In the Jewish-American community one can exhibit complete indifference to Jewish
culture and be an outspoken atheist and yet remain a perfectly acceptable member
of the tribe. On the other hand, any Jew who openly disapproves of the State of
Israel is at risk of being branded a traitor, a dupe of the ubiquitous anti-Semitic
enemy, and a self-loathing Jew. Most of the writers and activists represented in
Seth Farber’s Radicals, Rabbis and Peacemakers are unapologetic anti-Zionists,
and thus “traitors” in precisely that most honorable sense.
Farber’s book, lively and provocative, reflects not only the author’s
commitment to social justice, but [also], according to a brief biographical note,
“his faith in prophetic Judaism as a medium of spiritual/social transformation.”
So these conversations serve a dual purpose: on the one hand they explore the
Palestinian/Israeli struggle from a progressive Jewish point of view and, on the
other, they engage the question of contemporary Judaism itself, a post-Holocaust faith
that has largely replaced the love of Yahweh with the worship of Israel.
Noam Chomsky, in his conversation with the author, asserts that the very concept
of a state that is not the state of its citizens but of the Jewish people is an
illegitimate principle upon which to have founded the nation of Israeli. He clarifies
his advocacy of the two-state solution by explaining that he conceives such a political
configuration to be no more than a stepping stone toward a binational state, but
just how the creation of a tiny Palestinian state can lead to Israel and Palestine
becoming a single binational nation Chomsky does not make clear, and it is not impossible
that his current position reflects his own ambivalence about that issue. He also
hedges his bet on the right of return: the Palestinians must not be forced to give
up that right, he declares, “but the expectation that it will be implemented
is completely unrealistic. And to advocate that is just to cause pain and disaster
to the refugees.” Although this is a common enough position among progressive
Zionists, it is much the sort of logic Alice encountered after tumbling down the
rabbit hole. In similar fashion, Chomsky admits that the Jews had no more right
to establish a state on land that was not theirs than did the American colonists,
but then dismisses this most sticky and fundamental of issues with the casual comment
that he doesn’t “see a lot of point in these discussions.”
Joel Kovel, author and former psychoanalyst, is less equivocal: “Zionism is
a horrible mistake.” Israel is illegitimate in much the way Apartheid South
Africa was illegitimate. Because of its privileging of one racial group above others,
it is not capable of “joining the community of nation states that are grounded
in universal human rights.” Nor does Kovel have a particularly high opinion
of ancient Judaism, observing that despite the “transcendent ethical potential”
of its beliefs, ancient Judaism had “not just a sense of superiority but a
rejection of everybody else.”
Adam Shapiro, one of the founders of the International Solidarity Movement, who
became momentarily newsworthy in the United States when his parents were threatened
by outraged Brooklyn Zionists, observes that “any anti-Semitism that you find
in Muslim countries today is the direct result of the policies of Israel vis-à-vis
Palestinians.” When Farber suggests how ironic it is that the Jews turned
into oppressors, Shapiro replies that he does not find it at all surprising. “Over
and over and over in human history those who have been oppressed have turned into
the oppressors.” And when Farber suggests that something in Jewish ethical
tradition might have kept them moral for all those centuries, Shapiro reminds him
that those supposed Jewish values are nowhere in evidence in those colorful biblical
stories in which various peoples are exterminated by the pious Hebrews under God’s
mandate.
Phyllis Bennis, author of Calling the Shots: How Washington Dominates Today’s
UN, reminds us of something that is rarely acknowledged: even if the three-quarters
of a million Palestinians had fled in 1948 at the bequest of the Arab invaders,
as the Israeli version of history had for so long insisted, “those refugees
still would have the right to go home. It doesn’t matter the reason they fled.
Their right to return is not conditional on having fled for the right reason.”
Bennis also makes the important point that the US Mobilization for Peace and Justice,
by making opposition to US support for Israeli occupation a central component at
its mass anti-war demonstrations, has helped break through the solid wall of US
support for Israeli aggression.
Another conversation is with Steve Quester, an activist with the New York organization
Jews Against the Occupation who remarks, in a fascinating aside, that being queer
allowed him to figure out that everything he’d been taught about Israel was
a lie: “Whereas for straight Jews who’ve never gone through this process
of realizing that they’ve been systematically lied to by all aspects of the
society, it’s much harder for them to let go of all the lies they’ve
been taught about Israel.”
Another conversation is with Ora Wise, the passionately outspoken daughter of a
“very Zionist” Conservative rabbi, a young woman who worked with Rabbis
for Human Rights in the West Bank and was a founding member of the Ohio State Committee
for Justice in Palestine. Dealing head on with the criticism that the Palestinians
should organize non-violent resistance, she reminds us that terrorist attacks are
“the product of a brutal, vicious, controlling, oppressive military occupation
that is destroying the lives of millions of Palestinians and is deliberately destroying
Palestinians’ ability to organize in non-violent ways....”
The conversation with Norman Finkelstein, perhaps, by now, the most famous Jewish-American
critic of Zionist machinations, is peppered with statements by various eyewitnesses
to Israeli crimes and with chilling remarks by such luminaries as Moshe Dayan and
David Ben-Gurion and is followed by a brief essay by Finkelstein on Israel and Zionism.
Finkelstein’s discussion of Israeli “race-nationalism” in particular,
and Zionist ideology in general, is sharply focused and forceful, in that incendiary,
take-no-prisoners polemic style that makes his own books such a sizzling read. When
Farber quotes to Finkelstein a remark by the Jewish theologian Marc Ellis, to the
effect that those Jews struggling for Palestinian rights “may ultimately decide
the future of the covenant... and the Jewish people,” Finkelstein dismisses
the notion saying “I have no interest in covenants. I don’t know who
the Jewish people are. These are all metaphysical, extraneous terms for me.”
But they are not extraneous for Farber. Rather, for him, they are absolutely central.
To focus on such questions, Farber has chosen to include conversations with Norton
Mezvinsky, an advocate of the universalist humanism promoted by early Reform Judaism,
and with two orthodox Jewish thinkers: Daniel Boyarin and Rabbi David Weiss, both
of whom are anti-Zionists.
Mezvinsky, who was singled out by Daniel Pipes’ Campus Watch for “spewing
anti-Semitic calumnies,” is another who believes that Zionism is inherently
a racist ideology. On the matter of the two-state solution, he argues that what
the Israeli leadership has always meant by a Palestinian state is a small “autonomous
region” without any real sovereignty. Considering that 40% of the water
for all Israel comes from aquifers the Israelis have built in the West Bank, it
is hardly likely, he argues, that they will return the West Bank to the Palestinians.
If neither a single state nor two genuine states is currently realistic, why not
opt, Mezvinsky suggests, for the better, more democratic and just approach—a
binational state.
The two orthodox Jews have a difficult time squaring their hatred of Israel’s
military aggression with their biblical literalism. Though Daniel Boyarin believes
that Zionism is “out-and-out heresy,” he is clearly uncomfortable when
Farber reminds him of Yahweh’s commands that the Israelites commit genocide
against various peoples. He insists that such questions are simply “not relevant
anymore,” though clearly, if one is a literalist, they are indeed relevant.
When Farber poses the same sort of question to David Weiss, a rabbi of the Neturie
Karta community, the rabbi can only fumble helplessly in response:
But it’s not my issue to try to answer for G-d why he would want such a thing
which is in the bible which is accepted. I could look and try to find, according
to the Kabbalah, reasons, you know... that’s secret as far as, you know, there’s
a deeper meaning for everything...
For Weiss, the reestablishment of Jewish legitimacy over the holy land is a perfectly
legitimate goal—so long as it occurs after the return of the Messiah.
If Farber’s least favorite Jewish progressive is Rabbi Michael Lerner, who
has famously argued that Jews had the right to steal the Palestinian homeland as
an act of “affirmative action,” the figure whose position the author
most fully seems to respect is the theologian and philosopher Marc Ellis, who apparently
refused or was unable to participate in this project. Farber has included a brief
essay by Ellis and has made that author the subject of both his introductory and
concluding essays. Like Mezvinsky, Ellis advocates a Jewish theology of liberation
based on the tradition of the later prophets and is opposed to “Constantinian
Judaism,” the notion that the secular power of a national state is the true
fulfillment of the Jewish covenant. His is another variation of Reform Judaism’s
early but long abandoned commitment to universal brotherhood.
It would have been useful for Common Courage Press to have hired a decent copyeditor
to correct the shocking number of distracting typos and help the author organize
the material a bit more gracefully. The conversations seem to have been transcribed
to the page unedited, interviewer and interviewee constantly—and at times
disconcertingly—interrupting one other. A good editing of the individual conversations
would have helped. Those caveats aside, for anyone seriously interested in the question
of Zionism, Israeli colonialism, and the Palestinian struggle, Radicals, Rabbis
and Peacemakers will be a provocative and absorbing read. The complexity
and richness of the discussions are not the least of the book’s virtues. And
for those struggling with the issue of how believing Jews can frame their faith
and confront the disconcerting issues of Israeli aggression and Zionist supremacism,
it will prove doubly provocative and doubly a pleasure.
—Previously published in Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture
(Issue 5.2, Spring/Summer 2006); republished here by permission of Mary Kowit
described himself as “a poet, essayist, teacher, workshop facilitator, and
all-around no good troublemaker.” A member of the Jewish Voice for Peace,
he lived in Potrero, California with his wife Mary and several companion animals.
He taught poetry workshops in San Diego, and his handbook for writing poetry, In
the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet’s Portable Workshop, is widely used.
His most recent collections include The Gods of Rapture (City Works Press,
2006) and The First Noble Truth (University of Tampa Press, 2007).
His book of new and selected poems, Cherish: New and Selected Poems, is
forthcoming from the University of Tampa Press in spring 2015.
stevekowit.com
In Memory of Steve Kowit