BI-NATIONALISM AND JUDAISM
MARK A LEVINE, HISTORY NEWS NETWORK - 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
bi-national idea to the proverbial dust bin of history. . .
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. . .
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. . .
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. . .
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 re-imagine 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.
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