We Need to Talk about Israel
Lynne Segal
'What do you love about Israel?’, our critics ask. It is a hostile question, designed to undermine the basis of our declaration, Independent Jewish Voices (IJV), launched in Britain in February of this year. Jews like to see themselves as a disputatious people; it’s the nub of endlessly recycled Jewish jokes. Yet the laughter stops in the blink of an eyelid, once discussion turns to Israel. IJV wants the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to be addressed in terms of general principles of human rights and social justice, with agreements reached in accordance with international law. Our most passionate critics besmirch our voices, with accusations of self-hatred, betrayal, anti-Semitism. Jews generally have always prided themselves on traditions of commitment to principles of justice, equality and free speech. Yet, such principles are automatically shut out by some self-affirming Jews, observant or secular, never to be aired in the light of day, when heads turn to the starkest human rights violations visible throughout forty years of Israel’s illegal expansion into, rule over, or enclosure of, East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip. How dare you speak of Israel? Why aren’t you addressing Chechnya, Dofar, Iran?, critics demand. We do, as it happens; though even if we did not, this would hardly be a rational response to our conviction that we need to talk about Israel.
Just as we hoped, the launching of IJV has been widely reported internationally. It has generated unexpectedly high levels of support and thoughtful discussion, both in Britain and dozens other newspapers around the world, from Ha'aretz in Israel to the The Hindustani Times in India. There were over two and a half thousand responses to the series of articles we published in the webpages of the Guardian, Comment is Free, in February, thousands of supportive letters and, most welcome of all, useful presentation of conflicting views about Israel within many Jewish publications where it is rarely found, with Britain’s own Jewish Chronicle carrying several articles and a front page banner headline, ‘The rebellion Goes Global’. True enough, within weeks, I notice, Australians have their own Independent Jewish Voices (IAJV) (http://iajv.org.).
Belgium, Canada and other countries are at this moment launching similar declarations. Sadly, as we expected, our stance has also provoked bitter denunciations from and abusive encounters with other Jews. ‘Jews for Genocide’, was the most extreme – almost obscene – headline introducing the report from Britain’s most established conservative Jewish commentator, Melanie Phillips, on her own website.
Yet what we are saying contains little that should be new to anyone about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has been dramatically deteriorating for years now. We know that there have been Palestinian atrocities, and rockets still fire out of Gaza onto innocent Israeli civilians. We deplore the fear and loss of life this generates. We also know that the Israel has been responsible for the most continual and extreme elimination of human rights in its occupied territories for the last forty years. This includes not only brutal policies of collective punishment, arbitrary arrests and accidental shootings, but also routinely undermining Palestinians right to free movement, water, education, or even access to sources of livelihood within what their own territories. There is really little doubt that the strongest party in this conflict, the Israeli state, has only rarely attempted to do all it can, and mostly done nothing at all, to negotiate an acceptable peace agreement to put an end to such atrocities.
‘To this very day, those negotiations have not even started’, Uri Avnery, the founder of Gush Shalom (The Peace Bloc), affirms on the website of the organization he leads. Back in the 1930s Avnery fought in a paramilitary group to help establish the state of Israel, so he can now say confidently, ‘I am an Israeli, and I do not feel that I need anybody's recognition of the right of my state to exist’. But his life has for some time been dedicated to attempting to help bring about at least the beginning of genuine peace negotiations to end a conflict that he, like a minority of other Israelis, believe to have become as destructive for its ‘winners’ as for its ‘losers’: ‘Successive Israeli governments have prevented it because they were not ready under any circumstances to fix final borders’. Some of Israel’s own historians, such as Avi Shlaim in The Iron Wall, have themselves been documenting this situation for years, agreeing that the Israeli government has always seen its best interests served in never finally agreeing to anything at all, while any promises it has made have always been broken. There has never at any stage been a prolonged cessation of Israel’s expansion into Palestinain land in the West Bank, while today Gaza remains imprisoned.
IJV exists because we wish to speak about this situation. We have strong reasons for wanting our voices to be heard. In the last twelve months alone, Israel launched a massive military strike against civilian areas in Lebanon in the summer of 2006, following serious border skirmishes with and rocket attacks from Hezbollah. The Israeli PM Ehud Olmert immediately flew to the USA to announce, ‘I believe this a war that is fought by all the Jews’. Apparently in agreement, the Jewish Board of Deputies in Britain called a demonstration in support of what proved to be Olmert’s quite disastrous military venture, which ended with the death of thousands of innocent Lebanese, the destruction of much of the country’s civilian infrastructure, yet served only to strengthen the position of Hezbollah within it. We oppose the automatic US-led Western acceptance, if not encouragement, of Israel’s prevailing policy of first-resort to massive military retribution over other possible forms of negotiation. Though they may fear to express them, we believe many Jewish people around the world are disturbed by Israel’s aggressive policies. A survey amongst British Jews, for example, found that amongst a group of practicing Jews, 31% agreed that they were ‘often very critical of Israeli government policies’, against 28% who disagreed (Jewish Chronicle 18 June, 2004).
How can we even discuss our worries if issues of identity and putative primordial affiliations are allowed to cloud the issue? Within IJV we have no single understandings of what it means to be Jewish, we have variable ties to Jewish communities and differing feelings about Israel and its significance for Jewish people worldwide. However, Jeremy Newmark, as spokesman of the Jewish Leadership Council in Britain, merely illustrates the problem we exist to address when he dismisses us with the comment, ‘These are people who have no profile in the community or in Jewish life in recent history’. The same diversionary denunciations are directed at others who discuss the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. In the USA a campaign to smear ex-US President Jimmy Carter began as soon as he published his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, arguing for a renewed effort to start the Middle East peace process. Leaders from mainstream American Jewish organizations, ignoring the minority of alternative voices such as Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), Tikkun or Jews of Conscience, orchestrated the campaign, with Abraham Foxman (director of the Anti-Defamation League) branding Carter’s views ‘outrageous’ and ‘bigoted’. In parallel, the Indiana university professor, Alvin Rosenfeld, denounced the historian Tony Judt, and playwright Tony Kushner, among others, as responsible for encouraging anti-Semitism for their criticisms of Israeli’s continued policy of occupation. Yet, you have only to listen to some of Israel’s own most authoritative dissident voices, such as that of former Israeli MP, Shulamit Aloni, to hear her mourn, ‘Yes, There is Apartheid in Israel’: ‘through its army, the government of Israel practices a brutal form of Apartheid in the territory it occupies. Its army has turned every Palestinian village and town into a fenced-in, or blocked-in, detention camp.’ (CounterPunch, January 8, 2007)
Jews today are deeply divided over many things. This is hardly surprising, when identities are never the straightforward markings that those who claim to speak in their name would like others to think, whatever the identity. But Jewish identity, with its tragic histories of persecution and genocide, arouses the very fiercest passions and conflict. Strangely, as I explore in my book, Making Trouble, my own engagements with Israel today reprise aspects of my Australian grandfather, beginning over a century ago. Throughout most of the first half of the twentieth century this man, Alfred Harris, was the editor of Australia’s main Jewish paper, The Hebrew Standard. There he was increasingly embroiled in a battle over Zionism, along with his friend and adviser, Sir Isaac Isaacs (who became Governor General in 1931) and the leading Australian Rabbi of the 1930s, Francis Cohen. Reflecting sentiments common amongst Jews in much of Western Europe then, they were critical of the World Zionist Organization, founded in Vienna in 1897 by the secular Jew, Theodor Herzl. Prominent British opponents of Zionism at the time believed that Herzl’s plan to create a separate Jewish state was itself ‘a child of anti-Semitism’. In their view, those who supported the plan were abandoning the struggle to defend the right of Jewish people to live free from persecution in the differing European homelands they had inhabited for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. They were hardly wide of the mark. The leading non-Jewish supporters of Zionism were indeed often motivated by anti-Semitism, including Arthur Balfour, who had pioneered the Aliens Act of 1905 (specifically designed to keep Jews out of Britain) before later signing the Balfour Declaration encouraging the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine in 1917: Jews, he warned parliament ‘remained a people apart’.
Deeply worried about the rights of the overwhelmingly Arab population of Palestine if a Jewish state were to be imposed on the land they had lived in for fourteen centuries, The Hebrew Standard supported moves to find alternative Australian sites to establish a Jewish homeland for those in need of shelter as discrimination against European Jews heightened. Sites were suggested on land in the Northern Territory and later in Western Australia, but both attempts foundered because the Australian government refused to allow the formation of an autonomous Jewish state within its territory. However, The Hebrew Standard continued its opposition to a Jewish state in Palestine, my grandfather’s editorials insisting that such moves would inevitably fail to allow ‘due weight to the spiritual aspirations of the Christians and Moslems’. To ensure justice for all three religious groups, he backed the formation of a Palestinian state. Zionism, his editorials summed up, was ‘unjust, dangerous to a degree, even cruel in its inevitable consequences and, after all, unattainable.’ He was proved wrong on only that last, crucial, point. There was treachery and racism involved in Britain’s complicity with the foundation of Israel. In the devastation this brought to its existing indigenous population, following the catastrophe of the Holocaust, I see neighbours paying the price for the sins of the fathers – the fatality of Western anti-Semitism.
Times change. Anti-Semitic attacks still occur in Europe, on the rise especially in France. They are utterly deplorable, even though in Europe such assaults display more discontinuities than continuities with the past. It does not mitigate the crime of anti-Semitic attacks to point out that racism and xenophobia are on the rise generally at the moment, with Europe’s Arab and Muslim inhabitants overwhelmingly its first targets. In Britain, there has also been a disturbing rise in anti-Semitic attacks. It does, however, place them in a clearer contemporary perspective to point out that in this devastating hierarchy of hatreds, anti-Semitic attacks are at the lowest level of race attacks overall: roughly 2%, compared to 32% of attacks against people of African and Caribbean origin, 30% against Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, and 22% against white Europeans (‘Report reveals hierarchy of hate’, the Guardian, Monday March 7, 2005). In attending to actual anti-Semitism, past and present, it is crucial neither to underplay nor embellish the particular patterns of prejudice, discrimination, violence and neglect all around us. In Western countries, Jewish groups who accuse the government and media of inaction mislead us. Attacks against Jews and Judaism are widely reported and robustly condemned, with police protection very evident when requested. When Abraham Foxman, in Never Again? The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism, declares that Jews, wherever they are, now confront a threat as great ‘as the one we faced in the 1930s – if not a greater one’, he is making a reduction we find as offensive as it is misleading. This is because much of the ‘new anti-Semitism’ he speaks of is synonymous with criticism of Israel’s actions in its occupied territory.
Jewish histories have never been undivided in their views about Israel. However, what is rather wonderful in my own case is that, unexpectedly, I have acquired the very closest ties with some peace activists in Israel. Their existence is what I love about Israel. For them, it is no great secret that there can be no lasting peace so long as the Israeli military machine keeps over three million Palestinians living under virtual detention in its occupied territories, in the land seized in 1967. These Israeli dissenters, some calling themselves Zionists, have long been active in dozens of grass-roots struggles and cross-border activities, working tirelessly for peace. Genuinely fearing that his country today poses more of a danger than a sactuary for Jews, the Israeli journalist Akiva Eldar said a few years ago: ‘It is much easier to claim that the entire world is against us than to admit that the State of Israel, which arose as a refuge and a source of pride for Jews, has not only turned into a place less Jewish and less safe for it citizens, but has become a genuine source of shameful embarrassment to Jews who choose to live outside its borders.’ (Ha'aretz, November 3, 2003). He exaggerates. Many diasporic Jews are also adept at turning potential shame into anger; the greater the condemnation, the fiercer the anger. Talking about Israel, there remains an ever-increasing defensiveness, on the one hand, and ever-growing despair, on the other. There are only occasional glimmers of hope amongst for Jews seeking a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is to expand what we see as that glimmer of hope that IJV was formed.