Dana Goldstein, whose thoughtful condemnation of the Gaza slaughter after years of reserve I celebrate, is a little uncomfortable with the embrace. She points out that I have identified myself as a non- or anti-Zionist, and says that anti-Zionism is redolent of antisemitism. She's a post-Zionist, she says. Goldstein's comments deserve a response, especially at this moment in intellectual life, when so many people are crowding the doorways of this conversation (they turned away 500 people at the University of Chicago Thursday!).
I used to say post- or non- to avoid being negative. Playwright David Zellnik told me that anti-Zionist felt like denying Israel's considerable achievements and I was under David's kind influence on that point. Now I've come to say that I'm an anti-Zionist for several reasons.
First, perhaps most important: My feelings are not neutral about Zionism; I don't like it. I find that I think about it a lot and there is nothing I can really embrace in it outside of the Jewish pride and the historical significance of it and its visionary component. All these elements have lost their value: Zionism privileges Jews and justifies oppression, and this appalls me. Saying I'm anti-Zionist is a sincere expression of my pluralist, minority-respecting worldview. (Here's my back-of-the-envelope description of Zionism, by the way).
Second, Post-Zionist strikes me as an evasion. At this moment, Zionism reigns in historical Palestine and in American Jewry. To say you're a post-Zionist is like saying you're a post-Communist during the Stalin purges. You are tastefully separating yourself from the world, dainty as an English person drinking tea with their little finger separated from the teacup handle. Zionism is a very powerful force in world affairs, certainly Middle East and American society. It is not helpful to one's own thinking or to others who are trying to understand these matters to evade this fact or suggest that post-Zionism is actually a real factor in, say, the life of Gaza City. I urge my readers and others to take a stand if they find Zionist beliefs that so privilege 6 million Jews over 5-6 million non-Jews and that have entailed apartheid and ethnic cleansing a supportable ideology, especially in the age of our mutt president-to-be.
Third, anti-Zionism is a great idealistic Jewish tradition. I have said that anti-Zionism is the new Zionism. It draws on the same visionary and If-you-dream-it feeling that Zionism did 100 years ago, before the militants ruined it, and engages the same young restless sensibilities and liberationist feeling as Zionism did. We anti-Zionists can say with honor that great Jewish anti-Zionists like Rabbi Elmer Berger identified the problems with Zionism 60 years ago, accurately, and Jack Ross who is biographing Berger continues that in his bold youth: Berger said that Zionism meant contempt for the Arab population, dependence on a backroom lobby in the United States, and the introduction of dual loyalty into American Jewish life. All true. Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin and Norman Mailer all opposed Zionism to one degree or another out of ethnocentric concerns. Didn't like the Is-it-good-for-the-Jews stuff. These problems are larger today than ever, especially post-Iraq and Iraq's idiot stepson, Gaza.
Finally, saying I'm anti-Zionist is my way of trying to make room in American life for this view, just as American intellectual life had room for anti-Communism, socialism, and Communism too, when I was little. Being critical of Zionism means that you can hurt your business, as the San Francisco Chronicle has reported. This is true and disgusting. As Jimi Hendrix said when he was changing America: I'm going to wave my freak flag high!
The antisemitism point. The American Jewish Committee has said the same thing, of course: anti-Zionism is antisemitism. It would thus conflate Jewishness with Zionism. A conflation that is damaging Jewish experience around the world. When Dana says it, I feel a hovering penumbra of censoriousness. There are things you can and can't say. Well I am an empowered Jew who has never experienced functional antisemitism ever in my life, and that too is important, my empowerment: I insist on speaking about Jewish cultural/financial power in the U.S. as a component of my Zionist critique. Do I think that Jews should be denied power? No! Do I think that there should be quotas on Jewish inclusion in elite institutions? No! Well: I would like Jewish participation in mainstream media roundtables on the Middle East held to 50 percent or lower. That is my quota. These ideas–including my description of Jewish place in the Establishment and the underrepresentation of Jews in the military– have made some readers uncomfortable. They've made me uncomfortable. I grew up in fear of lurking antisemitism. I have decided in my 50s that these are things I think about all the time as a mature person, however intellectually and emotionally flawed I am, and so I am going to talk about them come what may because I think they're important.
And I would add that shutting down debate in the name of "antisemitism" strikes me as selfish. Our phantom worries about a second Holocaust take precedence over the real evidence that surrounds us of man's inhumanity to man, not just man's inhumanity to Jews. And our phantom worries mean that we cannot address the incredible, everyday, real suffering of Palestinians that has been perpetrated politically in large part by empowered American Jews who are all over the media and political establishment, some of whom limit debate of the issue by citing a possible infraction of our tremendous freedoms. Believe me, when our freedoms are encroached upon, I will howl. Today and tomorrow I howl for the Jewish leadership's actual crushing of the Palestinian right of self-determination.
Related posts:
{ 27 comments }
Phil quotin' Jimi. This be the post-zionist Woodstock.
A corollary of ascribing to the proverbial 'two-state solution' is that it complicates the task of formulating a 'pro-something' label in place of 'anti-zionism.'
After all, if a single state became the goal, 'pro-Palestinian' could refer to Jews as well as Arabs. I'm convinced that some day it will.
Still waiting for J Street to swoop in and save the day for the Gazans who are being mass murdered? The latter don't have the luxury of debating semantics.
No liberal would describe their politics towards South Africa pre-1993 as merely 'post-apartheid'…
The money shot people like Phil's boyhood buddy, Richard Witty don't see:
"To say you're a post-Zionist is like saying you're a post-Communist during the Stalin purges."
Worse, Richard is a self-proclaimed Zionist.
Fittingly, Phil has assimilated, Richard–not at all.
You tell me which of them deserves the title of American patriot, and which, the title of Fifth Columnist.
The proverbial Reasonable Man knows…
Perhaps start with something simple.
A terrorist is someone who deliberately targets civilians.
Is Hamas a terrorist organization?
Yes.
Is IDF?
Yes.
And move from there.
Did I say Woodstock? Aww shucks, I meant to say Altamont! 'Ceptin' the dead 'uns is a gonna be ZIONAZIS dis time!
Bravo.
Ho ho — an Israeli comedy show brightens the mood with some light-hearted schtick:
————
With nearly 800 Palestinians and 13 Israelis killed, four of the latter by so-called friendly fire, the Gaza war is no laughing matter, putting Israel's most popular comedy show in a delicate position. Eretz Nehederet (Wonderful Country) – the Israeli equivalent of the Daily Show – has nonetheless been highlighting the lopsided fatality count of the war raging in the Gaza Strip.
Last week's episode featured a warmongering military correspondent, played by actor Tal Friedman, repeatedly breaking in to the newscasts with updates on the rising Palestinian death toll as if the war was a sports match.
"It's 500 for the visitors, four for the home team," the correpondent says. "The result is good but we can't be complacent and we have to widen the lead." A moment later he announces "a direct hit on a fashion studio, we are up to 501". That may be in poor taste, but at least it constitutes a mention of the civilian casualties, something getting little coverage in the largely mobilised Israeli media.
In another sketch, Defence Minister Ehud Barak, also played by Mr Friedman, tells a spoof press conference that the next phase of the campaign is "untargeted artillery fire into Gaza", and later asks, "How are we supposed to know it was a kindergarten? They should put a sign on it in Hebrew".
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israeli-comedy-show-satirises-gaza-violence-1297579.html
————
Man, they got some great comedy writers, don't they?
That's funnier than loading dead babies into a freight car with a pitchfork.
Post no. 7 at 1:06 PM is fake, by an imposter.
Ahem, no, post 11 is . . .
This getting ri-dunk-olous!
Nice piece, Phil. Clear. And it accurately takes Dana Goldstein to task for her unnecessary reserve and caution in her post-Zionism article: teach the young'uns they can put their shoulders back and hold their head high.
""To say you're a post-Zionist is like saying you're a post-Communist during the Stalin purges.""
Its an interesting dramatic point, but I derive the OPPOSITE significance from the same "logic".
That is that I new MANY committed communists (old communists, not just new left) that rejected and condemned Stalinism, but remained committed communists in some important regard through their lives, even as they were suppressed from saying that they were communists.
They concluded that the question was NOT whether they were communist, but HOW to be communist. (Or anarchist, or socialist, or progressive)
Phil should make some contact with the WESPAC organization in White Plains, and talk with the some of the long-time WESPAC supporters. I worked actively with them on anti-nuclear efforts opposing the Indian Point reactor for example. I can give him a very few names for a start, if he is interested in writing a history.
The same question is the relevant question for Zionism, NOT whether to be associated with Jews the people (on land, with a state), but HOW to be associated. (Intimate, supportive, indifferent, and/or critical)
Anti-zionism is not described as anti-semitism for the power to suppress dissent. It is described as anti-semitism for the message that Jews should not be considered a people (but only an assimilated minority) and therefore should have no right to self-govern.
There is NO WAY to avoid that meaning of the term. Phil may, like a hundred thousand others, say "no, thats not what I mean".
In the list of assumptions that Phil lists, he astounds me to the extent that he imagines that his experience of being a Jew is representative.
The FACT is that the very vast majority of Jews in Israel comprise four groups that are DIFFERENT than most of the Jews that Phil has known.
1. Survivor and children of survivors
2. Refugees and children of refugees from forced dispossession from Arab countries
3. Sabras from prior to the holocaust
and the very smallest group
4. Newbies (Russians, hilltop Americans)
NONE of them are in Phil's close experience. His generalization is a FALSE one. His conjecture that there is no longer a need for Zionism for protective purposes conflicts with the experience of the majority in Israel. His conjecture that there is no longer a valid urge to self-govern, that equality in assimilated US, is the GOLDEN MOUNTAIN, is in fact a personal choice (both mine and his), but is NOT a representation of Jewish life in the world.
Phil has a right to his opinion. But, he also bears the moral responsibility of actively expressing that opinion to those that trust his judgement.
I am pro-Zionism. I am also pro-democracy and pro-cosmopolitan in Israel/Palestine, moreso than most dissenters, moreso than most anti-Zionists.
That means that I support the right of people to self-govern, to establish rule of law consistently applied in a color-blind manner, to establish cross cultural relationships, or to voluntarily refrain from doing so.
My sense is that the political (meaning the approach of organizing emotion-driven mass movement regarding the "people" as ones chosen weapon) is a form of making war.
I distinguish between a politics that originates in morality and compassion and a politics that originates in power. Phil has chosen the political, rather than the social.
"Anti" politics excludes. It expresses irritation only. Its opaque, either/or only. Neglecting to propose, NEGLECTING to hold perspective as relevant.
Its FLAT EARTH, compared to the contributions of artists that demonstrate truth in multiple perspective.
And, ironically, if Phil still holds that Israel has a right to exist as Israel within 67 borders, then he remains a Zionist.
In the world I live, among dissenting community, I'll wave my freak flag high as well.
"I am a Zionist", and "I am a humanist", and "I am a moralist".
Mutt: mmmm more bush is all there is
Richard Witty is a sociopath, at least, if not a psychopath like Israel itself in the world community. Witty thinks there is no problem with an Israel defined as "a Jewish democratic state" even as he sucks in
all the benefits of being a USA citizen.
Witty is a romantic accountant, always dreaming in his own numbers, and always focused on his conception's answer to
his obsession: Is it good for the jews?"
Time to give him the boot, make him fly on angel wings to the
higher soul state.
RE: "In the world I live, among dissenting community, I'll wave my freak flag high as well.
"I am a Zionist", and "I am a humanist", and "I am a moralist".
Posted by: Richard Witty | January 10, 2009 at 02:54 PM"
And exactly in that order. Witty is honest here.
I am against Israeli military aggression and territorial acquisition. US arms have turned the Israeli leadership into a monster. Americans should take responsibility for their generous and vigorous help arming Israel to defend itself by now defending the Palestinians they so grievously wronged in 1947. Insisting all Israelis return to their only legal borders and guaranteeing Palestinian determination over all remaining territories now by the US, would deliver some small, timely justice. Israelis have to remember how happy their grandparents and parents were sixty years ago, despite the protestations of the Palestinians, and rejoice again at the legality of the UN's mandate and renounce all territorial acquisition since that time. Then the US can once again, in good faith, help Israel defend their borders.
Phil, thank you once again for a wonderful response to Dana. I hope your words will help her to see things more clearly, and perhaps alter her views on this all-important subject.
Dana writes: "Heer calls us "post-Zionist," and that just sits better with me. "Anti-Zionism" is not always anti-Semitic, but it sometimes is. "Non-Zionism" implies a lack of support for Israel in any form. Post-Zionism, I think, acknowledges Zionism's place in modern Jewish history while urging a pretty radical rethinking of the Zionist project itself — and whether the actions of today's Israeli government, and its Diaspora supporters, are really best suited to accomplish the original Zionist goal of making the world and the Promised Land safer for Jews.
This is a perfect example of the confusion Zionists of all stripes enmesh themselves in. Let's break it down:
Anti-Zionism" is not always anti-Semitic, but it sometimes is.
Zionism is by its very nature racist. And so this is a perfect example of what Zionism leads to: anti-Jewish feelings (unless you're one who subscribes to the idea of "anti-semitism" happening in a vacuum, there being an "anti-semitic" gene, and other such nonsense).
Non-Zionism" implies a lack of support for Israel in any form.
As a "Jewish state", yes. We're interested in true democracy, not Israel's warped idea of a "Jewish democratic state."
Post-Zionism, I think, acknowledges Zionism's place in modern Jewish history while urging a pretty radical rethinking of the Zionist project itself — and whether the actions of today's Israeli government, and its Diaspora supporters, are really best suited to accomplish the original Zionist goal of making the world and the Promised Land safer for Jews.
There is a lot here. Has Israel made the world safer for Jews? Was that the intent of the Zionist project anyway? Weren't Jews in the "Promised Land" (interesting that Dana uses that term) much safer before the Zionists came along? In wishing to "acknowledges Zionism's place in modern Jewish history" will Dana be acknowledging the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population of Palestine, the overt racism of Zionist leaders past and present, the Zionist leaders' indifference to and exploitation of the suffering of European Jews during WWII?
Only a Kook would describe me as sociopath.
The dogs are 'hasbaraking' … but the antizionist caravan rolls on.
Thanks to Dan Kelly.
Particularly like your point that "acknowledging Zionism's place in modern Jewish history" might not be particularly appropriate in a community that refuses to acknowledge both the Nakba and its own racism.
As Elie Weisel never grew tired of saying: "Confront your past; confront yourselves."
Very nice, Phil. Thank you.
However, if we are to influence things and not just wait for some epiphany of either the US Jewish Establishment or of the politicians who behave like their trained circus animals, we need to do four things:
1) Voice our concerns by writing to our representatives. Again and again. It takes less time than to write a good comment here or elsewhere. So turn up the heat.
2) Boycott Israel.
3) Boycott Israel. And last but not least,
4) Boycott Israel.
Glenn Greenwald:
I have a question for supporters of the Israeli attack on Gaza: Prior to the Iraq War, if it were known that the war would last six years, that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would die and millions more would be internally and externally displaced, there would presumably have been some number of supporters of the U.S. invasion who would have changed their minds, concluding that the costs (human, financial and otherwise) were too great to render the invasion justifiable.
For supporters of the Israeli war in Gaza: is there some number of Palestinian civilian deaths that, once exceeded, renders this war unjustifiable? 1,000? 10,000? 25,000? Or is the idea that because Israel is justified in the mission itself, then the number of Palestinian civilian deaths is irrelevant — i.e., Israel should do what it thinks it needs to do and, provided it exercises some form of "restraint," then it is justified regardless of how many innocent human beings (Palestinians) die as a result?
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/01/10/moyers/index.html
Well, as Phil shamelessly and explicitly tells, us, he assumes – ASSUMES – that what the world needs now is another great big highly publicised burst of specifically Jewish corporate political heroics, for everyone to gasp at and admire. Some people simply cannot outgrow the pompous illusions of their upbringing, can they?
Israel is justified in whatever it does exactly to the extent its PR apparatus deems manageable. One Jew is worth a thousand gentiles,
Arab or otherwise. It would be a million, or a billion, but Israel still depends on USA goy money and UN vetoes. Pretty simple, given the mission, which is to keep the line of Hebrew descent intact at ALL costs, forever. It's the jewish version of eternity, a very practical one, not at all given to hair pie in the sky like Christianity or Islam.
Great post!!!
Too long to a short comment, but see here
Comments on this entry are closed.