You can tell the Israeli government is really on edge about its image with American Christians. In this 60 Minutes piece, the venerable news show explores what it’s like to be Christian in Nazareth and Bethlehem, the former in Israel and the latter in the occupied territories. Many Christians are leaving for abroad due to the second-class citizen status of both positions, making the thrust of the interviews “Why is the Christian community shrinking? Will there be any Christians left in Jesus’ birthplace? Who is to blame?”

Notably, the Israeli journalist interviewed gave the most cogent summary, which I’ll paraphrase: Christians aren’t being persecuted as Christians in Israel and the territories. But Christians are being impacted by Israeli policy, which is encouraging them to leave. Sounds quite reasonable.

But Israeli Ambassador to the US Michael Oren created a bit of a press flap by his seemingly unprecedented phone call to the chairman of CBS News to complain about the anticipated bias of the report. The anticipated bias.

I wonder often what American Christians experience when they visit Bethlehem for the first time, crossing into enemy territory as one appears to do. Palestinians are so loathed by Americans at large — according to opinion polls, Palestinians are the 3rd worst favored country/group globally, whereas Israel is the 3rd or 5th most favorable. Yet that antipathy goes hand-in-hand with a negative view of Islam and Muslims, and not the Christian population of Bethlehem. That Christian Palestinians also desire independence from Israel and the end of the occupation, live under military rule, and cannot leave their town without permits must be a shock to American stereotypes.

If you’ll be there too, kindly introduce yourself. Tweet me at @kungfujew18 or email me at me@judaismwithoutborders.org.

Sunday, March 24

• At 8:30 am, I’m Jewschool’s session co-chair of “The Next Generation: How Young Israeli Activists and Young American Jews are Transforming Zionism and Pro-Israel Advocacy” featuring author Peter Beinart, Israeli protests leader Staf Shafir, Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity co-founder Hillel Ben Sasson, and J Street U leader Rory Silver.
• Between noon and 1 pm, you can find me volunteering at the New Israel Fund information table.
• At 2:15 – 3:30 pm, I’ll likely be in NIF’s session “Jewish Extremism and the Politics of Religion in Israel” featuring NIF’s Israel Director Rachel Liel.
• At 5:45 – 830 pm, I’ll be hosting a Young Professionals Happy Hour at Vapiano Chinatown, 623 H Street NW between 6th and 7th Streets. Co-Sponsored by NIF’s New Generations.
• At 8:30 – 10:00 pm, I’ll definitely be at the launch of Peter Beinart’s new book, The Crisis of Zionism.

Monday, March 25

• At 8 am, I’ll be in the advocacy leaders orientation, preparing to take J Street NYC constituents to meet with our NY State legislators.
• Who knows what sessions I’ll go to, but I’m definitely interested in the morning’s “LGBT Issues and Israel: Legitimate Advocacy or Pinkwashing?”

Tuesday, March 26

• If you are staying for Advocacy Day and are from New York City or State, there’s a chance that I’ll be taking you to the Capital Hill.

See you there!

The discussion we should be having is not how we can more effectively twist [Rep. Camp's employee Aharon] Friedman’s arm into granting his wife a divorce or whether public servants should be required to play a part in enforcing religious mandates. We should be talking about how we can change the law so that a woman can walk into court with her head held high and walk out with a divorce that she didn’t have to beg for.

If maintaining a nearly thousand-year-old ruling is more important than offering women equality within the religion, I would at least like to see one of these rabbis condemning Friedman admit as much. It would be refreshingly honest to hear one of them say something like, “When faced with the choice of preserving tradition and promoting justice and equality that would give women the freedom to divorce, we choose the former.”

But that doesn’t make a good slogan for a picket sign, now does it?

Note that in America, unlike in Israel, civil divorce exists. Yet in America, agunot are still unable to remarry within orthodoxy. I agree with Meyers wholeheartedly, and with Debra Nussbaum Cohen, who in the latter Sisterhood link says that this situation is “positively medieval.”

In this interview, Finkelstein faults his BDS-sympathetic interviewer for a failure of pragmatism. By not taking a position on Israel, he charges, the BDS movement has foolishly taken a very public stand against a “non-starter” of the general public: the State of Israel’s survival as the homeland of Jews. If they don’t believe in a state of the Jews, he repeats, then the movement should just say so. It will remain hypocritical and irrelevant, but at least it won’t be dishonest. The international community has established through law the State of Israel, which the BDS movement silently opposes. Finkelstein doesn’t impune their methods or their morality, but their dishonesty. He says if the movement wants to be effective in persuading the broad global public, then it should continue to boycott, divest and sanction but only as far as forcing Israel to reach a two-state compromise.

Those of us in the mutually pro-Israel, pro-Palestine camp have always felt this about the pro-Israel right-wing and the pro-Palestinian left-wing: the ideologues on both sides are willingly intellectually dishonest and morally single-sided. Pro-Palestinian advocates, like pro-Israel boosters, selectively view international law and morality, often ignoring how ethnic conflicts the world over are solved in common practice.

I think about this often. I’m not someone that’s comfortable with ethnic nationalism, of any stripe. But philosophically, either you believe in collective rights or you don’t. Nationalism is one form of collective rights. Opposing collective rights requires the upending of whole canons of international law. It is a major plank of global legal adjudication. Law that those of us who care for Palestinian independence rely upon inseparably for its statehood and a redress of Palestinian life and property losses in 1948 and 1967.

There is indeed a tension between collective rights and individual rights, one that frustrates anybody who cares about justice for individuals. But successfully solving ethnic conflict usually requires “class action” solutions where often millions of competing individual claims are resolved en masse, albeit imperfectly. For example, many survivors of the Holocaust and their descendants never reclaimed their personal property from European governments, but Germany and European nations paid massive reparations to the State of Israel and Jewish global communities. Likewise, many Palestinians will not receive back their homes in Jaffa, Haifa, Jerusalem and some 200+ villages across Israel, but will receive other compensation. (Same with Jews expelled from Arab nations.) That is the inevitable compromise between these two negotiating bodies.

If one believes in collective rights, then one must stand behind the decision of the UN to partition two states for two peoples. One must also recognize that the State of Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization were established as the collective bargaining entities of the two parties — Jews and Palestinians. And while one can organize to support a fair, stable deal between these two unequal parties, there is no way around that basic formulation. And if one does not believe in collective rights, then use of international law and its deliberations selectively is willfully hypocritical.

But the Jerusalem Post has finally gone too far! Their pages. And ads. Are ugly. As hell. It’s a headache just looking at it: