[Photo by AnomalousNYC from a demonstration in Union Square in New York in July 2006 during the Lebanon war that the Israeli “left,” Meretz and Labor, supported]
Today’s Abraham Lincoln’s 200th birthday. Lincoln’s achievement was chiefly political: he took a corrupt and fragmented political system and grew a mighty oak of resistance in the heart of it, and that resistance was called the Republican Party-abolition. In his beautiful speeches, Lincoln said to his audience, If you are for the right to have slaves in Kansas, then you do not belong here! And by doing this he resuscitated the American dream of equality and freedom that he knew had been sacrificed.
Gideon Levy is undertaking that political work with a great column in Haaretz about the end of Zionism. The liberation ideology of 120 years ago has collapsed in a political dead-end: it lost diversity, when it lost the left to anti-Arabism. A leftwing party, Meretz, supported two disgusting slaughters (Lebanon, Gaza). Laborite Ehud Barak said that the Palestinians are no true partners for peace–a lie to protect himself post Camp David, when he offered a fragmented West Bank to the Palestinians. Levy:
And what is Zionism nowadays? An archaic and outdated concept born in a
different reality, a vague and delusive concept marking the difference
between the permitted and the proscribed. Does Zionism mean settlement
in the territories? Occupation? The legitimization of every act of violence and injustice? The left stammered. Any statement critical of Zionism,
even the Zionism of the occupation, was considered a taboo that the
left did not dare break. The right grabbed a monopoly on Zionism,
leaving the left with its self-righteousness.
A Jewish and democratic state? The Zionist left said yes
automatically, fudging the difference between the two and not daring to
give either priority. Legitimization for every war? The Zionist left
stammered again – yes to the beginning and no to the continuation, or
something like that. Solving the refugee problem and the right of
return? Acknowledgment of the wrongdoing of 1948? Unmentionable. This
left has now, rightly, reached the end of its road…
Levy says the only way to save Zionism is for Israelis to come out against the occupation:
If you prefer, this is Zionism, and if you prefer, this is
anti-Zionism. In any case, it is legitimate and essential for those who
do not want to see Israel fall victim to the insanities of the right
for many more years. Anyone who wants an Israeli left must say “enough”
to Zionism, the Zionism of which the right has taken complete control.
Something is left out of Levy’s picture: The United States. As Avrum Burg says, American Jews are part of the structure of Zionism. Until they wake up and begin to apply their own experience of minority rights to the racist politics of Israel, Levy’s political project can’t work. And who can move that American Jewish leadership? Obama.
(Phil Weiss)
