A reader of a draft of my article, “Hannah Arendt: From Iconoclast to Icon” (published recently in Tikkun‘s new online edition), asked me something that triggered my elaborate response, which evolved into another article. It begins with Arendt, but it’s really not about her. “Finding Refuge: Why Palestine?” was published in the March/April 2011 issue of Outlook: Canada’s Progressive Jewish Magazine. I am making it available on Tikkun Daily because Outlook did not choose to publish it on its website. It also seems opportune at this time because Holocaust Remembrance Day falls this year on May 1, with the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising commemorated on April 21:
It may surprise some admirers of Hannah Arendt, the renowned German-Jewish intellectual, to learn that when in exile from Nazi Germany in the 1930s, she worked in Paris for Youth Aliyah, a Zionist agency that assisted European Jewish young people to enter Palestine. Although Arendt is well known as a critic of Israel and Zionism, she recalled toward the end of her life in an interview on West German television that this was the most satisfying work she had ever done.
Hannah Arendt as a graduate student
The final chapter of an anthology of Arendt’s work entitled The Jewish Writings (Schocken Books, 2007) is an afterword by her niece, Edna Brocke. This warm, personal remembrance confirms Arendt’s enthusiasm:
She understood Zionism as a concrete way of combating rising National Socialism, … rescuing Jews and above all children and young people by sending them to Palestine. … [She] considered that to be her active contribution to the defense of the Jewish people.
I’ve recently been asked to explain why such efforts by Arendt — and others associated with the Zionist movement in the 1930s and ’40s — to facilitate Jewish immigration to Palestine, were justified. This question was presumably posed because the mostly hostile Arab reaction to Jewish immigration led to war and the eventual widespread displacement of the indigenous Palestinian-Arab population.
The questioner mistakenly assumed that other destinations, such as South Africa and Latin America, were readily open to Jews. This assumption grossly underestimates the dimensions of the Jewish predicament at the time. And how ever one views historic and current events in the Middle East, Israel’s origins as a haven from oppression and genocide are worth recalling.
Only one day after Rabbi Lerner presented the Tikkun Award to South African Justice Richard Goldstone, at a celebration of Tikkun’s 25th Anniversary attended by over 600 people at the University of California, Berkeley, Rabbi Lerner’s home was again assaulted by extremist Zionist haters who plastered posters over his home once again. This is the 3rd assault on his home since Lerner announced the award to Justice Goldstone whose report on Israel’s human rights violations during the Israeli assault on Gaza in Dec. 2008 and Jan.2009 was denounced by the State of Israel and by the AIPAC-dominated House of Representatives last year. You would not have known about the 2nd attack, which was reported to the police but not to the media because Lerner had been advised that not giving the attackers attention might make future attacks less likely. That strategy failed.
Each time the posters have sought to display Lerner as either a tool of an evil Goldstone trying to hurt Israel. The current posters were done more professionally than the previous ones, and present a picture of Nazi officers carrying away a Jew. Lerner’s name is put on one of the Nazis and “Islamic extremists” is written on the other Nazi, and the innocent Jew is identified as the State of Israel. The perspective of the attackers is clear: “Rabbi Lerner is a Nazi assaulting Israel.” That is why the police have labeled this a “hate crime.”
Photo by Patricia Smith Melton, www.PeaceXPeace.org
This is my sketchy outline (all I can do in a blog post) of how close we were several times to peace in the last two decades, and what undermined this each time:
The first major blow to the Oslo peace process was Baruch Goldstein’s mass murder of Palestinians at prayer in Hebron. Israel contritely apologized but didn’t act as Meretz and other doves urged at the time, to forcibly evict the extremist settlers in Hebron and/or nearby Kiryat Araba. This was seriously considered by Prime Minister Rabin, but fatally rejected in the conviction that the timetable for final-status talks on the disposition of the settlements should not be disrupted. There were a couple of small Palestinian terrorist incidents before the Goldstein massacre, but they escalated precipitously afterward.
Then, there was the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in Nov. 1995 by a pro-settler extremist, which left Israel under the leadership of Shimon Peres, who stumbled badly during his brief tenure as prime minister. His most damaging error was in unwisely authorizing the Shin Bet hit on Yihyah Ayyash, the Hamas master bomber known as “the engineer.”
Earlier, Peres had failed to exploit Rabin’s postmortem popularity with a snap election, which Peres would undoubtedly have won. Instead, he called an election later, and Hamas and Islamic Jihad struck back for the killing of Ayyash with a wave of attacks that took 60 Israeli lives in the middle of Jerusalem (with two exploding buses) and Tel Aviv (where numerous mothers and children were murdered in a central square). This was in the middle of the election campaign, and Peres immediately lost his 20-point lead and was defeated by Netanyahu in a squeaker on May 26, 1996. This terrorist wave had occurred hard on the heels of Israel’s withdrawal from most of the West Bank’s population centers and its authorization of the first free election in Palestinian history, with Arafat elected as president of the Palestinian Authority.
Photo by Patricia Smith Melton (Independence Day celebration, 2008) www.PeaceXPeace.org
When addressing the World Union of Meretz about five years ago, the dovish Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua argued a truth that should be better known than it is: that Zionism is not a single movement or ideology but a common platform or framework shared by political parties and philosophical currents from widely divergent places along the ideological spectrum.
Zionism was a grassroots Jewish reaction to the most pervasive and pernicious bigotry of recent Western history. Nineteenth century nationalist movements in much or most of Europe reignited virulent antisemitism, which eventually culminated in the slaughter of a majority of Europe’s Jews and one-third of all Jews worldwide.
We are always interested in ideas and links our readers send us, though we editors don’t always have time to check them out. For weeks we have been deep in deadlines to get 118 pieces for Tikkun’s 25th Anniversary issue into the print magazine (in bookstores now! buy one here!) or onto the web (where the web exclusives will all be up by week’s end, we trust), plus we just launched a new and beautiful newsletter which you can see here, and sign up for here (along with other Tikkun emails) and we are designing an even more wonderful new magazine website. That’s the Tikkun office headlines.
Luckily we did manage to read this email from one of our readers, Scott Rosenblum, which we are very happy to post. Incidentally, Letty Cottin Pogrebin is one the authors in the current print issue of Tikkun.
For Tikkun Daily, I thought you might be interested in an op-ed from the newest edition of the Forward, written by Letty Cottin Pogrebin, a leading figure in American Jewish feminism and the founding editor or Ms. magazine. In her editorial and with the two year anniversary in mind for Operation Cast Lead, she gives her take on the Jewish response to Richard Goldstone and the Goldstone Report, namely that many of Israel’s defenders have acted contrary to Jewish values in their attacks on him and his report on the Gaza War. She argues that the criticism against Goldstone should be condemned on specifically Jewish grounds because:
“the observant and educated of Goldstone’s attackers surely knew that speaking ill of another human being (“hate speech” in current parlance) violates one of Judaism’s most sacrosanct laws, the prohibition against lashon hara (the Evil Tongue – i.e., gossip), which Maimonides defined as any utterance (true or not!) that might cause a person physical or monetary damage, or shame, humiliation, anguish or fear.”
Human Rights Watch (HRW) has accused Israel of increasing its arbitrary repression of Palestinian non-violent activism lately. Abdullah Abu Rahma’s arrest — which I reported on in the second segment of my interview with Starhawk — is part of this crack-down in Bil’in, Nil’in, and Ramallah, where grassroots demonstrations have begun to mobilize Palestinians, Israelis, and international solidarity against the wall being built between the occupied territories and Israel. According to HRW,
Israel is building most of the barrier inside the West Bank rather than along the Green Line, in violation of international humanitarian law. In recent months, Israeli military authorities have arbitrarily arrested and denied due process rights to several dozen Palestinian anti-wall protesters.
Starhawk believes that the Israeli government fears this non-violent resistance more than the violent action they’ve contended with for years. Why? Because the government knows the movement’s power to shift public opinion and mobilize people against Israeli injustice. These grassroots efforts undermine several pillars of Israeli control in the occupied territories, according to Starhawk, and start to shatter the story that Palestinians are all evil terrorists.
Like most Jewish kids in postwar America, Starhawk grew up believing that Israel was the salvation of the Jewish people. She collected pennnies to plant trees in the Holy Land, learned Israeli folk songs and Israeli dances, and dreamed of going to Israel. At 15 she finally attended a Zionist program in Israel.
Star believes that she was raised with a compelling story — that Jews were kicked around for 2,000 years, almost exterminated in the Holocaust, and out of those ashes, finally got their own land again. “And by God,” she adds, “nobody’s going to take an inch of it away from us.” This is a persuasive story for many people, according to Starhawk. But unfortunately, the Palestinians aren’t in it.
For Starhawk, as for many American Jews of her age, it was painful to face the injustice that Israel was carrying out against the Palestinian people. Star senses that much of this injustice stems on a deep psychological level from an inability to see the Palestinian people as people — with their own humanity, their own rights, their own desires and flaws. Denying Palestinians that full range of humanity — and acknowledging that their ranks include the good, the bad, the vicious, the kind, the compassionate — is at the root of the unjust treatment they receive. Seeing every Palestinian as a suicide bomber who wants to kill an Israeli will not resolve this conflict. Nor will denying the existence of the Palestinians.
Starhawk hopes that another compelling narrative will begin to take the place of the one that she grew up with. This is a tale that’s very familiar to readers of Tikkun. It’s the story that Judaism stands for justice, for the regneration of the world, for tikkun olam. This, too, is a powerful story. And Star believes that if we can call people back to that story — as painful as it is to face the truth of what Israel has done to Palestine — then we can actually stop this injustice.
Tisha b’av is the day of mourning for all the destructions and oppression that happened to the Jewish people. Jewish theology claims “because of our sins we were exiled from our land,” so it’s important to raise the issue of whether our current sins toward Palestinians may lead again to another exile from our land.
The selection below comes from Jeremiah Haber’s blog, The Magnes Zionist. Magnes was first president of Hebrew University, and a strong supporter of a one-state option and for reconciliation with Palestinians. He, along with Martin Buber and others, developed a kind of Zionism that has not had major influence on the mainstream currents of contemporary Zionism, but which demonstrates that there is nothing intrinsically racist or colonialist in the theory of a Zionist project, however its actuality may have turned out to be — just as we might say that imperialism is not intrinsic to the original conception of American democracy however its actuality may have turned out to be.
Below is Haber’s post, reprinted in full with his permission:
