A debate over Zionism in the bowels of the Rayburn House Office Building

Back in April, I participated in a discussion about the future of the conflict organized by the Middle East Policy Council in Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill. Here is the video. Here’s the transcript. One of the personal highlights of the session was getting to share a stage in the bowels of Rayburn with Henry Siegman, a Holocaust survivor who has become one of the most important critics of Israel inside the establishment Jewish community. Siegman has paid a huge personal price for his honesty. And in a post right after the event, I  broke out Siegman and Steve Walt‘s news to Washington: Imagine a future beyond the two-state solution.

I also took issue with Siegman over Zionism. I pushed the question, and he and I had something of an exchange over the ideology. Below are excerpts, first me (I’ve edited out some of my stammerings for clarity), then him, then me again: 

I am a Jew who is an anti-Zionist. I don’t see a need for a Jewish state. I’ve never seen a need for Jewish state. Now, the reasons that my community embraced Zionism, there were very real reasons for that, of course. And I may well have been a Zionist a hundred years, even 80 years ago. And surely, maybe right after World War II, I might have been a Zionist. Zionism was a real — a valid response — and a predictable response to the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe as Jews entered the cities of Central and Eastern Europe. And there was always an anti-Zionist strain in Jewish life, but that ended pretty much after World War II and then after the ’67 war.

And what I’m doing in my work inside Jewish life is to say that I like a state in which a religious minority has freedoms and rights as I do in the United States. That’s the type of state that I want. I’ve never seen a need for Jewish state, and I think that what I described about the occupation has resulted inevitably from the character of that state, that it is — the Jewish national home, that some of the oppression of minorities and the contempt for Palestinians grows out of the very nature of that creation.

So I’m taking on Zionists in American Jewish life. I want to have that conversation. It’s very important to go into this and say, why are you here enjoying the freedoms of liberal democracy if you think it’s so important to have a Jewish state? And is it possible to sort of warehouse one state while you’re in another? There are contradictions that I think are deep inside Zionism that have to be interrogated. And I am taking that project on, and a lot of my friends in Jewish life are taking that on.

The American piece of that is that there was an anti-Zionist element in American political life too. Now, the overlap of anti-Zionism in American political life and anti-Semitism was unfortunately — there was a certain congruence of those communities. But that being said, we’re not far from where George Marshall, the secretary of state, said to Truman in ’48, if you recognize this state, I’m not going to vote for you in the next election, where — we’re not from where James Forrestal died after opposing — committed suicide after opposing the creation of a Jewish state and feeling that he was hounded by Zionists. In fact, the press was — helped to destroy his reputation for that. And we’re not far from the State Department where Near East Affairs, the Arabists, said back in ’48, if you create a Jewish state in Palestine, there is going to be never-ending conflict. And surely, there has been never-ending conflict. So I think that there has to be a recovery of our own American tradition of questioning an ethnocracy.

Siegman then spoke and took me on: 

But let me try to live up to this reputation I have of being a controversial person and start by telling you that unlike (the ?) previous speaker, who I — whose writings I admire and respect, I am a Zionist, and I’m not opposed to a Jewish state. Indeed, I spent much of my early life supporting the creation of a Jewish state.

And my understanding of Zionism, however, was shaped by the founders, the early — the early founders of the Zionist movement, who would be appalled and are probably turning in their graves seeing what their historic experiment actually yielded. And I personally did not begin writing the kinds of things that you have — some of you have been reading until the early ’70s, when it became clear to me that these foundation principles of the early founders of the Zionist movement were being traduced and violated by successive Israeli governments and that some of the assumptions they made about the kind of society that would be shaped and that would develop in Israel in the state — in this Jewish state turned out to be false assumptions, not because the enterprise of developing a democratic state was inherently a false one, but because the people who came to power in Israel, who led its governments, tragically and sadly seemed to learn absolutely nothing from 2,000 years of Jewish experience and even less from the Jewish heritage which gives the name “Jewish” to the state that — and to the governments that they have formed. And that is when my attitude to — not to the idea of a Jewish state but to the policies of the government of that state changed completely….

During the Q-and-A, I brought up Zionism again.

A friend was telling me about the U.S. campaign to end the occupation lobbying in Congress some years ago, and they would go to a congressman’s office with citizens from his district or her district to say, we don’t like this occupation. And the staffer or the congressman would just be kind of marking time with these activists, and then one of them would say, “I’m a Jewish-American in your district.” And according to my friend, who was involved in this lobbying effort, the congressman would look up and would listen to what the person was saying.

And I think what that reflects is that the moral force behind the creation of Israel and behind the sustaining of Israel is the force from the Holocaust, and the legacy of Jewish persecution — Henry here barely escaped the Holocaust — and there’s a reason why we honor people of Henry’s generation who chose Zionism as a response to the Holocaust. And — but that is the essential political dyad, I think, in this whole conflict, is Israel and the United States and a sort of commitment that the United States made to Israel out of this great historical persecution.

And that’s why I believe that for a different time, we have to overcome that dyad. And the way that I think that we overcome it is by saying, Henry, I think that was an error. While I honor what happened— it’s a sacred chapter of Jewish history– I think it’s as if the Jewish community said, we want the Marcus Garvey option. And that’s what they did. They chose the Marcus Garvey option, which was, we’re not safe here; we’re not safe in Europe. So we have to create a national home. I think that was a wrong choice. And and that’s why I’m an anti-Zionist, because I don’t believe in the Marcus Garvey option.

And the last part of this, politically, that is so significant is, Avraham Burg, a former speaker of the Knesset in Israel said that [the Jewish commmunity] created two great structures after the war. It created the state of Israel and it created the American Jewish power establishment that supported Israel— the lobby, in a word. And I am responsible for that personally. I’m part of the American Jewish community, which is being represented by the lobby, and I say no.

So I think that the greatest thing I can do is say, I don’t believe in the Marcus Garvey option. And that could have a huge effect on what Henry rightly describes as the attachment of the Israeli people to a Jewish state and a Jewish majority. If the other part of that partnership, the American Jewish community, honestly says, as I honestly say, I do not want the Marcus Garvey option; I want participation in a liberal democracy, and I am going to organize my community on that basis, both American Jews and the larger American community, I think that could have a huge effect on the consciousness of Israelis.