Introduction
he debate about the Israel/Palestine question remains, after
a century of discussion, negotiation and armed conflict one
of the major unresolved issues of global politics. In
its current manifestation all sides, including the Israelis,
have ostensibly settled on a two state solution: the Jewish
state already exists but the Palestinian state awaits its
birth. In the main, the issues have been framed by the
claims of Zionism, or Jewish nationalism, and Arab
nationalism to a rather small body of land with huge
material and symbolic stakes. Now Adam Shatz, who is
literary editor at The Nation, has edited an
anthology of the writing by non-Zionist Jewish intellectuals
and commentary by writers grouped under the rubric of he
calls “the other Zionism,” about Zionism and Israel. Of the
non-Zionist Jews Isaac Deutscher and Hannah Arendt are
perhaps the representative figures who set the main context
for Shatz’s argument that there has always been a secular,
anti-nationalist discourse about Israel and Zionism which,
in different modalities, is shared by Marxist and
non-Marxist Jews.
Both writers begin from the problematic status of Jews in
the diaspora; they are acutely aware of anti-Semitism in the
West and well as the Middle East. Deutscher’s “The Non
Jewish Jew” is a memoir of his own orthodox childhood, a
lightening fast history of the relation of Marx and Marxism
to the “Jewish Question” and a meditation on the reason,
despite constant persecution, Jews have survived in the
capitalist epoch. Deutscher’s thesis is that Jews represent
the market economy because they have been consigned to it by
anti-Semitism as well as by the fact that they were
merchants in semi-feudal societies such as 18th and 19th
century Central and Eastern Europe. They were bearers of
capitalist progress and, for this reason accumulated the
economic and social resources to avoid obliteration before
the Holocaust and even after it. Arendt published her “The
Jew as Pariah Peace or Armistice in the Near East” in 1950,
two years after the founding of Israel as a Jewish state. A
refugee herself, she spent much of the 1930s and 1940s
working for Jewish resettlement from Nazi Germany and other
countries of Central and Eastern Europe where Jews suffered
a precarious existence. Profoundly aware that Jews have
suffered the stigma of “outsider” or Pariah, her article is,
nevertheless a stinging indictment of the British strategy
to prevent a peaceful arrangement between Jews and Arabs in
Palestine and a powerful critique of the underlying
nationalist premises of Zionism:
…almost from the beginning the
misfortune of building a Jewish National Home has been
that it was accompanied by a Central European ideology
of nationalism and tribal thinking among the Jews, and
by an Oxford inspired colonial romanticism among the
Arabs. For ideological reasons the Jews overlooked the
Arabs, who lived in what would have been an empty
country, to fit their preconceived idea of national
emancipation. Because of romanticism or a complete
inability to understand what was actually going on,
the Arabs considered the Jews old-fashioned invaders
or newfangled tools of imperialism.” (85) |
Newfangled or not, Arendt goes on to show
that imperialism played an important ideological role in
shaping the thinking of both Arab and Jew.
The title of Shatz’s book, Prophets Outcast, is
borrowed from the third volume of Isaac Deutscher’s
monumental biography of Trotsky, which chronicles Trotsky’s
sojourn in exile from the Soviet Union he helped create,
until his tragic murder in 1940 under the axe of a Stalinist
agent. Both terms of the title, “prophets” and “outcast” are
richly discussed and documented in the pieces. Their
prophecy consists in dire warnings, issued from the dawn of
Zionism and the Jewish migration to Palestine at the turn of
the 20th century, that the prevailing Jewish nationalism
would lead to disaster. And all of the essays collected in
this volume constitute a consistent repudiation of the
hallowed ideology that identifies the Jewish Homeland with
the Jewish state. Here, for example, is Yitzak Epstein, a
pioneer who settled in the Upper Gallilee in 1886, during
the first Jewish migration. Writing in 1907 Epstein explodes
one of the sustaining myths of Zionism. Contrary to its
claim that settlers found a virtually undeveloped desert
when they arrived, and that their efforts amounted to both a
civilizing project and a restoration of fallow land, Epstein
states:
there are no empty fields [in
Palestine]; to the contrary every fellah tries to
enlarge his plot from the land of the adjoining
cistern, if it does not require excessive labor. Near
cities they also till the sloping hillsides and around
the settlement of Metullah, the poor fellahin, like
those in Lebanon, plant between the rocks and do not
let a cubit go fallow. (37) |
And I. F. Stone and Noam Chomsky
systematically deconstruct many of the lapses of historical
memory that have been invoked by staunch supporters of
Israel’s settler society. In 1969 Stone reminds us that
during 1947-1948 fighting Israel “seized 23% more land than
was allotted to it” and demonstrates convincingly that the
founding of the state of Israel was closely bound up with
imperial politics (197) Chomsky’s essay, published six years
later, is notable for its reconstitution of the early
program of the socialist Zionists, with whom he had been
affiliated in his youth. The left socialists were not for an
ethnic state that was Jewish, but for a bi-national state
where Jews and Palestinians could live with each other and
attempt to build an egalitarian, socialist society based on
mutual respect.
Martin Buber and Albert Einstein, professed Zionists, issue
dire warnings that a radical departure from the values of
humanism and the concept of the community of
nations—statements that echo Arendt’s repudiation of ethnic
tribalism—would condemn the new state of Israel to isolation
and prevent the creation of what Einstein terms a “common”
future for “two great Semitic peoples.” In 1948 Einstein
minces no words in his condemnation of the Jewish Right for
its attacks on Arab villages, terrorist acts and bleak
nationalist vision. But it is Buber who raises the stakes in
the debate about the new Jewish state. In Buber’s view, at
its inception, Israel was losing an opportunity to forge a
union with the Arabs by constituting itself as a small
state—Buber calls it “normal”—which resists taking a broader
and more inclusive view and instead was militant in defense
of its own sovereignty.
This book intends to resuscitate an almost forgotten
tradition within the debate about the fate of Jews. Many of
the contributions reveal a penchant for polemic,
fearlessness about the consequences of puncturing sacred and
all but unassailable versions of history and contemporary
Israeli reality, and a fierce assertion and defense of
secular cosmopolitanism. Some of the essays have
characteristics of classics: Deutscher’s “Non Jewish Jew,”
the Stone and Chomsky pieces and a stimulating article by a
contemporary Israeli native brought up on a Kibbutz and
currently teaching in the United States, the historian
Gabriel Piterberg on the question of historical and
contemporary “Erasures.” Although another article by the
Israeli peace activist Simcha Flapan covers some of the same
ground, Piterberg’s essay completely obliterates many of the
sustaining myths of Zionism by invoking historical evidence
and theoretically informed analysis to get at the underlying
truths of Israeli claims. Marc Ellis’s article on the
Palestinian uprising of the late 1980s is at once a good
account of the first Intifada and a severe puncturing of
what he calls “Holocaust theology”—the widely held refusal
among Jews to recognize, let alone criticize the abrogation
by the Israeli government of Palestinian rights, or to
admit, for example that Israel has nuclear weapons in
violation of international agreements. Shatz’s introduction
and his notes to every contribution help illuminate the
issues and provide short biographical material on some of
the lesser known writers.
The collection has two weaknesses that detract from an
otherwise compelling representation of a the critical
tradition: the section called “Marxism and the Jewish
Question” focuses, exclusively, on the brief comments of
Trotsky and the Trotskyist, Abram Leon whose book on the
topic, Zionism: A Marxist Interpretation was published in
1940. The Leon work is a major contribution to Marxism and
to the literature on Zionism. However the excerpt is both
too brief and does not give enough the theoretical flavor of
the work. But there are other, perhaps equally important
Marxist writings on Jews and Zionism that did not find their
way into the book. One, Ber Borochov’s The National Question
and the Class Struggle, written in the early 20th century,
from a left-Zionist perspective was profoundly influential
on Hashomer Hatzair and other Labor Zionist tendencies until
the late 1960s. Communists like M. J. Olgin and V. J. Jerome
wrote critical analyses of Zionism in the 1930s and 1940s.
Here, Shatz displays an unexpected narrowness which
contrasts to the rest of the volume which goes out of its
way to include diverse non-Zionist and Zionist perspectives.
Judith Butler’s confrontation with one of the more egregious
aspects of Zionist invective, its label of anti-Semitism
attached to any criticism of Zionism or the state of Israel,
and the charge that its Jewish critics must be “self-hating”
addresses an important issue in the current debate. And Tony
Judt’s article from the New York Review of Books calling for
a return of bi-nationalism is, perhaps, one of the boldest,
if utopian, pieces in the collection. But just as earlier
writings such as those by Arendt and Chomsky link the
questions of the middle east to the world politics of their
own time, one would have hoped for the inclusion of a
similar set of articles for our own time, especially the
relation of US policy to the Palestinian and Israeli
conflict. These criticisms are not meant to detract from the
urgency and brilliance of Shatz’s effort. In what follows, I
want to offer my own reading of some of issues, including
those of history an memory on Israel and Zionism, that bear
on the politics of our time.
I
A YEAR AND A HALF
AFTER THE US INVASION OF IRAQ IT IS increasingly evident
that this was not a war for democracy, to fight terrorism
or, of course, to eliminate Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction. This is a war to establish US dominance over
the Middle East. In the administration’s calculus, ending
the Ba'athist regime that governed Iraq for more than thirty
years was a means, not an final objective. Displaying
overwhelming US military power and toppling Saddam Hussein
was merely a prelude to a much larger aim: to warn the
Europeans as well as neighboring Arab states that in its
quest for unchallenged economic and political regional
hegemony, the United States was prepared to go it alone—at
least in relation to its traditional Cold War era European
allies. The stakes were not only the rich Iraqi oil
reserves, as the Left was wont to point out or the region’s
centrality to world energy resources, although these should
not be overlooked or minimized. Contrary to his 2000
election pledge to stay clear of foreign entanglements,
George Bush and his administration have used the events of
9/11 to undertake an extensive program of military
intervention without, however, offering a clear plan for
post-war nation-building or reconstruction.
Short of unmitigated disasters, an eventuality that is still
not impossible given the full throated insurgency now in
process which has caused a high level of casualties
following its military conquest of the Iraqi state, we can
expect that occupation forces will remain in place for the
foreseeable future. The American military will stay en masse
in Iraq not only because of the neo-colonialist intentions
of this administration, which require setting in place a
stable Iraqi-led puppet regime, and privatizing state-owned
enterprises, not the least the oil industry, but also
because it continues to label the multiple insurgencies
instances of “terrorism.” That terrorism has become the
indiscriminate name for all dissent is consistent with the
Bush doctrine that, since 9/11, terrorism is the rubric
under which a new evil other has been constructed and has
rapidly become the key element of US foreign policy.
Iraq’s conquest is only one component of the intricate, but
interlinked US middle east intervention. Numerous missteps
notwithstanding, the Bush administration—and its Democratic
rivals—are committed to three crucial elements of a Middle
East policy installing friendly, if not always puppet
regimes in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan and neutralizing
Libya and Iran; dismantling and otherwise thwarting the
development of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons
among Arab countries and Iran; even as, under the excuse
that, in Bush’s words, “Israel has the right to defend
itself,” the US bestows unconditional support to Israel’s
own program to develop, maintain and possibly deploy weapons
of mass destruction, not the least of which are nuclear
weapons about which the Israelis and the American government
are strictly silent; and supporting the unconditional right
of Israel not only to exist, but also, in the name of
self-defense, its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the
prospective sites of the still unfulfilled promise of the
autonomous Palestinian state. That the Democrats may differ
on the issue of unilateral ism and may be critical of the
performance of US intelligence agencies, which grossly
misstated the Ba'athist threat to United States security,
should not divert our gaze from the essential
bi-partisanship that continues to govern US Middle East
policy. It is true that, as demonstrated in the 2004 primary
season, there is dissent on some of these questions. But, at
least for the present, it has been effectively stifled
within the party’s ranks, and this subordination is
particularly evident in the silence among leading liberals
on Israel and the Palestinians, a silence that has provided
ample space for Israel to pursue, with increasing
approbation by the Bush administration, a new colonialism in
the region.
An important part of the administration’s strategy is to
support, by indirection indicated by the US government’s
silence on the bloody results of the occupation and the
relentless forward march of Jewish settlements, Ariel
Sharon’s program for a “greater” Israel that will reduce the
promised Palestinian state, when and if it comes into being,
to a dependent, noncontiguous, poor semi-colonial
possession. Since fall 2001, in concert with the Sharon
strategy, the Palestinian resistance, just like its
predecessor, the Intifada of the 1980s, has been conflated
with terrorism (indeed insurgency against all but
US-supported regimes suffers the same label). In contrast to
forty years during which successive US national
administrations—Republican as well as
Democratic—rhetorically opposed Israel’s annexation of the
West Bank and Gaza—even as all refused to impose sanctions
on the Israelis and regularly supplied the government with
large sums of economic aid aid and military funds—recent
statements by the Bush administration have reversed this
administration’s early censure of Israel’s systematic
disenfranchisement of the Palestinians. Instead, consistent
with its doctrine of building an alliance of the imperial
willing, it now clearly sides with the Israeli government’s
policy of dispossession by settlement and armed occupation
of these territories. In this respect we note that the
New York Times 8/21/04 reported that the Bush
administration might support some new West Bank settlements.
In this regard Sharon’s spring 2004 unilateral announcement
of Israel’s eventual withdrawal from the Gaza must be taken
with grain of salt; especially since, almost simultaneously,
he has tried to placate his right by promising new
settlements in the West Bank. Israel’s occupational forces
have moved in and out of the non-Israel territories such as
Lebanon as well as Palestinian lands since the 1967 War. In
this respect one may speculate that Sharon’s gesture was
intended to give him cover against accusations that he has
violated the Camp David and the Geneva Accord that called
for the creation of a Palestinian State in the current
occupied territories, accords which would have mandated the
immediate dismantlement of the Jewish settlements on the
West Bank as well as Gaza. After driving the Palestinians to
their knees, the Sharon government hopes that its victims
will accept a deal. As Tony Judt argued more than two years
ago, the Palestinians are asked to accept a more
economically prosperous subordinate status in return for
surrendering their passion for genuine autonomy. In 2002
Judt’s conclusion was that this is the most serious of
Sharon’s many flawed assumptions. Passion, according to Judt,
will always win out. It remains to be seen whether this
optimistic analysis can withstand the severe tests placed
before it by Sharon’s shenanigans.
There is no doubt that Bush has, in part, adopted these
policies in order to pander to the powerful American
pro-Israel lobby that, tragically, enjoys the support of the
overwhelming majority of organized US Jewry. Moreover,
neither of the two post-Vietnam war Democratic
administrations since the 1967 war that initiated the
occupations of Palestinian territory, nor the 2004
Democratic presidential candidate, John Kerry, dare risk the
ire of the pro-Israel lobby whose unconditional support of
the program of Greater Israel has contributed to the
paralysis in American politics to confront the serious
consequences of Israeli aggression. Since this lobby (AIPAC)
is directly and indirectly responsible for raising major
campaigns funds for both parties’ electoral efforts, it is
highly unlikely that either will bite the hand that feeds
it. But while the politics of influence and campaign
financing is a necessary part of the explanation for US
policy, it is insufficient. The bare fact is that Israel is
a vital component of the main objective of US Middle East
policy: to establish the dominance of United States and
US-based energy corporations and to thwart movements for
genuine Arab independence in the region. Since 1948 when, by
armed struggle and the powerful alliance with the Soviet
Union and Great Britain, Jews achieved their national home,
the United States remains responsible for building Israel’s
military dominance in the region; Congress has appropriated
more than $3 billions a year for this purpose, and Israel is
the world’s largest recipient of US aid for non-military
purposes. Today Israel is perhaps the 4th strongest military
power in the world. Despite its democratic protestations,
the Bush administration has not extended similar backing to
the Iranian liberalization movement any more than it is
prepared to put its weight behind Palestinian autonomy by
insisting that negotiations for the establishment of a
Palestinian state proceed in a timely fashion.
Moreover, the US public has never been effectively disabused
of one of the most enduring myths about Israel: that
contrary to all of its Arab neighbors and Iran, it is the
one democratic state in the Middle East. Carefully disguised
from this account is the rank economic and social
discrimination suffered by the nearly one million Israeli
Palestinians. For while they are citizens and enjoy
suffrage, they have been systematically denied significant
land ownership and their civil liberties and social rights
are severely restricted by police and other surveillance
forces. Together with what Ella Shohat has called “Arab
Jews,” the Sephardim who migrated from countries such as
Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, among others, they constitute
a significant fraction of the Israeli working class, many of
whom are poor, suffer authoritarian scorn from the
Ashkenazim, who constitute the overwhelming majority of
professional/managerial and bourgeois classes and who own
the lion’s share of Israel’s productive property.
Citing the rash of suicide bombings that have occurred in
the past several years the Israeli government’s program of
systematic disempowerment of the Palestinians by acts of
violence such as blowing up Palestinian homes, killing
civilians who demonstrate, peacefully or not, lengthy
internment of all manner of dissenters without preferring
charges and its latest maneuver, the construction of a wall
around Israel that effectively creates a new apartheid in
the area and deprives tens of thousands of Palestinians of
their livelihood. The ominous silence of the US government
in the face of these hostile, aggressive acts has resulted
in an unprecedented repudiation and isolation of both Israel
and the United States government in world opinion. Israel’s
relentless military repression of Palestinians that has
resulted in hundreds of deaths every year since the
occupation that began in 1967, for its trampling of human
rights Israel stands condemned by Amnesty International, the
United Nations and other human rights organizations but, so
far with little effect.
Even as the Bush administration has refused to condemn
Israel’s virtual house arrest of Yassar Arafat in Ramallah,
he remains the President of the Palestinian Authority which
enjoys official US and UN and recognition, Still, the Bush
administration is somewhat constrained by world opinion. It
is still official US policy to favor an autonomous
Palestinian state. To be sure, Arafat’s career as the leader
of Al Fatah and as chief of the Authority has been riddled
with corruption: cronyism, nepotism, authoritarian rule, and
opportunism and provides enough convenient grist for the
Israeli government’s propaganda mill. Arafat faces serious
opposition from within, not only from his traditional
religious nationalist opponents who reject any settlement
that will recognize Israel’s right to exist and suspect
Arafat of being all to willing to make compromises. Recently
thousands of young Palestinians who are not connected to
Hamas or other Islamist groups took to the streets to
protest Arafat’s leadership. The potential emergence of an
anti-Arafat, secular movement is, undoubtedly, giving Sharon
and his allies on the Right as well as in the Center Labor
Party which, at this writing, is poised to enter the Sharon
government, some sleepless nights. For if this movement
gains momentum it may deprive the Israeli elite of one of
its central excuses for refusing to engage in serious
negotiations with the Palestinians: Arafat is unreliable.
Sharon’s proposed “national unity government’ reveals the
degree to which Labor has, itself, drifted right and
indicates the growing strength of the intransigent
ultra-right coalition led by Benjamin Netanyahu. For if a
new secular democratic force emerges victorious within the
Palestinian resistance, they will deprive the Israeli
government of its main excuse for not negotiating a serious
settlement: that Arafat is not a worthy partner.
II
SINCE WORLD WAR TWO
WORLD JEWRY HAS BEEN PREOCCUPIED
with the Holocaust.
There can be little dispute that the Holocaust was one of
the defining events of the 20th century. Those who refuse to
draw its implications for the future of what has
euphemistically been described as “civilization,” let alone
those who regard the legacy of the bourgeois enlightenment
as unproblematic, even after Auschwitz, are no less culpable
for the current state of global affairs than Americans who
fail to take account of the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki and the subsequent global buildup of stockpiles
of even more powerful nuclear weapons.. The genocide
perpetrated by the Nazis against European Jews, and the
first historic use of nuclear weapons by the US government
have coarsened both those who directly participated in these
events and those who sanctioned them either by silence or by
granting enthusiastic support. It is no exaggeration to
claim that the ravages of World War Two during which 40
million perished, including 20 million Russians and six
million Jews, the Vietnam war, which killed millions of
Vietnamese civilians, “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia, bring
new meaning to Gandhi’s ironic remark. When asked what he
thought of western civilization he is said to have replied:
“it would be a good idea.”
The Holocaust was not only unique in its display of
systematic extermination of an entire people, but revealed
two profound flaws in the Enlightenment legacy. The first is
the “banality of evil” that Hannah Arendt describes in her
controversial study Eichmann in Jerusalem. The social
content of this phrase is the critique of the pervasive
bureaucratic rationality of Western capitalism. In Max
Weber’s terms the machinery of extermination was derived
from the same algorithms upon which the success of large
scale industry and government relies. The second is perhaps
even more serious. One of the myths of the Enlightenment is
the what we mean by progress is intimately bound to the
presumed disinterestedness and political neutrality of
Science. Science is said to be liberatory to the extent that
is hermetically sealed from the chaos of political struggles
and the conflicts of everyday social relations. Hitler’s
scientists were to be unencumbered by the uses to which
their discoveries and inventions were put.
For example Werner Heisenberg may have failed to develop a
nuclear weapon for the Third Reich but, patriotism aside,
his motives were equally to engage in the techno-games that
impelled his counterparts in the West. Perhaps few of those
who engaged in research directed toward extermination, were
anti-Semites. They were good worshippers of the religion of
Science. If poetry was one of the highest forms of humanist
expression, Adorno asked whether there could be poetry after
Auschwitz. Those who work on weapons of mass destruction
during World War Two and perform similar tasks in
laboratories all over the world today will almost invariably
protest that theie science has nothing to do with with mass
suffering, including genocide. They are only doing their
jobs and even more, taking advantage of the proclivity of
states to fund scientific discovery through military
programs. As citizens they may disapprove of these programs;
as scientists they have no choice by to avail themselves of
their largesse.
Zionism is an ideology whose key premise is that, absent
their constitution as a nation-state with territorial
integrity Jews have no secure home. For some Zionists the
Holocaust was only the final proof that Jews required a
“national home” to survive the brutality of anti-Semitism
which, presumably, pervades even the most enlightened modern
states. The Zionist argument relies as well on a
quasi-religious recuperation of the twenty five hundred year
history of persecution by a succession of rulers, beginning
with the destruction of the first Temple. For it was the
expulsion of Jews from 15th century Spain, the frequent
Pogroms of Czarist Russia, and the widespread discrimination
visited upon Jews in most countries of Europe and the United
States that, a half century before World War Two, led
Theodore Herzl, Chaim Weizmann, and others to conclude that
hopes of Jewish assimilation even in the most democratic
societies were misdirected.
As practical politicians as much as visionaries, Herzl and
Weizmann were neither socialists nor anti-imperialists.
Herzl foresaw a capitalist Jewish state and was prepared to
enter into an alliance with the British, or any other major
European power that could deliver the requisite pledge that
Jews would have their own nation-state. In fact, he
negotiated with Turkey, then part of the Ottoman Empire, and
might have agreed to settlement in Uganda, but this
arrangement did not work out. Finally, as World War One
broke out, world Zionism settled on Palestine as its
objective, and dealt with some leading political figures in
the United Kingdom, whose empire, at least until World War
One, was unrivaled in power and scope. The focus on Britain
was aided by both the strength of the British Zionist
movement and its capacity to influence the government, and
by Chaim Weizmann’s important scientific contributions to
the war effort which impressed British government officials.
Indeed Herzl argued that advocates of a Jewish state in
Palestine would, of necessity, require the approbation of
the British. Moreover he sought to persuade the British that
a Jewish state in the Middle East could serve British
interests by providing the Empire with a vital military,
economic and cultural outpost. After years of hesitation and
diplomatic maneuver, not the least of which was a promise to
the Arabs that they would retain sovereignty in Palestine as
well as other Arab lands, in 1917 His Majesty’s Government,
under the leadership of Lloyd George, issued the so-called
Balfour Declaration of support for the concept of a Jewish
National Home in the area known as Palestine.
But the Balfour Declaration included a phrase, insisted upon
by Jewish opponents of the concept of a Jewish state, that
some Zionists might have interpreted as double talk. While
the opening of the declaration unambiguously reads “His
Majesty’s Government views with favor the establishment in
Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people an will
use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of
this object,” it goes on to state it being clearly
understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice
the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish
communities in Palestine, or the rights and political state
enjoyed by Jews in any other country
According to Ami Isseroff, “this wording was at least in
part a reflection of [the secretary for India] Edwin
Montague’s conviction, shared by other influential British
Jews, that the very existence of a Jewish state would call
into question the loyalties of Jews living in other
countries and be a source of anti-Semitic persecution. The
clause concerning the rights of existing non-Jewish
communities was used in the 1922 [Winston] Churchill White
Paper and more particularly in the Passfield White Paper to
justify limitations on Jewish immigration, which, it was
claimed, was threatening the economic rights of the Arabs by
causing unemployment and dispossession.” Plainly, in
addition to the anxiety of some British Jews in high places,
powerful elements of the British ruling circles also
harbored deep reservations about the identification of a
Jewish national home with the establishment of a Jewish
state in Palestine. For by the turn of the 20th century Jews
were already purchasing large tracts of land from resident
Arabs, a program which might be described as dispossession
by commerce. This conversion of Arab peasants into
proletarians continued throughout the length of the 20th
century and intensified after the war.
By 2000, by law and by commercial transaction, Jews owned
ninety percent of Palestine land. Contrary to the myths of
Zionism, Jews were not purchasing desert or other fallow
lands, but displacing thousands of Palestinians who, for
generations, sustained themselves on subsistence and
commercial agriculture. Before 1948 when the Jewish State
was won by armed struggle and diplomatic and political
triumph, the Palestinians did not typically leave the region
but, in most instances, were transformed into wage laborers
on the lands they once owned, or migrated to cities like
Jerusalem where some became small merchants, but most
entered wage labor for the growing number of Jewish owned
manufacturing, transportation and commercial enterprises.
Although legitimate real estate purchases constituted the
bulk of the ownership transfers until 1948, thereafter
Israel’s expropriation of the Arabs by means of military
force meant that many Palestinians were forced to migrate
from the new state of Israel, often to refugee camps within
the middle east. What David Harvey has called “accumulation
by dispossession” became the main source of Israeli capital
formation and this was one of the principal outcomes of the
1967 Six Day War when, as spoils of victory, Israel annexed
the West Bank, the Golan Heights and Gaza. At the same time
successive Israeli governments—Labor as well as those of the
Right—denied the “right of return” to the dispossessed
Palestinians even as they affirmed the right of any Jew to
“return” to their historic homeland even if they had never
before lived there.
III
THE UNITY OF ZIONISM
IS THE CONVICTION OF THE NECESSITY FOR the creation
of a Jewish national home. Regardless of other ideological
considerations such as the nature of the society which
should be established in the new state, all factions of the
Zionist movement share skepticism, even disdain, for the
concept of Jews living permanently in any disapora. For
Zionism diasporic Jews may be used for political and
financial purposes, but their Jewishness remains always
suspect. There agreement ends. Since the early 20th century,
one may discern three broad tendencies corresponding to
different interpretations of what means a Jewish National
Home and what kind of economic, political and social order
should be created. The dominant tendency, represented by
Herzl and Weitzmann, and most of the earliest settler
groups, including the Israeli Labor Party led by David Ben
Gurion, favored the creation of a Jewish state that would
exercise economic, political and ideological hegemony over
its resident Palestinians who, at best could expect bare
toleration,. Labor (Mapai) was prepared to grant those who
could not be displaced formal citizenship but vigorously
pursued a policy of dispossession, wherever the vital
interests of Jews was at stake. This policy accelerated
after 1948 when Israel, as a Jewish state, adopted an
official program of limiting Palestinians within its borders
and boldly coveted non-Israel territories of Palestine.
Of course Mapai disagreed with “bourgeois” Zionists
regarding the economic character of the Jewish State. Even
before the founding of the state of Israel Mapai and the
Histadrut, its trade union federation, set up union-owned
businesses, some of which are operated as cooperatives
which, through the 1960s, dominated Israel’s economy. A
concomitant of these institutions under Labor’s auspices,
Israel developed one of the more comprehensive social
welfare states in the world, much of it underwritten by US
aid. Since the emergence of the Right in the late 1960s,
Israel has undergone significant privatization and some
elements of the leading Right-wing party, Likud, have sought
to dismantle or otherwise weaken welfare state programs,
either by privatization or by shrinking them. But like the
American social security system and similar European
practices and institutions, these programs enjoy broad
support among Israeli citizens. For this reason, at least
for the present, the Right has made little headway and in
Israel has suffered some political defeats when it has
attempted to implement is dismantlement program.
The rightist faction, whose most articulate ideologue was
Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, were eloquent in its contention
that the establishment of a Jewish State entailed the
ruthless pursuit of a policy of ethnic cleansing, both by
law and by terror. Jabotinsky boldly declared:
The Arabs loved their country as
much as the Jews did. Instinctively, they understood
Zionist aspirations very well, and their decision to
resist was very natural…There was no misunderstanding
between Jew and Arba but anatural conflict…No
agreement was possible with the Palestinian Arab; they
would accept Zionism only when they found themselves
up against an “iron wall,” when they had no
alternative but to accept Jewish settlement. |
That “iron wall” became the hallmark of
the Right’s policy regarding Palestinian Arabs. Jabotinsky
advocated colonization, and believed that the Palestinian
Arabs were part of a much larger Arab world of 35 million
people who could be made to accept colonialization only by
“bayonets.” He argued that only when the extremists had been
crushed would “moderates” take over. Sharon is a true
believer in the Jabotinsky legacy. He has converted a
metaphoric statement into a physical reality and it is no
accident. For Sharon himself is the political son of a
series of patrons including prime ministers Begin, Shamir
and other militants who participated in the independence
movement under the banner of the Irgun and were themselves
terrorists But in concert with the mainstream, Jabotinsky
believed in a policy of cultural Western homogeneity stating
that:
we Jews have nothing in common with
what is called the “Orient”...thank God. We are going
in Palestine, first for our national convenience
[second] to sweep out all traces of the “Oriental
Soul.” As for the Arabs in Palestine, what they do is
their own business but if we can do them a favor, it
is to help them liberate themselves from the Orient.
|
But as this statement shows, the rightist
sage first pointed to the Sephardim, “who must be weaned
from their “ancient spiritual traditions and laws” Israel’s
education policy has always been relentlessly Western. Far
from being multi-cultural its school system is firmly
controlled by the Ashkenazis.
Jabotinsky died in 1940, but his teachings have become the
new mainstream of Israeli society. During the struggle for
Palestine between the Great wars the Right’s militia, Irgun
and its terrorist wing, the Stern Gang, became something of
an embarrassment to the mainstream of the Mapai because of
their advocacy of terrorism against Palestinians as an
instrument of liberation. After 1948 they formed an
electoral party Herut, which became the contemporary Likud
Party. The Mapai distanced itself from the right on domestic
grounds but also because it recoiled at the inconvenient
language that the followers of Jabotinsky used. Labor had a
longer term strategy to achieve some of the same goals.
David Ben Gurion himself, Moshe Sharrett and other leaders
of the party were no less contemptuous of the Palestinians
and had no plan to grant them full citizenship. But during
the 1948 war and in the early days of Israel, they were
somewhat constrained by the need to win political and
economic aid from key European states such as the Soviet
Union, France, Britain and the United States whose support,
in the immediate post-war period, had been shaky at best.
Despite the best efforts of American Jews, Roosevelt had
never been a friend of the Jewish Agency, which administered
a program of relief and immigration, especially of Holocaust
victims.
In fact, Secretary of State Cordell Hull had consistently
spurned various representations that called attention to the
plight of European Jews and allowed only a sliver of those
with professional and scientific credentials to enter the
country. Truman was perhaps even more hostile to mass Jewish
immigration into the United States. After the founding of
the UN the Soviet Union became one of Israel’s most
important allies in the early debates about the desirability
of the Jewish state concept. That the Soviet Union was a
major supporter of the Jewish state was interpreted by many
foreign policy experts as part of its strategy to become a
leading player in the region, helped produce a sharp turn in
US foreign policy. Recall that early in 1947 a State
Department functionary, George Kennan, had written a memo
advising that US foreign policy be devoted to a strategy of
containment of Soviet expansionism after the agreements at
Potsdam and Yalta had ratified permanent Soviet occupation
of much of Eastern Europe. It may be argued that the
reversal of US policy towards Jews and especially its
belated agreement to back the proposal to found a Jewish
state in Palestine was one of the felicitous entailments of
the Cold War and followed Truman’s adoption of the Kennan
thesis and its concomitant, Winston Churchill’s fateful
Fulton MO speech declaring the Soviet Union the new enemy of
Western democracies. Despite the Soviet Union’s crucial
gesture, after the United States government’s support of the
Jewish state, and the UN declaration of a two-state solution
to the Palestinian question, Israel chose the West, a
decision that was foreshadowed by the liberal and
social-democratic orientation of the leading Zionist forces.
The third tendency, the left Zionists, was inspired by the
writing of Ber Borochov who in the first decade and a half
of the 20th century, provided a Marxist analysis of the
imperative of a Jewish homeland. His major work, The
National Question and the Class Struggle (1905), and
many articles in subsequent years, offered a theoretical
argument that tried to explain why Jews could never truly
assimilate into European and United States liberal
democratic states. The gist of his argument is based on the
marxist insight that the production of human life is
grounded in our collective relation to nature. According to
Borochov, through anti-Semitism and the social division of
labor Jews have been consigned in nearly all European states
and the US to sectors that are removed from basic industries
such as agriculture, mining and primary metals production.
Where Jews have found economic niches in productive wage
labor they are mostly in the garment and textile trades, or
are craftspersons in secondary and tertiary industries such
as retail and wholesale trades, or are independent petty
bourgeois shopkeepers. Under these “conditions of
production” their separation from nature and thus the
fundamental processes of capitalist production, combined
with their historic outsiderness renders next to impossible
their permanent assimilation into these societies.
Using a Marxist argument—that capitalism always functions,
in the first place, within a national market—Borochov enters
a vigorous defense of nation as the dominant context within
which classes are formed and class struggle is conducted.
After acknowledging that the Grand and petty bourgeoisie
adopt nationalism as part of their ideological and political
rationale, he takes pains, against the traditional socialist
assertion that the working class has no country and that
only an internationalist movement can effectively replace
capitalist relations of production, to insist that working
class consciousness is forged in the context of the
nation-state:
All propaganda and every moment,
which is rooted in the character of the conditions of
production of a given society, it is either nation or
nationalistic. Whenever attempts to blunt the class
and civil consciousness of the members of that
society, and whenever it ignores the class structure
and the antagonism between the interests of the
classes, it is nationalistic. If, however, it does not
obscure the class structure of the society, it is
national. |
If the Jews have no secure national
identity, if their position renders them relatively
powerless, they cannot control their own destiny. According
to Borochov even in the most liberal of “gentile” states the
position of Jews would always be precarious because of the
fragility of their economic position. Anti-Semitism, for the
most part latent in liberal-capitalist societies, would
inevitably become manifest in times of inevitable capitalist
crises.
Borochov’s theoretical work became the basis for the famed
Kibbutz movement in Palestine which beckoned thousands of
Europe and American Jews to migrate to Palestine between the
wars to reclaim the land. Borochov was the ideological
reference for the Hashomer Hazair, the Marxist Zionist party
that, until the 1967 war, was an important political force.
It identified itself with the international perspectives of
the Soviet Union which, notwithstanding anti-Semitism and
other serious flaws, it believed remained the most powerful
force in the world for socialism and had played a crucial
role in the defeat of fascism. As Israel moved ever more
firmly into the US orbit, Hashomer, or the Mapam, its party
name, found itself in an increasingly defensive position.
Before 1948 it was the only Zionist faction that advocated a
bi-national state in which Palestinian Arabs would have full
citizenship, enter into a collaborative relationship with
working Jews on the basis of their common class interests
and fight together for socialism. While it accepted the
Jewish state in the early years of Israeli independence, it
maintained its position for bi-nationalism. Its
disintegration reflected the heightened Israeli nationalism
that accompanied the post-war occupation and annexation.
More to the point, the party and its program were based in
the Kibbutz movement, a rather narrow fraction of the
population, and, in the burgeoning cities, managed to win
support mainly among the intellectuals. Further, as the
social composition of the Israeli population shifted from
European to middle eastern Jews, left Zionism’s appeal was
substantially diminished. It survived as the initial basis
of the Israeli peace movement which, however, was neither
socialist nor Marxist.
But there is an important fourth political tendency among
Jews, the secular, internationalist cosmopolitans, most of
whom are on the left. Although they readily acknowledge the
serious questions posed by Zionists about anti-Semitism
share with most Jews a strong cultural and political
identification with the legacy of the Holocaust, they are
not neither nationalists nor Zionists. I was raised in this
milieu.
IV
IN THE LATE 1940S I
ATTENDED NEW YORK CITY’S MUSIC AND Art High School,
having passed the entrance test in music. Organized by Mayor
LaGuardia to give “talented” students a chance to follow
their artistic interests while receiving a high quality
academic education it attracted kids from all over the city
and became, along with Stuyvestant, Brooklyn Tech and Bronx
Science the city’s “select” high schools. Many of us came
from liberal or left-wing families, a good number from the
Jewish working class. Of course there were an equal number
of students from the professional and managerial class and a
small, but not insignificant coterie of black and Latino
students.
“M and A” made an indelible impression on all of us for its
focus on the arts, but also, at the time of the American
Celebration, whose central proposition was that the US was
the best of all possible worlds, many of us had fairly
strong political interests, were critical of US foreign
policy and of the Truman administration’s rearmament program
that sacrificed social programs and were militantly
anti-racist. The overwhelming majority of the politically
active Jewish students were from families that were firmly
rooted in the diaspora. Ideologically our parents were
“progressives,” a common term describing those sympathetic
to the New Deal and its legacy, socialists and communists.
Our parents were divided over the Cold War, but a
surprisingly large number were among those who dissented
from the mounting pressure for conformity in American
society and culture.
Among our classmates was a small group of Hashomer members.
They were sympathetic to the Communist wing of the American
Left but generally refrained from getting involved in
American politics because they saw themselves as making
alliyah—moving to Israel—after graduation from high
school or college. In a school of students who were
generally better educated than most of their generation,
some of the Hashomer adherents were among the most talented
and well informed about political issues. As I became more
vocal in school affairs, they made fairly vigorous efforts
to recruit me. I met with their New York leader, attended
their camp in New Jersey over several weekends and read some
of their literature, including The National
Question by Borochov. After these experiences I knew in
my bones that I was not a Zionist. For even as I resonated
with some of Borochov’s arguments which were conveyed to me
verbally as well as in text and agreed that European Jews
needed a homeland and viewed the founding of Israel with
pride—largely due to the importance of the two labor parties
that were central to the military victory—my perspectives,
as unformed as they were, were directed to the American
situation.
Like most young Jewish radicals of my own generation I
fervently believed collective action could change America,
that the working class in this most advanced of capitalist
countries would eventually adopt Left politics and oppose
the dominant program of capital. I saw myself as a Jew, but
only culturally, because my parents were secular and
cosmopolitan, if not rootless. My father’s family came to
the US from Lithuania in 1908 and were practicing religious
Jews. But he, too, was an American. Through his
encouragement I was exposed to classic American
literature—by the age of sixteen I had read Whitman, Poe,
Hawthorne and the major 20th century novelists such as
Dreiser, Dos Passos, Thomas Wolfe and James T. Farrell.
Moreover, I was steeped in American History, having read the
Beards' Rise of American Civilization and a fair
amount of labor and black history.
Pursued by Russian authorities some members of my mother’s
family had been staunch activists in the Jewish Bund, a
revolutionary socialist, militantly anti-Zionist movement.
They had arrived in the United States as political refugees.
Some of her uncles were founders of the International Ladies
Garment Workers’ Union. The most prominent was my uncle
Zelig, who had been a garment worker and later a reporter
and labor editor for the Jewish Daily Forward, died in the
late 1960s. I remember attending the funeral home where over
200 people crowded into the chapel to say their farewells.
As I entered the home my aunt was engaged in a loud dispute
with the funeral director. It seems he had asked whether she
required a rabbi to officiate at the event. Angrily she told
him that “we don’t need a rabbi or any other religious
person to attend” and the director vanished. This was the
first time I was made aware of her and my uncle’s atheism.
The “service” consisted of a long list of often spirited
testimonials, in Yiddish, delivered from the podium by my
uncle’s friends.
Later, in the 1980s, when I was invited to give a speech at
a dinner sponsored by the American section of the Bund, I
was able to confirm, first hand, how truly secular and anti-
or non-Zionist this movement had been. Men and women in
their sixties and seventies and older still called
themselves secular Jewish socialists and, although they felt
ties to Israel and would defend her, their lives had been
living repudiation of the fundamental Zionist creed. Zelig
was far more vocal than most in his disapproval of Zionism
and of Israel’s adoption of Hebrew as the official Israeli
language. Even though he had abandoned the socialist
movement— having left the party in 1936 among many others to
support Roosevelt and affiliated with the American Labor
Party, a united front organization of principally trade
union socialists and Communists—he retained traditional
diasporic socialist values. These included: contempt for
organized religion which, he and others of his generation
believed, had thwarted the forward march of the Jewish
masses, in the first place the working class; the belief
that one could never affiliate with a capitalist party; and
the imperative that Jews remain staunch defenders of the
Enlightenment, especially secular education, science and the
arts. And, despite their strong feeling for Yiddish culture,
my mother’s side of the family considered themselves
dissenting Americans.
In sum, first and second generation immigrant Jews had
fallen for assimilation into American society and culture
more rapidly than their European counterparts. But, at least
until the late 1960s secular Jews remained staunch adherents
of all of the major left and left-liberal currents in
American society. Jews were heavily represented in the
leadership as well as the rank and file of the parties and
organizations of the Left and were among the leading trade
unionists, not only in the older needle trades and in the
retail and other service sectors but especially in the newly
organized public employees organizations. Jews are at the
top of some of America’s largest unions. The names of Jerry
Wurf, late president of the State, County and Municipal
Employees, Service Employees leader Andy Stern, the Teachers
Al Shanker and Sandi Feldman and the Communications Workers’
Morton Barr, attest to the role of Jews in the labor
movement.
But Zionism had effectively neutralized secular Jewry’s
voice in the determination of US Middle East policy because
many were afflicted with profound guilt about the Holocaust
and, perhaps, about their own assimilated identity After the
1967 war many on the Left either openly renounced their own
anti-Zionism, or fell silent about the Middle East. Some
Jewish labor leaders who had grown up in the non-Zionist
socialist movement became fervent and uncritical patrons of
Israel, even as they remained stalwarts of the liberal wing
of the Democratic Party, supporters of liberal feminism,
civil rights and even the anti-Vietnam war movement. This
was particularly true of democratic socialists of both
socialist and Trotskyist backgrounds, but, already rattled
by the celebrated Khruschev revelations about Stalin’s
infamies, many close to the Communists muted their
criticisms of Israel as well. A not insignificant fraction
of erstwhile left Jews of all persuasions, especially
intellectuals either drifted or galloped to the Right,
because, after the Left refused to defend it against a
threatened Arab invasion they viewed radicals, particularly
of the New Left variety, as implacable opponents of the
state of Israel After 1967, the fragment of left Jews who
remained critical of the actual policies of the Israel
government, especially the occupation and the hardening of
the Israeli class and race systems, were labeled “self
hating.” The implication of this phrase is that anyone,
especially in the diaspora who opposes Israel’s position
viz the Palestinians has become, intentionally or not,
an enemy of Israel.
After 1967 the grip of Zionism over the organizations of US
Jews—religious, fraternal and sororial, secularists
defenders of the constitution’s separation of church and
state, community centers, charities such as the Jewish
Federation, business organizations and others—was virtually
complete. The transformation of Israeli politics from mild
social-democratic to right-wing nationalism has the detained
the great majority of organized American Jews not at all.
Begin, Shamir Sharon enjoyed as much support in these
circles as did David Ben Gurion, Golda Meir, Yitzak Rabin
and Shimon Peres. It may be argued that the reason for this
trans-ideological solidarity is that the Zionist propaganda
machine has been all-powerful in the face of a vacuum in
counter-information about what is going on. But what remains
to be explained is why secular, cosmopolitan and radical
Jews have been almost completely marginalized in American
politics and especially in the debate about the Middle East.
Make no mistake. In the last thirty years, in addition to
the radicals who have been consistent, if uncritical, in
their support of the Palestinian Arab position, secular Jews
who have been generally sympathetic to Israel, have advanced
their agenda for peace in the Middle East. Conservatives
like Seymour Martin Lipset, Tony Judt, Daniel Bell, liberals
like Amitai Etzioni and other intellectuals have joined
democratic leftists like Michael Walzer, Irving Howe and
others grouped around journals such as Dissent and The
Nation in a fairly broad effort to urge both sides to make
peace and work toward a Palestinian state. They have taken
out ads, lobbied the Congress and written op-eds daily
newspapers that implicitly or openly criticized Israel’s
approach. The problem with these interventions is that they
reflect a wide agreement among Jewish intellectuals that
peace is both necessary and desirable, but have little base
in the court of Jewish public opinion. For today, in
contrast to the first two decades of the post-World War Two
period when secular liberals played an important role in
organized Jewry, there is no left or critical intellectual
coterie that commands a degree of moral authority in
organized Jewish circles. The neo-conservative journal
Commentary is, for most intents and purposes, the leading
intellectual forum of American Jewish opinion and it is
rapidly pro-Israel. The few specifically left Jewish
publications have a limited audience and the most widely
circulated among them, Tikkun, is edited by a former
radical, now rabbi Michael Lerner. But taking into account
Tikkun’s largely secular, non-Zionist readership, its
circulation is fairly confined to people on the left who are
more strongly identified as Jews. Tikkun simply does
not talk to the Jewish-identified small business, technical
and professional middle class.
V
ZIONISM WAS ONCE AS
DIVERSE AS MARXISM. WHILE THE concept of a Jewish
homeland inevitably entailed the creation of settlements
that might encroach on the lands of indigenous peoples,
strong Jewish currents within and without Zionism advanced
the notion of bi-nationalism as an alternative to the
dominant ideology of the Jewish state. Through the post-1948
period the voices of bi-nationalism were virtually stilled
as Israel consolidated its narrow, tribalistic concept of
sovereignty, hardened its mythological narrative of origin,
created a hierarchical ethnic and class ridden society that
all but reversed its once powerful legacy of laborism and
collectivism. Today many young Israelis, disillusioned with
the drift of their homeland, seek spiritual and economic
refuge in the United States and countries of the almost
defunct British Commonwealth, especially Canada and
Australia. I have met more than a few of these younger
people, some of whom are and were my students; and I have
had discussions with the previous generation of Israelis who
served in the 1947-48, 1967 and 1973 wars who have drawn the
conclusion that militarism has become the dominant strain in
Zionism. Theirs is not always a political critique of the
fate of Israel, but they are generally agreed that the
society feels stifling, dangerous, sometimes authoritarian,
and closed. For even in the midst of its unmistakable
military power, and as the Right and Center Zionists cling
to their near-monopoly over the discourse about the
discourse about the Holocaust, its institutionalized
memories, and its narratives, they are having a hard time
sustaining the view of Israel as a victim state, or as a
humanist refuge for the homeless and abandoned.
True, large migrations of Russians, following an earlier
arrival of Arab Jews, keeps alive the older idea. But
today’s Israel has pursued some of the worst features of
western capitalism. It has adopted a policy of “guest
workers” to replace the now excluded West Bank and Gaza
Palestinians who are barred by the Iron Wall from earning
their living. These workers—Turks, Yemenis and others cannot
qualify for citizenship since they re not Jews. At the same
time they compete with the other fractions of the Israeli
working class: Sephardim, Israeli Palestinians and Russians
to the benefit of the bourgeois and the Professional and
managerial elite. Buber’s lament about the normalization of
Israel has come to pass. But, despite the umbilical cord
that has been constructed, along with the Iron Wall, between
Israel and its patrons, the US government and the American
organized Jewry, there can be long-term security. Israel
stands alone in the region; even its once heralded alliance
with Egypt is all but sundered by its refusal to address the
Palestinian problem. And its willingness to lend its
technical and military capacities to further the ends of US
domination in the region, remains a thin thread upon which
to base any comfort.
Once viewed as a lapsed doctrine, after the Palestinian
state is erected, bi-nationalism may make an unexpected
comeback. For it is unlikely that the Palestinians will
accept a version of the Bantustan—dependent, economically
unviable, militarily weak and territorially split by the
strategic placement of Jewish settlements as military
outposts for Israel. This is is a possible scenario,
particularly in the face of the profound corruption of the
extant Arab states, whose historical betrayal of the
Palestinians shows no signs of abatement, let alone
reversal. A bi-national state in the region could be the
beacon of democracy and egalitarianism Israel once claimed
and still claims to be.
But it will take years of writing such as Shatz has offered,
political discussion and agitation within both left and
liberal circles, especially within the United States, a much
less timid Israeli peace movement, and a Left within Israel
and among US pro-peace Jewish activists, that courageously
embraces the possibility of bi-nationalism and, of course, a
Palestinian resistance that works to overcome the
nationalism within its own ranks and forges a democratic
alternative to the Arafat fraud. These are tall orders that
are likely to be fulfilled, if at all, unevenly and with
many setbacks. What we can do now is to take up the issues
raised by Prophets Outcast, not only on the
non-Zionist left (is there a Zionist left anymore worthy of
the name?) but into larger sections of American Jewish life.
Stanley Aronowitz is Distinguished
Professor in the Department of Sociology at the Graduate
Center at CUNY. His most recent book is How Class Works
published by Yale University Press.