[P2P-F] Fwd: The End of "Liberal Zionism"

[Michel Bauwens]

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From: Tikkun <magazine at tikkun.org>
Date: Sun, Aug 24, 2014 at 12:03 PM
Subject: The End of "Liberal Zionism"
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    The End of Liberal Zionism Israel’s Move to the Right Challenges
Diaspora Jews

By ANTONY LERMANAUG. 22, 2014

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LONDON — Liberal Zionists are at a crossroads. The original tradition of
combining Zionism and liberalism — which meant ending the occupation of the
West Bank and Gaza, supporting a Palestinian
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=KlUkRz3dcL0cx97yTKxch0iUkyWLOReh>
state
as well as a Jewish state with a permanent Jewish majority, and standing
behind Israel
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=%2Bp51e9TgqBYZolwovKN8v0iUkyWLOReh>when
it was threatened — was well intentioned. But everything liberal Zionists
stand for is now in doubt.

The decision of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to launch a
military campaign against Hamas in Gaza has cost the lives, to date, of 64
soldiers and three civilians on the Israeli side, and nearly 2,000
Palestinians, the majority of whom were civilians.

“Never do liberal Zionists feel more torn than when Israel is at war,” wrote
Jonathan Freedland
<http://org.salsalabs.com/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=acIks531YyZr4JJu3EvIy0iUkyWLOReh>,
The Guardian’s opinion editor and a leading British liberal Zionist, for
The New York Review of Books last month. He’s not alone. Columnists like
Jonathan Chait, Roger Cohen and Thomas L. Friedman have all riffed in
recent weeks on the theme that what Israel is doing can’t be reconciled
with their humanism.

Photo
 Israeli soldiers in Merkava tanks gather near the border with the Gaza
Strip.CreditAbir Sultan/European Pressphoto Agency

But it’s not just Gaza, and the latest episode of “shock and awe”
militarism. The romantic Zionist ideal, to which Jewish liberals — and I
was one, once — subscribed for so many decades, has been tarnished by the
reality of modern Israel. The attacks on freedom of speech and human rights
organizations in Israel, the land-grabbing settler movement, a growing
strain of anti-Arab and anti-immigrant racism, extremist politics, and a
powerful, intolerant religious right — this mixture has pushed liberal
Zionism to the brink.

In the United States, trenchant and incisive criticism of Israeli policies
by commentators like Peter Beinart, one of liberal Zionism’s most
articulate and prolific voices, is now common. But the critics go only so
far — not least to avoid giving succor to anti-Semites, who use the crisis
as cover for openly expressing hatred of Jews.

In the past, liberal Zionists in the Diaspora found natural allies among
the left-wing and secular-liberal parties in Israel, like Labor, Meretz and
Shinui. But Israel’s political left is now comatose. Beaten by Menachem
Begin in the 1977 national elections, it briefly revived with Yitzhak Rabin
and the hopes engendered by the 1993 Oslo Accords. But having clung to the
Oslo process long past its sell-by date, the parliamentary left in Israel
has become insignificant.

Diaspora Jewish politics has also changed. In the 1960s, when I was an
enthusiastic young Zionist in England planning to settle on a kibbutz in
Israel, some organizations had names virtually identical to Israeli
political parties. This identification lasted only as long as the
institutions that prevailed in Israel seemed to Diaspora Jews to reflect a
liberal Zionist viewpoint.

Today, the dominant Diaspora organizations, like the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee, the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation
League, as well as a raft of largely self-appointed community leaders, have
swung to the right, making unquestioning solidarity with Israel the
touchstone of Jewish identity — even though majority Jewish opinion is by
no means hawkish.
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Though squeezed by a more vociferous and entrenched right, liberal Zionists
have not given up without a fight. They found ways of pushing back,
insisting that their two-state Zionism held out the only hope for an end to
the conflict and setting up organizations to promote their outlook. J
Street in America and Yachad in Britain, founded in 2008 and 2011
respectively, describe themselves as “pro-Israel and pro-peace” and have
attracted significant numbers of people who seek a more critical engagement
with Israel.

I became an Israeli citizen in 1970, and I am still one today. I worked in
the Jewish community in research and philanthropic capacities for 30 years,
serving the interests of Jews worldwide. But in the 1980s, I began to
rethink my relationship with Israel and Zionism. As recently as 2007, while
directing the London-based Institute for Jewish Policy Research, an
independent think tank, I still thought that liberal Zionism had a role to
play. I believed that by encouraging Diaspora Jews to express reservations
about Israeli policy in public, liberal Zionism could influence the Israeli
government to change its policies toward the Palestinians.

I still understood its dream of Israel as a moral and just cause, but I
judged it anachronistic. The only Zionism of any consequence today is
xenophobic and exclusionary, a Jewish ethno-nationalism inspired by
religious messianism. It is carrying out an open-ended project of national
self-realization to be achieved through colonization and purification of
the tribe.

This mind-set blocks any chance Israel might have to become a full-fledged
liberal-democratic state, and offers the Palestinians no path to national
self-determination, no justice for their expulsion in 1948, nor for the
occupation and the denial of their rights. I came to see the notion that
liberal Zionism might reverse, or even just restrain, this nationalist
juggernaut as fanciful.

I used my position at the think tank to raise questions about Israel’s
political path and to initiate a community-wide debate about these issues.
Naïve? Probably. I was vilified by the right-wing Jewish establishment,
labeled a “self-hating Jew” and faced public calls for me to be sacked.
This just confirmed what I already knew about the myopia of Jewish
leadership and the intolerance of many British Zionist activists.

Photo
 CreditSébastien Thibault

Today, neither the destruction wreaked in Gaza nor the disgraceful antics
of the anti-democratic forces that are setting Israel’s political agenda
have produced a decisive shift in Jewish Diaspora opinion. Beleaguered
liberal Zionists still struggle to reconcile their liberalism with their
Zionism, but they are increasingly under pressure from Jewish dissenters on
the left, like Jewish Voice for Peace, Jews for Justice for Palestinians
and Independent Jewish Voices.

Along with many experts, most dissenting groups have long thought that the
two-state solution was dead. The collapse of the peace talks being brokered
by the American secretary of state, John Kerry, came as no surprise. Then,
on July 11, Mr. Netanyahu definitively rejected any possibility of
establishing an independent Palestinian state. The Gaza conflict meant, he
said, that “there cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we
relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan”
(meaning the West Bank).
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Liberal Zionists must now face the reality that the dissenters have
recognized for years: A de facto single state already exists; in it, rights
for Jews are guaranteed while rights for Palestinians are curtailed. Since
liberal Zionists can’t countenance anything but two states, this situation
leaves them high and dry.

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RECENT COMMENTS
  dwilday  11 hours ago

I think Mr. Lerman's ennui is in part due to a disconnect in his own
analysis of the state of liberal Zionism. In order for Israel to...
  HKGuy  12 hours ago

Israel is more liberal than ever. It has all-but recognized gay marriages,
gay adoptions, gay partner immigration. Tel Aviv is known as one...
  Givemeabreak  12 hours ago

The problem with this type of argument is not that it is incorrect per se,
but that it could equally apply to virtually every other country....

   - SEE ALL COMMENTS

 Liberal Zionists believe that Jewish criticism of Israeli policies is
unacceptable without love of Israel. They embrace Israel as the Jewish
state. For it to remain so, they insist it must have a Jewish majority in
perpetuity. Yet to achieve this inevitably implies policies of exclusion
and discrimination.

They’re convinced that Israel can be both Jewish and democratic, but they
fail to explain how to reconcile God’s supreme authority with the sovereign
power of the people. Meanwhile, the self-appointed arbiters of what’s
Jewish in the Jewish state — the extreme religious Zionists and the
strictly Orthodox, aided and abetted by Jewish racists in the Knesset like
Ayelet Shaked, a Jewish Home Party member who recently called for the
mothers of Palestinian “snakes” to be killed — are trashing democracy more
and more each day. Particularly shocking are the mass arrests — nearly 500
since the beginning of July
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—
of Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel for peacefully protesting, and the
sanctions against Arab students at universities for posting pro-Gaza
messages on social media.

Pushed to the political margins in Israel and increasingly irrelevant in
the Diaspora, liberal Zionism not only lacks agency; worse, it provides
cover for the supremacist Zionism dominant in Israel today. Liberal
Zionists have become an obstacle to the emergence of a Diaspora Jewish
movement that could actually be an agent of change.

The dissenting left doesn’t have all the answers, but it has the principles
upon which solutions must be based. Both liberal Zionism and the left
accept the established historical record: Jews forced hundreds of thousands
of Palestinians from their homes to make way for the establishment of a
Jewish state. But the liberals have concluded that it was an acceptable
price others had to pay for the state. The left accepts that an egregious
injustice was done. The indivisibility of human, civil and political rights
has to take precedence over the dictates of religion and political
ideology, in order not to deny either Palestinians or Jews the right to
national self-determination. The result, otherwise, will be perpetual
conflict.

In the repressive one-state reality of today’s Israel, which Mr. Netanyahu
clearly wishes to make permanent, we need a joint Israeli-Palestinian
movement to attain those rights and the full equality they imply. Only such
a movement can lay the groundwork for the necessary compromises that will
allow the two peoples’ national cultures to flourish.

This aspiration is incompatible with liberal Zionism, and some liberal
Zionists appear close to this conclusion, too. As Mr. Freedland put it,
liberal Zionists “will have to decide which of their political identities
matters more, whether they are first a liberal or first a Zionist.”

They should know that Israel is not Judaism. Jewish history did not
culminate in the creation of the state of Israel.

Regrettably, there is a dearth of Jewish leaders telling Diaspora Jews
these truths. The liberal Zionist intelligentsia should embrace this
challenge, acknowledge the demise of their brand and use their formidable
explanatory skills to build support for a movement to achieve equal rights
and self-determination for all in Israel-Palestine.

*Antony Lerman, a former director of the Institute for Jewish Policy
Research, is the author of “The Making and Unmaking of a Zionist.”*
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