FEATURED JOBS
Comments (0)When a family member behaves self-destructively, what do you do? Do you become an apologist, an enabler, or do you call him out?
Israel is our family member. But it must be said: Israel’s leaders are giving Israelis — and American Jews — less and less of which to be proud and inc-reasingly more to be concerned about.
Like most American Jews, I’ve always admired Israel’s democratic institutions. It has a Supreme Court that for years served as an international beacon of jurisprudence. When an Israeli prime minister strays, he is forced to resign, and when a president is found guilty, he goes to prison. They are not above the law.
But nothing can excuse the current Israeli government’s disdain for both the letter and the spirit of the law when it comes to unauthorized construction of settlements in the West Bank, in
violation of Israeli law, often on land privately owned by Palestinians. Never before has an Israeli government so openly thumbed its nose at the law and at the Supreme Court in an effort to launder illegal actions of the settlers.
Israel’s ruling coalition came to power through elections and presumes to represent most Israelis. An Israeli government, however, that is trying to turn majority rule into majority tyranny undermines democracy. Take the government’s lackadaisical approach to reining in militant settlers who attack not only Palestinian civilians, but also senior Israeli officers in the West Bank. It is the settlers’ way of deterring the rem-oval of settlement outposts that were built in violation of Israeli law, and it works. Israeli officials have said repeatedly that they are reluctant to enforce the law in the West Bank because they fear the violent wrath of the settlers.
Israel’s most appalling failure is not ridding itself of the occupation and achieving a two-state peace settlement with the Palestinians. Sure, the Palestinians bear a part of the responsibility for the diplomatic stalemate, but as President Shimon Peres and former Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin said recently, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu could have struck a two-state deal with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, but chose not to. By denying Israelis the peace they deserve, Netanyahu and his government are bringing the Jewish state closer to becoming a bi-national state, closer to the destruction of the Zionist dream: a Jewish, democratic state in the land of Israel.
American Jews don’t pay taxes in Israel. We don’t serve in its army. We don’t vote there. But it doesn’t mean that we don’t have a say. We have not only the right but the duty to support our brothers and sisters in Israel, such as Peace Now (Shalom Achshav), who disagree with the path their leaders are charting for them. We are our brothers’ keepers. We must act accordingly.