On October 16 The Christian Century <\/i>published my review of Rashid Khalidi\u2019s Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East. <\/i>(Here is the text of the review<\/a>). The fact that the Century <\/i>reviewed Khalidi\u2019s book is an indication of the media\u2019s increasing willingness to present viewpoints that challenge the very basis of Israel as a Jewish ethnic nationalist entity. This shift reflects the reality that once you address present-day violations of Palestinian rights, you see that the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza was the continuation of the program of ethnic cleansing that began in 1948 and continues to this day with the annexation and carving up of the West Bank and the inhuman siege of Gaza. You begin to understand that the dispossession of the Palestinians was the inevitable outcome of the project to set up a state for the benefit of one people. \u00a0It is also becoming frighteningly clear that oppression and frankly racist policies on the part of Israel are not limited to occupied areas, but to the territory within the de facto borders of the State of Israel prior to the 1967 war.<\/p>\n A recently released documentary demonstrates this with horrifying vividness. Ali Abunimah, Palestinian writer and activist and publisher of the Electronic Intifada, <\/i>has reported on a video entitled \u201cIsrael\u2019s New Racism: The Persecution of African Migrants in the Holy Land<\/a>,\u201d produced by Max Blumenthal and David Sheen, a piece solicited \u2014 and then rejected \u2014 by the New York Times<\/i>. \u00a0According to Blumenthal, it has since gone viral on YouTube, with close to one million views. The ten minute piece documents vicious, racist attacks on African residents of Israel incited by prominent demagogues and several members of the Israeli Parliament. The piece presents voices, not only shrieking in public demonstrations but speaking calmly in office interviews, proclaiming that Israel is the land of the Jews and that non-Jews (especially those with black skin) are not welcome. The video is shocking \u2014 but it is not surprising. From our twentieth-century perspective, we understand all too well that ethnic nationalism breeds racism \u2013 that it is<\/i> racism \u2013 and that oppression and violence \u2013 the bloody as well as the structural, state-sponsored kind \u2013 is the inevitable result. \u00a0In his recently published Goliath: \u00a0Life and Loathing in Greater Israel<\/em><\/a>, Blumenthal documents Israel\u2019s escalating move to the political right, into what many would described as fascism. \u00a0The problem, as I pointed out in my 2011 blog post about Peter Beinart<\/a> and his brand of \u201cprogressive Zionism,\u201d (a piece accepted and then rejected by The Nation<\/i>), is not the occupation, nor is it the religiously-based racism of fundamentalist Jewish settler-colonists \u2014 the problem is a state founded on an ethnic nationalist ideology.\u00a0 \u201cThe late and deeply mourned Tony Judt,\u201d I wrote then, \u201cgot it exactly right in his NYRB piece<\/a>\u00a0back in 2003: \u2018The problem with Israel [is that]\u2026it has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a \u2018Jewish state\u2019\u2014a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded\u2014is rooted in another time and place.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n For over half a century, much of the world, with the U.S. in the lead, has accepted and supported this anachronistic and, by Judt\u2019s definition, illegitimate political entity. A central point of Khalidi\u2019s book is how language has been used to deny the reality of a State of Israel that, by virtue of its founding principle of a Jewish homeland in historic Palestine has never been willing to share the territory. Khalidi describes the history of U.S. involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as \u201ca carefully constructed realm of obscurity, a realm in which the misuse of language has thoroughly corrupted both political thought and action.\u201d He documents how U.S. policy since the 1970s has embraced that denial by sponsoring a \u201cpeace process\u201d that has advanced Israel\u2019s expansionism, demonstrating how, I wrote, \u201clanguage functions to obscure the reality of a colonial settler project that has resulted in the dispossession of the indigenous Palestinians\u2026language used to maintain the destructive illusion of a process of negotiation between equal parties, rather than the reality of a powerless, stateless, occupied people at the mercy of a highly militarized state supported by the world\u2019s only superpower.\u201d\u00a0 Despite the futility of this approach to peacemaking, Khalidi points out, our government has pursued it doggedly, bowing to domestic political pressures and to Israeli stubbornness and persistence.<\/p>\n But things are changing. For an increasing number of Americans, the realization is dawning that the story they have been told is a distortion and that our government\u2019s policies are bad, not only for the Palestinians, but for the citizens of Israel. Mainstream journalism, which, like politics, responds to the wind of public opinion, is reflecting this shift.\u00a0 Ian Lustick\u2019s September 14 New York Times opinion piece \u201cTwo State Illusion\u201d<\/a> represents a sea change in NYT editorial policy with respect to Israel. Lustick\u2019s piece was followed closely by Yousef Munayyer\u2019s \u201cThinking outside the two state box\u201d <\/a>in the New Yorker\u2019s <\/i>online edition. \u201cThe reality now,\u201d wrote Munayyer, \u201cis that there is a single state. The problem is that it takes an apartheid form.\u201d\u00a0 Rather than solving the problem that it was intended to solve, which is security and freedom from fear for Jews, Israeli policy has condemned the Jewish citizens of the State of Israel to continuing conflict. \u201cIt\u2019s time\u201d Munayyer writes, \u201cto start thinking outside the Zionist box and look for solutions that secure the human rights and equality of all involved, not just the political demands of the stronger party.\u201d<\/p>\n On a recent panel, which they shared with Jeremy Ben Ami of J Street (watch it<\/a> or you access unedited transcripts<\/a> of the entire panel presentation) Lustick<\/a> and Munayyer<\/a> spell out the political danger of clinging to the possibility that negotiations can bring about a fair and sustainable two state solution. The addresses by Lustick and Munayyer are riveting \u2014 and an excellent adjunct to Khalidi\u2019s book. A key point made by both of them is that the implausibility of a fair partition at this point not only makes the negotiations pointless, but worse, perpetuates the conditions that make two states impossible, playing into Israel\u2019s hands even more effectively than handing them the entire territory on a silver platter.\u00a0 In contrast, Ben Ami\u2019s words give us a good look at the arguments that must be mustered to hold on to the \u201ctwo-state illusion.\u201d\u00a0 It is pretty much the brand of \u201cprogressive Zionism\u201d that Peter Beinart has been offering up to preserve the Zionist dream: nothing is impossible if we wish for it hard enough and believe in it deeply enough. Commitment to the idea of Jewish nationalist homeland trumps reality, and certainly any commitment to equality for Palestinians, despite the language to the contrary \u2014 duly served up by those committed to saving Zionism \u2014 about full commitment to a state of their own for Palestinians.<\/p>\n Recently, Beinart, in his blog Open Zion,<\/i> has adopted a strategy similar to that demonstrated by J Street in its recent annual conferences: \u00a0broaden the tent to competing points of view, in particular to those advocating some version of Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS).\u00a0 In her recent piece in Open Zion<\/i>, \u201cIf you want two states, support BDS,\u201d<\/a> Kathleen Peratis freely admits that her commitment to two states has her standing \u201con very narrow ground\u2026that the current peace process is at best a Hail Mary.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cSad Zionists,\u201d is how she describes herself and those who cling to \u201cour liberal Zionist dreams.\u201d\u00a0 My question to Peratis is this: how sad are you willing to be? Are you willing to tolerate the sadness of letting go of the concept that an ethnic nationalist entity, a concept carried over from the late nineteenth century, is the answer to anti-Semitism?\u00a0 Are you willing to mourn the understandable mistake of political Zionism as the solution to our historic suffering, a forgivable (if and when we acknowledge the mistake) but all the same catastrophic wrong turn? Are we willing to be sad enough?\u00a0 And having tolerated that sadness, are we then able to contemplate, as I wrote in my critique of Beinart, that \u201c[t]he end of Zionism will not be the disaster that so many Jews \u2013 and some Christians \u2014 fear. Rather, it will open the Jewish people to a future where the Other is embraced, rather than back to a past in which armies are mustered, walls are built, and enemies, real and imagined, are vilified and attacked. \u201cSaving\u201d Zionism by trying to make it into something it is not takes us in precisely the wrong direction.\u201d<\/p>\nIsrael\u2019s new racism<\/h4>\n
Sad Zionists<\/h4>\n