review | Ned Curthoys

QUESTIONING ISRAEL

• Antony Loewenstein: My Israel Question
  (MUP, $32.95, ISBN 0522852688)

This shameless exploitation of anti-Semitism de­legitimises criticism of Israel, makes Jews rather than Palestinians the victims and puts the onus on the Arab world to rid itself of anti-Semitism rather than on Israel to rid itself of the occupied territories.

Anyone who believes in social justice and opposes racist oppression must be in solidarity with all holocaust victims, especially European Jews . . . Such a person must equally be against the Zionist abduction of the holocaust to justify Israel’s colonial and racist policies.

ISAAC DEUTSCHER HAS famously described the “non-Jewish Jew”, a diasporic Jewish subjectivity in between and remote from fixed cultural traditions and established hierarchies of identity. He notes that emancipated German Jews in late eighteenth-century Berlin helped to initiate a meritocratic salon culture involving both Jew and Gentile, where talent, personality and intellectual flair were a litmus test for participation. In a 1964 interview, the now iconic German-Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt described a very beautiful and “specifically Jewish humanity” signified by the “worldlessness” of certain secular Jews, “standing outside of all social connections”, characterised by a “complete open-mindedness and absence of prejudice”.
     In My Israel Question, Antony Loewenstein resumes the questioning spirit and liminal sense of belonging typical of the secular non-Jewish Jew. His point of departure is the question of Israel as it affects Jewish identity, media freedom, and political discourse, enjoining a “radical rethinking of the conflict” between Israel and the Palestinians. Loewenstein offers no fixed subject position, but acts as a conduit for many perspectives, including those Palestinian and Israeli pleas for understanding and equality that are erased by pro-Zionist discourses which attempt to distort and occlude Israel’s intensifying oppression of the Palestinian people.
     Loewenstein’s book is structured as a bildungsroman, a transformative narrative of an inquiring protagonist’s independent journeys through multiple social strata and heterodox opinions, enabling rebellious, ironic and reflexive self-expression that usually entails an exile from the parochialism of one’s community of birth. Visiting Auschwitz in his mid 20s, Loewenstein was profoundly moved by “seeing the results of blind hatred and unchallenged devotion”, leading him to ask questions on a range of matters, including his “heritage and the state of Israel”. After his Jewish schooling in Melbourne, participation in Jewish youth groups, and the inculcation of the collective memory of Jewish suffering, Loewenstein becomes distanced from his ethnocentric “sentimental education” in issues relating to the vital interests of Jews, of which Israel is now the pre-eminent guarantor of Jewish identity and continuity: “I was taught about the creation of Israel, but not about the indigenous Palestinian inhabitants . . . the morality, or otherwise of Israeli actions was never questioned, let alone given context.”
     If the majority of Australian Jewry have become startlingly humourless about obeisance to Israel, a fundamentalism that is usually projected onto Muslims, then Loewenstein is the diaspora Jew cum obstinate schlemiel (think Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm), naïve and cheeky enough to question the façade that diaspora Jews should have some kind of mystical and organic attachment to Israel: “My young cousins enthusiastically embraced Jewish youth groups . . . forums aimed at fostering a lifelong love of Israel. I went to a few meetings, mainly to please my parents, and felt isolated. I didn’t love Israel. Why would I? I’d never been there.”
Loewenstein is stimulated by all the possibilities and comparative perspectives that multicultural Australia has to offer. He becomes ‘self-educated’, illuminating a hidden genealogy of non-Zionist diaspora Jews, as it becomes apparent from the record that it is “anything but un-Jewish” to question Zionism’s basic tenets. He quotes Albert Einstein who in 1938 predicted the “inner damage that Judaism will sustain” from a “narrow nationalism within our own ranks”. More recently the famous Jewish-American feminist philosopher Judith Butler, who declared in a public lecture that “I am not a Zionist”, reminds Loewenstein that a “mature Jewish community needs to be able to discuss matters of vast importance to the Jewish state in open forums”.
     Now a journalist, Loewenstein decides to journey into Israel and the occupied territories. He visits the now notorious Palestinian centre of Jenin in the West Bank, site of a vicious Israeli war crime in 2002. He chats with Abdul Raouf, a Palestinian nurse, who talks about life under occupation, of “ambulances being fired upon and destroyed by the IDF”, of pregnant women dying at checkpoints because the Israelis wouldn’t let them pass, of a public hospital that has to deal with sixty-four sick children in only seven rooms. More tragic and despairing still is the nightmare of Hebron, a holy city of great spiritual significance to both Muslims and Jews. Here “no place better exemplifies the apartheid-like policies of the Israeli state, where five hundred extremist Jewish settlers protected by the IDF live among, intimidate, threaten, harass, and vilify 170,000 Palestinians”, where sheets of wire mesh are suspended above the markets, preventing settlers, living on the levels above, “from throwing rubbish and faeces into the Palestinians”.
     Loewenstein’s analysis is admirably unflinching. Israel is trying to “suffocate” the Palestinians in their own land. He invokes the Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling, who describes Israel as engaged in “politicide”, the dissolution or at least great weakening of the Palestinian people’s existence as a legitimate social, political, and economic entity (the 1993 and 2000 offers of a non-contiguous Palestinian state without sovereignty over its borders). Israeli politicide is motivated, says Kimmerling, by “the desire of Israeli society as a whole, both left and right, to annex the historic heartland of the Jewish people in the West Bank without annexing its Arab residents”, one of the most fundamental and persistent aims of political Zionism: “(Theodor) Herzl’s seminal essay on the Jewish state shamefully ignored the indigenous Arabs of Palestine”.
     Thus the life-world and civil society of Palestinians must be repeatedly disrupted and encroached upon in the hope they will leave; for the colonised, life becomes arbitrary, degrading, the relationship between action and its effects becomes severed, if one has had the ontological misfortune to be Palestinian. It becomes a matter of pure chance if a Palestinian student is able to attend university on a given day. In the prison which is Gaza, Palestinians hope to be released from repeated curfews long enough to attain basic supplies. Land is confiscated at a moment’s notice, while the racial privileges of Jewishness wantonly transcend any law: “The mobile homes at Tamar were illegal, but Etkes said that authorities turned a blind eye. There were panoramic vistas from the settlement and I could see how Palestinian towns were being surrounded by Jewish settlements.”
     Traversing both geographical and psychic barriers, Loewenstein’s quest into the occupied territories re-enacts those startling and sometimes surreal exposés of colonial malfeasance inaugurated by Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. He depicts a classic colonial bifurcation: “Most Israelis never travel to the West Bank or Gaza, and mainstream media rarely offer perspectives on the occupation other than those of government officials”.
     In the best traditions of the new journalism, Loewenstein’s strategy is to allow a mosaic of brave and independent voices to be heard, to reconstruct a world in which journalists, peace-workers and NGOs retain, despite all odds, cross-cultural communication with and care for humanity. There is the leading Israeli journalist Amira Hass, who wryly terms herself an “expert in Israeli occupation”. Based in Ramallah she reports on life in the occupied territories for Haaretz: “For (Palestinians) Israel is no more than a subsidiary of an army that knows no limits and settlements that know no borders”. Another ‘maverick’ Haaretz journalist, Gideon Levy, derides the notion that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East: “a state with one of the most brutal and cruel military occupations in the world isn’t a democracy” . . . “When you drive a (settler only) road in the West Bank which is a road for only Jews, what is it if not apartheid? When you cross a checkpoint which is only open for Jews, what is it if not apartheid?”
     Loewenstein the wandering Jew returns home and ponders the profoundly anti-democratic spirit of contemporary Zionist lobbies such as the Australia Israel Jewish Affairs Committee (AIJAC) and the New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies, which attempted to prevent the moderate Palestinian voice of Hanan Ashrawi from being heard in this country. In a conservative anti-Muslim climate these lobbies have been remarkably successful in demoralising and ensuring the self-censorship of organisations such as the ABC and SBS; SBS in particular, according to Loewenstein, is now too pusillanimous to show programs which realistically portray the occupation of Palestine.
     Loewenstein’s conclusion is a cautiously optimistic humanism: an independent Palestinian state is inevitable, but it will not happen without the “involvement of many caring people”. Perhaps, but recent events in Gaza (intensifying destruction of Palestinian people, homes and infrastructure) and the horrors of Lebanon indicate an unfolding catastrophe and potential genocide, requiring, in the vein of Kimmerling and the Israeli linguist and post-Zionist commentator Tanya Reinhart, a radical re-appraisal of the pathologies constitutive of the contemporary Zionist imagination. Dan Stone’s recent theoretical discussion of the Holocaust and historiography, History, Memory, and Mass Atrocity (2006) offers some clues as to the helpless, fateful nexus of dehumanising force fields in which we find ourselves.
     “Colonialism and genocide”, he writes, “intersect on the level of the imagination as well as in empirically traceable continuities.” Hannah Arendt recognised that racist suprematism, the desire for a purified living space for the expansion of the superior race, and extraordinary asymmetries of military power, put the colonial oppressor beyond the law, and generate affective fantasies of domination and excessive energies that corrode the stability and democracy of the metropole. The effect at the colonial periphery, the West Bank and Gaza Strip for example, is frequent outbursts of sadistic and admonitory violence towards indigenous peoples. Such violence joyfully transgresses civil and international law in the name of the colonising community, “purifying it, returning to its myth”. In this case international norms and humanitarian ideals are deliberately breached in the name of the Zionist myth of a pioneering Jewish state cleansed of Arab inhabitants.
     Genocide, Stone argues, is an ever present possibility in the putatively modern world. There is a false distinction, he writes, between societies based on feelings, rituals and charismatic attachment to a leader (representations of Palestinians) and a society based on rationality and purposive, goal-oriented action (supposedly modern Israel with its ‘peace processes’, militant ‘targets’ and ‘security’ pretexts). Rather in the colonial frontier and under the cover of warfare, colonising societies give themselves licence to indulge in frenzied transgression of norms and laws (Jenin, the checkpoints, the satisfaction the IDF obtains in shooting children, the starvation of Gaza, the precision bombing of ambulances), enabling an “ecstatic (perpetrator) community” inspired and in thrall to a frustratingly unobtainable and increasingly fanatical racist ideal. The message is clear, only international pressure, including coordinated divestment campaigns and an organised academic and economic boycott of Israel, can prevent an increasingly frenzied Zionist politicide, physical, social, economic, and psychological, of the Palestinians.

Ned Curthoys is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at the Australian National University.

© Ned Curthoys

Overland 184–spring 2006, pp.78–80

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