DEBATE OVER "LEFT ANTISEMITISM"

[jacdon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]

The following article is from the June 7, 2003, issue of the email
Mid-Hudson Activist Newsletter, published in New Paltz, NY, by the
Mid-Hudson National People's Campaign/IAC and distributed by
jacdon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
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THE DEBATE OVER ALLEGED 'LEFT ANTI-SEMITISM'

Ever since the broad antiwar movement began to include the
Israel-Palestine question within its purview last year, recognizing the
obvious colonial relationship of one to the other and the disproportion
of state to individual violence, there has been a tendency on the part
of some U.S. supporters of the Jewish state to designate left critics of
Israel as "anti-Semitic."

The issue of Palestinian rights became prominent in the U.S. peace
movement as a result of the April 20, 2002, antiwar demonstration in
Washington just after the right-wing Tel Aviv government sent tanks and
troops into Palestinian territories.  Some 30,000 Muslims and
Palestinians of the diaspora, encouraged by the ANSWER coalition, joined
up to 70,000 other demonstrators, thus engendering an outcry from the
Zionist community.  

Earlier this year, Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of the progressive U.S.
Jewish magazine "Tikkun," specifically accused ANSWER of "anti-Semitism"
in an article he wrote for the Wall St. Journal.  The right wing
immediately added Lerner's allegation to its red-baiting attacks on the
left section of the antiwar movement.

Within the last month, two important articles have been published in
opposition to Lerner's attack, in The Nation magazine and in Tikkun
itself.

The Nation article was titled "Anti-Semitism, Israel and the Left," and
subtitled, "Who's really behind the crude equation between Israel and
the Jews?"  It was written by Philip Green, a member of the liberal
magazine's editorial board and author of several books, including
"Equality & Democracy." (Publication of this article in The Nation is
particularly interesting because some months ago a few of the magazine's
writers joined in the red-baiting of ANSWER and circulated a petition in
support of Lerner.)

The Tikkun article, "On Left Anti-Semitism and the Special Status of
Israel," was written by Bard College Professor Joel Kovel, a well-known
Mid-Hudson peace activist and left intellectual who has authored a
number of books including his most recent, "The Enemy of Nature." 

Green's article, appearing in the May 5 Nation (with several letters and
his lengthy reply in the June 9 issue), asks, are Israel "or its
policies above criticism merely because it and they are composed of or
made by Jews?  The clear answer that the left's ideological enemies want
to give to this question is yes:  if you criticize Israel, you're
criticizing Jews, and therefore you're an anti-Semite.  That thousands
of those critics, including many of the most distinguished (Noam
Chomsky, for example) are Jews themselves doesn't bother the right-wing
polemicists, who know they can always count on some conservative Jewish
ally to talk about 'Jewish self-hatred,' a self-serving ideological
concept without any clinical content at all, akin to the infuriating
psychiatric notion that if you disagree with an analyst's interpretation
of your motives you're merely displaying  'resistance.'"  

In his response to a critical letter, Green writes that he is "tired of
the libel... about 'questioning the right of [Israel] to exist.' 
Questioning the right of the current state to exist as such, yes;  but
the change to a different kind of state [with equal rights for all
citizens, including Palestinians, etc.] that various people, ANSWER
included, desire, even at its most extreme, could be accomplished by the
Knesset [parliament] in five minutes without a shot being fired or a
single Jew being discriminated against, let alone killed."

Unfortunately, The Nation has not included Green's article on its
website along with other articles from that issue, but copies of the
magazine are available at libraries, if you do not already subscribe.

Kovel's article appears in the May-June Tikkun.  In order to demonstrate
that the allegation about "left anti-Semitism" is false, he offers a
lengthy, nuanced and trenchant excursion into the nature of the Israeli
state, Zionism, and the plight of the Palestinian people. This piece,
too, is not available on the magazine's website but may be obtained
online at www.joelkovel.org.  It is well worth a careful reading.

"What, then," Kovel asks, "is the real character of the Israeli state
and the Zionism of which it is the fruit?  What are we to call a project
which, though it boasts of being a 'democracy,' reserves 92% of its land
for Jewish people? Where one who converts to Judaism or has a Jewish
great-grandmother is automatically given full rights to the land while
those others whose families merely happened to have lived there for
centuries are at best second-class and landless? Where Jews have full
legal rights and Palestinian rights have been 'temporarily' suspended --
since 1948? Where people have to carry identity cards, specifying
ethnicity (a category which may not include the identity of 'Israeli'),
and that determine how one is treated by the state? Where the
territories are laced with 'Jews-only' roads? Where political parties
that question the fundamentally Jewish nature of the 'democracy' are
outlawed? And that is afraid to draft a Constitution because it knows it
would have to declare itself defunct once it did.

"Is there any word for this except racism, institutionalized at the most
fundamental level of the state? Is not this the guiding logic of
Israel's militarization, and its mechanism of ruthless expansion and
repression -- and yes, the prospect of expulsion? Does it not devolve
onto society and through the Diaspora, corrupting the emancipatory
legacy of Judaism and sowing chauvinism and blind prejudice?

"The racist character of the Zionist state is the truth so hard to bear
by those who believe in Israel's fundamental legitimacy. But it also
disintegrates this belief, because racism at this level, where a whole
people is destroyed so that another people might thrive, epitomizes the
meaning of a crime against humanity. All claims of being 'the only
democracy in the Middle East,' or of saving Jews from anti-Semitic
oppression, or having fine symphony orchestras and universities, fade in
its glare."

Kovel puts forward a critique of the "two-state Israel/Palestine
solution," arguing, "How can there be any pretense to justice when one
side is asked to settle for a fragmented domain completely surrounded by
its oppressor, utterly dominated by the oppressor's economy, laced with
roadways reserved for its troops, where vital resources like water
remain under the oppressor's control, and where there are no real
guarantees for the withdrawal of the fanatical settlements cynically
augmented during the 'peace process?'"  

As an alternative, he suggests that Israel transform into a "non-racist"
state "beyond tribalism, and open to all."  This notion of a bi-national
state where the various communities would live in harmony is a
conception once favored by the progressive sector of Zionism but now
regarded as impractical or even idealist.  Kovel, however, believes it
is possible to revive this project, and that it could be successful.  As
a contemporary example of a relatively similar situation, he points to
South Africa's metamorphosis from a vicious apartheid system into a
single democratic state encompassing black and white.