I was part-way through my next posting when this appeared on my Facebook page. It was posted by Corey Robin, a professor at CUNY whose work is grounded in deep research yet is also deeply personal. Corey has been a courageous outspoken Jewish antizionist long before Gaza made that label more fashionable.
These are not Corey’s words, but those of David Myers, professor of Jewish Studies at UCLA. I don’t think he would call himself an antizionist. He has served as the president of the New Israel Fund, an organization devoted to building civil society in Israel, with a particular emphasis on the rights of Palestinians. We are long-time contributors to NIF. For a long time, its mission has been what kept us engaged with Israel despite our growing disappointment with a country that was drifting further and further from own values and ethical beliefs.
My own history with Israel is too long to recount here. In brief, my family celebrated the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. They were especially happy for our relatives living there, including my maternal grandparents. I grew up in a Jewish youth group that centered Israel in their program. Through them, I spent an important year in Israel after my freshman college years. Our daughter and her husband have lived in Israel for more than 30 years, where they have had front row seats to the injustices and indignities faced by Palestinians, including those who are citizens of the state. You need to know this about me to understand how painful it is for me to find resonance in the words you’re about to read.
David Myers’ words are a brave clarion call at the start of the New Year to rethink the nature of our commitments to both Israel and to our own moral and ethical beliefs. He is surely aware of the attacks he will be subject to for saying out loud the things that many of us have been whispering to ourselves, as I am aware of the attacks I am opening myself up to for circulating his words, but I share them as an opportunity to open an honest conversation about our relationship with Israel going forward. What I was writing about our preparations at home for the start of Rosh Hashana when David’s manifesto arrived seem so banal to me now. Imagine what follows introduced by a long blast of the shofar.
“The events that began on October 7 and continued in the unrelenting Israeli campaign in Gaza have produced a hurban, a destruction of Biblical proportions. They have also shattered the vessels, leading to a fragmentation of the religio-nationalist paradigm of Jewish identity into shards of trauma, revenge, hate, and indifference. This theological-political problem requires a theological-political remedy, a Jewish liberation theology that frees others and self at once….
“To regain our moral equilibrium, Jews must take down, in literal and metaphorical terms, the Israeli flag in which we have enshrouded ourselves and our vision of Judaism since 1948. We must re-orient ourselves, in a spirit of ethical urgency and humility, away from celebration of the Israeli state as an object of sacred reverence and toward a recognition that the well-being of Jews in Israel has come at the expense of Palestinians. The path to rebuilding a sustainable, morally tenable Judaism for the future will be paved by the embrace of Palestinian liberation as a moral necessity….
“Trauma, as the psychiatrist Vamik Volkan has observed, can be ‘chosen.’ This occurs when a group makes ‘an unconscious “choice” to add a past generation’s mental representations of an even to its own identity.’ Overcoming this instinct will not be easy. It will require the painful recognition that not only have we become dominators, but that victims can and often do become victimizers, which is hardly unique to Israelis or Jews. That said, it is imperative to break the chain of transmission of ‘hereditary victimhood’ (per Zygmunt Bauman) that enables a constant sense of victimhood and, hence, moral virtue….
“To regain our cultural equilibrium, Jews must rethink the ways in which we have educated their children over the past 80 years, in line with the regnant paradigm of identity. This means moving away from a predominantly statist orientation that places the state, its institutions, and official Hebrew at the heart of Jewish educational programs toward curricula that: 1) offer a more nuanced view of the history of Israel-Palestine, particularly by providing students direct access to Palestine history and culture; and 2) center the rich mosaic of Jewish cultures (including Israeli), religious streams, and ethical sources. Here it is important to note the many salutary efforts of younger Jews across the globe to pull from the margins the literary, cultural, and political richness of great Jewish languages such as Ladino and Yiddish.”
