In Praise of Diasporism (Page 2)

This is, in fact, a question on the minds of many secular, progressive Jews in 2004, when the security of Jews in Israel and the diaspora-not to mention the human rights and national aspirations of the Palestinian people under Israeli occupation-have fallen hostage to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's vision of a Greater Israel, a super-armed bunker state, governed by right-wing ideologues and ruling an archipelago of Palestinian ghettos surrounded by a barbed wire "security" fence.

Contrary to what the Jewish establishment would have us believe, to raise this question is not to call for driving the Jews of Israel into the sea, or, for that matter, back to Europe. The question today is not whether Jews will remain in Israel-Palestine, but where (within the 1967 borders or in a Greater Israel?) and on what terms (in an increasingly theocratic state in which Palestinians remain second-class citizens, or in a democracy based on Arab-Jewish equality?) they will do so. But the impersonator's critique of Zionism-of its romantic attachment to the soil, its glorification of military might and undisguised contempt for the gentle values of the diaspora, its oppressive treatment of Palestine's indigenous inhabitants-contains flashes of undeniable insight. The Zionist solution to the Jewish question has created a whole new set of problems, which it has so far proved incapable of solving. As with the fool in King Lear, there is wisdom in his lunacy.

Like Roth's impersonator, Jewish critics of Zionism and Israel have been treated by the Jewish establishment as, at best, innocent oddballs, naïve about the ever-present danger of another Holocaust, and too soft to inflict the brutalities necessary for the preservation of "Jewish democracy" in the Arab world-a "tough neighborhood," as Thomas Friedman constantly reminds us. At worst, such critics have stood accused of being irresponsible, crazy and "self-hating," if not downright disloyal.

I prefer to see them, however, as heirs to a prophetic Jewish tradition of moral criticism, and to the secular, cosmopolitan ideals of the Enlightenment, grounded in a commitment to human equality and solidarity. By opposing the injustices committed in their name, they have shown that there is another way of honoring the memory of Jews who perished in the pogroms and concentration camps of Europe, and that a concern for the fate of the Jews need not come at the expense of the Palestinian people. This book, a collection of writings by Jewish dissidents, pays tribute to a tradition of which few Jews--and even fewer non-Jews--are aware. This is no accident. The Jewish establishment and Israel lobby have done their best to suppress the dissident tradition, and, where they have failed, to vilify it. In these efforts they have enjoyed lamentable success. Today most non-Jews take it for granted that to be Jewish is to support Israel unconditionally. In the Arab world, which has experienced an alarming increase in anti-semitism since the outbreak of the second intifada--perhaps Sharon's most impressive achievement--Jewish critics of Israel are a curiosity. "Are there other Jews like you?" a wide-eyed Palestinian woman once asked me in Lebanon, as if I were an exotic bird. The confusion of Judaism and Israel--a confusion that has placed Jews abroad at increasing risk amid Sharon's ruthless campaign of repression in the Occupied Territories-has been consciously sown by the Israeli government, which seeks to equate all criticism of Israel with anti-semitism.

As I have indicated, Jews themselves have not been immune to such criticisms-a cause of understandable anguish on their part. The title of this book, Prophets Outcast, borrowed from the historian Isaac Deutscher, himself a great Jewish dissident, is meant to underscore the terrible price these remarkably prescient men and women have paid for speaking out. Far greater, however, is the price the world has paid for ignoring their warnings. Over the last century, these writers have predicted with uncanny precision the steady deterioration of Arab-Jewish relations under Zionism, the seemingly inexorable drift toward territorial expansionism and theocratic fanaticism in Israel, and the consequent erosion of Jewish ethics. Their dream of Arab-Jewish fraternity, either in the form of two sovereign states or in a single binational state, lost out, tragically, to Ze'ev Jabotinsky's vision of an "Iron Wall" between Israel and the Arab world. Jabotinsky's vision has recently found physical expression in Sharon's "security" fence, an apartheid wall that, by cruelly disrupting the lives of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, will only breed more insecurity for the Jews it purportedly protects.

But prophetic words, valuable though they are, are not the only legacy of these Jewish dissidents. The rise of a radical protest movement in Israel, where young men and women are refusing to serve in the Occupied Territories, is a homage to their influence. The revival of binationalism among progressive Jews and Palestinians is another, although, for now, a binational state in Israel-Palestine remains a distant dream. It is my hope that Prophets Outcast will contribute, in some small way, to rescuing this noble Jewish tradition from what Edward Thompson, the great historian of the English working-class, called "the condescension of posterity."

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