Freedom In vs. Freedom From
Morton Pancer biked down to the protest from Silver Spring, MD, decked out in cycling gear with a helmet, gloves, sunglasses and special bike shoes. He was disgusted.
“This is pathetic. Totally pathetic,” he said shaking his head. “It’s just too small!”
“The country is going to look and see this and think ‘where are the Jews who are upset about Iran?’ People are going to listen to J-Street. Can you imagine one country telling another country ‘you can’t grow?’”
He switched with astonishing speed from the subject of Iran to President Obama’s call for a freeze on settlement construction in the West Bank. His reaction also reflected a problem of purpose in the Jewish community—a tension between ensuring the physical survival of the Jews on the one hand and defending contemporary Judeo-Christian value systems on the other.
This tension between survival and values is not new, but the difference now is that it has also provoked an aggressive and angry battle within the Jewish community in Israel and the United States. Posters depicting Obama as Arafat have been appearing on the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway in Israel and a recent Jerusalem Post survey of the country’s residents showed that onlfour percent considered the president “pro-Israel.”
Or consider the vitriol directed toward ambivalent American Jews like Jay Michaelson, whose recent op-ed in the Forward, entitled “How I’m Losing My Love for Israel,” instigated an accusatory war of words. Within the United States, an American Jewish Committee survey showed the country’s Jews split by denomination regarding their approval of Obama, with less than one-fifth of Orthodox Jews in favor of the president’s policies while majorities of Conservative and Reform Jews supported him.
Meanwhile, a majority of American Jews support US or Israeli military action against Iran, something on which Obama has been equivocal.
Pancer was en route to the “Stand for Freedom” rally held September 24th in Washington DC’s Farragut Square Park. The protest attracted a couple hundred people, most of them observant Jews—men with kippot and women with long sleeves and skirts.
But what was so Jewish about the protest, and what was its purpose?
Even the protest’s name caused some confusion. Some fliers called it “Stand for Freedom in Iran” while others called it “Stand for Freedom from Iranian Threats.”
The protest’s goals were unclear. The event wasn’t just about freedom in Iran and it wasn’t just about protecting Israel and America.
Both views got some time in the spotlight. While Iranian-Americans filled the New York protests, in DC there were no signs of an Iranian-American presence apart from one of the speakers, Iranian dissident and writer Amir Fakhravar, who told a skeptical crowd, “Iranians love Israel. Iranians love the United States.”
Fakhravar represented the “Freedon in Iran” approach, but most of the speakers focused on “freedom from threats.” Representative Elliot Engel (D-NY) yelled into the microphone in a heavy Bronx accent, “He should’ve been arrested for supporting terrorism!” focusing, as much of the event did, on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a cause of much of the Jewish community’s anger toward Iran.
So was the DC protest about humanitarianism or was it a visceral reaction to nuclear fears? Do Jews concern themselves first with their own national survival or with supporting the emancipatory aspirations of another people?
If political groups focused on propagating Jewish values can find common ground with political organizations based around Jewish survival, perhaps the community can find common ground, at least enough to have a civil discourse.
If not, this civil war brewing within the Jewish community may get worse, and threaten to prevent us from achieving both of our goals.
The discussions leading up to the Iraq War provide an illustrative example of this tension between priorities. When the discussion centered on humanitarian concerns in Iraq, the prospects of war were dim: Saddam Hussein was guilty of ethnic cleansing, antagonizing his neighbors and depriving his people of freedom, but that concern was not new and therefore not compelling as a reason to go to war: he had been doing those things for years.
In building up support for invading Iraq, then, the president focused on the security threat, telling the United Nations in Sep. 2002 that Iraq was a “grave and gathering danger.” In other words, it wasn’t until officials started tossing around phrases like “WMDs” and “nuclear” that we found ourselves in Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Today, the U.S. and Israel are pushing for action against Iran, such as sanctions that could actually strengthen the Iranian Revolutionary Guard within Iran, crippling the anti-Ahmadinejad movement within the country: while sanctions would weaken Iran’s overall economy by limiting foreign investment, they would also permit the Revolutionary Guard to take a bigger market share within Iran.
The comparison does not indicate whether we should or should not invade Iran, but it suggests that the difference between humanitarian and survival rationales matters. The Jewish community needs to decide what it supports, and why.
