The ‘bait & switch’ politics of liberal Zionism

The New York Times has run another piece for readers who choose to believe the mythology of Israel over the reality of Israel.  This time it is Kai Bird’s Christmas Day Op-Ed piece, “Israel, a Jewish Republic,” an essay on the upcoming March election that portrays the Israeli ultraright as the “bad guys” and Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni as the “good guys.” The New York Times benefits from publishing these kinds of pieces because a dichotomy within Israeli politics–the “good guys” as the liberal Zionists and the “bad guys” as the ultra right–ultimately helps perpetuate the feeling among liberal Zionists that their brand of Zionism is so much more humane than the right.  Bird opens his essay with the declaration that “Israel has an identity problem.”   While this might be true, Bird’s essay fails to recognize a core issue that most liberal Zionists are unwilling to see–that every effort to resolve the country’s identity problem must first confront the distinction between the mythology of Israel and the reality of Israel.

I read Bird’s piece on Christmas Day while sitting in the San Francisco airport waiting to return to Chicago.  I had just finished the paragraph where he writes that Israel is no more Jewish than the U.S. is Christian when I was wished–for the sixth or seventh time–a “Merry Christmas.” I thought about Paul Kivel’s book that I had recently read, Living in the Shadow of the Cross: Understanding and Resisting the Power and Privilege of Christian Hegemony, in which he meticulously explains the ways in which the U.S. still operates from its deep Christian roots.  I was also reminded, however, that while I do live in a Christian nation, I am free to practice Judaism and to have a strong Jewish identity.  Bird is correct when he writes that “American Jews have thrived over the last hundred years, and in doing so they have enriched the secular and multi-cultural ethos of the United States.”  Bird might have mentioned, too, Alan Wolfe’s new book, At Home in Exile: Why Diaspora is Good for the Jews, in which Wolfe claims that it might indeed be better for the Jews to live outside of Israel and gives tons of historical proof for his claim.  But Bird seems more interested in mythos than historical context here.  His generalization is undermined by using an already incorrect metaphor by stating that Israel isn’t really Jewish, and the U.S. isn’t really Christian.  Both of these statements are false.  To suggest otherwise is to believe the mythology of how both of these nations were founded.  The reality, however, reveals the context that Bird avoids–that both states were created by ethnically cleansing their indigenous populations in the desire to create a white hegemonic society underwritten by a dominant religion.

In addition to arguing that Israel’s “Jewishness” is more cultural than national, Bird also upholds the mythology of Israel as an open, diverse state, writing that “Israel’s 1948 declaration of independence guarantees complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.”  Though this indeed is stated in Israel’s declaration of independence, Bird’s essay neglects the reality of the occupation and discrimination faced by Palestinian citizens of Israel.  All one needs to do is to look at Israel’s everyday discrimination played out in housing laws, jobs, checkpoints, home demolitions, lack of access to education and health care (not to mention the daily racism towards Jewish Israelis who are not Ashkenazi), lack of access to water (the list goes on and on), and of course the apartheid wall that keeps a significant portion of its indigenous population from freely living their own lives.

Bird’s piece further defends Israel as a model of secular diversity, writing that Israel is a “multiethnic, vibrant and largely secular society.”  For this Zionist turned anti-Zionist, halfway into the essay, I realized why this was such an appealing piece for the New York Times to print: it defends the Israel that liberal Zionists want to believe still exists.  Bird doesn’t write about the Israel that was founded by ethnically cleansing Palestinians, the Israel whose goal was–and still is–to have a white European colony in occupied Palestine, as Ilan Pappe says so eloquently, “with as much Palestine as possible with as few Palestinians as possible.”  And then I remembered my former self who used to believe the same things that liberal Zionists believe and cling to.  The Israel that Bird is writing about is the same Israel that I grew up loving and defending at all costs.  Bird’s piece–with the New York Times as the perfect venue–is perpetuating the myth that is Israel: a Jewish, culturally rich democracy devoted to supporting all of its citizens.  Indeed, Bird writes that Israel’s original Zionist founding fathers envisioned this “multiethnic, vibrant and largely secular society” as “a new, modern state in ancient Palestine,” yet he writes this without mentioning that anyone ever lived there, typical of liberal Zionism that upholds this mythology that is Israel, a country which exists among the nameless generalized “ancient” ruins.

What is good for peace, Bird’s piece claims, are the “good” Israeli politicians.  Bird does rightfully criticize Netanyahu here, writing that Netanyahu’s “insistence on a ‘Jewish state’ seems to be only a prescription for endless conflict with his ‘Muslim’ neighbors–and perhaps today a tactic to postpone further negotiations on the creation of a Palestinian state.”  However, Bird also writes that all Israeli politicians, since Israel’s beginning, have struggled with the question of whether Israel is a secular nation-state or a Jewish state.  “For more than six decades,” he writes, “Israeli politicians have maintained a useful ambiguity about this deeply existential question.”  But few Israeli politicians actually have been ambiguous about the creation of a Jewish state in occupied Palestine.  The plan to conquer Palestine was a meticulous and systematic effort and one that is still currently being carried out today.  For the last six decades, Israeli politicians have created settlements, uprooted Palestinians and Bedouins, and denied them their basic human rights.  To see it as anything else is to believe in the mythology over the reality.

At the end of his essay, Bird says that “talking about a ‘Jewish state’ destroys a useful and wise ambiguity,” and that instead, Israelis should “celebrate their ‘Israeli’ national identity,”  and their “cultural and technological achievements.”   It is true that Israel has had a lot of success in the areas of technology, academia, science, medicine, among others, but there is no mention that this success has come at the expense of destroying another people’s opportunities for equal success.

As I was finishing this essay, I re-read Bird’s moving New York Times Op-Ed piece from April 30, 2010, “Who Lives in Sheik Jarrah?” Bird writes about living there from 1956-1958 and having the privilege of “seeing both sides.”  In this piece, Bird is genuinely disillusioned at the Israeli efforts to destroy the Palestinian area.  He is critical of Nir Birkat for expanding into Arab neighborhoods.  He defends the Palestinians living in Sheik Jarrah, and personalizes the story by talking about his own experiences and focusing on the Kalbian family.  He says in his final paragraph that he supports a Palestinian state.  What makes this conclusion problematic, though, is that his reason for supporting a state for Palestinians is to ensure a Jewish democratic Israel.  “If Israel wishes to remain largely Jewish and democratic, then it must soon withdraw from all of the occupied territories and negotiate the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza with East Jerusalem as its capital.”  Bird’s essay supports a Palestinian state but seems to emphasize here that this is so that Israel can remain a Jewish democracy, instead of for the sake and dignity of the Palestinians–portrayed here as an “othered” backdrop.

What is happening with liberal Zionism?   I felt a similar twinge when I read Ari Shavit’s book My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel.  There’s a bait-and-switch that is occurring.  The reader is enticed with the progressive rhetoric, and once you’re deeper inside the writing, the author stops short and unveils potentially colonialist rhetoric.

When I was a liberal Zionist, I used to think that Israel had an identity problem.  I’d walk the tightrope of Zionism, believing that I could be both a Zionist and a progressive, but then I’d just stop short before getting to the other side of any real change (Max Blumenthal has written courageously on the inherent contradiction with liberalism and Zionism).  I’d sit at coffee shops in Tel-Aviv with other Americans after an afternoon at the beach, dissecting what we thought were these identity problems–dissecting the mythology we thought was Israel–personifying Israel as though she was sitting in a therapist’s office with her hand across her forehead trying to figure out just what her problems were.  And we liberal Zionists–protesting at checkpoints by day and drinking coffee at cafes and swimming at the beaches by night–with our own arms across our own foreheads as we accessed our own privilege of theorizing, swooning, and struggling about what we think is Israel, dribbling on in abstract theories while the occupation of indigenous Palestinians was going on all around us.

And then I awakened to the reality that the Israel I and so many Jews loved was a mythology that was constructed for us to fall in love with.  I don’t think Israel has an identity problem.  Israel and its politicians know exactly what they are doing.  Unfortunately, however, the New York Times needs to continue running pieces that perpetuate the myth of the good “old-fashioned Zionists” so that liberal Zionist readers of the New York Times can continue to feel good about their liberalism.  It would behoove the New York Times, one day, to begin to separate the mythology from the reality.  Only then could we have a chance at a real and just peace.