This is part of Marc H. Ellis’s “Exile and the Prophetic” feature for Mondoweiss. To read the entire series visit the archive page.
With another New Year approaching and no positive movement on the ground, the word from the Israeli left, at least what remains of it, is foreboding. The indefatigable reporter, Amira Hass, is on her own non-violent warpath. Avraham Burg, a former architect of the apartheid he now sees as the end of Israel as a Jewish state, isn’t mincing words either.
Hass is a must read. Hass relates her battle on the road where she speaks as an Israeli Jew. It seems that the space for thought, especially with reference to history, has narrowed. On the worldwide Left, Israel’s existence is being defined as a colonial enterprise without reference to the anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in Europe. As a child of Holocaust survivors, Hass can’t go there and for good reason. She asks whether Israel can still be spoken about intelligently without forsaking the demand for Palestinian freedom. But Hass’s challenge is broader. As she holds her ground as a dissenting Israeli Jew, she warns Jews outside of Israel not to become accomplices with Israeli aggression.
Unfortunately, Hass is too late on both counts. In the main, Israel will continue to be discussed as a colonial state. Jews have been and will continue to be accomplices in Israel’s crimes.
Avraham Burg goes further than Hass. His first lines are strong:
It must be said out loud: The ascendance of the right is not temporary, the occupation is permanent and Israel is one state with two regimes: One is good, and does well by Jews; the other is bad, wicked and discriminates against Palestinians. Now it’s time to fight it.
The struggle Burg sees is unequivocal:
The time has come for all the princes of the left and all its frogs to stop giving their services to the right-wing mechanisms of self-destruction that are being applied full-throttle in Israel today. We must admit, openly and unequivocally: The ascendance of the right is not temporary, the occupation is permanent and Israel is one state with two regimes: One is good, and does well by Jews; the other is bad, wicked and discriminates against Palestinians. From here on the battle is not over delusions of peace being just around the corner, nor over creating an illusory reality according to which any minute now, out of nothing, a separation agreement will appear and redeem us. This is a battle of life and death, between a bad one-state regime and one state that is good for both peoples.
The difference between Hass and Burg is important. Hass continues to argue the case for Israel. Burg has left Israel behind. In Burg’s mind the Jewish Left provides a fig leaf for Israeli oppression. It’s time for Jews to let go. Let Israeli power has its way:
It must also be said, to the same flaccid left: Don’t start now with empty claims of “responsibility” and “we must not abandon the state” and all the other things that end with sitting around the cabinet table. Israel’s hardball politics require two things that you don’t have. The first is to offer a full, complete alternative and to fight for it tooth and nail. The second is to allow for the ripening and completion of processes. No one appointed you the saviors of the right. Let Bibi-ism run its course and it will fall of its own accord. It will fall into your hands if you are ready with a worthy alternative.
Is Burg right, that left to its own devices, Israeli policies will fall of their own accord? It may be the case that the Jewish Left is powerless to stop Israel’s aggression. Why fight what you cannot win? Burg may also be correct that moral arguments by Jews prolong the reckoning needed to transform Israel into a unified democratic state for all of its people. But the sense that Israel will fail in its essential mission to conquer Palestine and subject Palestinians to an apartheid without end may be another fig leaf, a faith statement rather than a political program.
As enablers outside and inside Israel, Jews listen to Hass and Burg with hope that a breakthrough will somehow occur. But with Israel consolidating its power with its Arab neighbors, and with the United States and Europe strongly committed to Israel as a Jewish state, hope is difficult to sustain.
As Israel consolidates its power, the weakness of Jewish dissent becomes more and more apparent. It may be the case that Jewish dissent awaits another more distant day than either Hass and Burg, Jews and Palestinians, can afford to contemplate.
“with the United States and Europe strongly committed to Israel as a Jewish state, hope is difficult to sustain”
I agree that the United States is currently strongly committed to Israel as a Jewish state courtesy of the Zionist Lobby and the franchise which it holds over both the Republicans and Democrats, together with the warped support of the Evangelical Christian base. This situation on it`s own is not immutable.
I disagree that Europe is committed to Israel as a Jewish state either at a political level or even more importantly on the street. There are no remotely comparable Zionist lobby groups in terms of extreme power and influence that I am aware of and there are certainly no Evangelical Christian movements salivating over the end of days prophesy.
I think the only exception might be Germany where the WW11 atonement factor is still very strong both politically and on the street – but even this committment is starting to wear thin.
MARC ELLIS- “Is Burg right, that left to its own devices, Israeli policies will fall of their own accord?”
It is much more complicated than that. The fate of Israel is so intimately joined with the fate both of the American Jewish Zionist elites and with the fate of the American led transnational corporate/financial empire that linearity is unlikely. We have entered a period of massive change and social turbulence which will likely affect US/Israel’s policies in potentially unpredictable ways. The next five years could see truly dramatic changes, few of them good.
@Keith
Sorry I still don`t see any ” remotely comparable ” Zionist lobby groups in terms of extreme power and influence here in Europe.I don`t see mainstream politicians across the political spectrums cravenly and overtly seeking Zionist funding to support their campaigns. I don`t see an AIPAC or an ADL. I don`t see any European Adelsons and I certainly don`t see a huge Evangelical movement supporting the Zionist drive for the apocalypse.
I would be interested to know the details of European Laws whether EC or National Government Laws defining criticism of Israel as “anti -semitic”. Those who deny the Holocaust IMHO are seen rightly as fringe lunatics by the vast majority of Europeans and the vast majority of Europeans would simply not compare what you call “other incidents of mass murder” with the Holocaust. Even if that were the case “broadly construing” something may already be on its way to becoming a capital offence in the Land of Creation but here in Europe perceived inference has no legal standing.
A good measure of the relative weakness of the Zionist lobby in Europe is that the European Parliament as well as various individual European Parliaments have voted overwhemingly in favour of recognizing Palestine (albeit couched with the term “in principle”) as well as the recent EC labelling requirement for settlement products. Either of these actions would simply be impossible in the US because of the Zionist lobby.
Having said all that I respect your views and your right to challenge my views.
Without either a withdrawal of USA aid (unlikely short term) or a strong push from EU (ditto), Israel’s one-apartheid-state will continue and get worse (grabbing more territory, pushing more Palestinians off their land, confiscating water, etc.) USA’s MSM see-no-evil and Americans don’t know what’s going on. Be different, one hopes, if they did. But the hysteria about “terrorism” in France and in USA and the ignoring of “terrorism” in M/E is a bad sign — “white” skinned people circling their wagons against “dark” skinned people. Not a recipe for a change in MSM behavior. Or nation-state behavior by now-and-formed-colonial powers.
I happen to have read both pieces by Hass and Burg before reading this post by Marc Ellis. Hass is an exemplar of a journalist who remains steady in her principles. Burg is a man who found the truth after many unprincipled years in government, freed from the realities of politics and the voting booth, now he can tell us what he really feels. Which is fine, because reality and practical politics are primary facts of life on this planet and if only that path might have yielded progress we would not be here today in this Bibi = Zionism reality. So it is kosher to have gone from Knesset Speaker to heretic in his post Knesset career. Burg’s despair is appropriate and the future is grim. Left Zionists who are more devoted to the evils of the occupation than they are to the evils of BDS have yet to find enough leaders to show the way and Burg is one of the voices that we are counting on.