The End? Or the Kiboshing of Liberal Zionism?

  Bill  Clinton, Yitzhak Rabin,Yasser Arafat (photo: Vince Musi)

Israel is undoubtedly an important proxy for United States interests in the Middle East. This is only one of a number of reasons why the country finds itself anathema to many on the left, both in America and overseas. President Obama’s more moderate stance and the tensions that have existed between him and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu mirror the conflict of some liberals who were once fervid supporters of Israel. In addition, in the opinion of some, the Israeli lobby represented by AIPAC tends to take an even more hard line stance than many average Israelis themselves and there are Israelis who criticize the jingoism of today’s American Zionists whose zealotry is a form of windmill chasing that's not validated by practical everyday experience. You have to be there is the point. The film, The Law in These Parts dramatized the unsettling realities of a society which has failed to apply its own advanced and enlightened codes of justice in the occupied territories. But there was another era, almost hard to remember, when the newly independent Israeli state was the darling of the left. Israel was a socialist, primarily agricultural utopia in which a good part of the population lived on kibbutzim (today only a handful remain and agriculture is only a small part of a booming capitalist economy) and even more importantly Israel was a place of refuge for the survivors of the Holocaust. Baby boomers will recall bonds issued for the State of Israel decorated with the trees whose planting they financed.  In a recent Times Op-Ed piece, “The End of Liberal Zionism,” NYT, 8/23/14) Antony Lerman, author of The Making and Unmaking of a Zionist gave vent to some of the disenchantment of liberal Diaspora Jews with a country that embodied ideals they once cherished. Lerman states, “In reality, the only Zionism of consequence today is xenophobic and exclusionary, a Jewish ethno-nationalism inspired by religious messianism. It is carrying out an open-ended project of national self realization to be achieved through colonization and purification of the tribe.” But has a once venerated idealistic enterprise itself become the victim of  extremism? Are Israel’s enemies using it as a pawn in yet another messianic struggle that goes far beyond the questions of a two state solution or whether the country’s borders should be returned to where they were before the Six Day War? All societies have their doves and hawks. What is feeding the hawkish elements in a body politic with a substantial history of voting for leaders who supported peace, accommodation and reconciliation?

Rina Castelnuovo’s Times Photo

Photograph: Rina Castelnuovo For The New York Times

Nina Castelnuovo’s photograph of a faceless 28 year old Tel Aviv woman, which accompanied the Times front page story “In Israel, A Push to Test For Cancer Gene Leaves Many Conflicted"(NYT, 11/26/13) presents the viewer with a congeries of troubling emotions. It’s an iconic photo that goes beyond the substance of the article itself. The woman in the photo has pulled down the strap of her blouse to reveal the scar on her breast, where ostensibly a lump had been removed. But the breast is still defiantly intact and there is even the insinuation of the aureole. Above the incision is a tattoo of a Jewish star. The shot recalls a l964 film called The Pawnbroker in which a woman walks into Rod Steiger’s shop and pulls up her blouse in order to get what she wants. The effect of the Times image is a little like that in The Pawnbroker. Steiger, who plays a refugee who’d spent time in a concentration camp, is immediately flooded with memories, just as the reader of the Times story is flooded with associations that don’t entirely bear upon the subject at hand--which is the high prevalence of breast cancer in the population of Israeli women and the decision by those who according to the Times "tested positive for mutations in the BRCA 1 and 2 genes" to have double mastectomies, in addition to having their ovaries removed. Is the headless woman repelling or intentionally stimulating us with the revelation of her scar, her breast and her tattoo? Is she seducing us or turning us away? Tattoos and cutting are forms of self-mutilation, but they were also unwillingly inflicted on inmates in the camps. What is Castelnuovo’s subject saying? The photo is bold and sexual and in a way a jeremiad against the movement for the kind of preemptive surgery the article describes. The Jewish star was a stigma (and a source of pride) in the Warsaw Ghetto as was the tattoo for inmates in the camps. Now breasts or the absence of them have become the stigma. The Times photo with its breast and tattooed star comprises both of these painful images.

Leon Wieseltier’s Tractatus

Leon Wieseltier has written his own Tractatus. At least that’s the unequivocal aphoristic style in which the first three paragraphs of his review of Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel in The New York Times Book Review (“The State of Israel,” NYT, 11/21/13) read like. Here are some of his propositions: 1) “Israel’s problems are too often combined and promoted into a Problem, which has the effect of emptying the Jewish state of its actuality and consigning it to a historical provisionality” 2) “existence itself must never be regarded as an experiment” 3)“Israel is not a proposition…Its facticity is one of the great accomplishments of the Jews’ history.” If we think back on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus his proposition 1 was “The world is all that is the case” and his last proposition number 7 reads, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”With respect to his first propostion, Wieseltier appears to be in complete agreement with Wittgenstein (the title of the review is incidentally a wonderful double-entendre). He creates a philosophical argument for a seemingly de facto state (unless one discountenances political realities in favor of biblical justifications for the piece of real estate we call Israel).Wieseltier, however, appears to be in disagreement with proposition 7, the most quoted and compelling of Wittgenstein’s statements. He is not silent about that which cannot be said. In fact, a lot of things can’t be said about any political entity and particularly one as young as Israel. The creation of both the Roman and Ottoman empires and modern nation states, like the birth and death of individuals, remains one of the great mysteries of human existence and something which great historians like Gibbon, Carlyle and Spengler have spent lifetimes trying to understand. 

The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street

The Monster Are Due on Maple Street (The Twilight Zone)

Imagine a state of total anarchy, the world that PD. James envisioned in Children of Men. What’s happened is that buffeted by continual and unsolved terrorist attacks, society loses it spiritual stamina. It becomes like a fighter who’s experienced a knock down and is unable or unwilling to get up. It’s a little bit like what happened after 9/11 when the very basis of civil society, the constitutional injunctions against cruel and unusual punishment and of due process were suspended. This was the plot of a famous Twilight Zone called "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street." At some point along the way fantasy caught up with reality since this is also the story of Zero Dark Thirty, which dramatized the extreme measures used to capture Osama Bin Laden. But let’s say it grows even worse. Let’s say the Boston Marathon and World Trade Center bombings are  just the beginning.  Sports events and public gatherings are no longer safe and the financial world comes to a halt. Inhabitants of Syria and Iraq might say you have just described our lives. But let’s say frustration and starvation grow to biblical extremes with the biblical eye for an eye becoming the law of the land. The middle ages return. Those who are suspected of causing amputations get amputated publicly. The concept of proof beyond a reasonable doubt also goes down the tubes. Society becomes a ravenous animal, its thirst for revenge even exceeding its hunger for food. Nameless bombers catalyze nameless revenge with no one even remembering where the cycle of death and destruction begins. Hey come to think of it, isn’t this what happened in Algeria and Northern Ireland. Isn't this precisely what's happening in Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip today?

Zionism and Democracy

However much one believes in God or a spiritual life, once God gets into politics, trouble begins. Put another way, politics requires the language of empiricism and verifiability. Locke and Hobbes, who provide the philosophical bulwark for democracy, were empiricists. German metaphysics and idealist philosophy, culminating in Heidegger’s dasein, or “being there,” is great if you’re a phenomenologist, but Heidegger’s search for an unverifiable condition of ultimate truth might have led to his supporting Hitler. In a recent Times Op Ed piece, Gadi Taub, a professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, similarly differentiates between “the secular Zionist dream”—which “was fundamentally democratic” and followed from the ideals of Herzl and Ben Gurion—and the writings of Abraham Isaac Kook, chief rabbi of Palestine under the British Mandate, and his son Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook (“In Israel, Settling for Less,” 8/30/10). Zvi Yehuda Kook “focused his father’s theological ideas around a single commandment: to settle all the land promised to the ancient Hebrews in the Bible.”  “His disciples,” Taub explains, “energized by a burning messianic fervor, took Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War of 1967 as confirmation of this theology and set out to fulfill its commandment.” God would triumph over the ideals of democratic Zionism. The net result of the divine message is a quagmire. While Arabs, according to Taub, account for about one fifth of “Israel proper,” restoration of the biblical kingdom would eventually leave Jews outnumbered. “Israel would have to choose between remaining democratic but not Jewish, or remaining Jewish by becoming non-democratic. Israel’s enemies have long maintained that Zionism is racism and that Israel is an apartheid state. If the settlers succeed, they will turn this lie into a truth.” Taub’s Op Ed piece articulates the central quandaries of modern Zionism while also providing a brilliant argument for the necessity of a two-state solution. 

The Sound and the Fury

“Ozymandias,” the famous sonnet by Shelley, underlines the futility of human endeavor. “All is vanity,” says Ecclesiastes. Macbeth reiterates the sentiment when he describes life as “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Faulkner called his novel about the Compson clan of mythical Yoknapatawpha County The Sound and The Fury. Camus uses the myth of Sisyphus to describe the absurd condition of man, forever losing his footing, slipping two steps back for every one step forward, as he attempts to move his boulder up an impossible incline. The announcement about the reigniting of talks between the Palestinian Authority and Israel by Hillary Clinton also brings to mind the notion of futility. Everyone wants peace in the Middle East, and yet in the face of repeated failure, the body politic becomes like a disappointed lover who has lost faith that his or her partner will ever stop cheating. In the face of repeated trauma, the body goes into a state of shock in which it’s impossible to care or feel. Meaning-making is a little like artificial numbers in mathematics. There is logic and sense to certain types of math—like the question of the square root of minus one—even without the existence of any referent, anything in reality to reify the thought process. Joseph Schumpeter coined the term “creative destruction,” yet there seems to be a reverse process of spontaneous regeneration by which human history slogs forward in spite of wars and failures, and there is a new generation of peace-keepers to replace the generalissimos of the past. Netanyahu and Abbas may surprise us and turn out to be unlikely bedfellows, but if it isn’t them, it’s going to be someone else who will finally tame the monstrous cycle of retribution and realize the two-state solution, so that Palestinians and Israelis can get on with their lives. 

The Human Scale

Lawrence Wright is a writer for The New Yorker who recently performed his piece, The Human Scale, at Joe’s Pub. Based on Wright’s November 9 New Yorker article “Captives,” The Human Scale deals with the aftermath of the kidnapping of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. (Wright is also the author of a book about Al Queda called The Looming Tower.) Bertholt Brecht, whose plays have been a signature of the Public Theater over the years (Meryl Streep starred in Mother Courage back in 2006), epitomized the conjunction of politics and theater. What is unusual about Wright’s approach is that it’s the conjunction of journalism and theater, replete with a video backdrop and Wright’s attempts to capture the accents of Palestinian and Israeli subjects. Magazine articles sometimes become the subjects of movies, but they are rarely developed as monologues. What is also unusual about Wright’s screed is that it’s an impassioned plea for equanimity. Passion usually tends to be one-sided. Twenty years ago, Gazans were living and working in Israel; there were tensions, but there was also a de facto reciprocity between the two societies. Now, in the aftermath of the Shalit hostage-taking, the firing of missiles into Israel by Hamas, and the Israeli army’s response, Gaza has been reduced to rubble, its citizens taken hostage by an act of hostage-taking. There could have been other solutions, Wright maintains, but the kidnapping served a perverse purpose, in that it facilitated the kind of polarization that nourishes extremism.