Shlomo Sand - Stops being that which he denies exists!

From Debunking to Denying History

Two days ago I was sent a review from Ha’aretz (see below) on Shlomo Sand’s new book ‘How I stopped being a Jew’.  Shlomo Sands wrote a best selling book The Myth of the Jewish Nation.  This one is a dogmatic assertion (if Ha’aretz and others are to be believed  - I haven't read it yet) of what Sand considers Jewish identity to be, which is that based on the Jewish religion.  In this he agrees with the anti-Semitic Gilad Atzmon who argues that only Zionism provides another alternative Jewish identity, that of being Israeli and that Jews who are neither should not be criticising Israel.  

Below is my instant analysis of the book, based on the review and also the interesting rejoinders of Matzpen member and former Israeli Moshe Machover and David Finkel.    I hope to write a more considered review once I’ve read the book.

Tony Greenstein

i.  Many of the themes echo those of Gilad Atzmon, who has been all over Sand like a rash.

ii.  Sand has a fixed and static concept of what Jewish identity is.  He correctly sees that an Israeli identity is not the same as a Jewish identity, despite Israel's claim to be a Jewish State (the significance of which he fails to understand entirely) and adopts a lazy analysis of what Jewish identity consists of. 

Historically being Jewish was not just a religion, though for tactical reasons it's often simpler to assert this.  However in the transition from the feudal era, emancipation and the escape from the grip of the rabbis, where religion and social occupation were entwined, (Leon's 'people class' i.e. a caste) did indeed mean that being Jewish took on aspects of nationhood..  This doesn't mean that Jews were a nation but that in their heartland, the Pale of Settlement in Russia, Poland and Lithuania where they were confined, they did have territorial contiguity and a separate language (Yiddish).  They could be loosely defined as a national minority in that part of Eastern Europe.

iii.  In the US and UK being Jewish meant for most Jews being an immigrant section of the working class, with its own trade unions even.  It meant resisting the fascists and Police and being the advance guard of the working class (e.g. the election of England's only elected communist MP was in Mile End, the heart of the Jewish East End of London).

iv.  Today a secular Jewish identity in the West is primarily defined either by support for Israel or opposition to Zionism.  The majority of Jews are 'disappearing' i.e. integrating into the wider population because it is a transitory identity but Sand is wrong to suggest that there is therefore no secular Jewish identity, even if it is forged in opposition to Israel and what it stands for.

v.  Sand argues that there is nothing specifically Jewish in a secular Jewish identity.  But is there any specific national identity in  anything?  What does being Hungarian or British actually mean?  All national identities look back to national myths and borrow from other cultures and identities whilst claiming to be unique.

vi.  When he says that 'No achievement of Jewish secularists can be regarded as being Jewish, but is, rather, universal or belonging  to the nations where they took place.' my response is so what?   But why  did American Jews participate out of all proportion to their numbers in the civil rights struggles?  Or why did Argentinian Jews participate in and suffer disproportionately under the Junta?  Possibly the answer is that they saw their Jewish heritage as part of their anti-racism.

vi.  Hence the ridiculous claim that the 'involvement of people of  Jewish ancestry to him is totally incidental.'  Clearly it isn't to those who are involved.  Jewish values are not the same as Jewish religious ones, although the Orthodox (and the Nazis) proclaimed it as such.

vii.  Sand's denial of the right of secular non-Zionists to organise together is that of an Israeli academic who resents the solidarity movement.  Again he echoes Atzmon (in more elegant language and without the anti-semitism). 

viii.  His suggestion that Israel’s War of Independence was just like other similar wars suggests he either doesn't understand the specific nature of Zionism and its quest for demographic purity or he is unconcerned. 

ix.    Even more absurd is his attack on those who 'claim to be upholding Jewish values  while criticizing Israel,' and writes that they are no different from  “overt pro-Zionists.”   The latter are out and out chauvinists and often overt racists.  Hence their links with fascist organisations.  The same is not true of anti-Zionist Jews but one suspects that Sand is simply ignorant in this respect.  Jews have no greater rights than non-Jews but they do have a greater impact which is why we are targeted as 'self haters' by the Zionists.

x.   Sand's refusal to support the right of return of the refugees suggests that Sand himself accepts some of the tenets of Zionism (again  like Atzmon)

xi.  I agree with him is that the Palestinian people were the creation of Zionist colonisation.  That is also true of other colonised people, but so what? 

There were a few comments from other people when I first circulated this critique and I print them below:

Tony Greenstein

From  Moshé Machover:

I suspect that you are missing some significant fact about Sand and what he is trying to do and say. I think you are tacitly assuming that he is some kind of leftist. He was, but no longer is, and part of what he is trying to do is to make this clear. He comes from a CP family and in his youth was member of the Israeli Young Communists League. Following the 1967 war he and some of his friends attended Matzpen discussion circles; I recall them from that time when they described themselves as “between the CP and Matzpen”. After some vacillation he joined Matzpen. But not long after that he decided to follow an academic career and no longer engage in political activity.  He has since moved steadily to the right, and is now a kind of middle-of-the road liberal bourgeois nationalist. 

However he did not become a Zionist. In fact, he has retained some of the analysis of Zionism that he absorbed in Matzpen (although he is very careful not to mention this). So in the perverted Israeli classification he is regarded as a “leftist” (which simply means that he is not a Zionist or an anti-Arab racist).

His nationalism is of course not Zionist or any kind of Jewish nationalism; it is Hebrew (or “Israeli”) nationalism. Like Avnery (another Hebrew/Israeli bourgeois nationalist) he is patriotic about the 1947–49 “War of Independence” and opposed to the return of the Palestinian refugees; but supports equal individual rights for all Israeli citizens. 

His project is to establish his Hebrew/Israeli nationalism by rejecting and undermining Jewish nationalism and indeed any kind of Jewish identity. At the same time he is keen to disavow leftism and establish a bourgeois liberal persona. For this reason he attacks Jewishness in general, but most particularly left-wing anti-Zionist Jewish identity (this is where he meets Atzmon…).

ATB, MM

On 18 Nov 2014, at 14:27, CFC <cfc@igc.org> wrote:

Thanks, Tony -- these are interesting observations. Sand’s book (which I’m just now reading) is serious, where Atzmon’s is a lunatic rant. In any case, however, there’s an additional complication: The  statement that “The majority of Jews are 'disappearing' i.e. integrating into the wider population because it is a transitory identity“ sounds logical, even axiomatic to us materialists but  doesn’t hold up, at least in the U.S. context. A recent study (by the Pew institute, not a Jewish organization) indicates that while only 33% of U.S. Jews have any congregational affiliation, and only 23% attend synagogue or temple at least once a month, a much higher percentage affirm a Jewish identity and that this persists even in intermarriage – indeed, Jewish partners in intermarriage seem to feel a certain obligation to maintain the Jewish part of the family’s character. So Jewish identity is undoubtedly changing and becoming way less institutionally structured, but it is not disappearing. And support for Israel or opposition to Zionism – whatever any of us might like – does not seem to be decisive either way.  

David Finkel

 Shlomo Sand to secular Jews: I'm not Jewish and neither are you

Sun Nov 16, 2014 2:44 pm (PST) .

In his new book, the controversial historian challenges secular and anti-Zionist Jews to define their identity.

By Anshel Pfeffer, Nov. 15, 2014 

Perhaps the most telling passage in Shlomo Sand’s new book – “How I Stopped Being a Jew” (Verso Books, 112 pages, $16.95/£10) – comes about halfway through, when he mentions the famous meeting in 1952 between Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, and Rabbi Avraham Yeshayahu Karelitz (known by his followers as the Hazon Ish), at the time one of the most influential ultra-Orthodox rabbis. According to one version of what happened at that meeting, Rabbi Karelitz lectured Ben-Gurion that, in collisions between religion and state, the rabbis must prevail. To back this up, he cited the talmudic case of two carts blocking each other on a narrow road. The ruling is that the empty cart must give way to the full one. The inferred analogy – that secular Jews are the empty cart, devoid of heritage and learning, while only the Orthodox have any authentic Jewish culture, has been an enduring insult ever since to many Israelis.

But Sand, the controversial and iconoclastic Tel Aviv University  historian, whose previous books “The Invention of the Land of Israel”  and “The Invention of the Jewish People” caused furor within and outside academic circles, and who takes pride in being a total atheist, is on  the rabbi’s side. Not only, he argues, is there no Jewish culture that  is not derived from religiosity, but the very notion of secular Judaism  is indeed an empty one, since no such thing exists. His new book,  actually a moderately long essay, should instead have been called “Why I Never Was a Jew,” since Sand is emphatic that nothing he has ever  believed in has really been Jewish. His entire life, or as much of it as comes to light in what is also an abbreviated autobiography, led up to  the moment he realized his total lack of a Jewish identity. But more than anything else, while reading Sand’s new book, I felt I  was a religious affairs reporter once again, back in the days when I  read the ultra-Orthodox newspapers daily. Sand could have easily been a  pundit for one of them. I don’t mean those of the rabidly anti-Israel  Neturei Karta sect, but the more mainstream Haredi publications, like  Yated Ne’eman, Hamodia and Mahane Haredi, whose standard line is to  deride and denigrate any manifestation of Jewish secularity.

Just like the Haredi ideologues, Sand denies there is such a thing as  Jewish secular culture. No achievement of Jewish secularists, he says,  can be regarded as being Jewish, but is, rather, universal or belonging  to the nations where they took place. The involvement of people of  Jewish ancestry to him is totally incidental. This is classic Haredi  thinking: Judaism and Jewishness only manifest in rabbinically  prescribed religious practice – everything else is goyishe stuff. Once again, Sand’s most recent offering has caused much anger,  particularly among Israelis and Jewish supporters of Israel from the  right. This time most of the fury has been directed at his  characterization of Israel as “one of the most racist societies in the  Western world” in a shortened version of the book that appeared in The  Guardian. But while that is only to be expected, the new non-Jewish Sand poses little threat to the right wing; it is Jewish secular leftists he is challenging, particularly the anti-Zionist ones. I realized this at a lecture he gave last month at the London Middle  East Institute and the Center for Jewish Studies at the School of  Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Nearly 300 people  came to listen to Sand talk about his new book; a great many of them of  that specific demographic that, for want of a better description, can be labeled “conflicted Jews.”

 In the Q&A part of the lecture, two of  them asked Sand, with real pain in their voices, “instead of stopping  being a Jew, why didn’t you write ‘How I Stopped Being an Israeli?’” They simply couldn’t understand how their admired writer, who has  dedicated a major part of his writing career to dismantling what he sees as the fake mythology of Jewish nationalism, and lambasting the Israeli state, could deny the Jewish part of his identity in favor of his  Israeli one. But Sand has done the opposite of what they expected of him (and some of them have actually done themselves). Not only has he  constructed for himself a new form of Israeli identity, but he denies  these secular, progressive, non-Zionist Jews their intellectual  integrity. He ridicules those who claim to be upholding Jewish values  while criticizing Israel, and writes that they are no different from  “overt pro-Zionists.” These “anti-Zionist Jews” who have never lived in  Israel, he writes, “claim a particular right, different from that of  non-Jews, to make accusations against Israel.” Living in their  “diaspora,” a term he dismisses with quotation marks, they are “granting themselves the privilege of actively intervening in decisions regarding the future and fate of Israel.”

No universalist ethics

Sand denies the special right of secular non-Zionists to band together  as Jews, as they do in dozens of organizations and forums, and sit in  judgment of Israel. He goes further, accusing them of the same sin as  Jewish nationalists; of trying to claim that there is something special  or better about their Judaism. “But Zionism did pick up a lot of things  from Judaism,” he argues. “And even if Zionism is not Judaism, it  doesn’t mean that Judaism is an ethical religion – Judaism doesn’t allow marrying a non-Jew. Jewish ethics are not the ethics I dream of, it’s  not universalist ethics.”

Sand here is echoing both the ultra-Orthodox, who accuse the secular of transplanting foreign ideals into “authentic” Judaism, and Benjamin  Netanyahu, who famously said, “the leftists have forgotten what it is to be Jews.” Sand wants Jews to choose: You can be either religious or  nationalist (or both), but if you are neither, then you are not Jewish.  And don’t bother him with talk of Jewish ancestry and DNA, because if  that’s your alternative, then your definition of Jewishness is racial,  just like the anti-Semites.

There is nothing ethical about Judaism, says Sand, blasting away the  much cherished liberal notion of tikkun olam – if it’s enlightened, then it’s universal, and therefore not Jewish. The long lists of brave  Jewish revolutionaries and human rights advocates so beloved of  progressive Jews mean nothing, he claims. If anything, they were denying their parochial Jewish roots and joining a bigger and better global  brotherhood of man and woman.

Sand is the scourge of anti-Zionist secular Jews. Criticize Israel, by  all means, he tells them; but if you identify yourselves as Jews when  doing so, you’re phonies. You don’t get any special moral standing just  by accident of birth. You are no better than the goyim. He of course does have a special right to excoriate Israel. He is an  Israeli and prefers the citizenship of Israel to being a Jew, despite  Israel’s many faults, and racism that leads him to believe it will  “perhaps soon” be as bad as “1930s Germany” (though not 1940s, he  insists). His vision of a better Israel is simply a less Jewish one. “I  grew up there and lived there,” and these ties bind him forever: “My  culture is Israeli culture” (yes, there is such a thing). He even ends  the book with Theodor Herzl’s exhortation, “If you will it, it is no  legend.”

Mirroring the right

And here is his next major letdown for the anti-Zionist left. Of  course, Sand wants Israel to relinquish its notions of Jewish supremacy  and end the occupation, in the hope that it will end the conflict with  the Palestinians; but he isn’t willing to accept the Palestinian  narrative. Many of the audience were distressed to hear that he opposes  the Palestinian “right of return” because “it’s a denial of the  existence of the State of Israel.” This led an astonished  British-Palestinian academic to say to him, “I really liked you until  you said that.”

How awful for her that this fierce critic of Jewish nationalism refuses to embrace Palestinian nationalism instead. She would have been  devastated if she knew that Sand agrees with the Zionist right that the  Palestinian people are an invention. In 2012, he said in a Haaretz  interview that “the Palestinians were Arabs who lived in this region for hundreds of years. Zionist colonization forged the Palestinian people.” Many of his arguments against a return of the Palestinian refugees  mirror those used by the right.

He says that Israel’s War of Independence was just like other “wars of  the 1940s that kicked out minorities,” and the Palestinians don’t  deserve any special right of return just because unlike those expelled  in other wars, they were forced to remain refugees. He blames the Arab  states for perpetuating the refugee problem, along with Israel for  creating it. “The Arabs kept these children in the camps and they have  their responsibility, also with their nice solidarity. Let these people  go out of this shit of the camps.”

Sand advocates equal rights for all Israeli citizens; indeed, one of  his reasons for proclaiming he is not a Jew is that he doesn’t want to  belong to one set of “privileged” Israelis. But at one point in his  lecture, he echoed Avigdor Lieberman, when he raised the following fear: “What if the Arabs in Galilee want to have a Kosovo?” He also rejects  the Israel = apartheid equation much beloved of the anti-Zionist left;  not because Israel is any less racist in his reckoning, but because  unlike South Africa, which could not exist without its black population, Israel’s economy is robust enough to do without the Palestinians.

Sand’s challenge to secular Jews who refuse to be defined by religious  belief and practice is a strong and eloquent one. In the absence of  religion, he claims, there are only ersatz identities, such as clinging  to memories of persecution, which has largely disappeared from the  world. Everyone wants to be a survivor, he says, that’s the real  “Holocaust industry.” Or else Jewishness in this day and age is defined  by one’s artificial relationship with Israel, whether it’s support or  repudiation.

Sand takes advantage of a peculiar vulnerability of today’s  non-religious Jews – their failure to articulate what it means to be  Jewish in a century where no one is trying to shut them into a ghetto or murder them. Being Jewish without religion, he insists, means living in the past; it has no base in the present or future. But his insistence that if it cannot be defined, then it does not exist, is also his weakest point. Just like the Haredi outlook, Sand’s perspective of Judaism is a  fundamentalist one. He disregards the fact that ultra-Orthodoxy is also  just another reinvention of Judaism – in this case a reaction to the  18th-century Enlightenment and the auto-emancipation of the next two  centuries. In every generation, Jews fought with the contradictions of  their faith and allowed themselves to pick and choose. It was always a  nebulous identity, but never the weaker for that.

The identity of the skeptics and the heretics and the rebels was  Jewish, precisely because they chose it to be, and denied the rabbis the right to decide for them. Who can deny them that?

Sand implores his readers to allow him not to be Jewish; that should be his right. But at the same time, he cedes the right to define who is a  Jew to the rabbis. To win his freedom to define himself as he chooses,  he wants to deprive the rest of us of our freedom to remain Jews on our  own terms.