[Peace-discuss] Zionism is the problem

[C. G. Estabrook]

[A piece by the son of Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed).  See her article 
on socialism in the current Nation 9with other contributions), FWIW: 
<http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090323/ehrenreich_fletcher>. It's important to 
note that, as Norman Finkelstein pointed out here last week, US support is the 
conditio sine qua non for Israel's existence as a racist state.  We Americans 
should address our protests to DC rather than Tel Aviv.  --CGE]


	From the Los Angeles Times
	*Zionism is the problem*
	The Zionist ideal of a Jewish state is keeping
	Israelis and Palestinians from living in peace.
	By Ben Ehrenreich
	March 15, 2009

It's hard to imagine now, but in 1944, six years after Kristallnacht,
Lessing J. Rosenwald, president of the American Council for Judaism,
felt comfortable equating the Zionist ideal of Jewish statehood with
"the concept of a racial state -- the Hitlerian concept." For most of
the last century, a principled opposition to Zionism was a mainstream
stance within American Judaism.

Even after the foundation of Israel, anti-Zionism was not a particularly
heretical position. Assimilated Reform Jews like Rosenwald believed that
Judaism should remain a matter of religious rather than political
allegiance; the ultra-Orthodox saw Jewish statehood as an impious
attempt to "push the hand of God"; and Marxist Jews -- my grandparents
among them -- tended to see Zionism, and all nationalisms, as a
distraction from the more essential struggle between classes.

To be Jewish, I was raised to believe, meant understanding oneself as a
member of a tribe that over and over had been cast out, mistreated,
slaughtered. Millenniums of oppression that preceded it did not entitle
us to a homeland or a right to self-defense that superseded anyone
else's. If they offered us anything exceptional, it was a perspective on
oppression and an obligation born of the prophetic tradition: to act on
behalf of the oppressed and to cry out at the oppressor.

For the last several decades, though, it has been all but impossible to
cry out against the Israeli state without being smeared as an
anti-Semite, or worse. To question not just Israel's actions, but the
Zionist tenets on which the state is founded, has for too long been
regarded an almost unspeakable blasphemy.

Yet it is no longer possible to believe with an honest conscience that
the deplorable conditions in which Palestinians live and die in Gaza and
the West Bank come as the result of specific policies, leaders or
parties on either side of the impasse. The problem is fundamental:
Founding a modern state on a single ethnic or religious identity in a
territory that is ethnically and religiously diverse leads inexorably
either to politics of exclusion (think of the 139-square-mile prison
camp that Gaza has become) or to wholesale ethnic cleansing. Put simply,
the problem is Zionism.

It has been argued that Zionism is an anachronism, a leftover ideology
from the era of 19th century romantic nationalisms wedged uncomfortably
into 21st century geopolitics. But Zionism is not merely outdated. Even
before 1948, one of its basic oversights was readily apparent: the
presence of Palestinians in Palestine. That led some of the most
prominent Jewish thinkers of the last century, many of them Zionists, to
balk at the idea of Jewish statehood. The Brit Shalom movement --
founded in 1925 and supported at various times by Martin Buber, Hannah
Arendt and Gershom Scholem -- argued for a secular, binational state in
Palestine in which Jews and Arabs would be accorded equal status. Their
concerns were both moral and pragmatic. The establishment of a Jewish
state, Buber feared, would mean "premeditated national suicide."

The fate Buber foresaw is upon us: a nation that has lived in a state of
war for decades, a quarter-million Arab citizens with second-class
status and more than 5 million Palestinians deprived of the most basic
political and human rights. If two decades ago comparisons to the South
African apartheid system felt like hyperbole, they now feel charitable.
The white South African regime, for all its crimes, never attacked the
Bantustans with anything like the destructive power Israel visited on
Gaza in December and January, when nearly1,300 Palestinians were killed,
one-third of them children.

Israeli policies have rendered the once apparently inevitable two-state
solution less and less feasible. Years of Israeli settlement
construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have methodically
diminished the viability of a Palestinian state. Israel's new prime
minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has even refused to endorse the idea of an
independent Palestinian state, which suggests an immediate future of
more of the same: more settlements, more punitive assaults.

All of this has led to a revival of the Brit Shalom idea of a single,
secular binational state in which Jews and Arabs have equal political
rights. The obstacles are, of course, enormous. They include not just a
powerful Israeli attachment to the idea of an exclusively Jewish state,
but its Palestinian analogue: Hamas' ideal of Islamic rule. Both sides
would have to find assurance that their security was guaranteed. What
precise shape such a state would take -- a strict, vote-by-vote
democracy or a more complex federalist system -- would involve years of
painful negotiation, wiser leaders than now exist and an uncompromising
commitment from the rest of the world, particularly from the United
States.

Meanwhile, the characterization of anti-Zionism as an "epidemic" more
dangerous than anti-Semitism reveals only the unsustainability of the
position into which Israel's apologists have been forced. Faced with
international condemnation, they seek to limit the discourse, to erect
walls that delineate what can and can't be said.

It's not working. Opposing Zionism is neither anti-Semitic nor
particularly radical. It requires only that we take our own values
seriously and no longer, as the book of Amos has it, "turn justice into
wormwood and hurl righteousness to the ground."

Establishing a secular, pluralist, democratic government in Israel and
Palestine would of course mean the abandonment of the Zionist dream. It
might also mean the only salvation for the Jewish ideals of justice that
date back to Jeremiah.

Ben Ehrenreich is the author of the novel "The Suitors."
Copyright 2009 Los Angeles Times

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-ehrenreich15-2009mar15,0,6684861.story