Last weekend’s Zionism 3.0 conference at the Oshman Family JCC in Palo Alto was a terrific event — invigorating, challenging and thought-provoking. In this week’s story, we quote Israeli American journalist and author Yossi Klein Halevi calling it the best discussion on the topic of any conference he’s attended. And he’s been to a lot.
The gathering was subtitled “In search of the shared dream” and was devoted to in-depth, honest conversations about how American and Israeli Jews can fruitfully engage in the ongoing project of building Jewish identity in the Jewish sovereign state of Israel — in other words, exploring definitions of and goals for Zionism in the 21st century.
This is a noble endeavor, and a necessary one. As the JCC’s chief executive Zack Bodner pointed out when he kicked off the day, realities change with time, and both Israel and the American Jewish community are in different places than they were a generation ago. We need to learn how to relate to each other, over and over again.
This was not a political conference, but the word “occupation” did come up several times — not in discussing Israeli or U.S. policy (with the exception of Ambassador Dennis Ross’ presentation), but in terms of how the use or avoidance of the word impacts identity-building and intracommunal relations.
At one point in his talk, Halevi shared that many American Jews he’s met on his frequent book tours will not use the term “occupation” to describe the Israeli presence in the West Bank. Some will not even admit to the existence of a Palestinian people, he said, as if refusing to name a thing will make it go away.
All that does, however, is dodge the conversation. And too many in the American Jewish community persist in this linguistic avoidance, which is outdated and self-defeating. Halevi called it “discourse that belongs in the 1980s, which does not exist today in Israel.”
Israelis have been using the word “occupation” for decades, whether they believe it should persist or come to an end. Their sons and daughters in uniform are risking their lives patrolling a territory inhabited by people who are not Israeli citizens, and that is the definition of military occupation.
It’s time to take our heads out of the sand and call things what they are. Israel is occupying the West Bank, for good or ill. There is a Palestinian people claiming the land that Israel also claims, and they wish to establish a state called Palestine. Those are facts. They need to be acknowledged, openly. Only then can we make progress on solving the mess.