Tag: Jewish Muslim Solidarity

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Diversity, Ethics in Government, language, Mindset, Peace and War, People Helping People, Politics, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Thrilled to read that the left-center national Jewish organization JStreet polled Jewish voters and discovered some amazing transformations in Tuesday’s elections in the US: 72% of Jewish voters supported Democratic congressional candidates; 76% disapprove of President Donald Trump’s job performance; democracy and the economy were the leading electoral concerns; 76% support sanctions against violent West Bank settlers; and most amazingly of all, 66% believe AIPAC’s campaign spending against candidates who criticize Israel increases antisemitism in the United States—and 80% believe Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank increase antisemitism in the United States.

These are the actual subheads on their results press release, except that I added the phrase “and most amazingly of all” and combined their last two points. AIPAC is the acronym for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the most powerful pro-Israel lobby.

The group also raised $13 mm for its candidates. And 98 percent of the ~200 candidates JStreet endorsed won or appear to be headed toward victory!

This is a dramatic shift in the way mainstream Jews view Israel—AND a complete rejection of Trump’s attempts to drive wedges between the Jewish community and other constituencies—as well as a refutation of the despicable argument that any attack on Israel’s policies is antisemitism (especially if that false criticism provides cover for suppressing the speech of Arabs and Muslims).

The credit for that shift is partly the abject horror with which many Jews view Netanyahu’s policies. But it also represents decades of work within the Jewish community: progressive Jewish organizations like New Jewish Agenda in the 1980s and Jewish Voice for Peace in our own day—whose protests have been extremely visible since the October 7, 2023, attack by Hamas—Jewish-Palestinian partnership organizations like Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam (an intercultural village), Combatants for Peace (joint appearances by speakers who fought on opposite sides), West-Eastern Divan Orchestra (a bicultural youth orchestra), and Standing Together (a solidarity organization), to name a few among many. And this in turn meant that groups like JStreet were not seen as too far to the left, because there were a lot of Jews and Jewish organizations well to their left.

Disclosure: I was an active core member of the Western Massachusetts New Jewish Agenda chapter and of the intercultural Middle East Peace Group and have donated to several of the organizations listed above. And when I was involved with Agenda, which was early to call for a two-state solution, the mainstream Jewish community was openly hostile to us. Now, there are many Jewish and mixed organizations who want to go farther, and many synagogues have had speakers from some of these groups.

 

What this means:

Jews and lawmakers in the US finally have cover to take positions that would have been anathema a decade ago. Israel’s repressive warmongers and racists in government can no longer count on the support of US Jews and the lawmakers of any religion who want to keep that constituency happy. And the new Congress is likely to be a lot less sympathetic to funding Israel’s attempt to dehumanize and destabilize Arab and Muslim communities—not just in Palestine, where the military has stood by while ultra-right Jewish settlers have forced Palestinians from their homes and communities, interfered with the olive harvest, and committed acts of violence—but in Lebanon and elsewhere. It also means T’s dream to wipe out or expel 2 million Gazans and turn Gaza into a fancy beach resort for wealthy people from the US isn’t going anywhere.

So, over the next couple of years, we can expect a significant realignment. Many prominent members of the US Congress have been openly supportive of Israel’s openly racist government—not just in their rhetoric but in their massive funding. Many of those folks felt they had to do this because Jewish voters are a significant constituency that votes in high numbers, and supporting Jewish causes means kowtowing to AIPAC. We who’ve been saying for decades that AIPAC has no authority to speak for the entire Jewish people now have solid evidence that US Jews are willing to be harshly critical of Israel, and those who do will not be ostracized. It might even mean a reluctance to participate in asinine foreign policy blunders of the sort that got us into an unnecessary, completely avoidable, and damaging war with Iran. That war, and both the human and economic consequences, are a big part of the Republicans’ losses this week.

And from my canvassing and door-knocking in the 2024 campaign, I can say with certainty that some people who would have voted for Harris chose not to over the Biden administration’s refusal to hold Israel accountable for the Gaza war. Would it have been enough to prevent T’ second term? We’ll never know?

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Are big protests a waste of time unless they’re part of an overall strategic plan? Nonviolent social change theorist George Lakey and I have been discussing this.

After my February post about Lakey’s idea that DT is creating enormous opportunities for social change workers, I got an interesting response from George (which I only just saw, thanks to a quirk in the WordPress interface). Please go read the original post and his response.

I believe my settings close comments after two weeks, and I couldn’t find a way to turn that off temporarily for this one post). So just to make sure there’s a way to keep the dialogue going, I’m posting my response here, as a new post, starting just below:

Marching at the Women's March on Washington with my wife and children
Marching at the Women’s March on Washington with my wife and children (from left: son-in-law Bobby, daughter Alana, wife Dina, me, son Rafael)

I agree with most of what you’d laid out here, George and certainly the key kernel that mass action makes the most sense as part of a well-thought-out and multidimensional campaign. And yet, I’m more optimistic than you about the power of a one-off mass action to build momentum for change. It has to be sustained, of course—but it can play a key role.

  • My own involvement with the Movement began because I attended a mass rally about Vietnam, at age 12 (1969). One of the speakers said something that was life-changing for me. But it was not until I was in high school that I began to realize that the real work of social change happened in the meetings to plan those marches, more than the marches themselves—and to participate as other than a drone showing up to other people’s events.
  • The reason all those no-nuke Alliances sprang up was because of what we did at Seabrook, a mass action.We inspired many other groups around the country to borrow our strategy, process, tactics, and even nomenclature, to organize affinity groups as we did, to educate about the issues around nuclear power and the safe-energy alternatives, and to be trained in nonviolent civil disobedience. And the reason we heard about Three Mile Island in the news two years later when we hadn’t heard about the earlier accidents at Enrico Fermi, Browns Ferry, and elsewhere was because of this national/international mass movement that started at Seabrook. It was having thousands at the site and 1414 arrested that pushed the issue into America’s consciousness. The first two Seabrook occupations almost a year earlier, much tinier, had almost no impact outside the local area.
  • Occupy could have been much stronger with leadership and goals, I agree. But still the movement had a great deal of impact. Like Clam, some of its process innovations have become part of the Movement. You talk about those turned off by Occupy, but what I saw was a generation of young people who moved from inaction, maybe even apathy, to deep, personal, and highly inconvenient action. They made sacrifices for social change. And I think a lot of them moved into actual organizing after the camps closed.
  • The recent Women’s March had very little strategy behind it but sparked the immediate and clear message that resistance is mainstream, that DT does not represent normal, and that oh yes, there was something we could do. And of course, it provided yet another opportunity for DT to make a fool of himself saying ridiculous things about the protests. I don’t remember another time when nonviolent protests unscrewed the legs of legitimacy from a government less than one day old. And again, a lot of folks who had never done anything political went from the march to the meetings. The thousands of hives of the resistance were enormously strengthened by that unstrategic mass event.

I’m glad you brought up the business community. This is where I have very strategically placed most of my own organizing in recent years: showing that business can create meaningful social change, not out of guilt and shame but out of enlightened self-interest: the profit motive. This is the subject of my 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, as well as my “Impossible is a Dare” talks. It’s the opposite of mass organizing: small groups and even one-to-one conversations.

So yes, let’s incorporate big protests into a wider strategic view, as the Civil Rights organizers did. Let’s read Alinsky and Gene Sharp, MLK and Gandhi, Barbara Deming and Dorothy Day, and of course, George Lakey. Let’s study the successes AND weaknesses of all these movements including Occupy, BLM, and the current resistance. And lets create strategies that keep the needle moving, both publicly and behind the scenes, toward the world we want. Outside of my social change work through my business, I’ve been focusing my own parts of the resistance on the amazing opportunity to get people who haven’t been talking to each other not just talking but supporting and acting in solidarity. I see this work—and especially the chances for Jews and Muslims to work together in solidarity—as deeply strategic based on seizing the moment where a conversation is much easier to have under the lens of both groups being under threat.

PS: George, I apologize for the late reply. WordPress only showed me your waiting comment last night. I approved it immediately but wanted to bring my much clearer early-morning thinking to my response. [end of my quoted response]

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