LETTER OF RESIGNATION FROM THE JEWISH PEOPLE
(January 2005)
By Bertell Ollman
(NYU Professor Bertell
Ollman is a renowned international scholar and
recipient of the prestigious Charles A. McCoy Distinguished Career Award
from the New Political Science Section
of the American Political Science Association. He has devoted his
professional life to making Marx's theories and methodologies accessible to
social science scholars. In this essayProfessor Ollman is dramatically rejecting
"identity politics," beginning with his own ethnic identity, which in
his youth he had embraced as a universal good.)
“Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered,
when human dignity is in jeopardy,
national borders and sensitivities become
irrelevant. Whenever men or women are persecuted because of their race,
religion or political views, that place must – at that moment –
become the center of the universe”.
--Elie Wiesel
(Acceptance
Speech, Nobel Prize for Peace, Dec. 10, 1986)
Did you
ever wonder what your last thought would be just before you died or believed
you might die? Well, I did, and a few years ago in the waning moments before
going under the knife for a life threatening operation I got my answer. As the
nurses wheeled me into the operating room, what burst upon my consciousness was
not, as might be expected, the fear of dying but a terrible angst at the idea
of dying a Jew. I was appalled to finish my life with my umbilical cord still
tied to a people with whom I can no longer identify. That this should be my
"last" thought greatly surprised me at the time, and it still does.
What did
it mean… and why is it so hard to resign from a people? I was born in
It was in
college - the
In the
following years, as the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians
deteriorated from bad to worse and then to much worse, two surprising
developments – surprising at least to me - began to unfold. I found
myself, despite my best efforts to be fair to both sides, becoming increasingly
anti-Israel, while most American Jews, including some Jewish friends who never
considered themselves Zionists, became enthusiastic supporters of the Israeli
cause. Already in the 1980s, with the first intifada,
From what
I’ve said so far, it would be easy for some to dismiss me as a
self-hating Jew, but that would be a mistake. If anything, I am a self-loving
Jew, but the Jew I love in me is the Diaspora Jew, the Jew that was blessed for
2,000 years by having no country to call his/her own. That this was accompanied
by many cruel disadvantages is well known, but it had one crowning advantage
that towered over all the rest. By being an outsider in every country and belonging to the family of outsiders
throughout the world, Jews on the whole suffered less from the small-minded
prejudices that disfigure all forms of nationalism. If you couldn't be a full
and equal citizen of the country in which you lived, you could be a citizen of
the world, or at least begin to think of yourself as such even before the
concepts existed that would help to clarify what this meant. I'm not saying
that this is how most Diaspora Jews actually thought, but some did –
Spinoza, Marx, Freud, and Einstein being among the best known - and the
opportunity as well as the inclination for others to do so came from the very
rejection they all experienced in the
countries in which they lived. Even the widespread treatment of Jews as
somehow less than human provoked a universalist
response. As children of the same God, Jews argued, when this was permitted or
just quietly reflected when it wasn’t, that they shared a common humanity
with their oppressors and that this should take precedence over everything
else. The anti-Semitic charge, then, that Jews have always and everywhere been
cosmopolitan and insufficiently patriotic had at least this much truth to it.
Not
many Jews today, of course, take this position. In a 1990 interview,
The
two questions that remain to be asked, however, are - l) whether the natural
drive to belong to something, that served Berlin as his main premise, could be
satisfied by something other than a national state, and 2) whether in becoming
like Albania (even Greater Albania) Jews have been forced to give up something
that was even more valuable in the Judaism of the diaspora.
If it is true - and I am ready to admit it is - that our mental and emotional
health requires a strong bond with other people, there is no reason to believe
that only national groups which occupy their own land can satisfy this need.
There are racial, religious,
gender, cultural, political, and class groups without special
ties to one country that might do as well. Blacks, Catholics, gays, Free
Masons, and class conscious workers are but a few populations that have found
ways to satisfy this need to belong
without confining themselves to national borders. Membership in our common
species offers still another path to this same goal. Given the range of possibilities, which group(s) we "join" or take as our
primary identity will depend largely on what is available in the time and place
in which we live, how such groups
resolve (or promise to resolve) our most pressing problems, and on how we are socialized into viewing
these different groups.
As for
what was lost in acquiring a homeland, it is important to recognize that
Zionism is a form of nationalism like any other, and
nationalism – as even sympathetic observers like Albert Einstein were
forced to recognize – always has its price. While every Jew knows that
Einstein was offered the presidency of the newly independent Jewish state, few
understand why he turned it down. In contrast to Berlin, who wanted Jews to
become a “normal” people like the others, Einstein wrote, “My
awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state
with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power, no matter how modest. I
am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain – especially from the
development of a narrow nationalism within our own ranks, against which we have
already had to fight strongly, even without a Jewish state.”2
Who can doubt that Einstein was right to worry?
Like
all nationalisms, Zionism is also based on an exaggerated sense of
superiority as applied to members of the in-group and a feeling of indifference, bordering on contempt, for
members of other groups. Jews entered world history with an extreme act of “chutzpah” (for which a new word
had to be invented) in which they posed one just God who created everyone, and
then, for reasons best known to him, “chose” the Jews to be his
special people (why Christians and Moslems so happily accept their inferior
status in this arrangement I’ll never understand). But what the Zionists
have done is carry this original act of “chutzpah” over to
God’s commandments. Where Jews once believed they were
“chosen” to receive God’s laws for all humanity, Zionists
seem to believe that they were “chosen” to break them whenever they
interfere with the national interest. What room does this leave for a belief in
the inherent equality of all human beings?
Admittedly, the ancient Hebrews not only received the Laws from God but also, supposedly, the promise of a
particular piece of land. The latter, however, was always linked to the Jews
obedience to these laws, of which the most important – given the number
of times God refers to it - is the prohibition against idolatry. While the Jews
have not built any idols of Jaweh, their record on idolatry – perhaps in part the
result of the restraint shown in representing God – has probably been
worse than that of their neighbors. For well over 3,000 years, Judaism has
fought a largely losing fight against idolatry with the temple in Jerusalem,
the scrolls of the Torah and the land of Israel coming to embody and gradually
to replace the relations with God and the corresponding ethical precepts that
they were supposed to represent. But only in Zionism, the current version of
this land idolatry, have these precepts been sacrificed altogether. This modern
version of the Golden Calf has saved Moses the trouble of smashing the Ten
Commandments by doing it for him. That many of today’s Zionists
don’t believe in the God of their fathers simply makes it easier for them
to turn Eretz Israel into a new God. The idolatry
stands. Only now God’s laws can be written by a committee without
sullying their nationalist content with any universalist
pretensions. If such extreme nationalism is normal – which makes Spinoza,
Marx, Freud and Einstein thoroughly abnormal – then, I guess, Berlin
finally got his normal people.
The organic
tie that Zionism - as is typical with nationalist movements - takes for granted
between its people and their territory is also bathed in the kind of mysticism
that renders any rational discussion of their situation impossible. This is as
true for religious Zionists who actually believe that God made a real estate
deal with their ancestors as it is for secular Zionists who conveniently forget
the 2,000 years of the Jewish diaspora in staking
their “legal” claim to the land (only to recall the Jews’
suffering in the diaspora when the discussion shifts
to their moral claim to it). What room does this leave for dealing in a humane
and rational way with the problems of life in the 21st century? With
both morality and reason tailored to serve tribal needs first…and last,
the chamber of horrors that Zionism has constructed for the Palestinian people
was only a matter of time in coming. Could this be what the ancient Hebrew
prophets had in mind when they predicted that the Jewish people would become
"a light onto the nations"?
Certainly not, nor was it something that Jews themselves could possibly
have imagined during the period of the diaspora, when
probably no people attached a greater value to human equality and human reason
than the Jews. Einstein could even claim that the most important characteristic
of Judaism was its commitment to “the democratic ideal of social justice,
coupled with the ideal of mutual aid and tolerance among all men” without
anyone laughing at him.3 Now, even God would have to laugh…
or cry.
If
the diaspora for all its material inadequacies left
the Jews, morally speaking, on a kind of pedestal, why did they come down from
it? They came down when the pedestal broke. The conditions that underlay Jewish
life in the diaspora began to come apart with the
progress of capitalism, democracy and the enlightenment long before the
Holocaust, which only delivered the final blow.
As odd as this may sound for something that lasted almost 2,000 years,
Diaspora Judaism was and could only be a period of transition. Emerging out of Biblical Judaism, Diaspora
Judaism was constructed from the start on a contradiction between nostalgia for
the country that was lost and a forward looking, if often hesitant and partial,
commitment to the people and places where Jews came to live. The one looked
backward to the tribe and the land they once called their own, and the other
looked out upon the whole species and the entire world into which the Jews,
more than any other people, had spread. Except, for the longest time, the ties
that bound different peoples and places to each other - culturally,
religiously, commercially (much of that by Jews) - was loose at best, so that
the possibility of taking their new situation to its logical conclusion and declaring
themselves citizens of the world is something that most Jews could not even
conceive. Still, their attitude toward the rest of humanity, if not yet their
actions, made Jews increasingly suspect to the more rooted peoples among whom
they lived, who never ceased to condemn Jews for their
"cosmopolitanism" (a swear word it seems to virtually everybody but
Jews). Then, with the multiple
reconfigurations of the globe associated with capitalism, the enlightenment,
democracy, and finally socialism, more Jews could recognize that they were
indeed citizens of the world and became free to declare so publicly.
But the
same social and economic turmoil, with its new opportunities for advancement
and - also - frightening rise in anti-Semitism, that led many Jews to exchange
their prime identity in the tribe for one in the human species led other Jews
to reject their evolving cosmopolitanism in favor of a renewed nationalist
project. It is no coincidence that so many Jews became either socialists or
Zionists at the end of the l9th and in the early part of the 20th century.
Where no change in the condition of the Jewish people had seemed possible
earlier, now two alternatives emerged and vied with each other for popular
support. The one sought to do away with the oppression of Jews by doing away
with all oppressions, and the other sought the same end by removing the Jews to
a supposedly safe haven in Palestine. The same processes that gave rise to
these two alternatives brought the gradual and then rapid disintegration of
Diaspora Judaism. Though most Jews today live outside Israel in what is still
called the "diaspora", the great majority
belong to either the socialist or, increasingly, Zionist camps (including the
weak versions of each) and what remains will probably be drawn into one or the
other of these two camps in the near future. Diaspora Judaism, as it existed
for almost 2,000 years, has practically ceased to exist. It has divided along
the lines of its major contradiction into a socialism that is concerned with
the well being of humanity and a nationalism that is only interested in the
well being of the Jewish people and their reconquest
of Israel. Since Judaism has always tried to synthesize these irreconcilable
projects, their definitive separation - forget the artfully packaged nostalgia
that finds its way into the media - can be viewed as the end of Judaism itself.
Perhaps all there is left are ex-Jews who call themselves socialists or
communists and ex-Jews who call themselves Zionists (the secular/religious
divide among the latter has little relevance for my purposes).
If neither
socialists who reject the nationalist and religious aspects of Diaspora Judaism
nor Zionists who reject its universal and humanist dimensions (and often its
religious aspects as well) are Jews, then the real debate is over which
tradition has retained the best of their common Jewish heritage. Despite their
constant chatter about Jews, I would maintain that it is Zionism that has least
in common with Judaism. It is not by breaking the limbs of Palestinian youth
that the Jewish sages of the past predicted our people would "become a
light onto the nations". In Israel today - where "tsadik" (righteous person)
and "mensch"
(decent one) apply only to a few who are spat on by the great majority of the
population, and "chutzpah" has come to mean the defense of the
indefensible, there is little to remind us of the moral core of a once noble
tradition.
When I was growing up, my
Yiddish speaking mother would often try to correct some aberrant behavior on my
part by warning that it was a "shandeh fur die goyim"
(that I would be shaming not only me and my family but all Jews in front of the
gentiles). What I want to cry out loudest in front of all the crimes of
Zionism, and all those who try to defend them, is that what they are doing is a
"shandeh
fur die goyim". They themselves,
the big cheeses and the small fry, are all a "shandeh fur die goyim". (Ma, I remember). Socialist and ex-Jew that I
am, I guess I still have too much respect and love for the Jewish tradition I
left behind to want the world to view it in the same way as they rightly view
and condemn what the ex-Jews who call themselves Zionists are doing in its
name. And if changing my status from ex-Jew (current) to non-Jew (projected)
stirs even ten good people (God’s “minyan”) into action
against the Zionist hijacking of the Jewish label, then this is a sacrifice I
am ready to make.
To those
who wonder why the resignation of an atheistic communist from the Jewish people
might bother some Jews, I would just point out that the greatest sin a Jew can
commit – I was taught this from all sides – is to take leave of his
people (usually by converting to another faith). A family will often respond by
“sitting shivah”
over the offending member (treating him or her as dead). The deep shame and
anger that many Jews feel when this happens is hard to explain, but it probably
has something to do with the intense quality of the social bond that unites all
Jews, the result originally, no doubt, of being God’s chosen but also of
sharing and surviving so many centuries of oppression. While a Christian
relates to God as an individual, the Jew’s relation to God has always
passed through his connection to the chosen people, a people that God also
holds collectively responsible for the failures of each of its members.
Operating with such an incentive, Jews could never allow themselves the luxury
of indifference when it came to the life choices of their co-religionists. With
a little Jewish education, this inner connection becomes so ingrained that even
some atheist and communist Jews may experience the defection of a Jew from the
people as losing a limb from their own body. Certainly, my continuing
identification as a Jew, as some kind of a Jew, while lacking any of the
attributes of a believer, helps explain why I felt an overpowering need to
resign when “Jew” came to mean something I could not accept (or
ignore). And the same organic tie may help
explain why some Jews, including those of whom I am most critical and who might
be expected to rejoice at my resignation, may get so upset by the form that my
criticism has taken.
Here I
am almost at the end of my letter of resignation and I haven't discussed the Holocaust.
For many Zionists that would be enough to reject what I have to say. In my
defense, I would like to share a story that Joe Murphy, the former Vice
Chancellor of the City University of New York, used to tell about his Jewish
mother. "Joe", he has her saying, "there are two kinds of Jews.
One kind has reacted to the unspeakable horror of the Holocaust by vowing that
they will do anything to make sure it doesn't happen to our people again. While
the other kind of Jews took as their lesson from the same terrible event that
they must do whatever they can to make sure it doesn't happen again to any
people anywhere. Joe", she went on, "I want you to promise me that
you will always be the second kind of Jew". He did, and he was.
The
first kind of Jew, most of whom are Zionists and therefore in my language
really "ex-Jews", have gone so far as to unashamedly transform the
Holocaust itself into a club with which to bash any critic who has the temerity
to question what they are doing to the Palestinians, supposedly in
self-defense. (See Norman Finkelstein’s THE HOLOCAUST INDUSTRY) Any
criticism of Zionism, no matter how mild and justified, is equated with
anti-Semitism, where anti-Semitism has become a short-hand for people who bear
some responsibility for the Holocaust and are really hoping for another one.
This is a heavy charge, and it has proved very effective in silencing many
potential critics. It is no coincidence, therefore, that the striking revival
of media interest in the Holocaust comes at a time when Zionism is in greatest
need of such a protective cloak (shroud?).
In the process, the worst human rights violation in history is being
cynically misused to rationalize one of the worst human rights violations of
our time. Joe Murphy's mother would expect the second kind of Jews to be the
first to point this out and condemn it.
That
leaves the question of safety. Zionists insist that by creating their own state
they have improved the safety of Jews not only in Israel but everywhere.
Unfortunately, Israel's abominable treatment of the Palestinians together with
its “Wieselian” hypocrisy and
increasingly arrogant rebuffs to the world community have created more real
anti-Semitism not only in the Arab countries but throughout the world than has
probably ever existed. At the moment, Zionists feel secure against the
inevitable repercussions of their policies by virtue of the shield thrown over them by their American
“allies”. To the amazement of the entire world, except – it
appears – most Americans, Zionism’s success in cornering American
political support has been nothing less than extraordinary. As far as the
conflict in the “Holy Land” is concerned, Americans could just as
well dispense with choosing between Democrats and Republicans and vote directly
for Sharon. Orthodox Jews, as we know, hire a non-Jew (or “shabbes goy”) to turn the lights on for
them on the Sabbath. Israel, too, has many things that it cannot do for itself,
and it has managed to acquire the United States’ government as its
“shabbes goy”, and this one even pays the
electric bills. If this isn’t a miracle right up there with God’s
parting of the Red Sea, then we need to learn how it happened, and we
don’t really know, not yet, not in any detail.
Any good explanation, of course, would
have to trace the relations between the Israeli government, the Zionist lobby
(in its various dimensions), Christian Fundamentalists (who believe that the
second coming of Jesus won’t take place until all Jews are gathered in
Israel), both American political parties, Jewish voters, and the interests of
the American capitalist class in political and economic expansion. For as
influential as Israel has been in determining American foreign policy in the
Middle East, it couldn’t have succeeded so well unless its interests
overlapped to a considerable degree with the imperial designs of our ruling
class. As regards the Zionist component in this relation, the key step was
probably taken by the Israeli government in 1977, when Begin and Likud came to power and decided to forge closer links to
the Christian Fundamentalists in the U.S. (seventy million strong) in order to
help them become a more effective political lobby and one for whom Zionist
goals came first. Netanyahu, on the Israeli side, and Jerry Falwell
(who received the prestigious Jabotinsky Prize and
… a private jet from Israel), on the American side, were particularly
active in developing this alliance.4 The Bush II Administration offers but
the most recent evidence of how well this strategy has worked. Should the
Democrats oust the Republicans from office, our government’s support for
Israel would not diminish in the least, because the Zionist lobby – in
this case, with the aid of the Jewish vote, most of which goes to the Democrats
– is even more influential in Kerry’s party.
This “special” relationship to
Israel is unlikely to remain stable, however, since the foundations on which it
stands are being rapidly eroded. To begin with, the majority of the American
people, as shown by every poll, have never been as pro-Zionist as their
government(s), and such positive feelings as do exist have been seriously
strained by Israel’s inhuman response to the intifada. If it was possible to
view Israel in its wars with the Arab world as a little David standing up to a
mighty Goliath, its army’s brutal repression of a virtually unarmed
Palestinian people has turned this analogy upside down, so that Israel now
looks like the bullying Goliath. With new killings, new “woundings”, new humiliations, more destruction of
homes, more thefts of land and water, and now the building of an apartheid wall
taking place every day (often on T.V.), Israel’s policies also call into
question the official story of Israel as victim of the same kind of terrorists
who bombed New York (hence, deserving our sympathy and help) rather than as a
major instigator of Moslem violence around the world. In addition, the growing
unpopularity of the Iraq war (an unending war that should never have begun),
for which Israel and its strongest supporters inside the U.S. government were
– at a minimum – among the loudest cheerleaders, is also spilling
over to American attitudes toward Israel. Finally, the increasing insecurity of
Middle East oil supplies with its effects on prices and profits throughout the
economy – due to the wars but also to Israel’s escalating barbarity
towards an Arab people (with which the U.S. is unavoidably identified) –
has begun to drive a wedge between Israel and American capitalist interests.
Before long – if it hasn’t happened already – an important
section of America’s capitalist ruling class will start demanding that
the U.S. government adopt a new approach toward Israel. And, when in the
context of these developments the mass of the American public finally wake up
to the enormous and still growing costs in blood and money of providing Israel
with whatever it wants, of serving as its “shabbes goy” - coming as it does at a time of steep budget cuts for
all kinds of popular government programs
- the surge of anti-Semitism could be such as to threaten the security
of Jews and all kinds of ex-Jews everywhere.
Anti-Semitism
is often understood as an irrational hatred of Jews not for anything they
believe or do, but just because of who they are. This is incorrect, because
there are reasons. They just happen to be bad ones, either because they are
false (like Jews using the blood of gentile children to make matzas for Passover), or exaggerated, or of ancient
vintage, or irrelevant, or – if they apply at all (like Jews being rich,
etc.) – they apply only to a few people. This is why hating all Jews is
not only irrational but unjust, and, as we know, the results have often been
murderous. With this history, every Jew but also every humane and fair-minded
non-Jew must oppose the rise of anti-Semitism with all their might. That this
history, as painful as it is, does not give Jews any right to commit their own
crimes should be evident, and it is monstrous whenever Jewish criminals respond
to their accusers with charges of “anti-Semitism”, even if - as in
the case of Zionists – they believe their crimes serve the interests of
the Jewish people, and even if they have managed – another miracle?
– to get the third edition of Webster’s International Dictionary
to define “anti-Zionism” as a form of “anti-Semitism”.5
In claiming an equation between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, of course,
Zionists run the danger of having people accept the logic of their position but
not the use to which they put it. According to this logic, one must be both
anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic, or neither. The assumption is that faced with
this choice, most of their honest critics will simply pack up their tents and
go home. But given Zionism’s worsening record in Palestine, the choice
could go the other way. That is, some opponents of Zionism, who are convinced
by the logic put forward here and nothing else, might now embrace anti-Semitism
as well. Rather than making fewer anti-Zionists, this approach is probably
making more anti-Semites. The conclusion can only be that as an insurance
policy against future pogroms Israel
is not only worthless but downright dangerous to the health of those who have
put their faith and money into it.
At this
point - if not earlier - many readers of this journal will fault me for appearing
to treat Zionists as if they are all alike. I am aware, of course, of the many
differences in the Zionist camp, and am full of admiration for the courageous
efforts by more progressive and humane Zionists in Meretz,
Peace Now and Tikkun, among other groups, to oppose
the Israeli establishment. They cannot be exempted from my analysis, however -
and it's not just because their reforms seemed doomed to failure – since
they share at least some of the basic assumptions on which Zionism (in both its
Likud and Labor Party versions) is based. Setting up
a state in which only Jews were to be full citizens, setting it up in a land
already inhabited by millions of non-Jews, seeking to respond to anti-Semitism
in the world by a display of Jewish might, seeking to make Jews everywhere feel
safer because they now had a country to run away to (should the need arise),
and seeking to rationalize all this through a combination of religious myth and
the experience of the Holocaust - all this lies at the heart of Zionism, but it
is also the logic inherent in these
views that have brought us to the present impasse. And I don't see how it could
have been otherwise. The occasions where it appears the history of Israel might
have taken another turn are but face saving chimeras. Further, it is only by
rejecting these views root and branch that we can see Zionism and the situation
it has brought about for what they really are, and begin to orient ourselves
ideologically and politically accordingly.
For
example, ideologically, there is no longer a need to accept that Israel
presents us with a clash of two rights, as some moderate and even
“socialist” Zionists have put it. There is one right, and the
Zionists, who are the invaders and the oppressors, are in the wrong. Only the
assumptions that underlie the Zionist project have kept some people from
recognizing this. It also means that we
cannot regard the violence perpetrated by the Zionist government against Arabs
and by Arabs against Jews in Israel today in the same manner. Certainly, I can
and do deeply regret all the killing and destruction that is taking place, and
I sympathize and suffer more than I can say with the victims and their loved
ones on both sides. Only Israel, however, its government and its supporters deserve
to be condemned, and not just because they've made use of planes and tanks and
have killed far more innocent people. Of greater relevance here is the fact
that it is the Israeli government that has the monopoly of power in the
country, and it is the government that has created the rules of this grisly
game along with the horrid conditions in which the Palestinians are forced to
participate in it. They, and only they, can change these rules and conditions
at any time, and therefore must be held responsible for keeping them as they
are. They are the real terrorists, and not the poor souls who have been driven
so crazy by their escalating oppression and accompanying humiliation that they
are willing to use their own bodies as weapons. State terror and not individual
terror is the main problem everyone who would like to bring an end to this
conflict must confront, and that needs
to be reflected in our tactics. Sharon
is right in at least one respect: Arafat is irrelevant. So too, perhaps
unfortunately, are the rest of the Palestinians when it comes to arriving at a
stable peace. Instead of charging the Palestinians with some responsibility for
the conflict and diffusing whatever effect we might have, all attention should
go to putting pressure, all forms of pressure, on Israel.
Politically,
this means avoiding any association with this "rogue state"
whatsoever (as we did with South Africa earlier), boycotting it economically
and otherwise (keeping it out of the Olympics, for example), bringing pressure
on our politicians to stop all U.S. aid (private as well as public) to Israel,
supporting various sanctions (including trade sanctions) against it, calling
for the strongest possible resolutions at the U.N. and in all other available
forums denouncing Zionist human rights abuses, and, of course, confronting head-on the Zionist lobby that
would oppose all this. Similar steps should be taken in Europe and elsewhere,
but, given America’s power in the world in general and in Israel in
particular, it is in our country that the fate of the Palestinian people
– and ultimately that of Judaism and what ‘s left of the Jewish
people - will be decided. While isolating Israel in the ways I have suggested
would undoubtedly hurt those inside its borders who are working to change their
government’s policies, it would also help them by raising the costs of
these policies to unacceptable levels. What is clear is that for Jews whose
conscience does not stop at their bloodline, silence, moderation, balance are
no longer options, if they ever were. Oppressive regimes, after all, have
seldom needed more than passive and qualified support to carry out their
“business”. Along with the growing number of Jews who openly defend
Israel’s inhuman behavior, these often well meaning Jews also feed the
anti-Semitic stereotype that all Jews are complicit in the crimes of Zionism,
and so deserve the hatred that these crimes evoke. Isn’t this what most
Jews thought about the passivity of the so-called “good” Germans
during the Nazi period? How much did their passivity – at a time when
taking any action was far more dangerous than it is for us now - contribute to
the hostility so many Jews felt toward all Germans? An all out struggle against
Zionism by Jews, therefore, is also the most effective way to fight against
real anti-Semitism.
Furthermore, if Zionism is
indeed a particularly virulent form of nationalism and, increasingly, of racism
and if Israel is acting toward its captive minority in ways that resemble more
and more how the Nazis treated their Jews, then we must also say so. For
obvious reasons, the Zionists are very sensitive about being compared to the
Nazis (not so sensitive that it has restrained them in their actions but enough
to bellow "unfair" and to charge "anti-Semitism" when it
happens). Yet, the facts on the ground, when not obscured by one or another
Zionist rationalization, show that the Zionists are the worst anti-Semites in
the world today, oppressing a Semitic people as no nation has done since the
Nazis. No, the Zionists are not yet quite as bad as the Nazis, not yet, but
isn't the world witnessing a creeping ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians
at this very moment? If Zionists (and
their supporters) find this comparison unduly insulting and unjust, they have
only to stop what they are doing (and supporting), but I fear that the logic of
their position will only drive them to committing (and supporting) even greater
atrocities in the future, including genocide - another Nazi specialty, than
they have up to now. What, if anything, has such Zionism got to do with
traditional Jewish values?
As far as I’m
concerned, the comedian, Lenny Bruce, provided the only good answer to this
question when he said, "Dig, I'm
Jewish. Count Bassie’s Jewish. Ray Charles is
Jewish. Eddie Cantor is goyish…
Marine Corps – heavy goyish… If you live in New York or any other big city,
you’re Jewish. If you live in Butte, Montana, you’re going to be goyish even if
you’re Jewish… Kool-Aid is goyish. Evaporated milk is goyish even if Jews invented
it… Pumpernickel is Jewish and, as you know, white bread is very goyish.…
Negroes are all Jews… Irishmen who have rejected their religion are
Jewish… Baton twirling is very goyish”.6
To this I would only add,
“Noam Chomsky, Mordechai
Vanunu and Edward Said are Jewish. Elie Wiesel is goyish. So, too,
all ‘Jewish’ neo-cons. Socialism and communism are Jewish. Sharon
and Zionism are very goyish”.
And, who knows, if this reading of Judaism were to take hold, I may one day
apply for readmission to the Jewish people.
www.dialecticalmarxism.com For other writings by Bertell
Ollman, Dept. of Politics, N.Y.U.
1 Rochelle
Furstenberg, “Reflections of a Zionist Don”, The
2 Albert Einstein, “Our Debt to Zionism”, Ideas and Opinions (Modern Library, N.Y., 1964), p.6. Ben Gurion’s view of the offer of the presidency of Israel to Einstein is worth noting. To an associate he commented, “Tell me what to do if he says ‘yes’. I’ve had to offer the post to him because it is impossible not to. But if he accepts, we are in for trouble”. Fred Jerome, The Einstein File (St. Martin’s Press, N.Y., 2002), p.111.
3 Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, p.212. How Einstein would have reacted to the current situation in Palestine is suggested by such comments as – “The most important aspect of our (Israel’s) policy must be our ever-present, manifest desire to institute complete equality for the Arab citizens in our midst… The attitude we adopt toward the Arab minority will provide the real test of our moral standards as a people”. (1952) Ibid., p.111; and, in a letter to Weisman (1923), he wrote, “If we do not succeed in finding a path of honest cooperation and coming to terms with the Arabs, we will not have learned anything from our over 2000 year-old ordeal and will deserve the fate which will beset us”. Ibid., p.110.
4 Donald Wagner, “Evangelicals and Israel: Theological Roots of a Political Alliance”, The Christian Century (Nov. 4, 1998), p.1023.
5 Quoted in Robert Fisk, “A Warning to Those Who Dare Criticize Israel in the Land of Free Speech”, The Independent (London: Ap. 24, 2004), p.39.
6 Lenny Bruce, “Jewish and Goyish”, Record Number 5 of Lenny Bruce: Let the Buyer Beware (Shout Factory, Sept. 14, 2004), number 6.