{"id":135269,"date":"2019-06-10T12:00:59","date_gmt":"2019-06-10T11:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=135269"},"modified":"2024-09-23T14:42:21","modified_gmt":"2024-09-23T13:42:21","slug":"an-answer-to-the-question-why-do-you-care-so-much-about-palestine-israel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/06\/an-answer-to-the-question-why-do-you-care-so-much-about-palestine-israel\/","title":{"rendered":"An Answer to the Question, \u2018Why Do You Care so much about Palestine\/Israel?\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

An Israeli wall separating the Palestinian refugee camp of Shuafat from an East Jerusalem neighbourhood. The Irish Times<\/p><\/div>\n

21 May 2019 – <\/em>Several years ago, a student in my Israel-Palestine course approached me after class with a question. \u00a0Why, he wanted to know, did I care so much about this subject?<\/p>\n

The student liked my course, considered it fair-minded and had no complaints about the way I was teaching it. Though he didn\u2019t share many of my critical views about Israel he understood and respected them. But why, he was wondering, did the subject so consume me? \u00a0Why did my relationship to this history feel so intense, so visceral?<\/p>\n

Had I been a staunch defender of Israel the student probably wouldn\u2019t have found my emotional investment surprising. Especially since I was avowedly Jewish it would have seemed to him \u201cnormal\u201d for me to be teaching a class extolling Zionism and Israel. But what could be driving a Jew to invest so much critical energy in the subject?<\/p>\n

It was an honest question. The student wasn\u2019t preparing the ground to hit me with the ever-popular Zionist talking point about \u201csingling out\u201d (\u201cWhat about North Korea and Assad\u2019s Syria and China? Why not focus on and criticize them? What have you got against the Jews?\u201d). Rather, he was simply curious about why I was so focused on this particular history, this particular conflict.<\/p>\n

I never got back to him with a clear answer. But I\u2019ve never stopped thinking about his question. Here are my current thoughts on the subject:<\/p>\n

The most obvious but, in a way, most evasive response to the student\u2019s query would have been simply to say: \u00a0\u201cI have strong feelings because the Israel-Palestine conflict is of immense contemporary importance to the entire Middle East. And because America\u2019s support for Israeli policies has made it deeply complicit in a long history of unjust actions and designs. And because the Palestinians have been victims of \u00a0imperial and settler-colonial domination, of exploitation and betrayal by their putative Arab \u2018brethren,\u2019 of divided and frequently inept leadership, and of international toleration of Israeli crimes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though I believe all these things to be true, however, they don\u2019t, in themselves, satisfactorily account for the intensity of my intellectual and\u00a0emotional investment. After all, there are other subjects I am deeply\u00a0concerned about, many of them more pressing and potentially apocalyptic\u00a0than the Israel-Palestine conflict, starting with the planetary threat of\u00a0climate change and the growing menace of fascism in the U.S. and\u00a0abroad. So why have I been expending so many scarce brain-cells and so\u00a0much emotional energy in recent years on the subject of Israel-Palestine\u00a0rather than on these other issues?<\/p>\n

A reply to this might be: \u201cIt\u2019s true I\u2019ve been especially consumed by\u00a0the subject of Jews and Palestinians. But so what? Why is it necessary for\u00a0anyone to account for his\/her political preoccupations? It\u2019s one thing to\u00a0recognize an ethical and intellectual obligation to provide good reasons for\u00a0one\u2019s political positions. It\u2019s a very different thing to be obliged to explain\u00a0why one cares so much about any particular subject, e.g., about criminal\u00a0justice reform or the plight of the Chinese Uighurs or wealth inequalities.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe all have psychological reasons for paying more attention to one subject than to other deserving ones. So long as the focus of our particular concern is righteous; and so long as we honestly attempt to justify our arguments; what difference does our psychological motivation make?\u201d<\/p>\n

Such a response, I think, is entirely adequate. Yet it still feels like an evasion. The student\u2019s question still gnaws.<\/p>\n

An answer that many leftish Jews have been known to offer goes something like this: \u201cThe Jewish ethical and historical tradition is uniquely or especially committed to social justice and support for underdogs. Empathy for the Palestinians and anger about Zionist depredations is therefore a Jewish imperative. Actually existing Zionism is a betrayal of the essential Jewish tradition. Not only has it been disastrous for the Palestinians, it has been bad for the Jews. It has turned them into oppressors and caused them to abandon their historical \u2018calling\u2019 of tikkun olam, repairing the world. As \u00a0Jews, therefore, we are specially obliged to take up the Palestinian cause.\u201d<\/p>\n

For many reasons, however, this line of thought doesn\u2019t resonate with me.<\/p>\n

Is it true, I wonder, that Jewish ethics are really all that different from those of other religions? Do so-called Jewish ethics define Jewishness? And have Jews historically in fact been more just than other peoples?<\/p>\n

Accounting for my own ethical and emotional engagement in\u00a0terms of a putative Jewish ethical \u201ctradition\u201d (the reality of which I find\u00a0dubious) strikes me as historically problematic and extremely parochial.<\/p>\n

Moreover, the ways in which I\u2019ve personally understood my \u201cJewishness\u201d\u00a0have never had anything to do with Jewish theology or with any\u00a0transhistorical or metahistorical identification with an imagined Jewish\u00a0\u201cpeople.\u201d\u00a0But if this is the way I feel, is my \u201cJewishness\u201d at all relevant to my\u00a0engagement with the subject of Israel\/Palestine? And, if it is, how do I\u00a0understand\u00a0this \u201cJewishness\u201d anyhow?<\/p>\n

It seems that if I want to honestly grapple with my student\u2019s question a\u00a0biographical excursus is in order. So, here goes.<\/p>\n

My parents were first-generation American-born secular Jews. I never knew them to step foot in a synagogue except to attend other people\u2019s bar mitzvahs and funerals. My own bar mitzvah was very much my mother\u2019s doing and had everything to do with maintaining propriety and nothing at all to do with \u201cobserving the commandments\u201d or joining the \u201cJewish community.\u201d Apart from Hanukah, Passover and Purim, my understanding of Jewish holy days was just about non-existent, and my associations with these three holidays was aptly summed up by Alan King\u2019s aphorism: \u201cThey tried to kill us. We won. Let\u2019s eat.\u201d<\/p>\n

When it came to the subject of Israel, my parents were curiously\u00a0disengaged, despite their being intensely political in other respects. My\u00a0father had been an active Socialist during the 1930s and, like most pre-WWII leftists, had been staunchly anti-Zionist. One of my grandfathers had\u00a0been sympathetic to the Zionist cause and had apparently engaged in\u00a0heated conversations about the subject with my father. But by the time I\u00a0was growing up this was all ancient history. Not only was my father no\u00a0longer a socialist but he had become reconciled to the Zionist enterprise\u00a0and, as far as I could make out, regarded the State of Israel as a pretty\u00a0unalloyed Good Thing.<\/p>\n

A Good Thing, but a subject neither he nor my mother talked much\u00a0about. Indeed, when my parents were financially able to afford to travel\u00a0abroad, Israel was nowhere near the top of their list of preferred (England,\u00a0France, Italy, Germany, Holland) destinations. True, some years after my\u00a0father\u2019s death in 1979, my mother became a member of Peace Now. Yet\u00a0even then she rarely spoke about Israel and I had only the haziest idea of\u00a0what her thinking was on the subject. I can never recall her uttering the\u00a0word \u201cPalestinians.\u201d<\/p>\n

In sum: Though sympathetic with Israel and ill-disposed to finding \u00a0fault with it, my parents never equated their being Jewish with any allegiance to, or special interest in, the \u201cJewish state.\u201d They certainly never conveyed a sense that it was their or my \u201chomeland.\u201d<\/p>\n

So what exactly did my parents regard as their \u201cJewishness?\u201d They\u00a0never put it into words and probably couldn\u2019t have. For my mother, I think, it\u00a0was a matter of filial piety. Her much-revered \u00a0father, though an atheist who\u00a0never went to shul in the U.S., had taught in a cheder back in Poland, had\u00a0come to America to avoid being drafted into the tsar\u2019s army, and was\u00a0something of a yiddishist.<\/p>\n

For my father the issue was a little more complicated. His parents\u00a0were German (not Yiddish) speakers from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.\u00a0They had zero connection with any Jewish \u201ccommunity\u201d in the U.S. and\u00a0were given to looking down their petit-bourgeois noses at vulgar Eastern\u00a0European Jews, like my mother\u2019s family. My father, who won the German\u00a0language medal at City College in the 1930s, strongly identified with\u00a0German kultur, i.e., with what during the Nazi years, became known in the\u00a0U.S. as the \u201cGood Germany.\u201d Yet though he was never so crass as to\u00a0suggest for a moment that Jewish-Germans were in any sense preferable\u00a0to non-Jewish ones, he also never failed to somehow alert me to the fact\u00a0that paragons like Heinrich Heine, Albert Einstein and Kurt Weill (among\u00a0others) were not just Germans, but were German Jews. Which was also\u00a0apparently a Good Thing.<\/p>\n

In general, I think my father considered his own Jewish identity\u00a0to be inextricably enmeshed with an intellectual-cultural-political\u00a0Mitteleuropean<\/em> tradition which was significantly but by no means\u00a0exclusively Jewish. And whatever pride he derived from considering himself\u00a0an heir to this tradition was implicitly communicated to me. As I grew up,\u00a0therefore, I came also to feel a strong identification (bordering on a sense\u00a0of superiority) with a pan-European Jewish-inflected \u201ctradition\u201d of politically\u00a0progressive thought and action (think: Marx, Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg)\u00a0and radical cultural and literary brilliance (think: Freud and Kafka).<\/p>\n

To which I added my own firm conviction that Jews were funnier\u00a0than other people (think: Marx Brothers, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen).\u00a0Though my parents, like most Jews in post-war America,\u00a0spoke little about the Nazi Final Solution, I became quite transfixed by the\u00a0subject and thought often about the lucky accidents that had spared me\u00a0and my immediate family from Auschwitz or Treblinka.<\/p>\n

When I was an undergraduate at Brandeis University (established by largely secular, largely Eastern European descended American Jews in 1948, the same year as the creation of the State of Israel), I enrolled in what was probably the very first college course ever offered on the subject, \u201cThe Literature of the Holocaust,\u201d taught by Marie Syrkin, a fiery woman who was the daughter of Nachman Syrkin, an early and renowned left-wing Zionist. Though Syrkin had no success in interesting me in Israel, her course readings \u00a0(\u201cThe Wall,\u201d\u201dThe Last of the Just,\u201d Rudolph Vrba\u2019s \u201cI Cannot Forgive,\u201d Piotr Rawicz\u2019s \u201cBlood from the Sky\u201d) left a powerful impression. As, for that matter, did Hannah Arendt\u2019s New Yorker<\/em> articles about the\u00a0Eichmann trial (articles which of course Syrkin deplored), whose analysis of\u00a0bureaucracy and the \u00a0\u201cbanality\u201d of modern evildoers has stuck with me to\u00a0this day.<\/p>\n

Anyway, by the time I graduated from college, and for many years\u00a0thereafter, I thought of myself as an utterly irreligious self-identified \u201cJew,\u201d\u00a0proud of a Jewish radical and cultural \u201ctradition;\u201d proud to be associated\u00a0with Groucho, Woody and Mel; acutely aware of the civilization that had\u00a0been destroyed by the Nazis; and pretty much entirely indifferent to the\u00a0state of Israel, a place that was infinitely more \u201cforeign\u201d to me than London,\u00a0Paris or Berlin, and not half so interesting.<\/p>\n

So what changed? How did I come to be not just \u201cinterested\u201d in\u00a0Israel, but preoccupied with its appalling treatment of the Palestinians and\u00a0disgusted by its egregious special-pleading?<\/p>\n

Part of the answer, I think, had to do with the changes I began\u00a0perceiving in the American Jewish community. Starting in the late 1970s\u00a0the new and distinctively Jewish movement of neo-conservatism openly\u00a0and vitriolically repudiated the very \u201cprogressive\u201d legacy I had reflexively\u00a0taken to be characteristically Jewish: it was hostile to feminism, hostile to\u00a0gay rights, hostile to and contemptuous of African-American \u201cspecial\u00a0privileges\u201d and cultural assertion, unapologetically hawkish, intensely\u00a0nationalistic, skeptical (if not repudiating) of the New Deal and Great\u00a0Society, smugly dismissive of socialism and Marxism . . . and effusively\u00a0supportive of Israel (this during a decade defined by Begin, Sharon\u00a0and Shamir, by the proliferation of West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza\u00a0settlements, by the invasion of Lebanon and by the advent of the First\u00a0Intifada).<\/p>\n

The rightward shift of a vocal portion of the American Jewish\u00a0community, and especially the influence of neoconservatism on the so-called \u201cNew York (Jewish) Intellectuals,\u201d led me to start wondering about\u00a0the depth, strength and temporal scope of that Jewish progressive\u00a0\u201ctradition\u201d which had formed such an important part of my own Jewish\u00a0\u201cidentity.\u201d It began to dawn on me that what I had taken to be a long and\u00a0glorious legacy had been something of an illusion, that insofar as such a\u00a0progressive legacy had existed at all, it was of very recent vintage (dating\u00a0from the mid-to-late 19th century), was of very limited geographic\u00a0provenance (central and eastern Europe) and was exclusively an\u00a0Ashkenazi phenomenon (having nothing whatever to do with North African\u00a0or Middle Eastern Jews).<\/p>\n

What I had naively taken to be a long-standing Jewish progressivism\u00a0was in fact a modern and rather ephemeral historical outcropping,\u00a0shaped by the socio-cultural experience of a few generations of\u00a0European Jews and with little bearing on any sort of essential \u201cJewishness\u201d\u00a0(whatever that might mean). This realization didn\u2019t, of course, make\u00a0me think any the less of Luxemburg, Kafka or Groucho. But it did induce\u00a0me to reconsider the nature of my Jewish identification.<\/p>\n

There were other cultural developments transforming the American\u00a0Jewish community which affected me as well. In the later years of the 20th\u00a0century American Jews seemed increasingly to define their Jewish\u00a0\u201cidentity\u201d in terms of the Holocaust and of Israel. The former was\u00a0understood as the culmination of a long and relentlessly lachrymose history\u00a0of victimization which set the Jews apart from all other people and\u00a0represented a kind of negative \u201cexceptionalism.\u201d The latter was understood\u00a0as the miraculous redemption of a singular people whose providential\u00a0purpose was to be a \u201clight unto the nations,\u201d recapture the glory of Joshua,\u00a0David and Solomon, and produce an endless stream of doctors, scientists\u00a0and tech-savvy start-up entrepreneurs.<\/p>\n

Needless to say, none of this corresponded with my own\u00a0understanding of being Jewish and, to the contrary, impressed me as being\u00a0unhistorical, chauvinistic and downright dangerous.<\/p>\n

As indeed it was. And is.<\/p>\n

The changes in American politics and culture induced me to stop\u00a0valorizing my Jewish \u201cidentity\u201d and to consider my \u201cJewishness\u201d as\u00a0simply a morally neutral sociological and historical fact. But these\u00a0changes didn\u2019t of themselves transform me into a critic of Israel. For\u00a0that to happen, I had also to call into question the Zionist\/Israeli myths that\u00a0had long been internalized as self-evident truths by American Jews, myself\u00a0included.<\/p>\n

This final step in my personal evolution began to take shape in\u00a0the late 1990s and then especially after 9\/11. As a student and long-time\u00a0teacher of history I began, for the first time, to read systematically (and\u00a0then obsessively) about Zionist\/Israeli\/Palestinian history. Fortuitously, my\u00a0burgeoning interest in these subjects corresponded with a remarkable\u00a0efflorescence of new history writing (largely, but by no means\u00a0exclusively, produced by Jewish-Israeli scholars) which scrupulously\u00a0and devastatingly undermined one after another pillar of the hitherto\u00a0sanctified Zionist narrative.<\/p>\n

In addition to academic works, I also began to read some of\u00a0the enormously compelling autobiographical accounts produced by\u00a0Palestinians themselves, especially the remarkable diaries, recollections\u00a0and reconstructions of Raja Shehadeh ( Samud: Journal of a West Bank\u00a0Palestinian<\/em>; The Sealed Room<\/em>; Strangers in the House<\/em>; When the Birds\u00a0Stopped Singing: Ramallah Under Siege<\/em>; Palestinian Walks<\/em>; A Rift in Time<\/em>;\u00a0Occupation Diaries<\/em>; etc.); and the powerful memoirs by Ghada Karmi (In\u00a0Search of Fatima<\/em>, Return<\/em>).<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t only that these readings punctured myths and opened\u00a0my eyes to a history that had hitherto been unknown to me. Their effect\u00a0involved something more, something visceral. They made me feel as\u00a0I had during the 1960s when I\u2019d been similarly compelled by my studies\u00a0and conversations to jettison another celebratory myth-laden narrative: an\u00a0American fairy tale of freedom-loving settlers and democracy-promoting\u00a0expansionism. In both instances I came to realize that people I trusted and\u00a0respected had been promulgating a one-dimensional chauvinist history and\u00a0burying or muting beyond recognition important narratives of injustice.<\/p>\n

For all I knew the promoters of these self-serving and moralistic\u00a0narratives genuinely believed them. It didn\u2019t matter. The whole thing felt like\u00a0a swindle, a gigantic exercise of disavowal and triumphalist obfuscation.\u00a0And, worst of all, the primary perpetrators of the swindle weren\u2019t the\u00a0obvious Bad Guys (the Dr. Strangeloves and smarmy Nixons, the crazy\u00a0fascist West Bank settlers and the Likudnik captains of the Israel Lobby)\u00a0but instead were American liberals and Israeli \u201csocialists.\u201d<\/p>\n

The feeling of having been deceived by the supposed Good\u00a0Guys\u00a0has been at the wellspring of my personal investment in, and\u00a0anger about, the Israel-Palestine conflict. The emotions evoked by the\u00a0shattering of Zionist mythologies, together with the feelings generated by\u00a0the rethinking of my Jewish \u201cidentity,\u201d combined to produce the\u00a0obsessive investment in the way I thought and taught about the Israel-Palestine conflict. And, of course, the drive by American Zionists to\u00a0ruthlessly shut down any-and-all criticism of Israel with McCarthyite\u00a0accusations of \u201cdelegitimization\u201d and anti-Semitism; and the mealy-mouthed temporizing of American liberals, endlessly invoking a fraudulent\u00a0\u201cpeace process;\u201d has only deepened this investment.<\/p>\n

Is this personal history generalizable? Is it edifying? Probably not.\u00a0If I was a Palestinian I would probably regard a biographical narrative like\u00a0this one as besides the point and unhelpfully Judeocentric.\u00a0For what it\u2019s worth, though, this is how I might have answered my\u00a0student\u2019s question.<\/p>\n

________________________________________________<\/p>\n

Joel Doerfler is a long-time independent school teacher of history. He lives in New York.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 mondoweiss.net<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Had I been a staunch defender of Israel the student probably wouldn\u2019t have found my emotional investment surprising. Especially since I was avowedly Jewish it would have seemed to him \u201cnormal\u201d for me to be teaching a class extolling Zionism and Israel. But what could be driving a Jew to invest so much critical energy in the subject? It was an honest question.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":135270,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[772,120,1030,87,267,1029,260,487,866,504,88,263,234,767,291,771,444,86,1027,427,85,109,287,103,107,985,572,292,126,1026,118,172,1025,75,886],"class_list":["post-135269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-palestine-israel-gaza-genocide","tag-apartheid","tag-conflict","tag-fatah","tag-gaza","tag-geopolitics","tag-hamas","tag-history","tag-human-rights","tag-indigenous-rights","tag-international-relations","tag-israel","tag-matw","tag-media","tag-middle-east","tag-military","tag-nakba","tag-nonviolence","tag-occupation","tag-oslo-accords","tag-palestine","tag-palestine-israel","tag-politics","tag-power","tag-racism","tag-religion","tag-social-justice","tag-torture","tag-un","tag-violence","tag-wall","tag-war","tag-west","tag-west-bank","tag-world","tag-zionism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135269"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135269\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":275245,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135269\/revisions\/275245"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/135270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}