San Francisco — When I received a flurry of death threats last month in response to my stance advocating an end to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, I remembered a lesson we had learned in the 1960s:
If your people are involved in brutality on the outside, the cruelty and hatred is certain to reverberate on the inside of your community as well.
“You subhuman leftist animals should all be exterminated” ran one threat. Another began, “Someone will come to kill you — you should rot in hell.” This is par for the course when you are critiquing Israeli policy.
What changed my attitude was when a web site went up recently that identified me as one of the three major self-hating American Jews (the others were linguist Noam Chomsky and filmmaker Woody Allen), called me a “traitor” to the Jewish people — and published my home address with driving instructions how to get there. At that point, the Anti-Defamation League called the FBI.
The climate of hostility toward dissenters in the Jewish world has risen to new levels of verbal abuse. Tikkun, the magazine I edit, is the only nationally distributed Jewish magazine to challenge the assumptions of the occupation, to urge dismantling of the settlements in the West Bank and to insist that Israel must acknowledge some (not total) responsibility for Palestinian refugees.
Just as we in the anti-Vietnam War movement of the 1960s saw our opposition as flowing from the highest values of American democracy, so we in the Jewish peace movement insist that Jewish values lead us to insist that every human being is created in the image of God and brutality done to the Palestinian people is as much a tragedy as brutality done by Palestinian terrorists to Israelis.
This kind of moral equivalence infuriates some Jews, who insist that “no suffering is like our suffering” and that past suffering warrants present insensitivity to the Palestinian people.
Fight hate with love
Many Jews are unwilling to acknowledge that Israel is the only side in this struggle that has an army, that Palestinians have had 10 times as many deaths as Israelis and that this time it is the Palestinians who are closed into small areas and prevented from getting food, education and medical care.
It seems so much easier to blame the victims and become furious at the messengers who are raising serious moral objections to Israeli behavior.
The same dehumanization of Palestinians begins to emerge against peace-oriented Jews. Never mind that my son served in the Israeli army, that I am a strong supporter of Israel or that I lead a Jewish renewal synagogue in San Francisco. For these right-wing extremists, I am “a self-hating Jew.”
In the months before Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, there were similar charges against him. In Israel, it is now against the law to make that kind of charge, because people have come to realize how easy it is for hateful language to become violent action.
But even when it doesn’t go to violence, this kind of language scares many people and makes them reluctant to speak. Tikkun magazine has lost subscribers and donors as people feel scared to identify with an outspoken voice on these questions.
When people ask me what to do in response to all this, I have two answers. First, the best way to fight hate is to put more love into the world. Even the haters are people who are severely wounded, and those wounds can best be dealt with by compassion rather than by hating back.
Second, continue to speak out on these questions. Even many non-Jews have feared expressing legitimate criticisms of Israel, thinking that they would be interpreted as anti-Semitism.
During his recent visit to Syria, Pope John Paul II stood silently when President Bashar al-Assad uttered standard anti-Semitic tropes. Only a Christian world that aggressively challenges all remnants of anti-Semitism can have the legitimacy to critique Israel.
What the Jewish people need is for Christians to denounce anti-Semitism, but nevertheless to join with progressive Jews in criticizing immoral and self-destructive policies of the Israeli government.
In the past, I have called for Palestinians to renounce violence and follow the non-violent path of Martin Luther King Jr and Mohandas Gandhi. It’s time to ask the same of Jews — not only toward the Palestinians, but toward their fellow Jews as well.
Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun magazine and author of “Jewish Renewal: a Path to Healing and Transformation.” A version of this article appeared in the May 18 Los Angeles Times.
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