{"id":23832,"date":"2012-12-10T12:00:04","date_gmt":"2012-12-10T12:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=23832"},"modified":"2012-12-08T15:17:18","modified_gmt":"2012-12-08T15:17:18","slug":"zionism-and-its-discontents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2012\/12\/zionism-and-its-discontents\/","title":{"rendered":"Zionism and Its Discontents"},"content":{"rendered":"

Books Discussed in this Essay<\/strong>:<\/p>\n

The Crisis of Zionism <\/em>by Peter Beinart Times Books, 2012, 289 pp.<\/p>\n

The Unmaking of Israel <\/em>by Gershom Gorenberg HarperCollins, 2011, 325 pp.<\/p>\n

Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me <\/em>by Harvey Pekar and JT Waldman Hill and Wang, 2012, 172 pp.<\/p>\n

Underground to Palestine and Reflections Thirty Years Later <\/em>by I.F. Stone Hutchinson & Co., 1979, 260 pp. (first publication, 1946)<\/p>\n

At a downtown Manhattan dinner party several months ago, the name of a widely respected journalist\u2014author of an acclaimed book on genocide in Africa\u2014was mentioned. This is a man whose work, though not immune to criticism, is generally regarded as brilliant and humane. \u201cWhy, he\u2019s a Zionist<\/em>!\u201d one guest hissed, with the contempt that in previous eras would have been reserved for fascists or members of the Ku Klux Klan. Everyone at the table seemed to nod with satisfaction\u2014we\u2019re done with him<\/em>!\u2014until I said, somewhat stumblingly, \u201cWell, I am too. I mean, I believe in a state for the Jewish people.\u201d The other guests\u2014left-wing academics, accomplished people, smart people, good people, some of whom I not only like but love\u2014looked dumbfounded. An embarrassed silence ensued.<\/p>\n

I thought about that evening as I read Peter Beinart\u2019s The Crisis of Zionism<\/em>, which insists that an end to the Israeli Occupation and a rejuvenation of that country\u2019s democratic institutions are equally exigent and utterly interdependent tasks. The book\u2019s main argument is simple, yet essentially right: \u201cOur tradition insists that physical collapse was preceded by ethical collapse\u2026.Israel\u2019s physical survival is bound up with its ethical survival.\u201d Beinart, former editor of the New Republic<\/em>, pleads for liberal American Jews (those who, unlike my dinner-party friends, still believe in both the possibility and necessity of a democratic Jewish state) to re-engage, urgently, with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rather than leave it to rich reactionaries such as Sheldon Adelson and Ronald Lauder and, increasingly, the Orthodox. (Of the typical donor to mainstream American Zionist organizations such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Beinart writes, \u201cWhat he is buying for Israel, with his check, is American indifference\u2014indifference to Palestinian suffering and indifference to the principles in Israel\u2019s declaration of independence.\u201d) In Beinart\u2019s view, Jews need to undergo a kind of shift in consciousness from victim to actor (thus mirroring the shift in consciousness demanded by the original Zionists): a shift, that is, \u201cfrom Jewish powerlessness to Jewish power.\u201d How to govern an independent state and live in the world as modern citizens\u2014not (just) how to survive\u2014is the Jewish people\u2019s contemporary challenge.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are not history\u2019s permanent victims,\u201d Beinart, who attends an Orthodox synagogue, insists. \u201cMany of our greatest challenges today stem not from weakness but from power\u2026.Accepting that the Jewish condition has fundamentally changed requires looking to our tradition for guidance about how Jews should treat the people we rule, not just how we should endure treatment from the people who rule us.\u201d Only the establishment of real borders\u2014only the establishment of a Palestinian state\u2014can prevent Israel from becoming a permanent ethnocracy in which Jews rule over millions of stateless, vote-less, rights-less people, and in which its own democratic institutions, such as the Supreme Court, are routinely flouted: \u201cThe struggle for a liberal democratic Zionism, therefore, . . . must also be a struggle to satisfy the Palestinians\u2019 national yearning for a state of their own.\u201d<\/p>\n

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I am grateful that Beinart wrote this book; I hope that it reaches those outside of the \u201cshtetlsphere,\u201d and even that it changes a few minds. But there is not much in it that is either deep or new. The Crisis of Zionism<\/em> is a good book\u2014and what\u2019s rarer, a necessary one\u2014but it is also unremarkable. One can find all of Beinart\u2019s ideas\u2014not to mention ones that are considerably more radical\u2014in the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz<\/em> any day of the week. (See, for instance, Bradley Burston\u2019s July 3 column, written in response to the Netanyahu government\u2019s proposal to establish an Israeli university in the West Bank settlement of Ariel\u2014a clear statement by the government that it considers the Green Line meaningless. Burston, who lives in Israel and describes himself as \u201ca person who has long embraced the label of Zionist,\u201d argues that, with such proposals, \u201cthe [Zionist] revolution\u2019s over\u2026[It is] time to think seriously about what democracy really means. Time to think seriously, for example, about what it would mean to give the Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem the vote\u2026.We should call our own bluff.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Given the level of alarmed debate and self-criticism in at least some major sectors of the Israeli press, the tsunami of vitriol that has descended on Beinart and his book is fascinating, puzzling, and profoundly depressing. Negative\u2014sometimes savage\u2014reviews have appeared not only in the usual suspects such as Commentary<\/em> and the Wall Street Journal<\/em> but also in the New York Times Book Review<\/em>, the Washington Post<\/em>, Tablet<\/em>, and the Jewish Review of Books<\/em>, among others. (J.J. Goldberg of the Forward<\/em> accurately observed that the book has caused \u201cnormally high-minded publications to come unhinged.\u201d) A startling cognitive dissonance prevails between the essential moderateness of Beinart\u2019s book and the sarcastic fury it has inspired in mainstream publications. Alana Newhouse, writing in the Washington Post<\/em>, described Crisis<\/em> as \u201ca political stump speech\u201d and a \u201cfantasy\u201d that erects a \u201cself-satisfied and delusional monolith, calculated to appeal to\u201d\u2014the cruelest cut\u2014\u201cbeautiful souls\u201d; Jordan Chandler Hirsch in the Jewish Review of Books<\/em> called it \u201cshallow,\u201d \u201cfalse,\u201d and \u201csimplistic\u201d; Jonathan Rosen in the New York Times Book Review<\/em> derided it as \u201can antiquated act\u201d of \u201cManichean simplicities\u201d that \u201cliberates\u201d itself from \u201cthe practicalities of politics\u201d; Bret Stephens, in Tablet<\/em>, found the book to be \u201cemotionally contrived\u201d and \u201can act of moral solipsism\u201d that is simultaneously \u201coleaginous\u201d and dripping with \u201cicy contempt.\u201d Beinart himself has been attacked for using too many researchers and too many secondary sources, for abstraction, for nostalgia, for pathologizing Jewish politics, for his \u201csafe and comfortable lifestyle,\u201d and even for not discussing \u201cthe state of Palestinian agriculture\u2026before 1967.\u201d It all seems a bit meshugana<\/em>. Writing about the Beinart debate in Haaretz<\/em>, Mira Sucharov mocked the absurd competition in which (guilty) American Jews vie with each other: \u201cWho loves Israel? Who likes Israel? Who is ambivalent, who feels smitten, and who feels lust? Who wants to get married to Israel? Who wants to keep things platonic? Who prefers to be \u2018frenemies\u2019?\u201d Reading the American reviews en masse, one gets the distinct impression that the writers doth protest too much.<\/p>\n

Beinart\u2019s book is, of course, hardly flawless. Profound, it is not. More specifically, he underplays the long and continuing history of Palestinian terror\u2014not to mention the ayatollah in Iran and the eager martyrs of Hezbollah\u2014and, therefore, the fears of Israelis. (That Israel is strong and, simultaneously, faces real dangers is no oxymoron; those who ridicule Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s frequent evocation of 1938 shouldn\u2019t deny that 2012 holds quite enough perils of its own.) As Hebrew University professor David Shulman explained, in his review of Crisis<\/em> in the New York Review of Books<\/em>, \u201cWe\u2019re afraid. We\u2019ve been so traumatized, first by our whole history and then by the history of this conflict, that we want at least an illusion of security, like the kind that comes from holding on to a few more rocky hills.\u201d But fear and strategy are two different things: too often, an unexamined, almost Pavlovian, response links acknowledgment of Israel\u2019s fierce enemies with continuance of the Occupation, as if the former necessarily justifies the latter\u2014or, even more, as if the latter protects against<\/em> the former. Au contraire<\/em>: Shulman describes the Occupation as \u201cirrational, indeed suicidal\u201d\u2014a policy that endangers both the Israeli state as a whole and individual Israelis\u2014and comes to the same conclusion as Beinart: \u201cThe likelihood must be faced that unless the Occupation ends, there will also, in the not so distant future, be no Jewish state.\u201d (Shulman\u2019s main quibble with Beinart\u2019s book is that its description of the Occupation is \u201cfar too mild.\u201d) And, it should be remembered, there are many\u2014many!\u2014books that discuss the irredentism and political pathologies of the Palestinian movement, such as Benny Morris\u2019s 2009 One State, Two State<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Beinart was aiming to do something different: his book is not a history of the conflict (much less a report on Palestinian olive groves). He was trying to address American Jews as American Jews, to impress upon us the catastrophe of the Occupation for Israelis as well as Palestinians, to make clear that a two-state solution is on the verge of becoming impossible, and to argue why we should care<\/em>. The aim of Zionism, after all, was never (just) to secure a parcel of land, or to provide self-defense, or even to offer refuge, though it encompassed all three. From the beginning, the movement also embodied the stirring vision of a Hebrew revival\u2014cultural, political, ethical\u2014to be based, as the Israeli Declaration of Independence put it so well, \u201con the precepts of liberty, justice and peace taught by the Hebrew Prophets\u201d and on \u201cthe full social and political equality of all its citizens.\u201d Israel was always\u2014like the United States\u2014both a country and a set of ideals. Thus, Beinart writes, \u201cIf Egypt fails to become a democracy, I will consider it unfortunate. If Israel ceases to be a democracy, I will consider it one of the greatest tragedies of my life.\u201d His book is, essentially, addressed to those like Paul Krugman, who recently admitted on his New York Times<\/em> blog, \u201cLike many liberal American Jews\u2026I basically avoid thinking about where Israel is going.\u201d Beinart wants Krugman to understand that the tragedy will be his, too, even if Krugman has the luxury\u2014for now\u2014of believing otherwise.<\/p>\n

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The other major shortfall of Beinart\u2019s book is its proposals. He advocates, first, a boycott of \u201cnondemocratic\u201d Israel, that is, of exports from, and investments in, the Occupied Territories. Although some Israelis have embarked, whether officially or not, on such a boycott, it seems to be a practical impossibility for Americans to figure out what comes from where, and to buy or invest in only supposedly clean products. (In any case, as Noam Sheizaf wrote in the Israeli webzine +972mag<\/em>, \u201cThe occupation is\u2026an Israeli project<\/em>. It is not the work of the racist settlers\u2026but the decision of the entire society.\u201d) Aside from practical problems, there are political ones, too. Though Beinart opposes a general boycott of Israel and Israeli institutions, his proposal can only be confused with the broader Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement\u2014whose aim, contra<\/em> Beinart, is to ostracize and weaken Israel.<\/p>\n

Beinart\u2019s second proposal is even worse\u2014and, not incidentally, unconstitutional: a call for the U.S. government to fund Jewish schools. He believes this would strengthen Jewish life in this country; I believe it would ghettoize it. (If you want to send your kid to Hebrew school or Jewish day school, pay for it or find someone\u2014maybe Sheldon Adelson?\u2014who will.) In any case, with this demand Beinart clasps hands, somewhat inexplicably, with right-wing evangelicals who would erode the separation of church and state\u2014and whose increasing influence among American Zionists is terrifying to anyone who wants to see an end to the Occupation rather than the second coming of Christ. That church-state separation is, of course, one of the glories of American democracy, and one that is now under assault. \u201cAmerican Jewish liberals need to recalibrate their fears\u201d about government funding, Beinart argues. I don\u2019t think so.<\/p>\n

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There is a repetitive quality to the debates over Israel; this consistency is one of the most frustrating and bleakest things about it. When it comes to Israelis and Palestinians, history has repeated itself far more than once: though never, I would argue, as anything approaching farce. It is therefore not surprising to find that almost everything that\u2019s worthwhile in Beinart\u2019s book\u2014and more\u2014can be found in Gershom Gorenberg\u2019s The Unmaking of Israel<\/em>, which was published last year. Gorenberg, a historian and journalist, lives in Jerusalem and describes himself on his website as \u201ca left-wing, skeptical Orthodox Zionist Jew.\u201d His book is solidly researched and elegantly argued. It combines history and analysis, love and anger. Somehow, it avoids moralism. If you read one book on Israel, this should be it.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am concerned that the state of Israel is steadily dismantling itself,\u201d Gorenberg begins. He describes the Occupation as a weird mutant: a rogue operation that undermines the authority of the state and yet is supported by it. And he argues that the three main threats facing Israel are internal, and inextricably entwined: \u201cthe ongoing occupation, the fostering of religious extremism, the undercutting of the law by the government itself.\u201d In answer to those on the left who insist that a so-called one-state solution is inevitable, and to those on the right who argue that a besieged Israel has no alternatives to the path it has chosen, Gorenberg insists that change is possible and that choices exist. This calm, sane voice\u2014this belief in reason and freedom, in power and responsibility, in possibility<\/em>\u2014are among Gorenberg\u2019s greatest gifts to the reader. \u201cHistory is not an inevitable process, of redemption or of decay,\u201d he avers. \u201cIt is not written in advance\u2026.The changes I\u2019ve described\u2014ending the occupation, guaranteeing full equality, separating state and synagogue\u2014require a much smaller revolution than did the establishment of the country.\u201d But there is nothing dewy-eyed about Gorenberg\u2019s analysis, and he knows that a huge and possibly unbridgeable chasm exists between what is possible and what will be. Israel\u2019s \u201cdemocratic ideals,\u201d he warns, \u201care on the verge of being remembered among the false political promises of twentieth-century ideologies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Slowly, carefully, devastatingly, Gorenberg shows how the settlements and the more recent \u201coutposts\u201d have made a mockery of Israel\u2019s rule of law\u2014of how, that is, they contravene not only international laws but Israel\u2019s own. Take, for instance, Ofrah, which was built, according to an Israeli government report, \u201cwith no legal basis\u201d on land owned by Palestinians. In fact, Ofrah was constructed \u201cwithout government permission, with the express goal of undermining the foreign policy of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin,\u201d Gorenberg writes. \u201cOfrah epitomizes casual disregard for property rights and for the land-use laws of Israel\u2019s military government in occupied territory. Yet\u2026it has benefited from\u2026a legal system that mocks equality before the law, applying entirely separate rules to Israeli settlers and Palestinians in the same territory. Ofrah \u2026is where the state of Israel unthinkingly attacks its own foundations.\u201d As for the Israeli Supreme Court\u2014often proudly cited as a bedrock of Israeli democracy\u2014its rulings against settlements and outposts have been routinely flouted. \u201cThe Supreme Court justices\u2026are painfully aware that the proceedings in settlement cases have become a mockery,\u201d Gorenberg writes. \u201cThe government\u2026would not end its collusion with the settlers. So Supreme Court hearings became theater, disconnected from the real world.\u201d Some of Beinart\u2019s critics have accused him of trying to impose an inapt American-style democracy on Israel; but what kind of democracy, under any definition, is this?<\/p>\n

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I don\u2019t think that Gorenberg is a Marxist, but he is certainly a dialectician, and it is in contradictions that he finds the meaning of Israel\u2019s history, the source of its present dilemmas, and the possibility of its reclamation. (Debating whether Zionism is a democratic liberation movement or an oppressive colonial one is, he writes, \u201clike a debate over whether water is really oxygen or really hydrogen.\u201d) The most fascinating part of his book is his analysis of how the settlements, now so associated with the Right, grew out of Israel\u2019s left-wing, indeed revolutionary, tradition.<\/p>\n

For the early Zionists, settlement meant the ennoblement of physical labor, development of the economy, military defense, the securing of land and eventual borders, and the building of socialism. But with the declaration of independence and the victory in 1948, Zionism was no longer a revolutionary opposition movement but, rather, had morphed into a nation-state that \u201chad achieved self-determination.\u201d It was the subsequent victory of 1967 that, in Gorenberg\u2019s words, \u201cpulled the settlement ideal from the grave and gave it an unnatural new life.\u201d The new settlers, like their forefathers, saw themselves as rebels. But against what? The state they were defying was not the British Mandate but, rather, their own, and the strategy that had been used to establish borders was now used to annul them. In this analysis, the settlements represent the true tragedy of Zionism: the failure to make \u201cthe transition from revolution to institution, from movement to state.\u201d<\/p>\n

While those who long for the old Israel\u2014the pre-Occupation Israel\u2014are often accused of nostalgia, it is the settlers, Gorenberg implies, who are guilty of the deadliest nostalgia of all. \u201cFrom July 1967, all those involved in settlement saw themselves as serving Zionism. In fact, they were doing the opposite. They were living backward, turning a state into a movement. Stone by stone, they were dismantling the state of Israel.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thus, Gorenberg\u2019s book can be read as an indictment of the strategy, much beloved by Trotskyists, Maoists, and various other ultra-leftists, of \u201cpermanent revolution.\u201d The Unmaking of Israel <\/em>is a great warning about the ways in which a liberation strategy can become a tool of reaction, and of how a kind of political arrested development can reverse even the most progressive achievements. American readers may be reminded, unhappily, of our very own Tea Party, which insists that its anti-tax revolt\u2014so deeply injurious to the social safety net and to the very idea of a common good\u2014is actually the fulfillment of Jefferson\u2019s and Paine\u2019s revolutionary ideals. Neither Israeli settlers nor American Tea Partiers seem to have noticed that their respective countries won their wars of independence, that the governments they are attacking are not foreign tyrannies, and that the programs they espouse represent dysfunction and chaos rather than freedom.<\/p>\n

Gorenberg\u2019s critique of what we might call Zionism\u2019s political immaturity is shared (and, in some cases, was predated) by others\u2014and not only one-staters or anti-Zionists. A decade ago, the Canadian-born writer Bernard Avishai, who divides his time between Israel and the United States, wrote that \u201cZionism\u2019s central ideas, while sound in their time, were never meant to serve as the organizing principles of a democratic state\u2026.Three generations after the Zionist revolution succeeded, Zionist ideas had become wrong.\u201d Avishai argued that it is not only the \u201cmisguided messianism\u201d of the settlers that must be fought; basic government institutions that by definition favor Jews over Arabs, such as the Jewish Agency and the Israeli Land Authority, should be disbanded. These institutions made sense in the context of building\u2014that is, becoming\u2014a state, but their fundamentally anti-democratic character is now indefensible.<\/p>\n

*********<\/strong><\/p>\n

I wish that the late Harvey Pekar could have read Peter Beinart\u2019s book; I would love to know what he would have thought. (Pekar died, age seventy, in 2010.) In the new graphic novel Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me<\/em>, Pekar, longtime writer of the American Splendor<\/em> comic strip, and illustrator JT Waldman explore the conundrums that Israel presents for liberal and left-wing Jews. \u201cFor centuries Jews endured horrible suffering and like other people deserve the right to self-determination, but the current trajectory of Israel frightens me,\u201d Pekar writes. The book\u2019s title is far more polemical than its content; Pekar poses wistful, difficult questions rather than launching complaints or attacks. Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me<\/em> is also, as fans of American Splendor <\/em>would expect, frequently hilarious, though in a wry and quiet way.<\/p>\n

Pekar tells us that he never went to Israel, \u201cbut it\u2019s been a part of my life since childhood.\u201d His parents were Polish Jews who were enthusiastic Zionists\u2014supporters, that is, of a Jewish state\u2014though his mother was also \u201can ardent Marxist.\u201d (In one panel, we see her reading matter: a book or pamphlet whose cover boasts a Star of David and a hammer and sickle.) Pekar takes us through his childhood in Cleveland, including the rather traumatic preparation for his Bar Mitzvah. \u201cHarvey, there\u2019s a thin line between genius and crazy and you\u2019ve crossed it,\u201d his Hebrew-school teacher observes before kicking him out. (Ultimately Pekar\u2019s dad finds an \u201cold guy,\u201d a private tutor, who teaches Harvey well.)<\/p>\n

Much of Not the Israel<\/em> documents Pekar and Waldman\u2019s travels, albeit somewhat idiosyncratic, through Jewish history. (To understand contemporary Israel, Pekar says, \u201cYou gotta look at the big picture, including the old stuff.\u201d) Pekar and Waldman start with the really<\/em> old stuff\u2014Abraham\u2014and take us up to the present. At one point, Waldman sums up Jewish history as \u201chope, fear, redemption, remembering not to forget\u2026yearning for an impossible future\u2026All the ingredients for a perfect Jewish homeland.\u201d This slight book presents, of course, a vastly truncated history, but that\u2014along with its tone of almost childlike understatement\u2014is part of its charm. Of the seventeenth century, Pekar writes, \u201cScholars argue about how many thousands of Jews were murdered by the Cossacks. Suffice it to say it was not a good time to be Jewish and in Eastern Europe. After that, things just stayed bad for Jews.\u201d While this might not say quite everything, who can disagree with such a reasonable assessment?<\/p>\n

As a boy, Pekar cheers the founding of the Jewish state and, later, Israel\u2019s victory in the Six-Day War. But in the 1960s he begins \u201changing out with Marxists and leftists,\u201d and doubts about Israel\u2019s political development, and the Occupation, emerge. (\u201cDid they just ply you with dope and alcohol and get you to turn against Israel?\u201d Waldman asks Pekar, referring to Harvey\u2019s new friends.) The building of the settlements causes particular angst: \u201cGevalt! Are these people serious?\u201d Pekar asks. \u201cThese guys think that just because we Jews have suffered horrible injustices for centuries that virtually anything they do to advance the cause of Israel is legal.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, sometime in the mid-sixties, an aimless, unemployed Pekar\u2014who has already been sacked by the U.S. Navy \u201cbecause I couldn\u2019t wash my clothes right\u201d\u2014considers emigrating to Israel. The book\u2019s funniest section ensues as Pekar learns, alas, that the ingathering of the exiles includes every Jew in the world except Harvey Pekar. \u201cIt would be a big mistake for you to go to Israel,\u201d warns Mr. Cohen, the Israeli official with whom Pekar meets. Perhaps, Pekar asks, he could join a kibbutz? \u201cThey wouldn\u2019t take you, and if they did, they\u2019d throw you out,\u201d Cohen explains. Not one of Pekar\u2019s admittedly few skills impresses Cohen in the least. (\u201cMusic critic? We don\u2019t need music critics in Israel!\u201d) Pekar concludes, \u201cWhat the guy was saying was that I was a loser, and Israel had no time to rehabilitate schmucks\u2026.Israel probably had enough trouble with neurotic American Jews.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pekar avoids easy, cheap resolutions and comes to no definitive conclusions about Israel\u2014though he does reject Waldman\u2019s suggestion to \u201csend the Jews to outer space. Everyone will be happier if we\u2019re out there.\u201d Near the end of this tale, we see Pekar sitting in the library with, quite literally, nothing to say: all the learned books cannot, apparently, provide a solution to what often seems like the world\u2019s most intractable conflict. Yet the book concludes on a lovely, and less desolate, note. In the Epilogue, written by Pekar\u2019s widow, Joyce Brabner, we learn that she gave Pekar a Jewish burial, though one without a rabbi or cantor. \u201cI was\u2026determined to organize something for him that was, as he was, proudly Jewish, but not nationalist,\u201d Brabner writes. \u201cA friend\u2026wrote and guided a gentle service in which he substituted Cleveland, instead of Israel, as Harvey\u2019s place of belonging.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Those who believe that \u201cyou gotta look at the big picture, including the old stuff\u201d to understand Israel\u2019s contemporary dilemmas have many sources, but one of the best is I.F. Stone\u2019s Underground to Palestine<\/em>, originally published in 1946. This is not because a revisiting of post-Holocaust emigration to Israel somehow justifies the Occupation, any more than Hamas\u2019s crimes do. But Stone\u2019s account of his illegal boat trip with a group of (mainly young) Holocaust survivors, from an unnamed port in Europe to Haifa, is a rich reminder of why the establishment of Israel was not an imperialist project, why much of the Left at the time supported it, and why Israel would win its war of independence two years later. \u201cThey have nothing to lose,\u201d Stone observes of his comrades on this trip. \u201cSuch people, in such a mood, are not easily defeated. They who knew the SS are not terrified by the British. They who saw the gas chambers are not frightened by a naval blockade\u2026.I say here what I said in private to Azzam Bey Pasha, head of the Arab League, over coffee in Cairo\u2026.\u2018 Nothing will stop the people I traveled with from rebuilding a great Jewish community in Palestine<\/em>.\u2019\u201d Stone\u2019s book\u2014like its successor, This Is Israel<\/em>, published in 1948\u2014is also an excellent reminder of Britain\u2019s unforgivably destructive Mideast policies as it cynically extricated itself from the Mandate. Here, truly, was the colonial power, aligned with some of the most reactionary forces in Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, and Palestine. \u201cThe British government wants the Middle East to remain an area of backwardness,\u201d Stone charged. \u201cThey offer freedom neither to the Arabs nor to the Jews\u2026.The world will yet see that this is a struggle from which Britain will emerge with shame, but not with victory.\u201d Here, I would suggest, is a key to the obsessive anti-Zionism that pervades the British Left today.<\/p>\n

My edition of Stone\u2019s book contains an addendum entitled \u201cConfessions of a Jewish Dissident\u201d and \u201cThe Other Zionism,\u201d which consists of pieces published in the New York Review of Books <\/em>in 1978. Sadly, much of what Stone wrote then could be written today, though the political situation\u2014among both Israelis and Palestinians\u2014is infinitely worse now than it was thirty-five years ago; indeed, that time seems almost innocent in retrospect. Stone does not disown his former Zionist comrades\u2014nor his medal from the Haganah!\u2014and he does not rue the founding, and the existence, of the Jewish state. But he writes that, as an opponent of the Occupation, he is ostracized by the mainstream Jewish community (\u201cCommentary<\/em> has become the principal pillory for Americans who dissent from the Israeli hard line\u201d\u2014talk about consistency!), and his views receive more of an airing in Tel Aviv than in New York. Of Israeli politics, he observes, \u201cYet the center of moral gravity in the Zionist movement has moved steadily rightward. It is hard to find any trace of that prophetic ethic\u2026in Prime Minister Begin.\u201d Most important, he delineates what, in 1978, was the only solution to the conflict\u2014which, in 2012, is still the only solution to the conflict: \u201cThe two peoples must live together, either in the same Palestinian state or side by side\u2026But either solution requires\u2026a recognition that two peoples\u2014not one\u2014occupy the same land and have the same rights\u2026.Reconciliation alone can guarantee Israel\u2019s survival.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Every July 4, starting in the 1960s, my father would hoist an American flag over our house in Fire Island. (As it happens, I.F. Stone lived a block away from us, and he was a figure of much reverence.) This was at the height of the Vietnam War\u2014which my father had opposed since the Tonkin Gulf resolution (\u201cIt\u2019s a phony!\u201d he presciently claimed)\u2014when stars and stripes were associated with the likes of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew and Richard J. Daley. \u201cWhy should they<\/em> own the flag?\u201d my father, a proud WWII veteran, asked. \u201cThe flag belongs to us too!\u201d<\/p>\n

I think the same about the current debates over Israel. Why should Mortimer Zuckerman\u2014or Mitt Romney or, god forbid, Christians United for Israel\u2014be described as \u201cpro-Israel\u201d? Alternately, why should we on the left disown the founding principles of Zionism, and its great achievements, because of what post-\u201967 Israeli governments have done\u2014any more than we have disowned socialism because of what the Soviet Union became? The \u201cactually existing Zionism\u201d of Sharon and Netanyahu is not the only possible kind, regardless of what Adam Shatz or Philip Weiss or Jacqueline Rose might say.<\/p>\n

If Beinart\u2019s book\u2014and those that preceded it\u2014do any good, it will be by helping to reframe the discussion over Israel. And so, to make clear: Ending the Occupation is pro-Israel. Disbanding the settlements is pro-Israel. (Indeed, Gorenberg calls this \u201cthe authentic Zionist task of the moment.\u201d) An economically vibrant Israel is pro-Israel. The restoration of secular, democratic Israeli institutions is pro-Israel. Borders are pro-Israel.<\/p>\n

Some on the left, including the Israeli Left, have argued that it is already too late for all this: the Occupation has lasted too long, the settlements have spread too far, a two-state solution is no longer possible. \u201cIsraeli settlements are a by-product of Israeli democracy and not a negation of it,\u201d Joseph Dana, a Jewish-American journalist based in Tel Aviv and Ramallah, recently argued in the National<\/em>. But the question of two-state viability is no longer being posed only by anti-Zionists or binationalists. Longtime Israeli peace activist Gershon Baskin recently wrote an anguished column in the relatively centrist Jerusalem Post<\/em> about what, he fears, is the imminent death of the two-state solution\u2014and, therefore, of his \u201cZionist dream.\u201d \u201cI see a great disaster about to unfold,\u201d he warned. \u201cI simply cannot understand why people are not shouting \u2018don\u2019t let this happen!\u2019\u2026What do we do when partition is no longer possible?\u2026The two-state solution\u2026is no more than a speech, empty words on paper with absolutely no value any more.\u201d<\/p>\n

And so the question we need to ask, and answer, is not whether Peter Beinart loves the Jews but whether Gershon Baskin\u2019s despair\u2014or, alternately, Gershom Gorenberg\u2019s belief in political possibility\u2014is right.<\/p>\n

________________________<\/p>\n

Susie Linfield<\/em>\u2019s book The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence has recently been published in paperback and is being translated into Italian and Turkish. She directs the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University, where she teaches journalism.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 dissentmagazine.org<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Join the BDS-BOYCOTT, DIVESTMENT, SANCTIONS<\/em> <\/strong><\/span>campaign to protest the Israeli barbaric siege of Gaza, illegal occupation of the Palestine nation\u2019s territory, the apartheid wall, its inhuman and degrading treatment of the Palestinian people, and the more than 7,000 Palestinian men, women, elderly and children arbitrarily locked up in Israeli prisons.<\/p>\n

DON’T BUY<\/strong> PRODUCTS WHOSE<\/strong> BARCODE<\/strong> STARTS WITH<\/strong> 729<\/strong>, which indicates that it is produced in Israel. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0DO YOUR PART! MAKE A DIFFERENCE!<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

7 2 9: BOYCOTT FOR JUSTICE!<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Books Discussed in this Essay:
\nThe Crisis of Zionism by Peter Beinart
\nThe Unmaking of Israel by Gershom Gorenberg
\nNot the Israel My Parents Promised Me by Harvey Pekar and JT Waldman Hill and Wang
\nUnderground to Palestine and Reflections Thirty Years Later by I.F. Stone Hutchinson.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23832","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=23832"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23832\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}