Jerusalem Post
May 8 2010
If this is our future
By DANIEL GORDIS
07/05/2010 15:37
Conflict with Palestinians only link Brandeis protesters have to Israel.
Imagine this, if you can. A prestigious university in the United
States, with deep roots in the American Jewish community, invites
Israel’s ambassador to deliver its annual commencement address. But
instead of expressing pride in the choice of speaker and in the
country that he represents, the university’s students, many of them
Jewish, protest. They don’t want to hear from the ambassador. He’s a
`divisive’ figure, the student newspaper argues, and the students
deserved better.
Tragically, of course, there’s nothing hypothetical about the
scenario. Brandeis University recently decided to award honorary
degrees to Michael Oren, Dennis Ross and Paul Simon, among others, at
its May 23 commencement, and Ambassador Oren, an extraordinary orator
among his many other qualities, was invited to deliver the
commencement address.
But the days in which Jewish students on an American campus would have
been thrilled to have the Israeli ambassador honored by their school
are apparently long since gone. Brandeis’s student newspaper, The
Justice (how’s that for irony?), deplored the choice, writing that
`Mr. Oren is a divisive and inappropriate choice for keynote speaker
at commencement, and we disapprove of the university’s decision to
grant someone of his polarity on this campus that honor.’
The ambassador is a polarizing figure? Why is that? Because, the
editorial continues, `the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a hotly
contested political issue, one that inspires students with serious
positions on the topic to fervently defend and promote their views.’
This is where we are today. For many young American Jews, the only
association they have with Israel is the conflict with the
Palestinians. Israel is the country that oppresses Palestinians, and
nothing more.
No longer is Israel the country that managed to forge a future for the
Jewish people when it was left in tatters after the Holocaust. Israel
is not, in their minds, the country that gave refuge to hundreds of
thousands of Jews expelled from North Africa when they had nowhere
else to go, granting them all citizenship, in a policy dramatically
different from the cynical decisions of Lebanon, Syria and Jordan to
turn their Palestinian refugees into pawns in what they (correctly)
assumed would be a lengthy battle with Israel.
Israel is not proof that one can create an impressively functioning
democracy even when an enormous portion of its citizens hail from
countries in which they had no experience with democratic
institutions. Israel is not the country in which, despite all its
imperfections, Beduin women train to become physicians, and Arab
citizens are routinely awarded PhDs from the country’s top
universities. Israel is not the country in which the classic and
long-neglected language of the Jews has been revived, and which
produces world class literature and authors routinely nominated for
Nobel Prizes.
Nor is Israel the place where Jewish cultural creativity is exploding
with newfound energy, as the search for new conceptions of what
Jewishness might mean in the 21st century are explored with
unparalleled intensity, particularly among some of the country’s most
thoughtful young people. No longer is Israel understood to be the very
country that created the sense of security and belonging that American
Jews ` and these very students ` now take completely for granted.
No, Israel is none of those things. For many young American Jews, it
is only the country of roadblocks and genocide, of a relentless war
waged against the Palestinians for no apparent reason. For everyone
knows that Palestinians are anxious to recognize Israel and to live
side-by-side with a Jewish democracy. That, of course, is why Hamas
still openly declares its commitment to Israel’s annihilation, and
that is why Hizbullah has, according to US Defense Secretary Robert
Gates, accumulated `more missiles than most governments in the world.’
None of this is to suggest that Israel is blameless in the ongoing
conflict with the Palestinians, or that the present government has a
plan for ending it. Those are entirely different matters. The point is
that even if these students hold Israel partially (or even largely)
accountable for the intractable conflict with the Palestinians, even
if one believes that it should have conducted Operation Cast Lead
differently, or even if one disapproves of its policies in the West
Bank, for example, it is a devastatingly sad day for world Jewry when
those issues are the only ones that one associates with Israel, when
mere mention of the Jewish state evokes not the least bit of pride
from students graduating from a prestigious institution long
associated with the very best of American Jewish life.
WHAT WOULD have happened had Brandeis invited President Barack Obama
to deliver the commencement address? Obama is, after all, not exactly
a non-divisive figure. He is president of a country at war in Iraq and
in Afghanistan, places in which (a small number of) American troops
have committed their share of atrocities, a country in which civil
rights issues are still far from resolved, in which the bounty of
America is still far beyond the reach of millions of its citizens.
One suspects that the students would have been thrilled to hear Obama,
despite the fact that many do not agree with his policies. They would
have been honored to host him despite the fact that some must be
disappointed that he has not lived up to his campaign promise to call
the Turkish treatment of the Armenians a `genocide,’ despite the fact
that he is intent on pursuing the war in Afghanistan, to which many of
the students must certainly be opposed. They would have been delighted
by Obama’s presence because even if they disagree with some of his
views or some of America’s actions, they understand that the US is
more than Obama, and more than this war or that policy. And they are,
quite rightly, enormously proud of what America stands for and what it
has accomplished.
But that kind of instinctive pride in the Jewish state is, sadly, a
vestige of days gone by, even for many American Jews.
Reading some of the reactions to Oren’s invitation, one is struck by
an astounding simplicity, and frankly, an utter lack of courage to
stand firm against the tidal wave of unbridled hostility toward
Israel.
Jeremy Sherer, president of the Brandeis J Street U Chapter, wrote to
The Justice, `I am… bothered [by the invitation to Oren] because I
disagree with his politics.’ That’s what education is now producing `
people who want to hear only those with whom they agree? `I’m not
exactly thrilled,’ Sherer wrote, `that a representative of the current
right-wing Israeli government will be delivering the keynote address
at my commencement.’
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, of course, is now busy fending off
members of his coalition who are far to the right of him, like Moshe
Feiglin and Avigdor Lieberman, and whether or not one takes him at his
word, he is the first head of the Likud to endorse a two-state
solution, no small matter for those who know the history of the Likud.
But Sherer makes no mention of that complicating data, for it doesn’t
fit his overarching conception of the intrinsic evil of Israel’s
`right-wing’ government (of which the Labor Party is also `
inconveniently for Sherer ` a member).
The president of the Brandeis J Street U Chapter, who writes that he’s
of `Israeli heritage’ (whatever that means), did not see fit to say a
single positive word about Israel. Not one. One wonders what the
`pro-Israel’ part of J-Street’s `pro-Israel, pro-Peace’ tag line means
to Sherer.
Ironically, though, some of the attempts to defend the invitation to
Oren were no less distressing. A student representative to the Board
of Trustees writes in a disappointingly anemic piece to the The
Justice that Oren `is being invited for his academic achievements, not
his political ones,’ and then launches into a recitation of Oren’s
many academic accomplishments.
Here, too, however, not a single positive word about Israel, or of the
honor that having not only a world-class historian, but also its
representative to the US, might be for the university. That sort of
pride appears nowhere in The Justice’s editorial, the J-Street
representative’s piece or the op-ed defending the invitation. For too
many American Jewish undergraduates, it’s simply no longer part of
their vocabulary.
Imagine that Sherer had written something like this: `I disagree
passionately with Israel’s policies regarding the Palestinians, and
welcome President Obama’s new pressure on Israel to bring the conflict
to a close. But as a Jew who understands that despite my disagreement
with Israel’s policies, the Jewish state is key to the Jewish revival
of which my entire generation is a beneficiary, I honor Ambassador
Oren for his service to a country of which I am deeply proud in many
ways, and I look forward to welcoming him to campus.’
Or if the pro-Oren op-ed had said, `There is a radical disconnect
between our generation and today’s Israeli government. Many members of
my generation believe that Mr. Netanyahu and his government either do
not know how to speak to us, or are uninterested in doing so.
Ambassador Oren’s appearance on campus is a perfect opportunity for
the Israeli government to address us and our concerns; I urge our
campus to listen carefully to what may well be a watershed address at
this critical period in Israel’s history and in the relationship
between Israel and the future leadership of American Jewry.’
Imagine. But nothing of that sort got said.
Indeed, the seeming refusal of any of the student articles to say even
one positive thing about the Jewish state was all the more galling
given other events that took place across the globe on the very same
week that the Oren controversy was unfolding. At the University of
Manchester, pro-Palestinian protesters tried to attack Israel’s deputy
ambassador to the UK, some holding Palestinian flags up to the windows
of her car and others climbing on the hood and trying to smash the
windshield. In Berlin, a Danish street art duo known as `Surrend’
blanketed several neighborhoods with maps of the Middle East in which
the State of Israel had been removed, with the term `Final Solution’
at the top. The Scottish Labor Federation reaffirmed its support for a
boycott of Israel, and the student government at the University of
California, Berkeley fell just one single vote short in a bid to
override a veto against a divestment bill; a similar bill was also
debated at UC San Diego.
None of the writers to The Justice felt that they had to distance
themselves from those views, even as they critiqued or supported the
invitation to Ambassador Oren.
The student-thugs at UC Irvine, who disrupted Oren’s speech on campus
in February, have won. They have set the standard for how one treats
any mention of Israel on any campus. Israel is nothing but a
legitimate whipping post even at institutions of higher learning, and
sane discussion of its rights and wrongs need not be defended, even in
communities ostensibly committed to civil and intelligent discourse.
Tragically, even these students at Brandeis, one of the great
institutions of American Jewish life, had nothing terribly different
to say to the world. Theirs are only more tepid versions of the
delegitimization now spreading across the international community like
wildfire.
One shudders to imagine a future in which they might be our leaders.
The writer is senior vice president of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem.
His most recent book, Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win a
War That May Never End recently received a 2009 National Jewish Book
Award. He blogs at
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