I’m like Michelle Obama today, proud to be a Jew for once! Why? Aussie journalist Antony Loewenstein has a beautiful piece in Haaretz commending newly-elected Australian P.M. Kevin Rudd for his apology to the Aboriginals for the terrors done to the indigenous Australian population when children were forcibly removed from their families in the 50s and 60s–the "lost generation". Lots of Australian Jews have praised Rudd’s action. And of course Loewenstein makes the connection to the Australian Jewish response to the Nakba of ’48, when Palestine was cleansed of 750,000 Palestinians, and the continuing dispossession of the West Bank.
no Jewish leaders seem capable of considering similar sentiments towards the Palestinians.
They blame somebody else for the fact that the number of settlers
rose by five percent in the West Bank in 2007. They remain mute when
Israel’s Interior Minister Meir Sheerit suggests destroying a Gaza
neighbourhood. They look away when Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger
urges Israel to move Gazans to the Sinai Peninsula.New Republic editor Marty Peretz recently told Haaretz, "No
occupation is kind or sweet. But bad things happen everywhere, all the
time."
And where is Loewenstein’s argument appearing? In Haaretz, of course. Israel can hear these opinions. They are marginalized in my country, as the voices of Arabists, terrorist-sympathizers, appeasers. We are all morally inscribed and reinscribed in the Shoah here, but offered no education at all about the dispossession of the Palestinians. This is going to change! Young Jews, get on this moral train now! Be hip and be smart, don’t get left on a siding with the old stale generation while history moves forward! Toot-toot, hear that whistle blowin?
I love Loewenstein because he says what he thinks and doesn’t care who is upset. He just lets go with it. The scholar Marc Ellis wrote in Wrestling With Zion, the fabulous collection by Alisa Solomon and Tony Kushner, that the discourse among Jews over Israel is constructed in a narrow way. You are either for Israel or a critic, you are in the peace camp, or critical of the occupation. A dissenter. Those are the two spots. Well the critical dissenter spot is actually narrowly confined. You cannot be anti-Zionist or post-Zionist in that spot. If you think that Israel is a false prophet ala the Shabbatei Zevi, you cannot shout this out. You can’t be an Arabist or a member of neturei karta (the only Jews speaking loudly in one voice against atrocities in Gaza). You must always think of Israel’s existential crisis when you frame your criticism. (I think I have Ellis right.) And the point is that if you fundamentally question the moral framework of Israeli society, then the other dissenters distance themselves from you. It’s not a spot with any honor. So even the dissenters censor themselves. Well: Antony Loewenstein doesn’t, and that is wonderful. He is helping to build a new Jewish moral tradition in the free western Jewish-empowered world. Here he goes again:
The Zionist leadership in Australia and across the
Diaspora prefers a state of war to a state of peace because they have
not yet acquired the moral standing to take responsibility for Israeli
actions.
Wow, that’s the sound of a Jew thinking. Wish there were more of ’em.
