Israeli ethnic cleansing is troubling, but everybody does it– J Street rabbi explains at Passover

The ‘liberal-Zionist’ Israel lobby group J Street posted a piece for the current Passover titled “A Light Unto the Nations: Two-Way Street for Passover,” by Rabbi Seymour Rosenbloom.

The piece concerns itself centrally with the recent documentary film Tantura, which covers the massacre perpetrated by Zionist militias at the coastal Palestinian town of Tantura in 1948, just days after the state of Israel was established.

One thing is refreshing here: in contrast to the long-lasting Zionist denial that prevailed over this horrific episode and marked the academic/character-assassination of Teddy Katz who reported about it in detail in his masters thesis in 1998, Rabbi Rosenbloom treats this massacre as fact – wanton slaughter, mass grave and all the rest.

Let’s see how the rabbi puts it:

Tantura was an Arab village on the Mediterranean, north of Caesarea. The film details the work of Theodore Katz, who, when he was a graduate student at the University of Haifa, wrote a master’s thesis on the conquest of the village during the War of Independence. He interviewed surviving members of the Alexandroni Brigade which carried out the operation. They described horrific scenes of forced evictions, wanton slaughter and looting that had been covered up for years, including evidence of a mass grave of Palestinians near a beach now popular with Israelis. When this academic document became public, Katz was vilified. Many of the witnesses retracted their statements. It was too lurid a story to be accepted as true.

Such episodes pose a cognitive moral problem for those inculcated with the myth of Zionist righteousness and heroism. Rosenbloom:

The film is revelatory and haunting. It deals with the cover-up, lack of transparency, and outright denial of a tragedy of war. It conflicts with what most of us learned about the establishment of the Jewish state. We were taught that Israel was a “land without a people for a people without a land.” But there were many thriving Arab towns and villages with generations of history, just like Tantura. We were told that Israelis urged Arabs to remain, but they chose to leave at the behest of attacking Arab armies. But like Tantura, Arab residents were driven out of numerous villages by the conquering Israeli force.

So, let me summarize in less cautious words: There was, after all, an ethnic cleansing campaign. It wasn’t an empty land, and it had to be largely emptied of the indigenous Palestinian population so as to facilitate the creating of a Jewish majority.

Or as Israeli historian Benny Morris put it (in “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited”):

Transfer was inevitable and inbuilt in Zionism – because it sought to transform a land which was ‘Arab’ into a Jewish state and a Jewish state could not have arisen without a major displacement of Arab population.

If you’re a Zionist like Rosenbloom who simply loves Israel and the idea of a Jewish homeland, that whole logic creates a problem, if you also seek to be a liberal. If you’re Benny Morris, you can go all out and suggest that David Ben-Gurion should have done a more thorough ethnic cleansing and solved the problem for good. But Rosenbloom is certainly not there. He wants to live with this history and justify it somehow.

Because this history is not over. The Palestinian refugees have been denied return, and it’s still the same goal today as it was then: maintain the Jewish majority at all costs.

So, how do you square the circle?

Rosenbloom decides to relegate it to an idea of a sinful past that is largely over:

Do revelations like these delegitimize the State of Israel? Do they call into question its right to exist? While there are many who have come to this conclusion, and troubled as I am by Tantura and the growing awareness of other stories like it, and though I am dismayed by the coverup, I have come to a different conclusion. I believe that every nation state has both a sacred myth of how it came into being, and a reality that is often dissonant and includes violence against the native population. War and conquest are the realities of how nation states have always been created. Battles over land probably go back to the earliest human civilizations and even pre-history.

For me, the key issue is not how a nation was founded, but how it sustains itself, how it treats all of its inhabitants, and how it strives to live up to the ideals enshrined in its sacred myth. Or fails. How it owns up to its past. Or doesn’t.

This is what I find particularly challenging.

So, let’s answer the rabbi’s questions: How does Israel sustain itself? How does it treat all of its inhabitants (not least its occupied, besieged and expelled inhabitants)?

It treats its inhabitants with Apartheid – a term which Rosenbloom never refers to, but which has been the sober conclusion of a host of leading international, Palestinian and Israeli human rights organizations. It’s one thing to own up to the past – it’s another thing to own up to the present. And here Rosenbloom can’t say the A-word. Because he loves Israel so deeply:

I love Israel. I believe that the Jewish people need a homeland. I believe that our claim to the land which goes back millennia is as good as anyone else’s. And I believe that Israel has faced, and continues to face, threats to its security. It is a nation that must be vigilant.

Is it really as good as anyone else’s, that claim of a homeland? I mean, does it matter if people already live somewhere and have a modern cohesive population, or whether they just have a mythological sense of longing based in events which reach back two millennia? When we look at Russia and Ukraine, the idea that some thousand-year old Rus history around Kiev should permit a violent takeover of a whole modern country cannot be accepted. These things are not equal. Ancient mythology is not equal to modern reality. In any case, that ancient longing doesn’t erase the war crimes.

As to “threats to its security” — of course Israel faces threats to its security. What do you expect, when you enact a mass expulsion of the native population and enact Apartheid policies to secure the Jewish supremacist hegemony?

Rosenbloom appears to realize that he has ventured quite far into mythological romanticism, so he returns to modern liberal sensibility:

However, vigilance does not justify actions that demean and dehumanize others. Vigilance does not entitle Israel to continue a brutal Occupation that corrodes the morality of Israeli society, and subjects Palestinians to a life without rights or hope. It does not justify continuing the displacement of Palestinians from their land, and the settling of Israelis on that occupied land, in violation of international law.

If only the occupation were not there, we are made to believe, then things could be better. Indeed, this occupation, by Rosenbloom, even violates Jewish law and traditions. Emphasis mine:

Houses that are bulldozed in the middle of the night for punitive permit violations; settler violence against Palestinians, and Israeli human rights workers, that is perfunctorily investigated and rarely punished; arbitrary acts of detainment and callous treatment such as the deadly incident involving 78 year old Palestinian-American Omar Assad at the hands of IDF soldiers; or the case of Haj Suleiman Hathaleen who was killed by an  Israeli tow truck while peacefully protesting near his West Bank village – these are not acts motivated by legitimate security concerns. They are human rights violations. They violate Jewish law and tradition. They violate the foundational ideals on which Israel’s founders established a Jewish state.

So, Rosenbloom really believes in the righteousness of those proclaimed foundational ideals, of justice and equality. Many of us (including many Jews) cannot reconcile the idea of an exclusive, racial Jewish state with these ideals of equality, but Rosenbloom tries hard. He really believes that it can provide equality and be a “light unto the nations”:

Israel’s challenge is to reclaim the “child we prayed for.” A state that is Jewish and also treats everyone under its guardianship with justice and equity. “A Light unto the Nations.”

Rosenbloom believes that there is a righteous Israel, but it just needs to separate itself from the occupation. This is the “separate regimes delusion,” as Nathan Thrall described it: the idea that there’s this other Israel there, beyond and apart from the occupation, and that one day we will see it again. Thrall chides precisely ‘Liberal Zionist’ groups like J Street for maintaining this delusion, rather than holding Israel to account as a unified state (whose leaders can’t even speak of an occupation).

Rosenbloom’s “separate regimes delusion” is the idea of the “child we prayed for”. This is how he frames it:

In the fall the New York Times published an article entitled “Whose Promised Land? A Journey into a Divided Israel.” It opens with an interview of 86-year-old Shai Melamud, the son of an early pioneer. He muses what his father would think of Israel today. He concludes that “If he took a look, he’d say a single sentence: ’This wasn’t the child we prayed for.’ And then he’d return to his grave.”

So the idea is that Israel is really another child that just needs to be redeemed looking backwards.

However, the story of Tantura shows a horrific child, one that repeatedly massacres and ethnically cleanses. Where is the child we prayed for? The original bully child never really grew up. It never rectified its crimes, it never really came to terms with them, and it holds on to them so that its colonialist gains will not be reversed.

In other words, Rosenbloom is busy praying for an Israel that is not. He is in love with the idea of it yet is dismayed with the reality of it.

And because of that dream and prayer, we are supposed to restrain ourselves to mere soft criticism, so that we don’t damage the child too much. Philosophy, dreams and hope – those are the means of the liberal Zionist.

Thus Rosenbloom ends his message with a mythological reversal of victimhood combined with recognition of Palestinian suffering, and a vague hope that next year we may all be free:

At the Passover table we say, “This year we are slaves; next year may be free.” So long as Palestinians suffer under the heel of oppression and are not free, we all remain enslaved. Next Passover, may we all be free human beings.

Yes, many countries, particularly those with a colonialist past, have been founded by horrific acts. However, some of these countries have managed to extricate themselves from this past and come to terms in some ways with this history. It often takes centuries to come out of such a past. Israel, however, is in an active phase of its colonization, and is very close to the point of its founding in that sense. It is an Apartheid state, not a liberal democracy.

I doubt that Rabbi Rosenbloom or J Street will arrive at this recognition by next Passover, and I fear that they never will. Myself, I choose to be free of this contradictory ideology today.