Yesterday the Forward sent out an advertisers’ video, a new hasbara campaign aimed at the delegitimation of Israel on campus. Meantime, a neoconservative anti-Goldstone outfit announced a conference in New York aimed at stopping the delegitimizing of "democratic nations such as.. Israel." It is very important to understand what people mean by "delegitimization" of Israel. This is the new buzz word.
The common theme among the strong critics of Israel is that this society is in a deep crisis of expansionism and ethnic cleansing and Jim-Crow segregation. They do not seek the end of Israel, but do seek a kind of regime change, by exposing the inherent Jewish-exceptionalism inside Zionism. And some of them wish to bring an end to the idea of the Jewish state.
I have heard critics on the left who say that Israel does not have the right to exist, who wish to undo 1948. And they have gained ammunition from Israel itself: because Israel’s sovereignty over the West Bank and East Jerusalem has never been recognized by anyone, yet Israel continues to expand there like crazy, destroying Palestinian villages as it did in the Nakba. So if Israel has no right to exist there, why does it have a right to exist on the ’48 territories, many of which were taken by expansion/force, these critics say, or for that matter on any other lines than the ’47 Partition plan, which, granting a Jewish state, was approved by the General Assembly? The same body, by the way, that has repeatedly called for the right of return of Palestinian refugees.
For my part, I would say that Zionism has lost its legitimacy, and Israel and American Jews must get past it, for the sake of the planet. This is an ideology– and again I cite Nadia Hijab’s stirring piece on Mamilla, and the inability of Muslims even to bury their dead and visit their gravesites–that has established 137 official Jewish holy sites and no Muslim ones. That’s unfair. Americans should not support that.
The best piece on getting past Zionism was by former Zionist Tony Judt in the Financial Times:
States exist or they do not. Egypt or Slovakia are not justified in international law by virtue of some theory of deep “Egyptianness” or “Slovakness”. Such states are recognised as international actors, with rights and status, simply by virtue of their existence and their capacity to maintain and protect themselves.
So Israel’s survival does not rest on the credibility of the story it tells about its ethnic origins. If we accept this, we can begin to understand that the country’s insistence upon its exclusive claim upon Jewish identity is a significant handicap. In the first place, such an insistence reduces all non-Jewish Israeli citizens and residents to second-class status. This would be true even if the distinction were purely formal. But of course it is not: being a Muslim or a Christian – or even a Jew who does not meet the increasingly rigid specification for “Jewishness” in today’s Israel – carries a price.
Implicit in Prof [Shlomo] Sand’s book, [The Invention of the Jewish People] is the conclusion that Israel would do better to identify itself and learn to think of itself as Israel. The perverse insistence upon identifying a universal Jewishness with one small piece of territory is dysfunctional in many ways. It is the single most important factor accounting for the failure to solve the Israel-Palestine imbroglio. It is bad for Israel and, I would suggest, bad for Jews elsewhere who are identified with its actions.
So what is to be done? Prof Sand certainly does not tell us – and in his defence we should acknowledge that the problem may be intractable. I suspect that he favours a one-state solution: if only because it is the logical upshot of his arguments. I, too, would favour such an outcome – if I were not so sure that both sides would oppose it vigorously and with force. A two-state solution might still be the best compromise, even though it would leave Israel intact in its ethno-delusions.
Actually Sand has made something of the same argument. “Even a child that was born from a rape has a right to live. ’48 was a rape. But something happened in history. We have to correct and repair a lot of things.” Sand has also said that Israel/Palestine is not yet ready for a single state. Though that is what it is right now, a territory controlled by one government.
Myself I am agnostic on many of the outcomes. They are largely beyond my control; public figures with stature and strong convictions have had no effect on them in the last 60 years; and holding forth about them causes Stalin-like ideological divisions on the left that make me run for the hills. The thrust of Judt’s piece is that Israel, whatever it is, must become a normal state in its own neighborhood, with respect for Palestinians. For me this means working to get Jews beyond Zionism and, as an American, delegitimizing a powerful but bogus historical claim: the idea that a state halfway around the world can perpetrate Jim Crow segregation and massacres and rely for immunity on a privileged wing of my own ethnic group leveraging foreign policy in the United States.
Apologies to readers: I mistakenly hit the "publish" button on this post in the middle of the night, putting out a draft version. This one’s a little better.
