OCTOBER 2007
TIKKUN
AP PHOTO/GERALD HERBERT
1. A Zionist Boy Reads the Prophets—How I came to critique the Israel Lobby
I grew up in the heart of what would eventually become the Israel Lobby in the U.S.
My father and mother were national leaders of the Zionist movement in the U.S. My mother used to talk proudly of how, at five years old, I was standing outside the local bank on Bergen Street in the mostly-Jewish Weequahic section of Newark New Jersey, holding a Jewish National Fund (JNF) box, singing “Hatikvah,” and collecting money to plant trees in Israel. When my mother won election as local chair of Hadassah and my father as chair of the Zionist Council, the elation at home was even greater than when she was appointed the administrative assistant in charge of political affairs for the U.S. Senator she helped elect, or when my father became a judge. All the external political accomplishments, I was led to believe, were really not what counts in the world except to the extent that they allowed my parents to help Israel gain support in the U.S.
To me, this seemed a very noble enterprise, and I’m sure that I learned from my parents that activities for a social movement were really far more important than personal advancement. They were idealistic and motivated by a genuine concern for the Jewish people. Their Zionism emerged in the 1930s and 1940s when Jews were being attacked and discriminated against in the U.S. and eventually murdered in the millions in Europe. The staggering refusal of the U.S. government to allow refugees fleeing Nazism into this country unless, like the atomic scientists and some other well–known Jewish intellectuals, they had special skills that could be “useful” to the government, was only the tip of the iceberg. Country after country around the world shut their doors to the Jews. No wonder, then, that the Zionist movement, which had seemed far-fetched and unrealistic in its first decades, suddenly began to receive majority support from Jews after the Holocaust—Jews felt that the world had shown that the Jewish people could only be safe if we had our own country and our own army. I’m still proud of my parents for their commitment to an ideal outside of themselves. Their idealism and commitment to a larger movement made a big impact on me, even when I later chose different ideals and a different kind of movement with which to identify.
Nobody ever mentioned to me in the years that I was growing up that there had been a major expulsion of Arabs from their homes in 1947–49 and though I heard about it from the Left in the 1960s, I found it hard to take seriously until Benny Morris, an Israeli historian, published in Tikkun a summary of some of his findings gained from the opening of the historical archives in Israel in the late 1980s. But even as a child I knew that there were Palestinian Arabs who had stayed in their homes and who were in the 1950s living under martial law in Israel. And when I began to question this and the purity of the Zionist movement that my parents were leading, I was quickly led to believe that anyone raising questions of this sort would be dismissed as a “self-hating Jew” or a budding anti-Semite. Those terms are not specific to the last two decades—they have been thrown around quite loosely by the leaders of American Zionism for at least the past seventy years (I first heard these epithets being used to describe the American Council for Judaism, a Reform movement based group that dared question the assumption that a Jewish state in Palestine would be the best strategy for Jewish survival). It was taken for granted in my household that anyone who didn’t buy into Zionism was in fact a Jew-hater.
The repression of open discussion about Israel except to talk about how best to get people to support the new State was quite a departure from the norm of family discussions. Every evening my sister Pat (now Trish) and I would be invited to participate in lively discussions of politics, religion, school and television by parents who were liberal supporters of Adlai Stevenson, haters of McCarthy and the anti-communist crusade that dominated the 1950s, and early opponents of the war in Vietnam. While my sister honed her skills as an early stand up comedienne at these daily dinners, I tried to engage with the politics, and was encouraged to take any stance I wanted as long as it did not challenge whatever policies Israel happened to be following at the time. When my parents had Israeli Prime Minister Ben Gurion and, later, Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban visiting our dinner table, I was given a clear message to keep my mouth shut about anything other than how much I loved Israel. The same message was there at my Conservative synagogue where I was bar mitzvahed and even in the public Weequahic High School where we discussed world affairs from a liberal perspective, led by Jewish history teachers who were later identified as communists by the House Un-American Activities Committee, teachers who never allowed any discussion that might be critical of Israel.
There was only one place where I learned that Jewish nationalism was suspect and could be used in destructive ways: at Camp Ramah (a summer camp run by the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) and reflecting the more orthodox wing of Conservative Judaism). At Ramah we read the prophets and commemorated the Jewish Fast of Tisha B’Av, which seeks to explain the many calamities that befell the Jewish people as a product of our own faithlessness to God’s teaching that it was our responsibility as Jews to create a society of love, generosity, justice, and special caring for the most oppressed and for the Other (Heb: ger). When I studied with Abraham Joshua Heschel and Yochanan Muffs at JTS I learned that the prophetic teachings were at the heart of one way of understanding Judaism,but that way was under severe attack from those who sought to build a Judaism that was more compliant with the ethos of the American society into which Holocaust-traumatized Jews were desperately seeking to assimilate, a Judaism that celebrated itself as perfect and the Jewish people as the eternal victim.
The Prophets: “Do not oppress the stranger”
The Prophets were faced with a similarly self-congratulatory Judaism as pervaded the Jewish world in America; a Jewish community that had lost its moral foundations but were nevertheless sure that God would always be on its side. From Moses to Jeremiah and Isaiah, the Prophets taught a very different message: that the Jewish claim on the land of Israel was totally contingent on the moral and spiritual life of the Jews who lived there, and that the land would, as the Torah tells us, “vomit you out” if people did not live according to the highest moral vision of Torah. Over and over again, in one form or another, the Torah repeated its most frequently stated mitzvah (command): “When you enter your land, do not oppress the stranger,” (the Other, the one who is the outsider of your society, the powerless one) and then not only “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” but also (and almost never mentioned in the mainstream—and hence totally Zionist-oriented—synagogues of post-Holocaust America), “you shall love the Other,” the ger.
As I studied the Prophets more deeply at JTS, I began to realize that they were not only criticizing the values of ancient Israel and pointing to the ways that Judaism itself had become distorted by those who were its official spokesmen, but that they also provided a framework to criticize the dominant values of capitalist society.
Orthodoxies Take Over
After starting my study for a PhD in philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, and working for six months on a kibbutz in Israel, I became aware of the unfair treatment of Palestinians within Israeli society, something never discussed at JTS. As an American proud of all the good in this country, I had no choice but to speak out and become an active organizer against American racism and the war in Vietnam. Similarly, when I began to learn the shocking truth about racist treatment of Palestinians by the state that claimed to be the State of the Jewish people, I felt that my deep commitment to Judaism gave me no option but to speak out and critique Israeli policy as a violation of Jewish values and norms. But that wasn’t so easy. Almost all of my Jewish friends in the anti-war movement had had such bad experience in the Jewish communities and families of their childhood that they had totally rejected Judaism. The only time they even wanted to identify as Jewish was at moments of critiquing Israel. So for them, my critique of Israel (based on universalist principles, my love for Judaism, and my commitment to a prophetic movement in Judaism that strongly condemns the “realists”—those who believe that power, not ethics, will redeem us) was too pro-Israel for them. From my perspective, the Left’s critique is frequently articulated with so much one-sidedness and anger at Israel as to make it a distortion of the history and contemporary reality of Israel/Palestine (I tell a more balanced account in my book Healing Israel/Palestine [North Atlantic, 2003]).
My friend (and former leader of the Free Speech Movement) Mario Savio (not a Jew), shared that perception about the misguided harshness of Left critiques of Israel and joined with me in creating an organization that would be my first attempt at a “Middle Path” that was both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine and that would support a demilitarized Palestinian state, an international force to provide security for both Israel and Palestine, reparations for Palestinians, and a return of Israel to the pre-1967 borders with minor border changes so that Jews could continue to live in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem and worship at the Kotel (Western Wall)—it was called “The Committee for Peace in the Middle East.”
I was, at the time, chair of the Berkeley chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and had been part of the more confrontational “action faction” that picketed and held disruptive sit-ins to challenge the CIA and the ROTC when they sought to recruit on campus. I was also a spokesperson for a set of rather militant anti-Vietnam-War demonstrations (e.g. sitting on the train tracks to stop trains bringing new recruits to the war and closing the streets of downtown Oakland with thousands of demonstrators to prevent young people from getting to the Oakland army induction center where many of them were processed and sent to Vietnam). But the moment I extended my voice beyond Vietnam and racism toward Blacks, and got into this position of advocating a middle path on Israel/Palestine, I was dismissed by many of my SDS colleagues as a Zionist whose views (not only on Israel, but on everything including strategies for the anti-war movement) need no longer be taken seriously.
Shortly thereafter the other shoe fell. An article I had written which described the vision of the Committee for Peace in the Middle East was published in the American Jewish Congress-sponsored journal Judaism. The A. J. Congress had been a major Jewish voice for liberalism and free speech, integration, and civil liberties but when I discussed the issue of Israel in a somewhat critical way, the leadership stepped in and fired Stephen Schwarzschild, the magazine’s editor, for publishing this article (an act so outrageous that it generated a news article in The New York Times). So much for civil liberties and free speech if it questioned Israel or the values of the American Jewish community.
I learned this lesson and hoped when I formed Tikkun magazine in 1986 that our call for peace and reconciliation between Israel and Palestine would not undermine our ability to be the voice for Jewish liberalism, challenging the conservative values that had come to the fore in most Jewish institution and national organizations in the Reagan years of the 1980s. Things went well at first. But two years after we began, the Palestinian Intifada made it impossible for us to quiet our voices in critique of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and its response to Palestinian demonstrations (the words of then-Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces Yitzhak Rabin: “Break their bones” was meant quite literally as an order to Israeli troops). But the moment we published an editorial critical of Is-rael’s response to the Intifada, I was suddenly labeled a “self-hating Jew,” my invitations to speak at synagogues quickly disappeared, and the many Jewish institutions and donors who had shown interest in Tikkun as a voice of Jewish liberalism lost interest in our enterprise.
Over and over again, authors would tell me that they had been similarly attacked for publishing their articles in Tikkun. Some reported feelings of strong disapproval coming from senior Jewish faculty at the colleges or universities at which they taught, and worried about their own careers. Others told me that the other places that they had previously published were now communicating to them their lack of interest in publishing anyone who had written for that “anti-Israel” publication Tikkun. Our literary editor told me that he had received strong negative messages about his involvement with Tikkun from the outspoken right-wing Zionist Cynthia Ozick. Some of the most famous younger Jewish authors who today represent the mainstream of American Jewish fiction or literary writing admitted to me off the record that they felt reluctant to write for Tikkun because of the vulnerability they felt being associated with a magazine that was willing to publicly voice criticisms of Israel. The small but powerful group of neo-con Jews for whom support of Israel’s expansionist policies was the fulcrum of their worldview on almost all other domestic and international issues had powerful ties that shaped the consciousness of The New York Times op-ed page, culture sections, book review, and magazine and through that managed to intimidate many publishers into a narrow view of “what would sell” which dictated what books they’d publish (though their power now in 2007 only shapes the cultural coverage, the book review, and The New York Times Magazine, but not the editorial pages).