[Peace-discuss] Another Jew talks about Zionism

[Morton K. Brussel]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/philip-weiss/rethinking- 
zionism_b_156955.html

Dana Goldstein, whose thoughtful condemnation of the Gaza slaughter  
after years of reserve I welcome, is a little uncomfortable with the  
embrace. She points out that I have identified myself as a non- or  
anti-Zionist, and says that anti-Zionism is redolent of antisemitism.  
She's a post-Zionist, she says. Goldstein's comments deserve a  
response, especially at this moment in intellectual life, when so  
many people are crowding the doorways of this conversation.

I also used to say post- or non-Zionist to avoid being negative. The  
playwright David Zellnik told me that anti-Zionist felt to him like a  
denial of Israel's considerable achievements and I respected David's  
view. Now I've come to say that I'm an anti-Zionist for several reasons.

First: My feelings are not neutral about Zionism; I don't like it. As  
a Jew, I think about it a lot and there is nothing I can really feel  
positive about outside of the Jewish pride and its historical  
significance of it and its visionary component. All these elements  
have lost their value: Zionism privileges Jews and justifies  
oppression, and this appalls me. Saying I'm anti-Zionist is a sincere  
expression of my minority-respecting worldview.

Second, Post-Zionist strikes me as an evasion. At this moment,  
Zionism reigns in historical Palestine and in American Jewish  
leadership. To say you're a post-Zionist is like saying you're a post- 
Communist during the Stalin purges. You are tastefully separating  
yourself from the world, dainty as an English person drinking tea  
with their little finger in the air. Zionism remains a very powerful  
force in Middle East affairs and American society. It's not helpful  
to those who are trying to understand these matters to evade this  
fact or suggest that post-Zionism is actually a real factor in, say,  
the life of Gaza City. I urge people to take a stand if they find  
Zionist beliefs that privilege 6 million Jews over 5-6 million non- 
Jews and that have entailed apartheid on the West Bank and ethnic  
cleansing a supportable ideology, especially in the age of our mutt  
president-to-be.

Third, anti-Zionism is an idealistic Jewish tradition. In fact, it  
draws on the same visionary and If-you-dream-it feeling that Zionism  
did 100 years ago, before the militants ruined it, and engages the  
same young restless sensibilities and liberationist feeling as  
Zionism did by imagining Israel as a state of its citizens, not a  
Jewish state. We anti-Zionists can say with honor that anti-Zionists  
like Rabbi Elmer Berger identified the problems with Zionism 60 years  
ago, accurately when he said that Zionism meant contempt for the Arab  
population, dependence on a backroom lobby in the United States, and  
the introduction of dual loyalty into American Jewish life. All true.  
Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin and Norman Mailer all opposed  
Zionism to one degree or another out of concerns with ethnocentrism-- 
didn't like its Is-it-good-for-the-Jews backbeat. These problems are  
larger today than ever, especially post-Iraq-war and the Iraq war's  
idiot stepson, Gaza.

Finally, declaring I'm anti-Zionist is a way of trying to make room  
in American life for this view. Right now being critical of Israel  
means that you can hurt your business, as a Bay Area professional  
told the San Francisco Chronicle. True and disgusting. As Jimi  
Hendrix said when he was changing attitudes: I'm going to wave my  
freak flag high!

As to the antisemitism point, the American Jewish Committee has said  
the same thing: anti-Zionism is antisemitism. It thus conflates  
Jewishness with Zionism, and this conflation is damaging the Jewish  
experience around the world. When Dana says she worries about the  
antisemitic suggestion of anti-Zionism, I feel a shadow of  
censoriousness. There are things you can and can't say. Well, I am an  
empowered Jew who has never experienced functional antisemitism ever  
in my life, and my empowerment is also part of this conversation: I  
insist on speaking about Jewish cultural/financial power in the U.S.  
as a component of my Zionist critique. Do I think that Jews should be  
denied power? No! Do I think that there should be quotas on Jewish  
inclusion in elite institutions? No! Well: I would like Jewish  
participation in mainstream media roundtables on the Middle East held  
to 50 percent. That is my quota. These ideas have made some of my  
readers uncomfortable. They've made me uncomfortable. I grew up in  
fear of lurking antisemitism. But I have decided in my 50s that these  
are things I think about all the time as a mature person, however  
flawed I am, and I think they're important--so I am going to talk  
about them.

And I would add that shutting down debate in the name of  
"antisemitism" strikes me as selfish. Our phantom worries about a  
second Holocaust take precedence over the real evidence that  
surrounds us of man's inhumanity to man, not just man's inhumanity to  
Jews. And our phantom worries mean that we cannot address the  
incredible, everyday, real suffering of Palestinians that has been  
perpetrated politically in large part by empowered American Jews who  
are all over the media and political establishment, some of whom  
limit debate of the issue by citing a possible infraction of our  
tremendous freedoms. Believe me, when our freedoms are encroached  
upon, I will howl. Today and tomorrow I howl for the Jewish  
leadership's actual crushing of the Palestinian right of self- 
determination.
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