Tag: Journal Articles

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Let’s be Americans, which means being exceptional, which also means being honest in ways inconceivable to the rest of humanity. So here’s the truth of it: the American exceptionalism sweepstakes really do matter. Here. A lot.

Barack Obama is only the latest in a jostling crowd of presidential candidates, presidential wannabes, major politicians and minor figures of every sort who have felt compelled in recent years to tell us and the world just how exceptional the last superpower really is. They tend to emphasize our ability to use this country’s overwhelming power, especially the military variety, for global good — to save children and other deserving innocents.

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Somehow, through pureness of motive and the shining radiance of the way we exercise power, Washington’s politicians have taken words wielded negatively by one of the great monsters of history and made them the signature phrase of American greatness. How exceptional!

At first glance Paul R. Gregory’s Women of the Gulag (Hoover Institution Press) is old hat, repeating for the umpteenth time tales of Stalinist Russia’s brutality directed at its own citizens. [Content continues as in original, but with standardized formatting and spacing]

As I write this, the Obama administration is threatening missiles strikes on Assad’s Syria to show him and his allies that if he does not surrender his stock of chemical weapons, the US will not stand by and let him gas his own people. Secretary of State John Kerry, echoing the president, has been unrelenting in trying to make a moral case that we cannot sit by and let this happen.

As a Jewish pacifist, I am mindful of the horror of so many people killed by chemical weapons but also of the one hundred thousand people already killed by conventional weaponry, not to mention those maimed and homeless because of the civil war. Still, I believe that launching missiles would be a serious blunder and that many more will die if we send in missiles.

As always, I have come up with questions to better understand the problem and, with hope, find a solution that fits this situation. Here are some of those questions:

Is it morally, not to mention politically and militarily, correct for the US to become involved in yet another country’s internal conflict? My response is No. There are wars and civil wars around the world and more ahead, and we as a nation cannot and should not be the moral judge and jury that once again asks our young men and women soldiers to shoulder the burden of war and sacrifice.

But can we turn our backs on those who have been gassed by one party or another and do nothing? No. Dropping missiles on parts of Syria is not the solution. It will not automatically lead to peace, and it will only create more deaths, especially in a region historically divided between religions, sects, and unforgiving extremists of all stripes.

Missiles will neither solve nor remedy the complex problems of the Middle East, as other nations have learned. Will the action our president proposes change the situation? No. In such a potentially explosive region, there is a serious risk of retaliation and counter-retaliation, and of other nations, including the US military, being drawn into a wider conflict.

But is any war justifiable for pacifists? No! Never. Certainly not anymore, given that extraordinarily destructive weapons are more easily available than ever. We are hopeful that the UN and its major nations will find a peaceable solution and help effect a cease-fire while banning arms shipments to all sides, help the many distressed and frantic Syrian refugees, and encourage all nations, including Syria, Iran and Israel, to ratify the Chemical Weapons Convention and Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan have taken a great toll on our military and their families. Today, we are gratified that the American people overwhelmingly oppose getting into another Middle East war. To try to sell so misleading an idea, which is overwhelmingly rejected by a majority of the American public, can never bring peace at home or abroad. Last year we quit Iraq. Next year we should leave Afghanistan, another lost cause, and this is not the time to become mired in yet another bloody clash.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s very public confrontation with President Barack Obama over his reluctance to go to war with Iran in order to halt its nuclear program brings to mind a confrontation that nearly twenty-five years ago occurred between President George H. W. Bush and Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir over the settlements that Israel’s government was establishing in the occupied Palestinian territories.

At the time, the government of Israel and American Jewish organizations were seeking US housing loan guarantees to help finance Israel’s absorption of Jewish refugees who were leaving the Soviet Union in large numbers. President Bush agreed to provide the guarantees, but asked Israel to cease its illegal settlement construction. He pointed out that given the fungibility of money, US financial assistance would be going to fund an activity the US and the entire international community deemed illegal and intended to preempt negotiations over the disposition of the occupied territories by creating irreversible “facts on the ground.”

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Found my draft card yesterday while clearing out a drawer, and the mind it did reel. The leap of time — 40 years ago! The terse stamped words, revealing nothing of the seethe and roar and argument of that time.

That boy, just eighteen years old, registering for a draft for a war of which he knew essentially nothing. I remember Brother Four shouting furiously at the dinner table, later that evening, that he would join Canada rather than the army. I remember Brother Five pointedly registering immediately as a rebuke and rebuff to Brother Four.

I remember Brother Two joining the Navy and then unjoining, testifying about his conscience to this very draft board, Local Board Number Four, in New York. I remember my father, an Army veteran of the Second World War and the Korean War, going with him, and being proud of his son’s honesty.

I remember being asked my height by the grim lady registering kids for the draft, and she never looked up, so I added two inches, and that is why I was six feet tall then and am seventy inches tall now. I remember watching the draft lottery on television with my friends and the way they turned and looked at me when my number was called first among the four of us.

I remember my dad explaining that the army had basically stopped call-ups the year before and probably nothing would happen. I remember being terrified anyway. I remember wondering if I was brave or not, and concluding probably not. I remember wanting to be angry and sure, like Brother Four, or calm and sure, like Brother Five, but being totally at sea about duty and citizenship and war and peace, like Brother Two.

I remember thinking, as I stood with the other shy skinny sweating pimply kids in line at the post office, that blowing a guy’s head off to settle an argument about the government of a country more than ten thousand miles from where we stood seemed like a relatively poor idea, as ideas go. It still does.

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At a rabbinical conference in 1941 three individuals sat down and talked about a very real problem: Jewish Conscientious Objectors languishing in prisons across the United States because they objected to participation in military service. Just as sad, many of their families and friends, as well as every Jewish organization, had turned their backs on them. Only the Quakers stepped forward to offer some humane connection with these Jewish COs.

The three people who met and talked about the situation were Jane Evans, a Jewish communal worker; Rabbi Isidor Hoffman, Jewish chaplain at Columbia University, and Rabbi Abraham Cornbach of Hebrew Union College. The three decided it was time for an organization dedicated to convincing the Jewish community of its Judaic and moral obligation to Jewish men who refused to kill.

Before long, many rabbis and others joined together to form the Jewish Peace Fellowship. Seventy-two years later the JPF is alive and well. Our first newsletter, Tidings, was issued in August 1942 and continued as Shalom, and is now our online newsletter. We are among the very few consistent voices for nonviolence and peace in American Jewish life.

The JPF unites those who believe that Jewish ideals and experience provide inspiration for a commitment to life that shuns violence. Drawing upon the traditional roots of Judaism and upon its meaning in the world today, the JPF maintains an active program of draft and peace education, opposition to war, and belief in the reconciliation of Israeli Jews and Palestinians.

It’s our birthday at the Jewish Peace Fellowship. And for every birthday there should be gifts! So this year, please give a few minutes of your time and your generosity (tzedaka) and deepen your involvement. We love to read the thoughts of our readers and invite you to send them to us for Shalom. You may discover other JPF members in your area. And if possible, send a donation to the JPF to insure that we continue for another seventy-two years.

Draft registration ended in 1974 and the Selective Service System (SSS) was put into deep standby. In 1980 President Carter revived the SSS and resumed draft registration following the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979.

At that time there was significant vocal and public resistance to registration. For many people then, and still today, the act of registering for the draft is cooperation with the war machine, and that violates their conscience. Hundreds of thousands failed to register in the early years.

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It is past time to end draft registration and the penalties imposed on people of conscience. The Selective Service System should be put back into deep standby.

We have today entered a new political — or politico-religious — period in which the Muslim peoples of the Middle East are seizing control of their own fortunes, a control lost as a result of the First World War and the defeat of the Ottoman Empire. Few in the West seem to have grasped the significance of the fact that Muslims themselves have taken over the struggle against Islamic radicalism.

The West did not start the war in Syria. Until chemical weapons were used in the war, the West had had no direct implication in it, and feeble indirect ones, other than to assist the victims. It is the Syrians’ war, and that of the other Arabs who have chosen to take part.

The rebellion in Syria has divided into sectarian factions: the Alawites led by President Bashar Assad; Sunni Islamists supported by Saudi Arabia and Gulf Arabs; Shiite radicals supported by Iranians and Hezbollah; Kurds, plus several Christian communities attempting to escape the fighting.

The crisis is essentially an Arab phenomenon, and indirectly a Western one because the Mediterranean is where European (and latter-day American) imperialism interacted most intimately with Islam. This war within Muslim civilization is sectarian — Sunni against Shiite — as well as national because the modern Arab world was defined by imperialists in terms of modern monarchies, which subsequently become republics and/or military or secret police dictatorships.

The Arabs, Egyptians, and Maghrebis are struggling to redefine themselves and their own destinies, which certainly are not, as Washington thinks, eventually to become acolytes and puppets of Western secular, irreligious or antireligious, exploitative globalized and militarized capitalism.

It is essential that the West now cease its interference. It cannot reconcile the Syrians, or the Sunnis and Shiites, nor the conflicts in the Maghreb and the Sahel, mainly produced by climate and history. The West has suffered the delusion that a war on these people would produce modernity and democracy. War is a destroyer, which includes among its victims those who initiate it.