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Zionism's/Israel's internal inequality, racism, creation of refugees, and unrestrained violence have created moral crises for generations of Jewish scholars. Until I encountered these recent works, I was unaware of important links in the chain…On twitter.com
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1. In Doppelganger, Naomi Klein's @NaomiAKlein history of Zionism places it as alternative to Eastern European left efforts to claim a place locally. The relevant chapters are posted online (w/ publisher's permission) here: naomiklein.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Israel-Palestine-and-the-Doppelganger-Effect.pdfPermalink On twitter.com
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@NaomiAKlein At the core of the Jewish Labor Bund approach was "doi’kayt, or “hereness”—the idea that Jews belonged where they lived, in what was known as “the pale of settlement,” and should fight for greater rights and increased justice as Jews and as workers."Permalink On twitter.com
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@NaomiAKlein "The Bund held fast to the belief that Jews would be free when everyone was free, and not by building what amounted to a militarized ghetto on Palestinian land. 'Your liberation can only be a by-product of the universal freeing of oppressed people,' wrote Victor Alter in 1937."Permalink On twitter.com
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The books is laid out in much detail in this interview on The Fire These Times podcast. thefirethesetimes.com/2024/02/16/israel-and-american-jewish-dissent-w-geoffrey-levin/ This suggests a much more ambivalent community, especially before the 1967 war, and discusses efforts to suppress American Jewish dissent on Israel/Palestine.Permalink On twitter.com
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These dissents within the organized American Jewish community were of course paralleled by secular exiles from that community, most notably Noam Chomsky. But the dissent was far wider than I was aware of.Permalink On twitter.com
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3. Pankaj Mishra's essay "The Shoah After Gaza" is in large part a telling of the dissents occasioned among Shoah survivors over Israel long before 2023. lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n05/pankaj-mishra/the-shoah-after-gazaPermalink On twitter.com
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And this has been the most suprising and impactful given that the voices involved are people I was familiar with… Notably, two analysts of the Shoah/Nazi genocide I've relied upon, Saul Friedlander and Zygmunt Bauman are prominent in this story alongside Primo Levi.Permalink On twitter.com
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"Saul Friedlander, the foremost historian of the Shoah, who left Israel partly because he couldn’t bear to see the Shoah being used ‘as a pretext for harsh anti-Palestinian measures’…"Permalink On twitter.com
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"Zygmunt Bauman, the Polish-born Jewish philosopher and refugee from Nazism who spent three years in Israel in the 1970s before fleeing its mood of bellicose righteousness, despaired of what he saw as the ‘privatisation’ of the Shoah by Israel and its supporters. …Permalink On twitter.com
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"It has come to be remembered, he wrote in 1988, ‘as a private experience of the Jews, as a matter between the Jews and their haters’, even as the conditions that made it possible were appearing again around the world."Permalink On twitter.com
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Bauman's work pointed far beyond this, to a modern capacity for ultraviolence and new holocausts. He reframed the danger as a problem of states and bureaucracy.Permalink On twitter.com
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Bauman's work pointed far beyond this, to a modern capacity for ultraviolence and new holocausts. He reframed the danger as a problem of states and bureaucracy.Permalink On twitter.com
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Klein writes in Doppelganger that "To do onto others the same othering that has been done onto you is, of course, psychologically intolerable. Indeed, such actions are so antithetical to Jewish values that they demand extreme repression and projection."Permalink On twitter.com
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But I didn't grow up hearing of the many Jews who expressed that psychologically intolerance, at least around Israel. This makes it much more of a relief to hear the ones here. And to the hear this…Permalink On twitter.com
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The Serbian-Jewish author Aleksandar Tišma captures the revulsion many survivors of the Shoah felt at the images coming out of Lebanon: ‘Jews, his kinsmen, the sons and grandsons of his contemporaries, former inmates of the camps, …Permalink On twitter.com
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"… stood in tank turrets and drove, flags waving, through undefended settlements, through human flesh, ripping it apart with machine-gun bullets, rounding up the survivors in camps fenced off with barbed wire.’"Permalink On twitter.com
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Mishra: "Such survivors of the Shoah, who had been plunged from a serene belief in secular humanism into collective insanity, intuited that the violence they had survived – unprecedented in its magnitude – wasn’t an aberration in an essentially sound modern civilisation.Permalink On twitter.com
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"… preventive efforts against such impersonal and available modes of killing required more than vigilance against antisemitism."Permalink On twitter.com
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This could have been the lesson of the Shoah, and the other Nazi genocides, from the beginning. Now we will have to make it so again.Permalink On twitter.com
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Obviously, the first and most critical place for intervention is breaking the intellectual and moral circuit between the genocide Jews suffered and the one Israeli Jews are now perpetrating with the total cooperation of the American government.Permalink On twitter.com
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And on this front, there are many many links in the chain, a profusion that surges into physical spaces in incessant refusal. But they/we are part of a far greater legacy than I knew even two months ago.Permalink On twitter.com
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2. Historian Jeffrey Levin uncovers how liberal Americans radically questioned Israel in dialogue with the Israeli left during the 1940s to 1970s in Our Palestine Question. yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300267853/our-palestine-question/Permalink On twitter.com
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Thread continues… x.com/CarwilBJ/status/1764504643487309949Permalink On twitter.com
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