Shabbat Va-Tikra.
Saturday, March 24, 2007.
Sermon by Rabbi David Goldberg
The last time I preached at the LJS (Liberal Jewish Synagogue), three weeks ago, it was shortly after a storm had broken out in Anglo-Jewry over the formation of a new initiative called ‘Independent Jewish Voices’ – IJV – on whose Steering Committee I happen to be a member. The worldwide reaction IJV provoked, mainly hostile, was extraordinary. There was press, TV and radio coverage from the UK to continental Europe and the USA, to Israel and Australia, and of course the Jewish Chronicle was full of us, under a front-page banner headline ‘Now the revolt goes global’. That delightful journalist Melanie Phillips described IJV as ‘Jews for Genocide’, and one rabbinical colleague, in an e-mail, called us ‘traitors’ and ‘Jewish haters’ who deserve the biblical punishment of being ‘cut off from their people’.
So when I walked into synagogue on that Shabbat three weeks ago, having just returned from a holiday in Cuba and therefore having missed a lot of the flak hurled at IJV, Rabbi Wright asked me if I was going to be preaching about it. When I said No, she then enquired reasonably enough if the sermon was going to be a travelogue about Cuba. No again!
But this Shabbat I have just returned from the World Union for Progressive Judaism conference in Israel, where I read another rancid piece about IJV in The Jerusalem Report by Professor Robert Wistrich, who basks in the florid title ‘Head of the Vidal Sassoon International Centre for the Study of Anti-Semitism’, and also a splenetic article in The Jerusalem Post about IJV consisting of ‘self-hating Jews’ and ‘Jewish demonisers of Israel’. While in Jerusalem, I also managed a trip to Hebron, probably the tensest trouble spot on the West Bank. So yes, this week I will combine a few words about Independent Jewish Voices with a mini-travelogue, because the two topics metaphorically collide in Hebron. Hebron, with a population of about 30,000 Palestinians, down from 50,000 after the Six Day War, is still the second largest city on the West Bank, where 600 Jewish settlers are guarded by almost as many Israeli soldiers; an enviable one-to-one ratio that reminded me, as I said ironically to our guide, of the Oxford tutorial system in my student days.
Hebron is about 40 kilometres from Jerusalem. To reach it by road, if you have Israeli number plates on your vehicle, is an easy dual carriageway journey, past the settlements of K’far Etzion and Efrat and taking about forty minutes. The same journey, if you have Palestinian number plates on your car, can take anything from two to six hours along secondary roads, depending on how many military roadblocks have been set up. Driving past Efrat, a long, straggly town that has spread horizontally to acquire as much Palestinian land as possible, you go through a handsomely-engineered tunnel. Thanks to the Wye River Agreement of October 1998, the tunnel itself is under Israeli jurisdiction while the land above it is under Palestinian Authority control; a surreal scenario, but in the context of the West Bank and the tortuous way it is divided up, almost normal.
Hebron itself is a case in point. There, Hebron A is administered by the Palestinian Authority, while Hebron B, formerly the heart of the city and now containing the settlers, is under Israeli military command. Hebron B, which I remember from post-1967 days as bustling and jam-packed, is now a strangled ghost town. Twenty thousand residents have left. All the shops along its long main road are closed and shuttered, as are the big market, the bus station, and most of the Palestinian houses. Hebrew graffiti on empty houses proclaim ‘Nekama’ – ‘Vengeance’ – an allusion to the murder in 1929 of sixty Jews during the Arab Uprising, and plaques memorialise every settler killed in recent years. Every two hundred yards is an Israeli check point, manned by soldiers whose purpose it is to keep Palestinians and settlers apart. Each have their own routes and detours to the Tomb of the Patriarchs. An occasional pedestrian saunters along, eyed suspiciously from the check point. The settlers try to move in and establish their presence in every vacated Arab house. A few are still defiantly occupied, wire netting and grills protecting those inside from the missiles hurled by settlers. Their owners dare not step outside their front doors and make their way out by stepping from one roof to the next. They are not allowed visitors. A Palestinian primary school still functions opposite the former Hadassah Hospital, now a settler colony. The seven year olds have to be escorted to and from school, because the settler children have been taught by their elders to throw stones at them, and have injured several. Under the protection of the International Red Cross the Palestinian children make their way to the check point separating Area A from B, where they go through the metal detector and their satchels are searched. Watching the melancholy scene and feeling the ugly, resentful atmosphere, I kept on thinking of William Butler Yeats’ lines:
Out of Ireland have we come.
Great hatred, little room,
Maimed us at the start.
I carry from my mother’s womb
A fanatic heart.
Which brings me to Independent Jewish Voices. Essentially the only thing that unites Jews as diverse as Harold Pinter, Susie Orbach and Sir Geoffrey Bindman QC, to name just three from the 139 of us who paid for and signed an Open Letter in The Times, is a commitment to Human Rights. Some of us may be for a Two State solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, others - but not me - may prefer the bi-national option, still others, like the Marxist historian Prof. Eric Hobsbawm, are undoubtedly lukewarm about all forms of nationalism. But the five principles we all signed up to are clear and unambiguous: i) Human rights are universal and indivisible…….This is as applicable in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories as it is elsewhere; ii) Palestinians and Israelis alike have the right to peaceful and secure lives; iii) Peace and stability require all parties to the conflict to comply with international law; iv) There is no justification for any form of racism, including anti-Semitism, anti-Arab racism or Islamophobia, in any circumstances; and v) The battle against anti-Semitism is vital and is undermined whenever opposition to Israeli government policies is automatically branded as anti-Semitic.
Then followed the sentence: These principles are contradicted when those who claim to speak on behalf of Jews in Britain and other countries consistently put support for the policies of an occupying power above the human rights of an occupied people.
There is nothing there that any Liberal Jew – indeed, I would hope any ethically-concerned Jew of whatever religious or secular affiliation – could not endorse wholeheartedly. Why, then, the anger and vituperation that greeted IJV? Because, I would suggest, we have triggered a raw nerve. What I described in Hebron is but a tiny microcosm of the human rights’ abuses that occur on a daily basis all over the West Bank. Let me detail a few more: Palestinians from Gaza are forbidden to stay in the West Bank; Palestinians without a residency permit are forbidden to enter East Jerusalem; West Bank Palestinians are forbidden to establish residency in the Jordan Valley, settlement areas, or villages and land along the seam line between the separation wall and the original Armistice Green Line; Palestinian residents of Jerusalem are forbidden to enter Area A, that is those parts of the West Bank under Palestinian Authority control. To enforce these restrictions there are 75 manned checkpoints and 150 mobile ones throughout the West Bank.
It is not a pretty story. And do you know what makes it worse? In Hebron, when I saw those boarded-up Arab shops and houses, with Magen Davids painted over them and graffiti proclaiming ‘Vengeance’ and ‘Death to the Arabs’, I had a sudden memory flash of Jewish shops and houses in 1938 Germany, with Magen Davids and ‘Juden Raus’ painted over them.
Those of us who claim to care for the wellbeing of Israel have more, not less, need of independent Jewish voices.