washington | Audrey Clement biked across night-darkened bridges and through driving winter rain to make her point: Her party — the Green Party — made a fundamental mistake in a resolution calling for divestment from Israel.
She waited patiently for the D.C. Statehood Green Party to wade through its monthly agenda items of procedural items, reports on efforts to revive schools and libraries in afflicted areas of Washington, D.C., and a lengthy discussion on making the Web site accessible to all members.
Then she rose and launched her critique of a resolution that calls for total divestment from Israel for its alleged abuses of Palestinians: “What I am addressing is what I believe is subliminal anti-Semitism,” she said.
Clement appealed to the Washington branch at the Feb. 2 meeting because her Virginia branch of the party had ignored her request for a hearing.
Her appearance — and a debate now raging throughout the party’s rank and file — was the result of a hard-driven campaign by Gary Acheatel, a financial adviser in Ashland, Ore., launched not long after the Green Party passed the resolution in November.
Acheatel said the resolution was the final straw in what he said was Israel’s diminishing profile on the left. He joined the Greens and started contacting the delegates who voted against Resolution 190, which passed with a 55-7 vote.
Acheatel contacted Lorna Salzman, a veteran Green Party activist from New York City and they launched the “Let 190 Go” campaign, headquartered on the Web at www.advocatesforisrael.org. It has made some inroads.
In addition to Clement’s appearance in Washington, a number of Jewish veterans of the party are appealing for the resolution to be rescinded, including former candidates such as Stanley Aronowitz of New York, and Marakay Rogers, a candidate for governor of Pennsylvania.
“The credibility of the U.S. Green Party has been badly damaged; resignations from the party are occurring and letters are coming in to the media committee expressing anger and disappointment with the party,” Aronowitz and Rogers wrote in a letter to the party’s national committee. “We will continue to lose prospective members and we need to take these criticisms seriously.”
Acheatel said he has an additional goal: empowering Jews on the left, who Acheatel believes are not as versed in combating anti-Israel activism as their peers on the right.
“This is a perfect avenue for Jewish advocacy on the left to gain the taste of victory,” Acheatel said.
On that score, Acheatel’s campaign has scored a considerable success, enlisting a number of synagogues and progressive Jewish groups. The San Francisco-based Tikkun Community and the Progressive Jewish Alliance have each made appeals to the party.
Much of the debate’s focus is on how the resolution singles out Israel, while ignoring human rights abuses in a number of other countries, including many in the Middle East.
A statement accompanying the resolution takes other recent divestment proposals a step further by calling for the “serious consideration of a single secular, democratic state as the national home of both Israelis and Palestinians.”
It is that call that has sparked the most acrimonious debate.
“I don’t support Israeli aggression but I do support its right to exist as an independent state,” Salzman said in an exchange with Ron Francis, the co-chairman of the Massachusetts Green-Rainbow Party, a major backer of the disinvestment issue. “If you don’t, then come out and say it straight, don’t beat around the bush.”
Francis had referred, in the exchange, to his state party’s statement supporting “a secular, democratic governing entity for all people in the geographic region of historic Palestine.”
The U.S. party also ignored the international green movement’s tradition of consulting the relevant regional branch before committing to a policy.
“We are very disappointed that our sister party in the U.S. did not consult with the Israel Green Party before passing this resolution,” Peer Visner, the deputy mayor of Tel Aviv and the chairman of Israel’s Green Party, said in a statement. He called the resolution a “breach in trust.”