I’m reading a magnificent book, The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, and one theme in the 1961 novel is the souring, in 1956, of the promise of Communism even as its chief proponents in the west insist that it hasn’t gone bad. I’ve always heard about this period; how much more meaningful to read about it in such a realistic novel. The book’s protagonist, Anna Wulf, is a former party member, much like Lessing herself. In days to come I’m going to be quoting some passages from the book because Anna’s awakening in the mid-50s seems to me the only response a sensitive and thoughtful person can have to how Zionism has worked out in Israel and Palestine. And because part of my project here is to try and get American Jews out of the trap of this ideology.
As Anna makes clear, Communism had some very positive effects: It helped to liberate black Africa. But with Hungary in 1956 only a moral idiot didn’t understand that something was rotten in Moscow. The same might be said of Zionism today. Its triumphs are really in the past now. That it revived a language, that it built a great city, that it was a miracle–hey, what have you done for me lately? That it was a national liberation movement for the Jewish people, something I never cared about but many others did, has given way to militant nationalism shot through with “hubris and ethnocentrism” on the part of leaders who’ve never paid much attention to the popular will when making decisions about war and nukes (as Mike Desch shows in his incisive new book).
Interesting that The Golden Notebook actually refers to Israeli kibbutzes at one point, in a dreamy way. Well we used to read all about kibbutzes in Israel. Now what do we read about, settlements on confiscated land.
Here’s a passage from Lessing, in the voice of Anna Wulf:
One other thing Lessing reminds me of. Dual loyalty. The way that people overseas can be loyal and beholden to an ideal long after the people who actually have to live with that ideal have lost their faith.
