Responses to Kovel Posting
My posting the other day about Joel Kovel’s impending talk in Brookline, Massachusetts, generated several emails, all but one from appreciative friends. Two critical readers responded on the website of the Brookline TAB, where my op-ed was posted. Rather than repeat all the TAB comments, you can read them here.
The primary theme running through the comments is that, as history shows, Jews need a state of their own to be safe. On the TAB site, Steven Feinstein puts it this way:
Zionism is essentially “affirmative action” for the Jewish people. After centuries of persecution in Arab countries, and pogroms and then the holocaust in Europe, the Jewish people need and deserve a country of their own…This might seem unjust to some, but it is necessary and just, given the circumstances.
I don’t think the treatment Jews received in Arab countries is really comparable to European pogroms and the Holocaust, but even if it were true, that does not mean the Jews “deserve” a country of their own. Zionism developed as one of several historical options, and in hindsight it doesn’t look to me like the right option. By moving to the US instead of to Palestine, for example, my European grandparents set in motion generations of Jewish Americans living reasonably equal and even relatively charmed lives. The safety of American Jews is a lot more certain than the safety of Israeli Jews, especially if Israel remains a Jewish-priority state at Palestinian expense. Ultimately, improved equality and safety — for Jews as well as for non-Jews — depends more on reinforcing equality and democracy throughout the world and opening all states to those victimized elsewhere than on creating isolating pockets offering false hopes of protection.
The affirmative action analogy has some initial appeal, but it fails because statehood and affirmative action have different purposes. Affirmative action, designed in its clumsy way to counter individual discrimination and institutional inequality, is not applicable to national sovereignty. Groups have no fundamental right to statehood the way individuals have a right to equality. Indeed, thousands of national and tribal societies around the world lack states. I’d be glad to see every cultural and geographic group have more sovereignty and to eliminate the nation-state entirely, but in the meantime those who run the nation-state system will not tolerate thousands of mini-states. I’m not sure Jews have more claim to a state than the Kurds, the Druze, the Iroquois, or any other group.
Feinstein continues:
…you know very well that the Arab world has much more serious problems than the State of Israel. Arab leaders, just like countless dictators and despots before them, point their fingers at the Jews to distract their long-suffering people from their real problems. And you are complicit. More people die from malnutrition in the world each year than have ever lived in Palestine. Is dismantling the State of Israel the most pressing concern…?
Again, I think this is beside the point. That Israel is not the primary source of global oppression does not let its supporters off the hook. Unlike most other countries in this category, Israel claims to be a democracy, thus raising the standard, and its actions are made possible by US tax dollars. My own interest in this issue stems as well from my Jewish identity, which makes me recoil when Israel does things I disapprove of “in the name of the Jewish people.”
Palestinian victims may be outnumbered by victims elsewhere in the world, but victims are victims. At a time when Israel’s closure of the Gaza checkpoints causes hunger and tragedy for hundreds of thousands of civilians, it seems to me immoral to minimize the pain as well as the responsibility.
The second TAB commenter, Cheryl Mavrikos, ends with this:
Those who share your point of view have unfortunately learned very little from history and utterly fail to understand the political dynamics of the Arab world. What is more tragic is that those who view the conflict one-dimensionally proselytize as “political awareness” that which basically amounts to a personal failure of character.
Mavrikos attributes disagreement to either failure to understand or failure of character. Our differences seem to me instead to reflect different priorities. For all these commenters on my posting, the priority is what is best for the Jewish people. I understand that urge, but my priority is to do what justice requires, taking into account both universally applicable principles and an effort to balance individual circumstances.
Jewish suffering cannot justify oppressing Palestinians. I do think intense need requires solutions. No group of people should be dispensable. But the solution cannot ultimately mean a state for every group, especially states where non-preferred groups are subjected to institutional discrimination and repression. I’m not yet persuaded a single state for Israelis and Palestinians will ever become possible, but I am persuaded that any state based on supremacy of one group over another does not deserve support.
Technorati Tags: Israel, Joel Kovel, one-state solution, Overcoming Zionism, Palestine, two-state solution, Zionism
January 19th, 2008 at 10:23 pm
You are a racist. So is Kovel. Anti-Zionism is racism by Judea Pearl. Read it!
January 20th, 2008 at 1:33 am
Fox– you are the classical little jewish commie-symp asshole from Brooklyn with weak credentials from mediocre schools but with the chutzapadik know-it-all and sanctimonious half-brain typical of little troskyites. you and that old commie fart joel kovel make a fine pair, add chomsky and finkelstein to the mix, and you have the Four Shmucks of the Apocalypse. When all is said and done, the best word that describes you is not gadfly (your former metaphor in the Tab) but vawntz (Yiddish for bedbug). Good bye, vawntz, and stay in Brooklyn or Illinois, you stink up Brookline.
January 20th, 2008 at 10:50 am
Dennis, I applaud your decision to reject a tribalistic morality and embrace universal values like equality instead, as reflected in your statement: “Dropping my own Zionist identity meant rejecting the position that what matters most is what’s good for the Jews.” I would like to add, however, that the framework of “what’s good for the Jews versus what is just for humanity” is somewhat misleading in this context. It is misleading because it implies that Zionism is “good for the Jews,” which is simply not true. It is as wrong as the notion that George W. Bush’s warmongering in the name of protecting Americans from the “terrorists who hate us” is in any way “good for the Americans.” Israel today is, like the United States, a nation in which there is growing inequality, with a corporate/government elite using fear of “the Arabs” the way George W. Bush uses fear of “the terrorists” to command obedience to policies that enrich billionaires and impoverish ordinary people.
Zionist leaders have consistently betrayed ordinary Jews even going back to the days of the Holocaust, when they aggressively sabotaged efforts to rescue European Jews from the Nazis whenever the rescue aimed to send Jews anywhere other than Palestine. Zionist leaders actually argued that it was better for Jews to die at the hands of the Nazis than live safely in, say, England or France.
Why did Zionist leaders sabotage rescue efforts? The answer is spelled out very clearly in a dramatic letter. In the autumn of 1942 Nathan Schwalb (Dror) was representative of the Zionist He-Halutz (The Pioneer) organization in Geneva. At this time a Jewish rescue Working Group in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, was sending desperate appeals to He-Halutz for money to bribe senior Nazi officials to delay or prevent the transport of Czechoslovakian Jewry to Auschwitz and other death camps. Schwalb replied, in his letter to the rescue group, as follows:
“Since we have the opportunity of this courier, we are writing to the group that they must always remember that matter which is the most important, which is the main issue that must always be before our eyes. After all, the allies will be victorious. After the victory, they will once again divide up the world between the nations as they did at the end of first war. Then they opened the way for us for the first step [the British Balfour Declaration of 1917 supporting a Jewish homeland in Palestine — JS] and now, as the war ends, we must do everything so that Eretz Yisroel [the Land of Israel — JS] should become a Jewish state. Important steps have already been taken in this matter. As to the cry that comes from your country, we must be aware that all the nations of the Allies are spilling much blood and if we do not bring sacrifices, with what will we achieve the right to sit at the table when they make the distribution of nations and territories after the war? And so it would be foolish and impertinent on our side to ask the nations whose blood is being spilled for permission to send money into the land of their enemies in order to protect our own blood. Because ‘rak b’dam tihyu lanu haaretz’ (’only through blood will the land be ours’). As to yourselves — members of the group — ‘atem taylu’ (’you will get out’), and for this purpose we are providing you with funds by this courier.”
This, and much more evidence that Zionist leaders do not really care about the welfare of ordinary Jews, can be found in my referenced articles
“Should People Opposed to Bigotry and Anti-Semitism Support Israel?” (http://newdemocracyworld.org/War/Should-People.htm) and “Class Conflict in Israel” (http://newdemocracyworld.org/class_conflict_in_israel.htm).
January 20th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
Dennis,
You write, “Affirmative action, designed in its clumsy way to counter individual discrimination and institutional inequality,…”
There is a deep connection between Zionism and affirmative action, which I would like to discuss here.
First, was “affirmative action” really _designed_ for the purpose you describe above? The reasons why many good people support affirmative action may indeed be as you describe. But the reasons powerful people like Richard Nixon worked to replace the “end discrimination and treat everybody equally” goal of the Martin Luther King era Civil Rights movement with affirmative action’s very different “give preferential treatment to minorities to redress past discrimination” goal was not to help minorities but rather to destroy the solidarity that had developed between whites and blacks around the earlier Civil Rights framework of equality, by pitting the races against each other in the name of competition between the races (i.e. creating a “level playing field” for that competition.)
(”Incredible but true,” declared Fortune magazine at the time of Richard M. Nixon’s death in 1994. “It was the Nixonites who gave us employment quotas.”(1) Until recently, many scholars and journalists have credited Democratic Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson with initiating affirmative action. Yet it was a Republican president who first sanctioned formal goals and time frames to raze barriers to minority employment. Nixon, recalled civil rights leader James Farmer, was the strongest president on affirmative action–up to that point.”(2) [from http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-20649393.html ])
The actual (and in my opinion, intended) effect of decades of affirmative action has been to create resentment of whites against blacks. For decades whites have been told that they didn’t get the job or were denied admission to an institution of higher learning because a less qualified black person got it because of affirmative action.
Affirmative action plays the same role as Zionism, with both being a means of elite social control, based on pitting people against each other. More specifically, both affirmative action and Zionism are designed by elites to persuade the target group of ordinary people (blacks and women and liberals who wish to support them in the former case and Jews in the latter case) to reject, in practice, the values of equality and solidarity that they would otherwise support.
Thus Zionism tells Jews that, in order to make up for the danger of anti-Semitism, they need to embrace ethnic cleansing against non-Jews in Palestine, and embrace the idea of a Jewish state (as opposed to a state of all its citizens equally.) Affirmative action likewise tells people who would normally agree that “The state shall not discriminate against or grant preferential treatment to any group or individual on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin” that this statement is racist and reactionary. (It is in fact the text of the referendum question against affirmative action that will appear on the ballot in five states this year.)
For people to successfully resist the efforts of elites to pit us against each other we need to be vigilant in detecting and publicly exposing the clever means the elite use to persuade us to reject the values of equality and solidarity. Zionism, affirmative action, “the war on terror,” “protecting our borders against illegal immigration,” characterizing people opposed to same-sex marriage as “homophobic bigots,” and other elite-sponsored campaigns all have in common the fact that they use lies to pit one group of ordinary people against another, and thereby strengthen elite rule.
January 21st, 2008 at 9:21 pm
Responding briefly and somewhat off-the-cuff to John Spritzler’s two useful comments:
1. On Zionist leaders’ real goals and what’s really good for the Jews: I usually try to avoid basing arguments on unprovable premises, especially when I don’t think they’re necessary. So although I suspect conspiracies and secret plots of various kinds occur, John’s argument here doesn’t get to my main interest.
I do agree with him that Zionism’s creation of a Jewish-priority state is not ultimately good for the Jews, as I’ve noted in a number of places, especially given Israel’s inability to resolve its democratic/Jewish character tensions and the inability of any society to remain an island unto itself. And John seems to agree with me that many individual Zionists for more than a century really did think Zionism was the best solution to the shaky status of Jews in the world. I know that’s what I believed when I was a teenage and young-adult Zionist. That some political elites were more consciously willing to make trade-offs I would have rejected is upsetting, but I don’t believe all bad effects are caused by bad intentions or bad people. Sometimes good people trying to do the right thing get it wrong. In this case, the argument that Zionism was good for the Jews turned out to be incorrect whether it was sincere or not.
I should add that it doesn’t surprise me when leaders of states and national movements engage in cynical, deceptive, and immoral behavior. That’s the nature of statehood. I suspect John would agree with me about this.
2. On affirmative action:
I’d say much the same about affirmative action. It wouldn’t surprise me that some elites supported the policy to divide whites from blacks, but I just don’t think that explains the motivations of most of its supporters. I used the word “clumsy” as shorthand for a variety of problems not relevant to my main focus. Most legalistic efforts to resolve social problems are clumsy; they overreach, create messy side-effects, and avoid more serious issues, sometimes intentionally.
In my view, affirmative action was one of many liberal efforts to tinker with system strains without really changing the system. I would have preferred more fundamental economic and political changes designed to create a society in which affirmative action would be neither relevant nor necessary. I would not, however, support the anti-affirmative action referendums John refers to in the absence of those more-fundamental policies — reparations for descendants of slaves, for example, or full economic equality, or ending corporate rights.
I should also say I reject John’s support (here and elsewhere) for those who would ban gay marriage. Although I agree with him that people opposed to gay marriage are not all homophobes, my view of democracy does not extend to letting majorities control the personal lives of minorities. I would gladly take the state out of marriage entirely and leave that ceremony and status to religious institutions. The state, though, should not have the power to make what are essentially religious decisions.
January 23rd, 2008 at 9:52 am
John Spritzler’s ridiculous equation of Zionism with ethnic cleansing is a morally reprehensible prevarication that only a mind brainwashed by leftist-inspired anti-Semitism could possibly concoct. You fail to address his statement, Dennis; therefore I can only surmise that you buy into this pig-slop.
Fortunately, neither of you have any influence over either Israel’s or America’s policies in the Middle East. Piss and moan about imperialism, colonialism, Israeli “atrocities” all you like. It’s a free country – so long as people such as you and Spritzler don’t seek political office.