14 minute read
OPINION
The Jewish state: Zionism’s success, not failure
BY DONNA ROBINSON DEVINE
(JNS) Depending on the era, 1948 may have been the best of times or the worst for progressives. Progressives once embraced the Jewish state as a trope for self-sacrifice and solidarity, a testament to the redemption of a bruised and battered people. Progressives now see Israel practicing apartheid, genocide, ethnic cleansing and of sustaining itself as a remnant of an outdated and thoroughly delegitimized colonial order. Today, the old romanticized image of Israel–shaped more by Exodus, the film, than by Exodus, the biblical book–no longer gets much of a hearing. Recall that in the 1950s, the far-left Weavers recorded “Tzena Tzena,” a song celebrating Israeli soldiers and sexual freedom.
The more Israelis put their titanic struggle for safety and security behind them, the more difficult it became for progressives to find resonance in a Jewish state failing to end its conflict with Palestinians. Because the narrative of rebuilding a land through the sweat of the brow and toil of the hand no longer described the country’s map or society, it seemed more a description of the country’s past than of its present. With
DAVID BEN-GURION ANNOUNCES THE NEW STATE OF ISRAEL ON MAY 14, 1948. WHILE THE NATION DOES NOT HAVE A CONSTITUTION, THE KNESSET HAS PASSED A “NATIONALITY BILL.” CREDIT: ISRAEL MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS/ WIKIMEDIA COMMONS.
victimhood now elevated into a necessary, if not, sufficient cause of virtue, the progressive relationship with Israel came into a facile encounter with Palestinians who commanded increasing empathy and attention. In an America seething with anxiety and uncertainty, most progressives are more than willing to replace any past association with Israel with a pronounced h ostility to Zionism.
Trying to lend scope, if not comfort, to the position of Jews in the progressive movement and seeking (also and perhaps in vain) to express communal solidarity, some Jewish progressives have recently criticized Israel for its failure to live up to its Zionist ideals. Expanding on this notion, journalist Peter Beinart actually reimagined Israel’s moment of triumph in 1948 as Zionism’s defeat, whose aim for a homeland, he claimed–and presumably for only a homeland–was displaced by the founding of a sovereign state. To propose dismantling any state in the wake of COVID-19 expectations for strict border control as a means of saving lives probably belongs more to the realm of fiction than to utopia. But to argue that Zionism itself provides the reasons for dismantling a Jewish state says more about the identity of Jewish progressives than about how Zionism actually imagined sovereignty.
How credible is it to give new life to the Zionism that had, for one reason or another, reservations about struggling for an actual state? Cultural Zionists cautioned against placing too much emphasis on a “Jewish state, rather than on the state of Jews and of Judaism” in the words of their most eloquent exponent, Ahad Ha’Am, who died in 1927 in a Palestine ruled by Great Britain. Would a cultural Zionism propose dismantling the state that gave Hebrew the resources to become not only a modern literary language, but also the vocabulary for daily life? A reverential esteem for Ahad Ha’Am’s Zionism certainly did not deter Chaim Weizmann from securing global backing for a national home as a predicate for establishing a Jewish state. The very propositions underlying cultural Zionism contributed to the success of establishing the new Jewish state. Reviving the Hebrew language was an instrument to transform a people once defined by their religious traditions and law into a nation bound together by a shared, albeit often newly invented, mores. The creation of a culture whose literature and ideas were expressed in Hebrew, and whose ancient laws and rituals could be translated into national traditions, was the groundwork for a state offering Jews something Zionists believed could be found nowhere else–the opportunity to take advantage of the modern world. The homeland was almost as much about language as about land. It’s difficult to believe that a homeland could generate the same cultural fulfillment as the state has already delivered.
Past efforts to generate a Zionism without Jewish sovereignty offer no reason for optimism that enemies will be transformed into allies. There were Zionist advocates for a binational Palestine, but they never drew Arabs into their movement because both peoples were haunted by Jewish immigration and could not transcend their deep divisions over the issue. To disinter the Zionisms possessing reservations about moving from homeland to state is an interesting intellectual exercise; to deploy them as cudgels against Israel’s identity or independence reflects a deeply problematic use of history.
Imagining a Zionism rejecting even the idea of a Jewish state would have to discount much of the movement’s activities regarding land purchases and immigration. Such a perspective cannot account for the energy and resources invested into setting up an elected assembly called the Asefat Ha-Nivharim, which required serious consideration of an electoral system. Or the National Council, drawn from this assembly, that had authority over matters of social welfare, health, education and religion. The British Mandate, which provided Palestine with a geography and the site for a homeland, supplied the Jews with incentives to consolidate a comprehensive framework to help secure their needs, promote their goals, manage their own affairs–within the limits set by colonial policy–and ultimately project a polity so stable as to be worthy of sovereignty. Building a homeland and constructing a state were activities conducted
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OPINION Can a Jewish leader coexist with an antisemitic extremist?
BY JONATHAN S. TOBIN
(JNS) As it turns out, it isn’t Rodney Muhammad who is on the spot in the controversy about the NAACP and antisemitism. The people who should really be worried about the controversy engendered by Muhammad are the Jewish members of the national board of the NAACP, like Rabbi Jonah Pesner, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, who are being discredited by the organization’s failure to draw a line in the sand about Jew-hatred.
Muhammad is the Philadelphia chapter president of the venerable civil-rights group who sparked controversy last month with a blatantly antisemitic Facebook post. The post combined pictures of AfricanAmerican celebrities who had recently made antisemitic statements, and included the image of a Nazi-style caricature of a hooknosed Jew above a fake quote from Voltaire that said: “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” The obvious point was the false claim that powerful and sinister Jewish forces are working to suppress criticism of their fiendish hold on society by courageous but oppressed black people.
While Muhammad was bitterly criticized by various Jewish groups, as well as local politicians and public figures, he doesn’t seem so concerned about his future as a public figure, even after such a gross display of prejudice. The national leadership of the NAACP was slow to issue a statement about the incident and when it did, its condemnation stopped well short of demanding Muhammad’s resignation or his firing by the Philadelphia chapter.
As the African-American newspaper The Philadelphia Tribune reported, local black leaders such as Bishop J. Louis Felton, the first vice president of the Philadelphia chapter, said they had not received any instructions or guidance from the group’s national office. Instead, the Tribune reported that NAACP president and CEO Derrick Johnson would be meeting with Muhammad, as well as local community and faith leaders, to “open a dialogue and continue the educational conversations.” But the time for dialogue about this scandal is over. That statement could be reasonably interpreted as an indication that the national leadership has no interest in breaking with Muhammad, despite the fact that a state board could vote to call for his removal and he is up for re-election in
Zionism
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simultaneously.
Perhaps because Israel was imagined long before it was founded–visions conjured in the religious canon, in surreal fantasies and in political treatises–the country could never be entirely liberated from the idea of Zion, no matter how far it departed from reality. For the standards generated by the Zionist imperatives to build a nation state intended to be both “normal” and “exceptional” encouraged expectations that could not ever be met but could never be totally dismissed. And while the differences could often be hidden in abstractions or ambiguous language, by the same token, they could not be entirely avoided. Never reluctant to champion their ideals, Zionists displayed a remarkable linguistic flexibility, particularly about foundational terms like homeland and state in an effort to radiate a compensatory unity from a diversity of views and goals. The result: even political Zionists known for the sometimes brutal clarity with which they proclaimed their commitment to a Jewish state imagined it not possessing the sovereignty on offer from a Thomas Hobbes.
Even without a clear or single political theory of sovereignty, Jews in Palestine were conscious of participating in a story attracting intense global attention, as well as in a risky political experiment. Zionism gave voice to the power of their imagination not simply to reinterpret history, but more importantly, to change it for the sake of creating a radically different future for themselves and for the Jewish people. Substituting action for prayers gave Zionism its purpose. Work, rather than textual study, would be the vehicle for legitimizing possession, creating community and for transforming sites holy in scripture into a homeland. Zionists were builders empowered less as individuals than as members of a kind of collective construction team. It is not surprising, then, that for Zionism, left and right, 1948 symbolizes both the difficulty of building a promised land and the ease with which it could all be swept away.
Donna Robinson Divine is the Morningstar Family Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor of Government at Emerita Smith College. She is a resident of West Hartford.
November.
The reluctance of the NAACP to take swift and decisive action is disappointing. Jews were active in the organization’s founding. And there is a direct precedent in which the NAACP was faced with a similar situation in the not-too-distant past.
In August of 2000, Lee Alcorn, president of the group’s Dallas chapter, sparked controversy by denouncing the selection of Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) as the Democratic candidate for vice president. Alcorn said he opposed Vice President Al Gore’s running mate because “if we get a Jew person, then what I’m wondering is, I mean, what is this movement for, you know? … So I think we need to be very suspicious of any kind of partnerships between the Jews at that kind of level because we know that their interest primarily has to do with money and these kind of things.”
NAACP president Kweisi Mfume responded immediately. He not only condemned Alcorn’s remarks as “repulsive, antisemitic, anti-NAACP and antiAmerican,” he also immediately suspended him from the organization.
What changed in the last 20 years?
The difference may stem from the fact that Muhammad is the minister of the Nation of Islam’s Mosque No. 12 in North Philadelphia and a longtime supporter of Louis Farrakhan, the NOI’s national leader.
While Farrakhan, whose open advocacy for antisemitism and race hatred is often spoken of as being beyond the pale, his organization has far more grassroots support in the black community than is widely understood. Many AfricanAmericans see the group as standing for black empowerment and responsibility, not hate. Indeed, it is impossible to understand the rash of antisemitic comments from black celebrities or the surge in hate crimes committed against Jews in the Greater New York area in the last year without taking into account the way Farrakhan is honored by many in the black community.
In the past, having an official of the NOI–whose toxic mix of conspiracy theories and race and religious hatred ought to mark all of its adherents, let alone its ministers, as members of the lunatic fringe – as a local NAACP leader would have been unthinkable. But Muhammad’s local prominence illustrates the way the Nation of Islam has been mainstreamed.
Seen in that context, it’s hardly surprising that the NAACP would be reluctant to confront the extremists. The NAACP may have a long and honorable history in civil-rights advocacy, but it’s no longer on the cutting edge of activism with the more radical Black Lives Matter movement drowning out more traditional groups.
Still, the NAACP’s soft approach to the NOI leaves the group’s Jewish allies and supporters in a difficult position. National Jewish organizations say that while they are willing to speak out strongly against Muhammad and the way the NAACP is tolerating him, they won’t cut ties with the group. That sends a signal that Jewish leaders are satisfied with lip service about antisemitism, rather than action.
It’s the NAACP’s Jewish board members, however, whose reputations are being called into question by this controversy. Of particular interest is the presence of Pesner, the head of the political action arm of the largest Jewish religious denomination in the country. The RAC’s liberal political agenda makes it a natural fit for any group on the left. But Pesner’s spot on the NAACP board is as much a tribute to the long history of Jewish support for the group as it is for the civil-rights movement.
While Pesner and the RAC may share the NAACP’s views on a host of issues, the notion that he can coexist inside a group with a Nation of Islam adherent–let alone as a chapter president–is as shocking as it is unacceptable.
There is an argument to be made that Pesner is situated to work from within to persuade the NAACP to take action. But to date, he has failed to achieve that purpose.
It’s one thing to say that it is a political necessity to allow African-Americans to equivocate about Muhammad’s continued presence in the NAACP. It’s quite another for a person who is the head of one of the country’s leading Jewish advocacy organizations to remain as a board member of a group that has so far shown that it is prepared to tolerate an openly antisemitic Farrakhan supporter as an important official. In this case, national Jewish leaders need to follow the lead of a local group; the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia has rightly declared that it will no longer work with the local NAACP while Muhammad remains in office.
Put simply, the NAACP must cut ties with Muhammad immediately or Pesner must quit his seat on their board. If he does not, then he should be asked to quit his job at the RAC.
