LERNER: Yeah. Basic advice I have is this: Don’t be realistic. Don’t be realistic. Don’t allow the people around you to tell you what can happen, what’s realistic to happen. Don’t allow that to shape your vision. Instead, go for your highest vision of the good. Stay with that highest of the good.
In the current issue of Tikkun, the January/February issue that should be on newsstands at the beginning of January, the entire issue is dedicated to what we call, “Memos to Obama.” They were written by a wide variety of people, including Uri Avnery, who is the leader of the Israeli peace movement, and people like Deepak Chopra, Lerner Cohn (Cohen?), Father John Deere of the Jesuits, Reverend James Forbes, Lerner Arthur Green, and a whole bunch of spiritual progressives taking on both the Middle East, not only the Middle East, but the Middle East and poverty, immigration, mass media reform, nuclear weapons, education, the economy, climate issues, a whole variety of issues that we’ve written these… So my advice to Obama is to read this issue of Tikkun. And anybody who’s listening, if you can do anything to get this into his hands, get a copy of Tikkun into his hands, that would be great.
But my general advice to Obama is: Don’t be realistic. Don’ t allow the people who define what is realistic, inside-the-beltway logic of Washington, D.C., to shape your consciousness of what can happen. If you do – and you will have plenty of people around you who are doing that, including AIPAC’s point man in the White House, Rahm Emanuel, who is just about as close as possible, as anybody could be, to the AIPAC consciousness, to the Israel lobby consciousness, will be serving as gatekeeper to Obama and will surely keep me and other progressive Jews outside of his hearing range.
KALL: What can progressives do? On OpEdNews, we have some people who post saying Israel is evil, that Zionists are evil. I hear that a lot. I’d love to hear your response about Zionists and Zionism.
LERNER: I think the first thing to say is that if I were the Israeli Right, or if I were the right wing fundamentalists in this country, I’d be putting those lefties who are writing that on their payroll - in fact, they might be on their payroll, for all I know. In other words, this is the kind of language and the kind of thinking that ensures the predominance of the right. When people go to vilify the Jewish people or to vilify the State of Israel, to demean it, to assume that it is fundamentally evil, it’s pure craziness and it’s wrong. It’s wrong morally and it’s wrong factually.
The fact of the matter is that if these people are looking for someone to vilify, they might as well start with the United States, rather than with Israel. The fact that they don’t, the fact that they want to see Israel wiped off the face of the map, but when the United States is engaged in actions far more egregious and far more destructive of human life than Israel has ever done, just in this past few years with the United States in Iraq, and now considering going into Afghanistan and Pakistan… The attempt to vilify Israel and to make it appear to be the worst country in the world, which I do see often happening in left-wing circles, way too often happening in left wing circles, is a manifestation of an ancient anti-Semitism, hatred of the Jews, making the Jews seem as though they are worse than everybody else, when the facts simply don’t sustain that. We’ve just lived through, in the past…
KALL: But they say, “It’s not the Jews, it’s the Zionists and Israel. I don’t have a problem with the Jews; it’s the Zionists and Israel.” This is what they say.
LERNER: But it happens that Zionism is the national liberation struggle of the Jewish people. It is a struggle for Jews to… that emerged for Jews to fight their way out of the way that non-Jews have been treating us for the last 2,000 years.
That national liberation struggle has, in my view, been deeply screwed up in a lot of ways. That doesn’t distinguish it from the national liberation struggle of people in this country that created the United States of America, or the national liberation struggle of the Chinese that created the current Communist regime in China. You see what I mean?
KALL: People will argue that they’re not religions.
LERNER: Well, so what? What does that have to do with anything? So what if they’re not religions? Zionism isn’t a religion.
KALL: Okay.
LERNER: Right.
KALL: But it is very often equated with Judaism, of course.
LERNER: Then you’re telling me what you just denied a second ago. You said that they’re claiming that they’re not against Jews or Judaism; they’re only against a particular political movement called Zionism.
KALL: Well, I see the use of the term Zionism as a way to hide behind anti-Semitism very frequently.
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