AMERICAN JEWISH PROGRESSIVE ZIONIST

One might call me an American non-fundamentalist Jewish moderately Progressive Zionist who also happens to oppose Trumpism. I am an American because America is my country, and despite its imperfections (no country is perfect) I can think of no other country where I would prefer to live. I am a non-fundamentalist Jew because Judaism is my religion, but I do not believe that every word in the Torah and Talmud is necessarily correct. Between the two major non-fundamentalist Jewish denominations, I prefer Conservative (a misnomer in my view) to Reform because I was raised Conservative, but I could live with Reform (I don’t see much difference between the two). As for American politics, I am a moderately Progressive Democrat. I temper my Progressiveness with moderation because evolution might be slower than revolution but more likely to attain its goal by bringing in a larger group and minimizing pitfalls. I am a Zionist because I am concerned for the safety and welfare of all the people in the world with a particular focus on my fellow Jews, and 40% of all the Jews in the world live in Israel. Another 40% live here in America, and the other 20% live everywhere else.

Having revealed to you who I am and where I am coming from, I would like to discuss an issue that concerns me. Recently two Muslim American Congresswomen who favor BDS (an ant-Israel organization that favors boycotting, sanctioning, and divesting) proposed visiting Israel and the West Bank. At first Israel said OK, but then Trump told Netanyahu in a tweet that he should not allow them into Israel, so nebbish Netanyahu complied and said they could not visit. This resulted in an uproar in America, including among American Jews most of whom (like me) are progressive Democrats and pro-Israel. Trump thinks that he can gain some points in the 2020 election by winning over us American Jews. Sorry Donald, most of us are not for sale. I must add here that I do not expect everyone to hold the same views as mine. I disagree with Representatives Tlaib and Omar on some of their views concerning Israel, but they have every right to voice their opinions. After all, in a democracy we all have rights to our opinions, and I don’t expect everyone to agree with me.

Trump (like his handler Putin) feeds on division. Rashida Tlaib. like Trump, thinks she can also divide us. Both Trump and Tlaib are trying to convince us that our affinity toward Israel is incompatible with our affinity toward progressivism and justice. They are both wrong. President Trump, I will not support your dishonesty, your cruel anti-immigration policies, your insane gun promotion, your bigotry, your hypocrisy, your alliance with Putin and other Fascists against America, and so many other evils, just because you think that throwing out some goodies for Netanyahu and the Far Right extremists who have presently hijacked the Israeli government will cause me to fall at your feet. Representative Tlaib, I will not abandon my Israeli cousins and my Israeli co-religionists by looking through your eyes at only the worst of Israel ignoring the best. Perusing Google, I can’t find any recognition by you of the Hand in Hand schools in Israel that teach Israeli Arab and Jewish children together in the Arabic and Hebrew languages to create an atmosphere of trust. I also can’t find any mention of Reuven Rivlin, the president of Israel who promotes equality for Israeli Arabs and Jews. President Rivlin has at times proposed 2 possible solutions to the Israel/Palestine issue, a confederation or simply one country with Jews and Arabs including the Palestinians as equal citizens (similar to your suggestion although I suspect you are far apart in the details). BDS and your hatred of Israel and those of us Jews who support Israel does not promote the best interests of the Palestinian Arabs. I believe the real interests of the Israelis (Jews, Moslems, Christians, Bahais, and others) and those of the Palestinians (Moslems, Christians, and Jewish settlers) are closer than the extremists on both sides would concede and greater than their differences. The Palestinian Arabs want respect and full equality. The Israelis want assurances of security.

To Representative Tlaib, if you view one Israel/Palestine as a trojan horse in which to turn the country into an anti-Jewish dictatorship like Gaza, that will not set well with most Israelis and would not be supported by American Jews no matter how progressive we are.

To Prime Minister Netanyahu, on the other hand, an indefinite Far Right occupation of the West Bank is also not right or sustainable. Hopefully the Israeli people will elect a Center Left government in their election this autumn.

To President Trump, the 2020 elections are next year, and impeachment might come sooner. I look forward to a Democratic president in the White House who will have to clean up the international and domestic mess that you will leave behind.

RUSSIAN MUSIC AND ART

The Russian intelligence services attacked America at the direction of Vladimir Putin by hacking into the computers of our political parties and by spreading lies on the internet directed at influencing the opinions and votes of our people strategically to promote the election of Donald Trump, a stooge they compromised in a plot to influence our country and to sow division among our people. This was a bad thing. We must gain control of our nation at the ballot box ,and we must protect country by fighting back online as Putin has waged cyber war on us. Having said that, we should remember that not all Russians are bad. Putin has subjugated his own people more than he has done to us.
Also, we should never wage war on Russian music and art. To do so would deny us the enjoyment of the beauty that Russia has produced. To our credit, we have never done that. Even during the most contentious times of the Cold War we continued to enjoy the music of Tchaikovsky, Borodin, Glazunov, to mention only a few of the great Russian composers.
We need to protect our democracy, but that does not mean denying ourselves the beauty of Russian music and art.

SINGLE PAYER HEALTHCARE VERSUS OBAMACARE WITH PUBLIC OPTION

Most of the many candidates for nomination to be the Democratic nominee to run for President in the 2020 election promote an affordable healthcare plan (Obamacare). The controversy is between those who advocate single payer (no private insurance, only government) and those who advocate Obamacare with a public option. I favor the latter. It is necessary for health care to be affordable for all people, good quality, and mandated for everyone. All health plans must meet standards for affordability and quality of care. Cheap health insurance plans that do not meet the government's standard of care should not be allowed. There should also be a quality reasonably priced public option. The reasons I favor the public option over single payer are as follows.
1. Single payer alone would do away with competition.
2. There is no reason to believe that a public health plan would be better than private (or vice versa).
3. Doing away with private health insurance would do away with expertise that has accumulated over years.
4. If public insurance turns out to be so much better than private that everyone turns to public and drives out private then so be it, but I doubt that would happen.

THE AMERICAN DREAM

The American Dream, the idea that has attracted my ancestors and so many other immigrants to our USA, is to live in a land of opportunity, a middle class land, a large land, in the New World free of the stifling rigidity of the Old World. At least that was true for most of our ancestors. It’s true that the ancestors of some of us were brought here as slaves, and others were just here to start with.

Not everyone in America advances to achieve the American Dream, or at least not to the desired degree. Not everyone can rise to the top of the heap. The Republican Party dream is the possibility of advancement even if it does not happen. The Democrats (at least the pragmatic Democrats) appreciate that possibility, but say that in this very wealthy country there is enough to go around to give those at the bottom at least a minimum safety net. Economic success or failure might be related to one’s hard work or lack of work, but it often is not. So an economic compromise between pragmatic Republicans and Democrats, between pragmatic Conservatives and Liberals, between pragmatic Right and Left is Capitalism/Opportunity with a safety net for those who have not yet achieved the American Dream.

Unfortunately over years the Tea Party Far Right “Conservatives” economically have advanced maximizing opportunity without any safety net (along with putting a finger on the scale to cement and enhance the wealth of the most successful). Some on the Far Left, who now claim to be “Socialists,” advance a program of economic equality for all (with or without opportunity). Now, in the time of Trump, social factors (like bigotry, nativism, divisiveness, anti-immigration, corruption, and dishonesty) have been unleashed on the Right.

The recent Blue Wave of the recent mid-term election illustrated the strength of the Democratic party when it pulls together (along with some pragmatic former Republicans) against the dishonesty of Trumpism. We need to avoid rigidity (as President Obama has suggested) to pull our country together with sensible compromise to bring honesty, reason, and civility back to the White House.

 

OLD NEW LAND

Theodore Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, published a book of fiction in 1902 with the title Old New Land in which he envisioned what a Jewish Nation in Palestine might be like. Herzl was a secular Austro-Hungarian Jew. He died in 1904 before World Wars I and II and before the British Mandate. He never lived to see the Holocaust, and never lived to see the creation of the modern State of Israel. The book is written through his eyes.

At the time he wrote the book, Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire. It is not clear to me whether Herzl was describing a completely independent nation state or a semi-autonomous province in the Ottoman Empire. The Jewish community in the book is envisioned as a society created by Jewish immigrants in which the Arabs and people of any religion or origin have equal rights and participation. This idea is reinforced in the story by an election in which those inhabitants who favor inclusion and equal rights for all (portrayed as the good guys) triumph over those who favor an exclusively Jewish government (portrayed as the bad guys). The Jews bring modernism to the land which benefits all the inhabitants including the Arabs.

In real life, one often sees the picture of Herzl hanging on the wall in photographs of Israeli government offices and political events of both the Right and Left. Perhaps many of those nativists in the extreme Right who favor the recent Israeli Nation State Law don’t realize that their position contradicts the vision of the founder of Zionism. Perhaps those Arabs who say they oppose Zionism don’t realize the inclusiveness of Herzl’s vision of Zionism. Perhaps the extremes on both sides either never read or never comprehended what Herzl said in Old New Land.

RIVLIN AND ISRAELI PALESTINIAN CONFEDERATION

Reuven Rivlin is the president of Israel. He has at times advocated one bi-national Israel with equal citizenship for all Jews and Arabs in that state, and at times he has advocated a confederation between Israel and Palestine. The Israeli government has the parliamentary system. In that system, the president is mainly a ceremonial position (similar to the monarch in a modern constitutional monarchy like Britain but without the pomp and circumstance). The real administrative power belongs to the prime minister (at the present time Benjamin Netanyahu). At times Rivlin and Netanyahu disagree, often severely. Israel is a multi-party country where the prime minister has to cobble together a coalition to form a government and stay in office. Netanyahu’s coalitions have tended to the Right and have become especially Rightist recently. His coalition mainly includes nativist parties and religious parties. The nativists in the minority extreme Right (including the Settler Movement) believe Israel is a Jewish state including the West Bank as well as Israel proper with little regard for the Palestinian Arabs living there. Hamas in Gaza takes the position that Israel is illegitimate, Israel should be destroyed, and all (or most) Jews should go away. Many (how many?) Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank and a maybe a minority of Israeli Arabs share that view. But the Arabs and the Jews do exist, they are both there, and neither are going away.

There was a period in the 1990s when there appeared to be a warming of relations between Arabs and Jews in Israel and the Palestinian territories, both at the governmental level and at the level of ordinary people. At the end of that period, Ehud Barak, the prime minister of Israel, offered the Clinton/ Barak Plan to Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestinians for separating the land into 2 states, Israel and Palestine. The terms of that plan were unacceptable to Arafat who flatly rejected it without a counter proposal. At that time an unannounced visit to the El Aqsa Mosque located on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem by Ariel Sharon (who at the time was a right wing fringe member of the Israeli government) triggered an Intifada by the Palestinians and encouraged by Arafat. This resulted in harsh retaliation by Barak and ended the peace process. Why did Arafat react with an intifada instead of continuing negotiations? Perhaps he thought that would be the best way to negotiate better terms? Perhaps he was pushed by his hardliners? In any event it was a miscalculation. Perhaps Barak over-reacted and might have gotten a better result by reacting firmly but less (or perhaps there was no alternative to harshness?). Anyway the good will between the ordinary people on both sides disappeared overnight. Later Barak attempted to push forward the 2 State solution again by pulling Israel out of Gaza unilaterally. The thinking was that because Gaza is farther from the population center of Israel than the West Bank, it would be a good place to test the idea of an independent Palestine. Unfortunately the Gazans elected Hamas to be their government. Hamas does not recognize the State of Israel, promotes the destruction of Israel, and furthers that position by shooting rockets over the border into Israel and at times sends terrorists into Israel. Israel responds by walling off Gaza and limiting movement into and out of Gaza. Hamas also opposes the Fatah leadership on the West Bank.

So we now have a situation where many (probably most) Israelis do not trust the Palestinian Arabs to maintain a terrorist free peace. They look around them and see chaos in many of the surrounding Arab states like Syria, Iraq, and even Egypt. The Israeli government has maintained an under the table alliance with the surrounding Arab governments because of their common danger from the government of Iran. A kind of peace from terrorism exists for the time being although its stability is questionable. On the other hand the Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank experience a lack of independence and respect along with a progressive encroachment by the Israeli settlements.

The challenge now is to create a relationship which will protect the security of the Israeli people (real peace) and still give honor, independence, and self government to the Palestinian Arabs.

One possible solution that has been proposed might be a Confederation between State of Israel and the West Bank which could be called The State of East Palestine. Gaza would have to accept the legitimacy of Israel and it would also have to accept the West Bank government as their state government if there were to be one unified State of Palestine (which does not appear to be in the near future). Gaza could join the Confederation at a future date by rejecting Hamas and accepting the West Bank as their state government or perhaps joining as a third State of West Palestine. Gaza would have to stop attacking Israel and accept their border with Israel to be included. The confederation could be called the Confederation of Israel-Palestine or perhaps a new name altogether. A name like the Confederation of Abraham would recognize what both people recognize as a common ancestor.

One issue that would have to be resolved would be the status of the Israeli West Bank settlers. The non-contiguous smaller settlements should be disbanded. Israel is not going to give up all the Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem that have sprung up since 1967.  The parties will have to negotiate which East Jerusalem neighborhoods are neighborhoods and which are settlements. As for the status of Jews who remain in the West Bank, they could become citizens of the State of East Palestine and not the State of Israel (therefore could vote in East Palestine elections and not Israel elections). Any Jew who moves his or her residence (not just visiting temporarily) from East Palestine to Israel under the Right of Return would become an Israeli citizen and not a citizen of East Palestine. Whether that Jew might someday return to East Palestine citizenship would be up to the East Palestine government.

The process of moving from the present situation to confederation would be gradual, but gradual movement in the right direction would be an improvement over the present situation. The process would depend on changing of attitudes of the ordinary people on both sides. The populations on both sides would have to be educated and nudged into more favorable attitudes towards each other and will have to build trust in each other. One organization that is working toward that goal is Hand in Hand which builds schools in Israel in which Jewish and Arab children study together in the Hebrew and Arabic languages. Hand in hand has the support of President Rivlin. I don’t know what Prime Minister Netanyahu thinks of it, but googling Netanyahu and Hand in Hand together comes up with nothing. Perhaps Hand in Hand or a similar organization could exist in East Palestine. There is a long history of conflict that will have to be overcome. But Confederation would greatly benefit both sides in the long run, greater security for the Israelis, greater self determination for the Palestinians, greater stability and prosperity for all.

 

 

SPECIAL TAX ON LARGE POLITICAL DONATIONS

Senator Elizabeth Warren has stated that rich donors should not be allowed to give huge donations to candidates which allows the richest people in America to buy elections to the detriment of ordinary people. I would suggest that rather than preventing billionaires from giving large donations, there should be a special graduating tax on large political donations. In other words, a political donation of $10 or less in one year should be tax deductible. Political donations above $10 in one year should be subject to a graduating tax increasing according to the size of the donations in one year going up to 90% for the highest annual donations. This would not only limit the billionaire donations, but it would add money to the treasury to help the deficit and free up dollars for programs that would increase the quality of life for ordinary people.