by David Samel
In one sense, I owe my life to Zionism. My parents met in a Zionist youth group in New York in 1946. As a boy, I naturally absorbed the prevailing view portraying Israel as a lonely outpost of Jewish modernism heroically fighting for its very existence in a sea of irrational Arab hatred. But like most Jewish families, we also were unabashed liberals who cherished full civil rights for people of all ethnic backgrounds. The inherent contradiction between these two concepts was never apparent in my youth, but over the decades, it became impossible for me to ignore.
For the most part, I do not consider my personal journey to be of much significance. However, I will immodestly claim some insight into the views of other American Jews. For every dishonest and/or blatantly racist Jewish pundit — Dershowitz, Pipes, David Horowitz, Martin Peretz — there are many thousands of more sincere and decent folks who cling to romantic notions of intimate kinship to a people with a history of noble struggle. Most still believe that resistance to Israel and its occupation stems from irrational hatred of Jews, because they simply cannot perceive any other reason for Palestinian discontent. They don’t recognize that the Zionist dream was horribly unfair to the Palestinians, forcing them to endure what no American Jew would find tolerable, either for their own minority community or for any other. However, most Jews consider themselves “liberals,” and therefore may be susceptible to the increasing tension between the supposedly inviolable principles of democracy, freedom, and equality, and Israel’s daily violations of those principles.
Ironically, I see Israel’s noticeable rightward shift as a possible ally in this effort. I am loath to applaud any developments that bring more misery to the already miserable, but Israel’s racism is becoming so brazen and impossible to ignore that the obvious remedy is not simply smoothing over its rough edges but eliminating it entirely. Time may well be on our side for another reason. As the Holocaust recedes further into history, it becomes more difficult to convince Jews of the potential of an imminent outbreak of virulent worldwide anti-Semitism. For Jews of my generation (mid-fifties) and younger, our heritage has been much more of an asset than a liability. Do we really need Israel as a safe haven, when it has long appeared as the most dangerous place in the world for Jews?
Israel and its devoted followers in the U.S. still maintain a grip on mainstream discourse, but that grip may be slipping as their messages appear to emerge from a Bizarro World. They sadistically restrict the access of a million and a half civilians in Gaza to adequate food, water, and fuel, yet howl in indignant protest at the “deprivations” caused by the BDS movement. They have assembled one of the world’s strongest militaries with the unlimited assistance of the world’s only superpower, yet decry the “illegality” and “smuggling” of a tiny fraction of that firepower to the neighbors they threaten. They insist on the right of the Jewish people worldwide to exercise dominion and control over the non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, yet hurl accusations of bigotry against those who prefer full equality for all. They freely kill civilians with absolute impunity, sometimes in horrifying numbers, yet claim the mantle of justified self-defense while accusing children who throw rocks at well-protected soldiers of “terrorism.”
In the long run, only a solution which grants the same rights and privileges to all regardless of religion or ancestry has any chance of succeeding, and such solution is long overdue in the 21st century. This conviction can be easily grasped by all Americans, Jewish or otherwise, as we have recently undergone a similar struggle to finally achieve a national consensus opposing all forms of bigotry. Any situation in which people with guns tell unarmed people what they can and cannot do is intolerable, and the fact that ethnic ancestry is what divides the rulers from the ruled makes it even worse.
I foresee the one-state solution as inevitable, but the prospect of more immediate bloodshed presents a new urgency. Israel once again appears poised to demonstrate who’s the boss, insanely threatening war against Iran, Lebanon and/or Gaza for the sin of accumulating arms for protection from Israel’s threatened attack. But even at those rare times of relative “calm,” when such threats are minimal and there are no reports of violent deaths, the machinery of the occupation grinds on, with millions of people forced to accept whatever is grudgingly granted to them by an antagonistic foreign power. Palestinians’ freedom of movement and sometimes their very lives exist at the whim of frightened, bored, and sometimes unapologetically racist youths wielding automatic weapons.
There is an added burden on those of us who are Jewish to articulate a coherent position on Israel/Palestine. Whether we like it or not, Israel has conferred upon us certain privileges, and silence implies acquiescence. I think about how generations of white South Africans blithely enjoyed their racial entitlement without troubling themselves to consider the consequences on their victims. We all would like to believe that if we had been born into that environment, we would have refused the undeserved advantages of our skin color. Israel’s cordial invitation to me to join their party founded on brute force oppression of another people is something I must not only decline but publicly renounce.
