What led to IJV by Jacqueline Rose
Independent Jewish Voices began when some of the members of two groups got together in Spring 2005 – Jewish Writers Against the Occupation and the Jewish Forum for Justice and Human Rights.
The precipitating factor was an interview with Ehud Olmert in Ha’aretz, only partly reported in the Western press, in which he made it clear that his immediate political objective was to secure international backing for his realignment plan to annex large swathes of the West Bank and declare the wall as the border of the State (a plan since shelved as a consequence of the Lebanon war of last summer). He then prioritised the need to secure international backing, defining his task as one above all of diplomacy and speaking confidently of securing the support of Bush, Blair and Chirac (this was the part of the interview not reproduced here). For a number of us it seemed imperative that if and when he visited Great Britain, the Foreign Office should not feel able to state without qualification that British Jews were behind this plan, which would make non-viable the possibility of a Palestinian State. Blair’s uncritical support for US policy on Israel was also a serious cause for concern, for instance, his backing for Bush’s March 2004 letter to Ariel Sharon which declared support for retaining parts of the West Bank thereby reversing 37 years of US policy on Israel (Israeli historian Avi Shlaim has described Blair’s position on this as the greatest British betrayal of the Arab people since Balfour).
Our sense of the urgency of this initiative was increased by the Caterpillar affair when the Anglican Church voted to disinvest from this firm which supplies the bulldozers involved in house demolitions to Israel, the bulldozers involved in the death of Rachel Corrie. The Chief Rabbi immediately issued a statement that this move would be detrimental to Anglican-Jewish relations. We felt that it was not in his brief to make such an intervention and also that there were many Jewish people in Britain who would not concur with this view.
Finally, when we were already involved in drafting our declaration, the Lebanese war added another key dimension. We were concerned by Olmert’s declaration that this was a `war being fought by all Jews’, and by the Chief Rabbi statement at the Trafalgar Square rally that British Jews were `proud’ of Israel, as the IDF, in the words of then Chief of Staff Dan Halutz, proceeded with its plan to bomb Lebanon back 20 years. And again noting Blair’s craven support for Bush on these matters, we were appalled by his refusal to call for a cease-fire.
Our immediate aim, therefore, was to counter the impression that British Jewry speaks with one voice.
What unites us is a set of common principles, as can be seen from our Declaration:
- a commitment to human rights and international law;
- hatred of racism in all its forms;
- the feeling that the struggle against anti-Semitism, a struggle we consider vital, is diminished whenever criticism of Israel is branded as anti-Semitic; we believe that anti-Semitism will only be given its due and proper attention when this false link is not made so that the real anti-Semites can become the object of focus;
- above all perhaps, the feeling that our history as Jews lays a particular obligation on us to speak out against abuses of human rights even when – or perhaps especially when – those abuses are being carried out in our name.
Once we have stated our shared commitment to these principles, we crucially have a diversity of views: On the most desirable outcome of the conflict in terms of a one or two state solution; On the usefulness of the analogy with apartheid; On the question of a cultural and academic boycott. Within the frame of the above principles, our aim is therefore to create an open atmosphere of discussion.
We would also like to stress that it has never been our claim that we have been silenced as individuals. Nor have we denied that many of us have access to the media. On the contrary, our aim is to bring into the process of debate all those without such a platform – and we have reasons to believe they are many – often defining themselves as Zionists who are sympathetic to Israel but critical of the government’s policies – and who feel unable to speak out for fear of being labelled an anti-Semite or self-hating Jew.
Over the past two weeks, we have received messages of support from: Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, US, Canada, Australia, India, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Malta, Canada, New Zealand, Syria, Belgium and Holland.
In launching our initiative, we see Independent Jewish Voices as appealing to a long-standing Jewish tradition of commitment to justice. We are mindful of the Biblical injunction to remember that we were once `strangers in the land of Egypt’
To end with a quote from one of my favourite Israeli writers, Shulamith Hareven from her 1986 essay, `Identity:Victim’:
`If my only identity is that of the victim, the world’s deterministic and doomed victim, I may (or so it seems) commit any atrocity, including exiling Arabs from their homes (excuse me, dear hawks, `relocating them’) and taking possession of their land, because I am the victim and they are not; because this is the only way I define myself and my identity – forever.
But if I also define myself as the son or daughter of a people with a splendid four thousand year history of responsibility, of conscience, of repairing and improving, of appealing for social order and justice, of a legal system nearly unparalleled in the world, and of the protection of all these traditions; if I have indeed learned and internalised all these, so that they define my identity; then even if often in history I have been the victim of others, I will never oppress those weaker than myself and never abuse my power to exile them. I will not have to define my uniqueness in terms of the past alone.’