>How about JINSA, the "Jewish Institute for National Security
>Affairs, a non-profit, non-partisan educational organization
>committed to explaining the need for a prudent national security
>policy for the United States, addressing the security requirements
>of both the United States and the State of Israel, and strengthening
>the strategic cooperation relationship between these two great
>democracies." ? Here the term 'Jewish' and "Israel' are seen as
>co-extensive.
Of course the Zionists would like to make Jews and Israel synonymous (and they have themselves partly to blame when reckless anti-Zionists do the same). As Judith Butler put it in her very fine LRB piece on the topic:
>Summers's logic suggests that certain actions of the Israeli state
>must be allowed to go on unimpeded by public protest, for fear that
>any protest would be tantamount to anti-semitism, if not
>anti-semitism itself. Now, all forms of anti- semitism must be
>opposed, but we have here a set of serious confusions about the
>forms anti- semitism takes. Indeed, if the charge of anti- semitism
>is used to defend Israel at all costs, then its power when used
>against those who do discriminate against Jews - who do violence to
>synagogues in Europe, wave Nazi flags or support anti-semitic
>organisations - is radically diluted. Many critics of Israel now
>dismiss all claims of anti-semitism as 'trumped up', having been
>exposed to their use as a way of censoring political speech.
>
>Summers doesn't tell us why divestment campaigns or other forms of
>public protest are anti-semitic. According to him, some forms of
>anti-semitism are characterised as such retroactively, which means
>that nothing should be said or done that will then be taken to be
>anti-semitic by others. But what if those others are wrong? If we
>take one form of anti-semitism to be defined retroactively, what is
>left of the possibility of legitimate protest against a state,
>either by its own population or anyone else? If we say that every
>time the word 'Israel' is spoken, the speaker really means 'Jews',
>then we have foreclosed in advance the possibility that the speaker
>really means 'Israel'. If, on the other hand, we distinguish between
>anti-semitism and forms of protest against the Israeli state (or
>right-wing settlers who sometimes act independently of the state),
>acknowledging that sometimes they do, disturbingly, work together,
>then we stand a chance of understanding that world Jewry does not
>see itself as one with Israel in its present form and practice, and
>that Jews in Israel do not necessarily see themselves as one with
>the state. In other words, the possibility of a substantive Jewish
>peace movement depends on our observing a productive and critical
>distance from the state of Israel (which can be coupled with a
>profound investment in its future course).
>
>Summers's view seems to imply that criticism of Israel is
>'anti-Israel' in the sense that it is understood to challenge the
>right of Israel to exist. A criticism of Israel is not the same,
>however, as a challenge to Israel's existence, even if there are
>conditions under which it would be possible to say that one leads to
>the other. A challenge to the right of Israel to exist can be
>construed as a challenge to the existence of the Jewish people only
>if one believes that Israel alone keeps the Jewish people alive or
>that all Jews invest their sense of perpetuity in the state of
>Israel in its current or traditional forms. One could argue,
>however, that those polities which safeguard the right to criticise
>them stand a better chance of surviving than those that don't. For a
>criticism of Israel to be taken as a challenge to the survival of
>the Jews, we would have to assume not only that 'Israel' cannot
>change in response to legitimate criticism, but that a more
>radically democratic Israel would be bad for Jews. This would be to
>suppose that criticism is not a Jewish value, which clearly flies in
>the face not only of long traditions of Talmudic disputation, but of
>all the religious and cultural sources that have been part of Jewish
>life for centuries.
>
>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.
[...]
>What is ironic is that in equating Zionism with Jewishness, Summers
>is adopting the very tactic favoured by anti-semites.
[...]
>In holding out for a distinction to be made between Israel and Jews,
>I am calling for a space for dissent for Jews, and non-Jews, who
>have criticisms of Israel to articulate; but I am also opposing
>anti-semitic reductions of Jewishness to Israeli interests. The
>'Jew' is no more defined by Israel than by anti-semitism. The 'Jew'
>exceeds both determinations, and is to be found, substantively, as a
>historically and culturally changing identity that takes no single
>form and has no single telos. Once the distinction is made,
>discussion of both Zionism and anti-semitism can begin, since it
>will be as important to understand the legacy of Zionism and to
>debate its future as to oppose anti-semitism wherever we find it.
>