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Leonard Fein's Rosh Hashana Reflections on the Lebanon War / Plus NEW ESSAY at Online Conversation

The noted writer/teacher on this complicated period and in support of Americans for Peace Now -- plus link to NEW ESSAY at APN's online "Conversation"


Click here for APN's highly praised online "Conversation" with new essays each week from Leonard Fein (a bio of him is at the end of the letter below).

Fein's incisive commentary starts the conversation as readers have the opportunity to submit comments in response that appear immediately online. We welcome your participation.


Dear Friend,

What does one write after a summer such as this? Or, perhaps more pertinently, what does one feel?

My hunch is that I am not alone in having felt just about every emotion there is as the war exploded onward longer than anyone initially anticipated: anxiety, outrage, shame, relief, sorrow, and on and on. Every emotion, and very substantial confusion. From day to day, I did not know whether to hope for a decisive victory in battle or for an immediate cease fire. I careened back and forth, experienced cognitive whiplash.

Israelis will long debate whether there was another way, whether the prize was worth the chase. And we will doubtless debate along with them. This war now takes its place in the bitter chronicle etched into the consciousness of all who care deeply for Israel - 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982 and now, 2006. But this one may be the most difficult of all to assess.

I write these words on the first day of the Security Council call for a cessation of hostilities. Yesterday, eight Israeli soldiers were killed, and eleven were seriously wounded. Today, the guns and the rocket launchers and the tanks have apparently fallen silent. Perhaps no one, not on the Israeli side nor on the Lebanese side, will be killed in war tomorrow nor in the weeks that follow. Perhaps there will be some sort of lasting truce. Perhaps.

But if there are so many "perhapses," if the fog of war still lingers and blurs our vision, why write now? Why not wait until the fog has lifted?

There are two kinds of answers to that question: First, there's the technical matter of production schedules and such, the time it takes to get a letter intended to arrive during the Rosh Hashanah season into the mail. (This is, as you will likely have surmised, a letter meant to encourage, induce, urge, cajole, and humbly request your generous contribution to Americans for Peace Now, Rosh Hashanah being the holiday that keeps on costing.)

There's a different kind of answer, as well. For all the confusion, there are some enduring verities worth underscoring.

The Hezbollah fighters were better trained and better equipped and better led, were more resilient and even more brave, than had been expected. Long accustomed to the rag-tag, stone throwing Palestinians, here quite suddenly was, or so it seemed, a worthy adversary. But: This worthy enemy was firing huge numbers of rockets (3970 by official count, more than 900 hundred in Kiryat Shemona alone) into civilian populations. This worthy enemy is, by any sober measure, a terrorist organization. Whatever its grievances, real or imagined, authentic or manipulated, and whatever its successes in the social welfare arena, its record of murder is its hallmark. Wanton murder. That detail seemed to me often lost in the complexity of the war.

Here's another verity: Just as a cease fire ended the war, a furlough preceded it. In the heat of the military moment, it is well to remember that the peace process was dormant before the war was born. The pre-war years were littered with missed opportunities, missed imagination, missed boldness, a missed sense of urgency. Hezbollah lit the match that ignited the war - but the brush that fed the flames had been gathering and growing dry for years, a pyrotechnic's heaven produced and misdirected by Iran and Syria and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Palestine Authority and Bush and Cheney and yes, by Israel.

So, war. Again.

There's the war in general, the macro-war, CNN's war as it were, and then there are the micro episodes and anecdotes that drive it home like a bayonet. My friend's 36 year-old son, his wife newly pregnant, is called up to reserve duty, and he is a combat paratrooper. A distant relative, age 21, is part of the platoon 12 of whose boys were killed when an anti-tank missile hit the house where they were taking cover; he is spared, and was reported safe by a buddy who last saw him loading the bodies of his comrades into a truck. And the writer David Grossman's son Uri, age 20, killed on the Saturday before the cessation of hostilities, the day 24 Israelis died in Lebanon. (I talk a bit about Grossman in my posting called "Uri's Elegy" and it quotes a line from a poem by Karl Shapiro - "However others calculate the cost, to us the final aggregate is one, one with a name, one transferred to the blest; And though another stoops and takes the gun, we cannot add the second to the first.")

So it is, the unconsolable ravages that come with war, and all we have are words, words become formulas, and sometimes tears (too rarely?) as well.

These are odd accents with which to encourage your generosity. Yet perhaps once the heart is opened to sorrow, to grief, it may stay open a bit longer, open for love, open for hope.

At the end of June, less than two weeks before the dogs of war were loosed, I was in Israel, along with a number of other proud members of Americans for Peace Now. I say "proud" because whether or not we arrived in Israel that way, we were surely made proud by what we encountered there, and what we heard.

What we heard, from diverse ministers in Israel's cabinet and from America's ambassador to Israel and from journalists, too, was that Shalom Achshav, Israel's Peace Now movement, has earned a valued place in the Israeli landscape. People of all kinds and of divergent political orientations have come to rely on Peace Now's "Settlement Watch" for reliable information regarding the creation of new West Bank settlements and the enlarging of old ones. In fact, while we were in the country, the Minister of Justice asked Shalom Achshav to testify before the ministerial commission convened to evaluate Israeli policy regarding settlement outposts. They sat with him, with the other Cabinet officials who serve on the commission, and with representatives of the settlers themselves, and worked through the map of the West Bank. Our people had more accurate and more current information than the government. Need I add that it is your generosity that enables Shalom Achshav to carry on this important work? It does.

You may have read that Israel's "peace camp," including preeminently Shalom Achshav, was rendered irrelevant during the war, was immobilized by its own indecision. There's a small truth contained in that and a very large misunderstanding. The truth is straightforward and readily understood: In the heat of war, the more so when the war involves daily assaults on the home front and the mobilization of large numbers of reserve forces, the inevitable disposition is to mute one's critical views. (Vietnam protests are no precedent here; North Vietnam had not, after all, bombed America's cities.)

The misunderstanding is of greater moment, and takes a word of explanation.

When we of APN met with our Shalom Achshav counterparts in Jerusalem during our June visit, much of the conversation was about the wisdom of Prime Minister Olmert's proposed unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank. While there was total agreement that a unilateral withdrawal was a distant second best to a negotiated withdrawal, there were some who believed that any withdrawal, even one far from the ideal, was better than none, and there were others who believed that it would be unwise in the extreme to proceed unilaterally.

I was deeply moved not only by the intelligence of the exchange but by the candor of the participants. For the Israelis in the room, the issues were loaded with anguish, since suddenly it appeared they'd have to choose, as individuals and as a movement, between the negotiations they have for so long promoted and the end of the misbegotten settlement project they have for so long sought. We Americans - even the most engaged among us - recognized that for all our passion, our Israeli colleagues were facing life and death choices.

The war took everyone by surprise. To its credit, Shalom Achshav did not pull a standard anti-war statement from the potboiler drawer. It debated every aspect of the war and the war itself quite fiercely. And it recognized that just now, its own voice would not, could not be heard, that Israelis were understandably wrapped up in the moment, had no space to think about the morning after.

The misunderstanding? Shalom Achshav now and then sponsors or cosponsors protest rallies. But Shalom Achshav is not a protest movement. Its raison d'etre is positive, not negative; it is not about where we are but about where we go from here. Shalom Achshav remains, as it has always been, committed to a negotiated two-state solution. And as distant as that goal seems just now, it remains the only way the conflict will ever be resolved.

I have known the people of Shalom Achshav since its founding in 1978. It has had its ups and downs as the peace process has soared (peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, the Oslo agreements) and stumbled (Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the intifadas, the suicide bombings, Hamas). Ironically, its downs have been when peace was most proximate, since it was at such times that its ongoing work was least distinctive, and its ups have been at the lowest points in the process, when others have given up all hope for a better day. Through all these stormy 28 years, it has remained steadfast. Today, it is led by a new generation of activists, young men and women it is my honor to know. And I will not forget - nor was this the first time - that days after I sat and talked with them, more than a few were called up for reserve duty, with all its perils.

We enter now a difficult period in Israel's short history. It is quite likely that in the wake of the war, Israel will lurch rightward, all talk of peace again deferred. But: Not quite all talk. You may be assured, whatever the headlines say, that in the precincts of Israel, the men and women of Shalom Achshav will raise high the banner of their movement, of their dream.

Their dream, which I fervently hope is your dream as well. Shalom Achshav depends critically on the support it receives from Americans for Peace Now through your tax-deductible contributions. And we here, in my view, depend critically on Shalom Achshav to keep the faith, the faith that was born in the writings of the prophets of our people more than two millennia ago and that is, in our time, protected and defended by Shalom Achshav - and by us.

Please be as generous as you can be; the struggle for peace is quite as urgent as the repair of damaged homes.

Sincerely,


Leonard Fein
August 2006


Leonard Fein is a writer and teacher.

His most recent book is Against the Dying of the Light: A Story of Love, Loss, and Hope. In 1974, he founded Moment Magazine, which became America's leading independent magazine of Jewish affairs, and which he served as editor and publisher for 13 years. In 1985, he founded Mazon: A Jewish Response to Hunger, which has become the American Jewish community's principal vehicle for participation in the campaign against world hunger. And in 1996, he founded the National Jewish Coalition for Literacy, a project for mobilizing the American Jewish community to provide volunteer tutors for the Read America program. The NJCL now has tutoring programs in 45 American cities.

In the 1960s, Dr. Fein taught Political Science at MIT, where he also served as Deputy Director of the MIT/Harvard Joint Center for Urban Studies. In 1970 he joined the faculty of Brandeis University, where he was Professor of Politics and Social Policy and, for six years, the Klutznick Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies.

Among his other books are Where Are We? The Inner Life of America's Jews, which was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and Israel: Politics and People, which was, for ten years, a required text in all Israeli universities. His more than 900 articles and essays have appeared in dozens of newspapers, magazines, and journals, including The New York Times, The New Republic, Commentary, Commonweal, The Nation, and the Los Angeles Times. He writes a syndicated OpEd column for the Forward.

Fein's lectures have taken him to more than 400 American communities, 60 college campuses, and more than a dozen foreign countries; he has been the keynote speaker at more than 100 national conventions. He has served as a consultant to a wide variety of organizations, including among others the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the United Jewish Appeal, the New Israel Fund, Facing History and Ourselves, and the Reebok Foundation's Program in Human Rights. He has been a board member of some 40 organizations, domestic and international. He has been invited to testify before a number of Congressional committees, has been an advisor in four presidential campaigns and in numerous Congressional races across the country, and served for two years as Chair of the Policy Committee of the National Jewish Democratic Council.

From 1996 to the year 2000, Fein served as Director of the Commission on Social Action of the Reform Jewish movement.

In 1991, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Hebrew Union College; in 1994 the National Foundation for Jewish Culture honored him with its first award for achievement in Jewish scholarship; in 1999, the Jewish Council on Public Affairs honored him for his lifetime contributions to social justice. In June of 2000, he was honored by his alma mater, the University of Chicago, "for creative leadership in public service that has benefited society and reflected credit on the University."