Israel Right or Wrong? Not So Fast

I am Jewish...and an atheist.  How can that be you may well ask?  A recent Pew study pointed out that "cultural" Judaism has become a major thread in the American Jewish community.  Many American Jews consider themselves to be Jewish but they're not so sure about the whole god thing and the narrow strictures of religious practice.  I fall into that realm with the exception of the god thing about which I am sure: there is no such thing as god.

Part of what we are told is central to our culture as American Jews is unquestioning support for Israel.  This support of Zionism is constantly reinforced by Jewish religious institutions and leaders.  Politically, AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) has been granted virtual religious status within our community.  In most circles, to question AIPAC is to question the very core of Judaism itself.  Earlier this week, The New York Times published an article about highly observant Jews who are not Zionists.  After reading that article, I was motivated to write today's post to my peripatetic blog.

As I noted, I am not an observant Jew.  We still get together for Rosh Hashanah, to break the fast on Yom Kippur and celebrate Passover, but with the quasi exception of Passover, which is the Jewish celebration of freedom and a call to fight to end oppression, things I do not consider religious but rather ethical and moral, these are traditions and I celebrate them because those around me, who I love and respect, consider them to be important.  

But back to Zionism.  Mainstream Jewish-American thought believes in Israel right or wrong.  On the other hand, these folks don't treat the United States the same way.  Personally, I don't believe in any political entity right or wrong without adding the caveat added by Carl Schurz in 1872.

"My country right or wrong; if right to be kept right; and if wrong to be set right."

First, Israel is not my country.  I am an American.  I put what I believe to be the best interests of the United States ahead of those of any other country, including Israel.  I understand the reasons for the creation of the State of Israel.  After millennia of abuse and discrimination, the holocaust was the ultimate wake-up call to the world about the plight of the world's Jews.  It would have been unrealistic to assume that holocaust survivors could simply return home and resume the lives they lived before Hitler.  Their home communities were unwelcoming and awash in anti-semitism.  Their homes had been destroyed or appropriated by others.  It would have been far more practical for survivors to have gone to other welcoming countries, except there weren't any.  The United States was just another nation among the world's loud chorus of countries that rationalized their anti-semitism and refused sanctuary.  Jewish leaders wanted a state in their biblical homeland, and there really wasn't any organized nation-state in that area anyhow, so why not?  And thus Israel, after much debate and controversy, was born, with President Harry Truman being the first world leader to direct his country, my country, to recognize the new nation.

The Arabs went ballistic.  They didn't want all those Jews near them either.  But they were largely a tribal culture whose nations were the fictions of European imperial powers, so who cared if they were unhappy?  In the ensuing war, most countries didn't really care who won as long as they didn't have to get involved.  When Israel won that war, the world largely shrugged and moved on. 

In the decades since, the general antipathy toward Israel hasn't abated much.  The United States has had the benefits of a strong ally in a deeply contentious part of the world first during the cold war and since then in an age where military action has diversified to non-state players like al qaeda, Hamas, etc. who oppose us.  Of course, today, it is our very support of Israel that has been the greatest, but not the only, motivator of that opposition.

And so we find ourselves with a situation in the middle east that seems to have no possible solution.  Our ally and beneficiary, Israel, opposes our policies and the current Israeli government has meddled in our internal political affairs both directly and through its mouthpieces, of which AIPAC is the loudest.  That opposition is not coupled with any alternatives that might lead to resolution, only opposition.  Israel says that the Palestinians are not acting as partners for peace.  That is correct.  I would add that Israel is not much of a partner for peace either.  Many years ago, when I was in Israel, I was told that Israel conquers by settlement.  Certainly that has been the methodology we have witnessed over recent decades.  Of course when an American Jew opposes the incumbent government of Israel, he/she is berated for meddling in Israel's internal political affairs and often tarred as an opponent of the Jewish state.

The two state solution may not solve the conflict, but it is currently the only game in town.  Israel has opposed that solution while presenting no alternative.  Sometimes it has opposed it overtly and sometimes it has opposed it by undermining negotiations and buying time to build more and more settlements on disputed land.  The late Ariel Sharon finally got it when he broke with Likud over the demographics of not reaching a two state solution.  The only way to keep Israel as a Jewish homeland is to allow a Palestinian homeland to exist and slow the inevitable growth of the Palestinian population of Israel that will change the country to a majority Palestinian country.  That all begs the question of the legitimacy of a nation state that is committed to keeping itself relatively ethnically pure.  I'm not sure that such a nation can be either legitimate or democratic if it takes the steps that will be necessary to ensure Jewish control into the future. 

Israel and the AIPAC crowd oppose American policy toward Iran.  Again, they offer no alternative.  We have long been told that the point of the network of sanctions against Iran has been to force them to the negotiating table.  Well, it has worked, they have come to the table and they have made the kinds of commitments that the rest of the world has wanted.  Will they live up to those commitments?  I don't know and I'm not optimistic.  Do we have to give the process time to play itself out? Yes we do.  There is no other alternative available.  What do Israel and my fellow American Jews propose?  Military action?  More dead and wounded American soldiers, Israeli soldiers and civilians and Iranian soldiers and civilians are not the solutions that make sense to me.

I support Israel, but only if it pursues policies that have some possibility of success and that don't undercut the United States.  There is no question that Israel is a dynamic democracy, even if AIPAC and company want us to believe that there is monolithic support for the incumbent government.  But it's repression of Palestinians, refusal to negotiate a workable peace agreement and opposition to the United States make it harder and harder for me to support it.

One more observation, and then you may bombard me with your comments.  Any American Jew who equates the religious right wing's support for Israel with acceptance of American Judaism is delusional.  The fundamentalist vision of "the end of days" requires that all Jews be back in Israel before Jesus can return to earth and judgment day begin.  So they love Israel, and they love you too as long as you make aliyah, i.e. move to Israel.  If you stay here, you are just an obstacle and they are no less anti-semitic than any other anti-semites.

Veterans Day

We owe an enormous debt of gratitude for those who were both drafted into service and those who have chosen to serve to fight for the United States of America.  That is not the subject of this post.  I want to talk about two subjects.  

Vietnam is first on my list.  Like most of the people I know, I was vehemently opposed to the war in Vietnam.  But I don't intend to talk about that either.  I want to talk about the dismal behavior of those of us who were against that war, including me, toward its veterans.  We saw them as willing pawns who killed at the behest of the government.  The people I know never did anything physical to those vets in terms of insulting them publicly, although some others did act against them physically, but our thoughts and discussions were entirely dismissive of what they went through as them merely getting their just desserts.  I was wrong, we were wrong.  First and foremost, most of those soldiers were drafted and they had no option but to go.  But even those who volunteered did what they had to do to survive.  Yes, there were incidents where soldiers did unspeakable things like the massacres at My Lai, but that wasn't the norm.  Mostly soldiers spent their time in Vietnam alternating periods of intense boredom with periods of abject terror.  We were right that they were mostly used as pawns, but that doesn't fall on them, it falls on those who sent them there and who kept them there.  Our government bears full responsibility for the deaths, injuries and PTSD, which wasn't recognized then, that befell these men.  Our anger should never have been directed at the soldiers at all.  We were wrong.  We should have welcomed those vets home thankfully as survivors of the failed foreign policy of the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon Administrations.

Finally, I want to talk about the hypocrisy of those who self-righteously declare their undying support for and thanks to veterans of our most recent adventures, but then quietly cut their benefits and leave them and their families to wallow in poverty.  We all remember John McCain's opposition to the GI Bill, which was ultimately passed  anyhow, but the indignities have continued.  A significant percentage of those receiving SNAP benefits (food stamps) are vets.  As a result of cuts to SNAP something in excess of 5000 vets will lose those benefits.  Veteran medical benefits have been reduced.  The unemployment rate among vets is 10%.  One third of homeless men in the U.S. are vets.  Acts of Congress, not fiscal mismanagement, have nearly destroyed the USPS and caused many of its workers to be laid off.  Guess what, the USPS employs more vets than anyone except the Defense Department.  Increasing the minimum wage will help about a million vets.  Expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act would bring coverage to 40% of the 1.3 million vets who are uninsured and yet some of the most self-righteous empty suit Governors are the very people who have refused to except increased Medicaid coverage in their states.

If we as a nation really want to thank veterans, we should demand that they have access to food, jobs, health care and housing.  It just pisses me off when blowhard politician sing about their devotion to vets and then knife them at every turn.

The Iron Curtain

It seems clear that an Iron Curtain, to use Winston Churchill's phrase, has descended across the American Southland.  As a nation, we have worked for decades to encourage our public to participate in the nation's civic life by voting.  Many have marched, protested, been arrested and beaten to make sure that the right to vote would not be abridged in the United States of America.  Each election has seen a decline in the participation of more and more citizens.  It seemed that we were beginning to turn that around through things like the "motor-voter" laws and online voting.  Renewal of the Voting Rights Act has been approved by huge bipartisan majorities in the Congress right into the 21st century. Then the conservative majority on the Supreme Court gutted that law.  It's not that it can't be enforced, it's that enforcing it will be much more difficult to do.

The reason the Court gave for its action was that pre-certification is no longer necessary.  Within two hours of the decision, their reason was demonstrated to be fallacious.  Texas, one of the states that had been subjected to pre-certification, passed draconian voter identification laws, rolling the right to vote back to where it was when Martin Luther King marched in the 50's and 60's.  Pre-certification state North Carolina was next and Florida will soon follow.  The Iron Curtain is descending and the promise of our nation is being trashed.

How big a problem is voter fraud in the U.S.?  Since 2000, about 10 cases of in-person voter fraud have been reported in the country.  All but one was dismissed, and the one was caught and never actually voted.  So these states are solving a problem that doesn't exist.  Why?  What's going on here?

The Republican Party, now under the control of its extreme right wing, has realized that minorities, the young, the old and the poor tend to vote Democratic.  Rather than coming up with policies that will help these constituencies, they have decided to fight this rear guard battle.  These laws are designed to prevent them from voting. The processes required to get acceptable ID's for people without driver's licenses or access to birth certificates or who are students in the state is arduous and trying.  When it was the Southern Democrats suppressing the vote back before the Voting Rights Act there were poll taxes and "literacy" tests that were used to prevent "undesirables" from voting.  The mechanisms are different but the goal is the same. The harsh reality for the Republicans is that their constituency of white males is becoming a minority of aging curmudgeons.  These moves will only delay their descent into irrelevance.

They must be stopped and defeated in every election everywhere it is possible.  They have a core of oligarchs like the Koch Brothers who operate quietly behind the scenes to fund seizing and holding state government's and therefore control the redistricting and voting process.  What can be done?  We need a new civil rights movement.  Not founded on racial equality, but rather upon citizenship equality.  We need massive marches on the state capitols of those states behind the Iron Curtain and those in danger of disappearing behind it, like Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania.  We need to mobilize to help people negotiate the multiple obstacles to voting and then vote out those state legislators and governors whose agenda is to withhold the right to vote so that they may keep their dying grip on power for a few more years.  

I marched for equality in the 1960's and I am prepared to march again decades later.  Are you in?  Will you stand with me and those like me who are determined to defend the United States of America against these domestic threats?

Everybody Loves the Sequester

Republicans and Democrats alike fell in line behind the sequester when it was proposed not because they wanted to slash their favorite appropriations but because they figured the other side would never let slashing its favorite appropriations happen so the draconian cuts would never happen.  Surprise, surprise, no one blinked so now everyone is paying for Congressional obstinance.

Well, not quite everyone.  While 70,000 kids are being thrown out of Head Start, millions of seniors are deprived of nutritious meals, hundreds of Federal food inspectors have been furloughed endangering the nation's food supply, and thousands of teachers, police officers and firefighters have been laid off, not one member of the House of Representatives or the Senate has seen any effect at all.  In fact, the executive, legislative and judicial branches were specifically exempted from the effects of the sequester.  In all fairness, it should be noted that President Obama has voluntarily reduced his salary by 10% in response to sequester cuts.  No one else has rushed forward to share the pain.

In fact, while seniors go hungry, Congress and the President were so deeply moved by the impact of their own gutlessness on hapless air travelers that they loosened the rules of sequestration to allow the FAA to restore air traffic controllers and reduce air traffic delays.  Oh the horror of having to wait and extra hour in order to be treated like garbage by airlines and pay for a bag of 20 stale peanuts!  Let salmonella into our food chain, but don't make members of Congress and other air passengers wait another hour!  What hypocrites.

A couple of days ago, in an interview with Ryan Lizza, of CNN and The New Yorker, House Majority Whip Eric Cantor acknowledged that Paul Ryan and he created the sequester by pressuring Speaker John Boehner not to accept the grand bargain upon which he and the President had agreed.  Why do Cantor and Ryan like the sequester?  Simple, the sequester achieves the GOP right wing's long time desire to cut Federal spending on programs that they and the Libertarian/Ayn Rand wing of the party believe to be outside of the scope of Federal authority.  

Democrats naïvely believed that the threat of cuts to GOP favorites like defense and corporate subsidies would compel Republicans to avoid invoking the sequester.  But the Republicans understand that there is a lot more than 10% waste in the Pentagon budget, so defense wouldn't really feel the pain despite cries to the contrary from military leadership and Obama appointed Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta.  Libertarians are not fond of outright subsidies to the private sector either, and corporate earnings are at an all time high, so the large corporate entities that are beneficiaries of governmental largesse would weather the storm.  Those private sector companies that are very much dependent on the Federal government, like those working in cutting edge technologies, e.g. alternative fuel sources, are not likely to show profitability in the short run, and depriving them of their funding source will help kill them clearing the playing field for the traditional businesses that are major sources of contributions to the Republican Party.  

And so the sequester continues to devastate those who are most vulnerable and those who are working in developing the technologies we will need in the decades to come, while merely annoying the rich and powerful a little bit.  My conclusion?  This is an example of the Republicans being evil and the Democrats being stupid.  This is a hell of a government we've got here.

Sequester

Until recently, you just didn't hear the word "sequester" used in conversation very much.  I like the word.  It's not my favorite little used word.  That would be "bifurcate."  When did you last hear the word bifurcate used in normal conversation?  Right?  Like never!  Why is that?  It's a great word.  Think about how many times you've wanted to convey the concept of splitting something into two pieces, not equal pieces necessarily, just two pieces.  That's bifurcate.  Let's all try to use bifurcate in conversation from now on, until you or someone to whom you're speaking decides that the word just pisses you or them off.

"Sequester" is less satisfying to say, and probably used less frequently.  That is until recently.  My guess is that a large percentage of the people who are using the word don't really know what it means.  As kids we never played "sequester and seek," right, so it's not a familiar word.  Unfamiliar that is until it became linked to a) an artificially created financial deadline and b)...well I can't remember what b was going to be, so forget it.  I did.  

This sequester is about gutting every part of the Federal government regardless of merit or consequence.  If that doesn't sound like a good way to run a country, it isn't, but the political climate in the United States is mostly about how not to govern.  With all the politicos and pundits running around telling us that the sky is falling, you'd think someone would try to do something about it.  If you think that, you're wrong.  The Congress took is usual Presidents' Week break to go home, wrangle contributors, bloviate (another one of those words), do photo ops, smile at Presidents' Day parades and try to remember where their residences of record are actually located.  President Obama returned from golf with Tiger Woods last Tuesday to begin working on this, but there was no one to talk to until this weekend when members of Congress straggled back into town.  And even then no one wanted to talk, they just wanted to strut upon the stage.  The Republicans have opted to spend their time trying to blame the President for the sequester even though a majority of them voted for the sequester and it was proposed because Speaker Boehner could not get his caucus to agree to the grand bargain to which he and President Obama had agreed.  They have accused the President of failing to present an alternative to the draconian and, yes, I'll say it, stupid sequester.  I guess they're ignoring the White House web site.

Anyhow, you have to wonder why no one is doing anything.  I believe the answer is that they don't want to.  Polls show that 71% of voters believe that the solution should include revenue increases from closing loopholes and cutting subsidies to industries and companies that don't need them as well as cuts to Federal programs.  Thus the Democrats are ready to let the Republicans twist slowly in the the wind.  The Republicans have been trying to slash spending on Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, meals on wheels for the elderly, the National Endowment for the Arts, et al forever, and the sequester gets them there without having actually to do something that might anger constituents, so they are happy to let the Democrats get pummeled by their constituents, who overwhelmingly support those programs, because they didn't protect them.  There is another component to this thing and that is that the government won't actually run out of money until March 27, so the sh*t won't hit the fan until then.  Now every Federal agency, company and state government that will be effected has already started to plan to wind down.  But Congress figures it has until March 27th, so what the heck.  

Personally, if the government is going to choose between children, seniors, cops and teachers and subsidies for BP, ExxonMobil, Monsanto, Cargill and their ilk (another of those words), I'm going to have to side with the kids, seniors (of which I am now one), cops and teachers.  The reality is that our fiscal health can't be protected with cuts only, revenues are needed too.  I guess I should point out here that Medicare, a favorite target, can be fixed easily, but it will take political will and our politicians don't have that.

It's Been a Long Road and There is Further to Travel

Today would have been Martin Luther King's 84th birthday.  On NPR this afternoon, Talk of the Nation played Dr, King's "I Have a Dream" speech, which they do every year.  As I rode in the car listening I found that the power of his words brought me to tears, literally.  The guy in the pick-up truck next to me gave me a strange look, but I don't care.  While Dr. King was speaking of African Americans, his thoughts apply to all who seek justice in our country and around the world.  So instead of writing about those things, I decided to share the speech with you in this video.

The Second Amendment

"A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."

That's it folks.  That's the entire text of the second amendment to the Constitution. I suspect that most people haven't actually read the text since their days in high school, if then, but they wax eloquent over what it does and doesn't mean.

For the first 140 years or so of the existence of the republic, there wasn't really much conversation about the second amendment.  At the beginning, regulation consisted largely of apprehended criminals being punished for their crimes and their guns being confiscated until they had served their time.  Most of the original delegates to the Constitutional Convention saw the second amendment as allowing the states to maintain militias, now called the National Guard, and guns were used for hunting.  Not hunting for sport mind you, hunting for food.  The concept of "leisure time" was most uncommon among any but the wealthiest citizens, which would have included the rich, white men who were the delegates.  And, of course, shooting was a central component of the military.

In 1939, the Supreme Court, in United States v Miller, ruled that interstate commerce in sawed off shotguns could be regulated by the government because a sawed off shotgun had nothing to do with with the maintenance of a well regulated militia.  Thus the right of the Congress to determine which weapons were or were not appropriately allowed in interstate commerce.  

Seventy years later, in 2008, the Court revisited that ruling in District of Columbia v Heller, and in that ruling overturned the DC hand gun ban saying that Miller was an anomaly since a sawed off shotgun could not possibly be used for any legal purpose.  That still allowed the government to determine what weapons could or could not be allowed in interstate commerce by determining if a specific type of weapon could be used for a legal purpose.

In 2010, in McDonald v City of Chicago, the Court strengthened the rights of the individual, outside of the well regulated militia, to possess weapons under the protection of the second amendment.  

So here we are.  Twenty six people are dead in Newtown, Connecticut.  There was a shooting at a hospital in Alabama today.  We've had a bunch of these horrific incidents over the past couple of decades.  What should we do?  There are twenty times more gun deaths in the U.S. than in the other twenty two wealthiest countries combined.  Eighty seven percent of all gun deaths of children in the twenty three wealthiest countries occur here.  And this despite that fact that overall crime and gun crime has declined in the U.S. over the past decade or so.

What the hell is going on?  As I see it, and that's what counts here because this blog is entitled "The World According to Me," we have made guns too easy to get and mental health services to hard to get.  Any solution must address both these issues.

I don't believe it is necessary, or appropriate to ban guns.  Also, I believe that ship has sailed.  Guns are part of American culture, for better and worse.  An outright ban will simply promote a huge black market in guns, think prohibition, and make criminals of perfectly law abiding citizens.  Not only that, target shooting is fun.  In my profligate youth, OK, not really so profligate, but while I was in summer camp, I enjoyed shooting and even earned the NRA rank of sharpshooter second bar.  In those days, the NRA was an advocate regulation of firearms.

Having said all that, I also advocate registration of all guns, background checks and mandatory safety and use classes before someone may purchase a gun.  Owners should be required to report any theft or loss of a weapon to the local police so a national data base of weapons that are no longer accounted for can be maintained.

Extra capacity ammunition clips and bullets that are designed exclusively to kill, like hollow points, as well as automatic weapons should be banned.  Current owners of such clips, bullets and weapons may keep them, but they must be registered.  Penalties for failure to register or report theft/loss should be steep and cost of registration should be moderate.  Concealed weapons permits should be allowed only for those who can prove a need and those permits should be granted very sparingly.

As for mental health and addiction services, right now the Affordable Care Act prohibits insurers from denying coverage on the basis of a prior existing condition.  In 2014, mental health and addiction services will be part of the essential benefits  package that must be offered by the health care exchanges and Medicaid, so accessibility is about to be dramatically increased.

This is all great, assuming people are aware of their need for assistance.  The stigma attached to using mental health services must be removed and friends and relatives of those who need these services have to be willing to step forward and steer patients to those resources.  These school shooting rampages of recent years have been largely perpetrated by young, white, middle and upper middle class males.  After the fact we learn of the warning signs that were missed by those in a position to direct the shooters to get help.  Parents, teachers and, frankly, the public at large need to be educated as to for what they are looking.

None of these proposed solutions will be fool proof and all will take time to accomplish.  But they are a start, and we definitely need to start.  It behooves the public to push the NRA to return to its original policy of advocating reasonable gun regulations.  Right now, the NRA is no less than an accessory to multiple murders.  That must stop.  How to convince the NRA?  Take it over.  Members elect the leaders of the organization.  We need to learn NRA governance structures and co-opt them in the name of public safety.

Finally, gun advocates keep saying that if all the teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary, or the movie goers in Aurora, Colorado had guns this could have been stopped.  Am I the only one who thinks that a kindergarten teacher with a gun locked in her/his desk drawer could not have been counted on to get to that gun before he /she was shot, or that hundreds of panicked movie fans firing their guns in the dark, smoky slaughterhouse that the assailant had created would merely have increased the death toll and engendered even more panic?  The idea that more guns in more hands is safer is patently absurd.  It is true that guns don't kill people, people kill people, but guns in the hands of unstable people make death more likely.