ZGram - 8/17/2004 - "Paul Eisen: Jewish Power" - Part I

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

Zgram - Where Truth is Destiny:  Now more than ever!

August 17, 2004

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

I am sending this five-part, extraordinary essay to you under some 
kind of emergency I hope to describe to you later.  For the time 
being, just read it and reflect on it, for it sums up our Wesrern 
world. 

I cannot give you the source except the name of the author.  I tried 
to get permission but time was running out.  It was written by Paul 
Eisen of the UK, which is the only reference I have. I can only tell 
you that it was sent to me by someone with the same last name, Eisen, 
and that Paul Eisen heads an organization called "Deir Yassin 
Remembered."  Use your search engine to find out what it is all about.

  [START]

Jewish Power

Paul Eisen

The future is always open and nothing can ever be ruled out; but, for 
now, it's hard to see how Israel can be stopped. After over fifty 
years, it is clear that Israel will only relinquish its 
eliminationist attitude to Palestinians and Palestinian life when it 
has to. This need not be through military action but it is hard to 
see how anything else will do. The conventional wisdom - that if 
America turned off the tap, Israel would be brought to its knees - is 
far from proven. First, it's not going to happen. Second, those who 
believe it may well be underestimating both the cohesiveness of 
Israeli society and the force of Jewish history which permeates it. 
Even more unlikely is the military option. The only force on earth 
which could possibly confront Israel is the American military, and, 
again, that is not going to happen.

Palestinian resistance has been astonishing. After over fifty years 
of brutal assault by what may well one day be seen as one of the most 
ruthless and irrational powers of modern times, and with just about 
every power on earth ranged against them, Palestinians are still with 
us, still steadfast, still knowing who they are and where they come 
from. Nonetheless, for the time being effective resistance may be 
over (though the possibility of organised non-violent resistance can 
never be ruled out), and, for now, the only strategy open may be no 
more than one for survival.

For us it is so much easier to deny this reality than to accept it, 
and doubtless the struggle will continue. How fruitful this will be 
no-one can say. Although the present seems hopeless, survival is 
still vital and no-one knows when new opportunities may arise. 
Anyway, to struggle against injustice is always worth doing. But what 
if the struggle becomes so delusional that it inhibits rather than 
advances resistance? What if the struggle becomes a way of avoiding 
rather than confronting reality? Those slogans "End the Occupation!" 
and "Two States for Two Peoples!" are now joined by a new slogan, 
"The One-State Solution!"  This is every bit as fantastic as its 
predecessors because, just as there never was going to be an end to 
the occupation, nor a real Palestinian state, so, for now, there is 
no possibility of any "one state" other than the state of Israel 
which now stretches from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, 
and the only "solution" is a final solution and even that cannot be 
ruled out.

  "Zionism is not Judaism; Judaism is not ZionismŠ."

The crime against the Palestinian people is being committed by a 
Jewish state with Jewish soldiers using weapons with Jewish religious 
symbols all over them, and with the full support and complicity of 
the overwhelming mass of organised Jews worldwide. But to name Jews 
as responsible for this crime seems impossible to do. The past is 
just too terrible. All of us know of the hatred and violence to which 
accusations against Jews have led in the past. Also, if we were to 
examine critically the role of Jews in this conflict, what would 
become of us and of our struggle? Would we be labelled anti-Semites 
and lose much of the support that we have worked so hard to gain?

The present, too, is full of ambiguities. Zionism is not Judaism; 
Judaism is not Zionism has become an article of faith, endlessly 
repeated, as is the assertion that Zionism is a secular ideology 
opposed, for much of its history, by the bulk of religious Jews and 
even now still opposed by true Torah Jews such as Neturei Karta. But 
Zionism is now at the heart of Jewish life with religious Jews 
amongst the most virulent of Zionists and Neturei Karta, despite 
their impeccable anti-Zionism, their beautiful words and the 
enthusiasm with which they are welcomed at solidarity rallies, etc., 
may well be just Jews in fancy dress, a million miles from the 
reality of Jewish life.

And even if Zionism can still be disentangled from Judaism, can it be 
distinguished from a broader Jewish identity or Jewishness? So often 
Zionism is proclaimed to be a modern add-on to Jewish identity, 
another, albeit anachronistic, settler-colonial ideology simply 
adopted by Jews in response to their predicament. But, could it be 
that in our need to avoid the accusation of anti-Semitism and our own 
conflicted perceptions and feelings, our insistence that Zionism and 
Jewishness are separate, has led us seriously to misunderstand the 
situation? Has our refusal to look squarely at the very Jewishness of 
Zionism and its crimes caused us to fail to understand exactly what 
we are up against? 

Jews, Judaism and Zionism

Jews are complex; Jewish identity is complex and the relationship 
between Judaism the religion, and a broader, often secular, Jewish 
identity or Jewishness is very complex indeed. Jewishness may be 
experienced a long way from synagogue, yeshiva or any other formal 
aspect of Jewish religious life, yet is often still inextricably 
bound to Judaism. That is why secular Jews are able to proclaim their 
secularity every bit as loudly as they proclaim their Jewishness. 
Marc Ellis, a religious Jew, says that when you look at those Jews 
who are in solidarity with Palestinians, the overwhelming majority of 
them are secular - but, from a religious point of view, the Covenant 
is with them. For Ellis, these secular Jews unknowingly and even 
unwillingly may be carrying with them the future of Jewish life.

Jewish identity, connecting Jews to other Jews, comes from deep 
within Jewish history. This is a shared history, both real and 
imagined, in that it is both literal and theological. Many Jews in 
the west share a real history of living together as a distinct people 
in Eastern, Central and then Western Europe and America. Others share 
a real history of settlement in Spain followed by expulsion and then 
settlement all over the world, particularly in Arab and Islamic 
lands. But this may not be what binds all Jews, because for all Jews 
it is not a real, but maybe a theological, history that is shared. 
Most Palestinians today probably have more Hebrew blood in their 
little fingers then most western Jews have in their whole bodies. And 
yet, the story of the Exodus from Egypt is as real to many of them, 
and most importantly was as real to them when they were children, as 
if they, along with all Jews, had stood with Moses at the foot of 
Mount Sinai.

And histories like that don't stop at the present. Even for secular 
Jews, though unacknowledged and even unrealized, there is a sense, 
not only of a shared history, but also of a shared destiny. Central 
to Jewish identity both religious and non-religious is the sense of 
mission centered on exile and return. How else to explain the 
extraordinary devotion of so many Jews, religious and secular, to the 
"return" to a land with which, in real terms, they have very little 
connection at all?

For many Jews, this history confers a 'specialness'. This is not 
unique to Jews - after all, who in their hearts of hearts does not 
feel a little bit special? But for Jews this specialness is at the 
centre of their self-identification and much of the world seems to 
concur. For religious Jews, the specialness comes from the supposed 
covenant with God. But for secular Jews, the specialness comes from a 
special history. In either case this can be a good, even a beautiful, 
thing. In much of Jewish religious tradition this specialness is no 
more than a special moral obligation, a special responsibility to 
offer an example to the world, and for so many secular Jews it has 
led them to struggle for justice in many places around the world.

At the heart of this Jewish specialness is Jewish suffering and 
victimhood. Like the shared history itself, this suffering may, but 
need not, correspond to reality. Jews have certainly suffered but 
their suffering remains unexamined and unexplained. The Holocaust, 
now the paradigm of Jewish suffering, has long ceased to be a piece 
of history, and is now treated by religious and secular alike, as a 
piece of theology - a sacred text almost - and therefore beyond 
scrutiny. And the suffering never ends. No matter how much Jews have 
suffered they are certainly not suffering now, but for many Jews 
their history of suffering is not just an unchallengeable past but 
also a possible future. So, no matter how safe Jews may be, many feel 
just a hair's-breadth away from Auschwitz.  

Zionism is at the heart of this. Zionism is also complex and also 
comes from deep within Jewish history with the same sense of exile 
and return. Zionism also confirms that Jews are special in their 
suffering and is explicit that Jews should 'return' to a land given 
to them, and only them - by God if they are religious, or by history 
if they are not - because they simply are not safe anywhere else on 
earth.

But so what? If Jews think that they are a people with a religious 
link to a land and have a deep wish to 'return', why should we care, 
so long as the land is not already populated by Palestinians? And if 
Jews feel that they are special and that God has made some kind of 
special arrangement with them, so what, so long as this does not lead 
them to demand preferential treatment and to discriminate against 
others? And if Jews feel that they have suffered like no-one else on 
the face of the earth, fine, so long as they do not use this 
suffering to justify the imposition of suffering on others and to 
blackmail morally the whole world into quiescent silence?

This is the problem with Zionism. It expresses Jewish identity but 
also empowers it. It tells Jews (and many others too) that Jews can 
do what Jews have always dreamed of doing. It takes the perfectly 
acceptable religious feelings of Jews, or if you prefer, the 
perfectly harmless delusions of Jews, and tries to turn them into a 
terrible reality. Jewish notions of specialness, choseness and even 
supremacism, are fine for a small, wandering people, but, when 
empowered with a state, an army and F16s become a concern for us all.


[END]

Part II tomorrow.