On Sat, 14 Mar 2009, SA wrote:
>> [Pointed to by Lou Proyect on Marxmail. If Cohen's saying this stuff,
>> something's changing in elite U.S. attitudes towards Israel.]
>
> Man, check this out:
>
> ---
>
> An open debate on Israel
>
> The Los Angeles Times (Editorial)
> March 12, 2009
> http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-freeman12-2009mar12,0,6110962.story
And check the below on their Monday Op-ed page.
What has gotten into the LAT? This is way beyond the normal pale for a newspaper of record. Have they done this before and I just didn't notice?
============
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-ehrenreich15-2009mar15,0,6684861.story
Monday, March 16, 2009 The Los Angeles Times
Zionism is the Problem
The Zionist ideal of a Jewish state is keeping Israelis and Palestinians from living in peace.
by Ben Ehrenreich
It's hard to imagine now, but in 1944, six years after
Kristallnacht, Lessing J. Rosenwald, president of the American
Council for Judaism, felt comfortable equating the Zionist ideal of
Jewish statehood with "the concept of a racial state -- the
Hitlerian concept." For most of the last century, a principled
opposition to Zionism was a mainstream stance within American
Judaism.
Even after the foundation of Israel, anti-Zionism was not a
particularly heretical position. Assimilated Reform Jews like
Rosenwald believed that Judaism should remain a matter of religious
rather than political allegiance; the ultra-Orthodox saw Jewish
statehood as an impious attempt to "push the hand of God"; and
Marxist Jews -- my grandparents among them -- tended to see Zionism,
and all nationalisms, as a distraction from the more essential
struggle between classes.
To be Jewish, I was raised to believe, meant understanding oneself
as a member of a tribe that over and over had been cast out,
mistreated, slaughtered. Millenniums of oppression that preceded it
did not entitle us to a homeland or a right to self-defense that
superseded anyone else's. If they offered us anything exceptional,
it was a perspective on oppression and an obligation born of the
prophetic tradition: to act on behalf of the oppressed and to cry
out at the oppressor.
For the last several decades, though, it has been all but impossible
to cry out against the Israeli state without being smeared as an
anti-Semite, or worse. To question not just Israel's actions, but
the Zionist tenets on which the state is founded, has for too long
been regarded an almost unspeakable blasphemy.
Yet it is no longer possible to believe with an honest conscience
that the deplorable conditions in which Palestinians live and die in
Gaza and the West Bank come as the result of specific policies,
leaders or parties on either side of the impasse. The problem is
fundamental: Founding a modern state on a single ethnic or religious
identity in a territory that is ethnically and religiously diverse
leads inexorably either to politics of exclusion (think of the
139-square-mile prison camp that Gaza has become) or to wholesale
ethnic cleansing. Put simply, the problem is Zionism.
It has been argued that Zionism is an anachronism, a leftover
ideology from the era of 19th century romantic nationalisms wedged
uncomfortably into 21st century geopolitics. But Zionism is not
merely outdated. Even before 1948, one of its basic oversights was
readily apparent: the presence of Palestinians in Palestine. That
led some of the most prominent Jewish thinkers of the last century,
many of them Zionists, to balk at the idea of Jewish statehood. The
Brit Shalom movement -- founded in 1925 and supported at various
times by Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem -- argued
for a secular, binational state in Palestine in which Jews and Arabs
would be accorded equal status. Their concerns were both moral and
pragmatic. The establishment of a Jewish state, Buber feared, would
mean "premeditated national suicide."
The fate Buber foresaw is upon us: a nation that has lived in a
state of war for decades, a quarter-million Arab citizens with
second-class status and more than 5 million Palestinians deprived of
the most basic political and human rights. If two decades ago
comparisons to the South African apartheid system felt like
hyperbole, they now feel charitable. The white South African regime,
for all its crimes, never attacked the Bantustans with anything like
the destructive power Israel visited on Gaza in December and
January, when nearly1,300 Palestinians were killed, one-third of
them children.
Israeli policies have rendered the once apparently inevitable
two-state solution less and less feasible. Years of Israeli
settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have
methodically diminished the viability of a Palestinian state.
Israel's new prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has even refused to
endorse the idea of an independent Palestinian state, which suggests
an immediate future of more of the same: more settlements, more
punitive assaults.
All of this has led to a revival of the Brit Shalom idea of a
single, secular binational state in which Jews and Arabs have equal
political rights. The obstacles are, of course, enormous. They
include not just a powerful Israeli attachment to the idea of an
exclusively Jewish state, but its Palestinian analogue: Hamas' ideal
of Islamic rule. Both sides would have to find assurance that their
security was guaranteed. What precise shape such a state would take
-- a strict, vote-by-vote democracy or a more complex federalist
system -- would involve years of painful negotiation, wiser leaders
than now exist and an uncompromising commitment from the rest of the
world, particularly from the United States.
Meanwhile, the characterization of anti-Zionism as an "epidemic"
more dangerous than anti-Semitism reveals only the unsustainability
of the position into which Israel's apologists have been forced.
Faced with international condemnation, they seek to limit the
discourse, to erect walls that delineate what can and can't be said.
It's not working. Opposing Zionism is neither anti-Semitic nor
particularly radical. It requires only that we take our own values
seriously and no longer, as the book of Amos has it, "turn justice
into wormwood and hurl righteousness to the ground."
Establishing a secular, pluralist, democratic government in Israel
and Palestine would of course mean the abandonment of the Zionist
dream. It might also mean the only salvation for the Jewish ideals
of justice that date back to Jeremiah.
© 2009 The Los Angeles Times
Ben Ehrenreich is the author of the novel "The Suitors."