Israel-Palestine Conflict

Long read .... but worth the effort imo.

www.lrb.co.uk

Adam Shatz · Israel’s Descent

Eight months after 7 October, Palestine remains in the grip, and at the mercy, of a furious, vengeful Jewish state, ever...
www.lrb.co.uk www.lrb.co.uk

A few paragraphs from the above



There are decades where nothing happens,’ Lenin wrote, ‘and there are weeks where decades happen.’ The last eight months have seen an extraordinary acceleration of Israel’s long war against the Palestinians. Could the history of Zionism have turned out otherwise? Benjamin Netanyahu is a callow man of limited imagination, driven in large part by his appetite for power and his desire to avoid conviction for fraud and bribery (his trial has been running intermittently since early 2020). But he is also Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, and his expansionist, racist ideology is the Israeli mainstream. Always an ethnocracy based on Jewish privilege, Israel has, under his watch, become a reactionary nationalist state, a country that now officially belongs exclusively to its Jewish citizens. Or in the words of the nation-state law of 2018, which enshrines Jewish supremacy: ‘The right to exercise national self-determination in the state of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.’ It’s no wonder Palestinians and their supporters proclaim: ‘Palestine shall be free from the river to the sea.’ What many Zionists hear as a call to ethnic cleansing or genocide is, for most Palestinians, a call for an end to Jewish supremacy over the entirety of the land – an end to conditions of total unfreedom.

It isn’t surprising that on the student left the word ‘Zionist’ has become an epithet for those who oppose equal rights and freedom for Palestinians, or who, even if they claim to endorse the idea of a Palestinian state, persist in thinking that the desires of Israeli Jews, by virtue of their ancestors’ persecution in Europe, outweigh those of Palestine’s indigenous Arabs. But, as Shlomo Sand reminds us in Deux peuples pour un état?, there was another, dissident Zionism, a ‘cultural Zionism’ that advocated the creation of a binational state based on Arab-Jewish co-operation, one that counted among its members Ahad Ha’am, Judah Magnes, Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt. In 1907, the cultural Zionist Yitzhak Epstein accused the Zionist movement of having forgotten ‘one small detail: that there is in our beloved land an entire people that has been attached to it for hundreds of years and has never considered leaving it’. Epstein and his allies, who founded Brit Shalom, the Alliance for Peace, in 1925, imagined Zion as a place of cultural and spiritual rebirth. Any attempt to create an exclusively Jewish state, they warned, would turn Zionism into a classical colonial movement and result in permanent warfare with the Palestinian Arabs. After the Arab riots of 1929, Brit Shalom’s secretary, Hans Kohn, denounced the official Zionist movement for ‘adopting the posture of wounded innocents’ and for dodging ‘the least debate with the people who live in this country. We have depended entirely on the force of British power. We have set ourselves goals that were inevitably going to degenerate into conflict.’

But this was no accident: conflict with the Arabs was essential to the Zionist mainstream. For the advocates of ‘muscular Zionism’, as Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin has argued, the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine would allow Jews not only to achieve the ‘negation of exile’ but also, and paradoxically, to reinvent themselves as citizens of the white West – in Herzl’s words, as a ‘rampart of Europe against Asia’. Brit Shalom’s vision of reconciliation and co-operation with the indigenous population was unthinkable to most Zionists, because they regarded the Arabs of Palestine as squatters on sacred Jewish land. And, as Ben-Gurion put it, ‘we don’t want Israelis to be Arabs. It’s our duty to fight against the Levantine mentality that destroys individuals and societies.’ In 1933, Brit Shalom folded; a year later, Kohn left Palestine in despair, convinced that the Zionist movement was on a collision course with the Palestinians and the region.

Ben-Gurion’s movement was also on a collision course with those who, like Kohn and Arendt, sympathised with the idea of a Jewish cultural sanctuary in Palestine, but rejected the maximalist, exclusionary, territorial vision of the state associated with Israel’s creation in 1948. Jewish critics of Israel who traced their roots to the cultural Zionism of Magnes and Buber – or to the anti-Zionist Jewish Labor Bund – would find themselves vilified as heretics and traitors. In Our Palestine Question, Geoffrey Levin shows how American Jewish critics of Israel were dislodged from Jewish institutions in the decades following the state’s formation. After the 1948 war, the American Jewish press featured extensive, and largely sympathetic, coverage of the plight of Palestinian refugees: Israel had not yet declared that it would not readmit a single refugee. ‘The question of the Arab refugees is a moral issue which rises above diplomacy,’ William Zukerman, the editor of the Jewish Newsletter, wrote in 1950. ‘The land now called Israel belongs to the Arab Refugees no less than to any Israeli. They have lived on that soil and worked on it ... for twelve hundred years ... The fact that they fled in panic is no excuse for depriving them of their homes.’ Under Israeli pressure, Zukerman lost his job as a New York correspondent for the London-based Jewish Chronicle. Arthur Lourie, the Israeli consul general in New York, exulted in his firing: ‘a real MITZVAH’.

Zukerman wasn’t alone. In 1953, the American Reform rabbi Morris Lazaron recited a prayer of atonement in the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, declaring ‘we have sinned’ and calling for the immediate repatriation of a hundred thousand refugees: as members of the ‘tribe of the wandering feet’, he said, Jews should stand with Palestine’s refugees. The leading expert in the US on the Palestinian refugees, Don Peretz, was employed by the American Jewish Committee (AJC). After the 1948 war, he worked with a Quaker group that distributed food and clothing to displaced Palestinians living under Israel’s military government. Horrified to discover ‘an attitude towards the Arabs which resembles that of American racists’, Peretz wrote a pamphlet on the refugees for the AJC. Israeli officials responded by trying to have him fired; Esther Herlitz, Israel’s consul in New York, recommended that the embassy ‘consider digging him a grave’ at the Jewish college in Pennsylvania where he taught. Peretz was not a radical: he simply wanted to create what he called ‘a platform from which to voice not only eulogies of Israel, but a critical concern about many of the problems with which the new state has become involved’, above all the ‘Arab refugee problem, the condition of Israel’s Arab minority’. Instead, he encountered an ‘emotional environment’ that made it ‘as difficult to create an atmosphere for free discussion as it is in the South today to discuss interracial relations’.

Among the most illuminating episodes recounted in Levin’s book is the campaign to smear the reputation of Fayez Sayegh, the leading Palestinian spokesman in the US in the 1950s and early 1960s. A native of Tiberias, ‘Sayegh understood acutely that any Arab flirtation with antisemites tarnished their cause,’ Levin writes, and so steered clear of neo-Nazis and other anti-Jewish activists who turned up at his door. He joined forces with an anti-Zionist rabbi, Elmer Berger of the American Council for Judaism, who had already established himself as a critic of Zionism in his 1951 book, A Partisan History of Judaism, in which he assailed the movement for embracing ‘Hitler’s decree of separatism’ and betraying Judaism’s universalist message. Described by a pro-Israel activist as ‘one of the most competent polemicists that American Jewry has ever had to counteract’, Sayegh was considered especially dangerous because he could not easily be painted as an antisemite. In their efforts to combat this Arab ally of a prominent, if controversial, rabbi who never succumbed to antisemitic rhetoric, Zionist activists were forced to invent a novel charge: that anti-Zionism was itself a form of antisemitism. The Anti-Defamation League developed this argument into a book in 1974, but, as Levin shows, it was already in circulation twenty years earlier.
 
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Here4Politics said:
If true, mind blown (again):

Click to expand...

The problem here is how this fits with the example of antisemitism in the IHRC definition. It's antisemitic to make stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews such as Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions. Yet AIPAC is an organisation that seems quite powerful at controlling government.
 
Postman Pep said:
Long read .... but worth the effort imo.

www.lrb.co.uk

Adam Shatz · Israel’s Descent

Eight months after 7 October, Palestine remains in the grip, and at the mercy, of a furious, vengeful Jewish state, ever...
www.lrb.co.uk www.lrb.co.uk

A few paragraphs from the above



There are decades where nothing happens,’ Lenin wrote, ‘and there are weeks where decades happen.’ The last eight months have seen an extraordinary acceleration of Israel’s long war against the Palestinians. Could the history of Zionism have turned out otherwise? Benjamin Netanyahu is a callow man of limited imagination, driven in large part by his appetite for power and his desire to avoid conviction for fraud and bribery (his trial has been running intermittently since early 2020). But he is also Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, and his expansionist, racist ideology is the Israeli mainstream. Always an ethnocracy based on Jewish privilege, Israel has, under his watch, become a reactionary nationalist state, a country that now officially belongs exclusively to its Jewish citizens. Or in the words of the nation-state law of 2018, which enshrines Jewish supremacy: ‘The right to exercise national self-determination in the state of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.’ It’s no wonder Palestinians and their supporters proclaim: ‘Palestine shall be free from the river to the sea.’ What many Zionists hear as a call to ethnic cleansing or genocide is, for most Palestinians, a call for an end to Jewish supremacy over the entirety of the land – an end to conditions of total unfreedom.

It isn’t surprising that on the student left the word ‘Zionist’ has become an epithet for those who oppose equal rights and freedom for Palestinians, or who, even if they claim to endorse the idea of a Palestinian state, persist in thinking that the desires of Israeli Jews, by virtue of their ancestors’ persecution in Europe, outweigh those of Palestine’s indigenous Arabs. But, as Shlomo Sand reminds us in Deux peuples pour un état?, there was another, dissident Zionism, a ‘cultural Zionism’ that advocated the creation of a binational state based on Arab-Jewish co-operation, one that counted among its members Ahad Ha’am, Judah Magnes, Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt. In 1907, the cultural Zionist Yitzhak Epstein accused the Zionist movement of having forgotten ‘one small detail: that there is in our beloved land an entire people that has been attached to it for hundreds of years and has never considered leaving it’. Epstein and his allies, who founded Brit Shalom, the Alliance for Peace, in 1925, imagined Zion as a place of cultural and spiritual rebirth. Any attempt to create an exclusively Jewish state, they warned, would turn Zionism into a classical colonial movement and result in permanent warfare with the Palestinian Arabs. After the Arab riots of 1929, Brit Shalom’s secretary, Hans Kohn, denounced the official Zionist movement for ‘adopting the posture of wounded innocents’ and for dodging ‘the least debate with the people who live in this country. We have depended entirely on the force of British power. We have set ourselves goals that were inevitably going to degenerate into conflict.’

But this was no accident: conflict with the Arabs was essential to the Zionist mainstream. For the advocates of ‘muscular Zionism’, as Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin has argued, the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine would allow Jews not only to achieve the ‘negation of exile’ but also, and paradoxically, to reinvent themselves as citizens of the white West – in Herzl’s words, as a ‘rampart of Europe against Asia’. Brit Shalom’s vision of reconciliation and co-operation with the indigenous population was unthinkable to most Zionists, because they regarded the Arabs of Palestine as squatters on sacred Jewish land. And, as Ben-Gurion put it, ‘we don’t want Israelis to be Arabs. It’s our duty to fight against the Levantine mentality that destroys individuals and societies.’ In 1933, Brit Shalom folded; a year later, Kohn left Palestine in despair, convinced that the Zionist movement was on a collision course with the Palestinians and the region.

Ben-Gurion’s movement was also on a collision course with those who, like Kohn and Arendt, sympathised with the idea of a Jewish cultural sanctuary in Palestine, but rejected the maximalist, exclusionary, territorial vision of the state associated with Israel’s creation in 1948. Jewish critics of Israel who traced their roots to the cultural Zionism of Magnes and Buber – or to the anti-Zionist Jewish Labor Bund – would find themselves vilified as heretics and traitors. In Our Palestine Question, Geoffrey Levin shows how American Jewish critics of Israel were dislodged from Jewish institutions in the decades following the state’s formation. After the 1948 war, the American Jewish press featured extensive, and largely sympathetic, coverage of the plight of Palestinian refugees: Israel had not yet declared that it would not readmit a single refugee. ‘The question of the Arab refugees is a moral issue which rises above diplomacy,’ William Zukerman, the editor of the Jewish Newsletter, wrote in 1950. ‘The land now called Israel belongs to the Arab Refugees no less than to any Israeli. They have lived on that soil and worked on it ... for twelve hundred years ... The fact that they fled in panic is no excuse for depriving them of their homes.’ Under Israeli pressure, Zukerman lost his job as a New York correspondent for the London-based Jewish Chronicle. Arthur Lourie, the Israeli consul general in New York, exulted in his firing: ‘a real MITZVAH’.

Zukerman wasn’t alone. In 1953, the American Reform rabbi Morris Lazaron recited a prayer of atonement in the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, declaring ‘we have sinned’ and calling for the immediate repatriation of a hundred thousand refugees: as members of the ‘tribe of the wandering feet’, he said, Jews should stand with Palestine’s refugees. The leading expert in the US on the Palestinian refugees, Don Peretz, was employed by the American Jewish Committee (AJC). After the 1948 war, he worked with a Quaker group that distributed food and clothing to displaced Palestinians living under Israel’s military government. Horrified to discover ‘an attitude towards the Arabs which resembles that of American racists’, Peretz wrote a pamphlet on the refugees for the AJC. Israeli officials responded by trying to have him fired; Esther Herlitz, Israel’s consul in New York, recommended that the embassy ‘consider digging him a grave’ at the Jewish college in Pennsylvania where he taught. Peretz was not a radical: he simply wanted to create what he called ‘a platform from which to voice not only eulogies of Israel, but a critical concern about many of the problems with which the new state has become involved’, above all the ‘Arab refugee problem, the condition of Israel’s Arab minority’. Instead, he encountered an ‘emotional environment’ that made it ‘as difficult to create an atmosphere for free discussion as it is in the South today to discuss interracial relations’.

Among the most illuminating episodes recounted in Levin’s book is the campaign to smear the reputation of Fayez Sayegh, the leading Palestinian spokesman in the US in the 1950s and early 1960s. A native of Tiberias, ‘Sayegh understood acutely that any Arab flirtation with antisemites tarnished their cause,’ Levin writes, and so steered clear of neo-Nazis and other anti-Jewish activists who turned up at his door. He joined forces with an anti-Zionist rabbi, Elmer Berger of the American Council for Judaism, who had already established himself as a critic of Zionism in his 1951 book, A Partisan History of Judaism, in which he assailed the movement for embracing ‘Hitler’s decree of separatism’ and betraying Judaism’s universalist message. Described by a pro-Israel activist as ‘one of the most competent polemicists that American Jewry has ever had to counteract’, Sayegh was considered especially dangerous because he could not easily be painted as an antisemite. In their efforts to combat this Arab ally of a prominent, if controversial, rabbi who never succumbed to antisemitic rhetoric, Zionist activists were forced to invent a novel charge: that anti-Zionism was itself a form of antisemitism. The Anti-Defamation League developed this argument into a book in 1974, but, as Levin shows, it was already in circulation twenty years earlier.
Click to expand...
Thanks for posting. I'm not sure how this ends. Most Israelis are Zionist but the future may depend on how many are persuaded that it is "us or them". Netanyahu's attempt to nobble the judiciary had some in the armed forces on the edge of mutiny. October 7th changed everything but if "us or them" is associated with the end of a two-state
solution and the only state is a racist / apartheid Jewish state from the river to the sea (and beyond the river for some of the right-wing extremists) then Israel will be isolated by a new global generation who, without denying the Holocaust, will have no wish to see the Palestinians as victims of a new Shoah.

The value of Israel as a strategic partner in the region diminishes if it becomes the case that most tensions in the region derive from Israeli policy (I nearly said "from the existence of Israel" but that would be to give up on the idea of a solution that doesn't end in "us or them"). It's a sad situation.
 
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