Meretz USA is proud to be a part of “Jews Uniting to End the War & Heal America" (November 2008)

Meretz USA is proud to take part in this gathering of "Jews Uniting to End the War & Heal America." The US misadventure in Iraq has not only been a bloody disaster for the Iraqi people; it's also been bad for the US, bad for Israel and bad for the Jews. As a progressive Zionist organization, Meretz USA wishes to address how bad the war has been for Israel and the American Jewish community.

The five-year US occupation of Iraq has harmed Israeli interests - emboldening the enemies of Israeli-Arab peace and impeding the progress of peace talks between Israel and its neighbors. With America bogged down in Iraq, the war has expanded the influence of Iran in the region, as well as its rejectionist allies within Lebanon and Palestine. Additionally, the occupation has created new US-Syria antagonisms that have prevented Washington from taking any positive role in the reemerging peace process between Damascus and Jerusalem.

The war has also sharpened Iran's virulent anti-Israel posture. President Ahmadinejad's Holocaust-denying utterances, his musings on a world without Zionism, his characterization of Israel as a "corpse," and other such provocative statements, coupled with Iran's insistence on an unmonitored development of nuclear technology, have understandably created deep concerns in Israel about its very survival. We hope that this conference cultivates an understanding that, although war with Iran is not a desirable response, Israel has a legitimate concern about Iran as a nuclear threat.

In supporting this event, we would also express the hope that the conference does not fall into the trap of blaming the Jewish community and Israel for the Iraq war. Like most segments of US society at the time, a large proportion of the organized Jewish community did initially support the invasion of Iraq. However, Jews as a whole have been more critical and more opposed to this war than most other Americans. Following Iraq's defeat in 1991, Iraq ceased to be a realistic threat to Israel, but the 2003 war was initially sold to Jews as being in Israel's interest. Observers from both left and right have confused this cynical selling job to American Jews with the reason for the war.

Unfortunately, anti-Semites -- and others who are not malicious in intent -- have blamed the Iraq war on an amorphous entity they call the "Israel Lobby." They have reduced a small group of Bush administration appointees, think-tank policy wonks and journalists known as neoconservatives into an all-powerful cabal of right-wing Zionists, whom they conflate with all pro-Israel organizations. This unfairly renders the Jewish identity of prominent neoconservatives into a problem -- rather than their politics -- making "the Jews," "Zionism," Israel or "the Lobby" a focus for vilification that unites the isolationist extreme right with the anti-Israel extreme left.

Meretz USA salutes its immediate past president, Lilly Rivlin, who is participating as a panelist at this conference. We wish Ms. Rivlin and her fellow participants, and the co-sponsoring Workmen's Circle and Shalom Center, every success in conducting this impressive event, in the hope that President-elect Obama's incoming administration will soon relinquish the US military role in Iraq, as he has promised.