BY ADAM PARKER
April 2, 2012
A generation ago, the state of Israel was for many Jews still a mythical place: a democratic oasis in the Middle East that helped save a people, a secular state based partly on egalitarian principles, a country under physical threat but determined to secure its future for the generations of Jews to come.
But then something went wrong. Opportunities to end the occupation of Palestinian territories seized in 1967 were squandered — perhaps intentionally, undermined by both sides for different reasons. And Zionism, once a liberal idea conceived by Theodor Herzl and other secular European Jews, was transformed into a quasi-theocratic form of neo-colonialism that compromised its legitimacy.
Today, it is in serious trouble, according to Peter Beinart. In his passionate new polemic, “The Crisis of Zionism,” Beinart spells out the problem in a heart-rending interpretation of the current political impasse, an impasse not just between Israelis and Palestinians but within Israeli society.
“As a Zionist, I believe that after two millennia of homelessness, the Jewish people deserve a state dedicated to their protection,” Beinart writes. “As a partisan of liberal democracy, I believe that to honor that history of suffering, a Jewish state must offer equal citizenship to all its inhabitants.” He refers here not only to Arab citizens of Israel, of which there are perhaps 1.5 million (20 percent of the population), but also to those living outside the Green Line but who are nevertheless subjected to Israeli rule.
“At the heart of the Zionist project is the struggle to reconcile these two valid but conflicting ideals,” Beinart explains. “If Israel fails in that struggle, it will either cease being a Jewish state or cease being a democratic one. Today, it is failing, and American Jews are helping it fail.”
Strong words, possible to utter in 2012 for several reasons, and not only because they are true. In recent years, as the standard-bearers of American Zionism have aged and the gulf between their defend-Israel-at-all-costs strategies and the sentiments of average American Jews has widened, the debate over the occupation and its corrosive effects on both Jews and Arabs has intensified.
Peace activists in Israel have grown more vocal, and many in America have attempted to seize control of the political discourse from an old guard that’s out of touch and in denial. Beinart himself calls on a selective boycott of all goods and services that originate within the West Bank — or, “nondemocratic Israel,” as he prefers to call it. Israel is divided into two: its legitimate democratic part and its illegitimate nondemocratic part.
“American Jews should look for every way possible to reinforce (this distinction),” Beinart writes. “We should lobby the U.S. government to exempt settler goods from its free trade deal with Israel. We should push to end IRS policies that allow Americans to make tax-deductible gifts to charities that fund settlements. We should urge the U.S. government to require Israel to separately mark products from the settlements, as the European Union now demands. Then we should stop buying those products and stop investing in the companies that produce them.
But that’s not enough, according to Beinart: “Every time Avigdor Lieberman or any other prominent public figure from nondemocratic Israel comes to the United States, he should be met with pickets. Every time any American newspaper calls Israel a democracy, we should urge that it include the caveat: only within the green line.”
A big problem, he writes, is that too many Zionists have largely failed to confront the new reality of Jewish power. Gone are the days when American Jews were poor and marginalized, and gone, too, are the days when Israel was rightfully preoccupied with its survival, when surrounding Arab nations threatened annihilation and fascism in Europe culminated in the Holocaust.
Surely anti-Semitism remains a concern; certainly Jews must remain vigilant. But, Beinart insists, “we need a new American Jewish story, built around this basic truth: We are not history’s permanent victims. In a dizzying shift of fortune, many of our greatest challenges today stem not from weakness but from power.” And with power comes responsibility.
At the heart of Beinart’s argument is an insistence that American Jews, who are generally liberal politically and concerned with human rights, are increasingly abandoning the idea of Zionism, whether because their political affinities contradict the brutality of the Israeli occupation or their cultural affinities adhere less and less to Judaism.
Beinart’s genuinely worried about the newer generations of Jews in the U.S. and implications of their Zionistic apathy or disregard. Without a Jewish-American community willing to strengthen its ancient cultural ties and pass on their heritage to their children, they will increasingly cede the secular-liberal ideals of Zionist to religious fanatics and right-wing political extremists like Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman and prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he writes.
And if Israel is controlled by such people, with their talk of population transfer and insistent expansion of Israeli settlements, then it will lose forever what’s left of its democratic character as well as any legitimacy in the eyes of the world, Beinart warns.
His solution is radical and perhaps unrealistic: Beinart would have Jewish Americans throw their financial support behind the development of Jewish schools that might corral Jewish children and teach them about their history, culture and religion. By strengthening Jewish identity (the liberal, democratic, American kind), Jews in the U.S. can exercise their influence on Zionist policy, helping to reverse the self-defeating actions of recent decades and reinvigorate the democratic character of Israel.
The middle part of his important book is devoted to an original and penetrating analysis of the tense relationship between President Obama and Netanyahu. In essence, Beinart shows, Netanyahu has managed to get his way and humiliate Obama, who has allowed the Israeli leader to trample upon his long-standing sympathies with liberal Zionism and exploit the “special relationship” of the two countries.
It’s a brutal, painful accounting of Netanyahu’s stubborn self-destructiveness and Obama’s failures to save Israel from itself.
In his effort to explain the crisis of Zionism, Beinart leaves a critical issue insufficiently discussed: Whether democracy in an ethnically and religiously diverse land and Zionism ever can be reconciled. The former insists on secular egalitarianism; the latter on a state defined by its religious and ethnic identity. To remain viable, therefore, Zionism must remain an exclusive enterprise — which explains why Israeli policy remains essentially hostile towards Palestinians.
For Beinart, the answer to this dilemma seems to be a half-way solution in which the Palestinians get a state, Arab Israelis (about 20 percent of the national population) get full rights, but limits remain. Of course, where limits remain, so does conflict. But coping with some conflict is an acceptable alternative to enduring a lot of conflict, Beinart seems to suggest.
It is questionable whether the liberal Zionism that set the wheels of the Jewish state in motion, requiring the displacement of Palestinians and appropriation of their property, can also save the Jewish state. Indeed, Beinart is too quick to exonerate the secularist founders he admires such as Theodore Herzl and David Ben-Gurion. They knew very well what had to be done in order to secure the land for Jews. If you doubt it, read Ben-Gurion’s War Diaries, or the 1988 account of them called “The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities” by Simha Flapan.
A larger question is whether Liberalism itself is as benevolent as its defenders claim, for it often leads to irresolvable contradictions and social and economic damage. According to Liberalism and its social tenets of tolerance and inclusiveness, extreme religious and ideological views have as much right to sit at the table as their moderate and leftist counterparts. Liberalism, therefore, too often has the effect of defending — or at least condoning — radicalism.
For those who care deeply about Israel’s fate, “The Crisis of Zionism” is a difficult book to read. Its brutal honesty and passionate arguments are clearly the result of a life-long dedication to both Judaism and Zionism, offered by a man who no longer can remain silent. Members of the old guard in the U.S., with their outsized influence and allegiance to the Israeli government as opposed to Zionism itself, surely will attempt to discredit Beinart, but they are a fading minority.
More and more American Jews are closing their ears to the hyperbole and rant. For years the majority of American Jews has favored a two-state solution and objected to settlement growth, surveys cited by Beinart show. They have wanted the U.S. to exert more pressure on Israel to end the occupation and stop the settlements. They have objected to the disproportionate use of force. Yet American Jewish organizations such as AIPAC, often condemn anyone who dares to criticize Israel.
“There is a terrible irony here,” Beinart writes. “Perhaps no group of Jews has ever made liberalism — the belief in individual freedom and equality of opportunity, irrespective of gender, religion, race, or creed — as central to their identity as have American Jews.” This is why they tend to support candidates “most likely to give their money to the poor,” and this is why “they supported Barack Obama, a black man with a Muslim father, at roughly twice the rate of white Christians, and at a higher rate than did women, Hispanics, or lesbians and gays.”
So why is an American Jewish community so concerned with social justice represented by leadership reluctant to insist on liberal democracy in Israel?
“The answer is simple,” Beinart writes. Today’s American Jewish establishment was not born from American Jewish liberalism; it was born as a reaction against it.”
It is past time, therefore, for American Jews to step up and voice their concerns, he argues. And they better hurry, for soon it will be too late.
Perhaps it already is.
No comments:
Post a Comment