In Praise of Diasporism (Page 4)

I can anticipate the protests of some readers. Isn't Israel a democracy--in fact the region's only democracy? Indeed it is--for Jews. As the sociologist Baruch Kimmerling notes, Israel's democracy, for all its vitality, remains a Herrenvolk democracy, based on blood rather than citizenship. Today, democracies are judged not only by the freedoms they extend to their citizens but, more crucially, by the exceptions they make. It is revealing that those who praise Israel as the "only democracy in the Middle East"-a line most American politicians have committed to memory-have no wish to extend full citizenship rights to the Arabs within its 1967 borders (a fifth of Israel's population and rapidly growing), much less to Palestinians under occupation. In fact, the call for Israel to become a "state of all its citizens," raised by the Arab Knesset member Azmi Bishara, is considered tantamount to a call for "the destruction of Israel."

But isn't Israel a sanctuary for the Jewish people, a guarantee that Jews will always have a place to go if there is another outbreak of virulent Jew hatred? There is no denying that Israel once provided a refuge for Hitler's victims, a "Jewish hospital in which Jews could begin to recover from the devastation of that horror," as Roth's impersonator puts it. Leaving aside the question as to why this sanctuary should come at the expense of the Palestinians, who played no role in the Holocaust, it is by no means clear today that the existence of a Jewish ethno-state in the Middle East makes Jews safer today, or whether it actually exposes them to greater dangers. What is clear is that, as the Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery recently observed, Israel under Sharon has become a "laboratory for the growing of the anti-Semitic virus."

But haven't the Palestinians committed vile acts of terror? Do they not share some of the blame for the current impasse? Have they not been terribly misled?

The answer to all these questions is yes. Since their expulsion and dispersion in 1948, the Palestinians have suffered a terrible ordeal and, much like the Jews, they have been in many ways hardened, not ennobled, by the experience. As Frantz Fanon once pointed out, "the native is an oppressed person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor." Some Palestinians have found an awful and quite literally self-destructive way of achieving this "dream" in the suicide bomb. The Palestinians have not enjoyed the visionary leadership of a Mandela-but then who has, besides the South Africans? Neither the suicide bomb nor Arafat's leadership is the principal obstacle to peace, contrary to the claims of the Jewish establishment and of a distressing number of self-described liberals. The main roadblock is the Israeli government's effort to pursue what Kimmerling calls "politicide," an organized campaign of land confiscation, harassment and violence whose ultimate goal is to destroy the Palestinian will to achieve self-determination. The infernal logic at work today should be obvious by now: Sharon's campaign of politicide fosters terror, and terror reinforces Sharon. The primary responsibility for breaking the current cycle lies with Israel, the vastly more powerful party.

What, then, is to be done?

The writers in Prophets Outcast do not speak with one voice. They form a polyphonic ensemble of Zionists, anti-Zionists, and non-Zionists, as well as anarchists, liberals and Marxists. Some espouse a two-state solution, others a binational Arab-Jewish state. What they do share is a commitment to genuine, peaceful coexistence between the Arabs and Jews of Israel-Palestine. As the Syrian poet Adonis, an Arab dissident who is a spiritual cousin of these prophets outcast, once said to me, "Israelis and Palestinians must find a way to live together. Whether it is in two states, one state or a federation, is up to them. But they must find a way to live together." Prophets Outcast does not propose a political framework for resolving the conflict. This is, in form as well as spirit, a Jewish book--a book of questions rather than answers. Readers in search of a unified critique will have to look elsewhere. The emphasis here is on exemplary, individual acts of moral protest, not on ideological rectitude. As Hannah Arendt observed, "in the darkest of times...illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and works, will kindle under almost all such circumstances and shed over the time span that was given them on earth." For too long, the Jewish left has been splintered into sectarian camps that have wasted precious energy on quarrels with little echo in the real world. This is no time for petty feuds over doctrinal purity, but for organized resistance to the Occupation, both in solidarity with the Palestinian people and out of concern for Jewish security. The narcissism of small differences is a luxury we can scarcely afford.

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