Madinat al-Muslimeen Islamic Message Board
| Hillel: "The goal: fighting Arab and Muslim activity on U.S. college campuses." |
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| Arsalan |
| 01/05/02 at 03:33:36 |
| Please forward if you wish Assalamu alaykum if not now then when is a question that I am constantly asking myself these days. The student movement must reclaim its rightful place on campuses across the US and Canada. Not doing so today will find us regretful tomorrow. This article is just another stark reminder that even as we sleep, those opposed to our presence in America continue to plan to stifle our voice, to marginalize and restrict our participation, and ultimately, to turn us back on our heels. We will not be stifled, we shall not be marginalized nor our participation restricted and we shall never, ever, bi'idhnillah turn back on our heels. Please read and reflect on this article. Wassalamu alaykum your brother in the struggle, altaf www.haaretz.co.il Saturday, January 05, 2002 Tevet 21, 5762 Israel Time: 05:55 (GMT+2) Tiffs at the family table By Lily Galili (From left) - Tzahi Rosenberg, Michal Berdugo and Stuart Jacobs. A wake-up call. (Photo: Photos by Lily Galil) The 700 members of Hillel (The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life) who participated last month in the General Assembly of the United Jewish Communities (UJC) in Washington, D.C. wore on their lapels a blue-and-white button bearing the slogan: "Israel. We're family." That is very moving - even if there was a time when the slogan denoting the relationship between Israel and American Jewry was "We are one." Today the family is an extended one - and it has its problems. The number of students who came to the GA in Washington this year from all over the U.S. was the largest ever. They were swallowed up in the sea of VIPs from the Jewish establishment, but it was clear to everyone that these students constitute the special task force that now has a mission of great political importance. The goal: fighting Arab and Muslim activity on U.S. college campuses. September 11 created a new situation in the relationship between the U.S. and Israel, and the Jews have an important role in this relationship. On the superficial level, the American administration has given almost unlimited support to Israeli policies. What could be more heartwarming to the Jews of America than the president lighting Hanukkah candles in the White House? And what could make the Jews of New York prouder than an outgoing mayor (Rudolph Giuliani) and an incoming mayor (Michael Bloomberg) demonstrating their identification with Israel at the site of a terrorist attack in Jerusalem? The expression that has become widespread in America after the terrorist attack, "Now we understand how the Israelis live," is sweet music to the ears of most American Jews. The harmony between the two countries is, after all, an important component of their existence. But beneath the surface, there are other streams. The atmosphere on campuses all over America is a prominent example of this underlying complexity. Same balance of power Even before September 11, the Jews of America, mainly those who are committed to Israel, followed with increasing concern the considerable success of Arab-Palestinian propaganda on campuses all over America. Right before the attack on the World Trade Center, Hillel heard of the intention of Arab and Muslim organizations to set up symbolic "roadblocks" on the campuses, in order to illustrate to the student body the humiliation suffered by the Palestinians under Israeli occupation. The attack on the WTC led to the cancellation of the roadblock campaign, but did not really change the balance of power on campuses such as Berkeley, Michigan, Columbia and many others. Liberal campuses like these are a problem not only for Israel, but for U.S. policy in general. According to internal surveys in the U.S., students still support American policy, but even now, the campuses are enclaves from which dissonant sounds emerge that spoil the patriotic harmony. These are the places where they are asking tough questions about the nature of the American response; this is the arena in which an increasing interest in Islam is being expressed. Books, lecturers and lectures on Islamic subjects are very popular. Some consider this phenomenon a natural response, a matter of "Know thine enemy." Some Jews fear that some of those who are showing interest will not stop at intellectual curiosity, but will be captivated by the exotic attraction of the idea, with the result that the delicate balance on the campuses will be even further upset. Some of what is happening on the campuses is considered a natural generational issue. This generation of students grew up on the Vietnam War in the movies, and on the humiliating American retreat from Somalia on television, and from these two sources, they learned that war and force are not always the solution. "They absorbed the opposition to Vietnam from their parents, and now they are confused," says Georgia Pollack, a public relations person for the liberal Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, not far from New York City. The first reaction of the student body at this campus, one of whose students lost his father in the attack on the WTC, was the establishment of a coalition against unjust reprisals, already in the afternoon hours of September 11. Even Jewish students joined the coalition. "I ask myself why that was the first reaction here," says Pollack, who converted to Judaism when she married. "The college authorities allowed them, of course, to do what they wanted, but I'll tell you something in an unofficial capacity: I don't understand why there isn't enough of a Jewish voice on campuses, in general. I did a small study of my own among Jewish organizations, and the only answer I received was that there is a tremendous range of opinions among the Jews, and there isn't actually a uniform `Jewish position,' as opposed to the Arab position. If I were an Israeli, I would invest all my money and effort in Jewish education for America's young [Jewish] people." The starting point for the educational process is not encouraging, neither from the point of view of established American Jewry, nor from that of official Israel. About 400,000 Jewish students are studying today at colleges and universities all over the U.S.; about 20,000 of them, only about 5 percent, have any connection to the Jewish community; about 2,000 of these are considered the young leaders of Hillel. "This last year of the intifada was hard for me on campus," says Tzahi Rosenberg of Wayne State University in Michigan, whose parents left Israel about eight years ago. "I walked around campus surrounded by shouts of `PLO forever' as though inside a shell, even with a sense of fear." Stuart Jacobs of the University of Michigan says that the immediate reaction on his campus disturbed him very much. "I was angry at expressions like: `We have to be careful not to discriminate against the Arab community.' One of the problems is that as opposed to a united Arab-Muslim community, there isn't really a Jewish community. There are a lot of individuals with a sense of identification, but they don't combine into one community." Michal Berdugo, who was also participating in the GA for the first time, says that at her small university, there are about 400 Jews (in a student body of about 2,000), but only about 20-30 of them come to Jewish events of any kind. After September 11, the question of Israel's blame for the terrorist attack was brought up for discussion in many classes. "There are many harsh statements against the Jewish students," she says; "A friend of mine was the only Jew in her class when they spoke in this way, and it wasn't easy for her. Her professor didn't exactly jump to her assistance." Some of the students who were attending the large Jewish convention for the first time define what happened on September 11 as a "wake-up call" that demands an end to complacency, and points up the need to organize private feelings of identification into a community that speaks with one voice. Organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League [ADL] and AIPAC [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee - the U.S. pro-Israel lobby] are now hastening to give Israeli public relations materials to the Jewish students who received emergency appointments as Israeli delegates on the campuses. "There are students who want to help Israel, but don't know how," says Robert Lichtman, vice president of Hillel, "but there are also many students who are not even sure that they want to do so." Within this complex situation lies the basic question of the link between American Jews and Israel. Some consider Israel an asset, others consider it a burden, but there are also many who simply do not consider the Jewish state relevant in defining their identity. That is the case with Barbara Weinberg, a social worker and a third-generation New Yorker. Weinberg, who is in her thirties, has never visited Israel and feels no great wish to do so. "The State of Israel is definitely not part of how I define my identity," she says. "In the home where I grew up there were no symbols of organized Judaism, and Israel did not exist. The Jewish state does not define my identity as a Jew; the Jewish people - yes, and most of them are here, in America." But even the many who feel like Weinberg find it difficult to escape the symbiosis between Israel and American Jews that is sometimes forced on them by their surroundings, which consider all the Jews one big tribe. They are asked to explain Israel and to defend it, sometimes against their will. "In all the years when I was growing up, Israel was a unifying factor for the Jews of America," says Prof. Alan Dershowitz, a professor at the Harvard Law School, who is involved in Israel's affairs. "Today, Israel is in many cases a divisive factor. The anti-Semites simply love [Prime Minister] Ariel Sharon, because he supplies them with an excuse." One of the incidents that illustrates the delicate seam-line between the attitude towards the State of Israel and the situation of American Jews, took place right in front of Dershowitz's house. A short time after the attack on the WTC, a group of three Episcopalian bishops in Boston joined a large group of Palestinians in an anti-Israel demonstration in front of the Israeli consulate in the city. The slogans were directed against Israel's policy in the territories, the flags were Palestinian. The Jewish community, which has felt particularly vulnerable during recent months, protested against what it saw as an anti-Semitic demonstration. "That's a stupid reaction," says Prof. Michael Walzer of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, author of the book "Just and Unjust Wars" (Princeton: Basic Books, 1977), in a dismissive reaction to this interpretation. "But it certainly was a wicked demonstration. There is a type of reaction to the September terror attack by the religious left, which turns Al-Qaida into a promoter of the political agenda of these organizations. But that is not anti-Semitism." Dershowitz does see an anti-Semitic dimension to this demonstration, but he places part of the blame on Israel. "Failures of Israeli public relations are endangering American Jews," he states in his assertive style. "I have a hard time understanding how Jews, who are supposed to be great experts in all areas of communications, are so bad at PR. How is it that not one Hanan Ashrawi [a well-known Palestinian spokeswoman] has been produced by Israel? On the other hand, the friends of the Jews in the academic world are simply remaining silent. The least courageous people on earth are tenured professors." He laughingly says that he exploits his tenure for negative purposes every day. On the political left, Dr. Bernard Avishai, who writes often on Israeli issues, claims that it is not PR, but Israel's policy, that is threatening American Jews. "Most American Jews have never considered the settlement project and Israeli-style Orthodoxy an expression of themselves. They only accepted them passively. In my opinion, this attitude is about to disappear. When America is fighting Islamic fundamentalism and is demanding that it internalize the democratic ethos into its religious world, the Jews can no longer say: `We are allowed to have our Taliban.' The events of September 11 have only brought the issue to a head. On the one hand, terror in America temporarily made it easier to explain that the occupation is a necessary evil stemming from Palestinian terror; on the other hand, when the Jews, like other Americans, now look around at what is incompatible with America's democratic values, they see the settlement movement, which they will have a hard time defending." Inseparable entities There appears to be an open contradiction between the approach of Dershowitz, who considers the weakness of Israeli PR a danger to the world's Jews, and that of Avishai, who considers Israel's policy a threat to the Jews of the U.S. But on a deeper level, both share a view that sees the State of Israel and the Jews of America as two almost inseparable entities in a symbiotic relationship. This is how things looked in an exhibition on the subject of Jewish identity that opened at the Yeshiva University Museum at the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan, about six weeks after the attack on the WTC. In a large oil painting in the entrance, a Nazi soldier is seen grabbing the arm of a skeleton wrapped in a tallit [Jewish prayer shawl]. In another corner of the room there was a display: Under the front pages of newspapers documenting the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, stood a plant containing soil from the Land of Israel and a large spoon. The defiant caption read: "Clinton's peace plan - the President invites you to take some of the Holy Land." From the display at the exhibition designed to document Jewish identity through art, one could conclude that the Holocaust and Israel are still the principal components in defining Jewish identity in America. This description stands in sharp contradiction to studies showing the weakening of the link to Israel among younger American Jews. This gap can be explained by the gap between the depth of alienation felt by "disaffected" Jews and the depth of the connection to Israel of "committed" American Jews. The findings of surveys conducted after September 11 indicate a general increase in the strengthening of the link with Israel, and a further turn to the right among American Jews. A survey conducted after the attack on the WTC by Prof. Steven Cohen, a sociologist from Hebrew University in Jerusalem, for the American Jewish weekly Forward, painted an interesting picture: 48 percent of American Jews reported that they feel "much more connected" to their American identity; only 17 percent of those polled reported that they felt "much more connected to their Jewish identity." A little over half defined their attitude towards Israel as "somewhat connected." About 60 percent of American Jews reported that they see these two components of their identity as being in "great harmony." But this harmony may now be disturbed. The overwhelming majority of American Jews summarily reject the possibility of the development of a conflict of interest between America and Israel, to the point where they will have to decide to which side their loyalty belongs. "At my college we used to argue about the question of which side we would be on if Israel and America were to fight one another," recalls Neil Rubin, editor of a Jewish newspaper in Baltimore. "My answer was, and remains, that in order for such a situation to develop, something so monumental has to go wrong in one of the countries, that it will be obvious on which side I will be." These college conversations, which are reminiscent of discussions in an Israel Scout troop, have now been replaced with fear of a conflict of values between the two countries. Together with the wave of patriotism that characterizes America during the present struggle, one can begin to hear voices that are testing the limits of right and wrong even in the situation of a just war. This discourse is an inseparable part of the great American ethos, and it will not remain within the confines of an internal discussion. Its significance for Israel, especially after September 11, could be: Terror is in fact very bad, and it justifies a determined struggle, backed by support; but occupation and settlements are a moral evil. Opposition to the settlements has always been America's political position, but now America, including the Jews, is also thinking in terms of morality. For years, American Jews have been confused in their attitude towards the political process in Israel, Even those among them (about 50 percent) who support the dovish position, have felt that they were prevented from expressing their opinion, because they have no moral right to talk about this issue. Now this feeling may change. Moreover, American Jews who have been making a special effort during recent months to demonstrate their part in the American ethos, may be pushed into making a decision. "September 11 is definitely not only good news for Ariel Sharon," says Prof. Steven Cohen, who researches American Jewry. "What concerns American Jews even more than a critical attitude towards Israel is the possibility that America will withdraw from its involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and return to its isolationist tendencies after completing what it is doing now." Even before the long-term consequences of September 11 have become clear, one phenomenon in the complex relationship between Israel and American Jews stands out: the disappearance of the guilt factor. The loaded dialogue between Israelis and American Jews was always accompanied by a hidden subtext of "You give money and support, but we give blood; you live there in peace, and we live here with terror." September 11, as a collective American experience, has erased this guilt factor. "I personally never felt guilty, but I see this change, too," says an American Jewish intellectual. "It's a change for the better, of course. Maybe now we can conduct a more honest dialogue with Israel." |
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