“Wrestling With Zionism” —— A Chronology Of
Jewish Critics From Zionism’s Birth Until Today
Allan C. Brownfeld, Editor
Issues
Fall 2020
Wrestling With Zionism: Jewish Voices of Dissent
By Daphna Levit,
Interlink Publishing,
288 Pages, $20.00
By Allan C. Brownfeld
Zionism, many now forget, was always a minority view among Jews. When
Theodor Herzl organized the Zionist movement in the 19th century, he met
bitter opposition from Jewish leaders around the world. The chief rabbi of
Vienna, Moritz Gudemann, denounced the mirage of Jewish nationalism. “Belief
in one God is the unifying factor for Jews,” he declared, and Zionism was
“incompatible with Judaism’s teachings.” In 1885, American Reform rabbis
meeting in Pittsburgh rejected nationalism of any kind and declared, “We
consider ourselves no longer a nation but a religious community, and
therefore expect neither a return to Palestine ...nor the restoration of any
of the laws concerning the Jewish state.” It was only the advent of Hitler
and the Holocaust which convinced many Jews that a Jewish state was
necessary. Many are now coming to the realization that this was indeed a
mistake, and a violation of Jewish moral and ethical values.
In this important book, Daphna Levit amplifies the voices of 21 Jewish and
Israeli thinkers—-scholars, theologians, journalists and activists who
challenge Zionism on religious, cultural, ethical and philosophical grounds,
beginning in the late 19th century, long before the founding of the State of
Israel. She brings together a range of viewpoints into a single historical
conversation. Among those discussed are Albert Einstein, Martin Buber,
Hannah Arendt, Noam Chomsky, and such dissenting Israelis as Yeshayahu
Leibovitz, Zeev Sternhell, Shlomo Sand and
Ilan Pappe.
Levit is an Israeli who now lives and works in Canada. She served in the
Israeli army and slowly came to understand that the Israeli narrative of
events was contrary to history. She saw with her own eyes the daily
mistreatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories. She writes: “My
own lengthy process of disillusionment with the Zionist narrative and search
for other dissenting voices began soon after the Six Day War of 1967, when I
served as press liaison officer at the Allenby Bridge and watched
Palestinian refugees attempting to flee across the border. The separation
from my country was gradual and took several decades. In 2002, I left Israel
for Canada, at a point when the Zionist agenda was becoming increasingly
militant and intolerant
of opposition.”
“A light to the nations”
A Jewish state, Levit believed, was meant to be a “light to the nations.”
Instead, she points out, it became something far different: “Instead, we
became a military power, armed to the teeth and blind to the victims of our
own cruelty. I found other, perhaps more enlightened, kindred spirits in my
quest for absolution from the guilt of my complicity in the actions of
my country.”
The voices she has gathered together are indeed eloquent as they try to
maintain the Jewish moral and ethical tradition in the face of the excesses
to which nationalism leads. From the very beginning, Zionism’s slogan of “A
land without a people for a people without a land” was refuted by the
earliest Zionist settlers in Palestine, who discovered that the land was
populated by people who had been there for many generations. Asher Ginsberg,
a Russian-born cultural Zionist, objected to Herzl’s lack of Jewish “Nefesh”
or spirit. He wrote under the pen name Ahad Ha’am, which literally meant.
“One of the people.” In 1891, after his first visit to Palestine, he wrote
that, “The land was not empty, its people are not savages, and Jewish moral
superiority was unwarranted. Jews in Palestine were behaving in hostile and
cruel ways to the native population.”
In September 1922, he wrote a letter to the Haaretz newspaper after a
revenge killing of an Arab boy by Jews: “Is this the dream of the return to
Zion which our people dreamt for thousands of years, that we should come to
Zion and pollute its soil with the spilling of innocent blood?” He was
adamant about the rights of people in their own lands and the abuse of those
rights by a
colonization project.
Defender of human rights
Levit writes that, “Although Ahad Ha’am may have been the odd combination of
a secular Zionist promoting Jewish values, he was a staunch defender of
human rights. The native inhabitants had been there for millennia and had
every right to pursue their own national identity with no Jewish
overlord.... He warned Jewish settlers in Palestine to treat Arabs fairly,
cautioning that brutality and cruelty would lead to resentment and put the
Zionist project in great danger. He was the first Zionist to seriously deal
with the now ubiquitous question of Judaism as a nation-state or religion.
He stressed that the only legitimate claim Jews could make for a sovereign
nation was if it reflected Jewish tradition of morality and universal
conscience. He implicitly endorsed a two-state solution to the problem of
sharing the land with its existing population. Despite the relevance of his
thinking to contemporary Israel, Ahad Ha’am has been relegated to a
secondary status, after Theodor Herzl. His ideas so often contradict the
dominant narrative of contemporary Israel that he is not yet appreciated as
the visionary that he was. Except, of course, by those who actually read
his essays.”
Levit reviews the thinking of a wide variety of Jewish and Israeli critics
of Zionism. In 1938, alluding to Nazism, Albert Einstein warned an audience
of Zionist activists against the temptation. To create a state “imbued with
a narrow nationalism in our own ranks against which we have already had to
fight strongly even without a Jewish state.” Einstein initially endorsed the
idea of a homeland in Palestine for the Jewish people, but he opposed the
idea of a state with borders, with an army and with temporal power. Peaceful
coexistence in that homeland was more important than any national objective.
He considered himself a cultural rather than a political Zionist. and
supported the idea of a binational State, in which Jewish-Arab cooperation
was a prerequisite.
In a speech given to the National Labor Committee for Palestine in 1938,
Einstein declared, “I should much rather see reasonable agreement with the
Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish
state. 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 ...”
“Blasphemes the name of Zion”
The respected philosopher Martin Buber spoke out in 1942 against the aim of
the minority to conquer territory by means of international maneuvers. From
Jerusalem, in the midst of the hostilities that broke out after Israel
unilaterally declared independence in May 1948, Buber cried out in despair,
“This sort of Zionism blasphemes the name of Zion, it is nothing more than
one of the crude forms of nationalism.”
In 1901, Buber agreed to be editor of Herzl’s Zionist journal. Der. Welt.
But he left after one year, disillusioned with the material goals of
political Zionism. “Instead,” writes Levit, “he launched his own publishing
company and in 1916. Launched the journal Der Jude to provide a platform for
Zionist literature and for debates about the direction of Zionism. He
opposed the idea of Jewish nationalism that had become an end in itself.
‘The moment national ideology makes the nation an end in itself, it annuls
its own right to live, it grows sterile.’ The land of Israel alone was an
insufficient condition for the creation of a viable and long-lasting Jewish
nation. The nation created had to be an exemplary ethical community seeking
spiritual purpose.”
Buber scolded the nationalists whose only goal was living in the land they
described as “promised”. To them, without having any sense of their
spiritual purpose which he described as “the great up building of peace.” He
noted that, “Their only wish is to join the wolf pack. If we are not
acceptable in the pack, it is enough to live on its fringes, in its
neighborhood...of all the many kinds of assimilation, in the course of our
history, this is the most terrifying, the most dangerous, this nationalist
assimilation. That which we lose on account of it, we shall perhaps never
acquire again.”
A binational Jewish-Arab state
Martin Buber began advocating for a binational Jewish-Arab State in the
early 1920s, arguing that it was necessary for the Zionists to live in peace
with the Arabs, even at the cost of the Jews remaining a minority in the
country. In 1925, he was involved with other Jewish Intellectuals, including
Albert Einstein, in the creation of the organization Brit Shalom (Covenant.
Of Peace). which called for a binational state with equal rights for Jews
and Arabs. In 1938, Buber settled in Palestine to teach at the Hebrew
University in Jerusalem, where he continued to argue for a binational,
rather than an exclusively Jewish state.
One chapter is devoted to Yeshayahu Leibovitz, an Orthodox Jew and. Longtime
professor at the Hebrew University. He says that no nation or state should
ever be worshiped as holy and advocated the separation of religion and
state. He saw the occupation of Palestinian land as an abomination that was
corrupting the soul of Israel. He did not want Judaism to serve “as a cover
for the nakedness of nationalism.” Nor did he want it to be used “to endow
nationalism with the aura of sanctity attributed to the service of God.”
Reverence for the State of Israel as a Holy land was unacceptable, a form of
idolatry. In Leibovitz’s understanding. of Judaism, no piece of land could
be holy, nor could any nation or state. Only God is holy, and only His
imperative is absolute.
In 1977, in his essay “The Religious and Moral Significance of the
Redemption of Israel,” Leibovitz relates part of a conversation he had some
twenty years earlier with David Ben-Gurion, a man he considered to be
hostile to religion. Knowing that the separation of religion and state would
keep religion independent “so the political authority will be compelled to
deal with it,” Ben-Gurion had said, “I will never agree to the separation of
religion and state. I want the state to hold religion in the palm of its
hand.” This, says Leibovitz, “...reflects the cast of minds of a man who
entertained a bitter hatred of Judaism....The status of Jewish religion in
the State of Israel is that of a kept mistress of the secular government—-
therefore it is contemptible. The State of Israel does not radiate the light
of Judaism to the nations, not even to the Jews.”
Occupation of Palestinian Territories.
Leibovitz’s assessment of the occupation of Palestinian Territories is
summed by Levit: “An Israel seeking conquest and control over the Occupied
Territories would ultimately face self-destruction as a Jewish state and
find itself entrapped in perpetual war with its Arab neighbors. The
occupation of Arab lands was an abomination. He predicted that isolationism,
self-perceived victimization, and nationalism would destroy any Jewish
values, and if Israel did not withdraw immediately from the Occupied
Territories, all of its energy would be tied up in ruling another people
against its will. If Israel’s soul were not destroyed, the occupation would
corrupt it.”
Another chapter is devoted to Zeev Sternhell, who served as head of the
department of political science at the Hebrew University and is a widely
recognized expert on fascism. He wrote an article in 2018 entitled “In
Israel, Growing Fascism and a Racism Akin to Early Nazism.” Sternhell asks,
“How would a historian, in 150 or 100 years, interpret our period? When did
the state devolve into a true monstrosity for its non-Jewish inhabitants?
When did some Israelis understand that their cruelty and ability to bully
others, Palestinians or Africans, begin eroding the moral legitimacy of
their existence as
a sovereignty?”
In a 2017 article entitled. “Apartheid Under the. law,”. Sternhell decries
the policies advanced by minister of justice Ayelet Shaked. Sternhell
charged that she promoted laws that legalize the threat to Palestinian land
for the benefit of the settlers. These lands are confiscated to build roads
that could only be used by Jews. Sternhell notes that since most of the
lawmakers in Israel accept or actively endorse what he calls “the apartheid
system of Israel,” this policy of dispossession could not successfully be
opposed. He laments that, “This is what the rule of law has come to
in Israel.”
Intolerably ethnocentric
In the case of Shlomo Sand, Professor Emeritus of History at Tel Aviv
University, he believes that the Jewish society in Israel has become
intolerably ethnocentric and racist and that it has evolved a closed and
exclusive cast, which Sand abhors. Jews in Israel today have greater
privileges than others living in the same country. Even Jews living outside
of Israel, who have never set foot in Israel, have more rights and
privileges than Palestinians, whose families have lived there for many
generations. “Ironically,” writes Levit, “until he became an academic
historian, Sand had never doubted the axiom that the Jewish nation existed
for four thousand years. Through his research, he found the legitimacy of
this and other aspects of the Zionist narrative problematic, and he felt
compelled to probe more deeply.”
In his book. “the Invention of the Land of Israel,” Sand attempts to analyze
what he believes is the “overwhelming myth” of the longing for a Jewish
homeland over thousands of years. “Although a valuable propaganda tool for
Zionists,” writes Levit, “the narrative was a myth. Throughout their
history, the Jews have shared nothing other than religion, with diverse
linguistic and cultural traditions developed in a variety of host countries.
The longing for the Promised Land was part of that shared Jewish religion,
and through literature, prayer and ritual, it became a part of Jewish
collective memory, but nowhere in the holy literature was there any
aspiration for collective ownership of a territorial national homeland. In
religious terms, the Holy Land was tangible and exalted, attainable only
after the arrival of the Messiah. Only then would the living and the dead
gather together in eternal Jerusalem. Any attempt to turn it into a physical
site was considered a
grave transgression.”
In the 1980s, three decades after the State of Israel was founded, a number
of historical documents were declassified. A group of scholars emerged—-
social and political scientists, historians, anthropologists and economists
—-who studied these documents, using research methods in their various
disciplines to re-examine Israel’s narrative of the Atab-Israeli conflict.
The term “New Historians” was coined in 1988 by Benny Morris to describe the
work of these scholars——who included Morris himself and, among others, Sinha
Flapan, Baruch Kimmerling, and Avi Shlaim.
Israel’s “New Historians”
Perhaps the most controversial of these has been Benny Morris, a long-time
professor of history at Ben-Gurion University. His investigation into the
origins of the Palestinian refugee problem began in the 1980s when he had
access to Israeli government archives. He found evidence of undisclosed
expulsions of Palestinians and atrocities that had been committed by Israeli
soldiers before, during and after the 1948 war, and revealed his findings in
“The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949” published in 1987.
“The book was a cornerstone work of the New Historians, notes. Levit, “and
definitively contradicted the official Zionist narrative.”
Morris claimed that 600,000-700,000. 60 per cent of the population, fled
their homes to escape Israeli military assaults or out of fear of impending
attacks or expulsions. The book provides detailed chronological accounts of
the Arab exodus from Jewish-held parts of Palestine during the nineteen-
month period from December 1947 to July 1949. Shattering the myth of the
most moral military force in the world, the book meticulously described
brutalities such as documented rapes by Israelis and about two dozen
massacres and executions committed by Israeli forces during this period.
Another of the “New Historians” was Simha Flapan, who served as editor of
“New Outlook” magazine, which promoted rapprochement between Israelis and
Palestinians. He is best known for his book. “The Birth of Israel: Myths and
Realities,” published in 1987, the year of his death. He shows, Levit points
out, that, “Ben-Gurion was explicitly complicit ...in historical revision
and is exposed by the documents to have consistently preferred territorial
expansion to any compromise with the Palestinians. Very early in the history
of Israel the predominant socialist Zionist aspiration was for a
demographically homogeneous Jewish State, with borders extended as far as
the nationalist affiliation of the leaders could dictate. The more right-
wing the leader, the greater the territory required. Regardless of the
ultimate size of the state, the demographic concern necessitated. The
expulsion of Palestinian Arabs.”
Massive flight of Palestinians.
The 1948 war resulted in the massive flight of 85 percent of the
Palestinians, an estimated 700,000 people, from there lands in what would
become Israeli territory. “The myth,” Levit notes, “was that all these
people left their homes voluntarily, obeying the commands of the Arab
leadership who were about to send in the imminently. victorious Arab armies.
Flapan contradicts this myth. He blames the Israeli leaders for encouraging
the Palestinian exodus with ‘aggressive defense measures’ ‘psychological
warfare and intimidation.”
Another Israeli historian whose work is discussed by Levit is Ilan Pappe,
now a professor at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom and
previously at the university of Haifa. Pappe came to the conclusion that it
was not possible for two independent states to exist in Palestine and that
the only solution was the creation of a single state to be shared equally by
all who live there, a binational state for Palestinians and Israelis. But
with an increasingly oppressive Israeli government, such a solution was far
from imminent.
“Long before Pappe,” writes Levit, “Zionists and non-Zionist Jews were
searching for a solution that would have, in effect, created a single state.
Ahad H’am, Martin Buber, Albert Einstein, and even Hannah Arendt.” Ilan
Pappe elaborated on his contemporary, but similar, response to this
persistent problem in an interview conducted in 2015 by Khalil Bendid on
Status hour.
Settler-Nationalist Movement.
Pappe declared that, “This is a struggle between a settler-colonialist
movement, which arrived in the late nineteenth century in Palestine and
still tries today to colonize Palestine by having most of the land with as
few of the native people as possible. And the struggle of the native people
is an anti-colonial struggle...If you would suggest today as a progressive
person that you should divide South Africa between the white population and
the African population, you would be regarded as best as insane , and at
worst as someone who is insincere and a fascist. I think the fact that this
logic —-which is so clear to many people in any other place in the world—-
somehow fails to work in the case
of Palestine.”
Levit provides this assessment: “The policies Israel decided to impose on
the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967 have remained the same to this day
and resulted in the expulsion of half of the native population, the
destruction of villages and towns, and the appropriation of 80 per cent of
Mandatory Palestine by the Jewish state. These were considered survival
policies for the State of Israel and based on two principles: (1) the Jewish
state must control as much land of historic Palestine as possible, and (2).
Israel must reduce the number of Palestinian Arabs residing in it. In ‘The
Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,’ Pappe writes that the population problem had
already been recognized as a major issue for the early Zionists in the late
nineteenth century. As early as 1895, Herzl had proposed a solution: ‘We
shall endeavor to expel the poor population across the border unnoticed.’
And in 1947, Ben-Gurion reaffirmed the underlying principle: ‘There can be
no stable and strong Jewish state so long as it has a Jewish majority of
only sixty per cent.’ In 2003, Netanyahu reaffirmed: ‘If the Arabs in Israel
form 40 percent of the population, this is the end of the Jewish state...But
twenty percent is also a problem...The State is entitled to employ extreme
measures.’”
Pappe argues that the expulsions of Palestinians since 1948 constituted the
ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Contrary to the Zionist narrative, this
strategy was not decided an ad hoc basis, when security considerations
required strong measures, but in accordance with a plan explicitly drawn up
in 1947 by Israel’s future leaders. Plan Dalet. provided directions for the
systematic expulsion of the Palestinians from the areas the Zionists wanted
for the Jewish state. The inability to achieve peace in the Middle East is
attributable to policies that violate international law that were conceived
by the leaders of Israel, commencing, Pappe points out, with “the heroes of
the Jewish War of Independence...with the indisputable leader of the Zionist
movement, David Ben-Gurion. “
State-sanctioned Holocaust narrative
Israel’s State-sanctioned narrative of the Holocaust, Levit shows, has come
under widespread criticism: “.... Pappe tackles it boldly. In ‘The Idea of
Israel.’ An entire chapter, ‘Touching the Raw Nerves of Society: Holocaust
Memory in Israel’ Is dedicated to analysis of this inviolable topic...Pappe
discusses several prominent Zionists who have questioned the cynical
exploitation of the Holocaust by Israel for domestic and international
purposes. Among them is Nahum Goldman, founder and president of the World
Jewish Congress, in the 1970s, and Avraham Burg, a religious former Speaker
of the Knesset (1999-2003) who unambiguously expressed his concern in the
title of his 2008 book. ‘The Holocaust Is Over: We Must Rise from The
Ashes.’”
Many Jews in Israel, the United States and elsewhere have discussed the
incongruity of using the Holocaust as justification for injustice. One
important voice cited by Levit. Is Norman Finkelstein, who studies the
deliberate use of the Holocaust by Israel.
Born in New York to parents who were Holocaust survivors, he wrote “The
Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering.” He
argues that the representation of the Holocaust was “fraudulently devised
and marketed to the American public ...to justify criminal policies of the
Israeli state and U.S. support for these policies.” In Finkelstein’s view,
it is objectionable that, despite being a formidable military power, Israel
“casts itself as a victim state and thus garners immunity to criticism.”
Among the scholars who have attempted to expose the use of the tragedies of
the Second World War is Israeli historian Tom Segev. In his book “The
seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust,” Segev presented the early
Zionist leadership as interested exclusively in those Jews from Europe who
were willing and able to move to Palestine. In the 1930s leaders of the
Jewish community in Palestine were either naively blind to the perils of
Hitler’s rise or consumed entirely by their enthusiasm for Zionism. Ben-
Gurion said: “Zionism bears the obligation of a state, it therefore cannot
initiate an irresponsible battle against Hitler.” The Jewish community in
Palestine struck an agreement with the Gestapo not to support a worldwide
boycott of German goods so that German Jews could bring their possessions
into Palestine.
“Historical reckoning of the Jewish people”
Ben-Gurion is quoted as explaining: “if I knew that it was possible to save
all the children in Germany by transporting them to England, but only half
by transporting them to Palestine, I would choose the second—-because we
face not only the reckoning of those children, but the historical reckoning
of the Jewish people.”
Levit also discusses the work of one of Israel’s leading journalists, Gideon
Levy of Haaretz. In one of many televised interviews, Levy said that when he
started covering the West Bank, he was a young and brainwashed Zionist. In
those days, when he saw settlers cutting down olive trees or settlers
mistreating Palestinian women at the checkpoints, he considered these
incidents as exceptions, rather than official government policy. Eventually
he had to accept that he was witnessing a punishing persistent reality.
Although he has received multiple death threats, Levy defines himself as a
“patriotic Israeli” who is ashamed of Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians.
As Levy sees it, Israel has lost its moral compass. He describes Israel as
as an unrestrained country that blatantly ignores international law and
repeatedly defies U.N. security Council resolutions. He has called Israel’s
more than fifty-year occupation of Palestinian land “criminal,” “brutal” and
“rotten.” In an article entitled. “AIPAC Is Destroying Israel,” he
criticizes the so-called “lovers of Israel” for the damage they have
inflicted on the country: “The American Israel Public Affairs Committee may
be the organization that has caused the greatest damage to Israel. It has
corrupted Israel, taught it that everything is permissible to it. It made
sure America would cover up and restrain itself over everything. That it
would never demand anything in exchange. That Uncle Sam would pay—-and keep
mum. That the supply of intoxicating drugs would continue. America is the
dealer, and AIPAC is the pusher.”
Give U.S. politicians a tour of occupied territories
One recommendation made by Levy, writes Levit, “...was giving U.S.
politicians a tour of the Palestinian Occupied Territories, especially
Hebron. He proposes that anyone who doubts that Israel oppresses the
indigenous Arab population should spend just a few hours in Hebron, an
occupied city in the West Bank. No honest human being could visit Hebron
without being shocked...Armed Israeli settlers live in the center of the
city and Palestinians must travel on separate roads, which are patrolled by
Israeli soldiers. Many of these roads are covered by large nets, above which
the settlers and their families live. The gratuitous humiliation includes
settlers dropping objects such as dirty diapers—even urinating—from their
windows above.”
Another important journalist whose work is discussed by Levit is Amira Hass.
She began reporting from the Occupied Territories for Haaretz in 1991 and is
the only Israeli Jewish journalist who has actually lived full-time among
Palestinians. In her introduction to “Drinking the Sea of Gaza,” Hess
explains her work as, in part, the result of her experience as the daughter
of two Holocaust survivors. One day in 1944 at Bergen-Belsen, her mother was
being herded from a cattle car along with the rest of the human cargo: “She
saw a group of German women ...watch with indifferent curiosity...For me
these women became a loathsome symbol of watching from the sidelines...my
desire to live in Gaza stemmed neither from adventurism nor from insanity
but from that dread of being a bystander , from my need to understand ...a
world that is ...a profoundly Israeli creation. To me Gaza embodies the
entire saga of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It represents the central
contradiction of the State of Israel...democracy for some, dispossession for
others.”
Hess warns Jews living outside of Israel not to become accomplices and she
reminds Israelis that apartheid is considered a crime. It is the moral duty
of Israelis, she says, “to use our privileges to fight the regime of
privileges and as much as possible reduce the level of our collaboration
with the dispossession.” The Gaza Strip is roughly 362 square kilometers,
with over 1.8 million people. It is ranked as the third most densely
populated area in the world. And, according to Hass, it is one huge prison:
“It is an Israel-mediated, pre-meditated, pre-planned and planned project to
separate Gaza from the West Bank. Gazans. Have no freedom of movement, no
control over their own lives and no power to shape their own future.”
An end to water service
In a 2019 article, Hass writes about the supply of water to twelve
Palestinian villages in the West Bank. After six months of clean running
water, representatives of the Israeli Civil Administration, soldiers, border
police, and bulldozers arrived to put an end to this basic service. She
reported that, “The troops dug up the pipes, cut and sawed them apart and
watched the jets of water that poured out. About 350 cubic meters of water
were wasted. This was done despite the critical scarcity of water in the
region. As the Civil Administration diligently destroys water lines for many
Palestinian villages, it immediately connects illegal Jewish settlements and
outposts to water and electricity and even paves the roads leading to them.
Although these villagers had managed to construct a water line and widen the
roads to facilitate the delivery of water, a right-wing Israeli group
pressured the Civil Administration to destroy the infrastructure under an
inhumane law that prohibits Palestinians from hooking up to existing water
systems. The chairman of the council of villages, Nidal Younes, asked why
they demolished the water lines and one of the border police officers
answered him, in English, telling him it was done to ‘replace Arabs
with Jews.’”
Levit cites lawyer Michael Sfard, who practices international human rights
law, representing people who have been deprived of basic rights for over
fifty years. In a 2019 interview with David B. Green in Haaretz, he wrestled
with the definition of Zionism: “if Zionism is the belief or the desire that
the Jewish people will have a place where they can exercise their right of
self-determination as a nation, and that place is here, then I’m a Zionist.
If being a Zionist means thinking that this should come at the expense of
other people who live here, and they should become second-class citizens,
then I am not a Zionist.”
Levit provides this assessment: “As a result of persistent distortions by
interlocutors, who were presented as ‘reliable,’. Israel’s image as a
benevolent occupier of a land full of untrustworthy Palestinian terrorists-
in-waiting has been perpetuated among its supporters. In the evolving
Israeli historical narrative, the perception promoted was that Palestinians
sometimes felt no particular attachment to their homes or to the land on
which they had lived and worked for generations. Prime Minister Golda Meir,
admired by many as a grandmotherly humanitarian, clearly held and advocated
this view. ‘it is not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine,
considering itself a Palestinian people, and we came and threw them out and
took their country away from them. They did not exist.’”
Israel’s rationalization
The continuous repetition “of this misinterpretation,”. declares Levit,
“abetted Israel’s rationalization and justification of its right to exist on
Palestinian land. David Ben-Gurion offered his own variation on this theme.
‘The Palestinian Arab,’ judged Ben-Gurion, demonstrated no ‘emotional
attachment’. in the country. ‘He is equally at ease, whether in Jordan,
Lebanon, or a variety of places. They are as much his country as this is.
And as little.’ Since, presumably, the Jews had stronger emotional ties to
the land of their ancestors, it must be concluded that Palestinians should
just cooperatively move along to another location.”
This book, Levit points out, “...was not intended to be a comprehensive
history of opposition to the moral bankruptcy of militant nationalism, for
that would require a much longer work. Instead it presents the evolution of
dissent since the time that the quest for National Jewish identity and
independence in nineteenth century Europe grew into the Zionist movement. In
doing so, it uncovers a legacy not only of perspectives and ideas, but of
moral courage, commitment and imagination.”
Sharpest critics of Jewish nationalism have been Jews
This book shows us how using the term “anti-Semitism” to characterize
criticism of Israel and Zionism is completely ahistorical. The sharpest
critics of Jewish nationalism, as this book shows us, have been Jews,
seeking to maintain Judaism’s highest moral and ethical standards. And to
apply them equally to men and women of every race and nation. This history
is largely unknown to many Jews, and to many others, and Daphna Levit has
performed a notable service in telling this important—-and uplifting story.*
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