Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism by Judith Butler Columbia University Press, ISBN 9780231146111

In Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism Judith Butler makes the case that Judaism and Zionism represent vastly different world views. Butler’s readers are more likely to be liberal and progressive secular Jews, but no doubt readers also include both political and religious Zionists. Because Butler does not address the Zionists directly, as Shaul Magid does in The Necessity of Exile, they may be scandalized by the critical studies approach drawing on a variety of Jewish scholars, postwar philosophers, German-Jewish thinkers, and Palestinian writers. Nevertheless, Butler addresses Jewish ethics as well as Zionism’s use of state violence and its newfound messianism.

After Israel’s 2008 Operation Cast Lead, Butler sought to debunk the claim that criticism of Israel is antisemitic, proposing that Judaism is in fact opposed to injustice, state violence, expulsion, dispossession; and that in all its traditions — secular, socialist and religious — Judaism is dedicated to social justice and social equality. And if that case could be made, “it would be a painful irony indeed if the Jewish struggle for social justice were itself cast as anti-Jewish.”

Thus Butler sets out to show “that there are bona fide Jewish but imperative Jewish traditions that oppose state violence and modes of colonial expulsion and containment [,…] affirming a different Jewishness than the one in whose name the Israeli state claims to speak.”

To do this Butler needs to show that resistance to Zionism is itself a Jewish value, that Zionism’s illiberal exceptionalist lens must be replaced by a democratic universalist, and Jewish, lens. And, to overcome the objection that Zionism’s violence is only reactive and not intrinsic, it must also be demonstrated that a critique of state violence, which Israel uses to repress Palestinians, is not only inherent in Jewish values but that Zionism is not inherent in Judaism or in Jewishness. It’s a tall order.

Butler’s main task, like Magid’s, is to rescue Jewishness and Judaism from Zionism and to rescue Judaism from the grip of a Zionist framing:

“It continues to surprise me that many people believe that to claim one’s Jewishness is to claim Zionism or believe that every person who attends a synagogue is necessarily Zionist. Equally concerning is the number of people who think they must now disavow Jewishness because they cannot accept the policies of the State of Israel. If Zionism continues to control the meaning of Jewishness, then there can be no Jewish critique of Israel and no acknowledgment of those of Jewish descent or formation who call into question the right of the State of Israel to speak for Jewish values or, indeed, the Jewish people. Although it is surely possible to derive certain principles of equality, justice, and cohabitation from Jewish resources, broadly construed, how can one do this without thereby making those very values Jewish and so effacing or devaluing other modes of valuation that belong to other religious and cultural traditions and practices?”

In deriving first principles from an ethical or religious tradition, Butler asks if Jewish sources can be reinterpreted anew and if non-Jewish sources can ever be used to illustrate Jewish values.

One would think that these arguments would depend on firmly establishing that even Jewish sources regard Zionism’s qualities as alien to Judaism. And they do. But Jewish values such as cohabitation with the “other,” equality, and justice can be applied universally. Jewish experiences, such as dispersion and exile, may have particularist but also universal meanings. Certainly both Jews and Palestinians have experienced both. Butler acknowledges that universal concepts may not always hold precisely the same meaning for all parties. Even Jews are famously heterogenous. Everyone, Butler argues, perhaps Jews especially, must contend with the notion of the “other,” with alterity.

Ultimately, Butler elects “to depart from a[n entirely] Jewish-centered framework for thinking about the problem of Zionism and to locate Jewishness in the moment of its encounter with the non-Jewish, in the dispersing of the self that follows from that encounter.” These encounters are far-ranging, and if one does not have a solid background (which I don’t) in critical theory they will find themselves treading water instead of swimming happily along. Nevertheless, Butler’s book offers some useful framings to consider Zionism’s hijacking of Judaism.

Butler begins their meditations with an insight from Edward Said, who noted that Moses the Egyptian, Judaism’s founder, is recognizable as both a Jew and an Arab. The moment we begin to grapple with these opposing identities, we are engaging, in Butler’s terms, with alterity. Said makes the point that the only thing that really distinguishes Moses as a Jew is receiving the tablets at Sinai. The two peoples he embodies have much more in common — chiefly, their refugee status, both in scripture and in the modern historical record.

Outwardly it’s difficult to distinguish Mizrachi Jews from Arabs. It’s hardly a surprise that Jews (including many Ashkenazim) and Arabs share much of the same DNA. Now, many centuries after Sinai, having joined a world of nation-states, the real difference between contemporary Israeli Jews and Palestinians boils down to who has the power to deploy violence against the other to maintain its claim of exclusive ownership of a contested piece of land.

While critical studies certainly have their challenges, they are also remarkably capable of identifying central issues. In Zionism’s case it is institutional violence toward the “other.”

The weaponization of “alterity” and its counterpoint in the [non-militarized] idea of “cohabitation” are thus flip sides of a major theme of Butler’s book, whose first two chapters largely focus on Emmanual Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Rashi’s discussions of how Jews relate to non-Jews, and Walter Benjamin’s critique of violence.

Butler demonstrates that Judaism itself, Jewish scholars like Levinas, and sages like Rashi have long grappled with the ethics of the “other.” Contrary to Judaism, Zionism cannot see — in fact, refuses to recognize — the humanity of the “other,” valuing only survival, relying on state violence and operating by the law of the jungle.

Although Butler themself does not quote Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall, this foundational document expresses Zionism’s almost sociopathic “survival-over-morality” in terms that ought to make any religious scholar shudder:

“We hold that Zionism is moral and just. And since it is moral and just, justice must be done, no matter whether Joseph or Simon or Ivan or Achmet agree with it or not. There is no other morality.”

Zionism’s fundamental absence of morality was echoed recently in a statement by Israel’s Kahanist National Security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir:

“My right, my wife’s right, my children’s right to travel on the roads of Judea and Samaria is more important than Arabs’ freedom of movement. Sorry, Mohammad, but that’s the reality, that’s the truth.”

I had thought I was up to the challenge of reading Parting Ways because I had previously read several of the works of Hannah Arendt and Edward Said, which Butler uses as departure points. I thought I might be able to keep up. And even though I had also read the Kafka mentioned and Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, I had never read Benjamin’s famously obscure meditation on violence, which also treats divine violence and wades into messianism. Despite a better than average chance of understanding Butler’s many eclectic references, some of the chapters were still a very tough slog.

It pains me when Zionists claim that their beloved Apartheid state and the twisted, amoral ideology that undergirds it are central to Judaism. There may once have been a Kingdom of Israel (actually two, which only lasted 125 years) but that Israel is clearly not the same as today’s ethno-state, despite the fantasies of Kahanists, hilltop setters and Christian Zionists.

So I don’t mean to slam Butler’s overall thesis at all, because I agree with it. But this slim volume makes something relatively straightforward unnecessarily complex. I also found the book physically painful to read because the font size is 8 or 9 points. There are far more approachable dissections of why Judaism and Zionism are not only completely separate but stand absolutely in opposition to one another.

We could start with the Talmud, for one. There is nothing in the Talmud’s 63 tractates that describes the contemporary state of Israel now run by fascists, Kahanists, and religious lunatics. Look at the Talmud’s laws of war to see how Israel has violated virtually every stricture. Or look to the pre-state Zionists for their objections to contemporary Zionism, discussed in Chapter 6 of Parting Ways.

Even before Israel’s founding, many of the early Zionists like Albert Einstein, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, and Judah Magnes quickly distanced themselves from the ethnic cleansing and fascism that had become inevitabilities of Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionism embraced at the 1942 Biltmore Zionist Conference. Their argument was that stealing from and murdering Arabs would create an unsustainable, racist state and violate every tenet of Jewish ethics.

And, really. How could Zionists have proceeded to steal an entire land from its indigenous people in spite of such easily-foreseen consequences? Because Zionism has no morality, no concern for the “other,” no respect for universal values. Even after there was no longer a Nazi threat to Jewish life, Zionism continued on its trajectory of genocide and dispossession of Palestinians.

Today finding Jews critical of Zionism is not very difficult. There are hundreds of Jewish organizations, even some within Judaism itself, that are critical of Zionism. If you’re looking for a contemporary, theoretical critique, check out the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, which numbers a respectable share of Jewish intellectuals. Visit https://criticalzionismstudies.org/ and their podcast.

In the final analysis, recognizing the differences between Judaism and Zionism requires no esoteric meditation. Zionism, with its attendant, even logically consequential, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and oppression, is diametrically opposed to Judaism’s Tzedek, tzedek tirdof! (Justice, justice, shalt thou pursue!). And Zionism most surely contradicts Hillel’s dictum: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the entire Torah, and the rest is its commentary.”

This is the last of three book reviews on the One State Solution I started a few weeks ago. I previously reviewed Ian S. Lustick’s Paradigm Lost: from Two-State Solution to One-State Reality, and Omri Boehm’s Haifa Republic: A Democratic Future for Israel. From time to time I will add additional One State reviews.

Jonathan Kuttab has dedicated much of his life to human rights, first as one of the founders of Al-Haq, a Palestinian rights group established in 1979, and also as a co-founder of Nonviolence International in 1989. Kuttab is a Palestinian Christian lawyer who has practiced in Israel, Palestine, and the US and was the head of a legal team that negotiated the 1994 Cairo Agreement between Israel and the PLO. In 1980 Kuttab co-authored a study of Israeli military laws governing the West Bank that had been modified from British Mandate and Jordanian law to apply more draconian control over Palestinians and to “legalize” land theft.

Kuttab, then, is as qualifed as anyone to present a non-violent program for a One State solution in his book “Beyond the Two-State Solution,” available in English, Hebrew, and Arabic print editions and also in electronic format.

Despite his conciliatory tone, Kuttab doesn’t pull any punches. Zionism is a land grab and, following each war and Oslo, Israel always grabbed as much land as it could — finally rendering impossible a Two State solution. Kuttab analyzes the many failed brokered peace agreements and tries to isolate the unresolved sticking points.

Kuttab acknowledges Israel’s extreme preoccupation with security, the status of Jerusalem, the Palestinian right of return, and a difficult-to-imagine reversal of illegal settlements. After looking at all the proposals that bowed to Zionist domination, he eliminates Two States as a workable solution because “the language of the Two State Solution leaves the battling ideologies intact, and only requires a geographic division and spatial limitation on the exercise of each ideology. Chauvinism, racism, discrimination, and inherent problems are all swept under the rug. No real critique of Zionism or Palestinian Nationalism is required, if we accept the language of the Two State Solution.” Kuttab’s rejection of Palestinian nationalism may grate on those who want to discard one nationalism for another.

Kuttab begins by enumerating the “minimum requirements” for Jewish Israelis when entering into a bi-national state: (1) the Jewish Right of Return; (2) Security; (3) a Jewish rhythm of life; (4) Hebrew; (5) the right to live anywhere in Palestine. For Palestinians the list is virtually identical: (1) the right of return for refugees; (2) Democracy; (3) respect for and protection of Arab Identity; (4) Arabic; (5) the right to move about and live anywhere in Palestine. Kuttab sees no pragmatic impediment to a bi-national state and sets about describing how one could be realized, how national and meta-national laws and even a bi-national Supreme Court could protect both peoples with binding judgments instead of hollow actions in toothless international courts.

Kuttab throws out any number of concrete suggestions for structuring a new bi-national state, but these are only useful to illustrate the point that any serious party could come up with plenty of workable ideas. For this reason it’s not worth dissecting Kuttab’s specifics because specifics must be proposed by both parties and negotiated only after both come to terms with the reality that a bi-national state is the only possible option.

Kuttab writes that “Jewish fears need to be addressed forthrightly” (but of course Palestinians have their own well-justified fears). Kuttab demonstrates enormous (disproportionate?) sensitivity to the fears of Jewish Israelis who, even with the most powerful and only nuclear military in the Middle East, habitually reject Palestinian rights because they are perceived to limit Jewish security. So Kuttab suggests writing Jewish supremacy into the new state’s legal system with a Lebanese-style requirement that the head of the new bi-national military always be Jewish, while the head of the national police always be an Arab. As much as I respect what Kuttab is attempting here, it is an odd and lopsided provision that cannot fail to be a show-stopper.

in remaining chapters Kuttab addresses other objections and challenges to his proposals. One is that a bi-national state has never succeeded before. But is that true? Kuttab writes that Lebanon and Yugoslavia may have foundered because of ethnic strife, but Switzerland and Canada are examples of successes of confederation models.

Even if a successful model did not exist, Kuttab writes that the Holy Land is a special case that deserves special effort, and that a resolution of this particular conflict could play an outsized role in resolving other regional and global conflicts.

Kuttab asks rhetorically why Zionists — having “won” — would ever agree to anything limiting their power or supremacy. The quick answer is that Israel’s victory has never been a stable “win” and, in any case, is not sustainable without bottomless aid and diplomatic cover from Western colonial enablers who will eventually tire of subsidizing human rights abuses. And in the long run the injustices perpetrated on Palestinians cannot be ignored forever.

Another objection Kuttab addresses is the argument that the degree of enmity is so great that it can never be surmounted. If this were true then contemporary national alliances of the 21st Century would be impossible — consider Britain and France, the US and Germany, the US and Japan, Germany and Israel. Many of these former bitter enemies became friends within a generation following the end of conflict.

A final argument for pursuing a single state — and against doing nothing — is that, under Zionism, there is no place for minorities. The logic of Zionism requires that minorities (Muslim, Arab, Bedouin, Christian) can never be allowed to become a majority, and which requires that they must either be repressed or eliminated. But this is logic of the 18th and 19th centuries. A multicultural democracy is manifestly superior to endless occupation, war, racist law, and the perversion of democracy.

Kuttab never says so explicitly, but ultimately Israelis will recognize that Zionism is incompatible with democracy. As fantastical as such a prediction sounds in the middle of Israel’s most genocidal war to-date, Israelis will eventually admit that Zionism did its job of saving millions of Jews but it is now time to abandon it, just as Palestinians will have to abandon their own nationalist aspirations — that is, if a bi-national state is ever to take root.

Kuttab’s final chapter is a discussion of what one might call the “attitude adjustments” necessary to make a bi-national state possible. Kuttab, as a proponent of non-violence, rejects armed resistance for both pragmatic and moral reasons (to give you a sense of where he comes from, he’s on the board of a Christian Bible college). Before the two peoples can ever start to build a shared state, settlement will have to stop. Israeli’s aren’t going away, and not all settlers are extremists, Kuttab writes. Likewise, Hamas isn’t going away and (contrary to the propaganda) many of their members are moderates. In any case, Hamas will have to be part of any One State solution.

Palestinians have rights and agency. Thus, truly democratic elections in Palestine — not a US-Israeli-appointed regime – would have to precede any sort of political realignment in order to obtain Palestinian agreement. Collective punishment has to stop immediately. Gratuitous repression and domination for domination’s sake would have to end. “Administrative detentions” and many other Israeli excesses and daily insults would have to cease before Palestinians could enter into a new state with Israelis. Terror attacks (from both sides) and Israeli military incursions would need to stop immediately.

Jonathan Kuttab joins many other One-Staters who have reached the same conclusion — that Two States are now an impossibility and, even if feasible, would only defer and compound the conflict. As unimaginable as One State is now, it is the best and only hope for two peoples sharing one land.

This is the second review of three books on the One State Solution.

My previous review was of Ian S. Lustick’s Paradigm Lost: from Two-State Solution to One-State Reality. In this post I will look at Omri Boehm’s Haifa Republic: A Democratic Future for Israel; and in the final installment I will look at Jonathan Kuttab’s Beyond the Two-State Solution.

Why One State? It’s time to say kaddish for the dead and move on. “Two States” was an idea that had its genesis over a century ago and might have had its day for the briefest moment in time, but it was almost universally declared dead by 1983. To continue promoting two states is dishonest and as creepy as pretending to talk to the dead.

It is also high time that American “Liberals” and “liberal” American Zionists stopped supporting a violent ethnocratic supremacist state. We don’t want one here and we shouldn’t be paying for the one in Israel. Americans pretend that Israel is the “only democracy in the Middle East” but it’s no such thing. It’s an Apartheid state with a brutal occupation over millions of stateless people, and over five dozen laws that discriminate against its own non-Jewish citizens. With the massive amount of money American taxpayers shell out to preserve the Zionist state, why on earth are we not calling for a genuine democracy?

Moreover, the notion that any particular religion has a “right” to its own nation is hogwash. Where then is the Mormon nation? The Scientologist nation? A state for practitioners of Santeria? Rastafari? If liberals really believe in such a “right” then why are they not pushing just as hard for theocratic states all over the Western hemisphere?

It should go without saying: a repressive state does not have a right to exist as a repressive state. It cannot claim special privileges for itself, or whine that criticisms constitute hate-speech or antisemitism. If there are calls to dismantle Israel’s Zionist state, for all the shrill Cassandras, this in no way implies the extermination of its citizens; it simply means that the state itself must cease doing business as usual. Portugal, Greece, Germany, South Africa — to name a few examples of former dictatorships or repressive regimes — were all reconstituted as democracies without purges or extermination. And this is my hope for Palestine. The ADL and a myriad of Zionist attack organizations can infer whatever delusional meanings they like from it, but this is is what I mean when I utter that unambiguous phrase: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

Omri Boehm’s Haifa Republic

While Ian Lustick proposes recognizing the reality of Israeli domination “from the river to the sea” and building a single secular democracy (however slowly) out of a repressive ethnostate, Omri Boehm’s vision is of redefining Zionism to promote a confederation that allows two peoples to share one land. Boehm’s vision is similar to an early (pre-state) thread of Zionism that advocated a Jewish homeland but not necessarily a state.

Boehm begins by recounting the angry reception that Tony Judt’s essay in the New York Review of Books (“Israel: The Alternative”) received from Zionists in 2003 when he proposed that Israel abandon Zionism and embrace liberal democracy. Zionists huffed that Judt had crossed a line from legitimate criticism of Israel to “illegitimate criticism of Israel’s existence.”

But then Thomas Friedman — hardly a kefiyah-sporting radical — declared in a February 2016 New York Times column that “they all killed the Two State Solution. Let the one-state era begin.” But he wasn’t finished. Friedman went on, “It’s over folks, so please stop sending the New York Times your proposals for a two-state solution […] The next U.S. president will have to deal with an Israel determined to permanently occupy all the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, including where 2.5 million West Bank Palestinians live.” And Friedman was not wrong. Even an unlikely Henry Kissinger threw shade on the Two State solution shortly before his death.

Haifa Republic recounts the history of the Yishuv — pre-Israel — and the varieties of Zionism that existed before Revisionist Zionism prevailed and from then on Zionism meant (1) a state not just a homeland; (2) exclusive control over all of Palestine; and (3) ethnic cleansing (“transfer”) to ensure a Jewish majority. David Ben-Gurion implemented these goals and told the 20th Zionist Congress in 1937:

“In many parts of the land Jewish settlement would not be possible without transferring the Arab peasants. […] We’re lucky that the Arab people has immense and empty territories. The growing Jewish power in the land will increase more and more our ability to execute the transfer in large numbers.”

Boehm agrees with Lustick that a one-state reality now defines Israel:

The future is here: one-state politics now defines Israel’s reality, and the consequences are monumental — to Israelis, to Palestinians, and to world Jewry. But we’re still lacking a language for liberal Zionist thinking in a post-two-state, post-ethnic era.

But he believes that the beginnings of Zionism might hold the key to refashioning a new, shared democratic state:

The basic vocabulary of this language existed in the past — in Zionism’s beginnings. Whereas Zionist politics today is synonymous with the view that Jews have the right to their own sovereign state in Eretz Israel, the movement’s founding fathers held a more nuanced view. Intense ideological disagreements divided Herzl, Ahad Ha’am, Jabotinsky, and Ben-Gurion, but they could all agree on the distinction, all too often forgotten, between national self-determination and national sovereignty: up until very late in Zionist history, they all viewed the project as committed to the former but not the latter. In fact, they were for the most part committed to the latter’s denial.) That is, they believed that the Jews had the right to exercise political self-rule, administrate autonomously their own lives, and revive Jewish culture and education. But they did not believe that this should have been done in a sovereign Jewish state: the Jews’ state was envisaged as a sub-sovereign political entity existing under a multinational political sovereignty. Jabotinsky, for example, who is commonly regarded today as a raving right-wing Jewish nationalist, explicitly agreed with Brit Shalom, Martin Buber’s Zionist faction, that “the future of Palestine must be founded, legally speaking, as a binational state.” Even Hannah Arendt, who is often considered an anti-Zionist, could subscribe to this concept of Zionism. Until late in his career, Ben-Gurion actually did subscribe to it. When Wieseltier or Dershowitz condemn binationalism as a betrayal of Israel and the Jewish people, they overlook the distinction between self-determination and sovereignty: both as a crucial political distinction and as one that, historically, stood at the heart of Zionism’s origins. Israel’s political survival as a democracy depends on the recovery of this distinction.

Boehm wants to redefine Zionism — if such a thing is now possible. Redefinition seems like a face-saving device to soften the blow to liberal Zionists of abandoning the ideology. So Boehm doesn’t require them to abandon it; he just calls it something different. This seems like the perfect solution for people given to self-delusion. Maybe it could even work.

The Holocaust and the Nakba are thus the main pillars of Zionist thinking as we have come to know it– of the axiom that Zionism is essentially about Jewish sovereignty, and that Jewish demographic superiority, therefore, must be preserved at all costs. It’s time to see that this alleged Zionist axiom is not a Zionist axiom at all, and that adhering to it is leading to the destruction of Israel and expulsions of Palestinians.

It is time to restore a binational Zionism – with a strong notion of equal citizenship in a one-state solution. One way we can do this is by developing an art of forgetting, a politics of remembering to forget the Holocaust and the Nakba in order to undo rather than perpetuate them as the pillars of future politics. Ernest Renan advanced the idea of such an art of forgetting in his great lecture of 1882, “What Is a Nation?” Renan’s account of modern citizenship can help us rethink Israel’s future relation to its past. What is true of the Holocaust is true of the Nakba: for the sake of a future binational politics, the systematic expulsion of Palestinians from the country would have to be, in a similar sense, forgotten. But it can be forgotten only if we commemorate it first–and do justice to the past by committing ourselves as citizens to the Palestinians right of national self-determination. This includes a meaningful commitment to the right of return.

Perhaps realizing he’s out on a limb, Boehm addresses his skeptics:

How practical a binational political program would be, one may however wonder. Thoroughly practical. None other than Menachem Begin, Israel’s first right-wing prime minister and a vehement opponent of territorial compromise, offers a viable model with the “autonomy plan” he devised in the late 1970s. Begin’s program could just as well be called the “one-state plan.” It included not only the institution of a Palestinian autonomy in Gaza and the West Bank, but also an option for all Palestinians to become full Israeli citizens, as well as complete freedom of movement and economic rights in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza; and a department within the Palestinian Autonomy’s Council for the Rehabilitation of Refugees. The Knesset voted on this proposal and passed it by a large majority in December 1977.

That Begin had some such plan is familiar to some, but its details, coming so close to a binational constellation, have received little attention. Historians, deferring to the two-state orthodoxy, tend to see the plan as Begin’s plot to prevent Palestinian statehood, not as a program that originates in Jabotinsky’s binational thinking and could test and open up the ethnic political boundaries and taboos of contemporary Israel.

It is worth pointing out that the Likud and Netanyahu are political descendants of Jabotinsky and Begin. Netanyahu’s father Benzion was even Jabotinsky’s secretary. Philosophically, then, resurrecting and adapting Begin’s plan is something the current (37th) government of Israel could conceivably do. Boehm calls this “new Zionist” proposal the “Haifa Republic” in honor of a city that has played a key role in the history of Jews and Palestinians:

It is time to explore a program reconstructed from Begin’s proposal — I call it the Haifa Republic — recognizing the right of both Jews and Palestinians to national self-determination, even sovereignty, in their own states, separated along the ’67 border, and yet regulating their separate sovereignty by a joint constitution ensuring basic human rights, freedom of movement, and economic liberties throughout the territory. Such a plan could allow many settlers to remain in their homes. And it would enable Palestinians to exercise rights commonly associated with the right of return-the aspiration to return to the territories from which they were expelled in 1948. Plans of this sort have been raised in the past, and are still promoted, but they are too often regarded as Post-Zionist. The attempt here is to rehabilitate such politics as a Zionist program, consistent with the core aspirations of Zionism’s founding fathers.

In essence the Haifa Republic is a Zionist two-state fiction that permits settlers to remain in the West Bank and opens up present-day Israel to currently-expelled Palestinians. It is also somewhat of an ideological fiction because the nature of Zionism has been redefined.

The final chapter of Boehm’s small book fleshes out a few details of the “Republic.” The Palestinian state Begin proposed was to be demilitarized, overseen by an elected Palestinian council, and included a provision for vetting the return of some “reasonable number” of Palestinian exiles. But it unequivocally asserted the Jewish right to “Samaria” and “Judea” (the West Bank).

The Haifa Republic is based on Begin’s idea, but instead of making Palestinians citizens of Israel (as in Lustick and Begin’s plans) Boehm would conjure Palestinian nationhood without a physical nation. In the Haifa Republic Palestinians would have their own military which co-operated with the IDF in a mutual defense treaty. Complete freedom of movement and the ability to buy and own land anywhere in Palestine would be extended to all within the borders. Arabic and Hebrew would both be official languages. East and West Jerusalem would be capitals of each nation, respectively, and a legal entity structurally similar to the EU would apply to both nations. There would be a shared supreme court that adjudicated disputes without international involvement.

The big question is how to get from today’s one state reality to Boehm’s.

The devil, as always, is in the details.

According to defenders of Israel’s Apartheid state — which today maintains a brutal supremacist regime across all of Palestine — the phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” supposedly implies the genocide of the Jewish people. The ADL, which cites the Hamas and PFLP charters, calls it an “antisemitic slogan” that “means the dismantling of the Jewish state. It is an antisemitic charge denying the Jewish right to self-determination, including through the removal of Jews from their ancestral homeland.” — Or so they say.

Hamas, of course, is not the only group to have used this phrase. Israel’s Likud party used a similar phrase (“between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty”) in its platform. Perhaps it’s just simple projection, but Zionism has actually denied the Palestinian right to self-determination, especially through the removal of Palestinians from their ancestral homeland. The perpetuation of a system of Jewish supremacy maintained by a genocidal occupation is both unsustainable and unimaginable.

The purpose of this and two essays to follow is to review three books that propose — instead of a Zionist supremacist state– a shared democratic, secular state in Palestine.

It is fair to say that the so-called Two State Solution (TSS) may have once had its day, but that day is long gone following massive settlement by now more than 700,000 illegal settlers in the West Bank. Until or unless they are withdrawn there will never be any land for a contiguous Palestinian state. In terms of a Palestinian “rump” state, the conditions imposed on Palestinians in each of the American “peace” negotiations would have been unacceptable to Israel if imposed on Jews; thus each foundered because Palestinians too would reasonably not accept colonialism, even a “Lite” version that denied them a genuine state with full self-determination.

This leaves a One State Solution, or some variant, as the most reasonable solution — a single land for two peoples. Each of the solutions in these three books have a slightly different wrinkle, as we will see.

Today’s review is Ian S. Lustick’s Paradigm Lost: from Two-State Solution to One-State Reality. In following posts I will review Omri Boehm’s Haifa Republic: A Democratic Future for Israel; and Jonathan Kuttab’s Beyond the Two-State Solution. Each of the authors has proposed a solution “from the river to the sea” that is more than a maligned slogan — a solution in which everyone in Palestine is free.

But before we get into the books, the Hamas Charter frequently cited by Israel-defenders actually reads like a mirror of Zionist policies. You could almost do a global search and replace of “Judaism” with “Islam” or “Jewish” with “Palestinian.” Or replace “the Jewish people” with the “Ummah” — and you get the idea. Palestine is still contested land and its original inhabitants have rightly never given up their claim.

Here is the context in the Hamas charter in which the contentious phrase is used:

“20. Hamas believes that no part of the land of Palestine shall be compromised or conceded, irrespective of the causes, the circumstances and the pressures and no matter how long the occupation lasts. Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea. However, without compromising its rejection of the Zionist entity and without relinquishing any Palestinian rights, Hamas considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus.”

This doesn’t sound like genocide to me. Elsewhere the charter makes it even clearer:

“16. Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity.”

While it is presumptuous of the ADL and other Zionist attack organizations to tell us what our own words mean, their interpretations are quite a stretch. The authors of each of the three books I review could well be smeared as “antisemites” by Zionists for their proposals of secular democracies that do away with Jewish supremacy, but each of these proposals must be read to see how Jewish — and Palestinian — life and culture can not only survive but flourish in a shared state. This is anything but antisemitic.

And what of a Zionist state? Is dismantling a racist, Apartheid regime such a tragedy? The question answers itself.

To me the premise that any particular religion has a “right” to its own nation seems strange. Where then is the Mormon nation? The Scientologist nation? The state for practitioners of Santeria? Writing as a secular American, the whole notion of Christian Nationalism offends me, and the reality of today’s Christian nationalists (and their kissing cousins, the Zionists and Saudi Wahabbists) ought to be a cautionary tale about the dangers and excesses of theocratic states. So, yes, for Zionists to claim that Israel is the home of all the world’s Jews, including me, is both offensive and insane.

Furthermore, a repressive state does not have a right to claim special privileges for itself, or whine that criticisms of it constitutes hate-speech or antisemitism. If people call for dismantling Israel’s repressive state — as it is — this does not mean the extermination of its citizens; it simply means that the state itself cannot conduct business as usual under its toxic ideology. Portugual, Greece, Germany, South Africa — to list only a few examples of former dictatorships and repressive regimes — were all reconstituted as democracies without purges or extermination. And this is my hope for Palestine. This is what I mean when I say:

“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

Paradigm Lost

Ian Lustick is a former intelligence analyst with the State Department, and currently a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a founder and past president of the Association for Israel Studies, a member of the American Political Science Association, the Middle East Studies Association, and the Council on Foreign Relations. Lustick grew up Jewish in upstate New York. His dissertation was on Arabs in the Jewish state, and he has written extensively about the Israeli settler movement. He has clearly thought deeply about how two peoples might live in this one land.

Lustick’s One State Solution is essentially the democratization and transformation of Israel into a nation for all of its people from the river to the sea. He builds his case, beginning with an uncomfortable truth: “A Palestinian state could have been established and could have coexisted peacefully alongside Israel, but the opportunity to establish it was historically perishable and is no longer available.” The question then becomes: what kind of Single State does Lustick envision?

Lustick recounts the history of Zionism, from the Yeshuv to early Israel, through 1948, 1967, Oslo, the PLO, and Arab League peace initiatives. A Palestinian state was no longer an option by the 1980’s because it was official policy of almost every government that a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River could never exist. Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s famous “Iron Wall” was the operational philosophy that decreed that Palestinians must experience unrelenting, uncompromising force until their nationalist aspirations have been extinguished. While it guided successive Israeli governments and parties like the Likud, it has never succeeded. A variety of Palestinian liberation movements have fought Israel tooth and nail since its founding. The unintended consequences of the “Iron Wall” were, according to Lustick, that “Zionism’s strategic logic unintentionally institutionalized a political incapacity to discern or exploit Arab willingness to compromise.” Zionist state builders like David Ben-Gurion convinced themselves that the Arabs would eventually give up. But they never did.

Another self-inflicted Israeli delusion is what Lustick calls “Holocaustia.” This is the abuse of the Holocaust by turning it into a justification for the demonization and nazification of Palestinians and the Arab world. In 2006 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed American Zionists in Los Angeles, telling them “it’s 1938 and Iran is Germany.” In 2016 Israeli president Reuven Rivlin told a group of soldiers, “Today, seventy years after the liberation of the death camps, we stand before you and we swear an oath, and promise: All of us, each and every one of us, has a number tattooed on his arm.” While the Holocaust was certainly a defining traumatic event for many Israeli and Jewish families, in Israel it became weaponized as the justification for Zionism. Without an imagined second Holocaust just on the horizon, and without a new Nazi to fear — or as of October 7th the biblical enemy Amalek — Zionism is little more than a 19th century nationalist ideology in search of a contemporary raison d’etre.

Outside Israel, AIPAC and dozens of “lobbying” groups that fly high above FARA registration requirements hold American foreign policy captive and provide Israel with all the armaments and diplomatic cover it needs to continue operating its 76 year-old occupation. Lustick presents little new information here, but this mention is necessary because the United States is the only — as of yet unrealized — hope for applying leverage on Israel. Owing to the shared colonial (and genocidal) history of both the US and Israel, any solution would have distinct American fingerprints on it. Lustick believes that there is hope yet that Americans may yet decide to “save Israel from itself” and show some tough love leading to a breakthrough. This is going to require a paradigm shift.

Lustick regards the Two State Solution (TSS) as a dead paradigm, albeit one that politicians and liberal Zionists cling to desperately. Amusingly, Lustick compares the TSS to the old theory of phlogiston, a non-existent element related to combustion. Only after trial after trial after experiment after experiment was phlogiston debunked. Similarly, there is now enough proof of the impossibility of the TSS so that policy makers ought to stop talking about it.

In fact, over one hundred years of schemes and negotiations have demonstrated that, given Israel’s refusal to permit a Palestinian state, the idea of two states is a dead letter. Lustick systematically shows how each of the assumptions underlying Two States were undermined by different facts or contrasting assumptions. For example, Israelis wanted “two states” to mean no territorial concessions, but for Jordan to provide land for a Palestinian homeland. It wasn’t until the Oslo process that both sides saw TSS as a real possibility. Right after Oslo Israel slowed down settlements and there was discussion of land swaps. But by 1983 it was clear that annexation of “Judea” and “Samaria” had progressed too far to ever support two states. The window had been closed. Hope had become fantasy.

Lustick has tried to formulate a solution given his understanding of the facts on the ground. And the facts are that there is already a One State Reality (OSR) “from river to the sea.” Sorely lacking, however, are evenly-applied freedoms within that space. Lustick writes:

Though there is no “solution” in sight, there is a reality. There is today one state, the State of Israel, between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. It is an apparatus of power, recognized by the international community, whose policies and actions decisively affect the lives of everyone in the area. It collects taxes from West Bank and Gaza Palestinians and determines who enters and leaves those areas, who enjoys rights to property, and who can live, build, or even visit where. In its current form, the state is no group’s pretty picture. It was achieved by no one’s carefully implemented plan. It is not a solution but an outcome — a one-state reality (OSR).

Palestinians of Gaza and of the West Bank are citizens of no other recognized state. As measured by the State of Israel’s impact on the intimate details of their lives and indeed on whether they live at all, they are as much its inhabitants as black slaves were of the United States and as Africans in the Bantustans were of apartheid South Africa. The five-decade occupation of the West Bank and the twelve-year blockade of Gaza, combined with the exposure to state violence that these populations regularly endure, do not mark their exclusion from the Israeli state. Rather, they simply register the fact that Israel rules different populations in different regions in different ways. Though the Arab inhabitants of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip came within the ambit of the Israeli polity fifty-two rather than seventy-one years ago, the palpable fact is that they live within it.

Officially, the Israeli government views lands west of the Jordan River but across the Green Line – the 1949 armistice line that separates Israel from territories occupied in 1967 — as “disputed,” which implies that from their perspective they are part of the country, Thus, when Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics reports the number of Israelis in the country, it counts every Israeli living west of the Jordan River, not just those living in the part of the country surrounded by the Green Line.

Most official Israeli maps feature no divisions between the sea and the river other than administrative boundaries of districts and regions. Textbooks show lines surrounding the Gaza Strip and around Area A clusters and a slightly different shading for Area B clusters. But the only lines indicating a border between Israel and another sovereign country are those along its borders with Arab states — and these separate both Gaza and the West Bank from the Arab states. A map accessed in December 2018 on Israels Ministry of Foreign Affairs website was titled “Israel within Boundaries and Ceasefire Lines.” The map labels the Gaza Strip as “under Palestinian jurisdiction” and the Oslo demarcated areas of “A” and “B” in the West Bank as characterized by Palestinian responsibility for “civil affairs.” The country’s international boundary includes both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank within the state. All mail that enters or leaves the West Bank or the Gaza Strip does so via Israel. The undeclared OSR is also revealed in the ordinary language of public communications: images of the country used by Israeli ministries, weather maps, maps of annual average temperature and rainfall, maps of the topography of the “State of Israel,” road maps, and iconic depictions of the country’s borders used for tourism and other purposes.

In 2009 I visited Palestine and Israel. I spoke to Sam Bahour, a Palestinian-American I met in Ramallah, who expressed the view that the Palestinian demand for a separate nation, if frustrated, would lead to a Civil Rights movement in which Palestinians demanded equal treatment within the Israeli state. In this scenario, would American decision-makers take Palestinian demands for equal rights and civil liberties seriously, or pretend that two states are still possible, deciding that Palestinians need another 75 years of martial law and repression? Most of today’s Congress would opt for the latter, I’m sure of it.

To democratize Israel would require abolishing Zionism’s discriminatory laws and injustices. Zionism itself would finally have to be discarded. The “Basic Law: Israel as a Nation-State of the Jewish People,” which assigns rights of citizenship only to Jews, would have to be repealed in an expanded democracy. As it is, the law discriminates against 20% of Israeli citizens of Bedouin, Druze, Christian, and Muslim heritage for whom Israel resembles the Jim Crow South.

Finally, Israelis and Americans have to come to terms with the fact that Israel cannot be — and never really has been — a “democratic AND Jewish” state. Just as a “democratic and Christian” state is a similar impossibility in the US, American liberals and liberal Zionists will have to be among the first to recognize and reject this incongruity. In a land where Jews are actually a slight numerical minority, Zionism has no moral right to crush the hopes and lives of the majority. But for many Israelis and Jews who cannot see where Judaism ends and Zionism begins, this is going to be enormously challenging.

Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 is a history that nicely complements Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. While Pappe’s research shows exactly how Israel created both the conditions and tools to ethnically cleanse Palestine, Khalidi’s shows how the cleansing would never have been possible without Western colonial assistance, complicity and connivance.

Khalidi enumerates six “Declarations of War” by Western colonialists on Palestine, the last four of which he lays at the feet of the United States. The six include the time periods (1) 1917-1939; (2) 1947-1948; (3) 1967; (4) 1982; (5) 1987-1995; and (6) 2000-2014. From the Balfour Declaration to the League of Nations mandate system, to the carving up of Palestine in the most egregiously racist fashion, to colonial complicity in militarizing Israel, defending it in the UN, and pretending to be simultaneous ally and unbiased arbiter in so-called “peace” talks, the deck has been stacked since the beginning against Palestinians in favor of a European-flavored colonial outpost in the Middle East.

Khalidi’s accounts are invaluable, particularly since he personally was involved in some of the so-called “peace” negotiations and his family has a long intimate connection to Jerusalem and Palestine. But I’m going to skip over a discussion because, for me, Khalidi’s concluding chapter is the most important and thought-provoking. For the review you may have expected, Kaleem Hawa’s piece in the Nation is one of the best. And Khalidi himself spoke about the book at a gathering at Politics & Prose.

While the Goliath that is now Israel seems almost invincible, and justice for Palestinians so elusive, Israel nevertheless has a fatal vulnerability. The first is that Zionism, the ideology underlying everything the state does, has a bitter aftertaste in the 21st Century. Much of the world today regards Israel as an international pariah, a rogue state. As the historian Tony Judt observed, Zionism “arrived too late,” and it “imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on.” It is not lost on the Global South that represents the majority of the world’s nations that Israel’s only supporters are past and present colonial powers.

Israel’s second vulnerability is that, no matter how much hasbara (spin, propaganda) it generates, or how many Western Zionist lobby organizations are enlisted to do Israel’s bidding, Zionism itself can not withstand much scrutiny. There are simply too many founding documents, too many incriminating statements by politicians, too many political and military actions taken, too much history, too many racist, separatist, supremacist, discriminatory laws built into the state to deny or repudiate Israel’s malign ideology. Zionism, at its root, is scarcely different from the racist, undemocratic, repressive Christian nationalism that is Zionism’s greatest advocate in the United States.

Khalidi explains some of Zionism’s more blatant internal contradictions:

Of course, the five million Palestinians living under an Israeli military regime in the Occupied Territories have no rights at all, while the half million plus Israeli colonists there enjoy full rights. This systemic ethnic discrimination was always a central facet of Zionism, which by definition aimed to create a Jewish society and polity with exclusive national rights in a land with an Arab majority. Even as Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence proclaimed “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex,” dozens of crucial laws based on inequality of rights were implemented in the ensuing years. These severely restricted or totally banned Arab access to land and to residency in all-Jewish communities, formalized the seizure of the private and collective (Waqf) property of non-Jews, prevented most indigenous Palestinians who were made into refugees from returning to their homes while giving citizenship rights to Jewish immigrants, and limited access to many other benefits.

The problem of Zionism is a central moral question — one that a younger generation of American Jews certainly recognizes:

This core problem is even more stark today, with a total Arab population in Palestine and Israel from the Jordan River to the sea that is equal to or perhaps slightly larger than the Jewish population. That inequality is the central moral question posed by Zionism, and that it goes to the root of the legitimacy of the entire enterprise is a view that is shared by some distinguished Israelis. Imagining scholars looking back one hundred years from now, historian Zeev Sternhell asked, “When exactly did the Israelis understand that their cruelty towards the non-Jews in their grip in the Occupied Territories, their determination to break the Palestinians’ hopes for independence, or their refusal to offer asylum to African refugees began to undermine the moral legitimacy of their national existence?”

Finally, the illusion of “liberal Zionism” has finally been shattered, as a slew of recent books by Jewish writers now acknowledges. Israel can either be a Jewish state that discriminates against and dominates non-Jews, or it can be democratic. But not both. Khalidi writes:

For decades Zionists insisted, often referring to the state’s declaration of independence, that Israel could be and was both “Jewish and democratic. As the contradictions inherent in this formulation grew ever more apparent, some Israeli leaders admitted (indeed, even declared it with pride) that if they were forced to choose, the Jewish aspect would take precedence. In July 2018, the Knesset codified that choice in constitutional law, adopting the”Basic Law on the Jewish Nation-State, which institutionalized statutory inequality among Israeli citizens by arrogating the right of national self-determination exclusively to the Jewish people…

It is clear, once you begin turning over rocks, that Zionism is based on a zero-sum calculation that only one people can exist in Palestine, that one ethnicity must dominate. Thus Zionism’s survival ultimately depends upon “completing the job” of ethnically cleansing Palestine begun in 1947. Israelis constantly talk about “transfer” of Palestinians and “death to the Arabs.” Even within “1948” (Israel proper) North American Jews unwittingly support Judaization programs in the Galilee and elsewhere, with the intent to create Jewish majorities in traditionally Arab cities. This is the Trail of Tears alternative to sharing land stolen from Palestinians: displacement, ethnic cleansing and/or genocide.

While early “drafts” of Zionism contemplated nation-sharing schemes, ever since the 1942 Biltmore declaration Zionism has meant only domination and expulsion for Palestinians. To speak of any other type would not refer to the Zionism that eventually prevailed but to some other species of Western liberalism generally reviled in Israel. To speak of a non-Zionist Israel for all people “from the river to the sea” provokes only shrill denunciations and accusations of antisemitism. This is because Israel under Zionism cannot survive multiculturalism, democracy, and equality any more than the Confederate States of America could have.

Khalidi’s last chapter considers what the future might hold. He writes:

Settler-colonial confrontations with indigenous peoples have only ended in one of three ways: with the elimination or full subjugation of the native population, as in North America; with the defeat and expulsion of the colonizer, as in Algeria, which is extremely rare; or with the abandonment of colonial supremacy, in the context of compromise and reconciliation, as in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Ireland.

We can effectively rule out compromise and reconciliation, not because of Arabs “who never miss a chance to miss a chance” but because supremacy and domination is built into the state and its polity. Poll after poll show that Israelis don’t want Palestinian neighbors, either internally or even as a neighboring state: 65% of Israeli Jews oppose the existence of a Palestinian state; 70% of Israeli Jews oppose Israel agreeing to the establishment of an independent and demilitarized Palestinian state; and 71.5 % of Israeli Jews believe that if there were a Palestinian state, Palestinian terrorism would be stronger or least stay the same.

That said, either two (real, not rump) states or a single confederated state are the best alternatives to Zionist domination of Palestinians from the river to the sea.

We can rule out the Algerian or Haitian scenario, where colonizers were expelled or overthrown. Israel is the only nuclear country in the Middle East thanks to France and the United States. It has one of the most powerful militaries in the world, again thanks to Western colonial powers. If Israel were to cease operating as a Jewish supremacist fantasyland for hilltop settlers, no doubt some Israelis would return to the US or Europe (before October 7th as many as 15% were contemplating leaving). Israelis who remained (most with nowhere else to go) would have to reconcile with a new reality, as white South Africans discovered upon the collapse of the old Apartheid system.

This leaves the third option – “finishing the job,” as American after American after American after American – and Israeli after Israeli after Israeli after Israeli after Israeli after Israeli and 500 more examples – have described their violent fantasies of a “Final Solution” for Palestinians. Following October 7th Israel seems to have doubled down on genocidal talk. As Khalidi predicted (the book was published in 2020), international attention would be drawn to any Israeli attempts at ethnic cleansing on a grand scale:

There is still the possibility that Israel could attempt to reprise the expulsions of 1948 and 1967 and rid itself of some or all of the Palestinians who tenaciously remain in their homeland. Forcible transfers of population on a sectarian and ethnic basis have taken place in neighboring Iraq since its invasion by the United States and in Syria following its collapse into war and chaos. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees reported in 2017 that a record sixty-eight million persons and refugees were displaced the world over. Against this horrific regional and global background, which elicits scarce concern internationally, there might seem to be little to restrain Israel from such an action. But the ferocious fight that Palestinians would wage against their removal, the intense international attention to the conflict, and the growing currency of the Palestinian narrative all mitigate against such a prospect.

Given the attention, it would necessarily damage the “ironclad” relationship between Israel and its Western sponsors:

Given the clarity of what is involved in ethnic cleansing in a colonial situation (rather than in circumstances of a confusing civil-cum-proxy war interlaced with extensive foreign intervention, as in Syria and Iraq), a new wave of expulsions would probably not unfold as smoothly for Israel as in the past. Even if undertaken under cover of a major regional war, such a move would have the potential to cause fatal damage to the West’s support for Israel, on which it relies.

Nonetheless, there are growing fears that expulsion has become more possible in the past few years than a any time since 1948, with religious nationalists and settlers dominating successive Israeli governments, explicit plans for annexations in the West Bank, and leading Israeli parliamentarians calling for the removal of some or all of the Palestinian population. Punitive Israeli policies are currently directed at forcing as many Palestinians as possible out of the country, while also evicting some within the West Bank and the Negev inside Israel from their homes and villages via home demolition, fake property sales, rezoning, and myriad other schemes. It is only a step from these tried-and-true demographic engineering tactics to a repeat of the full-blown ethnic cleansing of 1948 and 1967. Still the odds so far seem against Israeli taking such a step.

Given Israel’s attempts to herd Gazans into the Sinai and opening up West Bank areas barred since 2005 to settlements, Khalidi’s 2020 crystal ball might have been a bit off. Nevertheless, Gaza 2023 did focus world attention on Palestine and Zionism, and a growing number of people now see much more clearly what has been going on for the last 75 years — including many in the Jewish community.

If elimination of the native population is not a likely outcome in Palestine, then what of dismantling the supremacy of the colonizer in order to make possible a true reconciliation? The advantage that Israel has enjoyed in continuing its project rests on the fact that the basically colonial nature of the encounter in Palestine has not been visible to most Americans and many Europeans. Israel appears to them to be a normal, natural nation-state like any other, faced by the irrational hostility of intransigent and often anti-Semitic Muslims (which is how Palestinians, even the Christians among them, are seen by many).

The propagation of this image is one of the greatest achievements of Zionism and is vital to its survival. As Edward Said put it, Zionism triumphed in part because it “won the political battle for Palestine in the international world in which ideas, representation, rhetoric and images were at issue.” This is still largely true today. Dismantling this fallacy and making the true nature of the conflict evident is a necessary step if Palestinians and Israelis are to transition to a post-colonial future in which one people does not use external support to oppress and supplant the other.

From the West’s perspective, the Abraham Accords, begun by Donald Trump and continued by Joe Biden, offer a shortcut to solving of the Palestinian problem once and for all. As usual, these schemes rely on the collaboration of autocratic regimes instead of stable democracies. But Khalidi warns against such a short-sighted approach:

GIVEN AN ARAB world that is in a state of disarray greater than at any time since the end of World War I and a Palestinian national movement that appears to be without a compass, it might seem that this is an opportune moment for Israel and the United States to collude with their autocratic Arab partners to bury the Palestine question, dispose of the Palestinians, and declare victory. It is not likely to be quite so simple. There is the not inconsiderable matter of the Arab public, which can be fooled some of the time but not all of the time, and that emerges with Palestinian flags flying whenever democratic currents rise against autocracy, as in Cairo in 2011 and in Algiers in the spring of 2019. Israel’s regional hegemony depends in very large measure on the maintenance in power of undemocratic Arab regimes that will suppress such sentiment. However distant it may seem today, real democracy in the Arab world would be a grave threat to Israel’s regional dominance and freedom of action.

Just as important, there is also the popular resistance that the Palestinians can be expected to continue to mount, whatever the shabby deal to which their discredited leaders may mistakenly assent. Though Israel is the nuclear regional hegemon, its domination is not uncontested in the Middle East, nor is the legitimacy of the undemocratic Arab regimes which are increasingly becoming its clients. Finally, the United States, for all its power, has played a secondary role — sometimes no role at all — in the crises in Syria, Yemen, Libya, and elsewhere in the region. It will not necessarily maintain the near monopoly over the Palestine question, and indeed over the entire Middle East, that it has enjoyed for so long.

Configurations of global power have been changing: based on their growing energy needs, China and India will have more to say about the Middle East in the twenty-first century than they did in the previous one. Being closer to the Middle East, Europe and Russia have been more affected than the United States by the instability there and can be expected to play larger roles. The United States will most likely not continue to have the free hand that Britain once did. Perhaps such changes will allow Palestinians, together with Israelis and others worldwide who wish for peace and stability with justice in Palestine, to craft a different trajectory than that of oppression of one people by another. Only such a path based on equality and justice is capable of concluding the hundred years’ war on Palestine with a lasting peace, one that brings with it the liberation that the Palestinian people deserve.

Finally, the war in Gaza has unleashed a struggle in the United States. Besides widespread protests against US complicity in Gaza, collusion with Israeli and autocratic Arab regimes, the Democratic president’s “ironclad” support for Zionism, and the massive military expenditures “we” are so willing to spring for instead of relief for our own citizens, it has become obvious to many that America is not a gleaming city on the hill — but instead an ugly empire with an insatiable appetite for war and the subjugation of weaker nations.

As Khalidi points out, controlling the narrative is essential to the survival of Zionism and the imperial aspirations of the Western colonial powers that support it. It takes considerable political repression, large doses of propaganda, and the abolition of civil liberties to keep a system like this running for the benefit of war profiteers and other stakeholders in Empire.

The bipartisan preoccupation with ensuring Zionism’s survival threatens to destroy the last shreds of our democracy. We Americans seem to be slow learners, so it may take several more decades of foreign adventures and supporting repressive regimes and toxic ideologies before we finally awake to the damage we’re doing to our own democracy.

I just finished reading Shaul Magid’s The Necessity of Exile. This is the work of a rabbi who spent much of his life in Israel. It is a Jewish book for Jews grieving — not October 7th, not the growing and very real antisemitism of Trump’s America — but the realization, deep down, that something they have long loved is a cruel and bitter fantasy, its ugliness and evil an indigestible truth that insults every liberal value they believe in.

Magid writes:

As I write this in 2022, I do not think it’s provocative to state that liberal Zionism is in crisis. It is, after all, abundantly clear today that the present iteration of liberal Zionism, as a humanistic project of Jewish self-determination based on liberal democratic values, is in a defensive posture. The problem is that the social and political realities of the Israeli state today cannot be defined as “liberal” by any stretch of the imagination. This includes the country’s continued — perhaps permanent — occupation/ annexation of millions of stateless Palestinians and their land, as well as its own narrative self-fashioning — illustrated in part by the 2018 Nation-State Law, which arguably codifies Jewish domination, even supremacy, into the state itself. (The law states that national self-determination is “exclusive to the Jewish people” in the State of Israel, where non-Jews comprise over 20% of the population.) Many in the contemporary Zionist camp celebrate this ethnocentric turn. Most liberal Zionists do not. And yet most liberal Zionists remain steadfast in their defense of the State of Israel. Therein lies the crisis.

Magid writes that this extends to diaspora Jews, particularly American Jews raised with not necessarily the reality of democracy and equality, but with a deep belief in those ideas.

Last year these uneasy American Zionists watched as their Israeli cousins massed in the hundreds of thousands in Tel Aviv and elsewhere to save Israel’s — not really a democracy — from fascists, racists, religious fanatics and genocidal monsters. Of course, absent from Israel’s so-called “democracy movement” was any pursuit of democracy for Palestinians on either side of the Green Line.

In parallel with the shifting values of liberal Jews, Magid notes how liberal America (at least parts of it) has also begun to jettison our own colonial-setter ideology:

John O’Sullivan’s Manifest Destiny theory was an engine that drove the American settler-colonial project during the western expansion, but was then replaced with Teddy Roosevelt’s “melting pot,” Horace Kallen’s “cultural pluralism,” John Kennedy’s “nation of immigrants,” as well as later forms of multiculturalism. In retrospect, Manifest Destiny was, and remains, a racist and discriminatory ideology. Yes, white supremacists still hold Manifest Destiny as one of their ideological foundations, but such illiberal ideas are justifiably under attack in the continued culture wars of twenty-first century America, as they should be. Manifest Destiny today has become the provenance ofthe far-right white nationalists in America, while liberal and progressive Americans have rejected it out of hand. Yet, the illiberal Zionism of the “untroubled committed [liberal Zionist],” the Manifest Destiny of the Israeli context, now rules the State of Israel.

Facing up to one’s own country’s settler-colonial history is not so easy. When Representative Lydia Velazquez introduced a resolution calling for annulment of the Monroe Doctrine, it received only six co-sponsors — all people of color — and GovTrack estimated it had a 0% chance of adoption. So if America is one step ahead of Israel in facing up to its racist, genocidal history, that step can only be measured in millimeters.

But Zionism’s main problem is that it appeared too late in world history. Ethnonationalism fell into disrepute after World War II for obvious reasons. Not simply an anachronism, Zionism like its ugly siblings Christian nationalism and Hindutva, is fundamentally racist, exclusionary, and undemocratic. A nation built on the supremacy of one ethnicity is bad enough, but when you throw in god and messianism, it quickly becomes both a moral and political disaster.

For those deeply invested in Zionism and its accompanying settler-colonialism, all criticisms are strongly deflected as nothing but antisemitism. Much in common with antisemites themselves, attempts to distinguish Zionism from Judaism are likewise rejected by Zionists, who claim that a Zionist state is the home of all Jewish people, and that (as antisemites could only dream) all Jewish people ought to leave their homelands and move to Israel.

The Zionist conflation of nationalism and religion only reinforces the antisemitic view that all Jews are racist ethnonationalists, and this is largely responsible for the predictable spikes in antisemitic expression whenever Israel’s aggression towards Palestinians becomes most severe. Similarly, the IHRA definition of antisemitism is designed to conflate Judaism and Zionism, a multi-tool to be used as both cudgel and legalism to muzzle Israel’s critics.

Unfortunately there is some truth to the conflation, as Judaism itself has been all-too-willingly put to work in the service of Zionism. It was once verboten to speak of an Israel that had not been divinely reconstituted. Orthodox Jews originally reviled Zionism and even today the Satmar, perhaps the largest sect of Haredim, still reject it. There is also a long history of anti-Zionism among liberal Jews, who before 1948 issued countless — prescient — warnings of the disaster that Ben Gurion’s expansionist vision would unleash on both Jews and Palestinians.

But after the 1967 war, many Jews began to think that all that winning must have been divinely ordained. Today there are few congregations that don’t host Zionist Federation events or have youth or congregational programs centered around Israel, lending weight to the view that antisemites hold that there is little distinction between Judaism and Zionism.

Rabbi (Rav) Abraham Isaac Kook predated the formation of the state of Israel, but he broke with Jewish Orthodoxy (literally) by claiming that creating a Zionist state was the first step of a messianic redemption of not only Jews but of the entire human race. After 1967 Kook’s son Zvi Yehuda Kook took it up a notch and created the Gush Emunim movement, upon which Israel’s violent settler movement is founded.

All this blending of Zionism and Judaism was bound to create a philosophical and theological muddle. Zionism was supposed to redeem Jews (particularity) and even the whole world (universality). But wasn’t that the purpose of Judaism?

As a rabbi, Magid dives into the question, looking at the historicity of some of these ideas within Judaism. He examines how the particular and the universal have always been in tension with one another in Judaism:

The universal, certainly as a kind of (perhaps messianic) ideal, was actually never quite endemic to ancient Israelite religion, even with the biblical tropes such as the decree that the Israelites shall be “a light unto the nations.” Yet Jewish responses to the universal-particular conundrum, which sometimes portray Jews as simultaneously “normal” (as in a normalized people) and “exceptional” (as in victims in perpetuity), continue precisely because the universal still hovers as a specter over the entire Israelite project. In some cases, such as Jewish communism or even certain versions of radical Reform Judaism, the universal becomes paramount, while in some forms of nationalistic Orthodoxy, the universal is subsumed by a highly particularistic narrative to such an extent that its presence is hardly felt. In such cases, the universalist tropes in prophetic religion either become so central as to efface the Jewish people’s particularistic agenda, or become interpreted and swallowed into a highly nationalistic paradigm. But in most forms of Judaism, universalism and particularism function in productive tension with one another.

Magid sorts through various writers on particularity and universality, taking on Chaim Gans’s A Political Theory for the Jewish People (2016). He considers Gans’ notion of universality and particularity and quickly dismisses the weak argument for Zionism’s “particularity.” But he also demolishes Gans’s insistence on a universal form of Zionism. And Magid does the same with Emmanuel Lévinas:

The French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas seemed quite concerned with this dilemma, and sought an ethical core of Judaism (what he called “ethics as first philosophy”) that did not succumb to Reform Judaism’s assimilatory project or communism’s utopian one. He wrote numerous essays on this subject, arguing that true universalism can only arise from the particular, while the particular must carry the universal, which implicitly criticizes Kant’s cosmopolitanism, and perhaps Marx’s communism, as naïve and misguided. This remains a central concern for political philosophers to this day. But Levinas’s project apparently could not bear the weight of his own proclivities. When asked in a famous interview about the Palestinian as “other” to whom one owes primary responsibility, he responded, “The other is the neighbour, who is not necessarily kin, but who can be. And in that sense, if you’re for the other, you’re for the neighbour. But if your neighbour attacks another neighbour or treats him unjustly, what can you do? Then alterity takes on another character, in alterity we can find an enemy.” In other words, the Palestinian is not the other, the Palestinian is the enemy. “Ethics as first philosophy” meets Jewish trauma and anxiety. I think in that very honest moment, Levinas’s “ethics as first philosophy” collapses. (In pointing this out, I am influenced by Fred Moten’s devastating critique of Levinas in “There Is No Racism Intended,” in his book The Universal Machine.)

As esoteric as all this is, Magid is on to something. Zionism could have moved in a humanistic direction — but chose not to. In the end Zionism simply devolved into a naked power grab, devoid of any humanistic or universalist pretense.

Some forms of early secular Zionism attempted to embody this dynamic interplay between the universal and particular: much of it was humanistic in orientation, or at least aspirational, and committed to refracting some sense of universal values through the particularity of Jewish collective existence. This is why Marxism and socialism played such a significant role in early Zionism. The creation of a quasi-utopian collectivist entity that could be an exemplar for the revolution of Trotsky’s Fourth International was a goal of some early kibbutzniks. But that was a long time ago. The ethnostate that is contemporary Israel chose another path.

No one in Israel can live in such a society without recognizing it — even as it is almost impossible to imagine a different identity:

But if being an anti-Zionist means being anti-Israel, I could not embrace that either. Living in Israel, and still holding an Israeli passport, I didn’t quite know what it meant. I remain a citizen of that state, albeit a very ambivalent one. I served in its army. And yet I could no longer believe that Zionism, in any form, could create a just and equitable society. The myth that pervades Zionism, what Chaim Gans has called “proprietary Zionism” — that is, the fundamental precept that the land belongs to us — was, by definition, inequitable.

Magid writes of his ultimate reckoning with Zionism’s supremacist ideology in a chapter called “From My Tragic Love Affair with Zionism.” This reckoning, like that of many Israelis, was simply the product of paying attention to all the injustices around him, coming from the state he loved, and some of which he perpetrated himself:

Like many Israelis, the IDF was a transformative experience for me. I entered out of a sense of responsibility and duty to my adopted country. I served in 1988-1989, during the First Intifada. As a thirty-one-year-old father of three young children, I was what is called a “second-tier soldier”; I was in a combat unit but never saw real combat. […] But anyone who spends months in training in an army camp near Nablus in the West Bank, and travels around as a soldier, sees the ugliness and brutality of the occupation firsthand. The hatred in the eyes of Palestinian children as you walk by them in full combat gear; the humiliation of a father having to submit to the whims of a nineteen-year-old soldier in front of his son’s eyes. […] In a convoy, after dropping off a lone solider at the entrance to the Casbah (the main market) in Nablus, a fellow solider turned to me and said, “What the fuck are we doing here?” I had heard all the answers, but I had no answer for him then, and I have no answer now, other than domination, pure and simple. We do what we do because we can. That’s all. That is the reality of the Hebrew term ribbonut: not just sovereignty but a more potent implication of power over another in other words, domination. We are “masters” over the Palestinians — the settlers call “Lords of the Land.” That has become Zionism on the ground, certainly on the right but also on the center and center-left.

Sharing an American identity, Magid also makes the inevitable associations with our own, and international, history:

As a child raised in America, we learned about Jim Crow. As a graduate student during the boycotts of South African apartheid, we protested systemic oppression. Of course, each situation has its own contours and its own context, but as I experienced the reality of the occupation first-hand and, in some sense, the reality of Zionism through that lens, they were all comparable to what I witnessed as a soldier. […] The relationship between one’s experience and how one constructs the world they live in, and the world they want to create, is both vexing and complex. I moved to Israel to live in the land and to be a part of Jewish history. I experienced both deeply, intensely, and then painfully. Not being a native, my point of reference in regard to Israel, and to Zionism, was always contingent and never unconditional.

But once you have seen what cannot be un-seen, there’s no going back; there can only be alienation from what has shown itself to be an illusion. Magid’s experience is precisely like that of liberal Jews who — today, Spring of 2024 — have seen what cannot be unseen and cannot use the same vocabulary as beloved friends and family.

One can also be a stranger in one’s own home. My choice to no longer identify as a Zionist was not easy, and the choice came with considerable anguish, and pain. I lost friends, and it has strained relationships with those I still consider friends. […] But whatever I had envisioned Zionism to be, and whatever I believed I was getting myself into, at some point began to dissolve as I grew increasingly alienated from that national project. I no longer cared what it aspired to be because I could no longer bear what it was.

So if I have abandoned Zionism, now what? I believe the term “counter-Zionism” better represents my views about Israel today. I suggest we need another ideology — not a “post” but a “counter” to better equip Israel to face the next century. Zionism is too chauvinistic, too ethnocentric, too inequitable — it came to counter a diasporic existence in the wake of the cataclysmic failure of European emancipation, yet Jews today are now integrated into the countries in which they live.

In some way, Zionism was thus an understandable outgrowth of the ugliness of prewar European antisemitism. But the response to that ugliness has produced another ugliness. Here I follow Arendt who warned us of this in 1948. Maybe it was inevitable, maybe not. But that’s what has transpired, against the efforts of many truly heroic detractors, then, and now. Zionism had its time; it did its work; now it can be set aside, along with Manifest Destiny, colonialism, and any number of other chauvinistic and ethnocentric ideologies of the past.

Magid’s thought project was to look beyond Zionism. He draws heavily from Rabbi Shimon Gershon Rosenberg, הרב שג”ר [HaRav] Shagar, a postmodernist Torah scholar and intellectual who originally followed Abraham Isaac Kook. Though never progressive in a political sense, Shagar had a lot of influence within both religious Zionist and even liberal Zionist circles. Kook’s teachings were not broad enough for Shagar to reconcile with the reality he lived. Zionism’s political and religious limitations were increasingly clear and Shagar began to conceive of a next step in a redemption of the land that superseded cruel domination with a multicultural democracy. Shagar’s writings also emphasize the return to the cultural and religious wealth of a bygone age of Hasidism that became a repository for many of the Jewish values that Zionism has dismissed.

In a chapter called “Exile in the Land” Magid invokes Shagar and others, turning toward Jewish identity and the moral values that existed in exile and diaspora for hundreds of years after biblical Israel’s short 125-year run. For Magid the state is superfluous. He reminds us that many of the early Zionists specifically envisioned a mere Jewish homeland and some specifically warned against a state for both political and religious reasons.

There are those ultra-Orthodox Jews and non-Orthodox Jews such as Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig who were against the state for this very reason. They held that the authentic Jew is the exilic Jew and thus they rejected the construction of Jewishness as connected to history and politics. The answer to their critique is that the establishment of the state is not a rejection of exile but rather a dialectical move, even a Hegelian one, that redirects exile into the state itself and thereby elevates it to its next phase, the phase of the political, to a state of justice and compassion.

Shagar viewed the positive and constructive notion of exile as a humbling force that enabled Jews to develop a deeply empathetic and ethical posture toward the world and toward themselves. He recognized the hazards of sovereignty as that which could erase both a relationship to the Divine and a sense of humanism toward the “other.” Here, we see again the notion of “substitution,” which Shagar describes in this context as a turn from a belief in God to a belief in the IDF, as a kind of inversion of the “substitution” of Nahman’s messianic vision. It reminds one of Golda Meir’s famous line as recounted by Hannah Arendt: “As a Socialist, I do not believe in God; I believe in the Jewish people.”

Books like Magid’s are important for Jews at a time when the moral failures and crimes of Zionism have been so well documented, and they follow decades of political critique of Zionism as the anachronism and abomination that it is.

Neither peace in the Middle East nor Judaism can survive Zionism. A different Israel is possible and an authentic Judaism freed of racist nationalism is also possible. A growing number of Jews know it and are working to repair the world that Zionism risks destroying.

The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens by Richard N. Haas
ISBN: 9780525560654

For starters, it helps to know who Richard Haas really is. Read this. Haas characterizes himself as apolitical but he is an ideological dinosaur who was hatched in the Cold War and went on to support every manner of US intervention, most notably in Iraq. His love of democracy, if he really has one, certainly doesn’t extend beyond US borders. He bemoans diminished US influence, wants to promote a type of democracy that can stand up to Chinese intervention (even mockery) and be an example for the world to emulate. Who says the United States should aim to foist its own overripe democracy on the world? Haas goes on to talk about how the executive branch has assumed war powers from Congress but as a neoconservative he himself took full advantage of it

Haas writes, “Americans are required to observe the law, pay taxes, serve on juries, and respond to a military draft, if there is one.” Right. Just like Bone Spur Trump. Haas downplays the fact that the rights of the highest and lowest in America are vastly different. Even our obligations are different. Shouldn’t we fix this rather than making appeals to citizenship and nostalgia? Haas provides numerous examples that show how the Constitution is deformed and has led to virtually every democratic crisis in our history, but despite his own knowledge of all this, his book is about citizenship. Haas’s thesis is constructed by completely rejecting the structural inequalities and defects in law and society as primary threats to a healthy democracy. This is a sneaky little book for Liberals who want to listen to MAGA bedtime stories.

Haas tells us that fixing voting rights, making election day a holiday, making it easier to vote, eliminating barriers to voting, regulating social media, getting rid of dark money in political campaigns, offering open primaries, ending the filibuster, expanding the court, eliminating income inequality, improving education, introducing paid family leave, offering free college, student loan forgiveness, tax reform, and immigration reform – none of these things are going to do anything to fix our democracy. “This is where obligations come in: American democracy will work, and reform will prove possible only if obligations join rights at centerstage.” This is exactly the same”pull yourself up by your bootstrap, there is no racism in America” magical bullshit that MAGA America loves to sip on. In reality, we need massive structural reforms, if not a complete do-over, and then we can talk about citizenship – within a completely new context.

Haas’s 10 obligations are intended to be uncontroversial, appeal to patriotic emotion, and invoke an America of 50 years ago. But, given the state of our democracy, and the fact that we are 2 minutes to midnight before a new Fort Sumter, almost all of Haas’s prescriptions require copious caveats and exceptions:

(1) Be informed: OK; (2) Get involved: Americans waste a lot of time trying to get little single-focus groups to do something when their political institutions should be leading the charge. So get involved in what?; (3) Stay open to compromise: Within reason, but what ever happened to sticking to your guns? The last debt ceiling impasse revealed that Democrats’ idea of compromise was rolling over and sacrificing Black people; (4) Remain civil: Civility is vastly overrated. Civility is what liberals demand of those who (rudely or not) speak justice to power; (5) Reject violence: This is a strange appeal given that Haas’s necon buddies killed a million people in Iraq. And if America ends up fascist, it will be the obligation of every American to fight it; (6) Value norms: We ought to question what the norms are. Racism and American exceptionalism are norms and I don’t want any part of them; (7) Promote the common good: Fine; (8) Respect government service: This asks too much when the levers of government are usually tilted against the poor, those of color, and non-citizens – especially if those service employees are in the military, jails, border patrol, or police or work in an unjust legal system; (9) Support the teaching of civics: Not if the civics taught was concocted at Hillsdale College or promotes flag-waving neoliberalism; (10) Put country first: Why not an internationalist outlook?

This is a book that both Democratic Neoliberals and MAGA Conservatives can read because, without either caring to admit it, they share many of the same values.

If you’re considering buying this book, don’t.

I am an unapologetic anti-Zionist. I do not accept that a “chosen” people ought to have exclusive ownership over any chunk of the planet. No self-respecting omnipotent deity — if such even existed — would sign over real estate of a paltry seven or eight thousand square miles of land to a tiny number of people on a puny planet in a vast cosmos of trillions of possible worlds. Where’s the ambition in that?

Moreover, I do not accept that any privileged group has the right to lay claim to any part of the planet or its resources. Each of the many worlds in the universe belongs to all of the living creatures in it. This essential belief probably explains why I’m a socialist on top of my many other faults.

Last week, on one of my walks, I listened to a couple of episodes with Shaul Magid on Daniel Denvir’s podcast, “The Dig.” Magid has exceptional recall, insight and clarity into the nature and history of Zionism and the two episodes I listened to covered a lot of ground. They are an excellent, quick introduction for anyone interested in what Zionism is, and how it came about:

• Magid – Zionism (episode 1)
• Magid – Zionism (episode 2)

Besides being an historian, Magid is also a rabbi. Having listened to his dissections of Zionism in “The Dig”, for all those criticisms I don’t think I ever heard him actually repudiate Zionism. It may be relevant that he’s also a citizen of the state of Israel. And yet — Magid’s a sort of un-Zionist Zionist. One of a growing percentage of American Jews.

In one of the podcast episodes, Magid remarks how similar his thought is to Hannah Arendt’s and that he almost always has one of her books on his desk. Like Arendt, Magid wrestles with the many contradictions and malignancy of Zionism’s illiberal, racist supremacism and its inherent incompatibility with democracy. But what really bothers him is how limited Zionism is, and how much damage it has done to Judaism.

So it was perfect timing that a new book of Magid’s just appeared. Emily Tamkin’s review of Magid’s The Necessity of Exile in the Forward, a Zionist Jewish cultural magazine, describes it as a book to challenge Jews to imagine something new and different. Tamkin diplomatically describes Magid not as an anti-Zionist but as a “counter-Zionist” — which will nevertheless provoke strong antipathies from some of her readers.

In his podcasts, Magid makes the point that Zionism has to a great degree replaced or become a dangerous central tenet of Judaism. Early Zionists had little or no interest in religion, today many Israelis are secular, and if Jews in North America and elsewhere do not support Zionism they are not even acknowledged as being Jewish.

Magid cites the November 3rd essay in the Jerusalem Post (“No longer part of us”) in which anti-Zionist Jews are characterized as Hamas sympathizers or more “charitably” as the “wicked child” in the Passover Haggadah — as outsiders, as non-Jews. Break the Sabbath all you want, eat pork and shellfish, and marry outside the faith. But don’t question Zionism!

Judaism may be an ancient religion, but rabbinic Judaism, particularly the elaboration of religious, ethical and moral positions developed in the Talmud over centuries, is of more recent vintage and is the legacy of disaporic Jews. On the secular side, innumerable elements of Jewish culture, from Yiddish and Ladino, literature, theatre, Klezmer music, food, humor, and general Yiddishkayt, are likewise cultural products of the diaspora.

With all this richness, and with the manifest poverty of Zionism, Magid’s book seems to promise an exploration of how Jews can reclaim both the religion and the culture from the death grip of an ethno-nationalism that violates so many of Judaism’s ethical prohibitions.

While there have always been tensions between Judaism’s liberal and conservative sensibilities, the religion of Rabbinic Judaism and the culture that developed around it have at least preserved liberal elements not found in the Revisionist Zionism of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud, the religious Zionism of Bezalel Smotrich’s National Religious Party, or the Jewish supremacist Zionism of Itamar Ben Gvir’s Jewish Power Party. For those who wax nostalgic for the defunct Labor or Meretz parties, their “kinder, gentler” version of Zionism was equally dedicated to ethnic cleansing and occupation as any of the recent extremist parties.

I reject the common view of older American Jews that Israel is an insurance policy, “the only safe place on earth for Jews.” If the last 75 years — and especially the last 75 days — have shown us anything, it’s how delusional this view is. Israel is neither a safe haven nor a light unto the nations. It is a profoundly screwed-up, repressive state run by extremists, coddled and preserved only at enormous cost by non-Jewish colonial world powers who need it for their own geopolitical purposes.

It enrages Zionists that young Jews are calling for freedom in Palestine “from the river to the sea.” The moral rot of Zionism can only envision ethno-nationalist supremacy within this geography. Any other vision invokes an irrational, illogical, and propagandistic reflex that claims these young Jews want a second Holocaust to extinguish the lives of their Israeli cousins.

Such claims invariably regurgitate talking points from the many Zionist organizations that exist solely to run defense for Israel’s indefensible foreign and domestic policies. But they also represent the failure to envision anything beyond the de facto Apartheid state that now exists from the river to the sea.

Magid’s book’s in the mail. I’m looking forward to reading what he’s got to say.

A couple of months ago I woke up with significant vision loss in one eye. As someone in his seventies I was probably overdue for a health crisis, and there is nothing like losing eyesight to focus you on your mortality. I was terrified that my writing days might be over and I was in grief at the prospect of a shrinking world. Worse, the type of optic neuropathy I was diagnosed with sometimes claims vision in the remaining eye. After a month, life is returning to normal. I’ve made adjustments, learned to see without the headaches I initially experienced, and I’m taking driving a step at a time.

But needing to take as much control over my situation as I can, I resolved that if I lost the other eye I would be prepared. The Hadley Institute has many resources for blind and low-vision people, including the Braille lessons I have started “just in case” the worst happens. Another of Hadley’s many resources is a podcast where I first heard an interview with New York Times columnist Frank Bruni, whose experience with non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy (NAION) was identical to mine.

Bruni is also the narrator of the Audible version of the book “The Beauty of Dusk” and I was of course eager to see how he negotiated his own adjustment to vision loss. However, “The Beauty of Dusk” is not merely about Bruni’s experience of sudden partial blindness but is more a meditation on mortality, our ability to meet challenges head-on, to transform our ways of doing things, to change our thinking and even ourselves — as well as the satisfactions of meeting those challenges and discovering strengths and possibilities we never imagined were within us. In confronting all his own fears and questions, Bruni managed to write a wise and generous meditation on what it means to be human and vulnerable.

The title of Bruni’s book is apt and comes from this passage: “[…] my story isn’t about dawn. It’s about dusk. It’s about those first real inklings that the day isn’t forever, and the light inexorably fades. It’s about a rising and then peaking consciousness that you’re on borrowed and finite time.” Exactly. Those of us “of a certain age,” for whom “old age isn’t for sissies,” may prefer more humorous characterizations of our silver years. But dusk is a perfect reminder that our day is almost over and there’s just so much light to be snatched before it all ends. It’s a sobering but a brutally honest and even actionable metaphor.

Bruni’s meditation explores almost every aspect of his medical experience as well as much in his own life. But it is far from a medical memoir. Most of “Dusk” is devoted to stories from the many friends he has — as we all have — whose burdens are far greater than his. These are tales of people who met unthinkable challenges that most of us imagine would have stopped us in our tracks.

But it doesn’t work that way. Buried within each of us is the capacity to adapt, to change, to look at the world differently. Bruni draws from the work of numerous psychologists and neuroscientists to remind us that our brains and our personalities are far more elastic than we imagine. Bruni also pokes fun at the comic irony of how he was forced to “see the world differently.” As he half-jokes, “when one eye closes, another one opens.”

Bruni reminds us of the polite caution, if not disinterest, we show those with disabilities. After his own experience with disability Bruni started asking every one he knew about how they navigated the world, what their challenges were. Many of their answers surprised him. Their desire to talk about their struggles initially surprised him.

“The Beauty of Dusk” is a triumphant book, a slightly sentimental book, and occasionally a tedious book of things (like his dog) that only some readers will find engaging. But it is also a book about the hard realities, both good and bad, of aging and disability. As I listened to Bruni narrate, barely a month after my own opthalmological adventure, I at times found myself weeping. There were naturally tears of sadness for what is lost, but also tears of triumph over my initial terror, despair, and grief. There were also tears of recognition — felt more fully now than ever before in my life — that I am finite, that life is finite, that what is left to us of each day is not to be wasted. That vulnerability and disability are waystations that each of us will visit sometime in our lives.

It has been 57 years since James Baldwin wrote The Fire Next Time — 28 years since Rodney King was beaten down by police in L.A. and 6 years since Michael Brown was murdered by one in Ferguson, Missouri. In the interim there have been hundreds of these police lynching, all but a handful ever prosecuted.

Baldwin’s warning, from which his title was chosen, calls out the “racial nightmare” of this country by name, challenging America to “dare everything” to end it:

“If we — and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others — do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophet, recreated from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water, the fire next time!”

But White America not only refuses to do anything about racism, it doesn’t even want to hear about it.

But if even the silent, nonviolent protest of “taking a knee” while the national anthem is being played is too much for delicate white sensibilities, then it is inevitable and expected — even reasonable to assume — that those most affected by America’s racial nightmare will have no other choice but to rage and try to burn the entire system down — over and over again, until the system stops killing them.

This essay was written about, and intended for, a group of friends I respect for their political engagement and civility. I hope this is received in the spirit of dialog.

I can’t believe it was fifty years ago that I first read Robert Paul Wolff’s “The Poverty of Liberalism.” Written in 1968, Wolff’s book took on the limitations (and poverty) of Liberalism — with its technocratic and individualistic utilitarianism, its grudging tolerance instead of full embrace of diverse community, and its acceptance of power dynamics instead of working toward shared values. Today, Liberalism continues to suffer a crisis of confidence, and its frequent conflation with democracy leads some people to believe that the crisis of Liberalism is really a crisis of democracy. Wolff’s book shows that this is not the case.

I have been attending a series of Wednesday night political dinners which, until last night, were mainly discussions of the Democratic presidential primary and current affairs — specifically impeachment and our descent into autocracy.

Most of my Liberal dinner companions support centrist Democrats. There are a couple of Progressives and a couple of conservative Republicans — though they are nothing like the MAGA-hatted racists seen behind Trump at his rallies. These are earnest, civil people trying to explain what they find wrong with American society and why they have embraced Donald John Trump.

Mind you, I don’t agree with their analysis — at all — and I haven’t been shy about saying so. But they know something that some of the others don’t — that a successful politician must passionately express a clear vision in terms voters understand. I don’t think any of the Democrats are doing that yet.

I’m no Republican, but I can still tell you all about Trump’s platform. Individual One ran on a platform of ridding the country of Mexicans and Muslims, building a wall that Mexico would pay for, bringing back dirty coal, eliminating regulations, giving billionaires tax breaks and padding his administration with them, making America Great (by which he meant White), privileging Evangelicals, outlawing abortion, and filling federal courts with extremists. That was Trump’s clear vision, as evil as it is.

But — quick! — without consulting an “on the issues” web page, tell me what Amy Klobuchar’s platform is. Or Biden’s or Buttigieg’s. No points if you say “Anybody but Trump.” That’s a phobia, not a platform.

Even Elizabeth Warren has the same problem of clarity, but it’s not because she hasn’t spelled out in great detail her many plans for healthcare, education, a 2% Wall Street tax, and other issues. It’s because Warren has drowned voters in a thousand policy memos — while failing to offer a stirring, coherent vision of a new America.

For the first time, last night’s discussion veered into Trump’s appeal to voters. Some at the table thought his simplistic, vague, and easily digested policy positions were absolutely the wrong approach for Democrats. Several said that radical policies of any kind would derail party unity (whatever that is), that what we really need is to simply focus on beating Donald Trump. And each of the centrist candidates my dinner companions support says the same.

One participant pointed out that even Bernie Sanders has failed to talk about deep structural injustices in America. Nobody is really talking about Native Americans. All of the candidates of color have been pushed out by the DNC and nobody is talking about racism. Now that Jay Inslee has exited the debate stage, climate change is scarcely mentioned. Another participant mentioned that no candidate has a coherent foreign policy. The White American Middle Class seems to care mainly about itself, its retirement, its health insurance. But there is a huge, forgotten America that centrist Democrats have never regarded as their natural constituents. If you haven’t read Thomas Frank’s “Listen Liberal,” buy yourself a copy.

First it was Republicans, but now Democrats have followed them in pandering to White America. And Democrats want to copy Republican success by focusing on regions like the Midwest, the South, and the Iron Range. This is a losing strategy. If you haven’t read Steve Phillips’ “Brown is the New White,” he argues that Democrats’ obsession with appealing to white centrists in Flyover Country will doom them in the 2020 election as it did in 2016.

Candidates who have tried to push past this limited view of the centrality of the White American Middle Class have been accused of being too strident or unwilling to compromise. There was a debate in the Democratic Party about identity politics, and the party elite decided to focus on white voters, not minorities. It was no coincidence that Democrats announced their “Better Deal” campaign in a white suburb in the South. Corporate media friendly to Democrats (there is also corporate media friendly to Republicans) red-baits Progressives or calls them brownshirts — and centrist Democrats take the bait.

Ignoring the fact that Republicans won the 2016 election on radical change, Liberals are only prepared to accept an extremely narrow range of acceptable socio-economic values and reforms. This may explain the strangely familiar situation Progressives and Conservatives both value values. If there has ever been any affinity between Trump and Sanders supporters, it may center around values.

In the Liberal political landscape, where values are suspect and only “electability” has currency, it is no wonder that the DNC bent over backwards to accommodate a second billionaire candidate — Mayor “Stop and Frisk” Michael Bloomberg. It is alarming to me that Democrats who claim to hate an entitled, racist billionaire from New York have fallen in line behind another one of precisely the same species.

It is unlikely that the 40-45% of Democrats who identify as progressive will ever see their candidate on the ballot in November. The Democratic Party is a much smaller tent than previously thought. And it’s too bad. Because, until the Democratic Party sheds its hollow centrist poliicies, it can never hope to win the confidence of voters looking for a new vision for America.

Yesterday was Martin Luther King Day, and I followed columnist Esther Cepeda in reading King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. But I’ve also been reading Cornel West’s “The Radical King,” which reprints many of Martin Luther King’s more “radical” essays and sermons. I’m not finished with it because you can’t read a book of thoughtful essays in one go.

But from what I have read, West sees no contradiction between the nonviolent King and the man he calls the Radical King. King’s nonviolence, for all the nods to Ghandi and other religious traditions, was rooted in his Christianity and specifically in the Black Church. Yet apparently there were also connections to the Jewish prophetic tradition — in which prophets rage against the evils of kings and tyrants. This may be one reason for King’s friendship with Abraham Joshua Heschel.

King’s most famous speech was part of a 1963 march on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and when he was killed King was in Memphis to support striking sanitation workers. King told his staff in 1966, “There must be a better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism.” King travelled across the country with his Poor People’s Campaign, a campaign that Rev. William Barber today is trying to revive. And though the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, four years later King still found himself fighting for civil and economic rights when he was assassinated in 1968.

America of 1968 was not only about to implode from racial injustice but also from economic injustices and wars of choice that were not only killing black, brown and poor white men but bankrupting America financially and morally. At quite a cost to his own political capital, and even putting himself at odds with other black leaders, King spoke out against American militarism and materialism.

King was regarded as the “most dangerous man in America” by J. Edgar Hoover, who also tried to brand King as a Soviet asset — not because he was a nonviolent advocate of racial equality (most certainly true), but because he represented a challenge to economic and political exploitation.

West points out in his introduction to the collection that King’s thoughts were constantly evolving. We are all familiar with the “long arc” optimism of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech but no one ever got to hear the more pessimistic sermon King had planned to deliver the Sunday after he was murdered, “Why America May Go To Hell.”

Toward the end, the radical King had grown disillusioned with white liberals whose deeds never matched their rhetoric. In one essay King discusses Stokely Carmichael’s rejection of both white allies and nonviolence. With increased physical represssion, Carmichael’s SNCC, CORE, and Deacons for Defense were all beginning to sense the limits of nonviolent strategy. In West’s “Black Power” excerpt from 1967, King never repudiates his nonviolence but clearly understands and even appreciates the reasons Black Power advocates gave for their willingness to use force if necessary:

“Black Power advocates contend that the Negro must develop his own sense of strength. No longer are ‘fear, awe, and obedience’ to rule. This accounts for, though it does not justify, some Black Power advocates who encourage contempt and even civil disobedience as alternatives to the old patterns of slavery. Black Power assumes that Negroes will be slaves unless there is a new power to counter the force of the men who are still determined to be masters rather than brothers.”

By coincidence, our book group’s selection this month was Colson Whitehead’s “Nickel Boys,” set in Tallahassee, Florida in 1962. The very first page begins with Elwood Curtis’s thoughts on a ten cent record of Martin Luther King’s speeches. King’s speeches could also serve other purposes than a moral call to action. For kids like Elwood, King’s speeches were educational and also an affirmation of black pride:

“In the third cut on side A, Dr. King spoke of how his daughter longed to visit the amusement park on Stewart Avenue in Atlanta. […] Dr. King had to tell her in his low, sad rumble about the segregation system that kept colored boys and girls on the other side of the fence. Explain the misguided thinking of some whites — not all whites, but enough whites — that gave it force and meaning. He counseled his daughter to resist the lure of hatred and bitterness and assured her that ‘Even though you can’t go to Fun Town, I want you to know that you are as good as anybody who goes into Fun Town.’ That was Elwood — as good as anyone.”

Elwood is well-read, naive, and a bit of a geek. And when his bicycle chain snaps, he ends up being arrested along with the driver of the stolen Plymouth he has hitched a ride with. Elwood’s grandmother Harriet, a great believer in doing things by the book, hires a white lawyer who absconds with the $200 intended to defend Elwood. Elwood ends up in Nickel Academy, a segregated prison camp for boys, where some go missing without explanation. Whitehead’s book deals with the boys’ attitudes toward resistance and compliance, particularly in a [still] Jim Crow prison setting. A boy name Turner “with an eerie sense of self” who knows that only he is ultimately responsible for his own safety is the foil for the tragically well-behaved and trusting Elwood.

In one passage which seems to illustrate the divide between Black Power and Respectability Politics, Elwood is still trying to make sense of Dr. King:

“He called upon his Negro audience to cultivate that pure love for their oppressors, that it might carry them to the other side of the struggle. Elwood tried to get his head around it, now that it was no longer the abstraction floating in his head last spring. It was real now:

Throw us in jail, and we shall still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall win our freedom.

The capacity to suffer. Elwood — all the Nickel boys — existed in the capacity. Breathed in it, ate in it, dreamed in it. That was their lives now. Otherwise they would have perished. The beatings, the rapes, the unrelenting winnowing of themselves. They endured. But to love those who would have destroyed them? To make that leap? We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we will still love you.

Elwood shook his head. What a thing to ask. What an impossible thing.

Indeed. What an impossible thing.

As he stated somewhat prophetically in his last speech, King had been to the mountain top. And King had seen the Big Picture if not been given sacred insight. King’s early sermons were well-crafted moral calls to action, Christian in style and language, but he frequently tipped his hat to other traditions. King was often ecumenical and usually very accessible. For example, in 1956 King delivered a sermon to 12,000 people at an Episcopal cathedral in New York City on the second anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. The talk was about evil. His sermon contained the seeds of the same argument that so perplexed young Elwood:

“Let us remember that as we struggle against Egypt, we must have love, compassion and understanding goodwill for those against whom we struggle, helping them to realize that as we seek to defeat the evils of Egypt we are not seeking to defeat them but to help them, as well as ourselves.”

Some will find King’s argument unconvincing (I am one), though most will admire the radical King’s ‘love of the oppressed. Some will admire the prophetic King for his speaking truth to power, while others will be surprised at his growing understanding of (and even sympathy for) those advocating change “by any means necessary” (King approached Malcolm X in 1966 about working together on a UN resolution).

Though King believed in ecumenism and frequently linked arms with men of different faiths, West cautions us to always remember that King’s

“radical love flows from an imitation of Christ, a response to an invitation of self-surrender in order to emerge fully equipped to fight for justice in a cold and cruel world of domination and exploitation. The scandal of the Cross is precisely the unstoppable and unsuffocatable love that keeps moving in a blood-soaked history, even in our catastrophic times. There is no radical King without his commitment to radical love.”

More essays to go.

The Hidden Wound by Wendell Berry

I have forgotten precisely how Wendell Berry’s “The Hidden Wound” came to be on my reading list. At the time I ordered the book I did not know that Berry had written it in 1968 as a meditation on race relations, safe in a quiet research room in a library on the Stanford campus. I knew only that Berry was a respected “agrarian” poet from Kentucky and a thoughtful man. Maybe I was hoping for a little hope.

Despite its age and defects, Berry’s book was not a disappointment. Those reading the book a half a century after it was written will be put off by dozens of uses of the N-word to describe a certain type of labor thought to be menial. And today’s reader will likewise be bewildered or angered by his thesis that white supremacy has equally wounded both whites and blacks. As one unsympathetic reviewer put it, “This book looks at the cultural wound of racism from the perspective of the oppressor, implying that the abused and the abuser suffer equally.” Berry never even comes close to making that case.

Likewise, Berry’s depictions of his grandfather’s tenant farmer Nick and Aunt Georgie are cringe-worthy tales of noble serfs who found true happiness in honest work on someone else’s land. To reinforce this notion Berry recalls the tale of Eumaios, “the noble swineherd” who befriended Odysseus upon his return to Ithaka. Berry also places himself in the shoes of Dostoevsky’s landowner, Levin, who desires to know more about the serfs who work his vast estate.

And Wendell Berry, in 1968, was hardly ready or willing to indict Capitalism for the separation of white men from the actual stewardship of the land they instead stole and despoiled and had others work on. His arguments are diffuse and he is almost comically incapable of drawing the obvious links between the racism, colonialism, and environmental destruction he describes throughout his meditation. Instead of understanding the sources of this alienation politically — which he explicitly rejects — Berry seizes upon Southern Agrarianism as the cure for his and America’s wounds.

Yet, despite these many sins and omissions, Berry’s book is nevertheless filled with insight. In the book’s early pages, Berry writes of white self-delusion facilitated by conscious myth-making and propaganda:

“As a people, we have been tolled farther and farther away from the facts of what we have done by the romanticizers, whose bait is nothing more than the wishful insinuation that we have done no harm. Speaking a public language of propaganda, uninfluenced by the real content of our history which we know only in a deep and guarded privacy, we are still in the throes of the paradox of the ‘gentleman and soldier.’ However conscious it may have been, there is no doubt in my mind that all this moral and verbal obfuscation is intentional. Nor do I doubt that its purpose is to shelter us from the moral anguish implicit in our racism — an anguish that began, deep and mute, in the minds of (my emphasis) Christian democratic freedom-loving owners of slaves.”

As a Southerner familiar with slaveholder customs, Berry demolishes the lie that slavery did “no harm” to either party:

“First, consider the moral predicament of the master who sat in church with his slaves, thus attesting his belief in the immortality of the souls of people whose bodies he owned and used. He thus placed his body, if not his mind, at the very crux of the deepest contradiction of his life. How could he presume to own the body of a man whose soul he considered as worthy of salvation as his own?”

Southern Christianity itself had to contend with this moral contradiction. It solved the problem by completely hollowing itself out. Murder, rape, slavery and exploitation were no longer to be regarded as sins and were replaced by prohibitions on trivial acts such as drinking, failing to attend church, or gambling.

“Detached from real issues and real evils, the language of religion became abstract, intensely (desperately) pious, rhetorical, inflated with phony mysticism and joyless passion. The religious institutions became comfort stations for scribes and publicans and pharisees. Far from curing the wound of racism, the white man’s Christianity has been its soothing bandage — a bandage masquerading as Sunday clothes, for the wearing of which one expects a certain moral credit.”

Fifty long years before Steve Bannon’s pan-European nationalism efforts, Berry indicted white American culture as a sterile, delusional imitation of Europeanism — while, on the other hand, he pointed to black culture’s richness and connection to the reality of its people, history and the land.

And Berry wanted some of that:

“And then in the spring of 1964 I turned back on the direction I had been going. I returned to Kentucky, and within a year bought and moved onto a little farm in my native part of the state. That return made me finally an exile from the ornamental Europeanism that still passes for culture with most Americans. What I had done caused my mind to be thrown back forcibly upon its source: my home countryside, my own people and history. And for the first time I felt my nakedness. I realized that the culture I needed was not to be found by visiting museums and libraries and auditoriums. It occurred to me that there was another measure for my life than the amount or even the quality of the writing I did; a man, I thought, must be judged by how willingly and meaningfully he can be present where he is, by how fully he can make himself at home in his part of the world. I began to want desperately to learn to belong to my place.”

The Southern Agrarianism that Berry seized upon in 1968 may then have been a naive, nostalgic rejection of industrialization, but today it is a prominent feature of Neo-Confederacy and the Alt-Right. Berry’s meticulously-drawn links to the actual stewardship of land by black farmers, sharecroppers, and tenant farmers belies the claims of the revisionist Neo-Confederates whose real or imagined ancestors simply owned the people who worked the plantations.

Most importantly, what Berry’s book tells us is that white people have understood racism for centuries and have passed down their own history as a self-indictment. “The Hidden Wound” was written at just about the same time the Kerner Report came out. White America has been able to read about this wound for at least a half century.

So now the real question is — what the hell are we going to do about it?