{news} Fw: USGP-INT The new Jewish bi-nationalism (Mark Levine, History News Network)

[Justine McCabe]

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Subject: USGP-INT The new Jewish bi-nationalism (Mark Levine, History News 
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> The New Jewish Bi-Nationalism
>
> By Mark A. LeVine
> History News Network (George Mason University),
> October 14, 2006
> http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/30789.html
>
> Mr. LeVine is professor of modern Middle Eastern
> history, culture, and Islamic studies at the
> University of California, Irvine, and author of
> the forthcoming books: Why They Don't Hate Us:
> Lifting the Veil on the Axis of Evil; and
> Overthrowing Geography: Jaffa, Tel Aviv and the
> Struggle for Palestine, 1880-1948. He is also a
> contributor, with Viggo Mortensen and Pilar
> Perez, to Twilight of Empire: Responses to
> Occupation. Click here to access his homepage
> <http://www.meaning.org/levinebio.html>.
>
>
> One of the things that has made Judaism unique
> among world religions is that from the start Jews
> have considered themselves members not just of
> the same faith, but of the same nation. Unlike
> Islam, in which the "ummah" comprises a
> world-wide community not grounded in any specific
> territory, the people of Israel--'Am
> Yisrael--have always been tied to a specific
> territory, the Land of Israel.
>
> It is natural, then, that while the pioneers of
> Zionism were mostly secular Jews, the Zionist
> movement and subsequently Israeli identity have
> always had a strongly religious core, which
> became increasingly powerful after the conquest
> of Israel's biblical heart land in the West Bank
> in 1967.
>
> The combination of religion, nationalism and
> territory within Jewish peoplehood has made it
> very difficult for Israelis, and Diaspora Jews,
> to accept that Palestinians could have an equal
> claim to the Land of Israel. To do so would call
> into question the fundamental basis of Jewish
> religious and national identity.
>
> From the beginnings of Zionist colonization in
> Palestine, however, there have been Jews who felt
> that the movement's maximalist
> territorial-nationalist aims were both
> unrealizable and immoral. Already in 1889 the
> great Hebrew writer Ahad Haam sent a scathing
> dispatch to the Russian Hebrew language newspaper
> Ha Melitz, documenting the mistreatment of
> Palestinian Arabs by Zionist immigrants. And in
> the 1920s, as the conflict over land between Jews
> and Palestinian Arabs was reaching crisis
> proportions, a group of prominent Jewish leaders,
> including Martin Buber, Gershom Sholem and Judah
> Magnes created the Brit Shalom (Covenant of
> Peace), which advocated a bi-national solution to
> the worsening intercommunal conflict.
>
> Not surprisingly, few Palestinians were willing
> to accept Brit Shalom's call for equal rights to
> Palestine when Jews still constituted a small
> minority of the country's population. And few
> Zionist leaders were willing to consider giving
> up their dreams of an exclusively Jewish state,
> particularly when their benefactor, Great
> Britain, held the mandate to prepare the country
> for independence. Sharing the land became ever
> less likely in the wake of the Holocaust and 1948
> war.
>
> In the wake of the establishment of Israel, and a
> generation later the conquest of the West Bank
> and Gaza Strip, the idea of bi-nationalism fell
> into the intellectual and political wilderness.
> The few Jews who advocated it were castigated as
> dangerous dreamers, self-hating Jews, or worse.
> The Oslo peace process , which was clearly--if
> not officially--premised on a two state solution,
> seemed to relegate the binational idea to the
> proverbial dust bin of history.
>
> But as the last decade has shown, Oslo was a
> fatally flawed process. Palestinians share the
> blame for its collapse, but its failure was most
> deeply rooted in the inability of most Israelis,
> even the politicians behind the peace process, to
> pay the economic and territorial price for real
> Palestinian self-determination: a truly
> independent state, free of Jewish settlements,
> with full economic sovereignty and control of its
> resources. And so the years of the peace process
> saw the number of settlers double, while land
> expropriations, the expansion of by-pass roads,
> and the destruction of Palestinian homes all
> continued at an alarming rate. This during the
> very period Palestinians were supposed to be
> moving towards independence.
>
> By the fall of 2000, all that was needed was the
> right spark--provided by Ariel Sharon's
> provocative visit to the al-Aqsa mosque--to set
> off a new intifadah. Six years later, the idea of
> a viable Palestinian state being established in
> the foreseeable future is hard to imagine.
>
> The current impasse in Israeli-Palestinian
> negotiations, coupled with the intensification of
> the West Bank occupation and increasing
> militarization of Israeli-Jewish identity has led
> a small but growing number of Jews to rediscover
> the bi-national option as a morally, politically
> and historically viable solution to the
> Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Such a vision sees
> Jews and Palestinian Arabs living throughout the
> Land of Israel/Palestine in peace, and with equal
> political and civil rights.
>
> One of the more recent advocates of
> bi-nationalism is NYU Professor and
> internationally renown historian Tony Judt, a
> British-born Jew who lost much of his family in
> the Holocaust. In the last month Judt has had two
> talks canceled after phone calls from Jewish
> leaders, including one at the Polish Consulate in
> New York City. This is on top of frequent and
> often strident attacks against him because of his
> advocacy of bi-nationalism and periodic criticism
> of Israeli policies.
>
> The attacks on Judt are not exceptional. Most
> every Jewish scholar or activist I know who has
> criticized Israeli policy has met with similarly
> virulent attacks by the organized Jewish
> community (non-Jewish scholars naturally fair
> even worse). Anti-Israel, self-hating Jew,
> Holocaust denier, terrorist apologist--these are
> just a few of the epithets hurled at anyone who
> challenges right wing Jewish orthodoxy concerning
> Israel. Visiting Israeli scholars routinely face
> similar accusations for expressing views that are
> the daily fare of Israeli opinion pages and news
> programs.
>
> I believe these intense clashes within the Jewish
> community over the future of Israel reveal the
> emergence of a new bi-nationalism; one related
> but not identical to Jewish territorial
> bi-nationalism. It reflects a deepening rift
> within Judaism, as Jews move farther apart from
> each other over the issue of Israel, and through
> it, what it means to be a Jew in the era of
> globalization.
>
> One half of the Jewish nation (sadly, the smaller
> half) imagines Judaism as a religion of peace and
> tolerance, one that fulfills the biblical
> commandment to be a light unto the nations by
> returning to the front lines of world-wide
> struggles for justice, democracy, sustainable
> development and healing the environment. The
> other half of the Jewish people is following the
> path of the Jewish founders of neo-Conservatism
> in the United States. Similar to their
> counterparts in the Christian and Muslim worlds,
> they see humanity as divided by a clash of
> civilizations and a zero-sum competition for
> power, territory and resources, in which
> compromise, never mind true coexistence with the
> Other, is impossible. In such an amoral world,
> their vision of Judaism celebrates achieving
> maximal Jewish political and economic power as a
> supreme good, whether in Israel/Palestine or the
> United States.
>
> The two binationalisms are in fact intimately
> related. As it becomes evident that a two-state
> solution is no longer possible, the Jewish
> community will divide even more sharply over the
> future of Israel, and through it, of Judaism as a
> religion and system of values. Many will support
> even harsher repression against Palestinians,
> which in the context of looming demographic
> parity between Jews and Palestinians will evolve
> either towards a Jewish-dominated apartheid state
> in historical Palestine, or towards the forced
> transfer of most of the country's Palestinian
> population so that, similar to 1948, only a small
> and manageable Palestinian community remains.
> (Indeed, Israeli scholars have been warning of
> "creeping" annexation, transfer and apartheid in
> the Occupied Territories since before the
> collapse of the peace process.)
>
> Others will choose reimagine Jewish and Israeli
> identity in a manner that embraces Palestinians
> as equal partners in the country's future, with
> Jews able to live freely in the heartland of
> biblical Israel while Palestinians are free to
> return to the more than two thirds of Palestine
> from which they have been exiled since 1948.
> Viewing themselves as "pro-Israeli and
> pro-Palestinian," they conceive of Jewish/Israeli
> or Palestinian security as unattainable absent a
> secure life for the Other.
>
> Of course, Palestinians, and the Muslim ummah
> more broadly, face a similar choice between
> peaceful coexistence and permanent war with Jews
> and the West at large. The divisions within their
> communities on these fundamental questions are
> becoming starker by the day.
>
> Few proponents of a bi-national solution to the
> Israeli-Palestinian conflict claim that it is an
> ideal solution. But given the failure of the
> two-state discourse and the unpalatability of
> most conceivable alternative solutions, it
> certainly deserves a hearing. At the very least,
> those who advocate it don't deserve to be accused
> by Jewish leaders of offering "offensive
> caricatures" of Israel (as ADL head Abraham
> Foxman accused Judt of doing), of being Holocaust
> deniers, or of supporting terrorists and even the
> "genocide" of our people.
>
> That kind of language will only sharpen the
> divisions within the Jewish community, weakening
> solidarity at the same time it violates the
> self-critical spirit of Judaism's prophetic
> heritage. Such a development will do more harm to
> Israel and Judaism than Hamas, Hezbollah and
> al-Qa'eda could ever hope to do.