OMNI
ZIONISM ANTHOLOGY #1
Compiled
by Dick Bennett for a World of Peace, Justice, and Ecology
https://omnicenter.org/donate
These readings offer a randomly selected, brief sampling of
criticism of Zionism mainly from the point of view of individual Jews and Jewish
peace organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace. I have not tried to represent the history of Christian Zionism,
which is also complex and abundant. --Dick
Esther Farmer and Rosalind Petchesky, and Sarah Sills,
eds. A Land with a People: Palestinians and Jews Confront Zionism. Monthly Review P (2023). https://monthlyreview.org/product/a-land-with-a-people/
Anti-Semitism Anti-Zionism Decolonization Palestine Reviews Settler colonialism Zionism A Land With A People Edited by Esther Farmer, Rosalind Petchesky and Sarah Sills. 226
pages, $19.
Review:
“’A desert which once bloomed.’ A
Land With A People” reviewed in the Indypendent by Eleanor J. Bader.
With few exceptions,
Jewish children reared in religiously observant households are taught to revere
Israel as a place of respite and safety, a country whose intrepid founders made
“a desert bloom.” What’s more, they’re taught that the area was a perfect set
up, “a land without people for a people without land.”
This, of course, is a
complete fabrication. As Palestinian-American attorney Noura Erakat writes in
the Foreword to A
Land With a People, “Zionism is not the triumphant story of Jewish
emancipation from centuries of antisemitism, but is a colonial project
facilitated by European imperial powers driven by a desire to remove Jews from
Europe rather than combat their own white supremacy.” Indeed, she explains, the
Zionism of Israel’s framers did not challenge Europe’s lingering hatred
of Jews, but instead relied on God’s alleged biblical promise to them, a pledge
that made Israel their “birthright.” The reality — that fulfillment of this
compact with the Almighty resulted in the dispossession of approximately
750,000 Palestinians — was ignored.
A rich tapestry of
voices: queer writers of Jewish and Palestinian descent and Jews from
non-European backgrounds are prominent. Several essays by people raised in
fervently-pro-Israel households provide texture and nuance.
A
Land With A People tells the story of Palestinian removal, but it also does
more than this. In 35 personal and scholarly essays, poems and photographs,
non-Zionist Jews affiliated with Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) join
Palestinian activists to share their grief, anger, and dreams of secular
coexistence. Atrocities committed by Israel are presented in stark detail and
the U.S. role in propping up the regime is outlined and denounced.
JVP activist Rosalind
Petchesky’s ‘Zionism’s
Twilight’ opens the volume with a brief history of Israel and the political
machinations that led to its creation. She begins by introducing the 1917
Balfour Declaration, Britain’s public statement of support for the
establishment of “a national home for the Jewish people.” Petchesky writes that
opposition to the declaration was immediate and notes that when the first
Palestinian Congress met in Jerusalem in 1919, participants demanded
independence for Palestine and rejected the legitimacy of British rule. Decades
of struggle followed. Nonetheless, in 1947 the United Nations General Assembly
agreed to partition Palestinian land and in May of 1948 the state of Israel
came into being.
Under the provisions
of the U.N. agreement, Jews living in every nook and cranny of the world were
automatically granted Israeli citizenship. Not so Palestinians. As Petchesky
reports, a 1952 Nationality Law gave Israeli citizenship only to those Palestinians
who had remained in Israel between 1948 and 1952, thus barring those who had
fled or been expelled from the country from legal residency.
Flash forward 70 years
and the legal restrictions have become far more egregious. Worse, Palestinian
territories that were initially under the jurisdiction of Egypt and Jordan,
including the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, are now under Israeli control.
And despite continued resistance to their endemic oppression, Israel continues
to rule Palestinian enclaves with an iron fist, suppressing dissent and
resisting international calls to respect Palestinian human rights.
A
Land With A People decries the inhumanity at the heart of Israeli social
policy, but the book’s
strength — and what sets it apart from other books that tread similar ground —
is the rich tapestry of voices that are included. Queer writers of Jewish and
Palestinian descent and Jews from non-European backgrounds are prominent. In
addition, several essays by people raised in fervently pro-Israel households
give the book texture and nuance.
Palestinian
territories that were initially under the jurisdiction of Egypt and Jordan,
including the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, are now under Israeli
control. Contributor Talia Baurer, for
example, writes in ‘Unlearning Zionism’ that, “I grew up knowing that Israel
was my homeland, that I had deep biblical and historical roots there, and that
its existence made me safer in the world.” Baurer’s beliefs, she explains,
began to shift when she entered college and encountered Students for Justice
in Palestine. “After my freshman year, I spent a month in Israel,” she
writes, “and visited the West Bank for the first time. My group toured the
Palestinian town of Susya with Breaking the Silence, an Israeli human
rights organization.” Seeing segregated streets and hearing first-hand accounts
of discrimination unsettled Baurer. “I finally let go of the historical
narrative of my childhood education,” she writes, “and began to hollow out my
own sense of what Israel and Zionism meant for me, my community, and the world
in general.” Hers is a thoughtful and
heartfelt explication and one that addresses the prominent conflation between
antisemitism and anti-Zionism.
Other contributors to
the anthology also tackle this terrain. In “An Israeli in New York Testifies
about Zionism and BDS,” U.S. law student Sagiv Galai, who was raised in the
West Bank, writes that supporting the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS)
movement “is not antisemitic, regardless of how much the right-wing and
powerful Zionist groups may want us to believe the opposite.”
You can find the above review
at the Indypendent.
https://indypendent.org/2022/03/a-book-for-people-who-want-to-know-more-about-a-land-with-a-people/
NAOMI KLEIN v. The False Idol of Zionism
Naomi
Klein. “Jews Must Raise Their Voices for
Palestine, Oppose the ‘False Idol of Zionism.’” Democracy Now (APRIL 24, 2024).
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TOPICS New York Gaza Senate Protests Israel Israel & Palestine
GUEST: Naomi Klein, award-winning writer and activist.
Thousands of Jewish Americans and allies gathered in
Brooklyn on Tuesday for a “Seder in the Streets to Stop Arming Israel” on the
second night of Passover, held just a block from the home of Senate Majority
Leader Chuck Schumer, to protest ongoing U.S. support for the Israeli assault
on Gaza. “Too many of our people are worshiping a false idol,” said
award-winning author and activist Naomi Klein, one of several speakers at
Tuesday’s rally. “They are enraptured by it. They are drunk on it. They are
profaned by it. And that false idol is called Zionism.”
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in
its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Among those who
addressed the crowd during the seder was award-winning author and activist
Naomi Klein. This is some of what she had to say.
NAOMI KLEIN: My friends, I’ve
been thinking about Moses and his rage when he came down from the mount to find
the Israelites worshiping a golden calf. The ecofeminist in me has always been
uneasy about this story. What kind of god is jealous of animals? What kind of
god wants to hoard all the sacredness of the Earth for himself? But there is,
of course, a less literal way of understanding this story. It is a lesson about
false idols, about the human tendency to worship the profane and shining, to
look to the small and material rather than the large and transcendent.
What I want to say to
you this evening at this revolutionary and historic Seder in the Streets is
that too many of our people are worshiping a false idol once again. They are
enraptured by it. They are drunk on it. They are profaned by it. And that false
idol is called Zionism.
It is a false idol that
takes our most profound biblical stories of justice and emancipation from
slavery, the story of Passover itself, and turns them into brutalist weapons of
colonial land theft, roadmaps for ethnic cleansing and genocide. It is a false
idol that has taken the transcendent idea of the Promised Land, a metaphor for
human liberation that has traveled across faiths to every corner of this globe,
and dared to turn it into a deed of sale for a militarist ethnostate.
Political Zionism’s
version of liberation is itself profane. From the start, it required the mass
expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and ancestral lands in the Nakba.
From the start, it has been at war with collective dreams of liberation. At a seder,
it is worth remembering that this includes the dreams of liberation and
self-determination of the Egyptian people. This false idol of Zionism has long
equated Israeli safety with Egyptian dictatorship and unfreedom and client
state. From the start, it has produced an ugly kind of freedom that saw
Palestinian children not as human beings, but as demographic threats, much as
the Pharaoh in the Book of Exodus feared the growing population of Israelites
and thus ordered the death of their sons. And as we know, Moses was saved from
that by being put in a basket and adopted by an Egyptian woman.
Zionism has brought us
to our present moment of cataclysm, and it is time that we say clearly it has
always been leading us here. It is a false idol that has led far too many of
our own people down a deeply immoral path that now has them justifying the shredding
of core commandments — “Thou shall not kill,” “Thou shall not steal,” “Thou
shall not covet” — the commandments brought down from the mount. It is a
false idol that equates Jewish freedom with cluster bombs that kill and maim
Palestinian children.
Zionism is a false idol
that has betrayed every Jewish value, including the value that we place on
questioning a practice embedded in the seder itself with its four questions
asked by the youngest child. It also betrays the love that we have as a people for
text and for education. Today this false idol dares to justify the bombing of
every single university in Gaza, the destruction of countless schools, of
archives, of printing presses, the killing of hundreds of academics, scholars,
journalists, poets, essayists. This is what Palestinians call scholasticide,
the killing of the infrastructure and the means of education.
Meanwhile, in this city,
the universities call the NYPD and barricade themselves
against the grave threat posed by their own students asking them —
CROWD: Shame!
NAOMI KLEIN: — students
embodying the spirit of the seder, asking the most basic question, asking
questions like “How can you claim to believe in anything at all, least of all
us, while you enable, invest in and collaborate with this genocide?”
The false idol of
Zionism has been allowed to grow unchecked for far too long. So tonight we say
it ends here. Our Judaism cannot be contained by an ethnostate, for our
Judaism is internationalist by its very nature. Our Judaism cannot be protected
by the rampaging military of that ethnostate, for all that military does is sow
sorrow and reap hatred, including hatred against us as Jews. Our Judaism is not
threatened by people raising their voices in solidarity with Palestine across
lines of race, ethnicity, physical ability, gender identity and generations.
Our Judaism is one of those voices and knows that in this chorus lies both our
safety and our collective liberation.
Our Judaism is the
Judaism of the Passover Seder, the gathering in ceremony to share food and wine
with loved ones and strangers alike. This ritual, light enough to carry on our
backs, in need of nothing but one another, even with — we don’t need walls. We
need no temple, no rabbi. And there is a role for everyone, including
especially the smallest child. The seder is portable, a diaspora technology if
ever there was one. It is made to hold our collective grieving, our
contemplation, our questioning, our remembering, and our reviving and
rekindling of the revolutionary spirit.
So, tonight — so,
look around. This here is our Judaism. As waters rise and forests burn and
nothing is certain, we pray at the altar of solidarity and mutual aid, no
matter the cost. We don’t need or want the false idol of Zionism. We want
freedom from the project that commits genocide in our name. We want freedom
from the ideology that has no plan for peace, except for deals with the
murderous, theocratic petrostates next door, while selling the technologies of
robo-assassinations to the world. We seek to liberate Judaism from an
ethnostate that wants Jews to be perennially afraid, that wants our children
afraid, that wants us to believe that the world is against us so that we go
running to its fortress, or at least keep sending the weapons and the donations.
That is a false idol.
And it’s not just Netanyahu. It’s the world he made and the world that made
him. It’s Zionism. What are we? We, in these streets for months and months, we
are the exodus, the exodus from Zionism. So, to the Chuck Schumers of this world,
we do not say, “Let our people go.” We say, “We have already gone, and your
kids, they are with us now.”
AMY GOODMAN: Award-winning
journalist and author Naomi Klein, speaking at what was called the “Seder in
the Streets to Stop Arming Israel” on Tuesday at Grand Army Plaza in
Brooklyn, a block from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s home. Special
thanks to Hana Elias, Eric Halvarson and Ishmael Daro of Democracy Now!
US Judaism’s Anti-Zionism
Aaron Gell. “Has
Zionism Lost the Argument?” The New
Republic (April 2024).
Dissident is an unpaid
position, Steve Naman told me this fall. The 77-year-old resident of
suburban Atlanta is the longtime president (and accountant, webmaster, and
proofreader) of the American Council for Judaism—for decades the lonely
standard-bearer of the Reform movement’s beleaguered anti-Zionist wing. In its
heyday, the group boasted as many as 20,000 members, and its combative
director, Rabbi Elmer Berger, was a reliable thorn in the side of the
Zionist establishment. Berger was a devoted advocate of American Jewish
assimilation—a fulfillment, in his view, of the universalism espoused by the
Hebrew prophets. Perhaps more important, he was a fierce opponent of Jewish
nationalism, which he considered an invitation to catastrophe. . . .MORE https://newrepublic.com/article/179430/zionism-lost-argument-american-jews-israel
Two books by Bernard Avishai, 1987 and 2002.
Avishai, Bernard. The Tragedy of Zionism: How Its Revolutionary Past
Haunts Israel.1987. https://www.amazon.com ›
Tragedy-Zionism-Revolutio...
Bernard Avishai, The
Tragedy of Zionism — Revolution and Democracy in the Land of Israel, (New
York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1985). Reviewed by Moshé Machover (November/December 1987) https://merip.org/1987/11/avishai-the-tragedy-of-zionism/
By far the best part
of this book is its epilogue, in which Avishai berates American Jews for their
uncritical adulation and idolization of Israel and its policies, to the point
that “Israeli politicians, including the guilty General Sharon, [are] received
in American synagogues with a reverence justly denied them at home” (p. 353).
Among non-Orthodox American Jews, this subservience has replaced the Jewish
religion as the basis for Jewish identity and institutional life. Avishai — a
Jew who tried to make his home in Israel but returned to Canada when, after
three years, he and his wife felt they “were living among foreigners” —
believes in the possibility and desirability of developing a modern secular
Jewish identity in America, but feels that it must not be based-on servility to
Israeli policies and the new post-1967 Zionism.
Avishai is by no means
anti-Zionist. In the rest of the book, he argues that while pre-1948 Labor
Zionism was “a good revolution” (p. 10), admirable in every way, it became
outdated with the founding of Israel. This old Zionism, incapable of serving as
the guiding ideology of a democratic state, ought to have been discarded.
Instead, it was maintained but became increasingly ossified, holding on to
power by means of anachronistic bureaucracies such as the Histadrut and the
Jewish Agency. Since 1967, this atrophied Labor Zionism has been increasingly
displaced by something much worse: the new Zionism of the rightwing and the
religious movements — expansionist, fundamentalist, chauvinist and therefore
inconsistent with democracy. This post-1948 process is what he regards as the
“tragedy” of Zionism.
Avishai’s main thesis
cannot be dismissed out of hand, even if it must ultimately be rejected. Nor
should he be condemned for writing, in effect, a propaganda tract rather than a
dispassionate account. What does condemn this book is its cavalier treatment of
the truth, its sheer lack of veracity. . . .
Avishai.
The Tragedy of Zionism: How Its Revolutionary Past Haunts Israel. Helios Press, 2002. Publisher's
Weekly called The Tragedy of Zionism "an
explosive book.”
Contents
Revolution: The Making
of Zionist Institutions -- Introduction: The Jewish Problem -- Political
Zionism -- Cultural Zionism -- The Conquest of Labor -- Class to Nation -- The
Contradictions of Self-determination -- Independence or Colonialism -- State and
Revolution -- The End of Zionism? -- New Zionism and the Trial of Israeli
Democracy -- A New Zionism for Greater Israel -- The West Bank Tragedy --
Democracy or Zionism? -- Conclusion: The Divisions of Unity and Beyond --
Epilogue: Tribal Warfare.
REVIEW
Allan C. Brownfeld . “Which Israel Will Prevail: The One ‘Which
Wants Normality or the Messianic One?’” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, August 2005, pages 44-45. https://www.wrmea.org/2005-august/israel-and-judaism-which-israel-will-prevail-the-one-which-wants-normality-or-the-messianic-one.html
. . .In his book The
Tragedy of Zionism: How Its Revolutionary Past Haunts Israeli Democracy, Bernard
Avishai, dean of the Raphael Recanti International School and a professor of
business and government at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel,
writes that from the beginning there has been a tension between democracy
and Jewish nationalism: “Israel’s founders had only a limited imagination
for democracy as an end in itself, acting at critical moments out of sheer
expediency. As democrats, they introduced basic laws protecting freedom
of expression and electoral protocols. As Zionists, they maintained,
say, discriminatory property rights to secure the hegemony of Hebrew labor
communes, enacted immigration and residence laws that required theocratic
stipulations of Jewish status, and ceded key civil powers (marriage, burial) to
the Orthodox rabbinate. It was impossible to tell, in other words, whether
Israel’s founders were building a (mainly) Jewish democratic state, or a
(mainly) democratic Jewish state. This confusion was, and is, unsustainable.”
From the beginning there has been a tension
between democracy and Jewish nationalism.
The late Rabbi Meir Kahane argued relentlessly
before his assassination that contemporary Zionism was inconsistent with
democracy, and exhorted West Bank settlers to expel Palestinian Arabs from
their homes. Avishai “fears that, inadvertently, he hit on something
directionally right, though he took it to absurd lengths: that people who call
themselves Zionists today shy away from the grandeur of democracy. They are
afraid to compete in a marketplace of ideas.”
The “new” Zionism which emerged in Israel after the 1967 war,
Avishai reports, is one that frankly justifies Israeli national rights in terms
of Orthodox fundamentalist religious claims. Today, rabbis declare that Jewish
law prohibits ceding an inch of the West Bank to the Palestinians. “The
hardening of Israeli attitudes toward territorial compromise,” he writes,
“brought with it a new Zionist vocabulary of double-think names for
occupied territory: Yehuda V’Shomron (Judea and Samaria) for the West Bank;
Schechem for the Arab town of Nablus. The Education Ministry quickly issued new
national maps of Eretz Yisrael to public school classrooms, maps without clear
borders, or even the ”˜green line,’ which had previously divided Israel and the
West Bank.”
Gush Emunim quickly established itself as the
essential voice of the new Zionist program. For them, the Promised Land was
united and the Messiah was at hand. One leader expostulated: “Amos was here.
David was here, he tended his sheep here, everything that makes us a nation
happened here.”
Herrenvolk Democracy
Author A.B. Yehoshua has compared the West Bank to a tar baby, arguing that the
more the Israeli government strives to subdue Arabs, the more it sacrifices its
own moral independence. According to Meron Benvenisti, the former deputy mayor
of Jerusalem, most Israeli Jews have become accustomed to living in what he
calls Herrenvolk democracy, with first-class citizenship for
Jews and second-class citizenship for Arabs. “Since 1967,” Avishai writes,
“there has been polarization, a coarsening of political rhetoric, the stirrings
of racism...Over 60 percent of young Israelis believe Arabs should not be
accorded full rights in the state.”
What of the future? Writing in the January/Febuary 2005 issue
of Harpers, Avishai points to the fact that Israel’s
Declaration of Independence declares it “a Jewish state,” but also promises to
ensure the “complete equality of social and political rights to all its
inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.” Avishai urges Israel to
move toward a secular future in order to save its society from itself, perhaps
some kind of association with the European Union or NATO. “Israel would still
be a ”˜Jewish state,’” he writes, “whose national literacy and artistic
masterpieces, created in Hebrew, would be open to the cultural and scientific
currents of the developed world...Israel would have to replace the Law of Return, but it could
still have laws that prefer immigrants who are Diaspora Jews or the victims
of anti-Semitism.”
While
Avishai admits that such a scenario may be a “pipe dream,” he is certain that
Israel must resolve the tension between Jewish nationalism and democratic
principles. He fears that the recent transformation of Zionism along more
nationalistic and messianic lines has created an even greater danger for
Israel’s future. He urges American Jews to help Israel
advance toward genuine democracy, not defend its actions when they fall short
of such an ideal.
Which Israel will
prevail is impossible to know. But all of its friends who cherish democracy,
freedom and equality should make their voices heard now, before it is too late
to influence events. [Brownfeld writing in 2005. From the perspective of 2024, Avishai’s
scenario for a democratic Israel was a pipe dream. --D]
Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist
and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal
published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor
of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for
Judaism.
ZIONISM’S EXTERMINATION PROJECT: PERMANENT
NAKBA
“Notes
from the Editors.” The Monthly Review (February 2024) (Volume 75, Number 9).
As Israel continues its atrocities in Gaza, the
editors examine the nature of exterminism and its relation to what threatens to
become a permanent Nakba. The explicit aim, they contend, of Zionism’s
settler colonial project is nothing less than the extermination—in the
classical sense of the term—of the entire Palestinian population. | more… Source
. . .Exterminism was
woven into the whole myth of the frontier in the United States. For Frederick Jackson Turner, writing
in The Frontier in American History, the frontier “begins
with the Indian and the hunter; it goes on to tell of the disintegration of
savagery.” In 1893, Turner pronounced that the frontier had closed in 1890, the
year of the Wounded Knee Massacre (Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History [New York: Henry
Holt and Co., 1921], 1, 11).
In The Winning of the West, Theodore Roosevelt expressed
the exterminist views of settler colonialism when he wrote: “The most
ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages, though it is apt to be
also the most terrible and inhuman. The rude, fierce settler who drives the
savage from the land lays all civilization under a debt to him. American and
Indian, Boer and Zulu, Cossack and Tartar, New Zealander and Maori—in each case
the victor, horrible though many of his deeds are, has laid deep the foundations
for the future greatness of a mighty people” (Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, vol. 3 [New York: G. P. Putnam
and Sons, 1889], 45).
How does this history
of settler colonialism relate to the Zionist project in Israel and to
the horrors now transpiring in Gaza? The Syrian historian Constantin Zurayk
employed the Arabic word Nakba (“catastrophe”)
in 1948 to refer to the forcible expulsion of Palestinians from their land, in
line with the Zionist project of making Israel into a Jewish ethnoreligious
state. This meant the removal of more than a million Palestinians,
descended from a population that had inhabited the land in the region for thousands
of years. The result was the initiation of what is now understood as a permanent Nakba, aimed at the complete extermination
(in the classic sense of the term) of the Palestinian people. Moreover, since
the 1960s, Marxist and Palestinian analysts have theorized it as a form of
settler colonialism, with all that implies in terms of a logic of exterminism
(Vijay Prashad, “The No-State Solution Becomes More and More Real: Israel’s
Permanent Nakba Continues,” Asia Times, December
14, 2023; see also “Notes from the Editors,” Monthly Review 76,
no. 8 [January 2024]: c2–63). . . . https://monthlyreview.org/2024/02/01/mr-075-09-2024-02_0/?mc_cid=4629d0df9d&mc_eid=ab2f7bf95e
2024, Volume 75, Number 09 (February 2024)
