In the last month I did a few speaking gigs at universities and several times came up against my sexism. Once I used the word chick and saw the hollow look on the face of a member of Students for Justice in Palestine. Another time I ran into a young friend who said I showed favoritism toward male authors and who explained that an ideology is an invisible thing to those who are its beneficiaries– they think that’s just the way of the world because it serves them to believe so. At lunch at Northeastern Law School, I said something about social pressure to wear a hijab, and a woman friend took me apart. I had no response.
I’d be a fool not to acknowledge that this criticism has been a theme of my adult life. I’ve been involved in the left since the 70s or 80s and many times women have called me out for sexism and sought to educate me. I look back on a lot of my youthful behavior toward women with embarrassment, stories that I’d never tell on myself. When this website began to make a community, Adam Horowitz gently brought up stuff I’d written that wasn’t going over well among women friends. I declared to him that I was unreconstructed, Maileresque. Adam said nothing. It was a word-to-the-wise moment. I made an earnest effort to change. I’ve made progress but I doubt I’m ever going to be exemplary (partly, honestly, because I am still not sure how far down that road I want to go).
I relate all this because it helps me to relate to Zionists and their belief system– Zionism as privilege, Zionism as outmoded, Zionism as useless and in the way.
As for privilege, one reason I held on to sexism was that it really was in my interest. Consciously or not, I saw nothing to gain by opening the field to more women. I liked the company of winners, and wow, what a coincidence– they were almost all men. Who wanted more competition? Consciously and unconsciously, I saw feminism as threatening that privilege, and doing so angrily, which only made me feel guilty and defensive. (Once I told my girlfriend that her mother shouldn’t enter the workforce, after that I think she hated me.)
The parallel to Zionism is that if you set aside the religious and cultural mumbo-jumbo, you’re looking at one side that is privileged and another side that has no rights, and if you’re a Zionist why would you ever want to give up the goodies? As a friend working in Gaza told me on my last visit, in Gaza they’re burning garbage in the streets and you cross into Tel Aviv and people have lush yards. Which side would you rather be on? Why would you ever give that up?
Here’s the great answer to that question: people actually will sacrifice their privilege if they think that doing so will make society better. Good people overcome their defensiveness and understand that their privilege is just creating inequity and hatred. Many men worked on feminism issues; and I would give up a lot of my economic privilege if I thought there was a way to establish a fairer order.
These days, there are many aware former Zionists who understand that their society must deal fairly with the Palestinians to regain its soul. The protest leader Assaf Sharon spoke at J Street recently (yes a Zionist organization) about ending a system of privilege based on racial difference. Noam Sheizaf likes to quote the popular song that says, at the end of every sentence you write in Hebrew, there’s an Arab sitting with a hookah. It means that no matter how you construct your society you will have to deal with the unprivileged other. Sheizaf has absorbed that wisdom and put aside his future as a cinema critic to throw himself into changing the regime. Jerry Haber is the same way. He wants to sacrifice his Jewish privilege in the name of fairness and freedom.
Another lesson I draw from my experience in the sexism trenches is that I sure did a lot of talking over those years, but I don’t think I was ever useful in the discourse of social change. It’s not that I regret my many writings as a young man expressing the “cis-gendered” male point of view (a word I learned from Eleanor K on this site); I’m saying that in term of a political conversation, I was just a rod in the spokes. I was worse than useless. Women were addressing fundamental questions of unfairness and I wasn’t advancing the conversation.
I feel the same way about community-building today outside the walls of Zionism. If you’re a Zionist or even an ethnocentric Jew, you’re not really helping the conversation by belaboring your views. We’re dealing with a profound issue of injustice. We need people who are witnesses to those conditions and who can criticize them meaningfully to lead a community forward. I’m not against ethnocentrism per se, except when it’s uninterrogated, as the feminists used to say to me. And it’s no coincidence that the Israel lobby groups are male dominated (hey what ideology?), while the Jewish group I feel most comfortable with politically, Jewish Voice for Peace, is mostly women-led, and those women have experience doing gender work.They’ve dealt for years with changing consciousness about privilege. And you see this same spirit in the Arab revolutions– the insistence by great young leaders that women must be included equally.
Back when I was in the sexist trenches I remember the feeling we had that we might win, that we could just go on in our group and construct a privileged community without dealing with the revolutionary spirit outside. We were fiddling while Rome burned. Before long our position became untenable (not that gender relations have changed altogether; but don’t ask me). I see a similar dynamic going on now in the Jewish conversation about Israel and Palestine. AIPAC or J Street wants to circumscribe the conversation, keep Palestinians out of the boycott conversation, only allow “good” Palestinians to take part in the discourse. Well take it from a retired sexist, it doesn’t work. We had to let the women participate in the conversation and even lead it, cause they had studied the conditions. You have to let the Palestinians talk, even angry ones. Especially angry ones.
Now to the kumbaya moment. One other thing I learned about the feminism discourse is that things worked out better in the end. We felt like we were losing but in the end we were all winning. I find a society in which women are equal more interesting, I find conversations in which women are empowered a richer one, and I feel better for being a part of that. I think the same thing is destined to befall Israel and its advocates. They will one day find themselves in a more diverse society, and their souls will open up and they will realize how lucky they are.
And anyway, I remember what happens to people who can’t keep up with evolving attitudes. I remember the look that I saw in the eyes of the rest of the world– they can’t wait for you to die and get out of the way.
