Marty Levine
December 30, 2024
I recently talked to a college student about a paper she was writing. The topic was about older “leaders” in social justice organizations and it got me thinking about the path that led to my taking a role in Jewish Voice for Peace.
How did I, after my whole professional life, 50-plus years, working to build a living Jewish Community, pushed by my desire to see Judaism as a living force in the daily life of the Jews, become a supporter of an organization that has become a targeted as an enemy of the Jewish People by the very community I served and led? What brought me to move from a leader in the effort to make Israel an integral part of the American-Jewish world to someone who sees Israel as a practitioner of apartheid and genocide and who sees its behavior as antithetical to the Jewish values on which I have tried to center in my life? How did I change from someone who felt at home as I visited Israel because it was a place where Judaism was part of daily life, to someone who will not return because of how hostile I feel the country is to my Judaism.
If you are not familiar with JVP, here is how we describe ourselves:
Jewish Voice for Peace is the largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world. We’re organizing a grassroots, multiracial, cross-class, intergenerational movement of U.S. Jews into solidarity with the Palestinian freedom struggle, guided by a vision of justice, equality, and dignity for all people.
And here’s just one sample of how others in my Jewish community, in this case, an organization that calls itself Honest Reporting, think of JVP
JVP is a radical anti-Israel organization that actively aligns with those seeking to harm the Jewish state while also providing a veneer for its extreme politics through a revision of traditional Jewish rites and texts.
In this piece, we will look at how JVP uses its nominal identity as a Jewish organization to promote the boycott of Israel, tacitly support Palestinian terrorism and whitewash the antisemitism that exists among its political allies.
Some personal background: Israel was not deeply connected to my family and the Jewish home I grew up in. Being a Jew was central, but Israel was not. The intricacies of keeping a kosher home were always there. My Grandfather koshered meat on a kitchen counter every week. I was constantly reminded not to mix up dairy pots and pans and dishes with those for meat. Preparations for each of the Holidays that are part of the American Jewish ethos engaged everyone. And as our small family gathered for holiday or Shabbat meals the conversation around those tables focused on maintaining memories of Jewish life in the eastern European shtetls as many of my family had traveled from or conversations about earlier times once they got to this country. They were not about Israel.
Israel was part of my young years because of the synagogue-based Hebrew/Religious school I attended three afternoons a week until I was 13. Looking back, it seems that we were being taught about Israel not because my teachers believed it was central to our lives but as a quaint piece of history and as a way to connect it to the religion we were trying to understand. When there, we celebrated Tu B’shevat and were told about the fruits that grew there. In the spring we were asked to help raise money for the Jewish National Fund. I learned little about Zionism or the history of Israel. I knew more about what happened to Jewish patriarchs and matriarchs thousands of years ago than I did what occurred to bring a “Jewish State” into existence. I knew nothing about the Palestinian people or their history beyond the occasional news story about terrorism in Israel.
As a child, my political perspective was framed by the values of my parents and grandparents and their progressive, even socialist leanings. They were reinforced by my years exposed to the progressive social workers who ran the YMHA and summer camp that I spent much of my non-school hours with. This began when I turned 8 and was old enough to be sent away for 4 weeks of summer camp. Challenging the discrimination of our country and its economic inequity pushed me into the pursuit of my Social Work degree rather than becoming the doctor my father had dreamed of for my future. I selected Columbia University as the school I would attend because of the particular radical flavor of social work that it was then teaching.
Through my college and grad school years, as I got deeply involved in protesting the violence and the hate of Vietnam and our country, the Jewish roots I had put down were not lost. They pushed me to see my work as building that better world for all and not just for me; they pushed me to recognize that my focus should be on those who were most at risk, those who had been hurt and harmed.
There was so much to heal here in my country that Israel/Palestine was of little concern.
This only changed when I graduated and began my Jewish Community Center career. After years of looking at everything but the Jewish Community, it might seem strange that this was where I chose to take my newly conferred degree and begin my professional career. I had, with the hubris of youth, concluded that our country was as screwed up as it was because much of the Jewish community, after personally overcoming barriers and prejudice here had “made it” economically and socially and had checked out on the pain of others. They might support racism in the southern states but balked when they were asked to support policies that would end school and housing discrimination in their own neighborhoods. And so I set out on a career in Jewish Communal Service hoping I could be a force for good and for change.
I found to my surprise that for many in this community, different from the one I had grown up in, Israel was Central to what it meant to be a Jew. And I found a JCC movement that saw its role as of an enabler of building this link. Israeli “shlichim” (emissaries) were part of the staff alongside me. They were there with a mission to teach American Jews about their connection to modern Israel, to build political and economic support, and to build an Israeli centrality into what it meant to be a Jew.
The message being taught was that Israel was an example of a democratic oasis amidst backward and hostile Arabs. The message was that all real Israelis were Jews because we heard little about the 20% of the population who were not. Palestinians were not present in this picture. The 1967 victory was a miracle that justified our vision of Israel. Israeli pioneers were bringing a dead desert back to life with scientific genius. Certainly, we were being shown, that this was the centrality of modern Judaism.
I never questioned what I was hearing and learning. I had not been exposed to another narrative about Israel that would serve to challenge the mythology. I did not see the connection between Black freedom in this country to the lives of Palestinians. I did not hear the Woody Guthrie song “Deportee” and think about the lives of Palestinians and the role of Israel.
Writing those words hurts, knowing what I now know.
So, what changed?
Traveling to Israel was the catalyst for opening my eyes and mind.
The work I was doing had an impact on me. Hearing about an idyllic land that was “mine”, I wanted to visit and understand what I had not known before.
I just reread my journey from my first trip, one I took with my wife over two weeks in the early 1980’s. Carole had grown up in a different environment, one where Israel was a deeper part of her Jewish experience. Her family had been raising money to build Israel since they immigrated to this country at the turn of the 20th century. As a wedding gift, her grandmother gave us a ”blue box” which was used by JNF fundraisers to collect money going from house to house weekly. Carole was a member of a Zionist youth group with whom she traveled to israel shortly after the 1967 war had ended. We went on our first trip together because she wanted to see Israel again and I wanted to see and experience her sense of Israel.
We did not go as part of a tour; we rented an apartment for two weeks (even before this was the reality of today) and a car for a part of the time so we could travel across the land. We came with a list of people with whom we had some connection to so we could see their lives. My journal reflects my joy in being in Israel, our pleasure at being taken in by everyone we reached out to, sharing meals, and being shown their Israel. It tells the story of our travels to the Lebanon border. What is clear is that for me Palestinians were “the others” and I was fearful as when traveled to places that were “theirs” whether in the Jerusalem shuk (open-air market) or on the roads we drove. I was relieved when could pick up a soldier who was hitchhiking in our direction. We were considering our plans based on news about Palestinian protests that seemed to be ever-present. Our Israeli friends were concerned about the politics of their government but this was a Jewish politic — would one Prime Minister and their government be better than another. The reality of Palestinian life and of their less than equal status even those who had Israeli citizenship was not an issue of concern.
Back home the unequal duality of Israel and its ongoing occupation began to bother me. I had seen enough, even perhaps without recognizing it, that I couldn’t ignore the human pain brought by the occupation. I began to see that there was a need to end the status quo. But I could not yet see this as a failure of concept and not just a political problem. The bromide of a two-state solution was enough for me.
But trip by trip the reality became more and more impossible to ignore and be silent about.
On one trip one of our Israeli Friends, Jackie Handeli, a survivor of the Salonika Greece Jewish Community who had been living in Israel since he was a teenager, took us to visit his long-time friend Abed the jeweler. Abed’s shop was at the far end of the Jerusalem shuk (marketplace), just steps from the Old City’s Damascus Gate. As we sat over a glass of tea, the two men talked about their close relationship that had developed over the years, telling us about how their families had celebrated the births and marriages of their children and grandchildren in each other’s homes. The two sadly agreed that the current situation had made this no longer possible, the wall between Israeli Jews and Palestinians had become so high that their children did not, and would not know each other in that same way. They had become others rather than friends.
On another trip, we walked along the top of the Wall that surrounds the Old City of Jerusalem. The distinction between the modernity and comfort of homes in the Jewish Quarter contrasted to the squalor of homes in the Arab Quarter. The reality of differential investment and legal systems was apparent in the very basic of neighborhood.
On a trip along with my sons, we stood overlooking the security fence that had been built to separate 1948 Israel from the “West Bank” the land that was to become the Palestinian state of the two-state solution. We could see on the Israeli side a grove of olive trees and on the other the home of the Palestinian farmer whose trees those were. There was no gate to allow the farmer to tend or harvest his crop, and there was no concern that his livelihood and family’s stake in the land were being kept from him.
On another trip, driving to get from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea we forgot to update our understanding of the road system. Driving on the road that we had on an earlier trip found to be the direct route across the Judean Desert to Jericho and the road south to the Dead Sea, we ran straight into the Separation Wall. You could no longer make that drive. We asked why this way had been blocked and the answer was that Israel wanted to make it harder for Palestinians to get from Ramallah (where the Palestinian Authority was headquartered) to East Jerusalem.
On my last trip Carole and I decided to visit Jordan and the ancient marvels of Petra. After seeing the marvels that are there and thinking about the ancient people who built a city of grand facades along a stone canyon we were to return to Jerusalem and the rest of our days in Israel. In the Israeli entry terminal at the border, we saw painfully that as an American, Jewish visitor I was able to have the privilege of a quick and painless move through Jordanian and then Israeli border control. While moving through the Israel port of entry, walking quickly through the terminal to get a car to take us back to our hotel in Jerusalem. We walked by a long, slow line of Palestinian Israeli citizens or residents of east Jerusalem, who were also crossing the border into Jerusalem, and were being subjected to a level of interrogation and inspection because they were Palestinian and not Israeli.
What I saw could no longer be reconciled with the idea that Israel was an oasis in a desert. Or that it was a democratic nation.
In 2013 I read Ari Shavit’s memoir, “My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel” and encountered a different history than the one I had been taught and had taught. Israel was not a barren, unpopulated place in 1948. Jewish settlers had come before and after the creation of the State of Israel to a land that was another people’s home. The early settlement towns were built alongside Palestinian villages. The relationship between Jew and Arabs on that land was complicated with stories of effective mutuality being told alongside those of violent conflict. And the story of the expulsion (the Nakbah or Tragedy as Palestinians call it) of 750,000 Palestinians as part of creating the Jewish State of Israel stood out.
What I had seen on my visits to the land were the products of that beginning that were not resolved. Rather than a place where all people are equal, I saw a state that was built on a belief in Jewish supremacy.
As a Jew, I could not accept that.
Looking back now I think that the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. writing from the Birmingham jail were resonating in me.
I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly…
Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself…
And that has motivated me to stand with my JVP comrades and others in the Jewish Community who are willing to speak the truth of freedom and equality. We are motivated to act because we know that what is occurring in Israel/Palestine, what is occurring in Gaza, is wrong and must be challenged.
