[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Zionism is the problem

[Bill Totten]

The Zionist ideal of a Jewish state is keeping Israelis and Palestinians
from living in peace.

by Ben Ehrenreich

Los Angeles Times, latimes.com (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us to a homeland or a right to self-defense that superseded anyone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 five 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 nearly 1,300 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 (2006).

Copyright 2009 Los Angeles Times

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-ehrenreich15-2009mar15,0,6684861.story


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