A month back I went to a highly emotional talk at Columbia University Hillel that I have been meaning to blog about because it shows how much the discourse on Israel/Palestine is changing. Mine is a report from a liberal university, not a Washington think tank, but it reflects shifting attitudes among young Jews.
Amazingly, the title of the talk–Is Zionism Racism? was chosen by Lionpac, Columbias undergraduate version of AIPAC, the Israel lobby. About 35 students jammed a small conference room on the fourth floor of Hillel–a room in which I’d seen two men studying Torah just an hour before. Just when it seemed no one else could fit in, a darkhaired man wearing a black kaffiyah slipped through the door and dropped his scarf on the back of his chair: a Palestinian graduate student.
The speaker was Anita Shapira, an Israeli Zionist scholar. Seated at the conference table, she began by dismissing the question. She likened it to an insult in a joke in which a man calls another man’s sister a whore. If you don’t like someone you accuse them of racism. “Why do you ask me if Zionism is racism?” Having spoken 7 or 8 minutes, she opened the floor to questions.
I’ll now reprise the Q-and-A. The explosive moments come during an exchange between Shapira and the Palestinian, Saifedean Ammous, that I found cathartic. But the more intriguing exchanges were between Shapira and young Jews, who are struggling with the same questions Ammous is framing, but in a more tentative fashion.
The first question was from such a student. “Aren’t Arab citizens always going to feel alienated in the Jewish state?”
Shapira: “Maybe this is true but this is not racism. Israel defines itself as the state of the Jews. But it has non-Jewish citizens.â For instance, about a quarter million of the recent Russian immigrants were not Jewish. It is true that many Israeli Arabs don’t feel at home. But then Israel had been in a constant clash with their Palestinian brethren, and so how could you expect them to identify with Israel? This is a very tragic situation, but it has nothing to do with racism.”
Q. Why should we embrace Jewish nationalism?
Shapira: “Israel was founded according to a nationalist concept from Europe. That statehood goes with nation. The idea that state and people are more or less one and the same is not something that is considered illegitimate or out of place in Europe. Finland is the land of the Finns . Maybe the idea of a nation having a state is an outdated concept. Maybe it’s time to move on to multinational units [and here Shapira spoke of American pluralism]. But why should we always be the first to try it?”
Q. Why should we rationalize the law of return, allowing any Jew to move to Israel tomorrow?
Shapira: ”The fact of giving preference to a certain ethnic group in your laws because you want to promote the convergence between nationhood and statehood is something that many nations have and is not something we should apologize for. What is so awful about the fact that Jewish identity is a strange mixture of the ethnic and religious? The Israeli population was diverse. I come from Poland. There are Ethiopian Jews. There are Russian Jews. Ethnically we are anything but a race.”
At this point, Ammous, who had been seething in his chair, burst forth that Shapira was dishonestly trying to ennoble Israeli nationalism. “Why is there a clash between Jews and Arabs? Because Zionism is racism. That is why there is a clash…. I don’t believe in God. But my Jewish friends who were born to a religion which they don’t believe either can go and get my grandfather’s land from the Jewish National Fund.” This was a racial distinction; Ammous said that the Holocaust demonstrated how destructive such distinctions are.
Shapira seemed stunned. “The Jews are one of a kind. Both a nation and a people if you wish.”
Ammous: “I find it hard to believe that is an acceptable concept in the 20th Century. How’s that different from [Afrikaaners’ ideology in] South Africa?”
Shapira insisted that Ammous was racializing a simple conflict. “You have two national movements fighting for the same piece of land”– This is a normal clash between people. There are hundreds around the world– “I do not accept the fact that because Jews are a strange mixture of religion and ethnicity, I have to deny my own identity.”
Ammous said that her definition of citizenship, involving religion/birth and all those non-Jewish Russians, was arbitrary. “You might as well base citizenship on the Horoscope. No Scorpios are allowed, and my family are Scorpios. I see that as equally irrelevant, and absurd. The reason there is a conflict is because you set up an identity that excludes me and my grandfather. Don’t you see the absurdity of this racism?”
Shapira was now upset. “I am what I am. The relationship between the Palestinians and Jews goes back more than 150 years. Putting the label of racism on it is unfair.”
A pretty blond girl broke in. She thanked Ammous for coming, then said, “Israel was created as a safe haven for Jews. Very few nations have such strong claims to nationhood as Israel: a common culture, common land of origin.”
To which Shapira added, “Bahai people found a refuge in Haifa. There are Christians living happily in Israel.” The Palestinian case was special. The refugees created by the founding of Israel in 1948 were “an unfortunate situation –I know a lot of the invading Arab countries told them to get out.”
Ammous: “Wrong! You had to ethnically cleanse the land in order to set up the state.”
The room was in shellshock. Finally a leader of Lionpac broke in to move the conversation along. “I really appreciate your coming,” she said to Ammous. “I appreciate the liveliness of the debate.” But she said that the ‘48 war was not part of the topic.
I raised my hand. I was upset myself. In a calm tone, I said that on a trip to Hebron I took with an Israeli group last summer, religious settlers who had taken over the center of the city had thrown rocks at us. Later we watched a video of young settlers throwing rocks at Arab girls who were just trying to go to school. The Israeli next to me wanted to run from the room and vomit when he saw this. After I came home, Avigdor Lieberman, who believes in the transfer of Arabs out of Israel, became deputy prime minister, without significant protest from anyone. As a progressive Jew, I said, I want to wash my hands of the whole country. Why shouldn’t I?
Shapira said that such things make her want to vomit too. “The fact that Israel is not perfect, that is a fact. We have our better moments and our worse moments. We also make mistakes.” But she said that it was wrong to conclude “that everything is premeditated and everything is a conspiracy to bring about the suffering and displacement of the Palestinians. I wish other states would be so open and critical of their government.”
At this point, Ammous began playing a video game on his blackberry, and his role was taken over by a student named Noah Schwartz. âThe issue of 1948– thatâs the main argument we have here,â he said. âYou couldnât have a Jewish state without the displacement of another people. The idea of a distinct people in a vacuum may work for Antarctica. But the standard history, and it is not dispute, is that transfer arrangements were [discussed by]… the Jewish Agency, once the civil war broke out after Partition.â Because nobody believed the Jewish state could actually function, with a large Arab minority.
Shapira: âYou take for granted what happened after that as if it were planned in advance. In â47 [at the time of Partition] Jews were so happy to receive even a small portion of the landâ¦â
Schwartz seized on the issue of Jewish immigration during the Mandate period. “You live in Philadelphia, and all of a sudden 1 million Chinese move to the place. Speaking a different languge. You wouldn’t like it.”
Shapira: “The connection of Jews to Palestine was not the same as the connection of Chinese to Philadelphia.”
Now Saif Ammous broke in. “No, but how does that relate to the Palestinians living there.”
Shapira seemed to throw up her hands. “It’s a tragedy,” she said.
Ammous: “So we can just go fuck ourselves”
(“a PhD candidate hurling an f-bomb at one of the world’s foremost experts on Zionism…”– per a mocking/defensive post on a Columbia blog)
Shapira gathered her dignity about her, and concluded with a discussion of refugees. âAfter the war, we are talking about a period in which all over Europe we had movements of population. There were many many questions of refugees. All of them found an answer in the country where they landed. Later, Israel received 1 million refugees from the Arab world. She absorbed them and didnât claim that they are refugees. The Arabs refused to absorb their people in order to immortalize the problem. I donât think it had to be like this. I am sorry for the Palestinians.â
It was a good point (one that Alan Dershowitz makes, too). I know Ammous, and need to challenge him about it. As I say, the discussion was cathartic. Thanks to Hillel and Lionpac, I left the room smarter than when I went in. Later I thought that I should have followed up my own question. âWhen you say that Israel is not perfect, I am sure segregationists defended their system in the American south in the 1960s in the same way, ‘Itâs not perfect.’ At some point, as an outsider, you stop accepting rationalizations for injustice and just say, âThis has got to change.ââ That would have struck a chord with some of the young Jews in the room.
