Progressive Zionist Eschews ‘Mixed’ Groups Because of Their Insensitivity to Anti-Semitism (And Still, Palestine Burns)

I do not consider the Jewish concept of the chosen people to be equivalent to 72 virgins, jihad, etc.  A concept that obligates Jews to seek peace and pursue justice has nothing in common with a concept that promotes violence against civilians and the exploitation of women. Moreover, choseness does not imply racial superiority or entitlement to Palestinian land. Ethiopian Jews are every bit as much a part of the chosen people as Jews of European origin. Religious right wing settlers do tend to believe that God gave the whole land of Israel to Jews, but that is a separate notion from the belief that God chose Jews to receive the Torah at Mount Sinai.  By conflating a political issue (whether or not Israelis should settle on Palestinian land) with a theological one (the belief of some Jews that Jews were chosen to receive the Torah from Moses at Mt. Sinai).

What I said in full to Rev. Makue was something like the following: While your criticism of the settlers are fully justified, I would omit the comment about the chosen people or I guarantee that you will be misunderstood by the vast majority of Jews.   Some Jews believe that it means that Jews were chosen to receive the Torah from Moses.  In Hebrew the word is closer to meaning obligated than chosen, in the sense that Jews are obligated to seek peace and pursue justice.  I respectfully suggest that you leave that discussion [of the chosen people] to the larger Jewish community and to Jewish theologians.

Rev. Makue unwittingly invoked an anti-semitic tradition of Christians using their pulpits to expound on the alleged theological “deficiencies” of Jews and Judaism.  I’m not saying that he’s anti-Semitic.  I am saying that he is insensitive to the history of anti-Semitism, and unaware of the implications of criticizing the chosen people concept as a Christian minister at an event sponsored by a church. All kinds of Jews (not just right wing settlers) believe that Jews were chosen (the Hebrew word is closer to obligated) to receive the Torah from Moses at Mount Sinai and to follow its precepts to seek peace and pursue justice. (Jewish feminist Judith Plaskow drew on this tradition when she called her pathbreaking book Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective.)   I therefore found it distasteful and cavalier for him to say “they [the settlers] think they’re the chosen people.”  Apparently oblivious to the fact that some anti-occupation Jews also believe that God chose the Jews to receive the Torah at Mt. Sinai, Rev. Makue  implied that only settlers or those with pro-settler, anti-Palestinian sympathies would believe in choseness.

Like Rev. Makue,  I’m against the occupation.  However, I will not align myself with Christians who misunderstand Jewish beliefs.  Therefore, I work with Jewish anti-occupation organizations  (Meretz USA, J Street, Brit Tzedek v Shalom) rather than with groups such as the U.S. Campaign to End the Occupation.  I find that the “mixed” groups consistently attract people who are cavalier or insensitive about issues of anti-Semitism.

Far worse than Rev. Makue (whose work against apartheid in South Africa was honorable and courageous), was the strident and reductive Jewish woman who disagreed with my comments and said that any concept of being chosen “opens the door to Hitler [!]” I am angered and appalled that a Jewish woman would say this in a church and that many of the people in the audience applauded her.  This further reinforces my contention that this event was not an appropriate venue for an informed discussion about choseness in Jewish theology, and that Rev. Makue should have confined his criticism of the settlers to issues of human rights and international law.

 I will refrain from working with the U.S. Campaign to End the Occupation; although I will continue to selectively attend events that they sponsor; if only to watch out for the instances of insensitivity towards Jews that so often occur at them.

Here is the issue for me. Because of the Holocaust as your reference and understanding for the western world’s treatment of Jews, there will always be something wrong with what the goyim are saying when they criticize Israel, in terms of their insensitivity, and so you will always conclude, this conversation must happen inside the Jewish community. And inside the Jewish community, notwithstanding the often noble resistance of the Brit Tzedek community, you will be rolled again and again by the right wing zealots and the neocons and middle of the road almost neocons, who are our cousins, brothers, and moms.

And because you insist on staying in the Jewish community, out of concern for insensitivity to Jews, who are the most wealthy segment of American society now, and incredibly well represented in media, politics etc–that is to say, the Zionist understanding of the treatment of our minority in the west has been shown to be a false one, by history–you have foiled a coalition between Jews and Christian progressives on apartheid in Palestine.

So, you will always privilege our Jewish sensitivity over the pogroms against the Palestinians. Nothing less than pogroms are taking place in apartheid Israel. [Should have said Occupied Territories there] 100 years ago, my ancestors were freed from pogroms in Russia by the efforts of well connected Jews in the US working with Christians and politicians.

It is time that the Jewish community recognize the actual suffering and brutalization of Arabs on something approaching the sensitivity you assign to verbal slights in a progressive church against Jews.  And yes I would say that the idea of a chosen people, which is an American idea, and a Jewish idea, and which is not strictly theological, but a living ideology, has to be interrogated.