[A pool in Haifa. Before the Nakba.]
My wife has picked up the refrain that I'm a post-Zionist. "You're a post-Zionist! Let me explain why," she declares. "Post- means that you're not engaged in that old energy. Anti- means that you have to be against something. Post- means that you're not fighting over the existence of Israel. Post means…" Etc.
Then: "Do you ever lose a frikkin sock in the bed?
"Do you see what I'm saying? People want to feel that they've moved forward…"
Knowing what I do about my wife's influence, I bet I'm going to be a post-Zionist before long. But while I'm still an anti-, I'd offer one insight, something I read this morning. Jack Ross gave me a Hanukkah present of a book called Voice of Dissent: Jewish Problems, by the anti-Zionist William Zukerman. There's an essay from 1956 called "The Arab Refugees: Awakening of Conscience." The essay says that for a while Zionists would get as enraged by a bull seeing a red flag at the very mention of the words Arab refugees.
"The physical fact of the existence of 900,000 men, women, and children, deprived of their individual and collective home and living in camps on the frontiers or in the vicinity of Israel, was explained away by the rationalization that these people were not evicted from their homes and land by force, but had left of their own free will."
Oh, but Zukerman has great news. Jews are awakening to the fact of Arab dispossession. Even the ardent Zionist I.F. Stone was for raising funds for these people. And Israelis themselves are ahead of Americans in their understanding. Rabbi Benjamin in the publication Ner: "We have no right to demand that American Jews leave their country… and settle in a land that has been stolen from others, while the owners of it are homeless and miserable."
That piece, which imagined reparations and an equitable resolution, was published when I was nearly a year old. Now I'm lined and gray. No reparations, no justice, no acknowledgment. And yes, many of those people are in Gaza. I'm often optimistic on this site, but the point is Zukerman was faithful and naive, but it doesn't go away. There is some sort of irrational religious fervor that has entrapped Jewish consciousness, by and large, and so patent issues of justice have been argued away, viciously, militantly, for more than half a century. It's a very powerful ideology.
It allows people right now to explain away the slaughter of hundreds of little children as a completely legitimate response. Tell me who's post-?
My wife obviously doesn't want me engaged by negative energy and resentment. I understand that and hope to absorb the lesson, Nixon's lesson about having enemies. I don't want to be in that flow. Yet it's also true that this is the great question of this time for people who care about minority and human rights, and hon, I'm caught up in it. I've lost work because of it. When Jeffrey Blankfort says on a number of occasions to me that an IDF soldier "creased my hair" with a bullet in 1982, I realize that his politics have been formed by that event, and mine by my events, and I can't undo that struggle.
Which is not to say that I don't look forward to being a post-Zionist some day. I found the sock.
