My response to Boris Gorbis

Here is my response to Boris Gorbis’ "The Bag of Flower Seeds Or the Sad Disorder of Moral Blindness". I appreciate Boris’ warm words about me and reciprocate his affection. Yes, we have have very different positions of how to save Israel, but both of us love Israel passionately, and it is not only healthy, but absolutely essential, to have this ongoing debate. So here is my response to Boris’ heartfelt words…

Boris starts by asserting that Walter Ruby is deluded, that I don’t know the Israel that exists, but rather am a spaced out American hippie with some tra-la-la emotional pie-in-the-sky yafe nefesh version of the lion lying down with the lamb. Well, not to pull rank here, but I spent over five years of my life living in Israel and speak good Hebrew. That doesn’t make me the world’s greatest expert on Israeli reality, but I know a thing or two about the place. I have covered Israel as a journalist for many years. I feel Israel in my kishkes. So I am not some starry eyed nincompoop, offering illogical ideas from afar.

Yes, when Boris and I sat together in a hotel lobby in Ramat Gan for an hour a couple of months ago, I did share with him my vision of Israelis and Palestinians finding a way to live in peace based in part of peoples’ diplomacy and allowing children on both sides as he puts it archly, to have “a bomb-free lunch time.” Absolutely! If we can’t aspire to such a future, then what is there to believe in? Is Boris ready to accept the prospect of perpetual war, with all that implies for the children of Israel? I believe with every fiber of my being, based on journalistic work spanning decades among both Israelis and Palestinians that considerable majorities on both sides want the killing and suffering to end. It’s their kids and grandkids whose lives are on the line, and I don’t think most would appreciate Boris telling them essentially that there is no hope for an end to the killing.

Unlike Boris, I think the lady with the bag of seed was on the right track. I believe passionately that if and when Israelis and Jews, Palestinians and Arabs, begin meeting, dialoguing and forming personal connections, they will not be able any more to see each other as abstractions—as shadowy symbols of evil as Boris sees the entire Palestinian/Arab collective. The Oslo process failed in large part because not enough effort was made by both sides to form that web of personal connections. There ought to have been a big organized effort to have Israeli doctors meet Palestinian doctors, teachers meeting teachers, and Israeli and Palestinian scout groups hiking together on both sides of the green line. That it didn’t happen was partly the fault of the Israeli peace camp—much of which preferred to separate from the Palestinians, rather than engage with them as human beings. But if the two sides don’t engage with each other as fellow human beings, they will never trust each other enough to take the very real risks involved in making peace. The failure of Oslo showed that a small elite of diplomats and government officials meeting in Norway and coming up with some complicated agreement is not enough to end a century of hostility. There needs to be sustained grass roots involvement.

How do I know? Because I have taken part in such efforts for years. I was part of a group that brought Israeli and Palestinian youngsters to a summer camp in Spain and watched them connect with each other. It wasn’t easy and there were setbacks, but by the end of the three week session meaningful relationships based on real affection had been formed. I doubt many of those kids were able to keep those connections alive because of the violence that ensued and the sealing of the two populations off from each other. But I believe those kids were changed profoundly by what they experienced and the Israeli ones will never be able to dismiss “them” as “the Other” some form of absolute evil, because they got to know kids named Ahmed and Maha and the Palestinian kids met Moshe and Orly.

And thousands of other brave Israelis and Palestinians who did take part in such efforts were changed and when conditions begin to improve will begin again to push forward on such efforts. Please click the following link for one such effort which has yielded important positive results in stimulating meaningful dialogue between Israeli Jews and Arabs, including rabbis and imams.

Boris, I agree with you that Soviet Jews learned a lot that I did not through their bitter experience over 70 years. You learned how to survive in an inhuman system where your identity as a Jew was denigrated and crushed every day on the pages of Pravda and Izvestia, by hearing the word zhid on the tramvai, being blackballed from MGU and a thousand other insults and hurts. I have enormous respect and love for Soviet Jews for surviving as intact Jews and human beings through all of that and having helped to destroy that system and having become free Jews and human beings. But I would argue strongly that what you endured in the USSR doesn’t make Soviet Jews the ultimate authority on Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which goes back decades before Soviet Jews arrived on the scene and has a whole different set of characteristics. The dynamic there is different than the Soviet Union under Stalin or Brezhnev. So it’s not, as you suggest, about being a “good Jew” who kisses the ass of the KPCC. It is about finding a way for the six million Jews of Israel to survive in a part of the world inhabited by hundreds of millions of Arabs and Muslims. How is that going to happen? Not by force of arms. Despite Boris’ martial instincts we can’t kill or subjugate them all. In fact, it turns out that even the mighty U.S. can’t impose its will on Iraq. Israel cant do it either.

Boris and I may not agree on much, but we share a belief in Israel’s moral right to exist over the Arabs’ moral right to destroy it. From the time I spent a year in Israel at the age of 12 back in 1962 (do the math), I have known in my gut that if Israel were to be destroyed I would not want to go on living. The question is how do we ensure Israel’s survival—by Boris’ way or mine? It is clear to me that the only way to guarantee Israel’s survival in the long term is through reconciliation with its neighbors and that egregious and unnecessary acts like grabbing their land, building settlements and holding people in cities like Hebron and Nablus under perpetual military occupation is not the way to achieve such a reconciliation.

Boris starts telling us about admittedly terrible acts committed by Palestinians, like tearing apart the bodies of Jews and demands if there has been even one such case among Jews. Yes, I remember a mob in Bet Shean back in the 80’s tearing apart several Arabs who carried out a bombing attack in a local market. Their fury was understandable, but yes, it did happen. Jews did tear Arabs into pieces. Nor can it be said that Jews have never murdered Arabs in cold blood just because they are Arabs, have never beaten or humiliated them just because they are Arabs. What about Baruch Goldstein or Ami Popper who methodically mowed down innocent Arabs? What about members of the Jewish underground in the West Bank who plotted to blow up a Palestinian school in Jerusalem? What about West Bank settlers who behave sadistically toward Arabs, use every opportunity to humiliate and enrage them, and delight in hacking down their olive groves? What about Israeli soldiers and Border Police who have been shown on many occasions to have unnecessarily killed Palestinians? What about soldiers at checkpoints who have prevented Palestinian women In labor from reaching hospitals on time; have allowed Palestinians who have heart attacks from getting to hospitals—allowing quite a few to die right there at the checkpoints.

So, Boris, don’t give me your self-righteous yerunda that the other side are stick figures of absolute evil and we are so clean and pure. The truth is that ongoing conflict causes cruelty by both sides, causes both sides to dehumanize the other to the point where it is easy to kill them, either with suicide bombs or katushyas on the Palestinian side or by dropping bombs from the sky or shooting live artillery fire into civilian areas of Gaza on the Israeli side. We do not destroy Muslim shrines? Well, Israeli extremists have been plotting for decades now to blow up the Dome of the Rock to make way for the third temple. The Shin Bet arrested a whole bunch of them back in the early 80’s when the plot had gotten to a serious point, but most served short jail terms or none at all.

We don’t engage in all the terrorist acts Boris lists that the Palestinians have committed? True, we don’t need to emply terrorism because we have a strong army to enforce a 40 year occupation on the Palestinians. They don’t have an army so they conduct their struggle by other means—very ugly ones. But how many Israelis and how many Palestinians were killed during the intifada? Four or five times as many Palestinians were killed and a big percentage of them were not terrorists but innocent civilians who got killed when the IDF turned downtown Gaza or Nablus into free-fire zones. Can you have the least bit of compassion for any of those victims, Boris? They too are human beings.

So there is great cruelty and acts of murderous violence on both sides and there will continue to be until the two sides find a way to end this horror. Many brave Israelis and Palestinians understand this and have tried to reach out to each other across the barricades. They understand that there can be no winners in the mutual bloodletting; only the blighting of the lives of this generation, the next and the one after that. It is indeed very unfortunate that so many ex-Soviet Jews are coming into this situation with the attitude that war is the only way because given the demographic weight of ex-Soviet aliyah, if those attitudes continue, it will make even further off the day that the two peoples reach reconciliation.

And finally, yes, with all my affection for Russian Jews, let me say directly that people who were dehumanized as zhidi and oppressed as a people, should not dehumanize and oppress another people. It is understandable why that happens, but it is shortsighted and morally wrong. Jews are not evil and Palestinians are not evil. They are two peoples claiming the same piece of land for the past 100 years and fighting each other for it. The experience of the last 100 years shows that neither side can vanquish the other. So despite the present day horror and bloodletting, despite militance and fundamentalism on both sides, sooner or later, there will be another serious attempt to find a way to peace. Our job, for the sake of the children of both Israel and Palestine, is to do whatever we can to make that day sooner rather than later.

Walter