The fascinating article posted by Stuart outlines one aspect of this topic
which has been missing so far, which is the question of the semiotics of
this debate, the attempted juxtaposition of differential meta-narratives by
both sides in the debates (of which there appear to be three separate ones
now – whether a boycott can be discussed by the union, what is meant by a
boycott and what boycott should be voted on, and finally geo-political
analysis of the rights and wrongs of the Israeli/Palestinian situation).
Both sides presuppose a naturalized ‘obvious’ or ’neutral’ starting point
(Hones 2006), roughly described by an apartheid/anti-Semitism binary and the
fighting on both sides now appears to be about the positioning of taboos
(claiming the moral high ground?) - providing an incontestable underpinning
for one set of positionalities by translating doxa to Aristotelian endoxa.
If we parse the article by Newman semiotically, at least one side of this
oppositional, discursive world-creation becomes clearer. Take for instance
the following assertions:
“the boycott would have destroyed all the progress toward mutual
understanding.” “a university that was known for its liberal pro-peace
faculty members.” “The boycott became a crusade to single out Israel and its
academics as the lepers of world society. The boycotters live in denial of
China, Burma, Zimbabwe, and a host of other countries with which Britain has
academic and scientific links.”
The textual hinterland to the Newman piece is one in which the author is
assuming an impartial, non-located position which neutrally over-views the
topic of the boycott, as well as “a tendency to syntactic distancing
strategies, such as a reliance on the passive tense, to create a relational
split between the narrative position and its subject matter” (Hones 2006).
It is beyond question that there is some neutral signifier progress towards
which all actors are working, that the tactic of a boycott was to render
Israel and Israeli academics and society as ‘lepers’, that a homogenous and
unrepresentative monad (‘the boycotters’) had both unfairly singled out
Israel and were entirely unconcerned with China, Burma etc. Perhaps we could
call this a textual attempt to separate the sphere of the moral and
objective from the sphere of the behavioural and political.
Newman also tends towards positing the different voices, not only in this
debate but across the whole gamut of
Jewish/non-Jewish/academic/non-academic/British-Jewish/US-Jewish/Israeli-critical/Israeli-defensive
actors as unitary, monolithic: “further alienating Israelis” “all too easy
for those who are Israeli or Jewish to respond to pro-boycott union
members”. This is obviously an attempt to reduce the number of possible
positions in the debate by setting up a false and arbitrary binary
representation of two imagined positions, thus reducing the performativity
of complex mesh of actors across a range of fluid and shifting encounters to
‘manageable’ but exclusionary dimensions.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this article is its attempt to define
and at the same time limit a purportedly abstract ethical practice (positive
engagement between unnamed Israeli and Palestinian teachers (a la Elsevier
Reed) enforced by the nuclear option of the anti-semitic label), labelled
with intentional vagueness ‘welcoming neutral spaces of open dialogue’. This
vagueness gives the neutral arbiter flexibility to define and restrict the
spaces of acceptable debate and action, whilst at the same time utilizing as
a policing mechanism the psycho-social hinterland of the holocaust through
the employment of the unappealable label of anti-Semitism to which, of
course, only one ‘side’ in the debate may have recourse and of which there
is no counter of similar emotive and political power. The real power of this
weapon is, of course, in the veiled threat of its use – “the anti-Semitism
counter argument was too simplistic” and thus some of ‘the opposition’ are
well-intentioned but misguided “liberal academics who will stand up and
defend the rights of any student or professor”, who had nonetheless better
watch what they say or “the growing anti-Semitism that has visited England
and its universities in recent years” will give ‘us’ no option but to label
them as ‘officially’ anti-Semitic because of what they have “even if
unwittingly” encouraged, with all the consequent damage that will occur to
them as academics.
As a whole, the co-opting of unique victim status by Newman on behalf of
(presumably) the whole community of British Jews is partial, and his
treatment of the engagements he describes between Israelis and Palestinians
as a meeting of equals in which progress towards understanding is from
positions of equal intransigence renders invisible the unequal distribution
of power between the actors and the whole structure of Israeli-Palestinian
power relationships. As just one example, when he mentions the difficult
logistics of the meeting in Istanbul he fails to mention that the
Palestinians would have had to apply for travel documents from a hostile
occupying power which would only have been granted if they were lucky enough
not to be on some travel blacklist; it is also not unlikely that they might
be refused the right to re-enter Israel or the occupied territories as has
frequently happened in the past – a similar set of threats did not apply to
the Israeli academics. Where then is the mutuality in even this artificial
environment?
The semiotics of the Newman piece are by no means exceptional and are
reflected across the whole spectrum of representations of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, on both sides. Take for instance the assertion
by both the Israeli government and the European Community that Hamas cannot
be negotiated with because it denies the right of the State of Israel to
exist. Leaving aside the fact that considerable portions of Israeli society
ranging from left-socialists to orthodox observant Jews also believe that
the state of Israel as currently constituted is a illegitimate or even a
blasphemy (“The Jewish people were sent into exile by Divine decree. They
were then expressly commanded by the Almighty, not to attempt to leave their
exilic existence through any human intervention. They were expressly
forbidden to create their own state, such as the Zionist state of "Israel"”
Neturei Karta International: Jews United Against Zionism,
http://www.nkusa.org/activities/Statements/2006July18.cfm), both sides have
spent the decades since 1948 attempting to take advantage of the political
instrumentality of denying each others’ (and indeed their own) existence –
witness Golda Meir’s (in)famous 1948 statement that there was no such thing
as a Palestinian people, reiterated continuously by both sides since that
date and completely meaningless in the context of the relationships of power
and oppression that bedevil the region. In this situation one is reminded of
the US general during the Vietnamese war peace-talks, who allegedly
upbraided his North Vietnamese counter-part by stating that the North
Vietnamese had never been able to defeat the US on the battle-field – to
which the North Vietnamese replied that this was quite so, but utterly
beside the point.
On a similar note, observers of the region will have noted with some wry
amusement Israeli complaints that Iran is in breach of UN resolutions, just
as it asserted that Lebanon was in breach of UN resolution 1559 and 1701 and
called on the United Nations Security Council to take action. These
assertions might carry more weight were it not for the fact that Israel
itself is of course in breach of a substantial quantity of UN resolutions,
the most important of which include 194 (Palestinian right to return), 242
(Palestinian occupation illegal), 446 (Israeli settlements in Palestine
illegal) and 3236 (Palestinian right to self-determination). The list of UN
resolutions of which Israel is either in breach or which condemn Israeli
actions of one kind or another is 1397, 181, 106, 111, 127, 162, 171, 228,
237, 248, 250, 251, 250, 252, 256, 259, 262, 265, 267, 270, 271, 279, 280,
285, 298, 313, 316, 317, 332, 337, 347, 425, 427, 444, 446, 450, 452, 465,
467, 468, 469, 471, 476, 478, 484, 487, 497, 498, 501, 509, 515, 517, 518,
520, 573, 587, 592, 605, 607, 608, 636, 641, 672, 673 681, 694, 726 and 799,
according to Jews Against The Occupation
(http://www.jatonyc.org/UNresolutions.html) - one purpose of course in using
all these Jewish sources is to point out the sheer wealth and mass of
critical Jewish opinion and activism that is utterly absent from the
Newmanite discourse, or what we might rather term the Dershowitz/Newman axis
(DNA? O no, surely not!).
I leave you with an account of the experiences of our Jewish colleagues who
similarly contest the occupation of Palestinian lands and the treatment of
the Palestinian people, in other words our friends who likewise dare speak
truth to power.
Jon Cloke
Rosh Hashana Message:
Celebrate Jewish Glasnost!
Tony Karon
September 13th, 2007
<http://www.tonykaron.com/>
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174836>
First, a confession: It may tell me that I hate myself, but I can't help
loving Masada2000, the website
maintained by militant right-wing Zionist followers of Rabbi Meir Kahane.
The reason I love it is its D.I.R.T. list -- that's "Dense anti-Israel
Repugnant Traitors" (also published as the S.H.I.T. list of "Self-Hating and
Israel-Threatening" Jews). And that's not because I get a bigger entry than
-- staying in the Ks -- Henry Kissinger, Michael Kinsley, Naomi Klein, or
Ted Koppel. The Kahanists are a pretty flaky lot, counting everyone from
Woody Allen to present Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on their list of Jewish
traitors. But the habit of branding Jewish dissidents -- those of us who
reject the
nationalist notion that as Jews, our fate is tied to that of Israel, or the
idea that our people's historic
suffering somehow exempts Israel from moral reproach for its abuses against
others -- as "self-haters" is not unfamiliar to me.
In 1981, my father went, as a delegate of the B'nai B'rith Jewish service
organization, to a meeting of the Cape Town chapter of the Jewish Board of
Deputies, the governing body of South Africa's Jewish communal institutions.
The topic of the meeting was "Anti-Semitism on Campus." My father was pretty
shocked and deeply embarrassed when Exhibit A of this phenomenon turned out
to be something I'd published in a student newspaper condemning an Israeli
raid on Lebanon.
By then, I was an activist in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa,
which was consuming most of my energies. Having been an active left-Zionist
in my teenage years, I had, however, retained an interest in the Middle East
-- and, of course, we all knew that Israel was the South African white
apartheid regime's most important ally, arming its security forces in
defiance of a UN arms embargo. Even back then, the connection between the
circumstances of black people under apartheid, and those of Palestinians
under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, seemed obvious
enough to me and to many other Jews in the South African liberation
movement: Both were peoples harshly ruled over by a state that denied them
the rights of citizenship.
Still, this was a first. I could recite the kiddush from memory, sing old
kibbutznik anthems and curse in
Yiddish. I had been called a "bloody Jew" many times, but never an
anti-Semite or a self-hating Jew. What quickly became clear to me, though,
was the purpose of that "self-hating" smear -- to marginalize Jews who
dissent from Zionism, the nationalist ideology of Jewish statehood, in order
to warn others off expressing similar views.
What I like about the S.H.I.T. list's approach to the job -- other than the
"Dangerous Minds" theme music that plays as you read it -- is the way it
embraces literally thousands of names, including many of my favorite Jews.
Memo to the sages at Masada2000: If you're trying to paint dissenters as
demented traitors, you really have to keep the numbers down. Instead,
Masada2000's inadvertent message is: "Think critically about Israel and
you'll join Woody Allen and a cast of thousands..."
A New Landscape of Jewish Dissent
The Kahanists are a fringe movement, but their self-defeating list may
nonetheless be a metaphor for the coming crisis in more mainstream
nationalist efforts to police Jewish identity. The Zionist establishment has
had remarkable success over the past half-century in convincing others that
Israel and its supporters speak for, and represent, "the Jews." The value to
their cause of making Israel indistinguishable from Jews at large is that it
becomes a lot easier to shield Israel from reproach. It suggests, in the
most emphatic terms, that serious criticism of Israel amounts to criticism
of Jews. More than a millennium of violent Christian persecution of Jews,
culminating in the Holocaust, has
made many in the West rightly sensitive towards any claims of anti-Semitism,
a sensitivity many Zionists like to exploit to gain a carte blanche
exemption from criticism for a state they claim to be the very
personification of Jewishness.
So, despite Israel's ongoing dispossession and oppression of the
Palestinians in the occupied
territories, then-Harvard president Larry Summers evidently had no trouble
saying, in 2002, that harsh criticisms of Israel are "anti-Semitic in their
effect if not in their intent."
Robin Shepherd of the usually sensible British think-tank Chatham House has
gone even further, arguing that comparing Israel with apartheid South Africa
is "objective anti-Semitism." Says Shepherd: "Of course one can criticize
Israel, but there is a litmus test, and that is when the critics begin using
constant key references to South Africa and the Nazis, using terms such as
‘bantustans.' None of these people, of course, will admit to being racist,
but this kind of anti-Semitism is a much more sophisticated form of racism,
and the kind of hate-filled rhetoric and imagery are on the same moral level
as racism, so gross and distorted that they are defaming an entire people,
since Israel is an essentially Jewish project."
I'd agree that the Nazi analogy is specious -- not only wrong but offensive
in its intent, although not
"racist". But the logic of suggesting it is "racist" to compare Israel to
apartheid South Africa is simply
bizarre. What if Israel objectively behaves like apartheid South Africa?
What then?
Actually, Mr. Shepherd, I'd be more inclined to pin the racist label on
anyone who conflates the world's 13 million Jews with a country in which 8.2
million of them -- almost two thirds -- have chosen not to live.
Although you wouldn't know it -- not if you followed Jewish life simply
through the activities of such major Jewish communal bodies as the
Conference of Presidents of American Jewish Organizations and the
Anti-Defamation League -- the extent to which the eight million Jews of the
Diaspora identify with Israel is increasingly open to question (much to the
horror of the Zionist-oriented Jewish establishment). In a recent study
funded by the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies (an important donor
to Jewish communal organizations), Professors Steven M. Cohen and Ari Y.
Kelman revealed that their survey data had yielded some extraordinary
findings: In order to measure the depth of attachment of American Jews to
Israel, the researchers asked whether respondents would consider the
destruction of the State of Israel a "personal tragedy." Less than half of
those aged under 35 answered "yes" and only 54% percent of those aged 35-50
agreed (compared with 78% of those over 65). The study found that only 54%
of those under 35 felt comfortable with the very idea of a Jewish state.
As groups such as the Jewish Agency in Israel (which aims to promote Jewish
immigration) and the American Jewish committee expressed dismay over the
findings, Cohen and Kelman had more bad news: They believed they were seeing
a long-term trend that was unlikely to be reversed, as each generation of
American Jews becomes even more integrated into the American mainstream than
its parents and grandparents had been. The study, said Cohen, reflected
"very significant shifts that have been occurring in what it means to be a
Jew."
Cohen's and Kelman's startling figures alone underscore the absurdity of
Shepherd's suggestion that to challenge Israel is to "defame an entire
people." They also help frame the context for what I would call an emerging
Jewish glasnost in which Jewish critics of Israel are increasingly willing
to make themselves known. When I arrived in the United States 13 years ago,
I was often surprised to find that people with whom I seemed to share a
progressive, cosmopolitan worldview would suddenly morph into raging
ultranationalists when the conversation turned to Israel. Back then, it
would have
seemed unthinkable for historian Tony Judt to advocate a binational state
for Israelis and Palestinians or for Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen
to write that "Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a
well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the
idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and
some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort
we are seeing now." Unthinkable, too, was the angry
renunciation of Zionism by Avrum Burg, former speaker of Israel's Knesset.
And, in those days, with the internet still in its infancy, the online
Jewish dissident landscape that
today ranges from groups in the Zionist peace camp like Tikkun, Americans
for Peace Now, and the Israel Policy Forum, among others, to anti-Zionist
Jews of the left such as Not in My Name and Jewish Voices for Peace, had not
yet taken shape. Indeed, there was no Haaretz online English edition in
which the reality of Israel was being candidly reported and debated in terms
that would still be deemed heretical in much of the U.S. media.
Thirteen years ago, there certainly was no organization around like
"Birthright Unplugged," which aims to subvert the "Taglit-Birthright
Program," funded by Zionist groups and the government of Israel, that
provides free trips to Israel for young Jewish Americans in order to
encourage them to identify with the State. (The "Unplugged" version
encourages young Jews from the U.S. to take the Birthright tour and its free
air travel, and then stay on for a two-week program of visits to the West
Bank, to Israeli human rights organizations, and to peace groups. The goal
is to see another side of Israel, the side experienced by its victims -- and
by Israelis who oppose the occupation of
the West Bank.)
Clearly, much has changed, and the ability of the Zionist establishment --
the America Israel Political
Action Committee, the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League,
and others -- to impose nationalist boundaries on Jewish identity is being
eroded. It's worth remembering in this context that anti-Zionism was
originally a Jewish movement -- the majority of European Jews before World
War II rejected the Zionist movement and its calls for a mass migration from
Europe to build a Jewish nation-state in Palestine. The most popular Jewish
political organization in Europe had been the Yiddishe Arbeiter Bund, a
Jewish socialist party that was militantly anti-Zionist. Even among the
rabbis of Europe, there was considerable opposition to the idea of Jews
taking control of Zion before the arrival of the Messiah (and there still
is, of course, from a sizable minority of the ultra-Orthodox).
Of course, the Holocaust changed all that. For hundreds of thousands of
survivors, a safe haven in Palestine became a historic necessity.
But the world has changed since then, and as the research cited above
suggests, the trends clearly don't favor the Zionists. I was reared on the
idea that a Jewish nation-state in the Middle East was the "manifest
destiny" of the Jews. I learned in the Zionist movement that Jewish life in
the Diaspora was inevitably stunted and ultimately doomed. But history may
have decided otherwise. The majority of us have chosen to live elsewhere,
thereby voting with our feet. Indeed, according to Israeli government
figures, some 750,000 Israeli Jews (15% of Israel's Jewish population) are
now living abroad, further undermining the Zionist premise that the Diaspora
is an innately hostile and anti-
Semitic place.
The Ferocity of Nationalism, The Universality of Justice
Increasingly anxious that most of us have no intention of going to Israel to
boost Jewish numbers, the Israel-based Jewish Agency -- apparently oblivious
to the irony of its own actions -- has complained to Germany over official
policies that make life there so attractive to Jewish immigrants from former
Soviet territories, thus discouraging them from going to Israel. More
immediately
threatening to the Zionist establishment, however, is another reality: Many
Jews are beginning to make once unthinkable criticisms of Israel's behavior.
If you want to bludgeon Jewish critics with the charge of "anti-Semitism"
when they challenge Israel's actions, then it's hardly helpful to have other
Jews standing up and expressing the same thoughts. It undermines the sense,
treasured by Israel's most fervent advocates, that they represent a
cast-iron consensus among American Jews in particular.
That much has been clear in the response to the publication of John
Mearsheimer and Steven Walt's
controversial new book The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, which
challenges the wisdom and morality of the unashamed and absolute bias in
U.S. foreign policy towards Israel. In an exchange on the NPR show Fresh
Air, Walt was at pains to stress, as in his book, that the Israel Lobby, as
he sees it, is not a Jewish lobby, but rather an association of groupings
with a right-wing political agenda often at odds with majority
American-Jewish opinion,
Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, argued exactly the opposite: Walt
and Mearsheimer, he claimed, were effectively promoting anti-Semitism,
because the Israel lobby is nothing more (or less) than the collective will
of the American Jewish community. Which, of course, it isn't. In fact, in
the American Jewish community you can increasingly hear open echoes of
Mearsheimer and Walt's skepticism over whether the lobby's efforts are good
forIsrael.
But Foxman's case is undercut by something far broader -- an emerging Jewish
glasnost. Of course, like any break with a long-established nationalist
consensus, the burgeoning of dissent has provoked a backlash. Norman
Finkelstein -- the noted Holocaust scholar and fierce critic of Zionism
recently hounded out of De Paul University in a campaign of vilification
based precisely on the idea that fierce criticism of Israel is the
equivalent of "hate speech" -- could be forgiven for being skeptical of the
idea that the grip of the ultranationalists is weakening.
So, too, could Joel Kovel. After all, he found his important book Overcoming
Zionism pulled by his American distributor, the University of Michigan
Press, also on the "hate speech" charge. (This decision was later reversed,
but it may have long-term consequences for the distributor's relationship
with Kovel's publisher, the British imprint Pluto.)
Jimmy Carter -- who was called a "Holocaust denier" (yes, a Holocaust
denier!) for using the apartheid analogy in his book on Israel -- and
Mearsheimer and Walt might have reason for skepticism as well. But I'd argue
that the renewed ferocity of recent attacks on those who have strayed from
the nationalist straight and narrow has been a product of panic in the
Jewish establishment -- a panic born of the fact that its losing its grip.
As in the former Soviet Union with the actual glasnost moment, this is a
process, once started, that's only likely to be accelerated by such
witch-hunting.
Last year, a very cranky academic by the name of Alvin Rosenfeld, on behalf
of the oldest Jewish advocacy group in the U.S., the American Jewish
Committee, got a flurry of attention by warning that liberal Jews such as
playwright Tony Kushner, Tony Judt and Richard Cohen, all of whom had
recently offered fundamental criticisms of Israel, were giving comfort to a
"new anti-Semitism."
"They're helping to make [anti-Semitic] views about the Jewish state
respectable -- for example, that it's a Nazi-like state, comparable to South
African apartheid; that it engages in ethnic cleansing and genocide. These
charges are not true and can have the effect of delegitimizing Israel."
In reality, though, whether or not you agree with the views of those
critics, they simply can't legitimately be called anti-Semitic. Actually, I
doubt any of those he cited have accused Israel of genocide or compared it
in any way to the Nazi state. (Former Israeli Knesset Speaker Avram Burg,
however, recently did write, in reference to Israeli militarism and
hostility to Arabs, "It is sometimes difficult for me to distinguish between
the primeval National-Socialism and some national cultural doctrines of the
here-and-now."). But the ethnic-cleansing in which the Israelis expelled
750,000
Palestinians in 1948 and the apartheid character of Israel's present
occupation of the West Bank are
objective realities. Rosenfeld is suggesting that, to take an honest look at
either the occupation or the events of 1948, as so many Israeli writers,
journalists, and politicians have done, is to "delegitimize" Israel and
promote anti-Semitism.
Just last week, Danny Rubinstein, senior correspondent covering Palestinian
affairs for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, was slated to speak to the
British Zionist Federation -- and then, at the last minute, his speech was
canceled. The reason? Rubinstein had pointed out that "today Israel is an
apartheid state with different status for different communities." (While
many liberal Jewish Americans can't bring themselves to accept the apartheid
comparison, that's not true of their Israeli counterparts who actually know
what's going on in the West Bank. Former education minister Shulamit Aloni,
for example, or journalist Amira Hass use the comparison. (The comparison
first occurred to me on a visit to Kibbutz Yizreel in 1978, when the elders
of my Zionist youth movement, Habonim, who had emigrated from South Africa
to Israel, warned that the settlement policy of the then-new Likud
government was designed to prevent Israel letting go of the West Bank. The
population there, they told us, would never be given the right to vote in
Israel, and so the result would be, as they presciently put it, "an
apartheid situation.")
Use of the term "apartheid" in reference to the occupation does draw the
attention of those who prefer to look away from the fact that Israel is
routinely engaged in behavior democratic society has deemed morally odious
and unacceptable when it has occurred in other contexts. It is precisely
because that fact makes them uncomfortable, I suspect, that they react so
emotionally to the A-word. Take black South Africans who suffered under
apartheid on a visit to the West Bank -- a mild-mannered moderate Nobel
Peace Prize winner such as Bishop Desmond Tutu, for example -- ask them
about the validity of the comparison, and you know the answer you're going
to get.
Moreover, it's an answer with which a growing number of Jews, who place the
universal, ethical and social justice traditions of their faith above those
of narrow tribalism, are willing to deal.
In an earlier commentary, perhaps presaging his break with Zionism, Burg
noted in 2002:
"Yes, we Israelis have revived the Hebrew language,
created a marvelous theater and a strong national
currency. Our Jewish minds are as sharp as ever. We
are traded on the Nasdaq. But is this why we created
a state? The Jewish people did not survive for two
millennia in order to pioneer new weaponry, computer
security programs or antimissile missiles. We were
supposed to be a light unto the nations. In this we
have failed. It turns out that the 2,000-year
struggle for Jewish survival comes down to a state
of settlements, run by an amoral clique of corrupt
lawbreakers who are deaf both to their citizens and
to their enemies. A state lacking justice cannot
survive. More and more Israelis are coming to
understand this as they ask their children where
they expect to live in 25 years. Children who are
honest admit, to their parents' shock, that they do
not know."
Although I am not religious, I share Burg's view that universal justice is
at the heart of the Jewish
tradition. Growing up in apartheid South Africa was an object lesson in
Jewish ethics. Yes, there was plenty of anti-Semitism in the colonial white
society of my childhood, but the mantle of victimhood belonged to others.
And if you responded to the in-no-way-exclusively-so, but very Jewish
impulse to seek justice, you found yourself working side by side not only
with the remarkable number of Jews who filled leadership roles in the
liberation movement, but also with Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and others.
Judaism's universal ethical calling can't really be answered if we live only
among ourselves -- and Israel's own experience suggests it's essentially
impossible to do so without doing injustice to others. Israel is only 59
years old, a brief moment in the sweep of Jewish history, and I'd argue that
Judaism's survival depends instead on its ability to offer a sustaining
moral and ethical anchor in a world where the concepts of nation and
nationality are in decline (but the ferocity of nationalism may not be).
Israel's relevance to Judaism's survival depends first and foremost on its
ability, as
Burg points out, to deliver justice, not only to its citizens, but to those
it has hurt.
---
Tony Karon is a senior editor at TIME who also maintains
his own website, Rootless Cosmopolitan, where he
comments on everything from geopolitical conflict to
Jewish identity issues. "Rootless Cosmopolitan" was
Stalin's euphemistic pejorative for "Jew" during his
anti-Semitic purges of the late 1940s, but Karon, who
grew up in South Africa and whose family roots lie in
Eastern Europe, and before that France, takes the term
as a badge of honor. Karon was a teenage activist in the
left-Zionist Habonim movement before finding his way
into the big tent of the anti-apartheid liberation
struggle, an experience that prompted him to re-imagine
what it meant to be a Jew in the world.
Copyright 2007 Tony Karon
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