Rob Kall Interview with Lerner Michael Lerner 12-30-08

Transcribed by Carla Gilby and Jim Magee. Edited by Jay Farrington 

Listen to recording here until 1-30-2009. 

Kall: Tonight, I have Rabbi Michael Lerner with me to talk about what's been going on in Gaza and how we got there.  So, Rabbi Lerner, could you describe a little bit about what you do and your work first? 

Lerner: Well, I’m the Rabbi of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue in San Francisco and Berkeley California and I'm the editor of Tikkun magazine, which started some 22 years ago as the voice of liberal and progressive Jews and now it has become an interfaith magazine so it's also the voice of progressives in all of the various religious communities – Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and many people who consider themselves spiritual but not religious also, right in Tikkun.  I'm also a chair of a national organization of such people - spiritual but not religious, as well as progressives in the various religious communities, and it’s called the Network of Spiritual Progressives, online at www.spiritualprogressives.org 

KALL: Great.  So what's your take on what's happening over there? 

LERNER: Well, it's a tragedy, and it is a continuation of a tragedy that's been going on a long time for both Israelis and Palestinians.  What we see happening today is a continuation of a struggle that started really over a century ago, when Jews returning to their ancient homeland found themselves confronted by Palestinians who were living there at the time and who came to feel that the Jewish return to their homeland would be a threat to Palestinian existence there.  And Jews, in turn, feeling that the hostilities that they were greeted with - the way in which Palestinians saw them as representatives of Western imperialism - was really just a cover for anti-Semitism and traditional hatred that Jews have faced in almost every society that we’ve lived. So there developed a huge amount of antagonism as both sides suspected the other of base intentions and desire for power and control and no sensitivity to the others and their fears turned out to be self-validating, as more and more people on each side came to believe that their own survival would depend upon elimination of the other community.  That manifested finally in--after the Second World War, one in every three Jews were murdered and the Palestinian people did not accept Jews coming to Palestine as a possible place to flee to--this manifested in a huge struggle between the two peoples that led to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, but, simultaneously, the dispossession of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, many of whom fled for their lives on the belief that the new Israeli state would oppress them - which again was a belief that was self-fulfilling, but it was also not just created in the minds of Palestinians, but was validated tremendously by the right wing of the Zionist movement that created terrorist attacks against the Palestinians to convince them to leave.   

Plus, there was the actual involvement of the emerging Israeli army, the Haganah and Palmach, that together expelled over 100,000 Palestinians from their homes in a variety of cities in the central area of what had been Palestine.  Then you get the Palestinian refugee situation in which hundreds of thousands of refugees have left their homes - imagining that they might be able to return to their homes when the war is over and Israel, after the war was over, refuses to allow them to return, fearful that these people come back and be a fifth column who are working to overthrow the newly created and fragile State.  So you get the outrage of Palestinians who are by international law have every right to return to their homes, but who are actually being precluded from doing so by the newly created state of Israel, that believes that these Palestinians are largely, if not totally, hostile to the existence of the State of Israel.  And so, from there you get an ongoing struggle between these two communities, which intensifies after the 1967 war, in which Egypt and Syria pose a threat and make noises as though they going to invade and destroy the Jewish state and Israel, in a surprise attack, manages to prevent that from happening and, in fact, to conquer parts of previous Palestine that had been under Arab control - namely the West Bank and Gaza, as well as sections of Syria, the Golan Heights. 

KALL:  And Egypt… 

LERNER:  But from there on, that’s 1967, you get an Israeli occupation taking place, at first in a relatively soft and benign way, but, as more and more Israeli right-wingers decide to move to the West Bank and Gaza and create settlements there, you get an intensified anger from Palestinians, which anger then is responded to by tighter and tighter levels of oppression and lack of freedom of movement and, in general, an oppressive set of rules which allow the creation of roads especially for the Jewish settlers, and Palestinians not allowed on those highways; the inability of Palestinians to move from city to city, even to visit from city to city, without spending hours at checkpoints, going through them; and, in general, a very high level of oppression which then leads to more support for the more challenging, to Israel, elements in the Palestinian population and some more support for acts of resistance, which overwhelmingly were not nonviolent resistance, but violent resistance.  And the violent resistance then contributes to Israelis perceiving that the Palestinians will never accept their existence and that the only way to deal with the situation is through more violence and more domination of the Palestinians.  And conversely, that response seems to validate the Palestinians worst fear that Israel is going to always oppress them.  And so out of that there comes a great despair, and armed struggle - the first intifada; less armed struggle oriented in the second intifada - the second intifada taking place between 2001 and 2005.  And the attempt by Palestinians to negotiate some kind of settlement that would allow for a two-space solution is thwarted because, in part by Israel's refusal to take any serious steps to end the occupation of the West Bank or to dismantle West Bank settlements but in part also by acts of terror from the ultra-nationalists in the Palestinian camp, who would prefer to see this struggle go on for the next several hundred years - until the Arab states become powerful enough to vanquish Israel militarily. 

KALL:  Who were those ultra-nationalists? 

LERNER: The ultra-nationalists existed across the spectrum in the Palestinian world because some of them were part of the PLO and the Palestinian Authority; although they became less significant as the major part of the Palestinian Authority then were other groups.  But there were sections of the PLO that felt this way and then there was Hamas, and Hamas was a group that originally started as an Islamic service group to help people who were not getting the services that they badly needed - health services, education services, and welfare services that weren’t coming to them because the Palestinian Authority had started to siphon off whatever aid was coming to Palestine, siphoning it off and using it for their own individual advantages, and not for serving the country as a whole.  So that's part of the background. 

Now Hamas then emerges in countering that by becoming a group that does serve the needs of ordinary citizens in Palestine, by providing food, by providing shelters, by providing educational services, by doing what it can to provide the basic social services that the Israeli government had failed to provide and becomes particularly popular in the Gaza Strip, which is an area where you have one of the poorest populations in the entire world financially, living on the least possible amount of money, increasingly, many of the people there in conditions of near starvation and some really going over the line there and actually starving to death.  There’s starvation and a huge amount of hunger in Gaza, and that became intensified when Israel decided over the course of the last few years to use the closing of the borders as a security measure, but actually, its effect is to starve the Palestinian people into submission. 

KALL: I need to know a little bit more about this because the Israelis basically put up a blockade.  Is that what it is? 

LERNER: Well the Israelis decided to withdraw from Gaza, in 2005, because their presence there - the presence of the army - was a target for constant guerrilla attacks on the one hand and this in the midst of there were hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, Gazans, who were angry at Israel and were supportive of Hamas and Hamas became more of a military force that had been before.  It had originally been a social service force, but it became more of a military force - at least in Gaza and where there had been a split between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, because the Palestinian Authority had wanted to make direct negotiations with Israel and Hamas felt that such would violate their version of Islamic fundamentalism and would betray the Palestinian people.  So they didn't go along with it, and there was a split between those two.  Israel was playing somewhat of a reprehensible game here, because Israel decided to withdraw its troops, and it could've withdrawn its troops in favor of the Palestinian Authority, which was the Palestinian government in the West Bank.  But instead, Israel refused to negotiate the withdrawal with the Palestinian Authority and just sort of left it in the hands of the people there. 

The people there in Gaza were overwhelmingly pro-Hamas - in part because of the desperation level in Gaza was much higher than the desperation level in the West Bank, the deprivation of food, the deprivation of finances.  It's one of the poorest places on the entire planet Earth.  So, you then get more and more people out of their desperation turning towards fundamentalist solutions, and particularly since the leaders of the fundamentalist movements there – Hamas - were people who were sensitive to the survival needs of the people and had organized itself around that, so when Israel withdraws from the West Bank it de facto gave over Gaza to Hamas, because it didn't allow and didn't try to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority for Palestinian Authority to have influence over the Gaza that Israel was withdrawing from.  So as a result, this was a move by Arial Sharon that allowed for de facto division of the Palestinian people into a West Bank Palestinian people and a Gazan-based Palestinian people - the West Bank Palestinian people, being much more willing to deal with Israel; the people in the Gaza Strip, much less willing to deal with Israel - two different sides, and they actually came to blows at some point in 2005 and 2006. 

KALL: And what happened when they came to blows - Hamas was literally massacring the Palestinian Authority people, right? 

LERNER: Right, exactly.  Israel withdrew from Gaza - to say that it withdrew is somewhat of an exaggeration, because what actually happened is, it withdrew its troops to the borders and surrounded Gaza with its troops and made it impossible for anybody to get in or out of Gaza without Israel's permission.  So de facto, that meant that this was not what one would mean by a withdrawal in the common parlance of what people usually mean by withdrawal - they mean that one country lets the other one be free or decide for itself its own future. 

In this case, Israel was making it impossible for the Gazans to travel any place outside of Gaza - outside of the Gaza Strip - without Israel's approval, and Israel was frequently shutting the borders, and then permanently shut the borders.  In shutting the borders, it also shut the borders to the supply of food coming into Gaza and gas and other vital necessities for the Gazan people - to the Palestinians living in Gaza.  So this created a tremendous amount of anger on the part of Hamas and the Palestinians living in Gaza. 

KALL:  They shut it down completely and didn't let anything through? 

LERNER:  So what happens is that, for big periods of time, they shut it down and won’t let anything in and occasionally they’ll lift the blockade and let some food in - usually in response to international pressures and international demands.  But you have a level in which there… about 60% of the population of Gaza is facing severe malnutrition. 

KALL: Now where does the United States fit into all this? 

LERNER: Well, the United States has basically been the enabler of Israel's policies all through this period.  It has been giving a green light to whatever Israel wanted to do, and largely because Israel has been willing to be a local partner to the United States in whatever of the United States wanted to accomplish in the Middle East. 

Israel was and is the largest military force in the area and in fact has either the third- or fourth-most efficient army in the world - largest and most efficiently organized army in the world.  Israel became an ally; it started to be an ally with the United States during the Cold War, when the United States imagined that it should surround the Soviet Union with bases and allies of the United States to contain communism.  However, after communism collapsed in East and Western Europe, the special relationship between the United States and Israel continued and Israel became the ears of the United States and the eyes of the United States in the Middle East, often providing it with a base for operations on the intelligence level, as well as providing them with all kinds of safe harbors and safe passageway for American power in the Middle East.  So the United States became very aligned with Israel, Israel voted with the United States in the United Nations almost all the time, so that the United States was never just one, there were always two votes on the United States’ side.  And the United States has supplied Israel with a huge amount of weaponry of the most sophisticated and technologically advanced sort, which gives Israel a huge military advantage in any struggle with the surrounding Arab armies. 

KALL:  Has the treatment of Israel by the United States been the same under the George W. Bush administration, as compared to under Clinton or George Herbert Walker Bush? 

LERNER:  The only person who’s ever stood up to Israel in any way was George Herbert Walker Bush, who said that Israel should stop its construction of new settlements in the West Bank and if it wouldn't do that, then that Bush administration - the one from 1988 to 1992, would not allow Israel to receive the loan guarantees that it had sought from the United States, in order to build more housing or for Jewish refugees from Russia, who were taking advantage of the collapse of the old order in Russia, to flee Russia and come to Israel.  So Bush stood up to the Israel lobby, and, as a result, he lost a tremendous amount of support from all those who were friendly to the lobby and eventually got defeated in his rerun for the Senate. 

KALL:  Well, there were a lot of factors, including his, “Read my lips, no new taxes,” but do you think that… 

LERNER:  Yeah, I said rerun for the Senate, but I really meant rerun for the Presidency. 

KALL:  And this is always something that is a threat to any American politician, just about anywhere, except maybe the most remote parts of the Appalachian Mountains… 

LERNER:  The threat of the Israel lobby, AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee], is composed of many of the leaders of the organized Jewish community, but it also has the strength it has for several more reasons, one of which is the very strong pro-right wing Israeli government that comes from the Christian Right in this country.  The Christian Right is much bigger and in many ways more politically impactful than the Jewish community is and it has aligned itself with the Israeli Right. 

And then, of course, you’ve got the American corporate interests, which I believe to be decisive in foreign policy matters.  Those corporate interests have seen Israel as a big ally in potentially constraining any Arab militarism and supporting the more reactionary regimes in the Arab world like the Saudis.  Allegedly, I mean, on the surface, Israel and Saudi Arabia are in conflict with each other, but on a deeper level, they work in concert with each other in the sense that the Saudi regime makes sure that the Arab states do not align in any serious way to challenge Israeli power over Palestinians.  Israel and the Saudi regime and other Arab states are all aligned against the Arab militants who might seek to change the relationship of the Arab states to the United States and, in particular, not let the oil be sold at cheap rates to the West, where it’s been used to make it possible for the United States and other Western countries to have a higher standard of living in material terms. 

There’s a whole nexus of forces that lead to no one wanting to challenge Israel. 

Then, of course, you’ve got the American media, which has systematically distorted the accounts of what’s going on in Israel-Palestine, never tells the story from the perspective, or almost never tells the story from the perspective, of the Palestinian people and what it is suffering.  As a result, most Americans have a very distorted or skewed view of what’s going on there and have a great deal of antagonism towards the Palestinian people, an antagonism that is not warranted based on the actual behavior of the Palestinian people, since the Palestinians have indicated a strong desire for a peaceful resolution of this conflict. 

However, there is this Hamas group, which is the group that says, “No, we will never accept a peaceful resolution.”  And there, I think, it’s important for us to acknowledge that the Palestinian people, like the Israeli people, have a section of them that are extremists, that are not interested in resolving the issue, that are willing to continue this struggle for hundreds of more years if necessary. 

I think that that is a tragedy on both sides, that both sides have these extremist elements and feed on each other and help give power and support to each other, because every time the Israeli Right acts in a disgusting and repressive way, as it has done in the past few months in the city of Hebron, the Arab city of Hebron, where we’ve seen literal pogroms - that is, groups of Jews attacking random Palestinian civilians, the kind of things that used to happen to Jews all through our history – when that happens, that gives great strength to those forces in the Palestinian world that say, “See these Jews are impossible.  They understand nothing but force and they will never allow us to exist in a normal way in this society in Palestine.”  

Conversely, when Hamas or other extremist groups in the Palestinian world engage in acts of terror against Israeli civilians, of course, those acts are, number one, totally outrageous and morally inexcusable, but secondly, they are also things that strengthen the Israeli Right because the Israeli Right is then able to say, “You see?  This is who we have to deal with.” 

There’s a great tragedy that’s been going on.  This tragedy is now being played out in Gaza in the last week or so, as a cease fire that had been worked out with Hamas some six months ago has expired and Hamas said it would not restart that cease fire, because Israel had been continually violating its terms.  What Israel had been doing is using the cease fire and the cover of cease fire to go and assassinate various leaders of Hamas or other militant Palestinian groups, both in the West Bank and in Gaza.  That was a strong violation of the terms of the cease fire, at least as Hamas understood those terms.  Hamas said, “Look, if we’re going to just be sitting ducks here and you’re going to use cease fire and continue to kill us, we don’t want this, we’re not going the honor this cease fire.” 

Hamas, not honoring the cease fire, began to fire these rockets.  Their rockets are not like advanced weaponry that the United States has or that Israel has.  They’re rockets that, by-and-large, have been unable to reach Israeli cities, to which I say, “Thank God.”  I’m delighted that they don’t have more advanced weaponry.  In any event, their attacks were largely symbolic and this past week they launched all these rockets, most of which ended up in the desert, affecting nobody, but… 

KALL:  Eighty in one day, they launched. 

LERNER:  Yeah, but they were more for pride than for military effectiveness.  Those rockets were the excuse that Israel then used to make a bombing raid on Gaza, in which it killed 250 Gazans, most of them civilians, 20 of them children, and wounding another 1,000 people, and… 

KALL:  Wait… I’ve been reading in a lot of places that it’s up to 350 now, that 60 of the 350 were civilians, the rest were Hamas operatives or something like that. 

LERNER:  Well, I guess these claims, that my basis for the information that I read also on the web, I’m not there personally and I don’t think that anybody… that we have a good objective source for knowing exactly these numbers.  I think what we’re going find is that, until the fighting stops, we’re not going to know.  We get reports from the hospitals in Gaza that are totally overwhelmed with the numbers of people who are wounded or killed.  As far as the claim of who is a civilian and who isn’t a civilian, this is part of the propaganda battle, I guess, that goes on, because the issue of… 

KALL:  It is kind of hard to picture how they could figure that out so clearly in such a short time. 

LERNER:  Exactly, because you can pretty much tell when it’s women and children, that they’re civilians. 

KALL:  Right. What I’ve been picking up lately in trying to pull these pieces together is that there are a lot of power politics motivations on both sides, both the Israelis and Hamas.  Recent polls have Hamas less popular than George W. Bush and their popularity was falling and they had nothing to lose.  There was an article in the Washington Post suggesting that they refused to renew the truce because they would lose their credibility as resistance fighters and that they had something to gain by getting conflict started.  Then the Israelis, what are they going to do, say, “Let’s make nice with Hamas, who are shooting rockets at us?”  It would have been like handing the election over to her opponent, Netanyahu. 

LERNER:  I would never underestimate the venality of the political leaders on all sides of this struggle.  On the other hand, I don’t think that Hamas would have initiated this attack had there not been the targeted assassination going on through the period of the alleged cease fire by Israel against various leaders of Hamas and of others in the Palestinian world, both in Gaza and the West Bank. 

Similarly, I don’t think that Israel would have taken the stand that it did if Hamas had been a more reasonable group, trying to seek some longer-term solutions to the problems.  We’ve got bad people on both sides, as well as good people on both sides.  I do think that, in the case of Israel, where I can say I have a greater understanding of the political dynamics than I do in Hamas world, because Hamas isn’t so dependent on democratic support as it has been, as Israeli government is. 

The Israeli government has at its top Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak, and these two people are the ones who were responsible for the war in Lebanon two years ago that turned out to be a disaster for Israel.  They’re about to end their rule and Israel is going to the polls in February, so they didn’t want to end their rule in Israel with history judging them to have been these huge military failures.  By being able to attack Gaza and come away with some kind of military victory, they could easily have felt that this attack would up their popularity. 

I note that, on the very day after the attack, there was an article in Haaretz - the equivalent of the Israeli NYT, essentially, for Israel - the Haaretz had an article that said that Barak’s popularity had surged as a result of this attack and that he was now back in the political game, whereas before, for the last two years, he has been held largely responsible, along with Olmert, for the tremendous failure of the military up till now.  Since Barak was the head of the Labor Party, the Labor Party had been very, very low in its public support, so this move may increase the support for the Labor Party. 

KALL:  Where does Livni fit in with this? 

LERNER:  Well, Livni also would have benefited from anything making her look like she’s the foreign minister of this current government.  Her Kadema Party is standing also for elections – she’s running, like Barak, for Prime Minister.  Both of them are facing the much more popular Netanyahu and Netanyahu is the most – or, I shouldn’t say the most, because Israel continually produces yet more extremes – but he’s the most extreme of the likely Prime Minister candidates.  His support has come from more and more movement in Israel towards right wing solutions to its problems, towards extremist solutions to its problems.  So here comes Livni, and Livni and Barak together, both of them being able to say “See how tough we were.  We were able to stand up to Hamas and wipe them out.  What exactly could Netanyahu do more than what we’ve done?”  In that sense, the current attack on Gaza has to be understood as connected to the coming elections. 

KALL:  Well, I have to wonder… given the reality there in Israel, what could moderate politicians do, other than this kind of response, to prevent Netanyahu from taking the reins in February?  Could they have not responded militarily and had any chance of winning the election and keeping Israel more moderate if they didn’t respond with a violent military response to those 80 rockets? 

LERNER:  Israel… depends on when you’re thinking of - if you’re thinking of after the rockets were launched, then no.  There was nothing inevitable about that.  That was because they didn’t negotiate a new cease fire.  It couldn’t negotiate a new cease fire because Hamas put forward terms that said here, this is what we need for a new cease fire:  We need you to totally give up this attack on militant leadership both in the West Bank and Gaza.  We need you to open the border and not close it again, so that we can get food and we can get vital supplies into Gaza without it being dependent on the Israeli Army when they decide to cut it off.  And we want to exchange Gilad Shalit  [wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilad Shalit] for a thousand of our prisoners who are held in Israeli jails. 

These were terms it was putting forward as a way to negotiate an ongoing cease fire.  Were those reasonable terms?  This is a matter of debate, but they were prepared to negotiate a continuation of the cease fire.  It wasn’t that they were saying “Under no circumstances will we have a cease fire.” 

KALL: Well, because there are people saying that Hamas refused to continue to renew the ceasefire. 

LERNER: Well, they refused to continue it under the terms that currently existed because those terms were, for reasons that I've said, they were not reasonable terms for the Palestinians, but a ceasefire would have been possible and could have been negotiated, if Israel had made it clear that it wanted to do that, and wanted to make the concessions necessary to make that happen.  

But in a more general way, of course there's something that moderates could've done; the moderate government could have said, "Look, we've just received a clear indication from Syria that Syria wants to negotiate a peace treaty with us, we'll negotiate that, we've just received in the last two months a restatement by the Saudis that the twenty-three Muslim countries that supported the Saudi initiative several years ago have re-signed on to it are asking once again for Israel negotiate a final peace settlement that would include the creation of a Palestinian state and Israel could have jumped at that and said “Wow, here, we’re going to have permanent peace with all of our Arab neighbors.  They’re offering that peace.  Now let’s sit down and see if we can negotiate the terms in ways that are acceptable to us.”  But of course, the moderates didn’t do that. 

From my standpoint, that wouldn’t have been sufficient.  From my standpoint, what would be sufficient is if Israel were to take the next step, a step that I believe will only happen once the United Sates itself changes its orientation towards matters of war and peace.  From my standpoint, let me start from the United States, that the fundamental error of American foreign policy as a contemporary in the 21st century is that it is based on a 19th century conception of homeland security that says that security will come when we dominate others, either through military means, economic means, or diplomatic means.  This I call the Strategy of Domination.   

I believe that in the 21st century, the only possible way for the United States to achieve security, or for anybody else to achieve security, is through a strategy of generosity and caring for others.  That is, instead of domination, we need to show generosity towards others in the world.  That’s why we at the Network of Spiritual Progressives and Tikkun Magazine, have been calling for, and have been starting a campaign for, a global Marshall Plan, to once and for all end global poverty, homelessness, hunger, inadequate education and inadequate health care and to repair the global environment.  That approach would provide the United States with far more security than all the military spending that we are doing and will continue to do under the Obama government, because the Obama people still are stuck in the old paradigm of domination rather than of generosity and caring for each other. 

In Israel, it’s the same issue.  I would love to see the United States say, 

•  

  Ok we’re going to start the global Marshall Plan and the place we’re going to start is the Middle East.  We’re going to help fund a major plan for rebuilding the Middle East and providing the economic infrastructure, as well as taking care of eliminating the extremes of poverty that people face in that area. 
  

For Israel, the same thing; Israel could now end all of this by announcing that it would accept the basic structure of the Saudi plan, which would mean the creation of a Palestinian state within the pre-1967 borders of Israel with minor border modifications; and it would also involve a solid agreement of peace and not just tough peace, but an open hard peace between Israel and the surrounding Arab states. 

KALL:  I believe the conflict in the Middle East is the hardest problem in the world. 

LERNER:  I’m sorry you believe that.  I don’t believe that at all. 

KALL:  No? 

LERNER:  These are human beings, like human beings everywhere else.  They have the same desires and needs as everyone else. 

KALL:  But the Middle East has more layers and more parties with interests, like you described, the religious right, the Christian right in the United States, corporations, Saudi Arabia has interests in keeping the conflict going, I think, Egypt has interests in keeping it going. 

LERNER:  That’s true; and it’s also true that there are counter-forces there.  I don’t mean to say that it’s a cake walk or whatever; it’s going to take some serious negotiations and serious transformations of consciousness.  The place to start that would be for Israel to accept the Saudi plan at least in its basic formulation.  It’s been worked out in more detail by the Geneva Accord that had been worked out by [sounds like] Yesse Balin, who had been Israel’s top negotiator with the Palestinians under the previous Barak regime.  To take that as its basis, and then for Israel to announce that it’s committed to a Marshall Plan for Gaza and the West Bank and to begin to implement that Marshall Plan, and to announce that it’s willing to bring in 20,000 to 30,000 Palestinian refugees each year for the next 30 years, which would not change the demographic balance, but would be a kind of gesture to show a whole different attitude on the part of Israel towards Palestinians.  That would have a tremendous impact in changing the dynamics in the Middle East, those three steps. 

So I don’t believe it’s intractable and I believe that a peace-oriented government, that was serious about peace, could take steps that would change the dynamics and the perceptions on both sides. 

KALL:  When my son was going to Sunday school at a Habad Sunday School, one of the things they taught him was that the Jews and the Arabs will never be at peace.  I was outraged and I pulled him out of the school. 

LERNER:  Now you’re repeating the same thing to me on the phone. 

KALL:  No, I’m not at all.  I believe there can be peace, but I think it’s really incredibly difficult because there are so many complicating factors and so many power games and the poor Palestinians are used by so many groups, it just… I guess my question, though, is who would attempt to stop this Marshall Plan for peace? 

LERNER:  Extremists on both sides.  Certainly extremists in Israel, the kinds of people who assassinated Rabin, are the kinds of people who would try to stop this Marshall Plan from working from the Israeli side.  Then you’d have many people from Hamas and Islamic Jihad and other groups… 

KALL:  Hezbollah? 

LERNER:  Hezbollah… who believe that it’s all just a ruse to continue Israel’s domination.  But if a global Marshall Plan were actually made as part of a three-part solution, one part of which is the acceptance of the Saudi Peace Plan; a second part of which is a symbolic gesture of bringing 20,000 to 30,000 Palestinian refugees back each year for the next 30 years, I think you’d have, in a very short time, a tremendous change in consciousness - like the kind of change that took place in Israel when Sadat came to Israel, because, before Sadat came to Israel in 1978, the polls indicated that 80% of Israelis were opposed to giving back any of the land conquered in 1967 from Egypt.  One week later, after Sadat had come and come with a magnanimous gesture and saying, “I want peace and I’m here to tell you I want peace,” and so forth, 80% of the Israeli public was in favor of giving up the land that had been conquered from Egypt.  Those kinds of transformations of consciousness have happened and will happen again. 

KALL:  Is that why you want the 20,000 to 30,000 Palestinians to move to Israel? 

LERNER:  Yes.  I think that’s part of a plan, not the sole component of it, but part of a plan to change the perception of who Israel is, from intransigent, caring only about Jews, to open and caring about the needs of Arabs and Palestinians, as well. 

KALL:  Another question I want to bring up - there’s a new lobbyist group, J Street.  Where do you think they fit into the picture? 

LERNER:  I think that they’re a very good group and I’m hoping that they will be successful in challenging the perception that the only force out there that Congressional people have to deal with is the Israeli lobby, and J Street will eventually become a counter-force to that.  I hope that that will happen. 

KALL:  And we’ve got a new president coming in very shortly.  Do you have advice for Obama, or steps to take? 

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. 

LERNER:  Well, that’s what I said – a lot of this attack is anti-Semitic.  It singles out Israel as the worst country in the world, when… I mean, it’s just crazy.  Look at the genocide going on in Darfur at this moment.  The numbers of people who have been killed, the numbers of people who have been raped, it’s just unbelievable what’s going on down there.  It far surpasses all of the deaths that have been caused by the Israel-Palestinian struggle from the beginning to the present moment; from the beginning of that struggle to the present moment, far surpassed by what’s going on in Darfur, not to mention what has gone on previously in Rwanda. 

And so, people on the left who single out Israel, when the level of violence and destructiveness is nothing compared to what’s going on in some of these other countries, are anti-Semitic, objectively anti-Semitic, whatever their intentions are.  It’s an anti-Semitic response. 

KALL:  Well, we’ve hit the end of the hour.  Thank you so much. 

LERNER:  I hope your listeners will consider subscribing to Tikkun Magazine, because this voice is only going to keep going if people are willing to at least put forward those $25 subscription fees, or to join the Network of Spiritual Progressives, which would help us tremendously, because this voice isn’t going to be here otherwise. 

KALL:  Okay, thank you and good night.  Have a happy new year.