Many are reflecting on the nobility of Anthony Lewis, the champion of civil rights at the New York Times who died in Cambridge two days ago. There is an important Jewish piece to Lewis’s story: In his generation, he was at the forefront of Jewish criticism of the Jewish state, to the point that a former spokesman for Netanyahu once called Lewis a “PLO booster for decades, a writer who yields to no one as an Arafat groupie.”
A couple of important moments in Lewis’s opposition to the occupation:
In 1986, when Joan Peters perpetrated the fraud of Of Time Immemorial–the Jewish bestseller that said that Zionism was such a great thing for Arabs that they immigrated to Palestine to get in on the boom– Lewis grabbed on to the scholarship of the young Norman Finkelstein to pen an important column, There Were No Indians, where he decried “the danger of trying to deny a people identity”:
The criticisms are unanswerable, or at least they have not been answered. That is the extraordinary thing. So far as I know, neither Miss Peters nor any of her supporters has answered a single one of the charges of distortion and fraud made against it.
Instead, it is said that the critics are from the political left, as a few are, or have been identified with the Palestinian cause, as some have. In other words, only politics matters, not facts. That from intellectuals.
In 1999, in a NYT Magazine piece called “The Irrelevance of a Palestinian State,” the freethinking Lewis publicized visionary statements by Meron Benvenisti that there was one country between the river and the sea. Lewis could see that the two-state solution would not insure Palestinian rights:
there can be no such neat resolution of the conflict. There will almost certainly be a Palestinian state; a majority of Israelis approves the idea now. But it will be a state of a peculiar kind. Its citizens will often have to go through Israeli security checks in traveling from one part of their own country to another. In entering or leaving the new Palestine, they will be subject to rigorous Israeli controls. The state will be utterly dependent on Israel economically.
He saw that Israel was creating Bantustans:
Jewish settlements in the West Bank are a fundamental obstacle to the creation of a normal state for the Palestinians. They dot virtually the entire territory — except that ”dot” conveys the wrong impression. Some of the settlements are urban towns, like Maale Adumim, east of Jerusalem, population 25,000. Special bypass roads to the settlements slice through the West Bank. A road from Jerusalem southwest to what is called the Gush Etzion bloc of settlements goes literally under the Palestinian village of Beit Jala, through two tunnels built at a cost of $32 million and then across a long bridge. In a last gasp, the Netanyahu Government approved a plan to add four square miles to Maale Adumim, connecting it to greater Jerusalem. The status of Jerusalem itself is a formidable question for the final negotiations.
There are now between 160,000 and 190,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank. And ideologically motivated Israelis, who believe that God gave all of the Land of Israel to the Jewish people, continue to plant new settlements. Since the Wye Agreement last October, 17 have been established. Most consist of a few trailers, a water tank and barbed wire on a hilltop: a bare suggestion of possession. But that is how many of the now substantial settlements began, as unauthorized seizures of Palestinian land.
The result of all this is a political map of the West Bank that looks like a collection of Rorschach blots.
The natural outcome of this argument– 14 years on, with the settler presence more than doubled– is that a Jewish state is irrelevant too.
I suspect Lewis felt that way personally. As Rick Hertzberg says at the New Yorker, Lewis was a liberal through and through. And he was a worldly man: he married a South African judge who had been active in the anti-apartheid movement, and he understood the universality of her experience. Having grown up in a Kosher household, Lewis evidently embraced the tolerant American experience as his inheritance and example. As Ami Eden reports at the Jewish Telegraphic Agency: “he says, now that he no longer attends synagogue, [Passover is] the one day a year that he gets to use his Hebrew.” Notice that Lewis exhibits no shame about that falling-away.
In that piece, Lewis calls the founding of Israel a “landmark” event for him. But I wonder whether that landmark did not fade as it did for other liberals of his generation.
He pretty strongly questioned the two state solution as it was conceived of then, essentially as a bantustanization that probably would not solve the problem, quite early I would say for his time. And who can imagine any recent NY Times writer relying on Meron Benvenisti and a”Palestinian friend” as their primary sources. Did Ethan Bronner even have a Palestinian friend? Though he has been relatively silent for years (perhaps due to illness and age, I don’t know the story) seems to me voices like his have been seriously lacking at the NY Times and in the mainstream since he stopped writing his column in 2001.
Update: More Lewis high points. In 2002, while embracing the Zionist dream, he stated that Israel’s international legitimacy was being undermined by “the settlement process, carried on for more than three decades, [which] has been sustained by colonial methods: suppressing the local population, seizing land, giving settlers superior legal status.”
And Jordan Smith points out that Lewis wrote the introduction to this important volume, The Other Israel (2004). I have it on the shelf, I’ll quote from it soon…
“In 1986, when Joan Peters perpetrated the fraud of Of Time Immemorial–the Jewish bestseller that said that Zionism was such a great thing for Arabs that they immigrated to Palestine to get in on the boom”
Side Note:
Their’s another Israeli historian known as Yehoshua Porath who really debunked much of Joan Peters books describing the book as a “sheer forgery,”. It’s important because many of the Main Stream Zionist groups still take Mrs. Peters claims or written books on such claims often time not siting her as the sources
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1986/jan/16/mrs-peterss-palestine/?pagination=false
Quote:
“Jews, and Zionists especially, developed their own myths about Palestine. First they interpreted ancient Jewish history according to the ideology of modern nationalism, equating the old Israelite and Judean kingdoms with modern nation-states. The Maccabean revolt and the period of Hasmonean rule were seen as typical manifestations of the struggle for modern national liberation. During the years when most Jews lived in exile, it was argued, they always kept a separate national identity: they never converted of their free will to another religion, and they preserved the memory of their ancestral land, to which they always hoped to return. Indeed, against all odds, some never left.”
Qoute:
“According to the Zionist myth, only modern Jewish colonization brought about the economic development of Palestine and improved the hard conditions there. These developments, it was said, attracted poor Arabs from the stagnant neighboring countries. Their numbers grew faster than the Jewish immigrants because the malicious British authorities always encouraged them to come and did much to help to absorb them, both economically and legally. ”
“Because Zionism was predominantly a European and secular phenomenon, many Oriental Jews in the Middle East and North Africa have never felt at ease with it and have tried to derive their own sense of Jewish history and identity. In Israel, under the guidance of the former Israeli minister of education, Zevulun Hammer, they have formulated a new Zionism that belittles the ideological and political revolution of European secular Zionism and argues that Theodor Herzl and the Zionist organization had hardly any effect on Jewish history. According to this interpretation Zionism began with Abraham and has been continued by practically all the Jews who have come to the Holy Land, whether to spend their old age and be buried there, or to engage in study or in business. All these are now regarded as Zionists in Oriental Jewish religious circles. ”
“Most historians now consider this view as in fact the opposite of Zionism, but, astonishingly, it has been adopted in its entirety in Mrs. Peters’s book without any serious discussion of its implications.”
“Until the 1850s there was no “natural” increase of the population, but this began to change when modern medical treatment was introduced and modern hospitals were established, both by the the Ottoman authorities and by the foreign Christian missionaries. The number of births remained steady but infant mortality decreased. This was the main reason for Arab population growth, not incursions into the country by the wandering tribes who by then had become afraid of the much more efficient Ottoman troops. Toward the end of Ottoman rule the various contemporary sources no longer lament the outbreak of widespread epidemics. This contrasts with the Arabic chronicles of previous periods in which we find horrible descriptions of recurrent epidemics—typhoid, cholera, bubonic plague—decimating the population. Under the British Mandate, with still better sanitary conditions, more hospitals, and further improvements in medical treatment, the Arab population continued to grow”
End Qoute.
Yet such myths by Zionist is repeated all the time even by media officals.
Unlike Lewis I don’t really know to much as to what happen to Mr. Porath nor why people don’t quote him more? I seen on a few sites others using his debunking piece.
As for Lewis thanks Phil for the interesting piece, I been hearing about his death and heard very little about the stuff you described and only about his civil rights record.
Beautiful. What a shame he wasn’t writing a column now, or in the past decade. It might have made a difference for the Times to have a regular voice that would have been skeptical about the Iraq war, respectable towards critiques of the Israel lobby, etc.
He answered thoughtfully argumentative letters from me when I was completely nobody, in the 80’s.
“(just as the New York Review of Books has orphaned Tony Judt’s pioneering argument of 2003 that a Jewish state is an anachronism).”
The Review is so good otherwise but it really is hamstrung when it comes to Zionism.
So sad ya.
Thanks for remembering Anthony Lewis.
About the fraudulent Joan Peters book…
Norman Finkelstein, then a graduate student, gave a careful reading to From Time Immemorial, found it to be a hoax, and tried very hard to interest various liberal media outlets and prominent individuals in publishing it. No luck. The only person to reply to Finkelstein was Noam Chomsky. The supporters of Peters included many people with a lot of influence: Elie Weisel, Bernard Lewis, Saul Bellow, (of course) The New Republic, (of course) Commentary, etc.
When a British edition of the book was published, Chomsky sent copies of Finkelstein’s findings to friends in the UK. Naturally the book got savage reviews in Britain. Even the Israeli media thought the book was worthless.
In the US, the only publication that would touch Finkelstein’s essay was In These Times, a tiny publication in Chicago.
That was picked up by Alexander Cockburn and (separately) by Edward Said in The Nation.
The New York Review of Books had been silent up to this point. Finally the NYR published a very critical essay by Israeli historian Yehoshua Porath, who labelled it “worthless propaganda”.
At that point, Anthony Lewis wrote an essay in the NYT, referring to the Porath piece in the NYR. The Lewis piece came out on the NYT when the Porath piece in NYR was still on the newsstands.
In today’s climate, another book in the Peters vein would be discredited in public in a hurry. Back then, it was a long and winding road from Finkelstein to In These Times to the UK reviews of Peters to the NYR, and finally to the NYT.
The publication of the Ben Ehrenreich piece in the Sunday magazine section of the NYT would never have been published 10 or 20 years ago.
Even today, there are still topics that are “too hot to handle.” For example:
After 9/11, the US busted a major Israeli spy ring in the USA. About 140 people were deported back to Israel. Journalist Christopher Ketcham wrote an article for The Nation about it, but The Nation killed the piece at the last minute. Alexander Cockburn ran it on CounterPunch.
It almost sounds like a joke: The very best of liberals (with all the respect earned by their courage in bucking received opinion) never seem to consider this basic fact: all the Zionist implantation from the start is an illegal settlement; all of Ishghael consists of “unauthorized seizures of Palestinian land” (or, very rarely, only usurpation of sovereignty.) This must be the background for any necessary concessions, not a tacit recognition of a state of invaders.