Mandy Katz profile of J Street’s Jeremy Ben-Ami in Moment shows that Ben-Ami, who was raised in New York, felt no curb on his ambitions in the U.S. but experienced barriers to his progress in Israel as a 35-year-old would-be immigrant. This touches on Shlomo Sand’s insistence that there is an Israeli people, and not a Jewish people. She also shows the close connection of Ben-Ami to Mark Green. Remember that Mark Green refused to criticize Gaza a year ago. And lo, Ben-Ami has all but refused to criticize Gaza. I wonder if both men are not representative of a NY elite generation that insists on considering the Israel/Palestine issue in a solely-Jewish context. Katz:
Personally, though, Ben-Ami found Israeli society harder to penetrate. He pauses uncharacteristically to shape his phrasing before plunging into an explanation: “If you didn’t grow up in Israel, and you’re making aliyah, and you don’t speak Hebrew fluently, and you didn’t serve in the army, in terms of professional opportunities and full acceptance into the society, there were some barriers to coming in at 35.” Despite his sabra ties and professional success, he concluded, “I didn’t think I could ever be 100-percent fully accepted as an Israeli.”
So, on December 31, 1999, he moved back to New York and began as policy director for the city’s high-profile Democratic public advocate, Mark Green…. [I]n February 2001, Ben-Ami was deputy campaign manager for Green in his close mayoral race against billionaire Michael Bloomberg, then a Republican. After Green lost, Ben-Ami took his first job in the Jewish organizational world as New York-based regional director of the New Israel Fund, a charity that champions social justice in Israel and has drawn fire from the right for advocating on behalf of Israel’s minorities. He left in 2003 to join [Howard] Dean’s campaign, where he was exposed to the leading edge of “netroots” advocacy—using the Internet to attract tens of thousands of small donors and to mobilize a cadre of younger supporters not usually reached by traditional campaign tactics.
While observing close hand the organizing methods that would prove so successful at MoveOn.org, the progressive political website, Ben-Ami’s bailiwick remained domestic policy—and, unexpectedly, the Middle East—after Dean’s “evenhandedness” remark blew up. Away from the microphones, he heard grumbling by many who agreed with Dean on Israel but felt too cowed to say so.
“The thing that struck me was how many people quietly would say the same thing that I was saying, which is, ‘I can’t believe this is the way the Israel issue plays out,’” Ben-Ami recalls. “These were big donors in Democratic Party politics, Jewish donors. So I was convinced there was a large group of people who just didn’t have a vehicle for engagement in American politics to express their views.”
If Ben-Ami doesn’t feel fully accepted in Israel, how does he think Israeli Arabs feel?
Shlomo Sand thinks there’s an Israeli people, not a Jewish people. I agree with him that there’s no Jewish people, but the idea of an Israeli people is no better. What are the criteria for membership in this alleged Israeli people? More importantly, who gets to decide what the criteria are? Orthodox Jewish Israelis? Israeli Arabs? If you exclude Jewishness (however you define it) from the definition of the Israeli people, what’s left? Of the two main things that Ben-Ami mentions above (speaking Hebrew fluently and serving in the Israeli army) one of them (the army) is currently off limits to Israel’s Arab citizens, while the other (fluent Hebrew) includes many Palestinians who live in the Occupied Territories, and doesn’t include many Jewish Israeli citizens. I have a hard time believing that Sand or anyone else could come up with a non-religious, non-ethnic definition of the “Israeli people” that wouldn’t cause outrage because of who it included or excluded. Why not abandon the fantasy of “peoples” and “nations” and instead talk about something practical, like equal rights, i.e. a one-state solution?
Well said Benjamin.
I haven’t had a chance to read Sand yet, so I can only guess that by “Israeli people” he means all the citizens of Israel.
Since the emergence of nationalism a few hundred years ago, the concept of “a people” (or “a nation”) has meant much more than “whoever happens to be a citizen of a particular state”; it implies a mythical belief system involving notions of ethnic, linguistic, cultural and/or religious commonalities, a shared history, “sacred” ties to a particular area of land, and many other things as well. To redefine “nation” in terms of mere legal citizenship would be a radical departure from the nationalist beliefs that currently prevail in every country in the world. But to do so in Israel, without changing citizenship law, would be self-contradictory. Citizenship in Israel depends on religious/ethnic criteria: Jews can immigrate and become citizens, but Palestinians can’t. If you try to define “the Israeli people” as “whoever can get Israeli citizenship”, you’ve actually taken for granted the idea that Israel is a state for “the Jewish people”, which is the principle that Israeli citizenship laws are based on.
Decades ago I saw a television drama set in occupied France in a which a collaborator first snarlingly asserted that he was not a Jew and then snivellingly accepted that he was a Jew if a Sturmbannfuehrer or someone like that said that he was. At the time I thought this was just a joke but actually it revealed the truth, that there is no scientific test, applicable either to ourselves or to our ancestors, for being or not being of any race, unless race is only a matter of appearance (even that not always easy to define). If it is only a matter of appearance it is something obviously trivial with no moral or political implications. And if races are not detectable by scientific tests they do not exist as a matter of objective fact.
There are cultural groups, Palestinians and Jews included, that attach great importance to ancestry and inheritance. I think that Sand shows that these two cultural groups are very closely linked to each other both genetically and by cultural links to the ancient history of Palestine. So if there are any rights based on ancient history both these groups, not just one, have those rights. If there aren’t any such rights we should think in other terms.
You’re right about race; a mainstay of 19th-century anthropology, it has long since been discredited and abandoned as a scientific concept.
As far as I understand, the argument of Sand’s book is that there was never a Jewish diaspora, and that the presence of Jews in Europe is the result of conversions due to Jewish proselytism in the ancient world. Hence he argues that the Jews who lived in Palestine during the Roman Empire are not the ancestors of European Jews; instead, they’re the ancestors of today’s Palestinians, whose families converted first to Christianity and then (for the most part) to Islam. In any case, I don’t think ancestry should have anything to do with rights. According to current paleoanthropology, all human beings alive today are descended from a group of about 150 people who emigrated from Africa 70,000 years ago. Does that give all of us the right to colonise Africa?
I think that there are some rights of inheritance, though they have to be fitted into our general social contracts and international treaties. Locke’s treatises on Civil Government are good on this – I like II 16, on Conquest. I think that when it comes to rights of sovereignty over Palestine the claims that may be made on behalf of Palestinians are in every respect, including (as Sand well shows) every respect related to the ancient world, at least as good as those that may be made on behalf of Jews – though Palestine has of course had a Jewish component for as long as anyone can remember.
As for inheritance rights, I side with Marx: they’re a way of reproducing class divisions. As for social contracts, Hume refuted Locke’s contractarianism: one can’t be bound by agreements that one’s ancestors made.
Should sovereignty be based on ancestry? Once again, I ask: if we are all descendants of Africans, can we all claim sovereignty over Africa? The plight of the Palestinian refugees, the Palestinians living under military occupation, and the Palestinian Israelis who are treated as second-class citizens, is morally unacceptable not because of their ancestry, but because they lack political rights here and now, rights that all human beings should enjoy. There’s no need for “ancestral sovereignty rights” to solve this problem; just turn Israel and the Occupied Territories into a secular, democratic state with open borders, so the Palestinians who want to live there, enjoying full citizenship and equal rights, can do so.