David Himmelstein: Pulling the Plug on Israel
August 2, 2006
No Peace Without Justice, No Justice Without Truth
Pulling the Plug on Israel
By DAVID HIMMELSTEIN
Whether or not it has reached critical mass, there exists a heterogeneous
agglomeration of Jewish people around the world-- e.g., moi--for whom the
state of Israel has come to represent an 800-pound albatross that needs to
be pried from our necks before it drags us over a cliff. A sense of
urgency is propelled by the U.S.-sanctioned bloodletting in Lebanon and
Gaza (which now seems to have been planned in advance) and the evident
flimsiness of its official justification. With Israeli adventurism on the
march, there are well founded fears concerning the general threat that
country poses to the peace of the world.
And there is a paticularized danger which stirs a thick chunk of
self-interest into the universalism of enlightened Jewish concern. In
terms of the fabled Jewish-interest litmus, it is proving decidedly not
"good for the Jews" when Israel gets away with murder. The spillover is
ubiquitous. After all, we have it on no lesser authority than New York
Times heavyweight Thomas Friedman that, in the early days of the American
occupation of Iraq, American soldiers in Iraq were being referred to on
the Iraqi street as "the Jews".
The worst-case scenario was laid out with characteristic bluntness by
dissident Israeli historian Ilan Pappe in a Zmag interview:
"I believe what Israel is doing will destroy the Jewish people in the
near or distant future as well. Even with 250 nuclear weapons and the
support of the world,s only superpower." Supporting scenario has been
sketched in by veteran peace activist Uri Avnery:
"What would happen for example if the United States sank ever deeper
into the bloody swamp of Iraq, into an atmosphere of national calamity?
When the search for a scapegoat is on, the Jewish neo-cons will stick
out. . . .One should not exaggerate these dangers. At present they are
hardly specks on the horizon. But I would advise the leaders of the
Jewish institutions in the United States to exercise some
self-restraint. Intoxication with power can easily lead to dangerous
excesses."
Sadly, this advice has not been taken. As a result, it is neither
surrealistic or irresponsibly alarmist to worry about a multi-continental
outburst of anti-Semitism-- especially when fuel for a new firestorm is
being splashed about by those representing themselves as the
quintessential defenders of Jewish interests. This present concern should
not be confounded with the perennial wolf-crying (the flip side of
wolf-baiting) by apologists like the Anti-Defamation League's Abraham
Foxman. The current unease is a spontaneous phenomenon-- rippling across a
broad range of independently minded Jews, stoking a visceral need to
express (even if only in the privacy of their own minds) emphatic
disavowal of the self-proclaimed Jewish State.
The endgame denoted in the title of this piece, although a seemingly
chimerical wet dream today, is a wish list with three main components.
1. In terms of immediate impact, the highest priority would be the
withdrawal of lockstep United States support for Israel's provocative
adventurism and its brutal stranglehold on Gaza and the West Bank.
Maximum U.S. pressure would be applied to hold Israel to its
responsibilities under international law and force it to address the
basic issues that have generated most of its problems.
2. Another high-impact development would be the voluntary drying up of
the river of financial support Israel receives from its many supporters
in North America. Obviously, such a stoppage would presuppose a prior
psychological upheaval within and among those supporters-- indeed in all
diaspora Zionists, i.e., those who believe that Israel is the homeland
of the Jewish people
3. Such a psychosocial earthquake would involve upending deeply
entrenched and cherished beliefs that contribute to a sense of
entitlement, such as that which comes to play when, at any point in
his/her life, a North American Jew discovers his/her inner Zionist.
He/She can draw on sacred and secular authorization to jet off to the
homeland and get fast tracked to a swimming pool in a hillside
villa--down below which the indigenous holdouts line up for water from
the well.
Given Israel's present commanding hegemony of resources and discourse,
such an upheaval may appear as unlikely as the "spiritual seizure" which a
pessimistic George McGovern wished for on a long-ago Election Day.
Nevertheless, there is abundant anecdotal evidence of increasing Jewish
alienation. While Israel's life-disrupting separation wall goes forward on
the ground, Israel itself is being walled off in independently minded
Jewish minds and hearts around the world. (Even some of those who consider
their metaphysical identity and destiny thoroughly intertwined with the
nation of Israel are troubled by twitches in a vestigial generic-- not
proprietary-- human sensitivity. However, the fundamentalist core will
cling even more fervently to triumphalism, and carry on with the
sanctimonious gong-ringing.)
Always seeking ways to "think outside the box", this writer sees advantage
in recycling a pop-psych chestnut to offer non-Jews (not to mention Jews)
a certain scope on the unspoken-for world Jewish community. The lens
consists of Elsabeth Kubler-Ross's five stages of grieving: denial, anger,
bargaining, depression and acceptance. Interestingly, they were first
labeled the five stages of receiving catastrophic news. Both terms are
applicable here: decades of "catastrophic news" about Israel and its
history have culminated (sometimes outside of conscious awareness) in
widespread Jewish mourning and grieving for a lost Zio-innocence.
The most immediate catastrophic news is coming out of Lebanon, but a
steady stream has emerged from Gaza and the West Bank during the four
decades of Israeli occupation. Perhaps even more unsettling is the cloud
of ethnic cleansing which increasingly hangs over the establishment of the
state of Israel in 1948. And any rewind winds up in the original traumatic
"primal scene": early Zionist settlers' shocked discovery that Palestine
was not, in fact, the "land without people" they'd been led to believe.
Many Jews have been shaken out of the denial stage by the substantive
force of the bad news, but anger, bargaining ("I promise --.") and
depression remain seductive lures. Getting to acceptance implies
uncomfortable acknowledgements and adjustments. In the most optimistic of
images, it will be a bumpy ride. But no alternative exists. And the hour
is late.
There will be no peace in the Middle East without justice, and no justice
without truth.
David Himmelstein is a writer and teacher in Montreal. Reachable at
chebrexy@hotmail.com.
August 2, 2006
No Peace Without Justice, No Justice Without Truth
Pulling the Plug on Israel
By DAVID HIMMELSTEIN
Whether or not it has reached critical mass, there exists a heterogeneous
agglomeration of Jewish people around the world-- e.g., moi--for whom the
state of Israel has come to represent an 800-pound albatross that needs to
be pried from our necks before it drags us over a cliff. A sense of
urgency is propelled by the U.S.-sanctioned bloodletting in Lebanon and
Gaza (which now seems to have been planned in advance) and the evident
flimsiness of its official justification. With Israeli adventurism on the
march, there are well founded fears concerning the general threat that
country poses to the peace of the world.
And there is a paticularized danger which stirs a thick chunk of
self-interest into the universalism of enlightened Jewish concern. In
terms of the fabled Jewish-interest litmus, it is proving decidedly not
"good for the Jews" when Israel gets away with murder. The spillover is
ubiquitous. After all, we have it on no lesser authority than New York
Times heavyweight Thomas Friedman that, in the early days of the American
occupation of Iraq, American soldiers in Iraq were being referred to on
the Iraqi street as "the Jews".
The worst-case scenario was laid out with characteristic bluntness by
dissident Israeli historian Ilan Pappe in a Zmag interview:
"I believe what Israel is doing will destroy the Jewish people in the
near or distant future as well. Even with 250 nuclear weapons and the
support of the world,s only superpower." Supporting scenario has been
sketched in by veteran peace activist Uri Avnery:
"What would happen for example if the United States sank ever deeper
into the bloody swamp of Iraq, into an atmosphere of national calamity?
When the search for a scapegoat is on, the Jewish neo-cons will stick
out. . . .One should not exaggerate these dangers. At present they are
hardly specks on the horizon. But I would advise the leaders of the
Jewish institutions in the United States to exercise some
self-restraint. Intoxication with power can easily lead to dangerous
excesses."
Sadly, this advice has not been taken. As a result, it is neither
surrealistic or irresponsibly alarmist to worry about a multi-continental
outburst of anti-Semitism-- especially when fuel for a new firestorm is
being splashed about by those representing themselves as the
quintessential defenders of Jewish interests. This present concern should
not be confounded with the perennial wolf-crying (the flip side of
wolf-baiting) by apologists like the Anti-Defamation League's Abraham
Foxman. The current unease is a spontaneous phenomenon-- rippling across a
broad range of independently minded Jews, stoking a visceral need to
express (even if only in the privacy of their own minds) emphatic
disavowal of the self-proclaimed Jewish State.
The endgame denoted in the title of this piece, although a seemingly
chimerical wet dream today, is a wish list with three main components.
1. In terms of immediate impact, the highest priority would be the
withdrawal of lockstep United States support for Israel's provocative
adventurism and its brutal stranglehold on Gaza and the West Bank.
Maximum U.S. pressure would be applied to hold Israel to its
responsibilities under international law and force it to address the
basic issues that have generated most of its problems.
2. Another high-impact development would be the voluntary drying up of
the river of financial support Israel receives from its many supporters
in North America. Obviously, such a stoppage would presuppose a prior
psychological upheaval within and among those supporters-- indeed in all
diaspora Zionists, i.e., those who believe that Israel is the homeland
of the Jewish people
3. Such a psychosocial earthquake would involve upending deeply
entrenched and cherished beliefs that contribute to a sense of
entitlement, such as that which comes to play when, at any point in
his/her life, a North American Jew discovers his/her inner Zionist.
He/She can draw on sacred and secular authorization to jet off to the
homeland and get fast tracked to a swimming pool in a hillside
villa--down below which the indigenous holdouts line up for water from
the well.
Given Israel's present commanding hegemony of resources and discourse,
such an upheaval may appear as unlikely as the "spiritual seizure" which a
pessimistic George McGovern wished for on a long-ago Election Day.
Nevertheless, there is abundant anecdotal evidence of increasing Jewish
alienation. While Israel's life-disrupting separation wall goes forward on
the ground, Israel itself is being walled off in independently minded
Jewish minds and hearts around the world. (Even some of those who consider
their metaphysical identity and destiny thoroughly intertwined with the
nation of Israel are troubled by twitches in a vestigial generic-- not
proprietary-- human sensitivity. However, the fundamentalist core will
cling even more fervently to triumphalism, and carry on with the
sanctimonious gong-ringing.)
Always seeking ways to "think outside the box", this writer sees advantage
in recycling a pop-psych chestnut to offer non-Jews (not to mention Jews)
a certain scope on the unspoken-for world Jewish community. The lens
consists of Elsabeth Kubler-Ross's five stages of grieving: denial, anger,
bargaining, depression and acceptance. Interestingly, they were first
labeled the five stages of receiving catastrophic news. Both terms are
applicable here: decades of "catastrophic news" about Israel and its
history have culminated (sometimes outside of conscious awareness) in
widespread Jewish mourning and grieving for a lost Zio-innocence.
The most immediate catastrophic news is coming out of Lebanon, but a
steady stream has emerged from Gaza and the West Bank during the four
decades of Israeli occupation. Perhaps even more unsettling is the cloud
of ethnic cleansing which increasingly hangs over the establishment of the
state of Israel in 1948. And any rewind winds up in the original traumatic
"primal scene": early Zionist settlers' shocked discovery that Palestine
was not, in fact, the "land without people" they'd been led to believe.
Many Jews have been shaken out of the denial stage by the substantive
force of the bad news, but anger, bargaining ("I promise --.") and
depression remain seductive lures. Getting to acceptance implies
uncomfortable acknowledgements and adjustments. In the most optimistic of
images, it will be a bumpy ride. But no alternative exists. And the hour
is late.
There will be no peace in the Middle East without justice, and no justice
without truth.
David Himmelstein is a writer and teacher in Montreal. Reachable at
chebrexy@hotmail.com.
