I spent much of the J Street policy conference last week struggling with the issue of racism in liberal Jewish life, including in my own thinking.
J Street set off this debate in my mind because it dispensed with two easily-dismissed rationales for the Jewish state that you hear everywhere at AIPAC: Israel is necessary because the antisemites are going to turn on us in the U.S., or it’s necessary because the bible gave us the land. J Street doesn’t go in for either argument. And yet it routinely invokes the necessity and goodness of Jewish democracy. I must have heard the words Jewish democracy a million times there. I’ve never seen a purple cow either.
But why is a Jewish democracy necessary?
The feeling that flowed through the J Street conference was: Two states is a lot better than one state because we’re Jews and we can’t trust what Palestinians would do if they were in charge. This theme was expressed in benevolent terms, as when Bernard Avishai spoke of the economic progress that Israel as a democracy "with a Jewish character" could make by teaming up with Palestine and Jordan. And it was expressed in frankly racist terms. Just read Sydney Levy’s post here, in which a J Street speaker crowed that four Palestinian children per family was a lot better than nine (which it used to be). If they said that in California, the guy would be out of a job.
So liberal Jews routinely invoke a racist idea–the "demographic threat"–to justify the Jewish democracy.
These ideas are familiar to me. They are what I was raised with, and am still engaged by. They surround Jewish feelings of superiority. We are chosen, we are smarter, we are irrigating the desert and building computers that will deliver a drop of water to every root of every artichoke bush, we have more Nobel prizes than all the Arab world combined. I’ve struggled with this idea of Jewish superiority all my life. It was in the warp and woof of my upbringing in an academic milieu, and I run into it in almost every argument I have with Zionists. It reminds me of schwarzer talk in the 1970s–talking about black people.
The elaboration of this attitude—which J Streeters seem to believe but don’t pound the table about, as the neocons do– is that Israel is a developed country while the Arab world is ignorant, that the Palestinians are peasants and Jews are urban people of the book, that the Arab world lacks basic freedoms. And so it would be a tragedy if the smart Jews of Israel had to share the government of their country, in one state, with the Palestinians. In a word, We don’t want to be governed by Arabs.
In fact, Ali Abunimah has observed that the two-state solution is the same deal the Afrikaaners tried to get under apartheid: they wanted to put the blacks in Bantustans and keep a majority of whites in the South African state, so that the whites wouldn’t have to be ruled by blacks. They probably said the same things about black Africa that Zionists say about the Arab world: Brutes.
I have to admit that I too worry about what will happen to the Jews if Israel becomes one state. I look at, for instance, this signature photograph of an Israeli Jew’s secluded garden (at the ethnocentric blog South Jerusalem) and it captures a whole lifestyle, and I identify. I think: That’s the way I would live in Israel/those people are having a good life/I have a life like those people here.
I went for a walk with my wife yesterday and told her about my confusion. We live in a beautiful part of New York. I said, “I’m going to test you. It’s 1987. We’re walking through the woods in the place we live, South Africa. We have a really good life. Yet we’ve been pushing against apartheid all our lives.
“But what is going to happen to our lives? Do we really want to be ruled by blacks? What would we have done?”
My wife didn’t have to think about it. “We would have fought apartheid."
"What about our lives?”
"It was inevitable. There was only one way that situation could go. There had to be freedom."
“But what’s happened to South Africa and those white people’s lives?”
“It hasn’t been great. Maybe it will take 50 years. But this is the way the world is going. I don’t see what the point is in fighting it.”
The conversation was helpful to me. I’m reminded that this is a simple story. The conflict won’t go away until the ideology of the white master, which permeates the Zionist story, is discussed openly in the United States, and we begin to see this as a story of dispossession and disfranchisement.
You can say anything you like about Palestinian peasantry, or women being covered in Gaza, or authoritarianism in Egypt, or Israeli technology. I share some of those political values. But none of these points is an argument for human bondage, let alone burning up children with white phosphorus or relying on powerful brethren in the U.S. to shut down the debate.
They are arguments that if Jews really want to be a light unto the nations, they must recognize that Israelis share a land with others, and they must work together to come up with a democratic ethos.
This idea goes before any political structure (one state, two states). Jerry Haber has said that if there is one thing American Jews can do it is "helping to transform the 1948 ethnocracy into a liberal democracy of all its citizens"–to work with organizations like Taayush to help other Jews imagine a conjoint future with Palestinians. I speak for myself when I say that a basic respect for the Other, which was lacking in my own background, is key to going forward.
