Our site keeps urging a mainstream conversation about Zionism. That’s the endpoint of our work, questioning that almost-religiously-held belief. Well, last night, the New York Times‘s opinionator blog published a bold piece by Joseph Levine, a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, saying that we have to question the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state–and pretty much concluding that it doesn’t have such a right.
Mind you the piece appears in the Opinionator’s philosophical section, which I see is called The Stone, and though it begins by asserting that Levine was raised in a Zionist home, it is a calm and logical disquisition, explaining why Jews do not deserve self-determination inside a state created in the Middle East, up until the end, when Levine arrives at the actual conditions of Palestinians, including the Nakba, and says that these abuses were “unavoidable” in the constitution of a Jewish state.
“I conclude, then, that the very idea of a Jewish state is undemocratic, a violation of the self-determination rights of its non-Jewish citizens, and therefore morally problematic.”
Writes Donna Nevel, who sent this to me:
I think it’s important that these positions are becoming more visible and it’s becoming much harder (though we know too well they still try!) for the Jewish establishment (and AIPAC, etc.) to silence and marginalize these discussions or pretend that views like this don’t reflect similar perspectives of an increasingly large segment of the Jewish community.
Here are excerpts. Go to the Times for the entire thing:
Over the years I came to question this consensus and to see that the general fealty to it has seriously constrained open debate on the issue, one of vital importance not just to the people directly involved — Israelis and Palestinians — but to the conduct of our own foreign policy and, more important, to the safety of the world at large. My view is that one really ought to question Israel’s right to exist and that doing so does not manifest anti-Semitism. The first step in questioning the principle, however, is to figure out what it means….
My view is that one really ought to question Israel’s right to exist…
But the charge that denying Jews a right to a Jewish state [is anti-Semitic because it] amounts to treating the Jewish people differently from other peoples cannot be sustained…
But if the people who “own” the state in question are an ethnic sub-group of the citizenry, even if the vast majority, it constitutes a serious problem indeed, and this is precisely the situation of Israel as the Jewish state. Far from being a natural expression of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination, it is in fact a violation of the right to self-determination of its non-Jewish (mainly Palestinian) citizens..
Any state that “belongs” to one ethnic group within it violates the core democratic principle of equality, and the self-determination rights of the non-members of that group…
I conclude, then, that the very idea of a Jewish state is undemocratic, a violation of the self-determination rights of its non-Jewish citizens, and therefore morally problematic…
There is an unavoidable conflict between being a Jewish state and a democratic state.
The piece is reminiscent of other Jewish landmarks/awakenings: Tony Judt writing 10 years ago in the New York Review of Books, territory the journal has never sought to lay claim to, that the Jewish state is an anachronism, Brian Klug’s great essay, “On saying that Israel has a right to exist,” which we republished two years ago. Once the media begin stating this argument more regularly, calmly and honestly, you’re going to be stunned by how many young Americans sign on.
Thank you Mr. Levine, Phil and Donna Nevel.
This gives me hope. I sincerely hope that many from both sides of the I/P “issue” read this.
I cannot wait for many people to be “stunned” at how many folks discard the odious and barbaric status quo.
The more that Jewish folks “come out” against apartheid, the false entitlement and the unsustainability of the present zionist state of Israel, the better off the world will be.
הכלבים נובחים השיירה עוברת…
I think Levine is suggesting (or “saying”) that Israeli Jews have no “right” — after all, this is an article about “rights” — to exclude the excludees (refugees, exiles) of 1948 and 1967, to occupy the occupied territories o9f Gaza, West Bank including east Jerusalem, and the Golan, and to enforce discriminatory laws against non-Jews (and, in a fashion I didn’t understand, against ultra-orthodox or some such).
In a word, Israeli Jews have no right to rule their roost in an anti-democratic manner. Or, as he says elsewhere, to rule it in a “Jewish” manner, whatever that might mean.
For him Israel must be ruled in an Israeli manner, democratically, the country of all its citizens and, indeed, of all its proper citizens (there are those pesky excludees again). And — if so ruled — Israel has a “right to exist”.
Yeah, team, way to go.
Joseph Levine’s logic is of the sort that says Jews cannot exercise self-determination because Arab rights are going to be infringed. Now unless you have an empty continent somewhere, some people’s rights are inevitably going to be limited when someone else takes over their territory to exercise self-determination on it. This can describe virtually every country in the New World and Oceania.
But he doesn’t employ his own standard to say no other country should exist because their self-determination is privileged above other claimants. No – he says only the Jews alone should not be able to exercise self-determination because in his mind the Arabs also have a claim. It should be noted nearly every country is a homeland for a particular ethnic people. The Arabs also constitute an ethnic group and a religious group and this is specified in the constitution of every Arab country. Dr. Levine doesn’t take issue with Arab ethno-domination and subjugation of minorities under their rule. He bristles only when the Jews exercise majority rule over their own homeland and grant the Arabs full minority rights. No one wants to live as a minority in someone else’s land – but the Arabs have options open to them the Jews don’t have.
Put quite simply, Dr. Levine’s essay is a more sophisticated version of the classic anti-Semitic meme that Jewish national rights threaten the rights of others which is not true at all. When he argues only the Jews have no practical right to self-determination, the fallacy of his argument is patently clear to all to see. And it doesn’t improve with age.
I wouldn’t be stunned at all by how Americans, your and old, and middle-aged, sign on.
Our long de facto policy in the Middle East assumes America will not sign on to perpetual US/Israeli exploitation of the Arab Street and Middle East oil via taxpayer funding of Israel, and support of despotic Arab regimes wedded, also, like Israel, to dependency on US diplomatically, and in the case of Israel, also financially–that is, only so long as the US Fourth Estate stays put as a propaganda arm of the US and Israeli Governments on all things Israel. This reality underscores the importance of Levine’s piece in the NYT, which I have not read yet, but Phil Weiss has shown a piece of today, here on MW.
The wheels of Justice grind slowly, but inevitably. Neither Israel, nor America is on the moral side of history. The Arab Spring, in the long run, will not be bought off, nor intimidated sufficiently, not even by Big international Banking. The shortest route to both America’s and Israel’s demise is being funded and supported by the 1% elite beneficiaries in both countries.