Some crucial distinctions

LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
The Hindu, 16 October

The High Holy Days celebrated during the past fortnight are the premiere events in the Jewish calendar. Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, accompanied by exuberant blowing on the ram’s horn, is followed by Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, marked by fasting and prayer. These are the two occasions on which Jews worldwide are most likely to attend synagogue.

The globe’s 13 million Jews are less than ¼ of 1 per cent of its total population. But their impact on the wider human community has been disproportionate: as contributors in science, arts, philosophy, socialist politics and capitalist finance; as the victims of the greatest crime of modern European civilisation; and today, in the eyes of many, as perpetrators of another crime.

As a Jew who opposes Israeli policies and rejects Zionism, I’m distressed whenever Jews as a whole are blamed for the crimes of the Israeli state. In this debate, crucial distinctions are too often blurred. Israel is a nation-state; Zionism is a political ideology. Judaism and Jewishness are harder to define but they are clearly entities of a different kind and not reducible to a state or an ideology. To criticise Israel or denounce Zionism is not anti-semitic. Nor is Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians an excuse for attacks on Jews or stereotyping Jewish people.

While hostility to Israel in many parts of the world does take on an anti-semitic colouring, it is Zionism itself that insists on the identification between Israel and Jews, and it is the advocates of Israel who are keenest to cement that link. Any attack on the rights and lives of Palestinians is jusitified by an appeal to Jewish history and collective Jewish interests. The occupation, the settlements, the targeted assassinations, the shooting of children, the bulldozing of homes, the curfews and checkpoints – all done in our name. Those of us who demur are labeled “self-haters”.

But we’re not as rare a species as people are led to believe. Indeed prior to the holocaust, Zionism was a minority trend in world Jewry. In the tradition of the old testament prophets (well, some of them), there have always been Jewish voices warning against the siren call of Zionism, with its foundation myth, that Palestine was “a land without people for a people without land”.

In 1891, the Russian Jewish journalist Ahad Ha’am returned from a visit to Palestine to report that “in the entire land it is hard to find tillable land that is not already tilled”. He condemned the “impulse to despotism” over the local people which seemed to have infected the Jewish colonisers, so recently “slaves in their land of exile”.

In a letter of 1930, Sigmund Freud wrote: “I can raise no sympathy at all for the misdirected piety which transforms a piece of Herod’s wall into a national shrine, thereby challenging the feelings of the natives.” In 1938, Albert Eisntein warned of the dangers of seeking to establish a Jewish state – as opposed to a place of Jewish refuge: “I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain – especially the development of a narrow nationalism within our own ranks.”

Einstein’s fears proved prescient. Today, most Jews remain in denial about the reailties of Israel. And there’s a powerful lobby dedicated to keeping them that way. Nonetheless, increasing numbers of Jews find that loyalty to the state ostensibly constructed on their behalf clashes with their humanist ethics. It’s hard to look at the ‘separation wall’ as it cuts through Palestinian land or the roads designated for use by Jews only and reconcile these with a basic sense of decency or a sane strategy for Jewish self-preservation. Groups like European Jews for Just Peace and Jews for Justice for Palestinians or the Israeli ‘refuseniks’ (who refuse military service in the occupied territories) testify to the fact – deeply uncomfortable for the the Israel lobby – that global Jewish opinion is diverse and in flux.

As a boy I attended Sunday school for eight years. When I was thirteen, I was bar mitzvah. I liked Passsover – a holiday celebrating the ancient Hebrews’ emancipaiton from slavery – but found Yom Kippur too dour. (I was never sure what I was supposed to be atoning for). I did not attend synagogue last week, thus maintaining a decades long tradition of my own, a tradition that is not so un-Jewish as may seem. Surveys reveal that Jews in the US and UK are less likely to believe in God, less likely to attend religious services, and more likely to intermarry than members of any other religious group.

Nearly 40 years ago, Isaac Deutscher, biographer of Trotsky, wrote a classic essay entitled “The Non-Jewish Jew.” Here he argued that “The Jewish heretic who transcends Jewry belongs to a Jewish tradition.” He cited Spinoza, who wrote about the contradiction within Judaism between a universal god and a “chosen people”, for which offense the rabbis excommunicated him. Others in Deutscher’s lineage included Heinrich Heine, Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, and Freud. In our own day one could add Noam Chomsky and Bob Dylan.

Backward in time, Deutscher traced the tradition to a story in the Midrash, a compilation of Biblical commentaries. One Sabbath, Rabbi Meir, a pillar of orthodoxy, is walking with his mentor, a heretic named Elisha ben Abiyuh, called Akher (The Stranger). Meir was so absorbed in Akher’s words that, Deutscher tells us, “he failed to notice that he and his teacher had reached the ritual boundary which Jews were not allowed to cross on a sabbath. The great heretic turned to the orthodox pupil and said: ‘Look, we have reached the boundary – we must part now; you must not accompany me any farther – go back!’ Rabbi Meir went back to the Jewish community, while the heretic rode on – beyond the boundaries of Jewry.”