Yesterday in the New York Times, Roger Cohen published a column from Hebron titled “Holy City of Sterile Streets” that lots of people are talking about, and which I see as distancing the columnist from Zionism: 1, It states bluntly that the Israeli goal of sterilizing Hebron streets by emptying them of Palestinians is reminiscent of anti-semitic rhetoric and actions; 2, It says the occupation has never ended and it is being done in the name of the Jews and is getting worse every time he sees it; 3, It urges people to put the disputed claims of the past behind them and look to the future.
The last message is a memo to Cohen himself. He has repeatedly cited the Jewish history of persecution to justify the existence of a “Jewish state” he chooses not to live in but to defend. That justification gets a lot slimmer in this piece. The Jewish history of persecution turns out to produce Jewish monsters. And Cohen surely recognizes that it is cruel to revisit such a place and only see the conditions get worse, and mouth liberal Zionist pieties as an answer.
Some excerpts. First, the endless occupation and the anti-Semitism echo:
The occupation of the West Bank is a half-century old. That’s a long time. Jews did not go to the Holy Land to deploy for another people the biological metaphors of classic racism that accompanied their persecution over centuries. But the exercise of overwhelming power is corrupting, to the point that “sterile” streets, presumably freed of disease-ridden natives, enter the lexicon.
Next, in this passage Cohen identifies the occupation as inherently “Jewish” in Zionist eyes, and rejects that strategy as oppressive.
[Yehuda Shaul of Breaking the Silence] remembers a mission statement on a wall: “To protect and defend the inhabitants of the Jewish community of Hebron.” He was ordered to fire a grenade machine gun into a heavily populated Palestinian residential area. He saw a Palestinian medical clinic destroyed. Doubts grew.
“It’s not defense, or prevention. It’s offense against Palestinian independence. That is the mission,” Shaul says. “The view is that between the river and the sea there is room for one state only, so it better be us.” Inevitably, the settlers, however extreme, become a vehicle of this strategic aim.
Here is the part where Cohen urges everyone to escape their nationalist narratives and look ahead:
To settlers, this is the first Jewish city in the biblical hills of Judea. To the Palestinian majority, this is their centuries-old home under relentless Israeli military occupation.
Like every Israeli-Palestinian argument, this one has no resolution. Other than to say the past is gone and what matters is the future.
Ever backward the violence spirals
Given the neverending fact of occupation that Cohen documents, there is only one way forward for American Jews: to get out of the back seat and remind Israelis of the political conditions under which we live in this country, and urge them as a model: One person one vote, equal rights for minorities, separation of church and state. I.e., abandon this idea of a Jewish people and Jewish national home for which we must hold the breathing tube.
I repeat that there is something cruel about a journalist visiting a Jim Crow town twice in 14 years (2004, 2018) and noting that it’s only gotten worse, something any activist could have told him, while continuing to defend Israel. You either bear witness or you don’t. Experiencing Hebron helped to transform me (when I went with Yehuda Shaul in 2006) and many others, and caused us to support BDS. Also, it would have been nice if Cohen had quoted a Palestinian. No, he has to quote the Hodding Carter character, the good white person in the south. That’s not good enough.
H/t Scott Roth, Robert Herbst, and Priscilla Read.
I first visited Hebron in 1980 after its mayor was exiled to Jordan by Israel. At that time there were few settlers. Now, nearly 40 years later, it has come to the criminal pass where it now stands. In 2004 I visited Hebron and saw nets suspended over Palestinian stores with garbage thrown down by settlers. This is the most vile racism, reminiscent of Nazi Germany’s against the Jews and Ku Klux Klan America’s against African-Americans. I don’t know if we have a chance to exterminate the fascist settlers – and many agree that Israel is now a fascist country. It is hopeful that young Jews are turning against Zionism, a relic of my generation’s days.
I was half depressed and half amused by the racist bozos in the comment section, particularly the ones who shed crocodile tears and then out all the blame for the situation on the Arabs and/ or Palestinians.
“I repeat that there is something cruel about a journalist visiting a Jim Crow town twice in 14 years (2004, 2018) and noting that it’s only gotten worse, something any activist could have told him, while continuing to defend Israel.”
It gets harder and harder to tell the crackers from the matzohs
Psychologically, I dare say that any person brainwashed to belief in an ideology — as Zionism is — will find it hard to let reality creep in which will disturb that belief, to say nothing of disturbing the place within the society of believers of which that person has been a member.
If Cohen is not as “pure” a believer in human rights as some MW readers would wish, he may still be a good deal too disenchanted with Zionism for the societies (at NYT for example) of true believers of which he has been a part which will be aghast at his expressions of mild dismay at Zionism and its fruits. Shaking loose that society of true believers is likely to be a slow and arduous business, especially as most of them will probably not visit such a wonderful example of the horrors of Zionism as Hebron is.
Unlike Chicken Little, who believed that the sky was falling because, so she thought, a piece of it had fallen on her head, most Zionists are unlikely to believe that a proof of the nastiness of Zionism has fallen on their heads because they keep their heads out of the way of such evidence. Much easier, really, to believe what Bibi and AIPAC say. Or, I suppose, Fox News.
But there might be hope. Israel allows Zionists to visit, even if it excludes BDSers. Maybe if some of those visiting ZIonists can get away from their minders long enough to see a bit of Palestine (O dear,, don’t go there, it’s too dangerous, and why would you want to see those flea-infested peasants/bomb-infested terrorists anyway?!), they’ll have the scales fall away from their eyes too.
Crackers and Matzohs notwithstanding.
Hard to tell, but it sounds as though Mr. Cohen might be suggesting that Jewish supremacists did not covet Palestine, did not wish to colonize it and did not wish to establish in as much as possible of it a religion-supremacist “Jewish State” of Israel primarily of and for Jewish Israelis and non-Israeli Jews. Except they did; and he knows they did; and, because he’s a Zionist, he’s OK with it (some minor hand-wringing notwithstanding).