The Politics of Hope Blog, August 17, 2011
Bursting the
Bubble of “Liberal Zionism”
By Mark Braverman
The
popular uprising in Egypt that unseated President Hosni Mubarak,
together with Aljazeera’s January 23rd release of the “Palestine
Papers,” have produced if not a an earthquake, then certainly
seismic rumblings in the ground supporting Israel’s control
of the West Bank (from within) and Gaza (from without). The plight
of the Palestinians is not what motivated Egyptians to take to
the streets – yet the complicity of the Mubarak government
with the siege of Gaza certainly stuck in the craw of the Egyptian
people. Similarly, the Aljezeera revelations that negotiators
for the Palestinian Authority had effectively ceded East Jerusalem
to Israel and relinquished the right of return for Palestinian
refugees would have only reinforced Egyptians’ conviction
that the promised Palestinian State a has been a snare and a delusion
perpetrated by the U.S.-Israel-Jordan-Egypt alliance.
It is a sure bet that any spillover from Tahrir Square into the
streets of Ramallah, Jenin, Nablus or Bethlehem will be quickly
repressed by the Palestinian Authority. But the future of the
inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza as well as the millions
of Palestinian refugees in the occupied territories and throughout
the world does not rest with the actions of the client government
installed in Ramallah. Rather, the fate of these people –as
well of the close to eight million citizens of Israel, is been
held hostage to the assumptions and requirements of political
Zionism.
More than territory and borders, the issue of demography is the
key to this conflict. The question of return of refugees has been
a red line for Israelis because the introduction of so many non-Jews
would spell “the end of Israel.” And so it would, as
long as its future is tied to the Zionist idea of a Jewish state.
But recognition is dawning that a just and equitable sharing of
the territory will mean, not the end of Israel, but its only hope
for a future. The release of the Palestinian Authority documents
is a further sign that the path to peace requires a confrontation
with Zionism itself as a political enterprise. But even within
the progressive camp, this realization has been slow in coming.
When Peter Beinart’s “The Failure of the American Jewish
Establishment” appeared in the New York Review of Books in
June 2010, it caused a considerable stir: here was a young Jewish
intellectual boldly challenging the human rights record of the
State of Israel. But Beinart’s subject was not Israel’s
mistreatment of Palestinians. Rather, he was addressing the failure
of the American Jewish establishment to successfully promote Zionism
as a viable political program. The piece opens with this declaration:
“Saving liberal Zionism in the United States—so that
American Jews can help save liberal Zionism in Israel—is
the great American Jewish challenge of our age.” To this
Jewish American, this is an astonishing statement, and it is tragically
off the mark.
Born in the heady years after the establishment of the state,
I grew up believing that Israel was the key to Jewish survival.
But I would suggest that preserving Zionism is not the challenge
facing Jews today. Rather, our task is to rescue Judaism from
an ideology that has hijacked the faith, continues to fuel global
conflict, and has produced one of the most systematic and longstanding
violations of human rights in the world today. Despite its romantic
attachment to the idea of the “new Jew” — a Jew
liberated from the powerlessness and humiliation of the ghetto
— in reality Zionism has served to keep Jews trapped in an
isolationist, exclusivist past. We must challenge a historical
narrative that has yoked us to a theology of territoriality and
tribal privilege. We must acknowledge how deep is the hole we
have dug for ourselves in the pursuit of our national homeland
project.
But it is not for the Jews alone to resolve this crisis. Rather,
the prospect of Israel spinning rapidly into rogue state status
challenges people from all faiths and nationalities to confront
sectarian and particularistic strivings wherever they hold the
political process hostage. This is not the challenge that being
thrown down by Beinart, however. Instead, he is proposing that
rather than questioning the legitimacy of Zionism, we shore it
up. Beinart never considers the possibility that Zionism itself
is a flawed ideology. Instead, he operates on the assumption that
if only Zionism could be implemented in its true democratic and
liberal spirit, meaningful change could be created and things
would work out. “Yes, we have erred, we have strayed,”
— so goes the argument – “but because we are heirs
to a liberal, humanistic tradition, we can make this work —
and our work deserves to be crowned with success.”
According to Beinart, bad actors have sabotaged the noble enterprise.
The problem, he maintains, lies with overtly racist politicians
like Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who proposes transfer
of non-Jews (and who recently pushed through the Knesset the targeting
of Israeli human rights organizations for special investigations),
and ex-cabinet minister Effi Eitam, who wants Arabs out of Israeli
politics. Here we have the classic straw man maneuver – very
much like progressive Israeli and non-Israeli Jews blaming the
“radical fringe” of the settler movement for Israel’s
human rights abuses and the “mistake” of the occupation.
But settler depredations, permanent occupation of Palestinian
lands, brutal suppression of popular resistance, racial laws governing
loyalty and land ownership, and de facto second class citizenship
for Arabs in Israel are not accidents or unfortunate deviations
from Israel’s democratic agenda. The government of Israel
is doing precisely what a Jewish state has to do to maintain its
Jewish character. Ethnic cleansing and military control of a subject
population (also known as Apartheid) have emerged as the only
means to address the threat to Israel’s continued existence
as a sovereign Jewish state. The abhorrent concept of the Arab
“demographic threat” is embraced in Israel by racist
demagogues and centrist politicians alike. The sobering truth
is that for Israel the line between racist demagoguery and government
policy has all but disappeared.
But for the Jewish progressive, the idea that Zionism itself is
the problem is unacceptable. A different enemy must be found —
and Israel’s fundamentalist Jewish establishment presents
itself as the most convenient. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, former Chief
Rabbi of Israel and spiritual leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas
party is the poster child for those who bemoan Israel’s threatened
descent into fascism. Last October Jewish voices the world over
issued horrified condemnations when a group of Israeli rabbis,
backed by Yosef, issued rulings against renting to non-Jews. Even
the Anti-Defamation League’s arch-conservative Director Abraham
Foxman weighed in against the “hateful and divisive ideas”
of these religious leaders. Lamenting Shas’ growing boldness
and influence, Beinart warns against this threat to Israel’s
“liberal and democratic order.” The point, however,
bears repeating: Shas and Israel’s other religious parties
are not unfortunate byproducts of democracy – rather, they
are firmly entrenched in Israel’s political structure. Despite
its initial conflict with political Zionism, Jewish fundamentalism
has shown itself to be frighteningly compatible with the goal
of building a Jewish state.
Quoted in a recent article in New York Jewish Week, Beinart expresses
concern that his children may have to choose between “blind
support” of Israel and their liberal values. But as Jews
– and Americans — we do have to choose. Accepting Zionism
as a workable, sustainable political program is a kind of blindness.
It calls for a striking lapse in critical thinking and the jettisoning
of fundamental humanistic principles, and it leads to the political
dead end in which we find ourselves today. Israel’s national
anthem, “Hatikvah,” (“The Hope”) embodies
the Zionist dream and ethos: “The hope of two thousand years,
to be a free nation in our land, the land of Zion and Jerusalem.”
This yearning is understandable and it is powerful. But I would
propose to Beinart and those progressive Jews who cling to this
dream that they replace it with one more in tune with the trajectory
of history, which points away from nationalism, and certainly
from ethnic nationalism. Zionism held a kind of desperate logic
for the Jews of 19th century Europe, and seemed valid in the historical
and ideological context of the time – but it is wrong and
unsustainable today. Only when Israel itself, and the Jewish community
that supports it, can begin to let go of these anachronistic strivings
can we turn ourselves to the task of recreating Israel as a political
entity truly committed to democratic and liberal principles. The
late and deeply mourned Tony Judt got it exactly right in his
NYRB piece back in 2003: “The problem with Israel, in short,
is not—as is sometimes suggested—that it is a European
‘enclave’ in the Arab world; but rather that it arrived
too late. It has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century
separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of
individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The
very idea of a “Jewish state”—a state in which
Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which
non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded—is rooted in another
time and place.”
In his recent book, The Icarus Syndrome, A History of American
Hubris, Beinart warns against “pushing ideas further and
further, until, like a swelled balloon, they burst.” We have
arrived at that bursting point. The end of Zionism will not be
the disaster that so many Jews – and some Christians —
fear. Rather, it will open the Jewish people to a future where
the Other is embraced, rather than back to a past in which armies
are mustered, walls are built, and enemies, real and imagined,
are vilified and attacked. “Saving” Zionism by trying
to make it into something it is not takes us in precisely the
wrong direction.
Mark Braverman is author of Fatal Embrace: Christians, Jews, and
the Search for Peace in the Holy Land, Synergy Press, 2010. Writing
and his blog can be found at http://www.markbraverman.org
