The Recognition by
Liberal Zionism’s Apostle that Democracy and a Jewish State are Incompatible is
a Breakthrough that cries of ‘anti-Semitism’ won’t silence
Peter Beinart is a
Professor of Journalism and Political Science at City University, a former
Editor of New Republic and the Editor-at-large of Jewish Currents. Beinart is at the heart of the liberal Zionist
establishment in America. His recent support, in Jewish
Currents, for a single binational state, not a Jewish state, has sent
shock waves around the Zionist blogosphere.
Beinart
argued in the New
York Times
that ‘For decades I argued for separation between Israelis and Palestinians.
Now, I can imagine a Jewish home in an equal state.’
Liberal
Zionists have vented their fury with Beinart for this ‘treachery’. Beinart
still considers himself a Zionist but is he?
Yitzhak
Laor, Israel’s finest poet, wrote in ‘The
Myths of Liberal Zionism’ that there never was such a creature as a liberal
Zionist. Liberal Zionism is an oxymoron. It is like supporting a democratic
dictatorship. At least when Viktor
Orban, Hungary’s Prime Minister expresses his wish to create a Christian
ethno-nationalist state he calls
it for what it is – an ‘illiberal Christian democracy’.’
Zionism
is based on creating a Jewish state in which the Palestinians are guests. Its
intention, from the very beginning, was to exclude the indigenous
population. As Herzl wrote in his Diary
 |
| This is what a Jewish State results in |
‘When we
occupy the land, we shall bring immediate benefits to the state that receives
us. We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to
us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by
procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any
employment in our country.’ (Diaries pp. 88,90)
This
was as much the policy of Labour Zionism as it was of the Revisionists. The only
difference was that the latter were more honest. The Revisionists believed that
only a policy of force, an Iron Wall would convince the Arabs that Zionism was
here to stay. As Vladimir Jabotinsky wrote
in his famous essay of the same name:
My readers
have a general idea of the history of colonisation in other countries. I
suggest that they consider all the precedents with which they are acquainted,
and see whether there is one solitary instance of any colonisation being
carried on with the consent of the native population. There is no such
precedent.
The
liberal Zionists sought to cajole the Arabs, by guile and sweet honeyed words, that
Zionism would benefit them but the reality was all too obvious. Wherever Jewish
settlements were established, the Arab workers were expelled from the land rather
than being re-employed as wage labour. As Tony Lerman wrote,
Liberal Zionism’s only role is to act as a
‘fig leaf for
the only Zionism that does have political agency today—right-wing, messianic,
ethnonationalist settler Zionism—it’s positively harmful.’
Although
Labour Zionism has almost died in Israel, it is alive and kicking in the
British Labour Party where it is leading the McCarthyist anti-Semitism’
campaign, whose purpose is to demonise the critics of the State of Israel.
There
have been predictable
attacks on Beinart such as that of David Weinberg for whom Beinart
is a ‘a shill for Israel’s enemies’,
a ‘woke and deracinated American Jew’
whose concern for the Palestinians is akin to understanding Nazi SS
stormtroopers!
Another
leading Zionist who invoked the Nazi analogy is Alan Dershowitz, a right-wing
American lawyer. Dershowitz’s thoughtful analysis in Newsweek was ‘Beinart's
Final Solution: End Israel as Nation-State of the Jewish People’. The same Zionists
who insist that any comparison between Israel and the Nazi state is
anti-Semitic never hesitate to compare their enemies to the Nazis.
The
reaction
of ‘liberal’ Zionist Daniel Gordis, was little different. Gordis described Beinart
as ‘a traitor to the Jewish people’
for calling for an end to Israel as a Jewish state. ‘Beinart's position is in line with
many anti-Semites.’ Gordis asks
rhetorically “Are you in the same camp as
Ilhan Omar and in the same camp as Rashida Tlaib?" declaring that “if you are in that camp, then we should
treat you the way we treat them... we
call you an “enemy” of our people.”
 |
| The Stab in the Back meme was used by German nationalists to portray Jews as disloyal and traitors - this is now used against Jewish anti-Zionists |
Talk
of ‘traitors’ and ‘enemies of the people’ is part of the
lexicon of the far-Right yet it comes naturally to ‘liberal’ Zionism.
In
End
the Jewish State? Let’s try some honesty, first Gordis vents his anger.
Beinart is accused of stringing together ‘an
astonishing array of sleights of hand and misrepresentations’ Gordis speaks
of ‘dozens of misrepresentations’ but
thankfully spares us the detail.
He
does though engage in a few sleights of hand himself, such as his assertion
that ‘the miracle of Israel is that we no
longer worry about annihilation’. Which is strange given Zionism’s weaponisation
of the Holocaust. Idith Zertal wrote
that there hasn’t been a war involving Israel ‘that has not been perceived, defined, and conceptualized in terms of
the Holocaust.’ Israel has mobilised the Holocaust ‘in the service of Israeli politics.’ [Israel’s
Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, p.4]
Begin
described Yasser Arafat as Hitler in his bunker during the siege of Beirut. The
examples of how the Holocaust informs Israel’s settler siege mentality are legion.
Yet according to Gordis Israel is
‘a grand experiment in the cultural,
intellectual, historical, linguistic and religious rebirth that can unfold when
a people is restored, with sovereignty, to its ancestral homeland.’
Which
is as good an example as any of the maxim that scratch a liberal Zionist and
you will find the same old racist. Beinart’s heresy is that he ‘cares more about the future of the
Palestinians than he does about the future of Judaism’s richness.’ Gordis ‘grand experiment’ is at the expense of 2 million Palestinians caged
in Gaza and a military rule in the West Bank. The culture that Gordis speaks of
exists on the back of torture, child imprisonment, settler violence and racism.
This is the Liberal Zionism that Beinart has betrayed.
 |
Israeli soldiers interacting in the West Bank last month with a Palestinian woman protesting the demolition of an unapproved animal shed.Credit...Abed Al Hashlamoun/EPA, via Shutterstock
|
Gordis’s
final insult is that Beinart is ‘much
more American than Jewish.’ This
really is a sin that cannot easily be washed away in the eyes of Zionism. In Gerald Kaufmann’s phrase, Beinart is a
ghetto, gutter Jew. He is part of Zionism’s despised Jewish Galut.
Beinart
links the dehumanisation of the Palestinians to the way that Zionism has internalised
and instrumentalised the Holocaust. The attribution of genocidal aspirations to the Palestinians
is a latter day abuse of the Holocaust and a consequence of this dehumanisation.
Beinart
quotes Holocaust survivor Yehuda Elkana’s essay in Ha’aretz, The Need to Forget’ that
relations with the Palestinians are mediated by ‘a particular interpretation of the lessons of the Holocaust’ which
sees everyone as against us. Not only is it a lesson that is nationalistic and
militaristic but it paints Zionism’s enemies as modern-day Nazis.
Beinart
describes the results of Zionist colonisation but refrains from describing
Zionism as a settler-colonial movement. Instead he describes the dehumanization
of Palestinians as ‘a cancer’ which
‘not only
turns Palestinians into Nazis, it turns anyone who takes up the Palestinian
cause into a Nazi sympathizer, guilty of antisemitism until proven innocent.’
And now,
as if on cue, Beinart himself has now attracted such accusations.
Thus
the enmity of the Palestinians for Zionism has nothing to do with the actions
of Israel. Rather the Palestinians are motivated by anti-Semitism. It is as if
the Irish were motivated by racial hatred of the English rather than Drogheda
and Bloody Sunday.
It was left to Gideon Levy to draw out the significance of Beinart’s conversion on
the road to Damascus. American Jews, he wrote ‘are beginning, if belatedly, to take a
clear-eyed look at Israel, its darling.’ American Jews have become increasingly disenchanted
with an Israel which does things to Palestinians that they would call anti-Semitic
if done to them. Beinart is the voice of an increasingly alienated American
Jewish youth.
What has particularly angered liberal Zionists
is that Beinart has belatedly recognised that the 2 state solution is dead.
Levy describes it as a ‘delusional
mirage. For 53 years
there has been a single state here’ an ‘apartheid
regime’. The fiction of 2 States and the ‘Peace Process’ has enabled
Apartheid in the West Bank to be justified.
 |
| Alan Dershowitz |
The
blackmail used against a single state is the same as that which was employed in
southern Africa, the settler fear that it would unleash a tidal wave of
violence from their victims. Yet as Levy points out ‘when a government of equality is established’ then ‘all its inhabitants win freedom and can
exercise their rights’. It is part of Zionism’s culture of violence against
the Palestinians.
Jonathan Leiter writes that ‘it’s likely that most liberal
Zionists will continue to choose the path of denial’
referring to the major American Jewish Organisations. American Jewish groups
are not going to fold because of Beinart’s insights yet nonetheless he has,
like Tony Judt before him, challenged the basic premises of Zionism in a way
that will resound with younger American Jews. Beinart has posed two very clear
alternatives – a democratic or a racist, exclusivist Israel. Liberal Zionism has
chosen the latter.
8
liberal Zionist Jewish organizations gave the game away when they declared
that annexation would prove that the Israeli government no longer seeks a
two-state solution, and that it has chosen a system of permanent repression and
inequality over liberal democracy. Their complaint was based on the
consequences for the Israeli state:
Such
action will drive further the wedge between many American Jews and Israel. It
would undercut the bipartisan nature of support for Israel in the United States
and risk triggering serious international diplomatic consequences.
It
is the attachment of liberal Zionists to ‘the
peace process’ that has enabled Israel to consolidate its territorial
gains. At least the right-wing Zionists were more honest. Leiter concludes by
arguing that
‘The
lack of a viable two-state solution does not mean that American Jews will stop
believing in one. Political fictions of such existential importance take a long
time to die.’
Just
as there are some people who deny the Holocaust or who believe in a flat Earth there
are those who will cling to the idea that an ethnic Jewish state can be democratic.
Ideas persist beyond the material circumstances that gave birth to them. [see Marx and Engels. Selected Correspondence. p. 498]
Jonathan
Cook describes
the development of Beinart’s disenchantment with the Israeli state and how his
rejection of the ‘most fundamental tenet
of liberal Zionism’ the need for a Jewish state verges on the sacrilegious.
Netanyahu’s annexation proposals ripped the ‘comfort blanket’ out of the liberal Zionist hands.
Cook
quotes Ha'aretz’s Anshel Pfeffer its ‘in-house
liberal Zionist’ who argues that Israel doesn’t need a moral narrative
since its existence is one of pragmatism. This is a glaring admission that
Zionism has lost the war of narratives. As Cook notes, the issue isn’t what
Israeli Jews think but what Israel’s western sponsors demand.
Like
many Jews before him, Beinart has fallen out of love with Israel. A state based
on a single ethnicity, especially one defined by religion, cannot be other than
a racist state. Today India is becoming the new Hindu Israel. Beinart is aghast
at what Israel has become and how it has transformed the Palestinians into the
Jews’ historical enemy:
‘Through a historical sleight of
hand that turns Palestinians into Nazis, fear of annihilation has come to
define what it means to be an authentic Jew.’
 |
| Racist Comments by Israel's Chief Rabbis are two a penny |
Israel,
Beinart notes, views its relations with the Palestinians through a ‘Holocaust lens’. For example on the eve
of the invasion of Lebanon, Prime Minister Menachem Begin declared that ‘The alternative to this is Treblinka’.
As
Peter Novick and Norman Finkelstein have argued, the Holocaust has become the
new Jewish religion. However it is a religion in the service of a state. Instead
of drawing universal, anti-racist lessons from the Holocaust Zionism drew nationalistic
conclusions. Racism was only wrong when Jews were the victims. Those Jews who rejected
Zionism could not complain about anti-Semitism. One of the barbs thrown
at anti-Zionist Jews is that by embracing the Arab ‘enemy’ they deserve to have
been murdered by Hitler.
For Zionism anti-Semitism
was the understandable reaction of non-Jews to the Jewish stranger in their midst.
As Jacob Klatzkin, Editor of Die Welt,(1909-1911) explained:
‘If we do not admit the
rightfulness of anti-Semitism we deny the rightfulness of our own
nationalism... Instead of establishing societies for defence against the
anti-Semites who want to reduce our rights, we should establish societies for
defence against our friends, who desire to defend our rights.’
Zionism
concluded that Jews must have their own militaristic state based on the same principles
that led to the persecution of the Jews. Except that this time it wouldn’t be
the Jews who were the victims. The opponents of that state, the Arabs, were cast
as the new Nazis.
 |
| This was what Rabbi Kashtiel of the Bnei David pre-military training college argued |
Some
like Rabbis Kashtiel and Radler went so far as to conclude
that Hitler was ‘100% correct’. His only mistake was to choose the wrong
target! In the hands of the Jews Hitler’s racist ideology would be correctly
applied - to the Arabs. Kashtiel and Radler were ‘educators’ at the Bnei David
military prep school and Eli Yeshivah, which is closely connected to Rafi
Peretz, the Minister of Jerusalem Affairs.
Netanyahu,
with his address
to the 2015 World Zionist Congress, exonerated Hitler claiming
that it was the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem who was responsible for the
Holocaust. According to Netanyahu, Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said
'If you expel them, they'll all come here
(to Palestine).', Hitler then asked: "What should I do with them?" and the Mufti replied: "Burn them."
 |
| What a member of the fascist Lehava, which the new Israeli Ambassador Tzipi Hotoveli funded, proclaimed |
Beinart
describes the apartheid discrimination that Palestinians experience in the West
Bank, complete with Jewish only roads and settlements. He also observes that
the Green Line dividing pre-1967 Israel from the West Bank rarely
appears
on most Israeli maps and that with some 650,000 settlers colonising the West
Bank and Jerusalem, there is now no possibility of a two-state solution. This
is the background to the question which provides the theme to the essay,
‘whether the
price of a state that favors Jews over Palestinians is too high. After all, it
is human beings—all human beings—and not states that are created b’tselem
Elohim, in the image of God.
Beinart
declares that
It is time for
liberal Zionists to abandon the goal of Jewish–Palestinian separation and
embrace the goal of Jewish–Palestinian equality.
This
is where Beinart effectively marks his break with Zionism, although he still
doesn’t recognise the implications of what he is saying. It is a long-standing Zionist
fiction that Israel can defy the laws of logic and be both a democratic and a
Jewish state.
How
can a state based on one religion not discriminate against those who are not of
that religion? How can defining nationality on the basis of religion not be
racist? Unfortunately Beinart does not ask these questions explicitly. He is an
empirical non-Zionist. Beinart maintains the fiction that you can be a Zionist
and support equality. The history of Israel proves otherwise.
In
1948 Israel solved its ‘demographic problem’, having too many Arabs in the
Jewish state by the simple expedient of expelling them. In 1967 it was unable
to expel the Palestinians of the West Bank although about 300,000 were expelled.
Beinart fears, quite rightly, that annexation will provide the political
opportunity for another mass expulsion and quotes Israel’s Democracy
Institute that over half of Israeli Jews, in the event of Area C in the West
Bank being annexed, favour the expulsion of its Palestinians. According to the IDI:
The Jewish
public’s preferred solution for the Palestinians who live in Area C, in case it
is annexed, is to transfer them to the areas under the Palestinian Authority’s
control. The solution preferred by the Arabs is to grant full citizenship
rights...
Annexation is ‘a
waystation on the road to hell.’ It is this which has led Beinart to the
conclusion that a Jewish state cannot be other than a racist state. Beinart’s
Zionist critics place the blame for the failure of the 2 State Solution squarely
on the victims, the Palestinians as colonialism has always done. This is why
those hoping for any major rupture inside the Zionist movement are likely to be
disappointed.
Beinart
has belatedly reached the same conclusion that increasing numbers of American
Jews have reached. The only alternative to apartheid and ethnic cleansing is
equality. It is this which drives his Zionist critics mad. To them, equality is
genocide. The idea of a state with equal rights for all its inhabitants is
anathema to Zionism because such a state cannot be a Jewish ethnic state. It is
the death of a nation.
What
particularly infuriates his liberal Zionist critics is that Beinart criticises
Apartheid within 1948 Israel. He quotes the leader of the Joint List, Aymen
Odeh, in which he describes a situation in which “700 Jewish towns and not a single Arab town” have been built in
Israel since its founding. It is an abiding principle of the Zionist ‘left’
that pre-1967 Israel was a haven of equality. They forget that from 1948-1966
Israel’s Arabs lived under military rule.
 |
| Rabbi Dahan was Deputy Defence Minister in Netanyahu's 2015 Government |
Beinart’s
comparisons between Israel and Apartheid South Africa, breaks new ground for a
liberal Zionist critique. Some Zionists will concede that the situation in the
Occupied Territories is like Apartheid but they fiercely resist its application
to pre-1967 Israel.
Despite
its eloquent wording with its obscure Yavne metaphor, the essay is
intellectually incoherent in one respect. Beinart still hesitates in cutting
the umbilical chord to liberal Zionism. Beinart argues that embracing the goal
of Jewish–Palestinian equality does not require abandoning Zionism and observes
that when in 2018 the Knesset passed the Jewish
Nation State Basic
Law which determined that only Jews have the right to national
self-determination in Israel, several 'members of the Joint List proposed
an alternative, which affirmed “the
principle of equal citizenship for every citizen.” The Zionist parties
however rejected equality in favour of Jewish supremacy.
Dealing
with the argument that hatred between Israeli Jews and Arabs is intractable,
Beinart notes that the same excuse was used in respect of southern Africa: ‘progress often appears utopian before a
movement for moral change gains traction.’ He observes that what lies
behind such arguments is a dehumanisation of the colonised, otherwise ‘it would be obvious that they, too, prefer
not to kill or be killed when they can achieve their rights in more peaceful
ways.’
Despite
making the comparison with post-Apartheid South Africa Beinart shies away from its
example of a unitary non-racial state. Beinart argues that the ANC ‘never saw itself as representing a separate
Black nation, but rather the South African nation.’ This is true but
instead of drawing the obvious conclusion that Palestinians should include
Israeli Jews under the umbrella of Palestinian nationhood, Beinart argues for a
binational state.
Beinart
attempts to rewrite the history of Zionism so as to suggest that at one time
the Zionist movement was benevolent and inclusive, that it did not envisage
statehood. He argues that
‘the demand
for a Jewish state did not define Zionism until the 1940s. This wasn’t only
true for “cultural Zionists” like Ahad Ha’am. It was also true for “political
Zionists” like Theodor Herzl, Leon Pinsker, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and even, for
much of his life, David Ben-Gurion.’
This is
simply not true. It is rewriting history. In 1896 Herzl published a short book,
‘The Jewish State’. Statehood was Herzl’s
aim and he set about achieving this by attempting to secure the backing of the imperialist
powers. Chaim Weizmann, the President of the Zionist Organisation declared, not in 1940
but at the 1919 Peace Conference that “the
Zionist objective was gradually to make Palestine as Jewish as England was
English”. That was why Ben-Gurion and the Zionist movement consistently
opposed any democratic representative institutions in Palestine until they
achieved a majority.
If the
Zionists did not oppose a binational state until the 1940s why, from 1920
onwards did Histadrut, the Labour Zionist colonising agency, support a campaign
of Jewish Labour and Jewish Land? In deliberately creating an Arab-free economy,
Zionism was sowing the seeds of transfer.
When
Beinart says that ‘The early Zionists
were concerned, above all, with creating a place of Jewish refuge and
rejuvenation.’ this again is untrue. Zionism’s goal was the preservation of
the Jewish race/nation. Hence their hatred of assimilation which, according
to former Education Minister Rafi Peretz “is
like a second Holocaust.” Their chosen instrument was statehood.
Zionism never
was a refugeeist organisation. Barely 1% of Jews fleeing the pogroms of Czarist
Russia went to Palestine. In Palestine itself Arthur Ruppin and the Jewish
Agency had a strict policy of selecting immigrants. Two thirds of Jews who
wanted to immigrate to Palestine in the 1920s were denied certificates of
entry.
Beinart
is wrong to state that ‘it was the
Holocaust that fundamentally transformed Jewish thinking about sovereignty’.
The 1919 King-Crane
Commission that Woodrow Wilson set up found that ‘the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of
the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine.’ [Tom Suarez, ‘State of
Terror – How terrorism created modern Israel’, p.44. In May 1911, Arthur
Ruppin, the Director of the Palestine Office, ‘suggested
in a letter to the Zionist executive a limited population transfer’ of
Arabs dispossessed by Jewish land purchases to other lands near Aleppo and Homs.
Of
course, whilst they were still a minority, the Zionists talked in euphemism’s
about a ‘Jewish national home’ and more ambiguously a ‘Jewish Commonwealth’ but
the idea of statehood was fixed from the very beginnings of Zionism.
At the Zionists’
Biltmore Conference in New York in May 1942 the demand was first made explicitly
for a Jewish state. This was when the death mills of Auschwitz were in full
operation. As Noah Lucas observed Ben Gurion was determined that
‘The forces
unleashed by Hitler in all their horror must be harnessed to the advantage of
Zionism. ... By the end of 1942… the struggle for a Jewish state became the
primary concern of the movement.’
The Holocaust
took second place to statehood. Ben-Gurion’s strategy was that
‘Disaster is
strength if channelled to a productive course. The whole trick of Zionism is
that it knows how to channel our disaster, not into despondency or degradation,
as is the case in the Diaspora, but into a source of creativity and
exploitation.’ [The Burning Ground, p. 853]
Beinart observes
that the Zionist movement views activists who boycott Israel ‘as a greater threat to Jewish life than
white supremacist politicians whose followers attack synagogues’ without reaching
any conclusions as to the nature of Zionism itself.
Beinart
instinctively grasps that Zionism cannot be reformed internally and that Israel
is headed on a path that will lead to it becoming a pariah. However he still
clings to the myths of Zionism and its origins. It is this which leads him to
characterise the situation as a conflict of 2 people, to be solved by a
binational state.
None of
his Zionist critics comes to grip with Beinart’s arguments as to the
consequence of Israel’s occupation. They prefer to attack the messenger. However
a binational state would simply replicate the present problems of racism and
segregation it would not overcome them. It would channel religious sectarianism
into legal channels.
The only
solution is on the lines of South Africa. A single unitary state enabled joint
Black-White participation in political movements. That is what is necessary in
a new Israel/Palestine. Jews and Arabs should be members of political parties
because, like most of the world, they share the same political beliefs. Their ethnicity or religion should be irrelevant
but in a Jewish state or even a binational state you would have Jewish and
non-Jewish parties.
The
significance of Beinart’s article is considerable but lies not in terms of
heralding a split in the American Zionist movement. What it does do is provide legitimation
for the increasing number of Jews who have become disillusioned with Israel. It
helps to bring the argument for de-Zionisation of Israel into the mainstream.
The same
rules apply to Israeli society as any other class society. If you give power
and privilege to one section of the population and base the very existence of
the state on that section, don’t expect the outcome to be any different from
that in any other racist states. As in Israel today, ruling elites will always deploy
racism as a method of ensuring the loyalty of the masses.
Beinart’s
analysis still shies away from understanding that Zionism was flawed from the
outset, not simply in terms of the Palestinians but for Jews too. Zionism began by an acceptance of
anti-Semitism and this was its original sin, its mark of Cain.
Tony
Greenstein
