Lillian Rosengarten
I have such a problem with Zionism today, some kind of distorted incarnation of what was once created from the ashes of the Holocaust to be a safe haven for Jews within a model of a secular nation state. I rage against attempts to blur the distinction between Zionist nationalism and Jewish religion. Of course some Jews are Zionists but I am a secular non-Zionist Jew who strongly believes in the separation of church and state for a country to be truly democratic.
From my view, nationalism in any form is dangerous. It means exceptionalism, an attitude of moral superiority, a hotbed for racism that is heightened by propaganda. Israelis in general do not know Palestinians. They are taught from an early age that all Palestinians are terrorists, that they hate Jews and want to drive them into the sea. This form of Islamophobia has spread through Europe and the US. This is the terrorism of fear. Israelis are taught Palestinians are dirty and they raise their children to be suicide bombers or to be used as human shields. Palestinians cease to be human and Israel behaves to its citizens and to tourists as if Palestinians do not exist. They have reduced them to sub-human monsters. It all sounds too familiar. Nothing about the caricature of Palestinian life is based on reality. It is a dirty myth used as a means to put an end to the Palestinian “problem.” Tragically, Israelis send their own children into the army to fight the “reviled unknown enemy” and this is considered patriotic. We know Jews have suffered and have been victims. Is it that mentality behind the wall Israel has built? Are they still “victims” of paranoia and fear? I say no! Yet, this is the justification for abominable actions perpetrated on their Palestinian neighbors and gives power to the idea of a Jewish State that belongs only to Jews. This is a dangerous road, as we know. Jews who love Israel must recognize that Jews can also do wrong and they must question and speak up against human rights abuses. The Jewish Community throughout the world but especially in the US and Europe, must distinguish the between secular Jew and Zionist Jew. This gives permission to stand up and say “No” and to debate the issues from a human rights perspective. To support the apartheid directives and the brutal forms of ethnic cleansing is to do an enormous disservice to Israel. To pretend Israel is a peace loving democracy is to be cajoled into a deception that pretends Israel is something it is not. Most important what has been done to the Palestinians by the Zionists in the name of Jews is false. What is being done to Palestinians by the Israeli Zionists will never be in my name as a Jew. To dissent is to rescue Democracy from death behind closed doors. (Molly Ivins) To dissent is not to be an anti-Semite.
I have evidence to exemplify a crucial component of Jew against Jew. As my readers most likely know, I along with six other elderly Jews set out to sail to Gaza. Human rights activists who believe in justice, we know that without justice, there can be no peace. Our mission was to show that we were Jews who did not support Zionist Israel’s agenda. In Gaza we were to be welcomed by a waiting crowd. We never made it but from the moment the IDF navy surrounded our little boat and kidnapped us to Ashdot, from the moment our beloved Yonatan Shapira, an Israeli refusnik who was tasered in the heart, from the moment I watched the Israeli navy in their scary uniforms with high boots and guns I wondered, how could Jews do this to Jews. We were not criminals, we were dissenters who speak out against Zionist Israeli policies. I was deported and cannot enter Israel for 10 years. To these soldiers, we were enemies of the state. For us, it was insanity, a state gone crazy, paranoia startlingly strong: a fear of it’s own destruction. A military state created by fear and desire for power where dissent is criminal. It is sickening, but torments me as well because I am ashamed of what Israel stands for.
When an American who runs for president states there is no such thing as Palestinians because there is no Palestine, one recognizes both racism and dishonesty. This talk was given to a Jewish audience. A pandering for votes and I suspect an enormous contempt for Israel and Jews. Lies such as this perpetuate man’s inhumanity to man and the failure to acknowledge some of the worst human rights abuses existing right in front of our noses. No, perhaps it was not meant as anti-Semitism but anti-Palestinian. What’s the difference? Hate is hate.
Nationalism has tainted the heart of Israel in its efforts to rid the country of people who also call Israel/Palestine their home. One must visit occupied Palestine and Gaza to see the truth of the deplorable crimes perpetrated on the hated neighbors. Tourists do not see outside the myth of Israel as a beautiful free democracy. Why is it anti-Semitic to shout against such abuses? If there were in Israel a separation of church and state, the boundaries that are now so blurred might be less likely to justify silencing dissenters on charges of anti-Semitism. Dissent against Israel is not anti-Semitic for it is not a statement against Jews. It is a statement against a nationalist Zionist movement that is guilty of gross human rights abuses. Incongruous as it sounds, it is the actions of the Zionist government against its Palestinian neighbors that has shaped a world response.. How can this not create anti-Jewish sentiments? What blindness prevails that propels Zionist Israel to detach itself from the humanity of Palestinians as people just like them? This is why it is so important to make a distinction between Jews and the rabid nationalism of the government of Israel. One must be awake to the painful intermarriage of religion and politics that has deepened the Israeli crisis and creates a distortion of who is a Jew. How can there be a democracy as Israel continues to hold Palestinians hostage in order to fulfill the fantasy of a Jewish State, a dream that explodes into a nightmare on the backs of the cruel occupation and murder of Palestinians?
Against a background of fragmentation, hate, violence and a police/military-run state, as Israel strives to become a Jewish majority, Charlie Rose in an interview with Ehud Barak asked, “Is a one state solution the worst thing that can happen to Israel?” Barak’s chilling response reinforces a profound failure for the hopes of Israel as a democratic state. “Israel has been established to become a Zionist Jewish state and to create a solid Jewish majority for generations.” It is Israel’s contempt and intolerance for other religions and cultures and the desire to be a “Jewish” state that is doomed to failure.
In Gaza, where I visited this past October, living conditions are a squalid hell. Hate, racist disregard to human life, harsh, brutalizing collective punishment aimed to destroy, not the lame excuse to target terrorists. What is destroyed is infrastructure required for a viable form of sustained life. What is destroyed are schools, power lines, waste facilities, water supplies, water purification systems, hospitals, homes, killing of families, killings and confiscation of the bare, sad little fishing boats used to catch a meager fish supply that may still inhabit the waste filled Mediterranean. Yet the Palestinians struggle on amazingly. It is something to see, their pride and hopes for freedom. They are a dignified people and to be witness to their suffering as well as the work they do for the Gazan population is beyond anything I have seen. Yet, it is not difficult to understand how brutalization invites hate. We can only guess how the children of Gaza who grow up amidst the endless violence, suffering, death and so much hopelessness, will grow up to despise the people (Jews) who are their enemy.
A Jewish state created through subjugation, occupation, collective punishment and humiliation of Palestinian neighbors, is not a democracy. This is not news. But these same people cry “Anti-Semitism” at the courageous ones who deplore Israel’s actions and dissent in any form it takes. I wish to reiterate, as I have written about many times about a government that has fallen into a black hole without the ability to reflect or empathize: Israel’s hard line has taken away its humanity and poetry. It is not healthy to occupy another country, for it violates the rights of individuals to be free, to live their own culture and religion with dignity. Israel’s poets must write of death for love cannot live in the presence of racism and apartheid. Listen before it is too late, for hate begets hate until there is no point of return.
This essay also appears at Palestine Chronicle.
Israel is a mess
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/supreme-court-thrusts-israel-down-the-slope-of-apartheid-1.407056
The High Court of Justice’s ruling Wednesday on the legality of the Citizenship Law proves the erosion of this institution’s role as Israel’s guardian of civil rights. Let’s look at how the justices voted at the moment of truth on the law, which bans Palestinians from living in Israel with spouses who are Israeli citizens.
In a 2006 ruling, 6 out of 11 justices said the law was unconstitutional, and in the current ruling, 6 out of 11 justices said the law, which was made more strict after the first ruling, was constitutional. That’s a disappointing outcome, in part because the first ruling was made not long after the terror attacks of the second intifada, while the current ruling was made during a period of calm, due in part to coordination between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
The title that Justice Asher Grunis gave his opinion – “Human rights are not a prescription for national suicide” – is also disappointing. No one disagrees with this, but Justice Elyakim Rubinstein, who arrived at the same judicial conclusion, recognizes that “a small group – those men and women in Israel’s Arab minority who want to marry residents of the region – must pay a heavy price for greater security for all Israelis, including their own.”
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/our-big-little-country-1.407059
The landscape and nature are not holy unless they are part of a culture of power. Even collective trips belong to the culture of ownership. The antiquity of the land is important only if it is under “our ownership.” What makes that more obvious than turning the graves of sheikhs in the Galilee into the graves of “the prophet Habakkuk,” “Mordechai the Jew,” and all kinds of Talmudic sages who lived and died in Babylon and were buried here merely as part of the spread of this state’s ignorance (which began with the “sanctification” of these graves in the 1950s )? The sanctity of the land means loving the state that is destroying the land.
Indeed, one cannot deny the demographic fact that, 100 years ago, 1 million people lived on this swath of land and now, without additional water or natural resources, since these have not been discovered over the years, almost 11 million live here. That is why the greenery is being taken over by concrete. But did they have to destroy the landscape? Well, those who built the state and destroyed the land were always blind to the scenery to which they came. It suffices to compare the minute spaces the state did not dare touch – those owned by Christian churches – to see how beautiful this land is when construction blends in with the landscape
Countries descend into destructive funks for various reasons. Israel entered this state around 2001 when Sharon took over. The insanity can go on for 40 years and more. Afghanistan shows the way.
BTW thanks Lillian. A wonderful article.
An interesting ,short interview with dr Norman Finkelstein.
“Israel has lost a lot of ground.”
“…………………….Another thing working against Israel in the long run, Finkelstein thinks, may be exhaustion within the international community, “which has grown weary of this conflict [and] recognizes that Israel bears the bulk of the culpability for its perpetuation.”
The recent leaked comments between French president Nicolas Sarkozy and Barack Obama himself indicate a certain degree of exasperation with the intransience of the current Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu.
“They are tired; the conflict has gone on for eternity and it is completely nonsensical at some level of abstraction,” says Finkelstein.
Finkelstein has created some surprise in certain circles with his position that the internationally recognized solution of two states — Israel next to a contiguous Palestinian state based roughly on the 1967 borders and east Jerusalem as the capital — can still happen. This is still viable legally and politically despite the large numbers of Jewish settlers illegally living on Palestinian land in the West Bank, he contends.
The proposal for minor land swaps by the Palestinians “is eminently reasonable,” Finkelstein says. That is, Israel can have 1.9 per cent of the West Bank which would enable the Jewish state to keep 63 per cent of the half a million settlers within Israel proper.
When asked about the danger posed to Israel by those that respected Israeli historian and peace advocate Yehuda Bauer calls “genocidal radical Jewish nationalists,” Finkelstein contends that those Jewish settlers who would violently resist an evacuation of the Palestinian territory represent at the most “a few thousand” diehards.
“All the Israeli army has to tell them is ‘we are leaving. If you want to stay, among 2 million Palestinians, you stay.’ And in the blink of an eye they will be gone.”
Finkelstein also suggests that if the United States alone decided to pressure Israel to seriously move on the two-state solution, that would happen.
“The Israeli government has no options or alternatives if the U.S. says you have to get out. There is nobody in the international community that Israel could lean on; and it is only the U.S. that is blocking action against Israel’s systemic and increasing violations of international law.”……………………..”
http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/norman-finkelstein-israel-has-lost-a-lot-of-ground/
Thank you Ms. Rosengarten for your thoughtful and passionate article.
I have noted that you refer, not to the West Bank, but rather to “Occupied Palestine” which I feel more accurately describes the situation – if this nomenclature was adopted by all who write or discuss I/P matters, I believe that it would have more impact.
The author’s essay expresses the inherent contradiction in the Zionist/Judaism concepts and made more powerful coming from a Jew. This contradiction is lost to those who blindly accept the actions of Israel as acceptable. A nation arising from sin (Nakba) and sustained by brutal force is destined to eventual destruction or radical transformation because of Universal truths one of which is to treat others as you would like to be treated. Along with the Holocaust, the destruction of the Palestinian civilization and it’s brutal Occupation will rank highly in rating the crimes our generation.