>But what was easy to conclude with regard to South Africa seems
>impossible with regards to something even more sinister - as in worse -
>Israel. That is because an honest and rational discourse on _what to
>do_ about Israel continues to be impossible in the US, including its
>left. And yes, Doug, that is the problem. Otherwise, why isn't there a
>strong boycott/sanction Israel movement, like there was with South
>Africa?
The ANC and SACP supported a boycott/sanction movement - is anyone in Israel doing so?
Speaking of which, I finally got around to reading Judith Butler's excellent piece in the Aug 21 London Review of Books. An excellent excerpt:
>What are we to make of Jews who disidentify with Israel or, at
>least, with the Israeli state? Or Jews who identify with Israel, but
>do not condone some of its practices? There is a wide range here:
>those who are silently ambivalent about the way Israel handles
>itself; those who only half articulate their doubts about the
>occupation; those who are strongly opposed to the occupation, but
>within a Zionist framework; those who would like to see Zionism
>rethought or, indeed, abandoned. Jews may hold any of these
>opinions, but voice them only to their family, or only to their
>friends; or voice them in public but then face an angry reception at
>home. Given this Jewish ambivalence, ought we not to be suspicious
>of any effort to equate Jews with Israel? The argument that all Jews
>have a heartfelt investment in the state of Israel is untrue. Some
>have a heartfelt investment in corned beef sandwiches or in certain
>Talmudic tales, religious rituals and liturgy, in memories of their
>grandmother, the taste of borscht or the sounds of the old Yiddish
>theatre. Others have an investment in historical and cultural
>archives from Eastern Europe or from the Holocaust, or in forms of
>labour activism, civil rights struggles and social justice that are
>thoroughly secular, and exist in relative independence from the
>question of Israel.
>
>What do we make of Jews such as myself, who are emotionally invested
>in the state of Israel, critical of its current form, and call for a
>radical restructuring of its economic and juridical basis precisely
>because we are invested in it? It is always possible to say that
>such Jews have turned against their own Jewishness. But what if one
>criticises Israel in the name of one's Jewishness, in the name of
>justice, precisely because such criticisms seem 'best for the Jews'?
>Why wouldn't it always be 'best for the Jews' to embrace forms of
>democracy that extend what is 'best' to everyone, Jewish or not? I
>signed a petition framed in these terms, an 'Open Letter from
>American Jews', in which 3700 American Jews opposed the Israeli
>occupation, though in my view it was not nearly strong enough: it
>did not call for the end of Zionism, or for the reallocation of
>arable land, for rethinking the Jewish right of return or for the
>fair distribution of water and medicine to Palestinians, and it did
>not call for the reorganisation of the Israeli state on a more
>radically egalitarian basis. It was, nevertheless, an overt
>criticism of Israel.
>
>Many of those who signed that petition will have felt what might
>reasonably be called heartache at taking a public stand against
>Israeli policy, at the thought that Israel, by subjecting 3.5
>million Palestinians to military occupation, represents the Jews in
>a way that these petitioners find not only objectionable, but
>terrible to endure, as Jews; it is as Jews that they assert their
>disidentification with that policy, that they seek to widen the rift
>between the state of Israel and the Jewish people in order to
>produce an alternative vision of the future. The petitioners
>exercised a democratic right to voice criticism, and sought to get
>economic pressure put on Israel by the US and other countries, to
>implement rights for Palestinians otherwise deprived of basic
>conditions of self-determination, to end the occupation, to secure
>an independent Palestinian state or to re-establish the basis of the
>Israeli state without regard to religion so that Jewishness would
>constitute only one cultural and religious reality, and be protected
>by the same laws that protect the rights of others.
>
>Identifying Israel with Jewry obscures the existence of the small
>but important post-Zionist movement in Israel, including the
>philosophers Adi Ophir and Anat Biletzki, the sociologist Uri Ram,
>the professor of theatre Avraham Oz and the poet Yitzhak Laor. Are
>we to say that Israelis who are critical of Israeli policy are
>self-hating Jews, or insensitive to the ways in which criticism may
>fan the flames of anti-semitism? What of the new Brit Tzedek
>organisation in the US, numbering close to 20,000 members at the
>last count, which seeks to offer a critical alternative to the
>American Israel Political Action Committee, opposing the current
>occupation and working for a two-state solution? What of Jewish
>Voices for Peace, Jews against the Occupation, Jews for Peace in the
>Middle East, the Faculty for Israeli- Palestinian Peace, Tikkun,
>Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, Women in Black or, indeed,
>Neve Shalom-Wahat al-Salam, the only village collectively governed
>by both Jews and Arabs in the state of Israel? What do we make of
>B'Tselem, the Israeli organisation that monitors human rights abuses
>in the West Bank and Gaza, or Gush Shalom, an Israeli organisation
>opposing the occupation, or Yesh Gvul, which represents the Israeli
>soldiers who refuse to serve in the Occupied Territories? And what
>of Ta'ayush, a Jewish-Arab coalition against policies that lead to
>isolation, poor medical care, house arrest, the destruction of
>educational institutions, and lack of water and food for
>Palestinians?
>
>It will not do to equate Jews with Zionists or Jewishness with
>Zionism. There were debates among Jews throughout the 19th and early
>20th centuries as to whether Zionism ought to become the basis of a
>state, whether the Jews had any right to lay claim to land inhabited
>by Palestinians for centuries, and as to the future for a Jewish
>political project based on a violent expropriation of land. There
>were those who sought to make Zionism compatible with peaceful
>co-existence with Arabs, and those who used it as an excuse for
>military aggression, and continue to do so. There were those who
>thought, and still think, that Zionism is not a legitimate basis for
>a democratic state in a situation where a diverse population must be
>assumed to practise different religions, and that no group ought to
>be excluded from any right accorded to citizens in general on the
>basis of their ethnic or religious views. And there are those who
>maintain that the violent appropriation of Palestinian land, and the
>dislocation of 700,000 Palestinians, was an unsuitable foundation on
>which to build a state. Yet Israel is now repeating its founding
>gesture in the containment and dehumanisation of Palestinians in the
>Occupied Territories. Indeed, the wall now being built threatens to
>leave 95,000 Palestinians homeless. These are questions about
>Zionism that should and must be asked in a public domain, and
>universities are surely one place where we might expect critical
>reflections on Zionism to take place. Instead, we are being asked,
>by Summers and others, to treat any critical approach to Zionism as
>effective anti-semitism and, hence, to rule it out as a topic for
>legitimate disagreement.
>
>Many important distinctions are elided by the mainstream press when
>it assumes that there are only two possible positions on the Middle
>East, the 'pro-Israel' and the 'pro-Palestinian'. The assumption is
>that these are discrete views, internally homogeneous,
>non-overlapping, that if one is 'pro-Israel' then anything Israel
>does is all right, or if 'pro-Palestinian' then anything
>Palestinians do is all right. But few people's political views
>occupy such extremes. One can, for instance, be in favour of
>Palestinian self- determination, but condemn suicide bombings, and
>find others who share both those views but differ on the form
>self-determination ought to take. One can be in favour of Israel's
>right to exist, but still ask what is the most legitimate and
>democratic form that existence ought to take. If one questions the
>present form, is one anti- Israel? If one holds out for a truly
>democratic Israel-Palestine, is one anti-Israel? Or is one trying to
>find a better form for this polity, one that may well involve any
>number of possibilities: a revised version of Zionism, a
>post-Zionist Israel, a self-determining Palestine, or an
>amalgamation of Israel into a greater Israel- Palestine where all
>racially and religiously based qualifications on rights and
>entitlements would be eliminated?