Heschel on Vietnam: Protest & Political Action

dominate us, and hence to take preemptive strikes in Iraq, Iran, and maybe in Syria, Pakistan, Bolivia, Cuba or Venezuela. As I detail in The Left Hand of God, the Domination Strategy for homeland security has deep roots in the patriarchal assumptionsthathavegovernedhumansocietiesformostofthepastsev eral thousand years. But militarist/patriarchal/domination theories of the world were under severe attack in the 1960s and early 1970s as counter-cultural visions began to rattle the walls and pillars of Western societies. It took a powerful rebound from the religious right combined with an intellectually sophisticated assault on progressive ideas to hold back and undermine the hopeful “left hand of God” worldviews that were becoming almost hegemonic in the women’s movement, the gay movement, the anti-war movement, the environmental movement , and the counter-culture. That intellectual assault was provided primarily by Jewish neocons like Norman Podhoretz, William Safire, Irving (and later William) Kristol , Martin Peretz, Cynthia Ozick, Ruth Wisse, Leon Wieseltier, Richard Perle, John Bolton, Leo Straus, Henry Kissinger, and Elliot Abrams. Many neocons freely admit that their worldview was shaped around the need to defend Israel from assault by critics on the Left and from the growing credibility that “left hand of God” perspectives were gaining in the 1960s and early 1970s, undermining America’s desire to rely on militarism and, hence, in the eyes of the neocons , undermining the likelihood that the U.S. would continue to provide the military protection that Israel needed to protect itself from the hostile Arab world. It never occurred to these neocons, whose worldview became dominant in the leadership of AIPAC in the next several decades, that Israel might take a totally different approach to its security, acknowledging the suffering of the Palestinian people and taking steps to alleviate it (e.g. a massive building campaign in Gaza and the West Bank to replace the slums and repair the inhumane conditions in which Palestinians were forced to live when Israel refused to let them return to their homes inside the pre–1967 borders. Israel could have built high quality housing, sanitation, health care, and economic infrastructure. It could have taught Arabic as a required language in Israeli schools and Hebrew in Palestinian schools so that communication would be easier. And it could have begun a systematic repatriation of refugee families at a level of, say, 20,000 families a year), and it could have encouraged the economic development and high levels of employment in the West Bank and Gaza. This would have done more to undermine the popularity of extremists than the systematic arrests without charges, torture, targeted assassinations, and construction of Israeli settlement on Palestinian land. The mass appeal of the Strategy of Domination has been dramatically reinforced by the ability of the Israel Lobby and its ERRATA:Weapologizethat:1)CaptionstoJohnGoodwin’sphotosofHeschelincludedtwoerrors.ThemannamedasRCBishopShannonwasinfactEpiscopalianRev. RogerAlling(July/Augp.15).Aphotodated2/6/68wasactuallytaken2/5/69(Sept/Octp.70).2)PaulaCaplan’sarticle“VetsAren’tCrazy—WarIs”includedproofingerrorsthathavebeencorrectedonlineatwww .tikkun.org.Theworstofthem:“numbness,whichalternatedbetweenrageanddespair"shouldhaveread“numbness, whichalternatedwithrageanddespair"(Sept/Octp.44). 14 T I K K U N W W W. T I K K U N . O R G N O V E M B E R / D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 7 5.editorial:Editorials+Columns 10/9/07 12:02 PM Page 14 S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2 0 0 7 W W W. T I K K U N . O R G T I K K U N 15 JACOB YUROH TESHIMA T he National Emergency Committee continued its “middle ground” strategy of attempting to persuade the government to decrease bombings and press for a negotiated settlement. Deciding that the organization should remain in existence until the end of the war, a group composed of [John] Bennett, [Abraham Joshua] Heschel, [William Sloane] Coffin, [Richard John] Neuhaus, and David Hunter (the deputy general secretary of the National Council of Churches) hired a full–time executive director, Richard Fernandez. This young, brash, witty minister had served in the army; later, as part of his campus work, he had participated in the civil rights movement. In May 1966 the committee changed its name...