WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Last week, in challenging Senator Sanders’ statement that “… the founding of Israel involved the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people already living there, the Palestinian people….”, I referred to the Senator as both a credible candidate for President of the United States and a Jew. A reader took umbrage at part of that, raising an issue on which we all need to reflect.
This Week: So Who’s a Jew? Last Week’s Reference to Bernie, and Reader Robert’s Response
In last week’s #879, I dealt with the Arab claim that Israel’s “founding” in 1948 “displaced the Palestinian population already there.” In stating that Arabs are not alone in making this claim, I cited statements by two U.S. politicians. I first cited President Obama’s 2009 statement at Cairo, “It is easy to point fingers – for Palestinians to point to the displacement brought by Israel’s founding.” And then I wrote:
“And here are the words, per Haaretz 2/28/17, uttered by another U.S. politician:
“… the founding of Israel involved the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people already living there, the Palestinian people….” [emphasis added]
“These were the words in a speech by a Jew, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, to the 2017 J Street Conference in Washington, 2/27/17, and we were still learning this week just how incredibly close Sen. Sanders came last year to becoming the current President of the United States.”
Most weeks, I’m favored with a few emails, some of which express opinions different from mine. Fine, the point of all this is to engage people I’m able to reach in conscious reflection upon the momentous historical event – the Jewish homeland’s rebirth as a sovereign state, after eighteen hundred years, that occurred in our time. And of that homeland’s delegitimization in the very language, much of which we ourselves use, of Arab-Israeli conflict discussion and debate.
But one response to last week’s #879 challenged, not my perception of our homeland and its wrongful delegitimization through language used in public discourse, but my perception of us. A reader named Robert wrote:
“Jerry, please correct ‘These were the words in a speech by a Jew, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders.’ Sanders may have been born a Jew, but he does not now, and has not considered himself one for many years. He is as much a Jew as the pope. He is an atheistic socialist and I’m embarrassed to be considered in any way related to him.”
Chalk one up for reader Robert for raising an issue worthy of thought.
Here’s what I, for one, think. Whether Senator Sanders himself has done so, I don’t know, but it is certainly within the power of a person born a Jew to “consider himself,” as reader Robert put it, no longer a Jew. But that does not address either whether other persons, particularly those not well disposed toward Jews, will consider him still a Jew, or whether, given the probability of such consideration of him by others, there remains a residue of loyalty obligation on him – especially if he is a public person – not to say derogatory things about Israel or Jews to which such non-Jews can point and say, “See, here is even a Jew saying this!”
And that persons perceived as Jews by persons not well disposed toward Jews can through their own acts shed themselves of such perception has proved problematical. During my lifetime, in Europe, that heartland of Western culture and civilization, it was enough that one of one’s grandparents was a Jew to make one a Jew, a designation at that time and place carrying considerable undesirable consequences. And I remember a few years ago, in New England, I think, that a boy brought up Christian was denied entrance to a high school prom at a country club because his father, not his mother who raised him as Christian, was a Jew, even though that boy was not deemed a Jew by us Jews.
So I would say that when Senator Sanders said “… the founding of Israel involved the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people already living there, the Palestinian people….”, words indistinguishable from those of proponents of “the Palestinian narrative” that Israel’s 1948 “founding” displaced “the native Palestinian population,” Senator Sanders, a quite-credible candidate for President of the United States, was perceived by many as a Jew saying this.
At least, Sen. Sanders, not immune to overstating the number of Arabs inconvenienced by Israel, said “hundreds of thousands” of Arabs had been displaced by Israel’s “founding,” not “millions.” Closing in on eighteen years ago, this media watch was “founded,” to use that word more correctly, to counter incessant Western media repetition of “millions of Palestinians and their descendants” having been displaced by Israel’s “founding” or by “the war that followed Israel’s creation.” With the exception of CAMERA and local voices like this media watch, the American Jewish community did not actively contest that canard of “millions” back then.
Perhaps, today, with post-ISIS-caliphate attention again focusing on forcing Israel out of homeland Jewish presence (“Jewish settlements”) in historic Jerusalem (“occupied East Jerusalem”) and Judea-Samaria (“the occupied West Bank”) back to the indefensible cease-fire lines of 1949 (“Israel’s 1967 borders”), we who witnessed Israel’s rebirth as a sovereign state in our generation will acquit ourselves better this time.