I’m like Michelle Obama today, proud to be a Jew for once! Why? Aussie journalist Antony Loewenstein has a beautiful piece in Haaretz commending newly-elected Australian P.M. Kevin Rudd for his apology to the Aboriginals for the terrors done to the indigenous Australian population when children were forcibly removed from their families in the 50s and 60s–the "lost generation". Lots of Australian Jews have praised Rudd’s action. And of course Loewenstein makes the connection to the Australian Jewish response to the Nakba of ‘48, when Palestine was cleansed of 750,000 Palestinians, and the continuing dispossession of the West Bank.
no Jewish leaders seem capable of considering similar sentiments towards the Palestinians.
They blame somebody else for the fact that the number of settlers rose by five percent in the West Bank in 2007. They remain mute when Israel’s Interior Minister Meir Sheerit suggests destroying a Gaza neighbourhood. They look away when Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger urges Israel to move Gazans to the Sinai Peninsula.
New Republic editor Marty Peretz recently told Haaretz, "No occupation is kind or sweet. But bad things happen everywhere, all the time."
And where is Loewenstein’s argument appearing? In Haaretz, of course. Israel can hear these opinions. They are marginalized in my country, as the voices of Arabists, terrorist-sympathizers, appeasers. We are all morally inscribed and reinscribed in the Shoah here, but offered no education at all about the dispossession of the Palestinians. This is going to change! Young Jews, get on this moral train now! Be hip and be smart, don’t get left on a siding with the old stale generation while history moves forward! Toot-toot, hear that whistle blowin?
I love Loewenstein because he says what he thinks and doesn’t care who is upset. He just lets go with it. The scholar Marc Ellis wrote in Wrestling With Zion, the fabulous collection by Alisa Solomon and Tony Kushner, that the discourse among Jews over Israel is constructed in a narrow way. You are either for Israel or a critic, you are in the peace camp, or critical of the occupation. A dissenter. Those are the two spots. Well the critical dissenter spot is actually narrowly confined. You cannot be anti-Zionist or post-Zionist in that spot. If you think that Israel is a false prophet ala the Shabbatei Zevi, you cannot shout this out. You can’t be an Arabist or a member of neturei karta (the only Jews speaking loudly in one voice against atrocities in Gaza). You must always think of Israel’s existential crisis when you frame your criticism. (I think I have Ellis right.) And the point is that if you fundamentally question the moral framework of Israeli society, then the other dissenters distance themselves from you. It’s not a spot with any honor. So even the dissenters censor themselves. Well: Antony Loewenstein doesn’t, and that is wonderful. He is helping to build a new Jewish moral tradition in the free western Jewish-empowered world. Here he goes again:
The Zionist leadership in Australia and across the Diaspora prefers a state of war to a state of peace because they have not yet acquired the moral standing to take responsibility for Israeli actions.
Wow, that’s the sound of a Jew thinking. Wish there were more of ‘em.
Related posts:
- Non-Arab Nakba Awareness Hits New High: the Associated Press!
- AP Uses the Word ‘Expelled.’ Nakba Awareness Inches Forward
- Michelle Goldberg: ‘Everybody knows’ journalists sacrifice their careers by taking dissenting views on Israel/Palestine
- Palin Pick Shows, Awareness of the Israel Lobby Is Now Out There in the American Hinterland
- ‘be proud of your connection to Eastern European secular Jews’
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What history have you read?
Kushner/Solomon is of current issues and struggles (ethical and groups).
It was a good book though.
Did you read the essay "Why I am an anti anti-Zionist?"
"Aussie journalist Antony Loewenstein has a beautiful piece in Haaretz commending newly-elected Australian P.M. Kevin Rudd for his apology to the Aboriginals for the terrors done to the indigenous Australian population when children were forcibly removed from their families in the 50s and 60s–the 'lost generation' … no Jewish leaders seem capable of considering similar sentiments towards the Palestinians."
I read about Rudd's apology in Australian and British papers, but not in U.S. papers. One reason this subject is untouchable in the U.S. is that the Lakotah nation has unilaterally withdrawn from its treaties with the U.S. (on very solid grounds), and is demanding sovereignty over parts of five states.
http://www.republicoflakotah.com/
The U.S. is no more going to acknowledge such demands (much less APOLOGIZE) that it is going to acknowledge its tilt toward Israel in the one-sided 'negotiations' concerning a Palestinian statelet. The Palestinians, at best, will be granted an isolated, fly-blown, unviable, middle eastern 'Indian reservation.'
"The sound of a Jew thinking." That's a very powerful, thought-provoking statement. I am not a Jew. I was raised as a Christian, although three of my four grandparents were (nonobservant/cultural) Jews and therefore, as I understand it, I am eligible under the Law of Return to become an Israeli citizen. But I have no interest in dual citizenship because I am humbly grateful to be an American. I have no wish to trade or extend my identity as an American because that identity, properly understood, is rooted in freedom and the source of freedom, God. And that God is universal. It is the same deity named in the Declaration of Independence with four different terms (Nature's God, Creator, Supreme Judge of the world, Divine Providence) and who created all men (meaning all people and all genders) equal. So my identity as an American is actually a universal identity which recognizes the entire human family as my brothers and sisters. It transcends all particulars of time and place. It is not rooted in territory or ancestry. It is grounded in the timeless transcendent.
By contrast, identity as a Jew seems to be rooted in a specific time (Old Testamental, pre-Christian era) and a specific place (the land of Israel or Zion). The same limited sense of identity seems to drive the Palestinians, whose "self" is rooted in the same era and same territory. Hence, the apparently irresolvable enmity.
Do I understand the Israeli-Palestinian situation correctly in its fundamental sense of self? If so, please answer this: Is the Israel of today the same Israel of Old Testamental times? If there was an exile, a Diaspora, a mixing by marriage and conversion with Gentiles, a "return" to Israel of Jews who do not have the genetic signature of the Jews living at the time of Moses and David, and a portion of the population of Israel today which is not Jewish at all, then what is the connection of Israel today to the Israel of Moses, let alone Abraham? In short, what is the self-identity of today's Israelis? That's a long-winded question, but the complex structure of it reflects what I see as the complexity of Israeli identity today.
This is the sound of a Gentile thinking—and asking for feedback to help me clarify what is, for me, a critical question with a so-far-puzzling answer.
As an Australian I am proud of Kevin Rudd, and also of Antony, who has been in the vanguard of the movement Philip, Richard Silverstein, Tony Karon, Tony Judt and others have spearheaded over the last few years, to crack open the dominanance of the Likudnik narrative in perceptions of Jewish attitudes. The Carters and Walts and Mearsheimers are crucial but Jews themselves need champions for decency and common sense.
I was wondering the other night how much there is in the way of precedents for the apology (which would have happened ten years ago had John howard not been elected) – has Germany for example ever formally apologised to Jews for the Holocaust?
I have advocated a formal apology to the people of Iraq from the COW in lots of places and never had much more than a lukewarm response. Indeed, former Clinton speechwriter Michael Cohen told me he thought such gestures empty and not useful, or 'helpful' or something like that.
And I think in time that Israel will have to apologise for the Nakba and the miseries of the illegal occupation. And just as Germany has compensated many of the Jewish victims of the Nazi regime, Israel will at some point be compelled to recognise it's responsibility for Palestinian losses, which they will, at least partly, have to make good.
This is the big question that hangs over Rudd's apology to the Aborigines – he has so far squibbed the matter of compensation, but after the euphoria of the apology has died down, that question will remain.
There's an old European saying: "Why are we running when we're not on the right road?" By not allowing any criticism the Zionists are deaf to warnings that they're headed off a cliff.
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