vol. no. published by the jewish peace fellowship february ...vol. no. published by the jewish peace...

Vol. No. Published by the Jewish Peace Fellowship February

ISSN: -

Jewish Peace Letter

Satellite image of Iran’s nuclear research site

at Natanz

A Statement by the Jewish Peace Fellowship

On Preemptive Military ActionAgainst Iran’s Nuclear Facilities

Stefan Merken: Stop Shouting! Listen.Murray Polner: German Silence

James Munves: Lorraine, November 1944Jeremy Kuzmarov: Militarizing Your Local Sheriff

In this issue, we feature our position about a possible Israeli-American war with Iran, a much larger and better-armed country than Iraq. Daily there are new

rumors and threats about an impending war, which conceiv-ably could be set off by some minor skirmish (think of Sara-jevo in August 1914).

Benjamin Netanyahu’s government says Israel is threat-ened by the possibility that Iran might develop a nuclear bomb, and hints at war. But Israel’s government is not with-out Israeli critics, especially among former Mossad and in-telligence veterans. Meier Dagan, the onetime head of the Mossad, for example, told an Israeli audience that an attack on Iran would be “a stupid idea” that “would mean regional war” and give Iran reason to go on with its nuclear plans. The US seems trapped by its history with Iran: helping to destroy the democratically-elected Mohammed Mossadegh government in 1953, enduring the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s seizure of the US Embassy in Teheran and entrap-ment of Americans in 1979, and the Iran-Contra scandal of 1986-1987.

Yet despite the Israel lobby and neoconservative hawks eager to attack (while they and their children remain safely at home), our two recent wars in Muslim countries have un-derstandably created worries that a much larger war could easily break out with calamitous consequences. Moreover,

as the Israeli historian Benny Morris wrote recently, such a war “would have a significant, negative impact on Israel — its economy, social cohesion, etc. — for months and years to come, whatever the outcome of the hostilities (which are not likely to result in a clear decision).” Perhaps worse, if the US is dragged into another war, even reluctant draftees could be called on to reinforce the military’s depleted and exhausted ranks, while the increased casualty lists would continue to be brushed aside, as shamefully they have been in our latest wars.

Far too many Americans believed their government and a mass media which served as its echo chamber about Sadd-am Hussein’s (nonexistent) WMD in Iraq. Americans — and Israelis and Iranians — would do well to heed the words of former Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni, who famously said, “If you like Iraq and Afghanistan, you’re going to love Iran.”

The late Steven S. Schwarzschild, a rabbi, professor of philosophy, JPF stalwart, and refugee who with his family fled Nazi Germany, once put it best:

“The men and women of my generation have gone through a world war, the Holocaust, Stalinism and Viet-nam — not to speak of other mass bloodlettings. I have seen enough unnatural deaths to outlive a lifetime. I know I do have a choice whether or not I will die with human blood on my hands. I am deeply tired of and sickened by killing.”

We need genuine negotiations, patience, and peace. Y

Stefan Merken

Men shout to avoid listening to one another.— Miguel de Unamuno, writer and philosopher (1864-1936)

Published by the Jewish Peace Fellowship • Box 271 • Nyack, N.Y. 10960 • (845) 358-4601Honorary President Rabbi Philip J. Bentley • Chair Stefan Merken • Vice President Rabbi Leonard Beerman

Editors Murray Polner & Adam Simms • Contributing Editors Lawrence S. Wittner & Patrick Henry

Established in 1941E-mail: [email protected] • World Wide Web: http://www.jewishpeacefellowship.org

Signed articles are the opinions of the writers and do not necessarily reflect the views of the JPF.

Jewish Peace Letter

Stefan Merken is chair of the Jewish Peace Fellowship.

From Where I Sit

2 • Shalom: Jewish Peace Letter February 2012 Jewish Peace Fellowship

The current Iranian govern-ment’s continued lack of transparent compliance with the international

community’s nuclear control regime, and its president’s statements that Israel should be “wiped from the face of the earth,” pres-ent serious challenges to world peace.

Preemptive military action, however, is an unacceptable response to these chal-lenges.

The Jewish Peace Fellowship opposes violence in all forms, especially war, and was founded in 1941 to support the right of conscientious objection to military ser-vice.

Our objection to war is based on Jew-ish religious tradition, which commands us to seek peace and to pursue it (Psalms 34:15), and teaches that shalom, the Hebrew word for peace, is the Name of God and the Name of the Messiah (Tractate Derekh Eretz, Perek “Hashalom”). Though Hebrew Scripture contains many accounts of wars fought, Jewish tradition teaches that Scripture is not to be taken literally, but rather is mediated by commentary.

Our reasons for opposing preemptive military action against Iran are based, in part, upon a commentary issued by the Central Conference of American Rabbis in 5762 (2002), in response to a question regarding the legitimacy of “preemptive military action when there is suspicion, but no prima facie evidence exists, that a perceived enemy will at-tack.” We do not follow the CCAR responsum’s conclusions in all instances, and we acknowledge that other commentar-ies on Jewish sources regarding similar constructions exist. We are confident, however, that many of the sources cited in the CCAR responsum provide grounding for our stance.

Jewish tradition, holding peace to be humanity’s highest commandment, deems armed conflict to be a final resort in the preservation of peace.

Indeed, our biblical tradition teaches that David, the leader under whose military ventures the kingdom of Israel was created, was denied a role in building the Temple be-

cause “you have shed much blood and fought great battles; you shall not build a house in My name for you have shed much blood on the earth in my sight” (I Chronicles 22:8).

Therefore, far from teaching that war is a normal and acceptable human activity, Jewish tradition teaches that all efforts must be pursued to preserve peace before resorting to military action.

Thus, before a state resorts to war, Jewish tradition teaches that a foe must first be offered peace (Rambam, Yad, Melakhim 6:1, commenting on Deut. 20:10). All efforts through diplomacy to maintain the condition of peace must be exhausted before resorting to armed conflict may be con-sidered.

Moreover, if leaders of a state believe armed conflict is necessary to preserve peace, they must appear before the state’s governing body and obtain its permission before tak-ing military action.

The current situation in Iran that underlies calls in some US foreign policy circles for preemptive military ac-

Our Next War?Preemptive Military Action

Against Iran’s Nuclear Facilities

An anti-aircraft battery guarding Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility, 2006.

www.jewishpeacefellowship.org February 2012 Shalom: Jewish Peace Letter • 3

A Statement by the Jewish Peace Fellowship

tion against that nation is complex, based on highly technical assumptions about Iran’s nuclear capacity, and highly inter-pretable assumptions about Iran’s intentions toward other nations. All of these assumptions are based on fragmentary intelligence that is open to a wide variety of contradictory interpretations.

The implications for preemptive military action by the US against Iran are further complicated by the following facts:

1. The strongest, and most strident, calls for preemptive action against Iranian nuclear capability come from leaders of the current government of Israel. These calls are echoed by prominent figures in American Jewish organizations, as well as from elected officials and numerous Christian spokesper-sons, who together constitute our nation’s amorphous “Israel lobby.”

2. Nevertheless, this support for preemptive war flies in

the face of judgments by senior figures in Israel’s intelligence community, who have publicly stated that available informa-tion does not indicate that Iran poses an “existential” threat to Israel.

3. While Iran’s compliance with the international nucle-ar control regime overseen by the International Atomic En-ergy Agency has by no means been transparent or forthright, that regime permits Iran to proceed with nuclear develop-ment for peaceful purposes. The mere existence of a nuclear capacity on the part of Iran does not constitute a prima facie justification for US or Israeli military action to eliminate that capacity.

4. Under these conditions, Iran does not represent a threat to the American people. An attack on Iran by the United States or Israel would be unwarranted and may well have catastrophic consequences throughout the Middle East and elsewhere. Y

A Correction

Sandy Tolan’s “It’s the Occupation, Stupid” (November 2011) contains an error. The article stated that the “Palestinian Authority’s campaign for statehood in the United Nations . . . prompted an Obama administration veto in the Security Council.” In fact, the US did not veto the establishment of a Pales-tinian state in the UN Security Council. While the US threatened to do so if it came up for a vote, the matter had been introduced, sent to committee, and either remained there or was dropped.

Illustrations: 1 • wallpapers.jurko.net. 3 • Hamed Saber, via Wikimedia Commons. 5 • Lieutenant Colonel Parke O. Yingst, US Army, via Wikimedia Commons. 7 • Screen capture of RT (Russian Republic) television news broadcast, via Wikimedia Commons. 8 • Via Wikimedia Commons.


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Reviewing Ian Kershaw’s The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1944-45 (Penguin Press) in The New York Times, James J. Sheehan wondered

why everyday Germans, facing imminent defeat in mid-1945, “continued to obey a government that had nothing left to offer them but death and destruction.”

Not an easy question. Why did they and their fellow Ger-mans blindly follow murderers and thugs they had once hailed and faithfully served? Could it have been simply obedience to leaders? Or was it, Thom-as A. Kohut asks, a tribal tendency to “belong and, consequently to exclude?” Kohut, professor of his-tory at Williams College and author of Wilhelm II and the Germans: A Study in Leadership (Yale, 2011), has no definitive answer — nor does the vast litera-ture about the subject. The virtue of his book is his attempt to see that blood-spattered era through the eyes of individuals, rather than politicians, generals and others justifying what they did and didn’t do.

A partial if still unsat-isfying answer may nonetheless lie in Kohut’s fifteen-year quest to collect sixty-two oral histories of “ordinary” Germans, many of them composites, a style to which some may object. He ex-plains that while the sixty-two “cannot be equated with an entire generation” they do show “significant characteristics of the gen-eration to which they belong, at times to a pronounced degree.”

Kohut tells us his father was a Viennese Jew, a fact which would have meant his death had he not fled to the US in 1938, a detail which may explain his remark, “I do not particularly like the interviewees.” It’s hard to know when and if personal feelings and ideology cloud a scholar’s view. Whatever the truth, his con-clusions have been corroborated by many scholars, few of whom

“liked” the people they wrote about.All sixty-two were German Protestants, all born before

World War I, all members of German youth movements. They were happy that the Nazis won the January 1933 election and were overwhelmingly supportive of the party and its aims for most of the Third Reich. One of his interviewees hailed the Anschluss with Austria in 1938 and proudly served in the military. Another spoke of the good life until it all came crashing down with the arrival of devastating bombing raids and approaching allied

armies from east and west. Once the war ended they needed to ignore their past be-havior, but were blind-sided when their adult children of the 1968 generation demanded to know why they had so enthusiastically fa-vored so brutal a re-gime.

Kohut devotes much space to Germany from the end of World War I to the Weimar Republic, which was a weak democratic gov-ernment despised by putative and actual

Nazis but also by run-of-the-mill Germans trapped by raging inflation, massive unemployment, and bitter and divisive politi-cal wars, all of which attracted them to promises of jobs as well as dreams of renewed German power. Actually, Germany’s fate was sealed when the German Communist Party (KPD), followed Moscow’s orders and slandered the Social Democrats (SPD) as “social fascists” in the 1933 election, thus splitting the opposition and allowing the Nazis to win. Here I concentrate on the Nazi epoch that followed.

The issue of anti-Semitism was raised in his interviews be-cause it was so prominent during the Nazi era. Jews had lived in separate German states and later in unified Germany for centu-ries and contributed much to music, the arts, sciences and lit-erature as well as economic and political life. Yet, emboldened

Murray Polner

German Silence

Murray Polner is co-editor of Shalom.

April 1945: German civilians view a wagon piled high with corpses in the newly liberated Buchenwald concentration camp, Thuringia, Germany.


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Interviews With a Generation

and persuaded by incessant Nazi propaganda, most of Kohut’s sixty-two interviewees accepted the anti-Jewish drumbeat as truth. Moreover, the Catholic and Protestant churches were si-lent (though politicians of Protestant- and Catholic-affiliated parties felt brave enough to speak out against the Nazi’s eutha-nasia plan). These “spiritual” institutions either “looked away” — or even approved — when confronted by the sight of Jews beaten on public streets, their businesses shattered, and their eventual disappearance from cities, towns and villages. Writes Kohut: “One way to characterize the interviewees’ knowledge of the Holocaust before the end of the war is that they knew facts that should have led them to conclude that atrocities were being committed against Jewish people. It took an act of will not to have known what was going on.”

How could they not have known, at least from stories they surely heard from furloughed and wounded soldiers, especial-ly those who served in Poland, the Baltics and Russia, where Jews were regularly murdered by Germans and their Baltic and Ukrainian allies. Everyday Germans had volunteered for the Einsatzgruppen death squads, slaughterers of an esti-mated one million Jews. (Only 14 of the killers ever received death penalties in postwar trials, though few were executed; most had their sentences commuted, and in 1958 all surviving killers were freed.) There is also the glaring example of “or-dinary men” in Christopher Browning’s searing book of the same name (Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland; Harper Collins, 1992), which re-counts the history of a Hamburg police force whose members volunteered to kill every Jew they could find in the conquered eastern lands. Browning’s arguable thesis was that they be-came mass murderers because of their deference to authority. In any event, when they returned from their bloody service to a city once called “Red” Hamburg because of its large num-ber of Communist sympathizers, neither then nor later, when the extent of their crimes became public, were they scorned or condemned by their fellow citizens.

“Franz Orthmann,”one of Kohut’s subjects, was a child of the middle class, and “absolutely susceptible” to the “powerful sense of revitalization” he dreamed the Nazis would create. He joined the party in 1938, after the Anschluss with Austria, ec-static about the realization of a Greater Germany. He enlisted in the army, became an officer and always believed he was serving a noble cause. But had he ever known of the sadism at home and in the occupied territories? Only rumors, he answered. “I never gave a thought to what it all meant, and there was much about the Propaganda Ministry that one shouldn’t simply dismiss out of hand.” Besides, he added, “I believed that I was serving in a great cause.”

But what about the many dead civilians? Orthmann says that when a soldier described to him several such killings he had seen, Orthmann called him a “pig.” But after a driver for the Oranienburg concentration camp told him of gas chambers, of Jewish children “tossed up in air and spitted on bayonets,” he says he finally became convinced that the rumors were true. All the same, after Richard von Weizacker, president of the Federal

Republic of Germany from 1984 to 1994, told the German par-liament that all Germans knew about the concentration camps and the extensive savagery, Orthmann became incensed, at first claiming it wasn’t so. He finally changed his mind when he per-sonally heard an SA man boast of the mass killing of Jews.

“Magdalene Beck,” another composite interviewee, was eighteen when the Nazis came to power. Her husband was a soldier. An early and unswerving enthusiast for the Nazis, she claims to have been essentially apolitical. Though Jews in her town suddenly were nowhere to be seen, she looked away even though stories began quietly circulating about horrific actions involving civilians in Poland, Russia and elsewhere. She and many Germans have always defended their silence, arguing that individuals who objected were helpless before the might of the Nazi state. Dissenters had all been crushed early on and the penalty for opposition was often execution (the fate of the White Rose critics and the July 20th plotters, for example). In the documentary film Elusive Justice, Hein-rich Gross, who ran a homicidal institute that euthanized children, justifies his role by saying, “If you were a staff mem-ber and refused to participate, you would be killed by the Nazis.”

Resist? “You are asking someone to resist who knows what will happen to him if he opposes such a dictatorial regime,” Madeleine Beck told Kohut, echoing Gross and far too many Germans. “He’ll implicate his whole family. You try that! You try that!” There is some truth in that: few individuals anywhere dare to challenge their tyrannical and even less brutal governments. Yet silence also meant that conforming and passive Germans had little to fear from the Nazis — except, as Kohut notes in his mesmerizing book, they ultimately paid a heavy price: six and a half million non-Jewish Germans died in the war, five and a half million of them soldiers.

In the final days of the war, with the Red Army getting closer,

Lorraine, November 1944

Shutters drawn,Feet of clay,Dusk or dawn,Going which way?

Sow unsewn,Cow cowed,Sky rends,Tall story.Crying out loud,Who put the ‘l’ in gory?

(opus based on personal experience as member Co C, 51st armored infantry battalion.)

— James Munves


Beck says she was terrified of rape, given the stories of mass rapes in Germany and Poland committed by Russian troops, though she says nothing about what her countrymen had done to Pol-ish and Russian women throughout subjugated Europe. And yet when Russians soldiers finally arrived, she says, they were unexpectedly kind, especially to children. But, echoing the Nazi

line, she was frightened of black American soldiers and told her children to avoid taking candy from them, fearing that it might contain poison.

“I was never one of those fanatical Nazis,” Magdalene Beck told Kohut after the war, “but I believed in it with all my heart and soul, and I worked for it.” Y

’Ten-hut!

Images of militarized police units organized in platoon formation pepper spraying and beating peaceful demonstrators at Univer-

sity of California-Davis and at Occupy encampments across the country have been disturb-ing to witness, though they provide a potent symbol of the times. While staffed with peo-ple from working-class back-grounds, the police in Ameri-can society have long served as “protectors of privilege” (as Frank Donner put it in a 1990 book) who uphold the power of the wealthy one-percent by frequently crushing labor pro-test, spying on and harassing civil rights and antiwar activists, and enforcing the “war on drugs” primarily in ghetto communities.

As much as racial profiling and brutality have been deeply rooted in the history of American police institutions,

so has their militarization, owing in part to the influence of overseas police training programs. Many police cap-tains dating back to the Gild-ed Age and Progressive eras have been military veterans, ensuring that departments have been organized along hi-erarchical and military lines. August Vollmer, the “father of modern law enforcement” who, as head of the Berke-ley police force from 1905 to 1931, pioneered innovations such as fingerprinting, lie

detector tests, and patrol cars, was himself a veteran of the Spanish-American/Philippines War. Vollmer was liberal, al-lowing Communists the right of assembly and prohibiting “third-degree” methods of torture; however most of his con-temporaries were not. As Alfred W. McCoy documents in Policing America’s Empire (University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), many police officials from the era served in the Phil-ippines constabulary, which pioneered novel techniques of surveillance and social control that were reapplied domes-tically. Lieutenant Colonel Harry Bandholz, who built up the Filipino secret service, was involved in crushing a coal

Jeremy Kuzmarov

The Militarization of American PoliceA Brief History

A campus police officer pepper sprays nonviolent protesters at the University of California at Davis, November 21, 2011.

Jeremy Kuzmarov is J.P. Walker assistant professor of history at the University of Tulsa and author of The Myth of the Addicted Army: Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs (University of Massachusetts Press, 2009), as well as the forth-coming Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation Building in the American Century (University of Massachu-setts Press, 2012). A version of this essay appeared originally in HistoryNewsNetwork.org.


miners’ strike in West Virginia, while Jesse Garwood, who offered bounties for cutting off enemy ears, helped set up the Pennsylvania state constabulary, known for suppressing strikes and “beating down foreigners.” Ralph Van Deman, the “father of U.S. military intelligence” and of the “Ameri-can blacklist,” meanwhile compiled thousands of dossiers on radical activists for the FBI. According to McCoy, the con-stabulary veteran was “one of the giants of anti-communism, a super-hawk . . . a phobic nativist red-hunter” whose “under-cover network penetrated not only the Communist Party but a whole spectrum of liberal targets, including religious, civil rights and labor organizations.”

The 1924 appointment of Marine Corps General Smed-ley Butler as chief of police in Philadelphia epitomized the militarization of American police institutions during the Progressive era. Known for having turned the Haitian Gen-darmerie into a powerful colonial instrument soon after the American occupation of that island in 1915, Butler cracked down on corruption, promoted use of high-speed cars and new radio technology, set up an iron ring of semimilitary posts around the city, and followed what he called a “pound policy” — ordering his men, armed with sawed-off shotguns, to raid speakeasies and suspected bootlegging institutions suddenly and repeatedly if necessary. During his tenure, po-lice closed 2,566 speakeasies compared with only two hundred and twenty in the preceding year. Claiming the best way to stop crime was to shoot criminals and make jails unbearable, Butler was replaced after he stormed the Ritz-Carleton Hotel and shut down a debutante ball. One angry citizen compared him to a military dictator, while another wrote that “military tactics which might do in Mexico and other places has no place in the administration of civil affairs.”

During the 1950s, the top policing textbook in the US was written by Colonel Orlando W. Wilson, a protégé of Au-gust Vollmer, who trained police in Germany to stabilize the post-World War II occupation. The central argument of his book was that police efficiency could be maximized through use of up-to-date tactical equipment, scientific deployment of mobile, well-trained troops organized along a hierarchi-cal military model, installation of an advanced communica-tions system, comprehensive record keeping and an ongoing public relations program. Wilson applied these methods not only in Germany but in Chicago, where he retired as head of the police just before the notorious beating of demonstrators during the 1968 Democratic Party convention.

One of Wilson’s chief assistants in Germany, Willie Parker, ran the Los Angeles Police Department from 1950 to 1966, dying of a heart attack shortly after the brutal sup-pression of the Watts riots. Subscribing to J. Edgar’s Hoover’s brand of theological anticommunism, Parker instilled boot camp-style training in the LAPD’s academies, which were headed in the 1950s by Frank Walton, an intelligence officer with the Black Sheep Aviation Squadron in the Solomon Is-lands in World War II and a Marine Corps staff officer in Korea. In the 1960s, Walton served as a police advisor for the

Office of Public Safety (OPS) in South Vietnam, helping to run the Con Son island penitentiary.

Worldwide in scope, the OPS programs proved to be a watershed in spawning a formidable police-industrial com-plex. A 1970 Pentagon report noted that the OPS was instru-mental in “stimulating U.S. industry to develop new and im-proved police equipment” such as tear gas, munitions with a nine-year shelf life, a police baton with a dye-marking fea-ture, a riot helmet with a built in radio receiver, light-weight body armor that floats, and communication devices operat-ing on solar cells. OPS Director Byron Engle testified before the Kerner Commission on Civilian Disorders that “in work-ing with the police in various countries we have acquired a great deal of experience in dealing with violence ranging from demonstrations and riots to guerrilla warfare. Much of this experience may be useful in the U.S.”

These remarks demonstrate how fighting “subversives” overseas provided a model for police institutions to be ap-plied domestically, with often terrible consequence. In Au-gust 1969, after demonstrators for People’s Park in Berkeley, California, were subjected to beatings and torture, the sher-iff in Alameda County tellingly stated: “We have a bunch of young deputies back from Vietnam who tend to treat prison-ers like Vietcong.” The continuity in pattern is evident today, as many police officers continue to come from military back-grounds, having been trained along paramilitary lines in the use of advanced military technologies and developed what former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper characterized as a SWAT mentality, where all demonstrators are treated as en-emies of the state. Deeply at odds with democratic principles, this latter mentality has a long historical precedent that will be difficult though not impossible to transcend, particularly if vast numbers continue to challenge publicly the elite thrust for wealth and global power which lies at the root of society’s over-militarization. Y

Chief August Vollmer, the “father of modern law enforce-ment” and head of the Berkeley, California, police force from 1905 to 1931.


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