Last month I attended the AIPAC conference in Washington and saw a lot to admire in people there but found the values deeply out of step with modern America (that link is to my piece in the American Conservative). One thing AIPAC does well is to tell “Zionist stories.” It shows a mini-documentary about someone who is building Israel, full of moving moments, then the lights go down and the announcer says, Ladies and gentlemen, will you please welcome– and names the person you just saw the documentary about. They walk out on stage to triumphant applause. It’s very Academy Awards, but schmaltzy. I was blown away each time, and particularly by Chen Abrahams, a young woman I could relate to, who lives on a kibbutz near Sderot.
I’ve decided to start posting Non-Zionist Stories. These are short bios of people I find inspiring, who are not Zionists, or who are working for reform in the Holy Land. The key question is, How did they allow themselves to go against the grain? The first one is by Jerry Slater, an academic who helped to bring the New Historians from Israel into the U.S. in the ’80s and is the author of important work on our media’s failure to say what is really going on there. I asked Slater when the lightbulb went on for him. He wrote:
“Growing up in NYC in the 1940s and early ’50s, I encountered plenty of
anti-Semitism of the usual variety–epithets and occasional punches from
the Irish or Italian kids. Although completely secular, like just about
everyone else from my generation, I regarded myself as a fervent
Zionist.
“In fact, I once volunteered to serve in the Israeli Navy if my
skills were needed in war–I had been an anti-submarine officer on a US
destroyer in the late ’50s, and a few years after that Egypt got several
subs from the Soviets, so I wrote to the Israeli Embassy to offer to
serve as an asw specialist on one of their destroyers, if war occurred
before they had fully trained their own people. (Response: thanks, but
we can handle it.)
“What made me change: facts. As an academic–and there’s no way to say
this without sounding pompous and pretentious–my first commitment is to
Truth. My disenchantment began in the early 1970s, when it became
increasingly apparent that much of, damned near all, the Israeli
mythology was largely false. Then came George Ball’s famous article,
“How to Save Israel In Spite of Herself” [1977] which showed me my life’s work. Then
came the new historians. Then came six months I spent at Haifa
University as a Fulbright professor in 1989. That pretty much completed
the matter.
“Since then, scarcely a day goes by without my reading something that
brings my blood to a boil. Who could have possibly known what Israel
would become, and what it would do to the Palestinians?”
