Tag: Palestine

Rapper makes us proud

Matisyahu, the reggae rapper whose refusal to be bullied into a political pledge resulted in his being removed from the lineup of a Spanish music festival, was eventually allowed to perform last weekend.

Global outrage over the politicizing of the musical event – and the potential whiff of antisemitism – led organizers of the Rototom Sunsplash Festival to reverse their demand that the Jewish American musician pledge support for an independent Palestine. (Not a two-state solution, mind you, or a negotiated settlement of the conflict.)

After he received an apology, Matisyahu accepted the invitation to play after all. He mounted the stage to heckles and chants of “out, out,” from multiple audience members waving large Palestinian flags.

“Let music be your flag,” he urged the audience as he proceeded with his 45-minute set, ending with a spine-tingling rendition of “Jerusalem,” a defiant anthem of Jewish survival and resilience: “3,000 years with no place to be / And they want me to give up my milk and honey,” he sang. “Don’t you see, it’s not about the land or the sea / Not the country but the dwelling of His majesty … Rebuild the Temple and the crown of glory / Years gone by, about sixty / Burn in the oven in this century / And the gas tried to choke, but it couldn’t choke me / I will not lie down, I will not fall asleep.… Afraid of the truth and our dark history / Why is everybody always chasing we?”

The incident was a nasty one, certainly, but its lesson is beautiful. Do not let bullies win, whether they attack you because of who you are or the ideas you carry. It is an issue we reflected on locally earlier this summer when outside forces attacked our community for hosting speakers from the New Israel Fund and it is an issue we face continually from the BDS movement, which, in the Matisyahu imbroglio, has shown its true colors.

Matisyahu also showed his. And it was a thing to see.

 

Why is media Israel obsessed?

More senseless violence has hit Jerusalem in recent months, with the brutal murder of four worshippers at a synagogue in the Har Nof neighborhood late last year and multiple stabbings and car attacks. Some folks, while on the one hand wanting to ensure the world learns of these heinous acts, will, on the other hand, continue to ask why the media is so obsessed with Israel.

I was reminded of this question not too long ago via a short CNN video clip with journalist Matti Friedman in which he discusses an article he wrote for Tablet last summer that’s taken on a new life online. To make his case that the media is unfairly biased against Israel, Friedman cites the 2013 death toll in Jerusalem compared to Portland (more deaths in Portland), and the century-long Arab-Israeli conflict toll compared to the ongoing carnage in Syria (more lives lost in Syria). He adds that, in the overall reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian saga, Israel is unfairly portrayed as the aggressor while the Palestinians are cast as victims rather than as agents of their own fate.

The question of presumed agency is a key one in the conflict: how the conflict actors themselves see it, and how others can serve to reinforce these roles. It’s a fair point.

However, to truly understand why individuals, media markets, foreign policy actors and international organizations devote so much time and energy to the Israeli-Palestinian nexus, we’d need some in-depth research to really understand their motivations. For now, here are several plausible reasons that seek to raise the discussion beyond the reductionist assumption that there is a “media bias against Israel” and the related, if unspoken, accusation that the world simply hates the Jewish state.

Perhaps most importantly, American taxpayers provide a significant annual sum of money to Israel, via the $3 billion in annual U.S. aid granted to Israel. It’s natural that the government and the voters in that country at least would disproportionately concern themselves with the region.

Second, the Israel-Palestine core is the heartland of the three main monotheistic religions. The role of religious symbolism in Western art, literature, film and culture in general is significant. The region, in short, has long captured the imagination of many.

Third, Israel – unlike Syria – is a democracy. Citizens of democracies tend to hold other democracies to democratic standards. That means that violence committed in the name of democratic values – for better or worse – sometimes gets more airtime.

Fourth, as others have written before, Israel is seen by many as a colonial transplant. There are very good arguments against a simplistic understanding of Israel as a colonial project. (There is no core state to which settlers send extracted resources, for example.) But there is no getting around the fact that Israel’s birth was precipitated in part by Europe’s carving up of the region into mandate territories after the First World War. The shred of the colonial shadow succeeds in galvanizing a certain political consciousness that other conflicts, especially civil ones within non-democracies, simply don’t, unfortunately perhaps.

Fifth, once Israel came into existence, it was seen by many as a plucky state surviving against all odds. It’s a narrative that Israel and the engines of Diaspora Jewry have themselves succeeded in promoting. That the world continues its fascination with Arab-Israeli geopolitics, played out now partly through the Palestinians, is, therefore, not surprising.

Sixth, Jews tend to punch above their collective weight in many aspects of popular culture: entertainment, the arts, literature and so on. That the Jewish state and its goings-on figure so prominently in the media can be seen as a benign extension of this. Add to this the fact that some of the players in the contemporary Israeli-Palestinian saga also hold American citizenship (three of the victims of the Har Nof synagogue attack held dual Israeli-U.S. citizenship, while the fourth was British Israeli) and the effect is magnified.

Finally, as for Friedman’s comparison between the disproportionate attention given to death and destruction in Israel compared to, say, in Portland, one could say that political violence naturally garners more international concern – again, sadly for those who are ignored – than death caused by typical urban ills such as poverty, petty crime, drugs or traffic accidents.

In sum, I’ve suggested seven plausible reasons why the world might be “obsessed” with Israel, none of them having to do with base hatred of the country or of Jews. Of course, there’s nothing saying that any of these possible reasons obviate the need to look antisemitism in the eye wherever it genuinely appears, or to spend more time analyzing the Palestinian part of the equation. But let’s at least consider the array of possibilities out there before we assume that the world is against us.

Mira Sucharov is an associate professor of political science at Carleton University. She blogs at Haaretz and the Jewish Daily Forward. A version of this article was originally published on haartez.com.

 

Israel launches campaign to discredit inquiry

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2014. (photo from UN photo/Amanda Voisard)

The Israeli government has launched a public diplomacy campaign to discredit the legitimacy of the International Criminal Court’s recent decision to start an inquiry into what the Palestinians call Israeli “war crimes” in the disputed territories.

According to ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda, the inquiry – which was initiated after a request by the Palestinian Authority – is not a formal investigation, but rather “a process of examining the information available in order to reach a fully informed determination on whether there is a reasonable basis to proceed with an investigation pursuant to the criteria established by the [ICC’s] Rome Statute.”

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas recently signed the Rome Statute in order to join the ICC after failing to get a UN Security Council resolution passed that called for Israel’s withdrawal from the disputed territories by 2017.

Israel’s campaign against the ICC inquiry will focus on the fact that the because the charges were filed by the PA, which is not a state, the court has no authority to act. In addition, the campaign will point out the court’s bias against Israel – a country on the frontline of the war against terrorism that makes sure to abide by international law by way of an independent legal system.

The Israeli government decided to launch the public diplomacy campaign at an emergency meeting in response to the ICC decision that was convened by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. The meeting, which took place at Netanyahu’s office, was attended by Israeli security, legal and diplomatic officials.

The ICC’s decision to launch the inquiry into Israeli actions is “the height of hypocrisy and the opposite of justice,” Netanyahu said on Sunday at the start of this week’s cabinet meeting, two days after the court announced the inquiry.

“During my years of public service, both as UN ambassador and as prime minister, I encountered these kinds of events, but this decision by the [ICC] prosecutor is in a league of its own,” Netanyahu said. “It gives international legitimacy to international terrorism.”

The prime minister said Israel would fight the ICC’s decision with every means it has available, including the enlistment of its allies. Along those lines, Israel is lobbying member states of the ICC to cut funding for the tribunal, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said on Sunday. Israel, which like the United States does not belong to the ICC, hopes to dent funding for the court that is drawn from its 122 member states in accordance with the size of member states’ economies, said Lieberman.

“We will demand of our friends in Canada, in Australia and in Germany simply to stop funding it,” Lieberman told Israel Radio.

Read more at jns.org.

Baird’s visit to Israel, Ramallah

Canada’s Foreign Minister John Baird, left, meets with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu earlier this week. (photo by Kobi Gideon/GPO)

After a hostile greeting by protesters in the Palestinian Authority capital of Ramallah, who pelted his convoy with shoes and eggs, Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird returned to Jerusalem to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and President Reuven Rivlin.

According to reports, Ramallah activists carried signs reading “Baird you are not welcome in Palestine.” Baird has opposed the PA’s bid for war crimes charges against Israel and other moves by the PA at the United Nations. Ottawa has also been vocally supportive of Israel during Stephen Harper’s tenure.

The foreign minister’s visit came on the anniversary of Harper’s tour of the region in 2014. Baird hoped to reaffirm Canada’s commitment to the strategic partnership and agreements forged on that visit. “Canada deeply values its close ties with Israel,” Baird said prior to his trip.

Baird traveled to Ramallah Sunday morning to meet with PA Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki. At that meeting, which Baird called “cordial and constructive,” Baird and Maliki discussed Canada’s “desire for a future of peace and prosperity, stability and security for both Palestinians and Israelis.”

Baird said Canada considers itself a “friend” to both Israel and the Palestinian Authority. “As friends, we have candid and frank exchanges on areas where we differ in opinion,” he said, adding that he asked Maliki to “strongly reconsider the consequences of moving forward with any action that may be counterproductive to a negotiated solution with the state of Israel.”

Last week, the PA brought war crimes charges against Israel at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, along with ongoing efforts to seek sanctions at the UN. Baird said these moves, “will not contribute to peace and security in the region.”

As Canadians, said Baird, “we strongly support Israel’s right to defend itself, and we will play our part to defend Israel from international attempts to delegitimize it.”

“Canada believes strongly in a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinian Authority,” Baird said prior to the trip. “Negotiations provide the only viable path to lasting peace.”

Returning from Ramallah Sunday afternoon, Baird met privately with Lieberman.

Lieberman has earned scorn with his plan to annex Israeli Arab villages to the PA. Under Lieberman’s plan, only those Arab citizens who moved to Israeli-controlled areas and pledged loyalty to the state of Israel would retain their current citizenship. Once considered a contender for prime minister, Lieberman’s chances have been diminished considerably by recent corruption allegations.

The ministers jointly signed four memoranda of understanding and agreements, including a declaration of solidarity and friendship, and a declaration on trade that Baird said aims “to double the value of our [countries’] commercial relationship.”

Baird said that with the rise of worldwide terrorism, including October’s attack on the Parliament buildings in Ottawa, “the relationship between Canada and Israel is stronger than ever been, and getting stronger every day.”

Business development between the two countries will be targeted specifically in the area of defence, security and cyber security, Baird said.

Canadian Ambassador Vivian Bercovici and other official representatives from both countries remained after Baird’s departure for award presentations to the 10 finalists of Grand Challenges Israel (GCI). Inspired by Grand Challenges Canada (GCC), which is led by chief executive officer Peter Singer, who received the Order of Canada in 2011, GCI rewards entrepreneurs for advances in affordable health care for the developing world. Finalists, chosen from more than 100 entries, presented innovations in water purification, disease diagnosis and an affordable wheelchair for children. Worldwide, the Grand Challenges initiative was launched by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2003.

Baird’s trip to the region included a stop in Egypt, which he visited prior to the Israel leg of his trip. There, he met with Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry but failed to ensure the release of Canadian-Egyptian journalist Mohamed Fahmy, convicted for being a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that is now banned in Egypt.

A year ago, on Jan. 20, Harper became the first Canadian prime minister to speak in the Knesset. His remarks about Israel’s right to exist and defend itself received a standing ovation, along with jeers and catcalls from Israeli Arab MKs who walked out in protest. On that visit, Harper pledged millions of dollars in increased support for the PA. Although Harper’s visit was well received by the Israeli media, the Canadian press was critical of Harper’s large delegation and “rigid” pro-Israel stance.

Baird’s Israel agenda originally included stops at the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, both atop the Temple Mount area behind the Western Wall in Jerusalem. No reason was given for the decision to cancel visits there. Harper canceled a similar visit a year ago.

Baird met Netanyahu on Monday afternoon before leaving Israel. He continued to Davos, Switzerland, to attend the 2015 World Economic Forum from Jan. 21-24.

– For more national Jewish news, visit cjnews.com.

The word “Palestine”

Does Palestine exist? A blogger on the often-provocative website JewsNews doesn’t think so. A package of dates marked “Palestine” must be “magic,” he says, since there’s no such country. And this echoes Moshe Arens’ trotting out of the old canard that Palestine doesn’t exist, but Jordan – the real Palestinian state – already does.

There are at least two issues at stake for Israelis: legitimacy and security. Yet a closer look reveals that neither concern is quite what it seems.

Part of the reason that many Jews have been allergic to the word Palestine is that it has long been used to negate the legitimacy of Israel. In this view, the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River (or west of that, to the Green Line, depending on one’s view) is like a blue and white transparent film revealing a red, white and green film, containing a different narrative beneath. Since time is linear and space is finite, there seems to be room for only one people and one narrative on that tiny slice of Middle East territory. One cannot reverse the flow of the sands of time. Israel exists, so Palestine, the logic goes, cannot.

But, surprise! Those who would wish to roll back history and replace Israel with Palestine, as the Palestinian national movement claimed to want to do for decades, have now indicated – at least via their official leaders – that they will be satisfied with a mere 22 percent of the land they originally claimed as theirs. A state of Palestine, in other words, need no longer negate the symbolic right of Israel to exist.

Complicating all of this, though, is the one little word one often hears from Israeli officials, and which every state and all people deserve: security. For example, Bibi Netanyahu, in a video posted Dec. 27 to the Prime Minister of Israel’s Facebook page, contained an address to an enthusiastically nodding U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham.

In the span of a few seconds, Bibi managed to call out Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat’s rhetorical hyperbole (Erekat’s comparison of ISIS’s Islamic state desires with Bibi’s Jewish state utterances), while associating the Palestinian negotiator’s “incitement” with the throwing of a firebomb on an Israeli girl in the West Bank. The kicker: the folly of the Palestinians seeking to bring to the United Nations Security Council a proposal – a “diktat” Bibi calls it – containing provisions that “seek to undermine our security.”

The trouble with the security discourse is that, just as stating “there is no Palestine” (or “there is, but it’s in Jordan”), it tends to serve as a rhetorical trump card. We all deserve security but we also know that full and total security is ultimately elusive. Where security threats were traditionally measured solely in terms of territory, now security experts also think in terms of environmental safety, immigration and contagious diseases. There are always new threats on the horizon. All the while, we must recall that conventional security threats never really disappear – for anyone.

On top of all this we must ask whether the little girl who was tragically burned by the act of terrorism in the West Bank was in fact more secure by Israel holding onto that territory and moving its population there. Counterfactual reasoning is never foolproof, but one could certainly make the argument that occupying a hostile population for decades on end is itself a security liability, rather than a security guarantee.

Many have indeed made this argument. More than 100 retired Israeli generals, other high-ranking officers, Mossad officers and police chiefs have even told their prime minister as much, writing a letter last November urging him to “adopt the political-regional approach and begin negotiations with moderate Arab states and with the Palestinians (in the West Bank and in Gaza, too), based on the Saudi-Arab Peace Initiative.”

Obviously Israel wants security. So do the Palestinians. When it comes to the nasty world of international politics, there are no absolute security guarantees – but there are calculable risks. For starters, peace treaties tend to hold better than wishing that an occupied people will sit on their hands for decades. With 59 internal checkpoints in the West Bank, not counting the 40 near the entry to Israel at B’Tselem’s last count, I would even suggest that hoping that your own civilian population can move freely and safely within the occupied territory where an enemy population resides is where the magical thinking really lies.

So, as for that blogger and those dates, I would advise him to take a bite out of the dried fruit. I doubt that those dates are magical, but there is indeed a sweet spot that reveals the best chance for peace between two peoples vying for security and independence. And it doesn’t involve keeping the status quo going, unhappily ever after.

Mira Sucharov is an associate professor of political science at Carleton University. She blogs at Haaretz and the Jewish Daily Forward. A version of this article was originally published on haartez.com.

 

Word choice matters

The Jordan River is “the only river on planet earth that on its good days is a few feet wide, and people claim that it has a bank 40 miles wide.” (photo from Beivushtang via Wikimedia Commons)

Settlements or Jewish communities? West Bank or Judea and Samaria? East Jerusalem or eastern Jerusalem? Those are some of the language choices that journalists covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are faced with each day – and those choices should not be taken lightly, experts say.

“It’s the terminology that actually defines the conflict and defines what you think about the conflict,” said Ari Briggs, director of Regavim, an Israeli nongovernmental organization that works on legal land-use issues. “Whereas journalists’ job, I believe, is to present the news, as soon as you use certain terminology, you’re presenting an opinion and not the news anymore.”

“Accuracy requires precision; ideology employs euphemism,” said Eric Rozenman, Washington director of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA).

At the conclusion of his essay, “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell argues that writers have the power to “send some worn-out and useless phrase … into the dustbin, where it belongs.” Many Jewish leaders, organizations and analysts wish to do just that with the following terms, which are commonly used by the mainstream media in coverage of Israel.

West Bank: Dani Dayan believes the “funniest” term of all that is used in mainstream coverage of Israel is West Bank. Dayan is the chief foreign envoy of the Yesha Council, an umbrella organization representing the municipal councils of Jewish communities in an area that the Israeli government calls Judea and Samaria, in line with the region’s biblical roots. Yet, media most often use West Bank to describe the area in reference to the bank of the river situated on its eastern border.

“[The Jordan River] is the only river on planet earth that on its good days is a few feet wide, and people claim that it has a bank 40 miles wide [spanning across Judea and Samaria],” Dayan told this reporter. “There is no other example of such a thing in the geography of planet earth. That proves that West Bank is the politicized terminology, and not Judea and Samaria, as people claim.”

Member of Knesset Danny Danon (Likud) has said it’s “ridiculous” that West Bank – a geographic term that once described half of the Mandate of Palestine – has “taken on a political meaning that attempts to supersede thousands of years of Jewish tradition.”

“The correct name of the heartland of the Land of Israel is obviously Judea and Samaria,” he said.

Rozenman, the former editor of the Washington Jewish Week and B’nai B’rith Magazine, draws a distinction between the context of Palestinian and Jewish communities in the area. “If I’m referring to Palestinian Arab usage or demands, I use West Bank,” he said. “If I’m referring to Israeli usage or Jewish history and religion, etc., I use Judea and Samaria. Israeli prime ministers from 1967 on, if not before, used and [now] use Yehuda and Shomron, the Hebrew from which the Romans latinized Judea and Samaria.”

West Bank is fair to use, “so long as it’s noted that Jordan adopted that usage in the early 1950s to try to legitimate its illegal occupation, as the result of aggression, of what was commonly known as Judea and Samaria by British Mandatory authorities,” added Rozenman.

Dayan, meanwhile, prefers to call Palestinian communities in Judea and Samaria exactly that. “The area is Judea and Samaria and, in Judea and Samaria, there are indeed Palestinian population centres, and that’s perfectly OK,” he said. “We cannot neglect that fact, that yes, we [Jews] are living together with Palestinians. And, in Judea and Samaria, there is ample room for many Jews, for many Palestinians, and for peaceful coexistence between them if the will exists.”

Settlements: Judea and Samaria’s Jewish communities are often called settlements, a term that can depict modern-day residents of the area as primitive.

Settlements “once referred in a positive manner to all communities in the Land of Israel, but at some point was misappropriated as a negative term specifically against those Jews who settled in Judea and Samaria,” Danon said. “I prefer to use ‘Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria’ when discussing the brave modern-day Zionistic pioneers.”

Dayan said that “settlements” is not pejorative, but still inaccurate. “It’s a politically driven labeling in order to target those [Israeli] communities,” he said. “Most communities in Judea and Samaria are not different from any suburban or even urban community in Europe, in the United States, in Israel itself, or elsewhere.”

Read more at jns.org.

Misdirecting attention

U.S. President Barack Obama has sent a letter to the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei requesting Iran’s support in the battle against ISIS. At a time when Israel’s relationship with the American administration is strained, the letter (which was apparently sent back in October and whose existence was recently reported by the Wall Street Journal) has sparked a great deal of reaction.

Stopping the Islamic State is and should be a global priority, but the softening of attitudes toward Iran’s regime is a concern. While there appears to be some progress in talks on Iran’s nuclear program – negotiations that are rapidly approaching a Nov. 24 deadline for an agreement – the hatred directed at Israel is as vibrant as ever. Just days ago, Khamenei tweeted an infographic titled “9 Key Questions About Elimination of Israel.”

The graphic design is better than the English grammar, but the message is unmistakable. No less than ever – and regardless of what we may read suggesting schisms in the highest reaches of the regime – the top leader is as committed as he ever was to the annihilation of Israel.

While insisting that, “of course, the elimination of Israel does not mean the massacre of Jewish people in the region,” the emphatic message is, put mildly, unwelcoming. Still, the world seems convinced that it’s a bluff. To see events at the United Nations, one would think it was Israel that was threatening to obliterate another member-state. Commentators dismiss destructive rhetoric like Khamenei’s as propaganda for domestic consumption, but most Jews, and anyone with a sense of history, take seriously threats like this at any time, but particularly in the week that we commemorate both the 76th anniversary of Kristallnacht and Remembrance Day.

Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry insists any Iran overture is unrelated to the broader issues of the Middle East, as if the interconnected web of intrigues, hatreds and alliances could be unraveled from one another. And then, as if there are not enough issues in the world with which to be concerned, European states are lining up to recognize the “state of Palestine.” These legally meaningless but symbolic votes by Britain and Sweden, with more legislatures intending to follow suit, are meant to force negotiations toward a two-state solution, with an underlying assumption that Israel is to blame for the lack of progress. All the incitement to violence by Palestinian leaders and the recent upsurge in vehicular murders and stabbings of Israelis are blamed on the Israelis themselves, who must somehow deserve what they get.

Often, commentators, including Kerry recently, state that resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the lynchpin to resolving the broader conflict in the region. By obsessing about Israel, the UN, European powers and others are wasting their energies on a sideshow while the feature presentations get short shrift.

Time for dynamic on-campus discourse on Israel/Palestine

With September upon us and the Gaza war behind us, university students may be facing Israel-on-campus discourse this semester with some extra trepidation. I often hear Jewish parents wondering about how we can best prepare our kids to “face” Israel opponents on campus. As a past active Jewish undergraduate student myself and now as a professor who specializes in the topic of Israel/Palestine, here are some of my thoughts about the best way to approach the topic of Israel on campus.

Critical thinking above all else. In today’s political climate, no one is served by advancing talking points rather than asking tough questions and truly listening. Jewish students should not have to see themselves as ambassadors of the Jewish state. Israel has its own cadre of hasbarah professionals. As a place to create intelligent and productive global citizens, the role of university is to help students absorb information and apply conceptual reasoning in a critically engaged way. Jewish students should not have to leave their critical faculties at the door on the subject of Israel, nor should they have to consider the classroom environment – with its natural predilection for analyzing multiple sides of a problem – as hermetically sealed from the rest of the campus, where more informal discussion and occasional activism takes place.

Put aside the labels. Students would be forgiven for believing that they must adopt a label like “pro-Israel” or “pro-Palestine” either before arriving on campus or while there. But, as I consistently try to show my students, those terms mean little. To some, being pro-Israel means supporting the settler enterprise. To others, it means spurring Israel to make peace with the Palestinian Authority. Similarly, being pro-Palestine may mean supporting Hamas’ war effort, just as it might mean supporting Mahmoud Abbas’ attempt to reach a peace agreement with the Israeli government. By assuming a monolithic stance, students mentally close out possibilities. Students who care about the region must take time to consider what is best for the individuals and nations living there.

Focus on the “why” questions. While the out-of-classroom campus climate can unfortunately tend towards the “blame game,” where activists point fingers at one side or another, students would be best served by focusing on the “why” questions. Analyzing why each set of political actors takes the actions they do is ultimately the best thing students can do to deepen their understanding of the region and perhaps to ultimately be in a position to help bring about desired outcomes. Importantly, addressing the “why” questions is not the same as providing moral justifications. “Why does Hamas shoot rockets?” could be addressed by an array of possible answers, all of which should be put on the table and evaluated using the best knowledge we have, before making gut assumptions. Focusing on these explanatory questions can also help to further dialogue with people whose instinctual political allegiances may be different.

Practice empathy. Moving from the “why” questions to the “what should be” questions is best done through a position of empathy. Understanding the narratives, experiences, and emotional and material reality of each “side” is essential to prescribing political outcomes that will stick. Just as demanding that Israel give up its Jewish identity is going to be a non-starter, so too is not recognizing that no people is going to accept living under occupation in perpetuity.

Start early. Finally, it’s all good and fine to hope that our community’s Jewish students are primed for Israel engagement on campus, but the kind of critical engagement that enables students to deploy all their intellectual and cultural tools must start early. Our community needs to ensure that spoken Hebrew instruction in our day and supplementary schools is a priority, thus paving the way for our students to engage with Israel and Israelis in a more intimate and nuanced way whether via social media or, ideally, in person. Similarly, our elementary and high schools should ensure that wide-ranging discussion on Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian relationship is encouraged, and that groupthink is avoided. An informed and critically engaged citizen will be one who can contribute most potently – and that is ultimately good for Jewish continuity, to boot.

Mira Sucharov is an associate professor of political science at Carleton University. She blogs at Haaretz and the Jewish Daily Forward. This article was originally published in the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin.