The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist
Zionism and Its Discontents
Zionism and Israel’s War with Hamas in Gaza
Roger Coehen
The New York Times, July 29, 2014
My
great-grandfather’s brother, Michael Adler, was a distinguished rabbi
who in 1916 compiled the “Prayer Book for Jewish Sailors and Soldiers”
at the front during World War I. As “chaplain,” he toured battlefields
administering last rites. At the end of the war he asked if British Jews
had done their duty.
“Did
those British citizens of the House of Israel to whom equality of
rights and equality of opportunity were granted by the State some sixty
years ago, did these men and women do their duty in the ordeal of
battle?” he wrote. “Our answer is a clear and unmistakable YES! English
Jews have every reason to be satisfied with the degree of their
participation both at home and on the battlefronts in the struggle for
victory. Let the memory of our sacred dead — who number over 2,300 —
testify to this.”
The
question for European Jewry was always the same: belonging. Be they
French or German, they worried, even in their emancipation, that the
Christian societies that had half-accepted them would turn on them.
Theodor Herzl, witnessing French anti-Semitism during the Dreyfus case,
wrote “The Jewish State” in 1896 out of the conviction that full
acceptance for the Jews would never come.
Herzl
was prescient. Zionism was born of a reluctant conclusion: that Jews
needed a homeland because no other place would ever be home. Scrawny
scholars would become vigorous tillers of the soil in the Holy Land.
Jews would never again go meekly to the slaughter.
The
ravages of European nonacceptance endure. I see within my own family
how the disappearance of a Jewish woman grabbed by Nazis on the streets
of Krakow in 1941 can devour her descendants. I understand the rage of
an Israeli, Naomi Ragen, whose words were forwarded by a cousin: “And I
think of the rest of Europe, who rounded up our grandparents and
great-grandparents, and relatives — men, women and children — and sent
them off to be gassed, no questions asked. And I think: They are now the
moral arbiters of the free world? They are telling the descendants of
the people they murdered how to behave when other anti-Semites want to
kill them?”
Those
anti-Semites would be Hamas, raining terror on Israel, whose
annihilation they seek. No state, goes the Israeli case, would not
respond with force to such provocation. If there are more than 1,000
Palestinian deaths (including 200 children), and more than 50 Israeli
deaths, Israel argues, it is the fault of Hamas, for whom Palestinian
victims are the most powerful anti-Israeli argument in the court of
world opinion.
I
am a Zionist because the story of my forebears convinces me that Jews
needed the homeland voted into existence by United Nations Resolution
181 of 1947, calling for the establishment of two states — one Jewish,
one Arab — in Mandate Palestine. I am a Zionist who believes in the
words of Israel’s founding charter of 1948 declaring that the nascent
state would be based “on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the
prophets of Israel.”
What
I cannot accept, however, is the perversion of Zionism that has seen
the inexorable growth of a Messianic Israeli nationalism claiming all
the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River; that has, for
almost a half-century now, produced the systematic oppression of another
people in the West Bank; that has led to the steady expansion of
Israeli settlements on the very West Bank land of any Palestinian state;
that isolates moderate Palestinians like Salam Fayyad in the name of
divide-and-rule; that pursues policies that will make it impossible to
remain a Jewish and democratic state; that seeks tactical advantage
rather than the strategic breakthrough of a two-state peace; that
blockades Gaza with 1.8 million people locked in its prison and is then
surprised by the periodic eruptions of the inmates; and that responds
disproportionately to attack in a way that kills hundreds of children.
This,
as a Zionist, I cannot accept. Jews, above all people, know what
oppression is. Children over millennia were the transmission belt of
Jewish survival, the object of what the Israeli novelist Amos Oz and his
daughter Fania Oz-Salzberger have called “the intergenerational
quizzing that ensures the passing of the torch.” No argument, no
Palestinian outrage or subterfuge, can gloss over what Jewish failure
the killing of children in such numbers represents.
The
Israeli case for the bombardment of Gaza could be foolproof. If
Benjamin Netanyahu had made a good-faith effort to find common cause
with Palestinian moderates for peace and been rebuffed, it would be. He
has not. Hamas is vile. I would happily see it destroyed. But Hamas is
also the product of a situation that Israel has reinforced rather than
sought to resolve.
This
corrosive Israeli exercise in the control of another people, breeding
the contempt of the powerful for the oppressed, is a betrayal of the
Zionism in which I still believe.
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