This is part six of Marc H. Ellis’s “Exile and the Prophetic” feature for Mondoweiss. To read the entire series visit the archive page.
If memory serves it was Elie Wiesel who wrote to a Palestinian that Jews can’t hate. Meaning, unlike Palestinians, of course. Read this email I received yesterday and ask if Jews can hate:
“Yes, Israel should have had ghetto Jews like you as leaders, we surely would have gone far. I just love the way you anti-Zionists portray yourselves as the epitome of Jewish ethics. So ethical, you demonize Jews every day. You are the pure Jews, we are all fascists. I am the son of an Auschwitz survivor and a former combat soldier in the IDF. To me, the lot of you, Silverstein, Weiss, are KAPOS.”
I have no idea the Silverstein and Weiss he refers to (although he probably refers to Phil Weiss and Richard Silverstein). They may be stand-ins for other people he knows or this may be a recycled (un)hateful email my email interlocutor mails various Jews whom he disagrees with. He simply forgot to change the names that are embedded in his mind. Not to get down on my email buddy since in somewhat more sophisticated language I’ve heard more or less the same accusations on university campuses by super-sophisticated Jewish and Holocaust Studies folks. Local Jews also have Israel on their brain. When local Jews saunter into university president offices to have my – or your – head, academic freedom and every other civil code flies out the window. The accusatory emails are the tip of the hate iceberg. Believe me – I know what I am talking about.
Everyone has a right to their opinion. However, if you were sitting on the fence about whether there is a Jewish civil war, I hope you just fell off. As if there isn’t enough evidence around us. This includes Elie Wiesel’s full page paid statements in major newspapers preening about Jerusalem as the eternal capital of the Jewish people.
Credit where credit is due, though, since my email interlocutor probably didn’t grow wealthy off his commentary on the Holocaust and Israel. Though he, like Wiesel, no doubt supported the invasion of Iraq, hopes for the bombing of Iran and probably supports a myriad of other covert wars to de-develop the Arab world. My email buddy also probably didn’t have a fortune to lose in the Madoff scandal like Wiesel did.
The people who send these emails usually aren’t high flyers. As well, I wouldn’t worry about Wiesel’s financial situation if I were you. There is plenty of money to be made when you are on the right side of the Holocaust/Israel divide. When you lose a bundle, there is more to be had. Much more.
Demonizing Israel is my email friend’s fantasy. I am not an anti-Zionist, a Zionist or a post-Zionist. My practical position is that the best solution for now is two real states, that is Israel within the 1967 borders and a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza with East Jerusalem as its capital. As we know, the decision for a one state solution was made by Israel’s military and settlement policies. Like most Jewish dissidents, I’m just watching Israel’s wheel go round and round. I speak and write without any power to change Israel’s course.
Where Auschwitz and the IDF are really taking Jews is another story. They have taken Jews into the geography of oppression. Have they also taken us into the night of our own destruction? Time will tell. We might know soon.
My favorite emails are harsher than the one quoted above. These are the ones that proffer that it would be best if I and others like me had died in the Holocaust. Other Jewish dissidents have the same experience. Ask Women in Black and the places they have been offered as their final resting place. Or check with those who demonstrate before Israeli consulates in the United States. The discussion isn’t rational and, for the most part, it is conducted by the uninformed. The Israel raised up isn’t the real Israel. It’s a mythical place where Jews dwell somewhere outside history. That is for American Jews, most of whom haven’t even visited the country of their dreams. Why spoil the dream with an infusion of reality?
No, Israel isn’t worse than other nations. It isn’t better either. Notice how the Jewish establishment has used the switch and bait. First, Israel was better, now it is no worse. Israel is simply being attacked. Or about to be attacked. Message: Leave Israel alone. Notice that the content of Israel is no longer discussed even by its most ardent supporters. Meanwhile the critical narrative of Israel’s founding in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians written by Palestinian historians and over the last decades by the new Israeli historians is accepted around the world as the real history of Israel. We need to take note of that. It’s huge for the future.
Have you noticed that with every political setback Jewish dissenters experience that the Israel/Palestine narrative victory is more assured? The narrative victory is important for a variety of reasons but primarily because the ultimate judge of power is history. And one day soon even the Jewish community will have to accept that Israel’s original sin was the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. In the very near future, Jewish identity will revolve around the Holocaust, Israel and the plight and possibility of Palestinian history. Which is to say that Jewish identity will revolve around two afters – after the Holocaust and after Israel.
By after Israel I mean after what Jews have done and are doing to Palestinians. This second after is the game changer Jews of Conscience have been waiting for – it’s what Jews of Conscience are living. Embodying the two afters isn’t easy. Who wants to be involved with such folks, especially when living the Holocaust after has become so easy, so successful and makes us so unaccountable. Revisiting the Presbyterian divestment debate – and all the other divestment struggles – isn’t that what the argument is really about – adding the second after?
So let’s get real. If you watched the Presbyterians question their financial officers, as in, how much of our money is involved in a possible divestment, according to my calculations the sum was a bit less than twenty million dollars. The entire Presbyterian investment portfolio – if I heard it correctly – was reported to be in the neighborhood of seven billion dollars. When I heard these figures in their respective order I was shocked at how little money was at stake and then how heavily invested this Christian justice-oriented denomination is in American and global capitalism.
Did anyone hearing this vast investment portfolio have the same question I had? In the first place, the sum to be divested was symbolic in terms of the companies affected. In the second place, no matter how the vote went, Presbyterians weren’t risking anything in the financial realm. Don’t get me wrong, I think symbolism is important and the divestment debate is fascinating, another step in the narrative road of discovering our flaws and possibilities. Nonetheless, we can’t skip over the alarming nature of Christian conformism to power – and the benefits they derive thereof.
The various industrial complexes that initially seemed far away on my beach walks is embedded in Christian and Jewish life. You cannot make a hundred grand and more a lecture as Wiesel often does or have a multi-billion dollar portfolio as the Presbyterians have without being part and parcel of the destruction of our planet. Of all the debating points, the Presbyterian portfolio made the biggest impression on me. How about a discussion of divesting all of that money on a variety of fronts? Wouldn’t that make a huge splash around the world, including in Israel and Palestine?
And yes since I am being honest, I note that some of the divestment community – I am thinking of two leaders of European divestment I spent time with a few years ago – are unreconstructed anti-Semites. One of them wouldn’t utter the word Holocaust – or Israel. The other had a Jewish world domination conspiracy model that was so retrograde and disgusting that I paid for my own hotel rather than accept his repeated invitations to bunk at his house. Interestingly, he couldn’t understand my insistence on the hotel. He thought I was being a prima donna.
Just between us, I prefer crude email companions to sophisticated anti-Semites. But, of course, painting the divestment movement with the broad brush of anti-Semitism is the flip side of the sophisticated anti-Semites that think they’re so above baiting Jews. Again, the Jewish Wheel of Fortune has boat loads of historical baggage. Sometimes I want to check out other community games and see if they are easier to play.
Speaking of BDS, word is out of another “Norman” interview that accuses the movement of having a cult-like status. I don’t see it that way at all. Some of it is deep political activism. Other parts are superficial glosses on identity formations. And Finkelstein should be aware that his own personae runs the cult danger he accuse BDS of. Veterans of dissent should know when their contribution has been made and allow history – and new voices – to emerge. New voices have a right to speak and be heard without being accused of usurpation or deviation. Finkelstein deserves respect for the work he’s done. His disaffected cult-like members have their own critical reflection to do.
Israel/Palestine has changed over these last decades. As I say, last chance is in the air. When the Jewish Wheel of Fortune spins its last chance everyone is on edge. But look how much we miss when we aren’t paying attention. As in, the Presbyterian capitalism buy-in. As in, anti-Semitism still exists. As in, the Palestinian situation continues to deteriorate. As in, the torch is being passed to a new generation of Jews of Conscience. As in, the continual need for critical thought and evaluation.
At the local library here – mostly catering to DVD check-outs and computer use, with chattering even by librarians the rule rather than the exception – there are also good books. One I’m reading now is a biography of the American painter, Andrew Wyeth. Commenting on his use of tempera, a much rougher medium than his already popular watercolors, a critic wrote: “These are very savage paintings, scraped and beaten. I see the anger under there.”
We shouldn’t underestimate the amount of anger that surrounds the Israel/Palestine issue and how that anger works itself into every nook and cranny of our lives. There’s lots of anger to go around on the Jewish Wheel of Fortune. Every place the needle lands.
“When I heard these figures in their respective order I was shocked at how little money was at stake and then how heavily invested this Christian justice-oriented denomination is in American and global capitalism.”
20 million is still alot at stake, but comparatively speaking you are making a point, and it suggests that what’s at issue isn’t just finances but considering the amount of energy put into a small part of the portfolio, it includes relations, perspectives, and the possibility of divesting more investments that are involved in abusive policies beyond just those three companies and perhaps even beyond the I/P conflict.
As to your second point, this probably applies to a huge majority of organizations and institutions that have sizable assets: to maintain or increase their assets they naturally invest in the national economy, which is capitalist. Granted, they could build socially-conscious portfolios, but they probably don’t care enough to put in the effort for less apparent financial rewards, when to their mind the standard corporations are morally-neutral. Now whether in fact bug standard corporations like Walmart and Nike are really morally neutral is another story (think outsourcing US jobs to third world sweatshops). So this is also a good point you are making that can apply to all kinds of should-be nonprofit organizations.
This is an exquisite literary piece by a guy who’s currently being dragged through hell in a drumhead tribunal.
I heard him speak twice and he was very clear and engaging.
Now for my quibbles about the content:
1. The problem with two states is that one of them (“Israel”) will be the same nuclear hair-trigger assassination state that is has been since the 1960’s. To be blunt, a Big Israel or a Little Israel will keep on invading and bombing Arabs until there are no more Arabs.
2. It’s good that Ellis, Weiss, etc. are for Palestinian human rights, and that they say nice things about BDS. However, the BDS movement has to break out of its incubator and onto the front pages of the nation before it can get Palestine freed.
3. That means a nationwide movement of Arab American college kids doing exactly what the Black Power movement did: assert their rights in the most massive and undeniable way, especially with big marches on the centers of power, demanding total boycott against Israel.
Until then, we are in this comfortable incubator called “BDS”, an acronym that means nothing to 99% of this country.
Total boycott is better.
“So let’s get real. If you watched the Presbyterians question their financial officers, as in, how much of our money is involved in a possible divestment, according to my calculations the sum was a bit less than twenty million dollars. The entire Presbyterian investment portfolio – if I heard it correctly – was reported to be in the neighborhood of seven billion dollars. When I heard these figures in their respective order I was shocked at how little money was at stake and then how heavily invested this Christian justice-oriented denomination is in American and global capitalism.”
Extremely disappointing sentiment here, Marc.
Who are you to judge the size of the Presbyterian portfolio?
That portfolio represents centuries of work by tens of thousands of Presbyterians in 11,000 congregations in the United States. The earnings of the portfolio support numerous retired workers-in-the-vineyard, and sustain thousands of programs of outreach to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, visit the sick.
In contrast — and you made yourself wide open to this — Haim Saban made his money by producing cartoons that debase the spiritual lives of children, then sold his cartoon industry for $5 billion, $1.5 b. of which went to Saban personally, in a transaction managed through off-shore accounts in order to avoid paying taxes to the United States government. Saban used part of that boon to buy up a chunk of the formerly respectable Brookings Foundation as well as an even bigger chunk of Hillary Clinton’s efforts in US senate and now State Department. Saban is a “single issue guy, and that issue is Israel.” Presbyterians are frying a lot more fish with their outrageous portfolio.
You owe the Presbyterians an apology.
I notice that Jewish activists eagerly attack American corporations–CAT, MOT, and Hewlett Packard, and investment funds like TIAA CREF, on which thousands of US teachers and academics — like me — rely for our retirement.
Presbyterians and most of us non-Jewish Americans are not killing Palestinians, nor are we donating our money to UJF to support Birthright and settlements.
Jews are.
So when will we see Jewish peace activists clamor for delisting TEVA Pharma from NASDAQ; boycott Sheldon Adelson’s gambling parlors; call on all Americans to Remember the Mavi Marmare and forgo that Carnival Cruise or trip to a Miami Heat basketball game — in Nima Shirazi’s words:
For Presbyterians to divest from CAT, MOT, or Hewlett Packard or TIAA CREF is like looking for your keys under the streetlight because it’s too dark & dangerous to look for them where you know you lost them, and it’s equally ineffective. Arison, Adelson, Saban, Aubrey Chernick and Alan Miller of Universal Health Services, the business that set the ball rolling of medical care as a for-profit enterprise: UHS was the first and is now the largest for-profit hospital in the United States — (in my city, the best hospital in the area was run by Presbyterians, until for-profit mania overtook what used to be the service of healing the sick) — control multiples of the wealth in the Presby portfolio, and those five men do a lot more damage with their wealth than the Presbyterian church does with its portfolio.
If you want to criticize people with fat portfolios that end up supporting oppression of Palestinians and others, start at your own front door.
And then you have people like Ben Ami and Beinart trying desperately to straddle the growing chasm between Jews of Conscience and Jews of Empire without being swallowed by the abyss.
“Meanwhile the critical narrative of Israel’s founding in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians written by Palestinian historians and over the last decades by the new Israeli historians is accepted around the world as the real history of Israel. ”
Accepted by who? Other post-colonialist historians who have the same biases as the authors of this history? Leftists who will accept any history of Israel that blames the Israelis for their own predicament? Do you have data to support this contention, Professor? It was once accepted by most Americans that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11. It’s accepted by many Arabs that 9/11 was a Mossad plot. People accept many things. It doesn’t make them true.
You want to fight a war of narratives. I ask why you can’t just acknowledge that like many things, the history is more complex than this side’s narrative or that side’s narrative. Both have some validity, both contain some myth.
As far as the emails you receive, that’s unfortunate. I’ve received my share of nasty emails from pro-Palestinian supporters wishing me dead. But we both know it does not reflect the majority of the protagonists on either side.