In the 1967 Six-Day War, under Eshkol, Israel had conquered immense territories, especially the Sinai peninsula. Our army was dug in along the Suez Canal.
A new Egyptian president, Anwar al-Sadat, was intent on getting the Sinai back. He put out discreet feelers with an incredible offer: if the Israelis go back to their former borders, Egypt would make peace with Israel. When this was brought to Golda, she rejected the idea with contempt.
As usual, Drucker brings out all the facts, many of them unknown until now. But again, I am not sure that he got the picture of Golda quite right.
Golda was born in Ukraine, and when she was 7 her family immigrated to the US, after witnessing – she claimed – a major pogrom. She grew up as an American Jewess, married and moved to Palestine at the age of 26. The young couple went to live in a Kibbutz, and Golda became active in the Mapai party.
While she was never a very attractive woman, she seems to have had a lot of love affairs with elderly party leaders. I remember many rumors about them at the time and understand why Drucker devotes a lot of time to them, though I myself find them singularly uninteresting.
The basic fact is that Golda had from the beginning an abysmal contempt for Arabs. Like all her predecessors (except Moshe Sharett, as I have already noted) she never had any real contact with Arabs, was totally ignorant of Arab culture and despised them from the bottom of her heart.
The ease with which the Israeli army had beaten three Arab armies in 1967 amplified this contempt. Golda did not dream of giving back the Sinai peninsula to Egypt, which was a contemptible Arab state. Especially since it was now headed by Sadat, who was regarded even by his great predecessor, Gamal Abd-al-Nasser, as a weakling.
Had she understood anything about the Arab world, Golda would have known that the Egyptians are an immensely proud people, who even in poverty are conscious of being the heirs of an 8000-year old culture. The canal is a part of that pride. The idea that they would ever give it up is infantile – as much as the idea that the Palestinian people would ever give up Arab Jerusalem.
Palestinian people? Golda scoffed at the idea. "There is no such thing as a Palestinian people!" she once declared in the Knesset, when I brought up the subject.
That Was the woman who headed Israel at one of its most crucial moments.
Just before Yom Kippur, 1973, the Israeli chief of intelligence was called to London for an urgent meeting with Israel's most valuable spy, an Egyptian traitor, the son-in-law of Nasser. He hastened back to reveal that the Egyptian army would attack on Yom Kippur.
Golda was not impressed. The Egyptians? What could they do? She called in her generals, and a vivid discussion ensued. Should the army reserves be called up? And if so, how many? 200,000, as the army chief of staff, David Elazar, proposed, or just 50,000 as defense minister Moshe Dayan suggested. Golda, like a typical politician, compromised: 100,000 were called up.
Later, this became the crux of the matter. "Why were the reserves not called up?!" opposition leader Menachem Begin thundered again and again.
In Drucker's film, Golda pictures herself as a helpless old woman, surrounded by the young and dynamic generals. The truth was quite different. Golda was the dominant and domineering personality at the deliberations, the generals were like children in her presence.
When the despised Egyptians crossed the canal and overran all the renowned Israeli strongpoints, Israel was dumbfounded. The idolized Moshe Dayan, incompetent as always, went around prophesying "the destruction of the third temple" (following the two temples of antiquity). Fortunately, Elazar (nicknamed Dado) proved competent and in the end Israel gained the upper hand.
The end was quick. A commission of inquiry condemned Dado and acquitted Golda and Dayan, but the country was in uproar, Golda and Dayan had to go.
Sadat came to Israel to make peace, a meeting between him and Golda was arranged. Golda, all smiles, shook his hand, describing herself as "the old lady". The dead of the war did not rise from their graves.
Are the present leaders of Israel wiser than Golda? Do they respect the Arabs more? Are they ready to give back the occupied territories?
No. And no. And no.
Uri Avnery is a veteran Israeli peace activist.
He writes @ Gush Shalom
Ben-Gurion said about her: "The only thing Golda knows how to do is to hate!"
Golda Meir did not hate me. That would be an understatement. She detested me.
The way I speak, the way I dress, the way I look. Everything.
Once, in the middle of a speech in the Knesset (I believe it was about allowing the Beatles to appear in Israel) I interrupted myself and said: "Now I want to answer MK Golda Meir…"
"But MK Meir has not said anything!" the chairman objected.
"I am not answering an interjection," I explained. "I am answering her grimaces!"
And indeed, Golda was grimacing, every muscle of her face proclaiming her detestation.
The Third chapter of Raviv Drucker's interesting series about Israel's first Prime Ministers was devoted to her.
Levi Eshkol died in February 1969 of a sudden heart attack. Jokers insisted that it was the result of the 74 year old leader marrying a woman 40 years his junior.
There were plenty of popular candidates to succeed him, but – what a pity! - none was a member of the ruling Labor Party (Mapai). So, out of nowhere, Golda Meir was chosen. She was not even a minister at the time.
Then a miracle occurred. On the eve of her coming to power her popularity rate in the polls was near zero. Overnight, it rose to over 80%.
During the following years, her authority was unlimited. There was no explanation for it. She had no personal power base, no personal political organization. She dominated the state with the sheer power of her personality.
I vividly recall one scene. In 1973, a new president of the state had to be elected. Golda was intent on having her candidate, a worthy university professor called Ephraim Katzir, elected. The opposing candidate was a worthy person, too.
At the same time, the Knesset was about to enact a new law concerning the method election results were translated into the actual size of the factions. Called by us "the Bader-Ofer conspiracy", it was designed to benefit the largest factions and hurt the smallest, one of which was mine.
I succeeded in forming a coalition of all the small parties – left, right, religious and secular – and together we had the power to decide who would be president. So we presented an ultimatum to the Minister of the Treasury, Pinhas Sapir, who was the strongman of the Labor Party. Annul the proposed law and we shall vote for Katzir, otherwise we shall vote for the opposing candidate.
Sapir took out his legendary little notebook, added up the numbers and decided that we did indeed have the power. "Wait here," he told us. "I am going to Golda."
What followed was astounding. We saw him enter Golda's room. After 10 minutes he came out, a changed man. The almighty Sapir, nicknamed "the director of the state", came out like a dwarf, avoided our eyes and went straight to the telephone. He called an ultra-orthodox religious faction, promised them a bank and got their votes. Golda had told him: "I will not let Uri Avnery decide who will be the President of Israel!"
But These are small episodes, compared to the biggest event in her life and the life of the nation: the Yom Kippur war.
In the 1967 Six-Day War, under Eshkol, Israel had conquered immense territories, especially the Sinai peninsula. Our army was dug in along the Suez Canal.
A new Egyptian president, Anwar al-Sadat, was intent on getting the Sinai back. He put out discreet feelers with an incredible offer: if the Israelis go back to their former borders, Egypt would make peace with Israel. When this was brought to Golda, she rejected the idea with contempt.
As usual, Drucker brings out all the facts, many of them unknown until now. But again, I am not sure that he got the picture of Golda quite right.
Golda was born in Ukraine, and when she was 7 her family immigrated to the US, after witnessing – she claimed – a major pogrom. She grew up as an American Jewess, married and moved to Palestine at the age of 26. The young couple went to live in a Kibbutz, and Golda became active in the Mapai party.
While she was never a very attractive woman, she seems to have had a lot of love affairs with elderly party leaders. I remember many rumors about them at the time and understand why Drucker devotes a lot of time to them, though I myself find them singularly uninteresting.
The basic fact is that Golda had from the beginning an abysmal contempt for Arabs. Like all her predecessors (except Moshe Sharett, as I have already noted) she never had any real contact with Arabs, was totally ignorant of Arab culture and despised them from the bottom of her heart.
The ease with which the Israeli army had beaten three Arab armies in 1967 amplified this contempt. Golda did not dream of giving back the Sinai peninsula to Egypt, which was a contemptible Arab state. Especially since it was now headed by Sadat, who was regarded even by his great predecessor, Gamal Abd-al-Nasser, as a weakling.
Had she understood anything about the Arab world, Golda would have known that the Egyptians are an immensely proud people, who even in poverty are conscious of being the heirs of an 8000-year old culture. The canal is a part of that pride. The idea that they would ever give it up is infantile – as much as the idea that the Palestinian people would ever give up Arab Jerusalem.
Palestinian people? Golda scoffed at the idea. "There is no such thing as a Palestinian people!" she once declared in the Knesset, when I brought up the subject.
That Was the woman who headed Israel at one of its most crucial moments.
Just before Yom Kippur, 1973, the Israeli chief of intelligence was called to London for an urgent meeting with Israel's most valuable spy, an Egyptian traitor, the son-in-law of Nasser. He hastened back to reveal that the Egyptian army would attack on Yom Kippur.
Golda was not impressed. The Egyptians? What could they do? She called in her generals, and a vivid discussion ensued. Should the army reserves be called up? And if so, how many? 200,000, as the army chief of staff, David Elazar, proposed, or just 50,000 as defense minister Moshe Dayan suggested. Golda, like a typical politician, compromised: 100,000 were called up.
Later, this became the crux of the matter. "Why were the reserves not called up?!" opposition leader Menachem Begin thundered again and again.
In Drucker's film, Golda pictures herself as a helpless old woman, surrounded by the young and dynamic generals. The truth was quite different. Golda was the dominant and domineering personality at the deliberations, the generals were like children in her presence.
When the despised Egyptians crossed the canal and overran all the renowned Israeli strongpoints, Israel was dumbfounded. The idolized Moshe Dayan, incompetent as always, went around prophesying "the destruction of the third temple" (following the two temples of antiquity). Fortunately, Elazar (nicknamed Dado) proved competent and in the end Israel gained the upper hand.
The end was quick. A commission of inquiry condemned Dado and acquitted Golda and Dayan, but the country was in uproar, Golda and Dayan had to go.
Sadat came to Israel to make peace, a meeting between him and Golda was arranged. Golda, all smiles, shook his hand, describing herself as "the old lady". The dead of the war did not rise from their graves.
Are the present leaders of Israel wiser than Golda? Do they respect the Arabs more? Are they ready to give back the occupied territories?
No. And no. And no.
Uri Avnery is a veteran Israeli peace activist.
He writes @ Gush Shalom
May 21, 2018
Mourning For Gaza, Israel, And Palestine
From Tikkun magazine Rabbi Michael Lerner reflects on the latest Israeli atrocities inflicted on the Palestinians.
On May 14, 2018 Israel raised the number of Gazan mostly unarmed civilians it had killed to close to 100, and the number wounded to several thousand. Its actions will go down in Jewish history as the height of the Netanyahu government’s ethical blindness and arrogance. All people of conscience should make May 14th an annual day of mourning for the Gazans and for the fate of all Palestinians living under occupation (whether in the form of military occupation in the West Bank or in the form of blockade and cutting off of electricity, food and medical supplies, and much more).
The excuses given by Israeli hasbara (explanation/propaganda) are pathetic:
1. “Israel has a right to defend itself.” Of course it does. But it does not have the right to occupy another people for 50 years and subject them to deprivation of freedom and self-determination. Moreover, there is no threat to Israel from the Palestinian people–Israel has one of the most powerful military forces in the entire world, and the Palestinians do not have an air force, a navy, tanks, or anything else that could over-run Israel.
2. “The army (IDF) was endangered by a few of the demonstrators who were armed with Molotov cocktails and were creating a smokescreen by burning tires” The IDF could have withdrawn a few hundred feet and would not have faced any danger. They were not facing missiles, but only what a few individuals could throw in their direction.
3. “The Gazans were intent on cutting through the border fence and would have then been a terrorist threat.” If Israel had warned Gazans that anyone crossing into Israel would have been shot, that would have prevented most of the deaths and injuries. Most of the Gazans were at the fence to demonstrate their desire to return to their homes taken by Israel in the aftermath of the 1948 war. It was not their intent to do that immediately. Most of those who would have crossed over the border would have been apprehended and imprisoned. The Israeli Army has a huge number of fighters at any given time and they could easily have stopped anyone crossing the border without shooting indiscriminately into crowds of thousands of almost all unarmed civilians, injuring and killing journalists, medics, women, and children.
In short, there was no security (bitachon) reason for the slaughter of innocent people.
There were provocative statements made by Hamas and by some of those at the demonstrations. We in the U.S. peace movement know about this. We’ve been at demonstrations in which some people call for the overthrow of the government or engage in acts of violence against people or property. It was these elements that made it possible for right-wing media to portray the “Occupy Wall Street” demonstrations several years ago as a group of violence-prone extremists and allowed police to disrupt the tent camps that demonstrators had set up. We would not accept killing and wounding random demonstrators as a legitimate response in these situations in the U.S. and they were not legitimate on the Gaza border either.
This is not to say that Israelis have no reason to be angry at Hamas and its followers. Hamas continues to insist that it wants to eliminate the State of Israel. In so doing, it provides a perfect partner to Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Israeli ultra-right-wing, providing the ostensible reason for why ordinary citizens should be afraid. And over the past decades individual terrorists have killed some Israelis and Hamas managed to send missiles toward Israel in the summer of 2014, though happily most of them were destroyed before landing. Yet the Israeli people spent hours each day in bomb shelters, and that intensified their fears in a very concrete way. Just imagine if North Korea or Cuba had been able to do the same to the U.S. and tens of millions of Americans had spent hours each day for two months in air raid shelters–can you imagine what a boost that would have given to the militarists in any Western country the way 9/11 also did.
I do not raise this point to legitimate the Israeli army violence that is taking place on the border with Gaza. It is, let me repeat, ethically outrageous. There is no moral equivalency between the struggle of Palestinians for their own liberation and the policies of Israel to prevent that liberation. Israel has the power to create a solution that ensures its security and has the economic, political, and military power to do so. The Palestinians have no such power; what they do have is the growing support of people around the world, including many younger Jews in the West who genuinely care about the suffering of all people who have not yet achieved liberation, economic well-being, and security. In their arrogance, the Israeli and U.S. governments think that this moment of power will last forever, it will not. And sadly, both the American people and the Jewish people will pay dearly in the future for the immoral behavior of their governments and their silent complicity.
Our approach at Tikkun, however, is to ask not how do we throw blame but how do we contribute to the possibility of a transformation in consciousness. And our answer is this: we need to help people on both sides of that struggle recognize that each side has been unnecessarily provocative and each side has a legitimate story to tell. It does no good to only talk about the evils of one side or the other or to portray one side as the righteous victim and the other as the evil incarnate. To do so is only to guarantee more suffering on both sides of this struggle.
In my book Embracing Israel/Palestine (available at www.tikkun.org/eip) I tell the whole story from the beginning till 2012. I recognize every particular outrage in the context of a larger struggle that has been going on for the past hundred years, a struggle in which each side has taken actions that are ethically unacceptable and each side has legitimate reasons to be scared of each other. You might ask “How can the Israelis be scared of Palestinians when they are so much more powerful?” Well, do you doubt that many Americans were scared and many remain scared of “terrorists” after 9/11, even though the U.S. was and remains the greatest military power in the world, and with no country on our border supporting terrorism? That fear has been magnified by a discourse that comes from both Republicans and Democrats, and led Hillary Clinton to advocate not only for the destructive war against Libya in 2011 but also for being “tough” against Russia. Now imagine that you lived in a state that was a few miles away from where ISIS and Hezbollah and other groups were active, and where Iran was placing missiles that could easily reach your own home. That context makes it easier to understand how right-wing-militarists in Israel could convince people that they were in constant danger, and that part of that danger, given the experience of the summer of 2014, was coming from Gaza.
“But wait,” you might say, “the Gazans are protesting the Nakba, and that was the atrocity that created the State of Israel.” So the first point I want to make is that the Nakba was another ethically outrageous result of the 1948 war, and we at Tikkunwere the first US publication to expose the lies of the Zionist establishment that claimed that Palestinians had fled because their leaders told them to do so. We printed the accounts of the “New Historians” in Israel who had access to the IDF’s archives and who were able to show that many Palestinians fled because of legitimate fear of Israeli right wing terrorist groups that were seeking to spread fear. At least 100,000 of the refugees were forcibly removed from their homes and forced to move to what is now the West Bank and Gaza, and many others fled in fear that the same would happen to them. There was no legitimacy for these deportations. Moreover, when a cease fire was achieved in 1949, the Israeli government refused to let these civilian refugees return to their homes, a position similar to what India was doing with Muslim refugees, thereby creating the Muslim state of Pakistan.
This situation, however, was the outcome of the Arab states and the Palestinian leadership refusing to accept the U.N. proposal of 1947 which would have divided the area into a Jewish state of Israel and a Palestinian state. Had the Palestinians accepted that proposal, which Israel did accept, there would today be a Palestinian state encompassing much more of the “Holy Land” than even the most optimistic of peaceniks now believes a two-state solution in the 21st century would give to the Palestinian state. This was a tragic decision on the part of the Palestinian leadership and their Arab neighboring states which would have averted a war.
Yet how could the Jewish Israelis, many of whom were survivors of the Holocaust, allowed this unjust outcome? So now go back to the decade previous to this moment, when fascism was spreading through not only Europe but also through parts of the Muslim world, and Jews were desperate to escape. The Arab states and the Palestinian leaders sought to prevent Jewish refugees from coming to Palestine, fearing that the Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in some part of Palestine. The British, who had been given the “mandate” over Palestine by the League of Nations, needed Arab oil to be able to fight the war against the Nazis which began in 1939, and so agreed to enforce the will of the Palestinians to prevent Jews from coming to Palestine. This was not aimed at allrefugees, but only at Jewish refugees. And even after the Nazis were defeated in 1945, and the Holocaust was known to the world, the Palestinians, aided by the British, kept up their demand to keep Jewish refugees from coming. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were kept in “displaced persons camps” in Europe until on May 14, 1948 the British left and Palestinian Jews proclaimed themselves the “State of Israel,” allowing Jews to come there. Many of those who came felt deep anger at the Palestinians who had refused them entry while their families were being murdered. Palestine was the nearest country to Europe with a substantial Jewish minority that was not under Nazi rule. For the Jews in displaced persons camps, the Palestinian people’s refusal to allow them to come to Palestine was evidence that they hated Jews, who were a minority group.
Leftists have usually taken up the call for open borders everywhere, or at least for non-discrimination against refugees seeking asylum. Yet they do not ever recognize that a significant section of the Jews who created the State of Israel in 1948 were refugees for whom Palestinians had denied asylum. Many Jews in Israel and around the world joined with many of these refugees in deeply resenting the ethically unacceptable desire to keep Jewish refugees out. Just as Palestinians kept Jews out, when Jews had the power after the 1948 war, they were not willing to let the Palestinian refugees come back. I find their actions ethically unacceptable. At the same time, I understand the fear that arises when people imagine refugees taking over their land (this applies both to Palestinians before 1948 and Jews after 1948). Yet Leftists who are outraged at the way the U.S. and many European states are currently treating refugees fail to see and understand the significance of this historical truth – namely that Palestinians and other Arab states did all they could to prevent Jewish refugees from coming to Palestine. This was an outcome of a long history of Left-wing anti-Semitism that I analyze more fully in my book The Socialism of Fools: Anti-Semitism on the Left. But you don’t have to read the book to get the gist—go to read the article by anti-Israel-Occupation “If Not Now” activist Benjamin Case on “Decolonizing Jewishness” in the Winter/Spring 2018 issue of Tikkun(which you can now read online at https://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/decolonizing-jewishness-on-jewish-liberation-in-the-21st-century). You will see there what I mean by Left-wing anti-Semitism (and no, it’s not being a critic of Israeli policies, which we at Tikkunhave been for the past 32 years).
“Still,” you might object, “wasn’t Zionism, the desire of the Jewish people to establish a homeland in Palestine, always simply a colonial project to aid European colonial ambitions against the indigenous people of the land, the Palestinians?” That question could only arise out of a lack of a full understanding of the history of the region. First of all, there are no indigenous people in the Middle East and certainly not in the land that the Roman conquerors named Palestine. All of those countries in the ancient world experienced one group or another conquering and settling those lands, moving populations, exterminating those who had previously conquered the lands, for thousands of years. By the time the Greeks and then the Romans conquered Judea two thousand plus years ago, there was a strong Jewish religious population in Palestine and when they were exiled from that land they made return to Zion (the hill on which their Temple had been constructed) a central part of their religion. When religiously practicing Jews hear lefties talking about the return of Jews to the land of Israel as a colonial project they shake their heads in disbelief at the lack of understanding that claim represents, because for two thousand years they have been uttering prayers for a return to Zion before there even were any European countries like England, France, Germany, or Russia. If in the last 19th and early 20th centuries that yearning became a political movement and sought support from European powers to accomplish that goal, they were no different from Arab states including Palestinian nationalists who similarly sought to win support for their efforts from colonial states and until the 1947 UN resolution calling for a two state solution, these Palestinians and Arab states had been relatively successful in getting colonial support as well (in part because the colonial states made conflicting promises to the Arab nationalists and the Jewish nationalists, as they did all around the world, dividing the populations they sought to dominate in order to conquer the lands).
So am I saying that “Jews had a right to the land of Israel?” No, I don’t think anyone has a right to any land in the world. Instead, I believe that all of humanity has an obligation to share the earth which other and to do so in ways that protect the fragile life support system of Earth. The ongoing military struggles between Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians, like the ongoing struggles among Arab peoples in Syria and Iraq, or between Shia in Iran and Sunni in Saudi Arabia, or between the U.S. and other forces in dozens of countries around the world—all of these are destructive to the possibility of saving the Earth’s life support system and all result in unnecessary human suffering and death, and hence are deeply unethical and ought to be stopped immediately.
How can that happen? In my view, it can only happen when all of the people of the earth overcome their nationalist demands to control some part of the earth, and move toward a consciousness of sharing the earth in a generous way. We at Tikkunand the Network of Spiritual Progressives have put forward two proposals that are first steps in this direction: the Global Marshall Plan www.tikkun.org/gmp and the proposed ESRA–Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the U.S. Constitution www.tikkun.org/esra which could be a model for many other countries.
To get to such a world, we cannot continue to side with one side or another in their endless struggles. Instead, we need to develop a compassionate attitude toward all peoples, and understand why they feel angry and threatened by others, no matter how irrational those fears appear to be from our perspective. It is only when we can approach all sides of these struggles with an attitude of what Cat Zavis, executive director of Tikkun’s interfaith and secular-humanist-and-atheist-welcoming Network of Spiritual Progressives, calls Prophetic Empathy can we hope to get people to move in this direction.
The prophetic part of Prophetic Empathy is the part that calls out those who are tolerating violence, injustice, racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia, or anti-Semitism and insists that those behaviors must stop. The empathy part is that we combine our calling out of what is wrong with an empathic understanding of how people got to where they are now in their consciousness, so that we can convey the kind of respect that is the precondition for anyone even beginning to listen to the rest of our political ideas about how to achieve a different kind of world.
So to return to Israel and Palestine today, we must challenge the immoral behavior of the State of Israel toward the Palestinians and seek to mobilize against that behavior. Simultaneously, we need to project an understanding of the dynamics that have led all the different actors in this struggle to come to where they have come to, rather than appear to only care for one side or another.
This struggle is a manifestation of the inner struggle that goes on in almost every human being between the idea that we can best achieve our needs by dominating others (whether that be the Israeli desire to make all of Palestine a subordinate part of Israel or the Hamas desire to make all of Palestine including what is today Israel an Islamic state under the rule of Hamas with a compliant Jewish minority) or the voice that tells us that human beings have the potential to respond to generosity with a generous and caring spirit if they can believe that generosity would not be taken advantage of by others. It is my contention that this struggle is worldwide and our task as tikkunistas (those who seek to heal and transform the world) is to strengthen the voice of generosity.
Speaking now as a rabbi committed to the well-being of the Jewish people, I insist that our well-being can only be accomplished when every other religion and every other people, every other ethnic group, on the planet have also secured their well-being. There is no longer in the 21st century a path to security and justice for one people that does not also involve a path to security and justice for all peoples. My religion teaches me that this is the direction not only because it is in our self-interest as human beings, but because at a deeper level the truth is that every human being is a manifestation of the sacred and deserves to be treated as such. But if you don’t like language about the sacred, and most Israelis don’t because they hate anything smelling of religion because of the way the ultra-orthodox in Israel have forced religion down their throats, then accept the self-interest argument for a prophetic empathy approach to all struggles.
I deeply mourn and am outraged by the loss of lives and injuries of Gazans caused by Israeli soldiers and the ongoing blockade that makes life in Gaza untolerable and unlivable. And I believe that the path to peace and security for Palestinians and Jews alike rests in our righteous call for Israel to abandon its “domination over others” perspective and realize that it is only with a policy of generosity toward Palestinians, not murdering them, that can provide a path to lasting peace and justice for themselves. As a Jew I also mourn for Israel and for Judaism that has become associated with a nation state and hope to see a Jewish liberation movement develop that will make clear, as we’ve been doing in Tikkunfor the past 32 years, that Judaism must be divorced from the policies of the traumatized people who have allowed the State of Israel to become a manifestation of values that are antithetical to what Judaism has been for the past several thousand years. I call upon friends of the Jewish people in every religion and every national or ethnic group to join with Tikkunin challenging Israeli policies that simultaneously rejects shame and blame and embrace an empathic discourse as we critique these horrendous policies. Yes, it is a difficult path to follow. But if we ever hope to change the world, it is the path that is most likely in the long run to help us build the world we want and need. And in the meantime, we should also hope that both the Hamas regime will be overturned by the people of Gaza and that the Netanyahu and far right regime in Israel will be overturned by the people of Israel, so that a new regime in Israel and Palestine can negotiate a lasting and just, and humanly and environmentally sensitive and caring peace for all of the inhabitants of the region.
Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun magazine.
He is rabbi of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue-without-walls based in Berkeley, California.
On May 14, 2018 Israel raised the number of Gazan mostly unarmed civilians it had killed to close to 100, and the number wounded to several thousand. Its actions will go down in Jewish history as the height of the Netanyahu government’s ethical blindness and arrogance. All people of conscience should make May 14th an annual day of mourning for the Gazans and for the fate of all Palestinians living under occupation (whether in the form of military occupation in the West Bank or in the form of blockade and cutting off of electricity, food and medical supplies, and much more).
The excuses given by Israeli hasbara (explanation/propaganda) are pathetic:
1. “Israel has a right to defend itself.” Of course it does. But it does not have the right to occupy another people for 50 years and subject them to deprivation of freedom and self-determination. Moreover, there is no threat to Israel from the Palestinian people–Israel has one of the most powerful military forces in the entire world, and the Palestinians do not have an air force, a navy, tanks, or anything else that could over-run Israel.
2. “The army (IDF) was endangered by a few of the demonstrators who were armed with Molotov cocktails and were creating a smokescreen by burning tires” The IDF could have withdrawn a few hundred feet and would not have faced any danger. They were not facing missiles, but only what a few individuals could throw in their direction.
3. “The Gazans were intent on cutting through the border fence and would have then been a terrorist threat.” If Israel had warned Gazans that anyone crossing into Israel would have been shot, that would have prevented most of the deaths and injuries. Most of the Gazans were at the fence to demonstrate their desire to return to their homes taken by Israel in the aftermath of the 1948 war. It was not their intent to do that immediately. Most of those who would have crossed over the border would have been apprehended and imprisoned. The Israeli Army has a huge number of fighters at any given time and they could easily have stopped anyone crossing the border without shooting indiscriminately into crowds of thousands of almost all unarmed civilians, injuring and killing journalists, medics, women, and children.
In short, there was no security (bitachon) reason for the slaughter of innocent people.
There were provocative statements made by Hamas and by some of those at the demonstrations. We in the U.S. peace movement know about this. We’ve been at demonstrations in which some people call for the overthrow of the government or engage in acts of violence against people or property. It was these elements that made it possible for right-wing media to portray the “Occupy Wall Street” demonstrations several years ago as a group of violence-prone extremists and allowed police to disrupt the tent camps that demonstrators had set up. We would not accept killing and wounding random demonstrators as a legitimate response in these situations in the U.S. and they were not legitimate on the Gaza border either.
This is not to say that Israelis have no reason to be angry at Hamas and its followers. Hamas continues to insist that it wants to eliminate the State of Israel. In so doing, it provides a perfect partner to Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Israeli ultra-right-wing, providing the ostensible reason for why ordinary citizens should be afraid. And over the past decades individual terrorists have killed some Israelis and Hamas managed to send missiles toward Israel in the summer of 2014, though happily most of them were destroyed before landing. Yet the Israeli people spent hours each day in bomb shelters, and that intensified their fears in a very concrete way. Just imagine if North Korea or Cuba had been able to do the same to the U.S. and tens of millions of Americans had spent hours each day for two months in air raid shelters–can you imagine what a boost that would have given to the militarists in any Western country the way 9/11 also did.
I do not raise this point to legitimate the Israeli army violence that is taking place on the border with Gaza. It is, let me repeat, ethically outrageous. There is no moral equivalency between the struggle of Palestinians for their own liberation and the policies of Israel to prevent that liberation. Israel has the power to create a solution that ensures its security and has the economic, political, and military power to do so. The Palestinians have no such power; what they do have is the growing support of people around the world, including many younger Jews in the West who genuinely care about the suffering of all people who have not yet achieved liberation, economic well-being, and security. In their arrogance, the Israeli and U.S. governments think that this moment of power will last forever, it will not. And sadly, both the American people and the Jewish people will pay dearly in the future for the immoral behavior of their governments and their silent complicity.
Our approach at Tikkun, however, is to ask not how do we throw blame but how do we contribute to the possibility of a transformation in consciousness. And our answer is this: we need to help people on both sides of that struggle recognize that each side has been unnecessarily provocative and each side has a legitimate story to tell. It does no good to only talk about the evils of one side or the other or to portray one side as the righteous victim and the other as the evil incarnate. To do so is only to guarantee more suffering on both sides of this struggle.
In my book Embracing Israel/Palestine (available at www.tikkun.org/eip) I tell the whole story from the beginning till 2012. I recognize every particular outrage in the context of a larger struggle that has been going on for the past hundred years, a struggle in which each side has taken actions that are ethically unacceptable and each side has legitimate reasons to be scared of each other. You might ask “How can the Israelis be scared of Palestinians when they are so much more powerful?” Well, do you doubt that many Americans were scared and many remain scared of “terrorists” after 9/11, even though the U.S. was and remains the greatest military power in the world, and with no country on our border supporting terrorism? That fear has been magnified by a discourse that comes from both Republicans and Democrats, and led Hillary Clinton to advocate not only for the destructive war against Libya in 2011 but also for being “tough” against Russia. Now imagine that you lived in a state that was a few miles away from where ISIS and Hezbollah and other groups were active, and where Iran was placing missiles that could easily reach your own home. That context makes it easier to understand how right-wing-militarists in Israel could convince people that they were in constant danger, and that part of that danger, given the experience of the summer of 2014, was coming from Gaza.
“But wait,” you might say, “the Gazans are protesting the Nakba, and that was the atrocity that created the State of Israel.” So the first point I want to make is that the Nakba was another ethically outrageous result of the 1948 war, and we at Tikkunwere the first US publication to expose the lies of the Zionist establishment that claimed that Palestinians had fled because their leaders told them to do so. We printed the accounts of the “New Historians” in Israel who had access to the IDF’s archives and who were able to show that many Palestinians fled because of legitimate fear of Israeli right wing terrorist groups that were seeking to spread fear. At least 100,000 of the refugees were forcibly removed from their homes and forced to move to what is now the West Bank and Gaza, and many others fled in fear that the same would happen to them. There was no legitimacy for these deportations. Moreover, when a cease fire was achieved in 1949, the Israeli government refused to let these civilian refugees return to their homes, a position similar to what India was doing with Muslim refugees, thereby creating the Muslim state of Pakistan.
This situation, however, was the outcome of the Arab states and the Palestinian leadership refusing to accept the U.N. proposal of 1947 which would have divided the area into a Jewish state of Israel and a Palestinian state. Had the Palestinians accepted that proposal, which Israel did accept, there would today be a Palestinian state encompassing much more of the “Holy Land” than even the most optimistic of peaceniks now believes a two-state solution in the 21st century would give to the Palestinian state. This was a tragic decision on the part of the Palestinian leadership and their Arab neighboring states which would have averted a war.
Yet how could the Jewish Israelis, many of whom were survivors of the Holocaust, allowed this unjust outcome? So now go back to the decade previous to this moment, when fascism was spreading through not only Europe but also through parts of the Muslim world, and Jews were desperate to escape. The Arab states and the Palestinian leaders sought to prevent Jewish refugees from coming to Palestine, fearing that the Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in some part of Palestine. The British, who had been given the “mandate” over Palestine by the League of Nations, needed Arab oil to be able to fight the war against the Nazis which began in 1939, and so agreed to enforce the will of the Palestinians to prevent Jews from coming to Palestine. This was not aimed at allrefugees, but only at Jewish refugees. And even after the Nazis were defeated in 1945, and the Holocaust was known to the world, the Palestinians, aided by the British, kept up their demand to keep Jewish refugees from coming. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were kept in “displaced persons camps” in Europe until on May 14, 1948 the British left and Palestinian Jews proclaimed themselves the “State of Israel,” allowing Jews to come there. Many of those who came felt deep anger at the Palestinians who had refused them entry while their families were being murdered. Palestine was the nearest country to Europe with a substantial Jewish minority that was not under Nazi rule. For the Jews in displaced persons camps, the Palestinian people’s refusal to allow them to come to Palestine was evidence that they hated Jews, who were a minority group.
Leftists have usually taken up the call for open borders everywhere, or at least for non-discrimination against refugees seeking asylum. Yet they do not ever recognize that a significant section of the Jews who created the State of Israel in 1948 were refugees for whom Palestinians had denied asylum. Many Jews in Israel and around the world joined with many of these refugees in deeply resenting the ethically unacceptable desire to keep Jewish refugees out. Just as Palestinians kept Jews out, when Jews had the power after the 1948 war, they were not willing to let the Palestinian refugees come back. I find their actions ethically unacceptable. At the same time, I understand the fear that arises when people imagine refugees taking over their land (this applies both to Palestinians before 1948 and Jews after 1948). Yet Leftists who are outraged at the way the U.S. and many European states are currently treating refugees fail to see and understand the significance of this historical truth – namely that Palestinians and other Arab states did all they could to prevent Jewish refugees from coming to Palestine. This was an outcome of a long history of Left-wing anti-Semitism that I analyze more fully in my book The Socialism of Fools: Anti-Semitism on the Left. But you don’t have to read the book to get the gist—go to read the article by anti-Israel-Occupation “If Not Now” activist Benjamin Case on “Decolonizing Jewishness” in the Winter/Spring 2018 issue of Tikkun(which you can now read online at https://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/decolonizing-jewishness-on-jewish-liberation-in-the-21st-century). You will see there what I mean by Left-wing anti-Semitism (and no, it’s not being a critic of Israeli policies, which we at Tikkunhave been for the past 32 years).
“Still,” you might object, “wasn’t Zionism, the desire of the Jewish people to establish a homeland in Palestine, always simply a colonial project to aid European colonial ambitions against the indigenous people of the land, the Palestinians?” That question could only arise out of a lack of a full understanding of the history of the region. First of all, there are no indigenous people in the Middle East and certainly not in the land that the Roman conquerors named Palestine. All of those countries in the ancient world experienced one group or another conquering and settling those lands, moving populations, exterminating those who had previously conquered the lands, for thousands of years. By the time the Greeks and then the Romans conquered Judea two thousand plus years ago, there was a strong Jewish religious population in Palestine and when they were exiled from that land they made return to Zion (the hill on which their Temple had been constructed) a central part of their religion. When religiously practicing Jews hear lefties talking about the return of Jews to the land of Israel as a colonial project they shake their heads in disbelief at the lack of understanding that claim represents, because for two thousand years they have been uttering prayers for a return to Zion before there even were any European countries like England, France, Germany, or Russia. If in the last 19th and early 20th centuries that yearning became a political movement and sought support from European powers to accomplish that goal, they were no different from Arab states including Palestinian nationalists who similarly sought to win support for their efforts from colonial states and until the 1947 UN resolution calling for a two state solution, these Palestinians and Arab states had been relatively successful in getting colonial support as well (in part because the colonial states made conflicting promises to the Arab nationalists and the Jewish nationalists, as they did all around the world, dividing the populations they sought to dominate in order to conquer the lands).
So am I saying that “Jews had a right to the land of Israel?” No, I don’t think anyone has a right to any land in the world. Instead, I believe that all of humanity has an obligation to share the earth which other and to do so in ways that protect the fragile life support system of Earth. The ongoing military struggles between Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians, like the ongoing struggles among Arab peoples in Syria and Iraq, or between Shia in Iran and Sunni in Saudi Arabia, or between the U.S. and other forces in dozens of countries around the world—all of these are destructive to the possibility of saving the Earth’s life support system and all result in unnecessary human suffering and death, and hence are deeply unethical and ought to be stopped immediately.
How can that happen? In my view, it can only happen when all of the people of the earth overcome their nationalist demands to control some part of the earth, and move toward a consciousness of sharing the earth in a generous way. We at Tikkunand the Network of Spiritual Progressives have put forward two proposals that are first steps in this direction: the Global Marshall Plan www.tikkun.org/gmp and the proposed ESRA–Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the U.S. Constitution www.tikkun.org/esra which could be a model for many other countries.
To get to such a world, we cannot continue to side with one side or another in their endless struggles. Instead, we need to develop a compassionate attitude toward all peoples, and understand why they feel angry and threatened by others, no matter how irrational those fears appear to be from our perspective. It is only when we can approach all sides of these struggles with an attitude of what Cat Zavis, executive director of Tikkun’s interfaith and secular-humanist-and-atheist-welcoming Network of Spiritual Progressives, calls Prophetic Empathy can we hope to get people to move in this direction.
The prophetic part of Prophetic Empathy is the part that calls out those who are tolerating violence, injustice, racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia, or anti-Semitism and insists that those behaviors must stop. The empathy part is that we combine our calling out of what is wrong with an empathic understanding of how people got to where they are now in their consciousness, so that we can convey the kind of respect that is the precondition for anyone even beginning to listen to the rest of our political ideas about how to achieve a different kind of world.
So to return to Israel and Palestine today, we must challenge the immoral behavior of the State of Israel toward the Palestinians and seek to mobilize against that behavior. Simultaneously, we need to project an understanding of the dynamics that have led all the different actors in this struggle to come to where they have come to, rather than appear to only care for one side or another.
This struggle is a manifestation of the inner struggle that goes on in almost every human being between the idea that we can best achieve our needs by dominating others (whether that be the Israeli desire to make all of Palestine a subordinate part of Israel or the Hamas desire to make all of Palestine including what is today Israel an Islamic state under the rule of Hamas with a compliant Jewish minority) or the voice that tells us that human beings have the potential to respond to generosity with a generous and caring spirit if they can believe that generosity would not be taken advantage of by others. It is my contention that this struggle is worldwide and our task as tikkunistas (those who seek to heal and transform the world) is to strengthen the voice of generosity.
Speaking now as a rabbi committed to the well-being of the Jewish people, I insist that our well-being can only be accomplished when every other religion and every other people, every other ethnic group, on the planet have also secured their well-being. There is no longer in the 21st century a path to security and justice for one people that does not also involve a path to security and justice for all peoples. My religion teaches me that this is the direction not only because it is in our self-interest as human beings, but because at a deeper level the truth is that every human being is a manifestation of the sacred and deserves to be treated as such. But if you don’t like language about the sacred, and most Israelis don’t because they hate anything smelling of religion because of the way the ultra-orthodox in Israel have forced religion down their throats, then accept the self-interest argument for a prophetic empathy approach to all struggles.
I deeply mourn and am outraged by the loss of lives and injuries of Gazans caused by Israeli soldiers and the ongoing blockade that makes life in Gaza untolerable and unlivable. And I believe that the path to peace and security for Palestinians and Jews alike rests in our righteous call for Israel to abandon its “domination over others” perspective and realize that it is only with a policy of generosity toward Palestinians, not murdering them, that can provide a path to lasting peace and justice for themselves. As a Jew I also mourn for Israel and for Judaism that has become associated with a nation state and hope to see a Jewish liberation movement develop that will make clear, as we’ve been doing in Tikkunfor the past 32 years, that Judaism must be divorced from the policies of the traumatized people who have allowed the State of Israel to become a manifestation of values that are antithetical to what Judaism has been for the past several thousand years. I call upon friends of the Jewish people in every religion and every national or ethnic group to join with Tikkunin challenging Israeli policies that simultaneously rejects shame and blame and embrace an empathic discourse as we critique these horrendous policies. Yes, it is a difficult path to follow. But if we ever hope to change the world, it is the path that is most likely in the long run to help us build the world we want and need. And in the meantime, we should also hope that both the Hamas regime will be overturned by the people of Gaza and that the Netanyahu and far right regime in Israel will be overturned by the people of Israel, so that a new regime in Israel and Palestine can negotiate a lasting and just, and humanly and environmentally sensitive and caring peace for all of the inhabitants of the region.
Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun magazine.
He is rabbi of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue-without-walls based in Berkeley, California.
A Christian Party - Time Is Nigh
Has the time come for Christians to unite and launch their own political party in Northern Ireland to protect Biblical values, rights and freedoms of expression and worship? That’s the key question posed by political commentator, Dr John Coulter, in his Fearless Flying Column to day, but he then realises such a party could cause more division within Christendom than heal theological rifts.
Maybe its a sign of the times, but there are so many wee independent places of worship springing up across Northern Ireland you would think they had taken a leaf out of republicans when they form a new movement - the first item on the agenda is ‘the next split’.
Mind you, Christian denominations throughout Ireland could take a leaf on unity from the LGBTQ community given the united voice with which that community speaks at Pride events across the Province.
But can you imagine a situations when ecumenists, evangelicals, fundamentalists, Calvinists, Hyper-Calvinists, liberals, independents and all the other factions of Christianity agree on a common manifesto? After all, in 21st century Christianity, even the clergy cannot agree on the unanimous definition of marriage, the role of women, the existence of Hell, and above all - how to get into Heaven.
The Christian Churches appear to be losing the battle against the secular society as with the exception of the DUP, the majority of Ulster-based political parties have a largely liberal and pluralist agenda.
If the Churches are to have any meaning and influence again in Northern Ireland, especially in a post Brexit society, they will need to form their own Christian Party, which could signal a degree of unity not seen on the island since the referendum campaign following the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.
But how would a Christian party work given that the Irish Catholic Church has been effectively politically neutered because of the clerical abuse scandals, and Protestantism is now theologically split into at least two dozen separate denominations, all claiming to be the descendants of Martin Luther?
Across the North, the Christians Churches now face their own political Alamo over same-sex marriage. Recognised in the Republic, which now also boasts an openly gay Taoiseach, as well as in mainland Britain, Northern Ireland remains the last bastion against the legalisation of same-sex marriage.
If devolution was restored to Stormont and a free vote allowed, there are now enough pro-same-sex marriage Assembly members to swing the balance in favour of recognition. Even if Stormont flops again and Direct Rule from Westminster imposed, the Tories may use their Commons influence to bully the DUP into agreeing same-sex marriage for Northern Ireland.
Northern Ireland was once regarded as one of the great bastions of Christendom, sending thousands of missionaries across the globe over the centuries. But Northern Irish Christianity must now swallow the bitter medicine of 21st century reality that the Southern era of Eamon de Valera’s cosy relationship with the Irish Catholic bishops is over, as is the impact of the famous 1859 spiritual Revival across Ulster.
Northern Irish Christians have only themselves to blame for the advance of the secular society. For decades they basked in the almost ritualistic infighting over whether women should wear hats to church, what type of music should be used, what are appropriate instruments to be played, what translation of the Bible should be read, and should men be allowed to remove their jackets during holy communion!
Christians need to face the reality that they could soon be a minority on the very island which boasts one of Ireland’s greatest saints – Patrick. Secularists may point to the steady decline in numbers attending Sunday worship at mainstream Christian denominations, such as Catholicism, Irish Presbyterianism, Methodism and the Church of Ireland.
But what about the quiet increase in numbers in Christian fundamentalist denominations, such as the Elim Pentecostalists who were founded in Monaghan in 1915? Many of these new Pentecostal churches and denominations see themselves as ‘Christian’, not Protestant or Catholic.
Unfortunately, many of these evangelical and fundamentalist Christians adopt the New Testament view of ‘coming out from amongst the world’ by not participating in politics.
A Christian Party would have the primary goal of ensuring that everyone who classified themselves as ‘Christian’ was not only registered to vote, but actually came out on polling days.
At one time, the fundamentalist pressure group – the Caleb Foundation (named after the Biblical Old Testament Israelite spy Caleb) – claimed to speak for 200,000 Christians; that’s a significant number of local councillors, MPs and MLAs if they all voted.
The Christian Party’s ethos would be to replicate the role of the Southern Afro-American Baptist Churches which ensured large numbers of that community registered to vote.
As for a political agenda, Christ’s Sermon on the Mount – known as the Beatitudes from St Matthew’s Gospel in the Biblical New Testament - would make an excellent anchor for Christian unity.
It has been suggested Karl Marx used the Beatitudes as a foundation for his communist manifesto, merely removing references to God.
It’s not a case of political Northern Ireland wanting a liberal society; it’s a case that too many Christians will not mobilise even to vote. Imagine a Northern Ireland if every Christian eligible to vote did so?
Follow Dr John Coulter on Twitter. @JohnAHCoulter
Dr John Coulter has been a journalist working in Northern Ireland since 1978. As well as being a former weekly newspaper editor, he has served as Religious Affairs Correspondent of the News Letter and is a past Director of Operations for Christian Communication Network television. He currently also writes political analysis articles for national newspaper titles.
Maybe its a sign of the times, but there are so many wee independent places of worship springing up across Northern Ireland you would think they had taken a leaf out of republicans when they form a new movement - the first item on the agenda is ‘the next split’.
Mind you, Christian denominations throughout Ireland could take a leaf on unity from the LGBTQ community given the united voice with which that community speaks at Pride events across the Province.
But can you imagine a situations when ecumenists, evangelicals, fundamentalists, Calvinists, Hyper-Calvinists, liberals, independents and all the other factions of Christianity agree on a common manifesto? After all, in 21st century Christianity, even the clergy cannot agree on the unanimous definition of marriage, the role of women, the existence of Hell, and above all - how to get into Heaven.
The Christian Churches appear to be losing the battle against the secular society as with the exception of the DUP, the majority of Ulster-based political parties have a largely liberal and pluralist agenda.
If the Churches are to have any meaning and influence again in Northern Ireland, especially in a post Brexit society, they will need to form their own Christian Party, which could signal a degree of unity not seen on the island since the referendum campaign following the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.
But how would a Christian party work given that the Irish Catholic Church has been effectively politically neutered because of the clerical abuse scandals, and Protestantism is now theologically split into at least two dozen separate denominations, all claiming to be the descendants of Martin Luther?
Across the North, the Christians Churches now face their own political Alamo over same-sex marriage. Recognised in the Republic, which now also boasts an openly gay Taoiseach, as well as in mainland Britain, Northern Ireland remains the last bastion against the legalisation of same-sex marriage.
If devolution was restored to Stormont and a free vote allowed, there are now enough pro-same-sex marriage Assembly members to swing the balance in favour of recognition. Even if Stormont flops again and Direct Rule from Westminster imposed, the Tories may use their Commons influence to bully the DUP into agreeing same-sex marriage for Northern Ireland.
Northern Ireland was once regarded as one of the great bastions of Christendom, sending thousands of missionaries across the globe over the centuries. But Northern Irish Christianity must now swallow the bitter medicine of 21st century reality that the Southern era of Eamon de Valera’s cosy relationship with the Irish Catholic bishops is over, as is the impact of the famous 1859 spiritual Revival across Ulster.
Northern Irish Christians have only themselves to blame for the advance of the secular society. For decades they basked in the almost ritualistic infighting over whether women should wear hats to church, what type of music should be used, what are appropriate instruments to be played, what translation of the Bible should be read, and should men be allowed to remove their jackets during holy communion!
Christians need to face the reality that they could soon be a minority on the very island which boasts one of Ireland’s greatest saints – Patrick. Secularists may point to the steady decline in numbers attending Sunday worship at mainstream Christian denominations, such as Catholicism, Irish Presbyterianism, Methodism and the Church of Ireland.
But what about the quiet increase in numbers in Christian fundamentalist denominations, such as the Elim Pentecostalists who were founded in Monaghan in 1915? Many of these new Pentecostal churches and denominations see themselves as ‘Christian’, not Protestant or Catholic.
Unfortunately, many of these evangelical and fundamentalist Christians adopt the New Testament view of ‘coming out from amongst the world’ by not participating in politics.
A Christian Party would have the primary goal of ensuring that everyone who classified themselves as ‘Christian’ was not only registered to vote, but actually came out on polling days.
At one time, the fundamentalist pressure group – the Caleb Foundation (named after the Biblical Old Testament Israelite spy Caleb) – claimed to speak for 200,000 Christians; that’s a significant number of local councillors, MPs and MLAs if they all voted.
The Christian Party’s ethos would be to replicate the role of the Southern Afro-American Baptist Churches which ensured large numbers of that community registered to vote.
As for a political agenda, Christ’s Sermon on the Mount – known as the Beatitudes from St Matthew’s Gospel in the Biblical New Testament - would make an excellent anchor for Christian unity.
It has been suggested Karl Marx used the Beatitudes as a foundation for his communist manifesto, merely removing references to God.
It’s not a case of political Northern Ireland wanting a liberal society; it’s a case that too many Christians will not mobilise even to vote. Imagine a Northern Ireland if every Christian eligible to vote did so?
Follow Dr John Coulter on Twitter. @JohnAHCoulterDr John Coulter has been a journalist working in Northern Ireland since 1978. As well as being a former weekly newspaper editor, he has served as Religious Affairs Correspondent of the News Letter and is a past Director of Operations for Christian Communication Network television. He currently also writes political analysis articles for national newspaper titles.
May 20, 2018
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