Those Who Forget the Past

by Ron Rosenbaum

  The specter of a Jewish-Zionist lobby/conspiracy that controls state power and the media, particularly in America, has become a significant theme in the writings of left-wing political journalists in Europe. So, for example, Robert Fisk (“I Am Being Vilified for Telling the Truth About Palestinians,” Independent,December 13, 2000) and John Pilger (“Why My Film Is Under Fire,” Guardian, September 23, 2002) insist that a powerful Zionist lobby operating in Britain but directed from America is working with considerable success to suppress all objective reporting and critical discussion of Israel. The January 14, 2002, issue of the New Statesman ran two articles on the Zionist lobby. The cover of the issue featured a large golden Star of David piercing the center of a British flag over the caption “A Kosher Conspiracy?” The first piece, by Dennis Sewell, concluded that the lobby, to the extent that it exists, is largely ineffective in stemming the tide of hostile reporting and comment on Israel. But the second article, by Pilger, repeated his claim of Zionist power in the British government and the press. It also included the comment that “Blair’s meeting with Arafat served to disguise his support for Sharon and the Zionist project.” For Pilger, then, Sharon’s appalling policies are only derivative problems. The real target is the country as such, reduced to an ideological slogan as “the Zionist project.” Peter Wilby, editor of the New Statesman, apologized for the offensive cover in an editorial that appeared in the February 11, 2002, issue. He explained that it had been innocently intended to attract attention on the newsstand. He did not address the obvious question of why a venerable publication of the Labor left should choose to use an image clearly reminiscent of Nazi iconography to promote its sales. It is too facile to dismiss this incident as a passing mistake of judgment. Sneering chatter of a powerful international Jewish lobby, once the stock in trade of fascist propaganda, has now become a staple of left-wing comment on Israel in the British and European press. By contrast, the activities of Arab, Muslim, and pro-Palestinian advocacy groups in the media and public discussion of the Middle East have gone largely unremarked. It is generally assumed, quite reasonably, that such groups have a natural role to play in debates on conflicts that concern them directly. Oddly, these assumptions do not extend to Jewish and Israeli advocacy groups.

  The contrast between Europe and North America in this matter is clear. While by no means free of anti-Jewish prejudice, North America defines itself as an immigrant society in which ownership of the country is not the preserve of a single native group. Jews function like other immigrant communities, most of which have succeeded in developing hyphenated personae, easily combining their ethnic identities with their active presence in the mainstream of American life. It is not surprising, then, that public Jewish visibility and the notion of a Jewish polity seem to pose less difficulty in America than in Europe and the Middle East.

  Although much of the criticism directed against Israel in the past two years of the intifada is legitimate if not always accurate, the growing hostility to the country stems, at least in part, from acute resistance to a Jewish polity and general difficulties with Jewish collective life. These attitudes are deeply rooted in the histories of both Europe and the Islamic world. The problem of distinguishing bigotry from reasonable opposition is difficult, given that in Israel the Jews are no longer dispossessed, but citizens of a powerful country with a large army that is now being used to sustain the occupation of another people. When considering the critical response to Israel it is reasonable to insist that it be accorded the same legitimacy and judged by the same principles as other countries. To require less of Israel is to allow it to claim rights that are denied to others. To demand more is to invoke a unique set of standards motivated by traditional prejudices. Both positions are unreasonable and must be resisted.

  EDWARD SAID

  A Desolation, and They Called It Peace

  NOW THAT OSLO has clearly been proven the deeply flawed and unworkable “peace” process that it really was from the outset, Arabs, Israelis, and their various and sundry supporters need to think a great deal more, rather than less, clearly. A number of preliminary points seem to suggest themselves at the outset. “Peace” is now a discredited and fraudulent word, and is no guarantee that further harm and devastation will not ensue to the Palestinian people. How, after all the land confiscations, arrests, demolitions, prohibitions, killings that occurred unilaterally because of Israel’s arrogance and power in the very context of the “peace process,” can one continue to use the word “peace” without hesitation? It is impossible. The Roman historian Tacitus says of the Roman conquest of Britain that “they [the Roman army] created a desolation, and called it peace.” The very same thing happened to us as a people, with the willing collaboration of the Palestinian Authority, the Arab states (with a few significant exceptions), Israel, and the United States.

  Second, it is no use pretending that we can improve on the current deadlock, which in the Oslo framework as it stands is unbreakable, by returning to golden moments of the past. We can neither return to the situation before the war of 1967, nor can we accept slogans of rejectionism that in effect send us back to the golden age of Islam. You cannot turn the wheel back. The only way to undo injustice, as Israel Shahak and Azmi Bishara have both said, is to create more justice, not to create new forms of vindictive injustice, i.e., “They have a Jewish state, we want an Islamic state.” On the other hand, it seems equally fatuous to impose total blockades against everything Israeli (now in fashion in various progressive Arab circles) and to pretend that that is the really virtuous nationalist path. There are, after all, one million Palestinians who are Israeli citizens: are they also to be boycotted, as they were during the 1950s? What about Israelis who support our struggle, but are neither members of the slippery Peace Now or Meretz or of the “great” Israeli Labor Party, led by Ehud Barak, widely presumed to be the murderer of Kamal Nasser and Abu Iyad? Should they— artists, free intellectuals, writers, students, academics, ordinary citizens—be boycotted because they are Israelis?

  Obviously, to do so would be to pretend that the South African triumph over apartheid hadn’t occurred, and to ignore all the many victories for justice that occurred because of non-violent political cooperation between like-minded people on both sides of a highly contested and moveable line. As I said in a recent article, we cannot win this struggle by wishing that all the Jews would simply go away, or that we could make everything become Islamic: we need the other wilayas and the people within them who are partisan to our struggle. And we must cross the line of separation—which has been one of the main intentions of Oslo to erect—that maintains current apartheid between Arab and Jew in historic Palestine. Go across, but do not enforce the line.

  Third and perhaps most important: there is a great difference between political and intellectual behavior. The intellectual’s role is to speak the truth, as plainly, directly, and as honestly as possible. No intellectual is supposed to worry about whether what is said embarrasses, pleases, or displeases people in power. Speaking the truth to power means additionally that the intellectual’s constituency is neither a government nor a corporate or a career interest: only the truth, unadorned. Political behavior principally relies upon considerations of interest —advancing a career, working with governments, maintaining one’s position, etc. In the wake of Oslo it is therefore obvious that continuing the line propagated by the three parties to its provisions, Arab states, the Palestinian Authority, and the Israeli government, is political, not intellectual, behavior. Take for example the joint declaration made by Egyptians and Israelis (mostly men) on behalf of the Cairo Peace and Peace Now. Remove all the high-sounding phrases about “peace” and not only do you get a ringing endorsement of Oslo, but also of the Sadat–Begin agreements of the late ’70s, which are described as courageous and momentous. Fine. But what does this have to do with Palestinians whose territory and self-determination were removed from those courageous and momentous Camp David documents? Besides, Egypt and Israel are still at
peace. What would people think if a few Israelis and Palestinians got together and issued ringing proclamations about Israeli-Syrian peace that were meant to “appeal” to those two governments? Crazy, most people would say. What entitles two parties, one who oppresses Palestinians and the other who has arrogated the right to speak for them, to proclaim peaceful goals in a conflict that is not between them? Moreover, the idea of appealing to Israeli government, expecting solutions from it, is like asking Count Dracula to speak warmly about the virtues of vegetarianism.

  In short, political behavior of this sort simply reinforces the hold of a dying succubus, Oslo, on the future of real, as opposed to fraudulent, American-Israeli peace. But neither, I must also say, is it intellectually responsible in effect to return to blanket boycotts of the sort now becoming the fashion in various Arab countries. As I said earlier, this sort of tactic (it is scarcely a strategy, any more than sticking one’s head in the sand like an ostrich is a strategy) is regressive. Israel is neither South Africa, nor Algeria, nor Vietnam. Whether we like it or not, the Jews are not ordinary colonialists. Yes, they suffered the Holocaust, and yes, they are the victims of anti-Semitism. But no, they cannot use those facts to continue, or initiate, the dispossession of another people that bears no responsibility for either of those prior facts. I have been saying for twenty years that we have no military option, and are not likely to have one any time soon. Nor does Israel have a real military option. Despite their enormous power, Israelis have not succeeded in achieving either the acceptance or the security they crave. On the other hand, not all Israelis are the same, and, whatever happens, we must learn to live with them in some form, preferably justly rather than unjustly.

  Therefore the third way avoids both the bankruptcy of Oslo and the retrograde policies of total boycotts. It must begin in terms of the idea of citizenship, not nationalism, since the notion of separation (Oslo) and of triumphalist unilateral theocratic nationalism, whether Jewish or Muslim, simply does not deal with the realities before us. Therefore, a concept of citizenship whereby every individual has the same citizen’s rights, based not on race or religion, but on equal justice for each person guaranteed by a constitution, must replace all our outmoded notions of how Palestine will be cleansed of the others’ enemies. Ethnic cleansing is ethnic cleansing, whether it is done by Serbians, Zionists, or Hamas. What Azmi Bishara and several Israeli Jews like Ilan Pape are now trying to strengthen is a position and a politics by which Jews and those Palestinians already inside the Jewish state have the same rights; there is no reason why the same principle should not apply in the Occupied Territories, where Palestinians and Israeli Jews live side by side, together, with only one people, Israeli Jews, now dominating the other. So the choice is either apartheid or it is justice and citizenship. We must recognize the realities of the Holocaust not as a blank check for Israelis to abuse us, but as a sign of our humanity, our ability to understand history, our requirement that our suffering be mutually acknowledged. And we must also recognize that Israel is a dynamic society with many currents—not all of them Likud, Labor, and religious—within it. We must deal with those who recognize our rights. We should be willing as Palestinians to go to speak to Palestinians first but to Israelis too, and we should tell our truths, not the stupid compromises of the sort that the PLO and PA have traded in, which in effect is the apartheid of Oslo.

  The real issue is intellectual truth and the need to combat any sort of apartheid and racial discrimination, no matter who does it. There is now a creeping, nasty wave of anti-Semitism and hypocritical righteousness insinuating itself into our political thought and rhetoric. One thing must be clear, in my firm opinion: we are not fighting the injustices of Zionism in order to replace them with an invidious nationalism (religious or civil) that decrees that Arabs in Palestine are more equal than others. The history of the modern Arab world—with all its political failures, its human rights abuses, its stunning military incompetences, its decreasing production, the fact that, alone of all modern peoples, we have receded in democratic and technological and scientific development—is disfigured by a whole series of outmoded and discredited ideas, of which the notion that the Jews never suffered and that the Holocaust is an obfuscatory confection created by the elders of Zion is one that is acquiring too much, far too much, currency.

  Why do we expect the world to believe our sufferings as Arabs if a) we cannot recognize the sufferings of others, even of our oppressors, and b) we cannot deal with facts that trouble simplistic ideas of the sort propagated by bien-pensant intellectuals, who refuse to see the relationship between the Holocaust and Israel? Again, let me repeat that I cannot accept the idea that the Holocaust excuses Zionism for what it has done to Palestinians: far from it. I say exactly the opposite, that by recognizing the Holocaust for the genocidal madness that it was, we can then demand from Israelis and Jews the right to link the Holocaust to Zionist injustices toward the Palestinians, link and criticize the link for its hypocrisy and flawed moral logic.

  But to support the efforts of Garaudy and his Holocaust-denying friends in the name of “freedom of opinion” is a silly ruse that discredits us more than we already are discredited in the world’s eyes for our incompetence, our failure to fight a decent battle, our radical misunderstanding of history and the world we live in. Why don’t we fight harder for freedom of opinion in our own societies, a freedom, no one needs to be told, that scarcely exists? When I mentioned the Holocaust in an article I wrote here last November I received more stupid vilification than I ever thought possible; one famous intellectual even accused me of trying to gain a certificate of good behavior from the Zionist lobby. Of course I support Garaudy’s right to say what he pleases and I oppose the wretched Gayssot Law under which he was prosecuted and condemned. But I also think that what he says is trivial and irresponsible, and, when we endorse it, it allies us necessarily with Le Pen and all the retrograde right-wing fascist elements in French society.

  No, our battle is for democracy and equal rights, for a secular commonwealth or state in which all the members are equal citizens, in which the concept underlying our goal is a secular notion of citizenship and belonging, not some mythological essence or an idea that derives its authority from the remote past, whether that past is Christian, Jewish, or Muslim. The genius of Arab civilization at its height in, say, Andalusia was its multicultural, multi-religious, and multi-ethnic diversity. That is the ideal that should be moving our efforts now, in the wake of an embalmed and dead Oslo, and an equally dead rejectionism. The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life, as the Bible says.

  In the meantime, we should concentrate our resistance on combating settlement (as described in an article I wrote [recently]) with non-violent mass demonstrations that impede land confiscation, on creating stable and democratic civil institutions (hospitals and clinics, schools and universities, now in a horrendous decline, and work projects that will improve our infrastructure), and on fully confronting the apartheid provisions inherent in Zionism. There are numerous prophecies of an impending explosion due to the stalemate. Even if they turn out to be true, we must plan constructively for our future, since neither improvisation nor violence is likely to guarantee the creation and consolidation of democratic institutions.

  DANIEL GORDIS

  Take Off That Mask

  Jerusalem, Israel

  Dear Jill,

  When The New York Times carries a story about a student newspaper at the Jewish Theological Seminary refusing to print a D’var Torah,35 something of interest is clearly happening. So, curious, I dug around the web a bit, found your submission, and read it with interest.

  Given that JTS—hardly a bastion of rabid Zionism these days—had refused to publish it, I expected something really outrageous. But on the surface, it wasn’t nearly as troubling as I’d expected. You’re concerned about the fair treatment of Israeli Arabs. So am I. You’re deeply troubled by the deaths of Palestinian civilians. So am I. You want Israel to be better. So do I
.

  So do many Israelis, Jill. Many of us are troubled by precisely the things that trouble you. That’s why, for a while, I found myself feeling that the whole thing was a tempest in a teapot. OK, so it was a bit political for a D’var Torah, and a bit left. But still, why the outcry?

  But I read it again, and again. And over a couple of days, I found it making me more and more uncomfortable. So I asked myself, given that there is so much that I, like many Israelis, actually agree with in your piece, why does it leave me with such a feeling of discomfort? There are, I think, three dimensions of the epistle that strike me as troubling. I’d like to tell you why.

  Before I do so, though, let me assure you that the critique that follows isn’t about you. We’ve never met, though I look forward to doing so. My comments here aren’t personal at all, but rather, are directed at a certain form of public discourse about Israel, which, I think, is reflected in your D’var Torah. What I’m addressing is a way of speaking about Israel that is found in the public utterances of groups like “Rabbinical Students for a Just Peace” (which you represent) and the American Jewish radical left, in general. Please read my letter in that spirit.

  The first thing that troubles me about your piece is your certainty that Israel is simply wrong. Your tone implies that Israel has alternatives that are readily apparent to anyone with even a modicum of moral sophistication. Where I live, we muse on our predicament all the time; but unlike you, none of us can seem to think of any easy answers.