A small but potentially significant U.S. political party has decided to call for the right of Palestinian refugees to return to homes inside Israel and to encourage the abolition of Israel as a Jewish state and its replacement with a bi-national Jewish-Arab state.
Most news media coverage of last week’s U.S. Green Party convention, held in Milwaukee and attended by about 1,000 people, focused on whether the party would endorse the independent presidential candidacy of consumer advocate Ralph Nader, who had run as a Green in 2000. The party chose instead to nominate its own candidate, attorney and activist David Cobb.
But while that drama was occurring, the party’s international and platform committees drafted, and the convention accepted (in a voice vote by acclamation, according to platform committee co-chair Holly Hart), a new platform that included a two-page “expanded plank” titled “A Real Road to Peace in the Middle East.” This plank includes such statements as:
“3. We reaffirm the right and feasibility of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes in Israel ….”
“4. We reject the U.S.’s unbalanced financial and military support of Israel while Israel occupies Palestinian lands ….”
“10. We call for the complete dismantling of the Israeli ‘separation wall’ in the occupied West Bank [because it is] an obstacle to peace and a unilateral escalation of the conflict.”
“11. …We support a U.S. foreign policy which promotes serious reconsideration of the creation of one, secular, democratic state, for Palestinians and Israelis, on the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan, as the national home of both peoples ….”
(The full text can be seen on the Internet at http://greens.org/ platforms/us/ in the section “Democracy,” subsection “Foreign Policy.”)
Green Party officials denied that they intend to do any harm to Jews living in Israel with these policies.
During a convention forum last Friday on “American Policy and the Israeli and Iraqi Occupations,” Justine McCabe, an international committee member, explained the plank to an audience of about 90 and contended, “Nobody wants to see any Israeli cast into the sea or transferred.”
In an interview with The Chronicle, international committee co-chair Tony Affigne said that in light of “the Green Party’s long-standing commitment to human rights, democratic participation and non-violence,” committee members and other Greens “were unable to envision a sustainable long-term future for the region’s Jews and Palestinians that did not propose absolute political equality.”
He also said that many Jews are top leaders as well as members of the party; and that Jews and non-Jews in the party had participated in creating and editing the plank during the two-year process of drafting the platform.
One of the party’s top Jewish leaders is law student Ben Manski of Madison, who at the convention concluded three years of being one of the party’s five national co-chairs.
When asked to comment about the platform, Manski, 29, said, “I think an increasing number of Israeli Jews and American Jews see the need for Israel to recognize that it is in fact a bi-national state. This is a fact on the ground. The real question for a democracy is whether that fact is recognized in law.”
Manski, who said he comes from a Zionist family and lived in Israel for five years as a child, asserted that to achieve “lasting peace and social justice in Israel and Palestine” requires that “one way or another there will have to be creation of more than simple parity between Arabs and Jews, and that in fact a stable society will be one which manages to integrate the two traditions.”
Nevertheless, a current within the party of contempt and hatred for Israel was visible at the foreign policy forum. This event featured Mazin Qumsiyeh, a Palestinian Christian geneticist and author of the book, “Sharing the Land of Canaan.” He denied that Israel was a democracy, calling it a state “for and by Jews” and alleged that Israel was “squeezing” Palestinians “into ghettos and Bantustans.”
The founder of Israel’s Green Leaf Party, Boaz Wachtel (see above story), also spoke at this forum. He tried to advocate a two-state solution and said an unlimited “right of return” for Palestinians would be “unrealistic” as most Israelis would not accept it.
He was met by some catcalls of “racist,” “Zionism is racism” and “what is this racist speaker doing here” (though others in the audience tried to quiet the disrupters and made a point of speaking to Wachtel afterward).
Wachtel told The Chronicle later, “I’m very sorry the proposed ‘one state solution’ will probably be adopted” as the U.S. Green Party’s position. “It does mean the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state and the elimination of the only place on earth where Jews rule their fate as a majority.”
Moreover, this position puts the U.S. Greens “in a fringe position instead of becoming an instrument for reconciliation,” Wachtel said.
Hannah Rosenthal, executive director of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the national coordinating organization for the Jewish community relations field, also said that this position “marginalizes” the Green Party “even further” than they already are.
She also pointed out that the only “foreign policy ranting” about a specific part of the world in the platform is about Israel. “Where is the Green Party [when it comes to] Sudan and the ethnic cleansing and mass murders [going on there]?” she asked.
According to its literature, the U.S. Green Party has about 300,000 members; and it has won some 200 elected offices throughout the country (among them are two positions on Madison’s city council). Affigne said that the party “enjoys about 3 percent support nationwide.”
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