Where was Tikkun Olam at the AIPAC Conference in DC?

Published on Thursday, May 7, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

Where was Tikkun Olam at the AIPAC Conference in DC?

by Rae Abileah

This past Monday morning as I walked briskly with a mass of well-dressed, mostly Jewish people headed into a huge auditorium room, I felt as if I could have been one of a horde of Jews rushing to get into our synagogue to pray on Rosh Hashanah. On any other day, I may in fact have seen the same people at synagogue, but on Monday, we were headed somewhere very different: The 2009 AIPAC (American Israeli Public Affairs Committee) Policy Conference at the Washington Convention Center. Once inside the big room the synagogue-going feeling disintegrated. Here, humble prayer was replaced with hubristic preaching, the kind of gospel you might see on a televangelical TV show deterring worshippers from choosing the "unholy" paths of homosexuality, interracial marriage, or abortion. Only here at AIPAC, the sinful acts we were to abstain from included diplomacy, trust, and turning a critical eye towards a particular government's use of military force. Instead, we were instructed to advocate for weapons, sanctions, and unwavering nationalism.

Putting aside weapons and sanctions--whether it is possible to bomb someone into being peaceful, or starve their children until they are peaceful, or cut off their access to energy and water until they are peaceful--there seems to be something fundamentally undemocratic about the idea of unwavering nationalism. This idea leads to rigidity, the position that if one critiques any policy of a government, she is being unpatriotic; she is becoming an enemy of the state; she is a traitor and, if that nation ascribes to a particular religious or ethnic background, may also be labeled as being a bigot against that group of people. I have seen this kind of nationalist fervor directed at anti-war activists by big men in leather on Harleys who shout, "Why don't you leave if you hate America so much?" and at McCain rallies, where people chanted "USA! USA!" But it pains me more to see this behavior in the people I call kin, in the American Jewish community.

Just questioning the most recent Israeli offensive attack on Gaza, which killed 1,300 civilians, seems to be a crime among the AIPAC crowd, never mind questioning the use of white phosphorous in Gaza, so evident recently that children are painting the chemical explosions into artwork showing their neighborhood environment. The inability to question Israeli policy reaches so far that when the global human rights organization, Human Rights Watch, called for a broader UN investigation, Israel said it will not let this group in. A recent UN report commissioned by Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, said the Israeli military intentionally fired at UN facilities and civilians hiding in them during the war and used disproportionate force, citing Israel to blame for specific targeted attacks on UN-run schools and hospitals. But in the eyes of AIPAC, UN reports, international human rights reports (like the recent studies by Amnesty International and the National Lawyers Guild), mass demonstrations and community organizing efforts around the world all amount not to a recognition of reality in occupied Palestine, but instead to an anti-Israel threat that is trying to sabotage the tiny country's right to exist. AIPAC's well-funded operation seems to be unable to question, understand, or even hear an alternative viewpoint, though it did acknowledge just how big that alternative voice is growing.

That's why I felt moved to bring another point of view to the AIPAC policy conference-to question the policies of Israel that lead to the death of so many innocent neighbors, too many of whom are children, their only "crime" the side of the line they were born on. I slipped into that mass of people converging into the convention center hall and, along with CODEPINK co-founder Medea Benjamin, secured a seat at a table up front next to the stage to watch Israeli President Shimon Peres speak to the AIPAC delegates. Peres stated in his opening speech that "Science.. enables us to live up to the value of Tikkun Olam (repair/heal the world) in providing people with life-saving medical solutions, innovative water technologies, solar energy and scientific agricultural advances, new to the world." How is it, I found myself wondering, that while there is a total lock down on crucial medical supplies getting into Gaza, President Peres can dare speak of Israel embodying the value of tikkun olam when it comes to utilizing science to save human lives? Just last week I heard a first-hand devastating account from a Palestinian young man about my age whose two brothers were shot by the IDF during cease-fire daylight hours, one with 18 bullets in the back, and left for 24 hours without access to an ambulance, until they both bled to death, while the soldiers looked on, two of them medics with supplies (American Friends Service Committee Citizen Hearings at the Department of Health in San Francisco, April, 2009). Where was tikkun olam during that long night?

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/05/07-3

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