Lamenting the Decline of “Liberal Zionism” Is a
Futile Enterprise Because It Never Really
Existed
Allan C. Brownfeld
Issues
Winter 2015
In Israel at the present time, almost no one any longer speaks of a “two-
state” solution. Land that would constitute a Palestinian state is being
settled by Israel. Palestinian officials say that Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu has refused to outline the borders of a Palestinian state or the
size of areas Israel intends to keep or to commit publicly to land swaps to
compensate the Palestinians for any adjustment to the 1967 boundary.
Israel seems to feel that it has been given a blank check by the U.S. to
continue its occupation policies and to abandon any need to pretend to
support a two-state solution. Gadi Wolfsfeld, a professor of political
communication at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzlya, Israel said of Mr.
Netanyahu: “The truth is that he is not really nervous about America or the
world anymore because until now, nobody has done anything.”
At the same time, racism and religious extremism are growing in Israel. A
best-selling book, “The King’s Torah,” by Rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef
Elitzur states that, “The prohibition ‘Thou shalt not murder’ applies only
to a Jew who kills a Jew.” They write that non-Jews are “uncompassionate by
nature” and that attacks on them “curb their evil inclinations,” while
babies and children of Israel’s enemies may be killed since “it is clear
that they will grow up to harm us.”
Less Tolerant Than in the Past
Professor Emanuel Gutmann of Hebrew University says that, “Overall, Israeli
society has turned to the right. Israeli society in general is less
tolerant, less interested in compromise, and more accepting of force than it
was in the past.”
David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker (Nov. 17, 2014) writes that,
“Israeli politicians often speak of the country’s singularity as ‘the sole
democracy in the Middle East,’ ‘the villa in the jungle.’ They engage far
less often with the challenges to democratic practice in Israel: the
resurgence of hate speech; attacks by settlers on Palestinians and their
property in the West Bank; the Knesset’s attempt to rein in left-wing human
rights organizations; and, most of all, the unequal status of Israeli
Palestinians and the utter lack of civil rights for the Palestinians in the
West Bank. A recent poll revealed that a third of Israelis think that Arab
citizens of Israel — the nearly two million Arabs living in Israel proper,
not the West Bank — should not have the right to vote — More explicitly
jingoistic and racist elements now operate closer to the center of Israeli
political life. Some well-known figures in the religious world speak openly
in an anti-democratic rhetoric of Jewish supremacy.”
These trends have caused many to lament what Antony Lerman, a former
director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research in London and author of
“The Making and Unmaking of a Zionist,” called “The End of Liberal Zionism,”
in an article in The New York Times (Aug. 24, 2014). He states that,
“Liberal Zionists are at a crossroads. The original tradition of combining
Zionism and liberalism — which meant ending the occupation of the West Bank
and Gaza, supporting a Palestinian state as well as a Jewish state with a
permanent Jewish majority, and standing behind Israel when it was threatened
— was well intentioned. But everything liberal Zionism stands for is now in
doubt.”
Romantic Ideal Is Tarnished
Lerman laments that, “The romantic Zionist ideal, to which Jewish liberals —
and I was one, once — subscribed for so many decades has been tarnished by
the reality of modern Israel. The attacks on freedom of speech and human
rights organizations in Israel, the land-grabbing settler movement, a
growing strain of anti-Arab and anti-immigrant racism, extremist politics,
and a powerful, intolerant religious right — this mixture has pushed liberal
Zionism to the brink.”
Author Peter Beinart, in his book The Crisis of Zionism, refers to himself
as a “liberal Zionist,” and expresses concern about what he sees as Israel’s
retreat from its traditional “liberal” values. According to Beinart, “When
Israel’s founders wrote the country’s Declaration of Independence, which
calls for a Jewish state that ‘ensures complete equality of social and
political rights to all its inhabitants, irrespective of religion, race or
sex,’ they understood that Zionism and democracy was not only compatible,
the two were inseparable.”
Those who believe that Israel is now in the process of abandoning its
founding philosophy of “liberal Zionism” are engaged in a futile enterprise,
for that “liberal” Zionism never really existed — it is a convenient myth.
They have not confronted a contrary thesis, which is supported by history,
that Zionism was flawed from the beginning, not only by ignoring the
indigenous Palestinian population, but rejecting the dominant spiritual
history and essence of Judaism.
Injustice to Palestinians
To understand the injustice which history has inflicted upon the
Palestinians, it is essential to consider the indifference on the part of
the early Zionists as well as the British government which issued the
Balfour Declaration, to transfer ownership of a piece of land it had gained
through war.
In his book Israel: A Colonial-Settler State, the French Jewish historian
Maxime Rodinson notes that, “Wanting to create a purely Jewish or
predominantly Jewish state in Arab Palestine in the 20th century could not
help but lead to a colonial-type situation and the development of a racist
state of mind, and in the final analysis, to a military confrontation.”
Rodinson writes that the colonization by the Zionists seemed “perfectly
natural” given the atmosphere of the time: “Herzl’s plan unquestionably fit
into the great movement of utopian expansion of the 19th and 20th centuries,
the great European imperialist groundswell.”
The immediate issue for the Zionists in the late 19th century was what they
called “the Arab problem” in Palestine, an indigenous population 92 per cent
Arab. The early Zionists, declares Israeli historian Benny Morris in
Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001, saw
that the establishment of a Jewish state would require the removal of these
Palestinian Arabs. The idea of removal, he notes, “goes back to the fathers
of modern Zionism … one of the main currents of Zionist ideology from the
movement’s inception.” Herzl accepted the removal (“transfer”) of the
Palestinians, though he emphasized the need for diplomatic caution in the
face of Ottoman, British and larger Arab vested interests.
Removal of Arab Population
In his diaries in 1895, Herzl wrote of the need to “spirit the penniless
(Arab) population” across the border to Arab countries while being mindful
that “both the process of expropriation (of property and land) and that of
the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”
According to Morris, the Zionist settlers referred to Palestinians as
“mules” and behaved “like lords and masters, some apparently resorting to
the whip at the slightest provocation … a major source of Arab animosity.”
The only “liberal” Zionism to be found in these early years was that of a
handful of “cultural Zionists,” who sought to establish a Jewish cultural
center in Palestine, not a sovereign and exclusively Jewish state. The most
important of these was the Russian Jewish writer and philosopher Ahad Ha’am.
He wrote in 1891 that the Jewish settlers arriving in Palestine from Europe
“behaved toward the (Palestinian) Arabs with hostility and cruelty, trespass
uniquely upon their boundaries, beat them shamefully without reason and even
brag about it.”
He reported in 1893 that, “The attitude of the colonists to their tenants
and their families is exactly the same as toward their animals … We are
accustomed to believing, outside Israel, that the Arabs are all desert
savages, a people like donkeys, and they neither see nor understand what is
happening around them. But that is a great mistake.”
Another People in the Land
Ha’am surmised that aggressive settler attitudes stemmed from anger “toward
those who reminded them that there is still another people in the land of
Israel that have been living there and does not intend to leave.”
The early Zionists used the slogan, “A land without people, for a people
without land.” In 1891, the Lovers of Zion sent Ahad Ha’am from Russia to
observe conditions in Palestine. He wrote: “From abroad we are accustomed to
believe that Eretz Israel is presently almost totally desolate, an
uncultivated desert, and that anyone wishing to buy land there can come and
buy all he wants. But, in truth, it is not so. In the entire land, it is
hard to find tillable land that is not already tilled … If the time comes
when the life of our people in Eretz Israel develops to the point of
encroaching upon the native population, they will not easily yield their
place.”
There were always a few who questioned the prevailing view of Jewish-Arab
relations. At a meeting in Basel, Switzerland during the 7th Zionist
Congress in 1905, Yitzhak Epstein, a teacher who had migrated to Palestine,
raised what he called the “hidden question.” He declared: “Among the
difficult problems associated with the idea of the renewal of the life of
our people in its land, there is one question that outweighs all the others,
namely the question of our attitude to the Arabs. We have overlooked a
rather ‘marginal’ fact — that in our beloved land lived an entire people
that has been dwelling there for many centuries and has never considered
leaving it.”
Palestine Is Totally Settled
At the same time, another early Zionist, Hillel Zeitlin, who wrote in Hebrew
and Yiddish, charged that Zionists “forget, mistakenly of maliciously, that
Palestine belongs to others, and it is totally settled.”
These few dissident voices constitute the essence of the alleged “liberal
Zionism” which existed as the expropriation of the land proceeded. Moshe
Sharett, a future prime minister, acknowledged that, “We have come to
conquer a country from a people inhabiting it … the land must be ours
alone.”
In the mid-19th century, the area corresponding to Palestine had about
340,000 people, of whom 300,000 or 88 per cent were Muslim or Druze, 27,000
or 8 per cent Christian, and 13,000 or 4 per cent Jews. By 1922, after the
Balfour Declaration, the population had grown to 752,048, of which Jews
constituted only 83,900, or 11 per cent. The increase in the Jewish
population had been spurred by the development of the Zionist movement in
Europe, particularly in the Russian Pale of Settlement.
Theodor Herzl promised that the new state “should there form a part of a
wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against
barbarism.” Herzl, an atheist, fit Zionism into the prevailing framework of
European imperialist policies. The writer Max Nordau, who became Herzl’s
second in command, agreed: “We will endeavor to do in the Near East what the
English did in India. It is our intention to come to Palestine as the
representatives of culture and to take the moral borders of Europe to the
Euphrates.”
Opposition to the Balfour Declaration
In England, Lord Curzon, the representative of the House of Lords in the War
Cabinet, who would succeed Balfour as Foreign Secretary in 1919, opposed the
Balfour Declaration. He charged that the term “national home” was
dangerously ambiguous and would commit Britain to creating a Jewish state in
a land that “already has an indigenous population of its own of a different
race.” The Arabs who lived there, Curzon warned, “would not be content
either to be expropriated for Jewish immigration or to act as mere hewers of
wood or drawers of water for the latter.”
According to George Kidton, who served in the Middle East Division of the
Foreign Office, Balfour promised Palestine to the Zionists “irrespective of
the wishes of the great bulk of the population, because it is historically
right and politically expedient that Balfour should do so. The idea that
carrying out these programs will entail bloodshed and military repression
never seems to have occurred to him.”
Balfour recognized very well that by embracing Zionism he was rejecting the
principle of self-determination for the people of Palestine. In 1919,
Balfour wrote to Lloyd George: “The weak point of our position, of course,
is that in the case of Palestine, we deliberately and rightly decline to
accept the principle of self-determination. If the present inhabitants were
consulted they would unquestionably give an anti-Jewish verdict.”
Support for Bi-National State
Another example of what we might call “liberal Zionism” manifested itself in
1925, when several prominent intellectuals, most of them natives of Central
Europe who were teaching at Hebrew University, formed Brit Shalom (Covenant
of Peace) which backed a bi-national state of Arabs and Jews. The group’s
members looked to Ahad Ha’am rather than Herzl as their mentor. They
rejected the attempt to impose a Jewish state on Palestine’s Arabs as
politically impossible without the use of force, and they saw doing this as
contrary to the ethical principles of Judaism. Their objective, the
sociologist Arthur Ruppin, the chairman of the group, said was “to settle
the Jews, as a second people, in a country already inhabited by another
people, and accomplish this peacefully.” This group enjoyed the support of
Albert Einstein, Martin Buber and Judah Magnes, the first president of
Hebrew University. It was small, attracted few members and soon faded away.
Mainstream Zionism proceeded with indifference, and often contempt for the
Palestinians, an overwhelming majority of the population. The publication of
the Zionist Organization of America, “The New Palestine,” declared in Sept.
1928, when the British had won Arab agreement to a legislative council, that
Arabs “are illiterate and live under indescribably primitive conditions. The
march of these illiterates to the polls can easily be pictured.” This
publication, the voice of American Zionism, repeatedly published articles
urging the transfer of Arab Palestinians to Jordan.
David Ben Gurion, then chairman of the Jewish Agency, acknowledged that
frustrated Palestinian national aspirations lay behind the 1936 rebellion,
as well as fears that a Jewish state was being thrust upon them. He knew
that the Palestinians had “legitimate fears and grievances.” He stated:
“Were I an Arab … I would rise up against immigration for Arabs are fighting
dispossession … the fear is not of losing land, but of losing the homeland
of the Arab people, which others (we) want to turn into the homeland of the
Jewish people. When we say the Arabs are the aggressors and we defend
ourselves — that is only half the truth … politically we are the aggressors
and they defend themselves.”
The Whole of Biblical Palestine
Ben Gurion revealed his strategy clearly. He declared: “After the formation
of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the state, we will
abolish partition and expand to the whole of Biblical Palestine. I do not
see partition as the final solution of the Palestine question … We will
expel the Arabs and take their places … with the force at our disposal. The
acceptance of partition does not commit us to renounce (acquisition of)
Transjordan … We shall accept a state in the boundaries fixed today, but the
boundaries of Zionist aspirations are the concern of the Jewish people and
no external factor will limit them.”
In Nov. 1947 the U.N. recommended partition of Palestine: 56 per cent for a
Jewish state, 44 per cent for a Palestinian state. There was a clear
inequity: the Jews, with 31 per cent of the population, were being allocated
56 per cent of the land. Moreover, Jews owned only 6 per cent of Palestine.
Palestinians asked what would happen to Muslims and Christians who
constituted nearly half of the population in the territory allocated to the
Jews? Now, with so-called “liberal Zionists” in control, we know what fate
befell them.
Israeli historian Avi Shlaim sums up what happened this way: “The Arab case
was clear and compelling. Palestine belonged to the people living in it, and
the overwhelming majority was Arab. In language and culture, as well as land
ownership, the country had been Arab for centuries. Geographical proximity,
historical ties, and religious affinity made Palestine an integral part of
the Arab world. It was entitled to immediate independence. Jewish
immigration and settlement could not take place without the consent of the
country’s Arab owners, and this consent was emphatically denied. Neither
Britain nor the League of Nations had the right to promise a land that was
not theirs to promise, the promise was null and void.”
Israel’s Turn to the Right
More recently, Israel has turned away even from the Zionism which many have
found it possible to mistakenly characterize as “liberal” in the past. In
Nov. 2014, a proposal for a basic law titled “Israel, the Nation-State of
the Jewish People” passed in the Israeli Cabinet by a vote of 14-6, with two
centrist coalition parties opposing it. Parliament has to approve the bill
for it to become law.
Opponents of the law argue that it would make Israel’s non-Jewish citizens —
20 per cent of the population — less than equal. In fact, of course,
Israel’s Palestinians already suffer under less than equal status. Ahmed
Tibi, a veteran Arab member of the Israeli Parliament said that there has
long been tension between the halves of the term “Jewish democracy,” as
Israel likes to define itself. He said that the proposed legislation simply
“confirms that the Jewish and democratic state is fiction.” He described
Israel instead as a “Judocracy,” that would “never recognize the collective
rights of a minority that has long suffered discrimination.”
The claim that Israel is the “nation-state” of “the Jewish people” is, on
its face, simply not true. The “nation-state” of American Jews is the United
States, just as the “nation state” of British Jews is the United Kingdom,
the “nation state” of French Jews is France, et.al.
Judaism Is a Religion, Not a Nationality
The Zionist notion that Israel is the Jewish “homeland,” and that all Jews
living outside of Israel are in “exile,” is an ideological construct which
has no relationship to reality. Most American Jews have always believed that
Judaism was a religion of universal values, not a nationality, and that
rather than being in “exile” in America, they were fully at home. This view
has been expressed repeatedly in our history. In 1841, at the dedication
ceremony of Temple Beth Elohim in Charleston, South Carolina, Rabbi Gustav
Poznanski declared, “This country is our Palestine, this city our Jerusalem,
this house of God our temple.”
The Israeli government, sadly, has never recognized that Jewish Americans
were not “Israelis in exile.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has
repeatedly called upon American Jews to make a “mass aliyah” (emigration) to
Israel. No other foreign government argues that millions of Americans —
because of their religion — are in “exile” in the United States and that
their real “homeland” — or “nation state” — is that foreign country.
Consider Prime Minister Netanyahu’s response to the terrorist attack in
Paris in January. He went to France and declared, “I wish to tell to all
French and European Jews — Israel is your home.” Netanyahu said that he
would convene a special committee to promote emigration “from France and
other countries in Europe that are suffering from terrible anti-Semitism.”
Yair Lapid, Netanyahu’s former finance minister and head of a centrist
party, said: “European Jewry must understand that there is just one place
for Jews, and that is the state of Israel.” Exploiting every development in
the world which seems to promote the Zionist narrative, Israel’s leaders
tell Jews in the U.S. and every other country that Israel is their real
“homeland.”
Horrors of Terrorism
The horrors of terrorism which have been inflicted upon Paris and elsewhere
are being confronted by the governments involved. French Prime Minister
Manuel Valls said, “If 100,000 Jews leave, France will no longer be France.
The French Republic will be judged a failure.” Rabbi Menachem Margolin,
director of the European Jewish Association, said that far better than
emigration to Israel, would be the preservation and protection of Jewish
life in the many countries Jews call home. He regretted that “after every
anti-Semitic act in Europe, the Israeli government issues the same statement
about the importance of aliyah rather than employ every diplomatic and
informational means at its disposal to strengthen the safety of Jewish life
in Europe.” He said: “The Israeli government must stop this Pavlovian
response every time there is an attack against Jews in Europe.”
Yonathan Arfi, Vice President of CRIF, an umbrella group of Jewish
institutions in France, says that he believes Jews should remain in France,
which is their home. “We have had a Jewish community living here for more
than a thousand years,” he said. “We went through bombing attacks, the
Holocaust, acts of terrorism, and we are not about to leave now. We just
want to be safe.”
Writing from Paris in The Forward (Jan. 16, 2015), Laurent-David Samama
notes that while some French Jews might be considering emigration, “Others —
including young Jews like me — feel that making aliyah is a too-easy escape;
it’s simply not the answer. Those of us who remain in Paris, Marseille or
Lyon are determined not to let the terrorists win. Throughout French
history, Jews have experienced many periods of crisis. We’ve always overcome
them, and we will overcome them again. Now more than ever … there is another
significant communal faction that believes France needs us to stay here, to
play the role of social whistleblower …”
Claude Lanzmann, the widely respected French Jewish filmmaker, best known
for his Holocaust documentry film Shoah, said that following Benjamin
Netanyahu’s advice would have only one result, giving Hitler, who did his
best to rid France and all of Europe of Jews, “a posthumous victory.”
Limited Democracy Is Threatened
When it comes to Israel itself, the proposed Nationality Law makes clear
that even the limited democracy which Israel now enjoys, is under serious
threat. In an editorial entitled “Israel Narrows Its Democracy,” The New
York Times (Nov. 25, 2014) declares: “Since its founding in 1948, Israel’s
very existence and promise … has been based on the ideal of democracy for
all its people. Its Declaration of Independence, which provides the guiding
principles for the state, makes clear that the country was established as a
homeland for the Jews and guarantees ‘complete equality of social and
political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or
sex.’ That is why it is heartbreaking to see the Israeli cabinet approve a
contentious bill that would officially define Israel as the nation-state of
the Jewish people, reserving ‘national rights’ only for Jews … To go back
and emphasize nationality and religion in defining the country … runs
counter to the long-term movement among liberal democracies toward a more
inclusive vision of a state … Having experienced the grievous legacies
created when a government diminishes the rights of its people, we know this
is not the path that Israel should take.”
Professor Juan Cole of the University of Michigan argues that, “Saying
Israel is a ‘Jewish’ state in the sense of race would be analogous to
insisting that the U.S. is a ‘white’ state and defining Latinos as ‘brown.’
And saying it is a Jewish state in the sense of observant believers would be
like asserting that the U.S. is a Christian state even though about 22 per
cent of the population does not identify as Christian (roughly the same
proportion as non-Jews in Israel) … Netanyahu’s demand is either racist or
fundamentalist and is objectionable from an American point of view on human
rights grounds either way.”
Among other things, the initial drafts of the legislation by right-wing
lawmakers, and approved by the Cabinet, would relegate Arabic from an
official language to one with a “special status.” Israeli legal experts said
that this legislation, in its more radical form, is clearly undemocratic.
Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute and a former
member of parliament, said that, “It’s an unnecessary piece of legislation
because Israel’s Jewish and democratic nature is established in judgments
and parliamentary legislation and in the Declaration of Independence.”
May Stain Israel
Avinoam Bar-Yosef, president of the Jewish People Policy Institute, said
that any distortion of the balance between Israel’s Jewish and democratic
character “may stain Israel in the eyes of the free world and distance
diaspora Jews who are counted as supporters of the Zionist project.”
Israel has no constitution. Instead, its constitutional character consists
of basic laws, judgments and the Declaration of Independence of 1948, which
enshrines the right of the Jewish people to their own sovereign state and
also pledges to “uphold the full social and political equality of all its
citizens.”
Yair Lapid, leader of the Yesh Atid party, which opposed the bill, said he
had spoken shortly before its passage with the family of Zidan Seif, a Druze
police officer who was killed while protecting Jewish worshipers from two
Palestinians who attacked a Jerusalem synagogue with butcher knives and a
gun in November. “What will we say to him? What will we say to them?” Lapid
asked. “That the deceased is a second-class citizen in the state of Israel
…?”
Mahmoud Seif, Zidan Seif’s great uncle, said that, “The Jewish people have
suffered as a people more than most. They know what it means to be a
minority, therefore they need to protect the minorities among them.” Zidan’s
brother spoke out harshly against the proposed nationality legislation,
telling Israel Radio that it would differentiate between Druze and Jewish
blood. He said he would actively encourage Druze teens not to enlist in the
army.
Druze Are Continually Disappointed
Most Druze, who follow a monotheistic religion that incorporates elements of
all Abrahamic religions, are citizens, holding Israeli passports, speaking
fluent Hebrew and fulfilling compulsory military service. Many later join
the police force or security services. But Druze leaders complain that their
towns are underdeveloped and they are forced to build illegally, and
therefore face government demolitions, because they are often unable to
obtain construction permits. Rabah Halabi, a lecturer at Hebrew University
and an expert on Druze in Israel, says: “The Druze community continually
feels disappointed by the state. They do everything that is asked of them,
but they never feel full equality.”
The nationality bill, which contributed to the collapse of Israel’s
coalition government, was called “a slap in the face” to non-Jewish Israelis
by Dr. Halabi. Many Israelis agree. Journalist Sarabeth Lukin, writing in
Washington Jewish Week (Nov. 27, 2014) declares that, “The bill upends the
concept of Israel as ‘a Jewish and democratic state’ and downgrades
democracy to a secondary status. It declares that Israel is, first and
foremost, ‘the nation-state of the Jewish people,’ providing all of Israel’s
8 million citizens with the vague promise that they will be afforded
‘personal rights in accordance with every law.’ The proposed law also
declares that only the Jewish people enjoy the right to national self-
determination and that housing can be determined by religion or nationality.
And if Jewish law, Halacha, takes precedence over civil law in both legal
and legislative proceedings, as some scholars interpret the bill, Israel
will find itself in the company of other theocratic Middle Eastern countries
like Saudi Arabia and Iran.”
According to Lukin, “Israel has no constitution, no bill of rights. Its
national identity is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, which
refers to the country as a Jewish state and stipulates that Israel ‘will
uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without
distinction of race, creed of sex’ … But Israel’s political character has
changed since those words were written in 1948, slowly but inexorably
acquiring a religious and nationalistic outlook.”
Retreat from Democracy
Many American Jewish supporters of Israel are dismayed about its retreat
from democracy. Editorially, The Forward (Dec. 5, 2014) stated: “The test of
a genuine democracy, or at least a nation that aspires to be one, is how it
protects the rights of those with a skin color, faith tradition, cultural
background, political party or language preference different from the
majority. Are those in the minority to be full citizens? Are they treated
equally by the laws and its enforcers? Is their difference considered a
welcome attribute or an obstacle to inclusion? … The absence of
constitutionally protected rights for minorities in Israel doesn’t only
endanger Muslims or Christians or Druze. It also oppresses secular or non-
orthodox Jews forced to comply with the enshrined religious monopoly of the
Orthodox — who, while the minority in terms of population, exercise majority
power in matters of conversion, marriage and, thanks to the Law of Return,
citizenship … Israel can act in far more productive ways to ensure its
eternal Jewish character than by enacting this law.”
Even groups that are usually hesitant to criticize Israel in any way have
expressed misgivings. The American Jewish Committee said that, “The proposed
Jewish state bill is ill-conceived and ill-timed.” The Anti-Defamation
League said, “It is troubling that some have sought to use the political
process to promote an extreme agenda.”
Israelis seem to recognize something which many American Jews fail to see —
liberalism and Zionism cannot really be reconciled. In an article, “The
Crisis Of Liberal American Jews” in The Jerusalem Post (International
edition, Jan. 2-8, 2015) Ashley Rindsberg writes: “Trying to reconcile
American liberalism, which at its heart is a doctrine of universal
integration, with a Jewish Zionism that holds separateness as a defining
principle … is like trying to mix oil and water. It’s an endlessly
frustrating endeavor, the attempt at which can only give rise to question of
hopelessness.”
It is time to come to grips with the reality that while Israel repeatedly
says it is “Jewish and democratic,” the reality is far different. For Jews
who are not Orthodox, Israel is a theocracy in which Reform and Conservative
rabbis have no right to perform weddings, funerals or conversions. Israel is
far more similar in this regard to Saudi Arabia and Iran than to Denmark or
Switzerland.
For non-Jews, the idea of Israel as a “democracy” contradicts reality. Omar
Barghouti, the Palestinian human rights activist, reports that, “Not even
theoretically are Palestinian citizens of Israel given full rights, with or
without this new law. Israel already has more than 50 laws that discriminate
against its Palestinian Arab citizens in every domain, according to the
human rights organization Adalah. The U.S. Department of State has
criticized Israel for its system of ‘institutional, legal and societal
discrimination’ against them … Israel does not recognize a civic Israeli
nationality, lest that avail equal rights, at least theoretically, to all
its citizens, and undermine its ‘ethnocratic’ identity.”
The State of Its Citizens
If Israel has any hope for a peaceful future, it must content itself with
being the state of all its citizens and abandon the myth that it is the
“nation-state” of Jews who are citizens of other countries. In fact, making
a false god of a sovereign state is not Judaism, but idolatry. Thus, Israel
is not only not a genuine democracy, but it is in contradiction to the basic
principles of Judaism itself.
Prior to the mid-20th century, the vast majority of Jews rejected Zionism.
In 1929, Orthodox Rabbi Aaron Samuel Tamarat wrote that the very idea of a
sovereign Jewish state as a spiritual center was “a contradiction to
Judaism’s ultimate purpose.” He wrote: “Judaism at root is not some
religious concentration which can be localized or situated in a single
territory. Neither is Judaism a ‘nationality,’ in the sense of modern
nationalism … No, Judaism is Torah, ethics and exaltation of spirit … It
cannot be reduced to the confines of any particular territory. For as
Scripture said of Torah, ‘Its measure is greater than the earth.’”
Those who look at Israel’s current policies, such as continued construction
and settlement of the occupied territories, are wrong to blame the right-
wing. Israeli governments, whether Labor of Likud, have continued the
occupation. Both right and left wing Israelis, apparently, are comfortable
with the status quo. Those who lament what they think is the decline — or
end — of “liberal Zionism” must seriously consider the possibility that
Zionism, from the start, not only turned its back on the Jewish universal
spiritual tradition but, by ignoring the rights of the indigenous population
of Palestine, on Western principles of democracy and self-determination as
well.
“Liberal Zionism” is not dead or dying. The truth is that it never existed
at all, except in the minds of those who could not confront what was
happening at the hands of an enterprise they eagerly embraced from afar,
ignoring its harsh reality. That reality has now become clear to all, hence
the current shock and dismay. Many continue to turn away from what is now
taking place, but this will not be able to continue very much longer. •
Allan C. Brownfeld is a nationally syndicated columnist and serves as
Associate Editor of The Lincoln Review and Editor of Issues. The author of
five books, he has served on the staff of the U.S. Senate, House of
Representatives, and the Office of the Vice President.
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