Opinion TWO: IsraelZionism is the problem
The Zionist ideal of a Jewish state is keeping Israelis and Palestinians from living in peace.
By Ben Ehrenreich
March 15, 2009
It's hard to imagine now, but in 1944, six years after Kristallnacht,
Lessing J. Rosenwald, president of the American Council for Judaism,
felt comfortable equating the Zionist ideal of Jewish statehood with
"the concept of a racial state -- the Hitlerian concept." For most of
the last century, a principled opposition to Zionism was a mainstream
stance within American Judaism.
Even
after the foundation of Israel, anti-Zionism was not a particularly
heretical position. Assimilated Reform Jews like Rosenwald believed
that Judaism should remain a matter of religious rather than political
allegiance; the ultra-Orthodox saw Jewish statehood as an impious
attempt to "push the hand of God"; and Marxist Jews -- my grandparents
among them -- tended to see Zionism, and all nationalisms, as a
distraction from the more essential struggle between classes.
To be Jewish, I was raised to believe, meant understanding oneself as a
member of a tribe that over and over had been cast out, mistreated,
slaughtered. Millenniums of oppression that preceded it did not entitle
us to a homeland or a right to self-defense that superseded anyone
else's. If they offered us anything exceptional, it was a perspective
on oppression and an obligation born of the prophetic tradition: to act
on behalf of the oppressed and to cry out at the oppressor.
For
the last several decades, though, it has been all but impossible to cry
out against the Israeli state without being smeared as an anti-Semite,
or worse. To question not just Israel's actions, but the Zionist tenets
on which the state is founded, has for too long been regarded an almost
unspeakable blasphemy.
Yet it is no longer possible to believe
with an honest conscience that the deplorable conditions in which
Palestinians live and die in Gaza and the West Bank come as the result
of specific policies, leaders or parties on either side of the impasse.
The problem is fundamental: Founding a modern state on a single ethnic
or religious identity in a territory that is ethnically and religiously
diverse leads inexorably either to politics of exclusion (think of the
139-square-mile prison camp that Gaza has become) or to wholesale
ethnic cleansing. Put simply, the problem is Zionism.
It has
been argued that Zionism is an anachronism, a leftover ideology from
the era of 19th century romantic nationalisms wedged uncomfortably into
21st century geopolitics. But Zionism is not merely outdated. Even
before 1948, one of its basic oversights was readily apparent: the
presence of Palestinians in Palestine. That led some of the most
prominent Jewish thinkers of the last century, many of them Zionists,
to balk at the idea of Jewish statehood. The Brit Shalom movement --
founded in 1925 and supported at various times by Martin Buber, Hannah
Arendt and Gershom Scholem -- argued for a secular, binational
state in Palestine in which Jews and Arabs would be accorded equal
status. Their concerns were both moral and pragmatic. The establishment
of a Jewish state, Buber feared, would mean "premeditated national
suicide."
The fate Buber foresaw is upon us: a nation that has
lived in a state of war for decades, a quarter-million Arab citizens
with second-class status and more than 5 million Palestinians deprived
of the most basic political and human rights. If two decades ago
comparisons to the South African apartheid system felt like hyperbole,
they now feel charitable. The white South African regime, for all its
crimes, never attacked the Bantustans with anything like the
destructive power Israel visited on Gaza in December and January, when
nearly1,300 Palestinians were killed, one-third of them children.
Israeli policies have rendered the once apparently inevitable two-state
solution less and less feasible. Years of Israeli settlement
construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have methodically
diminished the viability of a Palestinian state. Israel's new prime
minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has even refused to endorse the idea of
an independent Palestinian state, which suggests an immediate future of
more of the same: more settlements, more punitive assaults.
All
of this has led to a revival of the Brit Shalom idea of a single,
secular binational state in which Jews and Arabs have equal political
rights. The obstacles are, of course, enormous. They include not just a
powerful Israeli attachment to the idea of an exclusively Jewish state,
but its Palestinian analogue: Hamas' ideal of Islamic rule. Both sides
would have to find assurance that their security was guaranteed. What
precise shape such a state would take -- a strict, vote-by-vote
democracy or a more complex federalist system -- would involve years of
painful negotiation, wiser leaders than now exist and an uncompromising
commitment from the rest of the world, particularly from the United
States.
Meanwhile, the characterization of anti-Zionism as an
"epidemic" more dangerous than anti-Semitism reveals only the
unsustainability of the position into which Israel's apologists have
been forced. Faced with international condemnation, they seek to limit
the discourse, to erect walls that delineate what can and can't be said.
It's
not working. Opposing Zionism is neither anti-Semitic nor particularly
radical. It requires only that we take our own values seriously and no
longer, as the book of Amos has it, "turn justice into wormwood and
hurl righteousness to the ground."
Establishing a secular,
pluralist, democratic government in Israel and Palestine would of
course mean the abandonment of the Zionist dream. It might also mean
the only salvation for the Jewish ideals of justice that date back to
Jeremiah.
Ben Ehrenreich is the author of the novel "The Suitors."
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