The Advocate

Wrangling over Zionism
Book Review: Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.
Edited by Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon. Grove Press, 2003. 378 pp.

If God as some now say is dead, He no doubt died of trying to find an equitable solution to the Arab-Jewish problem. - I. F. Stone

This worthy collection is long overdue. Perhaps no issue save the Holocaust arouses Jewish-American passions like the Israeli-Palestine conflict, and those of us who decry Israeli state terror and support Palestinian self-determination are invariably deemed “self-hating Jews” by the majority of Zionists, no matter how much we might condemn Palestinian suicide bombers. The party line for American Jews—even amongst liberals—is, as Kushner and Solomon put it, that the survival of the state of Israel “requires nothing less the disappearance of Palestinians, at least figuratively, and for some, who openly advocate transfer, even literally.” We are told repeatedly that Israel has no one to negotiate with; the Palestinians are a non-people or, at best, a people submerged in a culture of death; former Israeli Prime Minister Barak made generous offers of land that were selfishly rejected; the Palestinians’ continued suffering is all the fault of Arafat and Hamas; and so on. And, of course, the tensions between Israel as a democracy and Israel as a Jewish State are glossed over or deemed nonexistent.

It’s worth picking up Wrestling with Zion, then, if for no other reason than to read essays that date as far back as 1891 and question the wisdom of the Zionist enterprise, at times from within the Zionist movement itself. Ahad Haíam notes how Israeli colonialists “deal with the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, trespass unjustly, beat them shamefully for no sufficient reason, and even boast about their actions.” Early Zionists such as Judah L. Magnes and Martin Buber find cultural and spiritual Zionism to be incompatible with “militarist, imperialist, political Zionism.” Many of the contemporary essays concern matters that are surely familiar to many readers of The Advocate: Israel’s relations with the United States; the outsized influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) on US policy towards the Middle East, as well as that of the lesser-known Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA); the US corporate media’s anti-Palestinian bias and its blackout of the death of the American Palestinian solidarity activist Rachel Corrie by an Israeli bulldozer; and, finally, the “unholy alliance” between the fundamentalist Christian right and right-wing Zionists, both American and Israeli. As Phyllis Bennis aptly puts it, “The intersection of pro-Israeli right-wing ideologues, the arms industry, influential institutions and powerful people in government makes the question of who are the dogs and who wags the tails essentially moot.”

Beyond this established perspective, some of the essays offer surprises. Michael E. Staub provides a history of the forgotten 1970s organization Breira, a nationwide, feminist, left-center alliance of “prominent American Jews that sought to challenge what they perceived already at that time to be the rightward drift of American Zionism.” Internally contentious (and openly so), for its four brief years of existence, Breira tried to be a dovish alternative to AIPAC and far-right religious Zionism, supporting Israeli negotiations with the Palestinian Liberation Organization and a self-determining Palestinian state. Though it defined itself as Zionist, the larger Jewish organizations denounced Breira, as did Jewish journals such as Hadassah, American Zionist, and Commentary. Breira crumbled under this assault, leading Dissent editor Irving Howe to “remember why I had nothing to do with the Jewish community all these years.”

The book offers a fair range of views. Esther Kaplan celebrates the current Palestinian solidarity movement, accepting that the path to the end of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip “will be littered with e-mail postings that are a bit strident and flyers that are insensitive to Jewish history—a handful of placards that read “Zionism = Nazism”—and so what? This new wave of activism has healthy roots, not [from] ancient wells of Jew hating.”

Contrast this with the “anti-anti-Zionism” of Ellen Willis, who refuses to accept “the intemperate tone of left anti-Zionist rhetoric” even as she endorses the generally-accepted two-state consensus. In my view, both writers have blind sides. Kaplan is right that the fact that Jews “don’t own this movement anymore” isn’t innately bad, but an irredentist movement that says that all peoples have the right to self-determination except for the Israeli Jews is not going to win over the majority of Americans. And if it were to do so, it would—intentionally or not—be through appeals to Christian anti-Semitism. (Consider the Pew Research Center report that roughly a quarter of all Americans believe that Jews were responsible for the death of Christ.) Willis, for her part, gives too much ground to past Israeli governments, failing to note the continued expansion of settlements during the Barak-Arafat talks and claiming that “the occupation came about as a result not of aggressive settlement but of defensive war,” which appears to not be the case.

To be expected, there’s commentary in Wrestling with Zion about anti-Semitism—the essay by Judith Butler, doyen of postmodern feminism, is perhaps the most lucid thing she’s ever written—but there’s little explicit debate about Zionism itself and what it means today. Does it merely connote a defense of the right of Israel to exist? Or is it inextricably tied to Jewish chauvinism? Only Joel Kovel begins to bring up this question. But there is, at least, a debate on the Israeli Law of Return, which gives automatic Israeli citizenship to any Jew. Some contributors argue that Jews should renounce their right of return, as it is a benefit that rests on the back of wrongs done to Palestinians. Others claim that the Law is a Jewish affirmative action program, a needed compensation for centuries of oppression against Jewish people. Letty Cottin Pogrebin thinks that the Law is justified if Israel acknowledges the Palestinian right of return, but for her this means Israel paying reparations and helping a Palestinian state “absorb some of its own diaspora within its own borders.” This might be acceptable provided that Israel, as Pogrebin wants, admits that “the displacement of another people was a by-product of establishment of the Jewish State.” But it still seems hardly fair that, to use the oft-cited example, a Jew from Brooklyn can automatically become an Israeli citizen while an Arab born in pre-Israel Palestine cannot. And quoting the racist David Ben-Gurion does not bolster her argument.

A good companion volume to Wrestling With Zion is Bennet Muraskin’s Let Justice Well Up Like Water: Progressive Jews from Hillel to Helen Suzman (The Center for Cultural Judiasm, 2004). The majority of those profiled are secular Jews who still “dedicated their lives to the development of Jewish culture and/or progressive social causes.” In other words, the historically important Marxist Jews (Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, et al) aren’t here—though Ernst Bloch and Issac Deutscher do show up, as do lesser-known American Communists (including, of course, Moissay Olgin of the CP’s Yiddish paper, the Morgn Freiheit) and the anarchists Gustav Landauer and Rudolph Rocker. Muraskin could have used a proofreader, and one could quibble with some comments that he makes, but his overall Jewish Labor Bund-derived political perspective is solid, as is the book.

Jason Schulman is a doctoral student in the Political Science program and wrote “The Life and Death of Socialist Zionism” in the Summer 2003 edition of New Politics, which he co-edits.