Israel in the Balance

For some reason, people in the Jewish community believe that the only way to present Israel is through "balance." I respectfully disagree.

When the norm of the country is a rapist president, a ganif prime minister, a chief of staff who sells his stock portfolio on the day a major war is launched, a deputy prime minister who forcibly sticks his tongue in the mouth of a young female soldier just before entering the meeting to decide to launch the war, and a finance minister who admits to stealing from the state coffers, then balance actually is something radically different. When a state has occupied another people for 41 years without giving them full political rights, then balance is something radically different. And when a state goes from almost full economic equality in the 1970's to being the country with the greatest disparity between the impoverished and the new rich next to the United States, then balance is something radically different.

I don't think that balance is a static term. It is not a value. We certainly don't need to read neo Nazi literature to balance our aspirations for peace, so why do we need to support giving a voice to Israeli Jews, or Americans who support them, who believe that our Palestinian neighbors should be transferred to Jordan, or that they don't deserve full political rights, or that we can, against our own laws, appropriate their lands for our own national purposes.

We do this on the economic level as well. People talk about pride in Israel through the lens of the successful high tech industry, but we never talk about the toll that has on the Israeli economy. The Gross National Product of a country says very little about how it takes care of its poor and Israel has many poor; forty percent of them are children living under the poverty line. Israel speaks proudly of its contributions to the advancement of medicine, but, in my own family, we have people who were the victims of human research with radiation that was banned in the United States.

As I write this, I am acutely aware that I sound like I don't love my homeland, and that is so very wrong. It is because I love Israel that I want to dispel this nonsense about balance in discussing Israel. I think balance is an important issue, but it should be balance between saying we are the only democracy in the Middle East and saying that we have a long way to go in incorporating our non-Jewish residents into the system. Israel still has never accepted an Arab party in the governing coalition. It direct contrast to Jewish values, she has a separate set of laws for Jewish citizens and Palestinians with Israeli citizenship and foreign workers, and Israel has run without a constitution for 60 years. Talking about both sides of the democracy coin is the type of balance I would like to achieve.

Or we could talk about the resurgence of Judaism from Tel Aviv in contrast to the very Jewish notion "כי מציון תיצא תורה" from Jerusalem Torah will emanate. Judaism has never been balanced in Israel. I was forced to marry abroad because my Reform rabbi's officiation at my wedding was considered illegitimate. Israeli Judaism is orthodox Judaism and Tel-Aviv and other strongholds of secular or non-orthodox Judaism are starting to gain ground amonst the people. This, I would say, is a development we can be very proud of and discuss as a move toward "balance," even if it is going to be a long journey.

George Lakoff, a linguist at Stanford , wrote a small book that was really a manual for the American Democratic party called Don't Think of an Elephant in which he lays out some basic principle of confronting the conservative affront on America. The most important of these principles is, "Don't let them frame the argument." By insisting on this benign term with all the positive connotations, we allow "balance" to frame the debate and paralyze us into inaction when our people are in serious crisis. Thomas Pynchon, in Gravity's Rainbow says, "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers." Let's not allow the conservative mainstream, with it's ganifs, rapists, and crooks to stop us from making Israel the great nation that it is meant to be.