[Marxism] Jews against Zionism

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2008/10/israel-jewish-zionism-jews
Never criticise the family
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Published 02 October 2008

Zionism is one of the most contentious ideas, freighted with emotion 
by both partisans and detractors. Now some Jews are speaking out, 
breaking a long self-censorship

A Time to Speak Out: Independent Jewish Voices on Israel, Zionism and 
Jewish Identity
Edited by Anne Karpf, Brian Klug, Jacqueline Rose and Barbara Rosenbaum
Verso, 310pp, £9.99

Journey to Nowhere: One Woman Looks for the Promised Land
Eva Figes
Granta Books, 184pp, £14.99

Plowshares Into Swords: From Zionism to Israel
Arno J Mayer
Verso, 432pp, £19.99

The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel
Gabriel Piterberg
Verso, 298pp, £16.99

On the Other Hand
Chaim Bermant
Vallentine Mitchell, 352pp, £17.95

Before Edward Gibbon began The History of the Decline and Fall of the 
Roman Empire, he had thought of writing another - a history of 
England in his own time. But he shrank with terror from a subject 
where every reader is a friend or enemy, "where a writer is expected 
to hoist a flag of party, and is devoted to damnation by the adverse 
faction". Gibbon's words will haunt anyone who writes about Zionism, 
and they are brought to mind by a group of new books. The whole topic 
of Zionism, its causes and consequences, is a minefield. No other 
subject is so fraught emotionally, as well as intellectually, so 
rarely discussed sine ira et studio.

This is explained in part by the bullying which tells non-Jewish 
critics of Israel that they are anti-Semitic, and Jewish critics that 
they are self-hating, but there is more to it. Given the 
circumstances in which the Jewish state was born, in the shadow of 
the most horrible catastrophe in Jewish history, it was difficult - 
if not morally impossible - for most Jews to disown the newborn 
state. History was rewritten to evade the inconvenient fact that when 
Theodor Herzl wrote The Jewish State in 1896 and launched his 
audacious project, most of the Jewish people were either indifferent 
to political Zionism and such a state, or fiercely hostile.

In recent years there has been a significant turn in opinion. Younger 
readers may not remember that there was once a time when Israel was 
deeply admired in the west. Since the 1967 Six Day War there has been 
a reaction, slow at first and then accelerating, which has found 
eloquent expression among Jews themselves, as various as the 
"independent Jewish voices" collected in A Time to Speak Out, or Eva 
Figes's memoir, which is also a polemic against Israel, or the 
Israeli scholar Gabriel Piterberg, or the American historian Arno 
Mayer, or the late and much-missed Chaim Bermant.

Throughout, there runs a theme, of resentment at having been expected 
to conform to a party line, or a code of omertà. "What is 
intolerable," writes Gabriel Josipovici, "is your father telling you 
never to criticise the family because a family must always present a 
united front." And Jacqueline Rose addresses head-on "the myth of 
self-hatred". But Mike Marqusee, in defending left-wing Jewish 
critics of Israel from the charge of anti-Semitism, raises another 
problem. One can't deny that the cast list here is politically 
predictable, and three of these books come from the same publisher: 
Verso is the publishing arm of the New Left Review, which is 
symptomatic, and a pity, however much that list should be commended 
for issuing valuable books.

As an old-fashioned philo-Semitic assimi lationist (if I may say), I 
have felt strongly for some time past that it would be disastrous if 
any large public controversy were to develop in which all, or even 
most, Jewish opinion were on one side and all non-Jewish opinion on 
the other. In June 1967 the British, like the western Europeans and 
Americans, Jew and Gentile alike, overwhelmingly supported Israel. By 
July 2006, however, when Israel attacked Lebanon, British Jews who 
supported Israel were painfully isolated. The division of opinion 
throughout the world that summer went roughly speaking like this. On 
one side: Israel, the Bush administration, the United States 
Congress, much of the Diaspora and Tony Blair. On the other side: 
everyone else. In one poll, only 22 per cent of British voters 
thought that the Israeli response was justified.

And although Jewish opinion is itself divided, as these books 
demonstrate, it would be even more lamentable if this question were 
to become one of left against right. Such liberal western Jews as 
still feel fondly towards Israel cannot be pleased to notice that her 
strongest defenders are now on the intransigent right, not only in 
America, but among the dismal Anglo-neocons who have infiltrated the 
Tory party. Nothing could be healthier than for an intelligent and 
honest conservative critique of Zionism to appear, or rather to reappear.

As it is, Jewish anguish can take dispiriting forms. Eva Figes is a 
much-admired novelist, but Journey to Nowhere is not a book that is 
easy to warm to, written as it is with such anger and bitterness. 
Figes's family were Berlin Jews who managed to escape to London 
before the war, leaving behind Edith, their housemaid, also Jewish. 
She miraculously survived, made her way to Palestine, where she was 
friendless and unhappy - German Jews were not beloved of many other 
Zionists - and then came to London, where she told young Eva her 
extraordinary story. Figes weaves this into her own disillusionment 
with Israel, but with a boiling rage that does not much enlighten us. 
"Zionists and Nazis had more in common than is generally 
acknowledged," she writes. But maybe not that much, as even critics 
of Israel might agree.

In Plowshares Into Swords, Arno Mayer gives a sweeping and often 
illuminating overview of the story of Zionism. He tries to rescue 
forgotten heroes such as Martin Buber, Judah Magnes and Yesha yahu 
Leibowitz, who lived in the Holy Land and were deeply absorbed in 
Jewish life but who strongly opposed the chauvinistic and brutalising 
tendencies of Zionism. It might seem paradoxical that Mayer also 
voices some admiration for Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of 
right-wing ultra-nationalist Revisionist Zionism (and still a hero to 
Tzipi Livni, who seems likely to become prime minister of Israel 
shortly), but it is not so strange, given Jabotinsky's intellectual 
honesty and clarity.

Despite the immense time and space devoted to the Israeli-Palestinian 
conflict in the news media, Jacqueline Rose has observed that very 
little is ever written about Zionism as such. In The Returns of 
Zionism, Gabriel Piterberg tries to make amends with an analysis of 
the intellectual and literary origins of the Zionist ideology. He 
begins unpromisingly by saying that other studies "adhere to an 
Idealist causality, because they privilege not only the ideational 
sphere but also the intentions of the Zionist settlers", whereas his 
own book will insist "on collapsing several alleged dichotomies".

Must you? There is a curious cultural pheno menon on display here. 
Piterberg pays glowing tribute to Perry Anderson, thanked by Mayer 
also. But it was Anderson who, eight years ago, acknowledged that the 
only starting point for an honest left as a new century began was "a 
lucid registration of defeat", while also lamenting the execrable 
prose of too much Marxist-academic writing. Indeed so, and the two 
may be related. Especially in America, such writers are as remote 
from the real life of their country as 4th-century monks or hermits 
in the desert. Hermetic is the word for so much of their discourse, 
almost as though they don't want anything they write to be accessible 
to the mere multitude.

But Piterberg's book proves to be very well- informed, and even 
fascinating. He has examined numerous Hebrew texts unknown in the 
west, to friend and foe of Israel alike. There is a particularly 
striking section on Chaim Arlosoroff, one of the leaders of Labour 
Zionism, who was much cleverer, though much less ruthless, than his 
rival David Ben-Gurion. Arlosoroff was assassinated in Tel Aviv in 
1933 and it has always been supposed that his killers were 
Revisionists of some stripe or other. Ever since, it has been highly 
convenient for Israeli Labour and its western allies to make Labour 
look better by portraying the Revisionists as quasi-racists and fascists.

And yet it has always been clear to anyone who looked harder that 
what really distinguished Jabotinsky from Ben-Gurion in their 
attitudes to the Palestinian Arabs was that Jabotinsky expressed 
himself publicly with a frankness that Ben-Gurion thought 
inadvisable. As Piterberg shows, the martyred Arlosoroff himself 
rejected joint organisation with Arab workers, and expressly compared 
the Zionists with other European settlers elsewhere.

When scholars such as Mayer and Piterberg write about Zionism as a 
colonial project that assumed an inferior place for the Arabs, they 
tend to adopt a now-it-can-be-told tone, as though these are 
startling revelations. But they only seem so because of the 
prolonged, and truly weird, attempt by some Zionists, especially 
Labour Zionists and their fellow-travellers, to deny the obvious 
truth. Martin Peretz, the former owner of the New Republic in 
Washington and a most voluble champion of Israel, proclaims risibly 
that "Israel was an anti-imperialist creation" whose "decolonisation 
struggle looks very much like other decolonisations, in the Indian 
subcontinent, for example", and insists that the Jews who settled in 
the Holy Land "were not colonialists". Well, that's what they looked 
like to the Palestinians - and that's what both Jabotinsky and 
Arlosoroff were happy to call themselves.

But if the problem on one side has been denial, on the anti-Zionist 
side it's prochronism. Herzl and his colleagues were not cruel or 
rapacious men, they were men of their age. Political Zionism was born 
in the heyday of European nationalism and European colonialism, and 
it would have been surprising if it had not echoed both. Zionists 
from the 1890s stand accused of ignoring the wishes and interests of 
the indigenous inhabitants, but what thought did the British at that 
time give to the wishes and interests of the people they ruled in 
Asia and Africa - or the Americans to the wishes and interests of the 
Indians of the West?

Something else is missing. All of our contemporary Jewish critics of 
Israel focus their attention on the Palestinians and their treatment. 
It is a fine thing that such voices should have set aside group 
loyalty and returned to the noble Jewish traditions of justice and 
individual conscience. And yet one would never guess from these books 
that the passionate Jewish opposition to Zionism once had nothing to 
do with its effects on the Arabs and everything to do with its 
potential effects on the Jews. Claude Montefiore was president of the 
Anglo-Jewish Association and an exceptionally proud and pious Jew. He 
entirely rejected, as many Jews then did, what he called the 
fundamental Zionist propositions that the Jewish people were "a 
'nation', or might profitably become a nation".

Along with David Alexander, president of the Board of Deputies of 
British Jews, he wrote to the Times shortly before the Balfour 
Declaration in 1917, denouncing any proposal to invest the Jews in 
Palestine "with certain rights in excess of those enjoyed by the rest 
of the population". This could only "prove a veritable calamity for 
the Jewish people", for whom, wherever they lived, the principle of 
equal rights was vital. "The establishment of a Jewish nationality in 
Palestine, founded in this theory of Jewish homelessness, must have 
the effect throughout the world of stamping the Jews as strangers in 
their native lands," he wrote, "and of undermining their hard-won 
position as citizens and nationals of those lands."

Those prophetic words might have been understood by Chaim Bermant; 
and On the Other Hand, a collection of his pieces, is a reminder of 
what a sane as well as witty voice was lost when he died ten years 
ago. Brought up on a shtetl in Latvia, he came with his father, a 
rabbi, and family to Glasgow just before the war. After it, he 
repeatedly visited Israel and almost settled there. He hated the 
Revisionist right - he mentions how in Jerusalem in the early 1950s 
he shunned Kapulski's cafe, "the hangout for the Begin crowd" - and 
later became a ferocious critic of the settlers in "the Wild West", 
as he nicely called "Judaea and Samaria".

While he knew all about the contradiction in "religious Zionism", 
Bermant was more indulgent towards his Labour friends, and overlooked 
that other contradiction - what George Steiner has perceptively 
called Zionism as a secular-political movement invoking a 
scriptural-mystical justification "to which it could not, in avowed 
honesty, subscribe". Or as the Israeli writer Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, 
cited by Piterberg, puts it, "There is no God, but He promised us the 
Land" (thank the Lord, wherever he may be, that Zionism has not 
extinguished another great tradition - Jewish irony).

And yet what was most admirable about Bermant was his rejection not 
only of Zionist violence, but of the sense of embattled exclusion 
that underlay it. He whose entire larger family, and every childhood 
friend, had been murdered by the Germans in 1941 disliked the 
"Holocaust industry", Holocaust museums and studies, and the harping 
on this horror "as the central event in Jewish history", all of which 
"can have a pernicious effect on Jewish attitudes to the outside 
world. It intensifies paranoia and the sense of isolation." He 
regularly told readers of the Jewish Chronicle that the Jews were not 
and never had been friendless.

That is my own sentiment, reinforced by all of these books. Maybe 
there are still some Jews who don't particularly wish to hear their 
dilemmas and misgivings discussed by non-Jews, but I hope not. I 
could not agree more with Bermant's central message. And my own 
belief, which I like to think Jewish readers might understand, is 
summed up by an everyday phrase: We're all in this together.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft's books include "The Controversy of Zion: Jewish 
Nationalism, the Jewish State and the Unresolved Jewish Dilemma" 
(Perseus), which won an American National Jewish Book Award, "The 
Strange Death of Tory England" (Penguin) and "Yo, Blair!" (Politico's) 


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