Compiled by Dick Bennett for a World of Peace, Justice, and Ecology
https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2024/04/omni-zionism-anthology-1.html
These readings offer a randomly selected, brief sampling of criticism of Zionism mainly from the point of view of individual Jews and Jewish peace organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace. I have not tried to represent the history of Christian Zionism, which is also complex and abundant. –Dick
Esther Farmer and Rosalind Petchesky, and Sarah Sills, eds. A Land with a People: Palestinians and Jews Confront Zionism. Monthly Review P (2023). https://monthlyreview.org/product/a-land-with-a-people/
Anti-Semitism Anti-Zionism Decolonization Palestine Reviews Settler colonialism Zionism A Land With A People Edited by Esther Farmer, Rosalind Petchesky and Sarah Sills. 226 pages, $19.
Review: “’A desert which once bloomed.’ A Land With A People” reviewed in the Indypendent by Eleanor J. Bader.
With few exceptions, Jewish children reared in religiously observant households are taught to revere Israel as a place of respite and safety, a country whose intrepid founders made “a desert bloom.” What’s more, they’re taught that the area was a perfect set up, “a land without people for a people without land.”
This, of course, is a complete fabrication. As Palestinian-American attorney Noura Erakat writes in the Foreword to A Land With a People, “Zionism is not the triumphant story of Jewish emancipation from centuries of antisemitism, but is a colonial project facilitated by European imperial powers driven by a desire to remove Jews from Europe rather than combat their own white supremacy.” Indeed, she explains, the Zionism of Israel’s framers did not challenge Europe’s lingering hatred of Jews, but instead relied on God’s alleged biblical promise to them, a pledge that made Israel their “birthright.” The reality — that fulfillment of this compact with the Almighty resulted in the dispossession of approximately 750,000 Palestinians — was ignored.
A rich tapestry of voices: queer writers of Jewish and Palestinian descent and Jews from non-European backgrounds are prominent. Several essays by people raised in fervently-pro-Israel households provide texture and nuance.
A Land With A People tells the story of Palestinian removal, but it also does more than this. In 35 personal and scholarly essays, poems and photographs, non-Zionist Jews affiliated with Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) join Palestinian activists to share their grief, anger, and dreams of secular coexistence. Atrocities committed by Israel are presented in stark detail and the U.S. role in propping up the regime is outlined and denounced.
JVP activist Rosalind Petchesky’s ‘Zionism’s Twilight’ opens the volume with a brief history of Israel and the political machinations that led to its creation. She begins by introducing the 1917 Balfour Declaration, Britain’s public statement of support for the establishment of “a national home for the Jewish people.” Petchesky writes that opposition to the declaration was immediate and notes that when the first Palestinian Congress met in Jerusalem in 1919, participants demanded independence for Palestine and rejected the legitimacy of British rule. Decades of struggle followed. Nonetheless, in 1947 the United Nations General Assembly agreed to partition Palestinian land and in May of 1948 the state of Israel came into being.
Under the provisions of the U.N. agreement, Jews living in every nook and cranny of the world were automatically granted Israeli citizenship. Not so Palestinians. As Petchesky reports, a 1952 Nationality Law gave Israeli citizenship only to those Palestinians who had remained in Israel between 1948 and 1952, thus barring those who had fled or been expelled from the country from legal residency.
Flash forward 70 years and the legal restrictions have become far more egregious. Worse, Palestinian territories that were initially under the jurisdiction of Egypt and Jordan, including the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, are now under Israeli control. And despite continued resistance to their endemic oppression, Israel continues to rule Palestinian enclaves with an iron fist, suppressing dissent and resisting international calls to respect Palestinian human rights.
A Land With A People decries the inhumanity at the heart of Israeli social policy, but the book’s strength — and what sets it apart from other books that tread similar ground — is the rich tapestry of voices that are included. Queer writers of Jewish and Palestinian descent and Jews from non-European backgrounds are prominent. In addition, several essays by people raised in fervently pro-Israel households give the book texture and nuance.
Palestinian territories that were initially under the jurisdiction of Egypt and Jordan, including the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, are now under Israeli control. Contributor Talia Baurer, for example, writes in ‘Unlearning Zionism’ that, “I grew up knowing that Israel was my homeland, that I had deep biblical and historical roots there, and that its existence made me safer in the world.” Baurer’s beliefs, she explains, began to shift when she entered college and encountered Students for Justice in Palestine. “After my freshman year, I spent a month in Israel,” she writes, “and visited the West Bank for the first time. My group toured the Palestinian town of Susya with Breaking the Silence, an Israeli human rights organization.” Seeing segregated streets and hearing first-hand accounts of discrimination unsettled Baurer. “I finally let go of the historical narrative of my childhood education,” she writes, “and began to hollow out my own sense of what Israel and Zionism meant for me, my community, and the world in general.” Hers is a thoughtful and heartfelt explication and one that addresses the prominent conflation between antisemitism and anti-Zionism.
Other contributors to the anthology also tackle this terrain. In “An Israeli in New York Testifies about Zionism and BDS,” U.S. law student Sagiv Galai, who was raised in the West Bank, writes that supporting the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) movement “is not antisemitic, regardless of how much the right-wing and powerful Zionist groups may want us to believe the opposite.”
You can find the above review at the Indypendent. https://indypendent.org/2022/03/a-book-for-people-who-want-to-know-more-about-a-land-with-a-people/
NAOMI KLEIN v. The False Idol of Zionism
Naomi Klein. “Jews Must Raise Their Voices for Palestine, Oppose the ‘False Idol of Zionism.’” Democracy Now (APRIL 24, 2024).
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TOPICS New York Gaza Senate Protests Israel Israel & Palestine
GUEST: Naomi Klein, award-winning writer and activist.
Thousands of Jewish Americans and allies gathered in Brooklyn on Tuesday for a “Seder in the Streets to Stop Arming Israel” on the second night of Passover, held just a block from the home of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, to protest ongoing U.S. support for the Israeli assault on Gaza. “Too many of our people are worshiping a false idol,” said award-winning author and activist Naomi Klein, one of several speakers at Tuesday’s rally. “They are enraptured by it. They are drunk on it. They are profaned by it. And that false idol is called Zionism.”
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Among those who addressed the crowd during the seder was award-winning author and activist Naomi Klein. This is some of what she had to say.
NAOMI KLEIN: My friends, I’ve been thinking about Moses and his rage when he came down from the mount to find the Israelites worshiping a golden calf. The ecofeminist in me has always been uneasy about this story. What kind of god is jealous of animals? What kind of god wants to hoard all the sacredness of the Earth for himself? But there is, of course, a less literal way of understanding this story. It is a lesson about false idols, about the human tendency to worship the profane and shining, to look to the small and material rather than the large and transcendent.
What I want to say to you this evening at this revolutionary and historic Seder in the Streets is that too many of our people are worshiping a false idol once again. They are enraptured by it. They are drunk on it. They are profaned by it. And that false idol is called Zionism.
It is a false idol that takes our most profound biblical stories of justice and emancipation from slavery, the story of Passover itself, and turns them into brutalist weapons of colonial land theft, roadmaps for ethnic cleansing and genocide. It is a false idol that has taken the transcendent idea of the Promised Land, a metaphor for human liberation that has traveled across faiths to every corner of this globe, and dared to turn it into a deed of sale for a militarist ethnostate.
Political Zionism’s version of liberation is itself profane. From the start, it required the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and ancestral lands in the Nakba. From the start, it has been at war with collective dreams of liberation. At a seder, it is worth remembering that this includes the dreams of liberation and self-determination of the Egyptian people. This false idol of Zionism has long equated Israeli safety with Egyptian dictatorship and unfreedom and client state. From the start, it has produced an ugly kind of freedom that saw Palestinian children not as human beings, but as demographic threats, much as the Pharaoh in the Book of Exodus feared the growing population of Israelites and thus ordered the death of their sons. And as we know, Moses was saved from that by being put in a basket and adopted by an Egyptian woman.
Zionism has brought us to our present moment of cataclysm, and it is time that we say clearly it has always been leading us here. It is a false idol that has led far too many of our own people down a deeply immoral path that now has them justifying the shredding of core commandments — “Thou shall not kill,” “Thou shall not steal,” “Thou shall not covet” — the commandments brought down from the mount. It is a false idol that equates Jewish freedom with cluster bombs that kill and maim Palestinian children.
Zionism is a false idol that has betrayed every Jewish value, including the value that we place on questioning a practice embedded in the seder itself with its four questions asked by the youngest child. It also betrays the love that we have as a people for text and for education. Today this false idol dares to justify the bombing of every single university in Gaza, the destruction of countless schools, of archives, of printing presses, the killing of hundreds of academics, scholars, journalists, poets, essayists. This is what Palestinians call scholasticide, the killing of the infrastructure and the means of education.
Meanwhile, in this city, the universities call the NYPD and barricade themselves against the grave threat posed by their own students asking them —
CROWD: Shame!
NAOMI KLEIN: — students embodying the spirit of the seder, asking the most basic question, asking questions like “How can you claim to believe in anything at all, least of all us, while you enable, invest in and collaborate with this genocide?”
The false idol of Zionism has been allowed to grow unchecked for far too long. So tonight we say it ends here. Our Judaism cannot be contained by an ethnostate, for our Judaism is internationalist by its very nature. Our Judaism cannot be protected by the rampaging military of that ethnostate, for all that military does is sow sorrow and reap hatred, including hatred against us as Jews. Our Judaism is not threatened by people raising their voices in solidarity with Palestine across lines of race, ethnicity, physical ability, gender identity and generations. Our Judaism is one of those voices and knows that in this chorus lies both our safety and our collective liberation.
Our Judaism is the Judaism of the Passover Seder, the gathering in ceremony to share food and wine with loved ones and strangers alike. This ritual, light enough to carry on our backs, in need of nothing but one another, even with — we don’t need walls. We need no temple, no rabbi. And there is a role for everyone, including especially the smallest child. The seder is portable, a diaspora technology if ever there was one. It is made to hold our collective grieving, our contemplation, our questioning, our remembering, and our reviving and rekindling of the revolutionary spirit.
So, tonight — so, look around. This here is our Judaism. As waters rise and forests burn and nothing is certain, we pray at the altar of solidarity and mutual aid, no matter the cost. We don’t need or want the false idol of Zionism. We want freedom from the project that commits genocide in our name. We want freedom from the ideology that has no plan for peace, except for deals with the murderous, theocratic petrostates next door, while selling the technologies of robo-assassinations to the world. We seek to liberate Judaism from an ethnostate that wants Jews to be perennially afraid, that wants our children afraid, that wants us to believe that the world is against us so that we go running to its fortress, or at least keep sending the weapons and the donations.
That is a false idol. And it’s not just Netanyahu. It’s the world he made and the world that made him. It’s Zionism. What are we? We, in these streets for months and months, we are the exodus, the exodus from Zionism. So, to the Chuck Schumers of this world, we do not say, “Let our people go.” We say, “We have already gone, and your kids, they are with us now.”
AMY GOODMAN: Award-winning journalist and author Naomi Klein, speaking at what was called the “Seder in the Streets to Stop Arming Israel” on Tuesday at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, a block from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s home. Special thanks to Hana Elias, Eric Halvarson and Ishmael Daro of Democracy Now!
US Judaism’s Anti-Zionism
Aaron Gell. “Has Zionism Lost the Argument?” The New Republic (April 2024).
Dissident is an unpaid position, Steve Naman told me this fall. The 77-year-old resident of suburban Atlanta is the longtime president (and accountant, webmaster, and proofreader) of the American Council for Judaism—for decades the lonely standard-bearer of the Reform movement’s beleaguered anti-Zionist wing. In its heyday, the group boasted as many as 20,000 members, and its combative director, Rabbi Elmer Berger, was a reliable thorn in the side of the Zionist establishment. Berger was a devoted advocate of American Jewish assimilation—a fulfillment, in his view, of the universalism espoused by the Hebrew prophets. Perhaps more important, he was a fierce opponent of Jewish nationalism, which he considered an invitation to catastrophe. . . .MORE https://newrepublic.com/article/179430/zionism-lost-argument-american-jews-israel
Two books by Bernard Avishai, 1987 and 2002.
Avishai, Bernard. The Tragedy of Zionism: How Its Revolutionary Past Haunts Israel.1987. https://www.amazon.com › Tragedy-Zionism-Revolutio…
Bernard Avishai, The Tragedy of Zionism — Revolution and Democracy in the Land of Israel, (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1985). Reviewed by Moshé Machover (November/December 1987) https://merip.org/1987/11/avishai-the-tragedy-of-zionism/
By far the best part of this book is its epilogue, in which Avishai berates American Jews for their uncritical adulation and idolization of Israel and its policies, to the point that “Israeli politicians, including the guilty General Sharon, [are] received in American synagogues with a reverence justly denied them at home” (p. 353). Among non-Orthodox American Jews, this subservience has replaced the Jewish religion as the basis for Jewish identity and institutional life. Avishai — a Jew who tried to make his home in Israel but returned to Canada when, after three years, he and his wife felt they “were living among foreigners” — believes in the possibility and desirability of developing a modern secular Jewish identity in America, but feels that it must not be based-on servility to Israeli policies and the new post-1967 Zionism.
Avishai is by no means anti-Zionist. In the rest of the book, he argues that while pre-1948 Labor Zionism was “a good revolution” (p. 10), admirable in every way, it became outdated with the founding of Israel. This old Zionism, incapable of serving as the guiding ideology of a democratic state, ought to have been discarded. Instead, it was maintained but became increasingly ossified, holding on to power by means of anachronistic bureaucracies such as the Histadrut and the Jewish Agency. Since 1967, this atrophied Labor Zionism has been increasingly displaced by something much worse: the new Zionism of the rightwing and the religious movements — expansionist, fundamentalist, chauvinist and therefore inconsistent with democracy. This post-1948 process is what he regards as the “tragedy” of Zionism.
Avishai’s main thesis cannot be dismissed out of hand, even if it must ultimately be rejected. Nor should he be condemned for writing, in effect, a propaganda tract rather than a dispassionate account. What does condemn this book is its cavalier treatment of the truth, its sheer lack of veracity. . . .
Avishai. The Tragedy of Zionism: How Its Revolutionary Past Haunts Israel. Helios Press, 2002. Publisher’s Weekly called The Tragedy of Zionism “an explosive book.”
Contents
Revolution: The Making of Zionist Institutions — Introduction: The Jewish Problem — Political Zionism — Cultural Zionism — The Conquest of Labor — Class to Nation — The Contradictions of Self-determination — Independence or Colonialism — State and Revolution — The End of Zionism? — New Zionism and the Trial of Israeli Democracy — A New Zionism for Greater Israel — The West Bank Tragedy — Democracy or Zionism? — Conclusion: The Divisions of Unity and Beyond — Epilogue: Tribal Warfare.
REVIEW
Allan C. Brownfeld . “Which Israel Will Prevail: The One ‘Which Wants Normality or the Messianic One?’” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, August 2005, pages 44-45. https://www.wrmea.org/2005-august/israel-and-judaism-which-israel-will-prevail-the-one-which-wants-normality-or-the-messianic-one.html
. . .In his book The Tragedy of Zionism: How Its Revolutionary Past Haunts Israeli Democracy, Bernard Avishai, dean of the Raphael Recanti International School and a professor of business and government at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel, writes that from the beginning there has been a tension between democracy and Jewish nationalism: “Israel’s founders had only a limited imagination for democracy as an end in itself, acting at critical moments out of sheer expediency. As democrats, they introduced basic laws protecting freedom of expression and electoral protocols. As Zionists, they maintained, say, discriminatory property rights to secure the hegemony of Hebrew labor communes, enacted immigration and residence laws that required theocratic stipulations of Jewish status, and ceded key civil powers (marriage, burial) to the Orthodox rabbinate. It was impossible to tell, in other words, whether Israel’s founders were building a (mainly) Jewish democratic state, or a (mainly) democratic Jewish state. This confusion was, and is, unsustainable.”
From the beginning there has been a tension between democracy and Jewish nationalism.
The late Rabbi Meir Kahane argued relentlessly before his assassination that contemporary Zionism was inconsistent with democracy, and exhorted West Bank settlers to expel Palestinian Arabs from their homes. Avishai “fears that, inadvertently, he hit on something directionally right, though he took it to absurd lengths: that people who call themselves Zionists today shy away from the grandeur of democracy. They are afraid to compete in a marketplace of ideas.”
The “new” Zionism which emerged in Israel after the 1967 war, Avishai reports, is one that frankly justifies Israeli national rights in terms of Orthodox fundamentalist religious claims. Today, rabbis declare that Jewish law prohibits ceding an inch of the West Bank to the Palestinians. “The hardening of Israeli attitudes toward territorial compromise,” he writes, “brought with it a new Zionist vocabulary of double-think names for occupied territory: Yehuda V’Shomron (Judea and Samaria) for the West Bank; Schechem for the Arab town of Nablus. The Education Ministry quickly issued new national maps of Eretz Yisrael to public school classrooms, maps without clear borders, or even the ”˜green line,’ which had previously divided Israel and the West Bank.”
Gush Emunim quickly established itself as the essential voice of the new Zionist program. For them, the Promised Land was united and the Messiah was at hand. One leader expostulated: “Amos was here. David was here, he tended his sheep here, everything that makes us a nation happened here.”
Herrenvolk Democracy
Author A.B. Yehoshua has compared the West Bank to a tar baby, arguing that the more the Israeli government strives to subdue Arabs, the more it sacrifices its own moral independence. According to Meron Benvenisti, the former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, most Israeli Jews have become accustomed to living in what he calls Herrenvolk democracy, with first-class citizenship for Jews and second-class citizenship for Arabs. “Since 1967,” Avishai writes, “there has been polarization, a coarsening of political rhetoric, the stirrings of racism…Over 60 percent of young Israelis believe Arabs should not be accorded full rights in the state.”
What of the future? Writing in the January/Febuary 2005 issue of Harpers, Avishai points to the fact that Israel’s Declaration of Independence declares it “a Jewish state,” but also promises to ensure the “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.” Avishai urges Israel to move toward a secular future in order to save its society from itself, perhaps some kind of association with the European Union or NATO. “Israel would still be a ”˜Jewish state,’” he writes, “whose national literacy and artistic masterpieces, created in Hebrew, would be open to the cultural and scientific currents of the developed world…Israel would have to replace the Law of Return, but it could still have laws that prefer immigrants who are Diaspora Jews or the victims of anti-Semitism.”
While Avishai admits that such a scenario may be a “pipe dream,” he is certain that Israel must resolve the tension between Jewish nationalism and democratic principles. He fears that the recent transformation of Zionism along more nationalistic and messianic lines has created an even greater danger for Israel’s future. He urges American Jews to help Israel advance toward genuine democracy, not defend its actions when they fall short of such an ideal.
Which Israel will prevail is impossible to know. But all of its friends who cherish democracy, freedom and equality should make their voices heard now, before it is too late to influence events. [Brownfeld writing in 2005. From the perspective of 2024, Avishai’s scenario for a democratic Israel was a pipe dream. –D]
Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.
ZIONISM’S EXTERMINATION PROJECT: PERMANENT NAKBA
“Notes from the Editors.” The Monthly Review (February 2024) (Volume 75, Number 9).
As Israel continues its atrocities in Gaza, the editors examine the nature of exterminism and its relation to what threatens to become a permanent Nakba. The explicit aim, they contend, of Zionism’s settler colonial project is nothing less than the extermination—in the classical sense of the term—of the entire Palestinian population. | more… Source
. . .Exterminism was woven into the whole myth of the frontier in the United States. For Frederick Jackson Turner, writing in The Frontier in American History, the frontier “begins with the Indian and the hunter; it goes on to tell of the disintegration of savagery.” In 1893, Turner pronounced that the frontier had closed in 1890, the year of the Wounded Knee Massacre (Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History [New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1921], 1, 11).
In The Winning of the West, Theodore Roosevelt expressed the exterminist views of settler colonialism when he wrote: “The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman. The rude, fierce settler who drives the savage from the land lays all civilization under a debt to him. American and Indian, Boer and Zulu, Cossack and Tartar, New Zealander and Maori—in each case the victor, horrible though many of his deeds are, has laid deep the foundations for the future greatness of a mighty people” (Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, vol. 3 [New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1889], 45).
How does this history of settler colonialism relate to the Zionist project in Israel and to the horrors now transpiring in Gaza? The Syrian historian Constantin Zurayk employed the Arabic word Nakba (“catastrophe”) in 1948 to refer to the forcible expulsion of Palestinians from their land, in line with the Zionist project of making Israel into a Jewish ethnoreligious state. This meant the removal of more than a million Palestinians, descended from a population that had inhabited the land in the region for thousands of years. The result was the initiation of what is now understood as a permanent Nakba, aimed at the complete extermination (in the classic sense of the term) of the Palestinian people. Moreover, since the 1960s, Marxist and Palestinian analysts have theorized it as a form of settler colonialism, with all that implies in terms of a logic of exterminism (Vijay Prashad, “The No-State Solution Becomes More and More Real: Israel’s Permanent Nakba Continues,” Asia Times, December 14, 2023; see also “Notes from the Editors,” Monthly Review 76, no. 8 [January 2024]: c2–63). . . . https://monthlyreview.org/2024/02/01/mr-075-09-2024-02_0/?mc_cid=4629d0df9d&mc_eid=ab2f7bf95e