From a synagogue Listserv:  “A CLEAN CAR AND A CLEAN CONSCIENCE: Stop by on Memorial Day – between noon and 3:30 to support my tzedakah project and have your car washed. All donations to the Save Darfur Coalition. Thank you for your support!”

It was a Bar/Bat Mitzvah project, no doubt, and not to be mocked. But it begs the questions, “What are adult Jews doing about Darfur, and are we able to move beyond our political comfort zone even in the circumstance of genocide?” 

Everybody wants to “Save Darfur.” Sermons, banners and “awareness raising” projects are fixtures in the Jewish community, but produce little more than the self-satisfaction of being ahead of the churches. Paying for “feeding stations” in refugee camps under attack is a sop to our conscience. Food is good, but in 1943 would it have been enough to demand that the Jews ate in Auschwitz? (“Never mind that oven over there.”) Enough to demand financial sanctions on Hermann Goering? Bombs on the railroad tracks would have been better.

President Bush has announced sanctions for Sudan, but sanctions hurt the weakest people, and anyhow have no traction in the UN where China protects Sudan’s government in exchange for oil drilling rights. Negotiations? Even the UN Special Envoy for Darfur admits, “Our peace strategy so far has failed. All we did was pick up the pieces and muddle through, doing too little, too late.”   He asked the UN for a “force of… peacekeepers with the authority to use violence to prevent attacks against civilians and disarm militias.” 

The death of nine "peacekeepers" in September makes it clear he means warfighters.

Militias, with government assistance and Chinese protection, are waging genocidal war against Darfur, and warfighters – people with the authority to use violence – are needed to protect the refugees and kill, yes kill, the perpetrators. Our own history tells us there is no reason to believe anything less will stop the ravaging of an already ravaged people. 

The people of Darfur need American Jews – who have the political clout they don’t have – to argue the case for their salvation. But as a community, we rarely acknowledge that war can serve the interest of peace and have been unable to demand military intervention where it is needed. Instead we have made the case for ensuring that the victims die full.

To the extent that we only clean our cars for Darfur, we are cleaning our collective conscience at their expense.