A little while ago in New York's East Village, I met the playwright David Zellnik to talk about the latest with his sweeping historical play: "Ariel Sharon Stands at the Temple Mount and Dreams of Theodor Herzl." The play offers a critique of Zionism-as-it-has-unfolded in a kind of conversation between Herzl and Sharon, and when I saw it at a workshop about a year ago, I found it thrilling and devastating. Then this summer it was performed at Theater J, a Jewish space in Washington, and got a rave review in the Wash. Post. It's only a matter of time before this ambitious play gets the big production it deserves, and makes Zionism and prophecy a live subject at New York dinner tables and restaurants and offices. "Sharon/Herzl" is that powerful.
David Zellnik has lately visited Israel and the occupied territories; see his moving portrait of a Hebron Palestinian with a skin condition here. That portrait shows Zellnik as a universalist, someone who thinks about the human family, not just the Jewish family. And yet he writes from within a Jewish tradition, in a sense the tradition of Herzl, a playwright himself (and an assimilationist, for a while). Zellnik is an idealist, and the artistic vision he offers, of Sharon's militarism as a golem figure, has transformative potential. Hey, we are still struggling with Leon Uris's archetype of the macho Jewish male, which came out of the humiliations of the Holocaust.
What follows is a Q-and-A with the playwright:
When your play was first performed in upstate New York, people were enraged. Not this time. I gather the play has changed?
"I don't know if it’s because the world has changed, or the play has changed. Almost everyone in the audience responded to it and seemed to get it. The whole epic scope of Zionism is looked at less in anger and more with a sense of tragedy. Sharon became a more human monster." Did some Jews respond positively to the play? "Especially the men over 50 seemed remarkably ready to grapple with the costs of Zionism. My play aims to speak to those good people who believed in Zionism and still do. I haven't lost my sense that it has much more to answer for… but if the play doesn’t honor the original dream, then those people won’t listen to the history of how it actually got implemented.”
Does Israel's situation affect the reception?
“It strikes me people might be ready to hear my play because it seems that Israel too in a coma. No one has any ideas. Most people believe disengagement failed, and military solutions failed, and no one has a plan. The only one with a strong idea is Lieberman."
Your first trip to Israel. Impressions? "At first it seems like a nice, normal place. But I kept having this whiplash.
Haaretz is devastating to read. The articles were all like: polls
showing how many Israelis wanted to kick out Arab citizens, atrocities
in the territories....and then and then I’d look up and I’d see just nice people. And all of a sudden I had this understanding of how American Jews go there and think Israel is simply great. Cause if you don’t read the paper and don‘t go to, say, Hebron, it’s quite easy to miss what’s going on."
What about Zionism as a militarist ideology? "My play is an argument about what happens when a man takes a sweet friend and tries to make him strong enough to fight back in hostile territory. The way the play moves back and forth between 19th century Europe and 20th century Palestine, you start to viscerally understand how Jews are carrying the traumas of Europe to Palestine. In some ways we’re living in our own psychic drama there. It doesn't matter what the Palestinians do, they're always Cossacks and Nazis."
You and I both grew up with a sense of Jewish specialness, superiority. Is it sustainable now? “When you combine ethnic nationalism with a sense of Jewish exceptionalism, it’s trouble. Okay, so I like to think of New York as a Jewish town, but for plenty of people it’s not, it’s a Latin town or Irish or whatever. The problem is if my definition is tied to power. In New York I'm allowed to say that I like Jews and I think Jews are smart. But in Israel, it becomes really problematic because it’s tied to a power structure that favors Jews and all of a sudden you’ve taken my sweet little secret and it’s something trashy, something with consequences for people who aren’t Jewish. "
Talk about young Jews. "The only Jewish guy in the cast in Washington played Sharon. He had never heard of Herzl.
How did you use Sharon's illness in your latest version? "At the end of the play, Sharon asks Herzl's spirit to put the word of God in his mouth and raise him up again. Give me the chance, I can make peace, I can declare the borders of Israel. But Herzl says, 'You would give them ghettoes.' A lot about modern Israel would baffle Herzl but if there’s one thing he would know from, it’s a ghetto.”
You're a calmer person than I am. You're better at dealing with criticism. How do you do it? "I didn't get into screaming fights around my play, because I feel like with my play, I have to be better than that. Because they want me to get into that. But I truly believe that in any reasonable discussion my side will win. Reason is my friend. Let them see my passion, let them see I care about it. Maybe even let them see my anger. But never let my anger lash out, never let it insult."
Tell me about Jewish identity and Zionism/anti-Zionism. "Even people who believe in Zionism have to admit the cost. Ultimately I don't think the current situation is sustainable. I don’t Zionism offers a way forward that I as a progressive leftist can get behind, and I don’t think it’ll be through Zionism that Jews and Arabs live in peace in the Middle East. But I do understand why people are Zionists. I think of myself as a post-Zionist. Not an anti-Zionist. A post-Zionist doesn't trash Zionism at every turn. If you say you’re anti-Zionist what Israelis hear is: I wish you were never born. I don't want to say that. I’ve been to Israel and I had a good time."
Really amazing stuff, Phil. Thank you for making us aware of Zellnick's work and his views as well.
I hope that such an enlightenment can emerge within the Jewish community before there is a powerful resurgence of anti-semitism in this country (which looks inevitable if things continue on the current trajectory.)
It is good to read that you admit that anti-zionism is tasteless.
You can be post-zionist. What is that?
Allow others to be Zionists.
And criticize some likud, npr style delusionary zionists.
The majority of Israelis want to be Israelis, and remain thankful to the early Zionists for their sacrifice.
A good article in Haaretz by Ruth Gavison:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/909325.html
Brian "Gorilla", in case you read this I want you to remember the title of the post on Mathew Yglesias' blog commenting that corageous article in Adbusters ("Why won't anyone say they're jewish?"): the title of his post was: "Yes, it's Anti-Semitic."
Yglesias (and Josh Marshall, by the way) contributed mighthly for the lobby efforts. They are not to be trusted.
The most appropriate form of "post-Zionism" is still in a Jewish state.
Its in a Jewish state renouncing expansion, and at peace with its neighbors.
In a free-trade and free-travel zone, but that does NOT have to wrestle with the need for common principles of governance with those that it does not share a value system.
Maybe in the future. But, to impose a form of democracy onto a disparate populace, is what we are "attempting" in Iraq, which I assume you agree is a gamble if not a folly.
" with those that it does not share a value system." (sic.)
Which value system would that be, Richard? Are you referring to the one on display in the occupied territories ? That shown in the deliberate starvation and economic sabotage of a whole people – the terrorising and the humiliation of the old, women and children – the land grabbing, the bulldosing of homes, the 'targeted assassinations ?
Listen to Tony Judt:
"I remember well, in the spring of 1967, how the balance of student opinion at Cambridge University was overwhelmingly pro-Israel in the weeks leading up to the Six-Day War – and how little attention anyone paid either to the condition of the Palestinians or to Israel's earlier collusion with France and Britain in the disastrous Suez adventure of 1956. In politics and in policy-making circles only old-fashioned conservative Arabists expressed any criticism of the Jewish state; even neo-Fascists rather favored Zionism, on traditional anti-Semitic grounds.
…
As recently as the early 1990s, most people in the world were only vaguely aware of the "West Bank" and what was happening there. Even those who pressed the Palestinians' case in international forums conceded that almost no one was listening. Israel could still do as it wished.
The Israeli nakba
But today everything is different. We can see, in retrospect, that the victory of Israel in June 1967 and its continuing occupation of the territories it conquered then have been the Jewish state's very own nakba: a moral and political catastrophe. Israel's actions in the West Bank and Gaza have magnified and publicized the country's shortcomings and displayed them to a watching world. Curfews, checkpoints, bulldozers, public humiliations, home destructions, land seizures, shootings, "targeted assassinations," the separation fence: All of these routines of occupation and repression were once familiar only to an informed minority of specialists and activists. Today they can be watched, in real time, by anyone with a computer or a satellite dish – which means that Israel's behavior is under daily scrutiny by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. The result has been a complete transformation in the international view of Israel. Until very recently the carefully burnished image of an ultra-modern society – built by survivors and pioneers and peopled by peace-loving democrats – still held sway over international opinion. But today? What is the universal shorthand symbol for Israel, reproduced worldwide in thousands of newspaper editorials and political cartoons? The Star of David emblazoned upon a tank.
…
… it has redefined Israel forever. It has become commonplace to compare Israel at best to an occupying colonizer, at worst to the South Africa of race laws and Bantustans. In this capacity Israel elicits scant sympathy even when its own citizens suffer: Dead Israelis – like the occasional assassinated white South African in the apartheid era, or British colonists hacked to death by native insurgents – are typically perceived abroad not as the victims of terrorism but as the collateral damage of their own government's mistaken policies.
Such comparisons are lethal to Israel's moral credibility. They strike at what was once its strongest suit: the claim of being a vulnerable island of democracy and decency in a sea of authoritarianism and cruelty; an oasis of rights and freedoms surrounded by a desert of repression. But democrats don't fence into Bantustans helpless people whose land they have conquered, and free men don't ignore international law and steal other men's homes. The contradictions of Israeli self-presentation – "we are very strong/we are very vulnerable"; "we are in control of our fate/we are the victims"; "we are a normal state/we demand special treatment" – are not new: they have been part of the country's peculiar identity almost from the outset. And Israel's insistent emphasis upon its isolation and uniqueness, its claim to be both victim and hero, were once part of its David versus Goliath appeal.
Collective cognitive dysfunction
But today the country's national narrative of macho victimhood appears to the rest of the world as simply bizarre: evidence of a sort of collective cognitive dysfunction that has gripped Israel's political culture. And the long cultivated persecution mania – "everyone's out to get us" – no longer elicits sympathy. Instead it attracts some very unappetizing comparisons: At a recent international meeting I heard one speaker, by analogy with Helmut Schmidt's famous dismissal of the Soviet Union as "Upper Volta with Missiles," describe Israel as "Serbia with nukes."
Israel has stayed the same, but the world – as I noted above – has changed. Whatever purchase Israel's self-description still has upon the imagination of Israelis themselves, it no longer operates beyond the country's frontiers. Even the Holocaust can no longer be instrumentalized to excuse Israel's behavior. Thanks to the passage of time, most Western European states have now come to terms with their part in the Holocaust, something that was not true a quarter century ago. From Israel's point of view, this has had paradoxical consequences: Until the end of the Cold War Israeli governments could still play upon the guilt of Germans and other Europeans, exploiting their failure to acknowledge fully what was done to Jews on their territory. Today, now that the history of World War II is retreating from the public square into the classroom and from the classroom into the history books, a growing majority of voters in Europe and elsewhere (young voters above all) simply cannot understand how the horrors of the last European war can be invoked to license or condone unacceptable behavior in another time and place. In the eyes of a watching world, the fact that the great-grandmother of an Israeli soldier died in Treblinka is no excuse for his own abusive treatment of a Palestinian woman waiting to cross a checkpoint. "Remember Auschwitz" is not an acceptable response.
…
And so, shorn of all other justifications for its behavior, Israel and its supporters today fall back with increasing shrillness upon the oldest claim of all: Israel is a Jewish state and that is why people criticize it. This – the charge that criticism of Israel is implicitly anti-Semitic – is regarded in Israel and the United States as Israel's trump card. If it has been played more insistently and aggressively in recent years, that is because it is now the only card left.
…
… Jews outside of Israel pay a high price for this tactic. Not only does it inhibit their own criticisms of Israel for fear of appearing to associate with bad company, but it encourages others to look upon Jews everywhere as de facto collaborators in Israel's misbehavior. When Israel breaks international law in the occupied territories, when Israel publicly humiliates the subject populations whose land it has seized – but then responds to its critics with loud cries of "anti-Semitism" – it is in effect saying that these acts are not Israeli acts, they are Jewish acts: The occupation is not an Israeli occupation, it is a Jewish occupation, and if you don't like these things it is because you don't like Jews.
…
Something is changing in the United States.
…
This new willingness to take one's distance from Israel is not confined to foreign policy specialists. As a teacher I have also been struck in recent years by a sea-change in the attitude of students. One example among many: Here at New York University I was teaching this past month a class on post-war Europe. I was trying to explain to young Americans the importance of the Spanish Civil War in the political memory of Europeans and why Franco's Spain has such a special place in our moral imagination: as a reminder of lost struggles, a symbol of oppression in an age of liberalism and freedom, and a land of shame that people boycotted for its crimes and repression. I cannot think, I told the students, of any country that occupies such a pejorative space in democratic public consciousness today. You are wrong, one young woman replied: What about Israel? To my great surprise most of the class – including many of the sizable Jewish contingent – nodded approval. The times they are indeed a-changing. "
As to Steve's ridiculous non sequiturs about the esteem Israel is held in (by Palestinians of all people): they are best passed over in silence. Go and inform yourself Steve – and don't come to us mouthing the platitudes of the MSM on a leader who has become inconvenient to the "New York money men", recently more precisely defined by Hersh as the Jewish money men.
Former IDF prison guard calls M&W "the most mainstream attack, against the political enfranchisement of American Jews since the era of Father Coughlin":
"The Usual Suspect," Jeffrey Goldberg, New Republic
link to tnr.com
Arie,
You respond to proposal with vitriol.
The proposal is based on the concept of consensual governance, which is most obviously met by a two-state solution, including a Palestinian state and a Jewish state.
There is no "post-Zionism" until the characteristics of confident safety for Jews as Jews is reached.
And then, its an if.
Its a nice phrase, but without meaning.
Thanks for the link to the New Republic article.
Even Playboy Magazine has gone antisemitic–
"Israel Shouldn’t Get a Free Pass: Real Debate Is Not Anti-Semitic"
Jonathan Tasini, Playboy, Oct. 2007
link to sabbah.biz
(CAMERA has already attacked them, but this is what happens when you don't own 100% of the media — the truth keeps leaking out.)
Goldberg, realizing that the term 'anti Semitic' will no longer do has replaced it with 'Judeocentric'which appears to be shorthand for such varied company as Buchanan, David Duke, Farrakhan, Walt and Mearsheimer …. and, it seems, AIPAC (because 'philo-Semites' can also be 'Judeocentric').
Well, he won't frighten the horses with that term.
For the rest of his review a sentence of Judt's article above will do:
"And the long cultivated persecution mania – "everyone's out to get us" – no longer elicits sympathy."
Who is saying "everyone" Arie?
Names are named. Specifics. Real.
Yes Arie – Who is saying everyone?