Gershon Baskin is someone I like, respect, and admire a lot. He’s a Jewish Israeli, quite forthright in his espousal of his version of the Zionist ideal. Moreover, unlike a lot of “Zionists” who sit in the United States and tell other Jewish people to go live in Israel, he actually “made aliya” to Israeli himself and has been living with the risks that that entailed ever since.
Gershon has a very moving op-ed in the Jerusalem Post today, in which he states his personal values very clearly:
- Zionism was not about conflict with our neighbors. It was about creating a just, progressive and humane society based on “Jewish values” for Jews to live and prosper, both in spirit and in substance. Real Zionism accepted the reality that non-Jews would always live within our midst. This was expressed with both eloquence and finesse in Israel’s Declaration of Independence. That Declaration has always served, for me, as a kind of statement of intent and of the values upon which this state and this society rests, or should rest.
ZIONISM is not about occupying the West Bank and Gaza. The continuation of the settlement enterprise is an act of suicide for the Zionist dream. It is not only about demographics. It is perhaps even more so about values, morality and lessons that we, as Jews, should understand better than anyone else.
The disengagement from Gaza is a Zionist act. Ending our occupation and domination over Gaza and its people is an action aimed at saving Zionism from those who have tainted the noble aspects of its cause since 1967. The Zionist dream is still in danger and the Zionist enterprise is at risk as long as we continue our occupation and domination over the West Bank and its people. The march out of the occupied territories must continue. We must return to ourselves and build Israel from within.
For many years now, Gershon has been the Jewish-Israeli co-director of an organization (that he founded) called the Israeli-Palestinian Center for Research and Information. One of the reasons I respect him such a lot is that, back in the early 1990s I was doing a lot of Israeli-Palestinian peace-building work, and he was one of the very few Jewish Israelis I worked with who sincerely seemed to “get” that having Jewish Israelis (and their Jewish-American friends) controlling every aspect of the “joint” Israeli-Palestinian projects that were proliferating like mushrooms in those days was not, actually, the best way to build longterm relations of reciprocity and mutual respect between the two peoples.
I could write a book about how many, extremely well-meaning Jewish Israeli “peaceniks” I worked with who thought that because they knew best, they should be able to make all the big decisions and keep their Palestinian “partners” in a quite subordinate position.
How incredibly patronising!
No wonder that a huge proportion of those “joint” projects ended up failing. When the second intifada broke out in September 2000, almost all them collapsed (but not until after a lot of the Israeli organizations and individuals– along with a much smaller number of their Palestinian counterparts– that had participated in them had profited handsomely from the investment put into them by well-meaning but naive international donors.)
Anyway, I write that here as background to the principal reason why– though I don’t always agree with Gershon– still, I respect him so much: he has always seemed to me to be sincerely trying to build IPCRI on a basis of
A number of well respected Palestinian figures have worked with Gershon as co-director of IPCRI. The current one is veteran newspaper editor Hanna Siniora.
Indeed, Gershon’s commitment to allowing his Palestinian partners to have their own voice within and through IPCRI’s projects even, earlier this month, extended to allowing them to use IPCRI’s mailing list as part of their effort to “take on” and publicly criticize the extremely patronizing/controlling approach often followed by people associated with the “Peres Center for Peace”, which is one of the veterans in the Israeli-Palestinian “peace”-monopolization business.
That whole dispute– which most likely continues– is over the terms on which Palestinian health professionals choose to engage with their Israeli counterparts. (You can find a short guide to that dispute, with links to some of the relevant statements and publications, here.)
Anyway, all of that is some more background as to why it’s worth reading what Gershon has written in the Jerusalem Post today:
- [Gershon Baskin:] I received a bumper sticker in my email this week. It was two Israeli flags, one in orange and white and the other in blue and white. It said beneath the flags: “Israel
You and I often disagree on Israeli-Palestinian issues, Helena, but in our respect for Baskin we are one. People like Baskin show what Zionism can be.
Gershon said
Great post, Helena. More power to Gershon Baskin’s arm.
Salah, I’m not sure where you’re getting your information on Zionism, but there are no Zionists today (except maybe a few far-right-wing nutters) who actually believe that the borders of the Jewish state should be the Nile and the Euphrates. That accusation is propaganda, nothing more.
Baskin is a little paranoid, or maybe I’m just optimistic, here’s Baskin on the anti-disengagement people:
I had heard this slogan and understood it to mean that only Europeans expel Jews — Jews don’t. I still feel I’m right but the slogan is perfectly ambiguous in this regard and I never would have come up with Baskins interpretation. In any case it isn’t historically accurate.
Baskin again: “THE DISENGAGEMENT from Gaza is a victory for me and my kind.” I thought only Hamas thought it was a victory. Is that Baskins kind? I understand land-for-peace and I understand giving up land as part of a negotiated peace treaty but I’m confused by Sharon’s giving up land for nothing. There’s a rumor it’s just to save money and there’s another story that Sharon is being blackmailed and another that it’s all because of US pressure in a time of high oil prices — but I haven’t seen the proof. Until I really understand why Sharon is doing it I can’t really support it.
Baskin again: “The toxic mixture of messianic lunatics aligned with political fanatics is explosive.” So much for religious tolerance. Suicide bombers are explosive, the extremely religious are just different. So far all they’ve done is graffiti, burn tires and march. Not really a big deal. And we all know they’ll lose and practically nobody will be physically hurt. A tempest in a teapot. Baskin thinks its World War III.
Baskin again: “Judaism teaches us to sanctify life, not places.” Well, it sanctifies life alright, but it also sanctifies places and a few objects. Baskin is just ignorant, and we should forgive him. Judaism sanctifies the Temple, the Torah, prayerbooks, and a few other odds and ends.
‘Their ideology says “Jews don’t expel Jews,” implying that Jews may expel non-Jews.’
I had heard this slogan and understood it to mean that only Europeans expel Jews — Jews don’t. I still feel I’m right but the slogan is perfectly ambiguous in this regard and I never would have come up with Baskins interpretation. In any case it isn’t historically accurate.
WW, why not take your jester’s cap and bells elsewhere.
i agree with much of what baskin writes, though i think he can’t have been paying very close attention to the sharon administration’s own descriptions of the gaza withdrawal – which they’ve explicitly said is the price for annexation of most of the west bank and all of east jerusalem.
but more importantly, i do want to point out that if his desires are as he describes them, there’s a serious contradiction between what he wants and any historically-grounded meaning of “zionism”.
baskin writes:
I cherish diversity and appreciate the wealth of cultural pluralism that we can experience in this land and in this region.
zionism, historically, in all its strains, has rejected even the diversity of jewish cultures. while the phrase “negation of the diaspora” has gone out of fashion, its legacy is visible today in the official marginalization of the mizrakhi and sefardi cultures of the majority of jewish israelis as it was in the yishuv and then the israeli state’s war on yiddish in the 1920s-50s. this zionist enforcment of a homogenous ivrit-based, nationalist culture as the only true version of jewishness can also be seen in the u.s. – more ashkenazim of my (30ish) generation speak a smattering of the language of the state of israel than the language our grandparents grew up in.
baskin again:
I don’t want to rule over another nation and don’t want their land. If important parts of my heritage and history are on the other side beyond our borders, I may want to visit them. But I don’t know have to be in possession of those places or rule over others in order to control them.
the one shared element of all versions of zionism is the notion that jews should “be a nation like all the others”, with a nation-state at the east end of the mediterranean. the only reason for that location is “possession of those places” that our mythology tells us are connected to our tribal origins.
that insistance on “possession of those places” what makes zionism distinct from “territorialism” or diaspora nationalism or bundist “doykayt” internationalism.
to state the obvious: you don’t need a nation-state to visit a place. shi’a pilgrimages from iran to najaf, karbala, etc. went on right through hussein’s viciously anti-shi’a rule; christian and jewish visits to jerusalem went on right through an array of khalifates, sultanates, etc. the only reason for a nation-state is to possess those places rather than have access to them.
and more to the point, the only function a nation-state (a state defined as belonging to a particular ethnic, racial, or religious group – be it jewish, french, afrikaner, or japanese) serves is to establish one nation’s rule over whoever else lives within its borders. a “french state” is a state in which “french” inhabitants rule over breton and basque inhabitants. and a “jewish state” is one in which those defined as “jewish” rule over palestinians (muslim, christian, or druze) and the imported workers so often left out of the conversation entirely.
in essence, “zionism” – commitment to a “jewish state” – means wanting their land. how much of it a particular strain of zionism wants is a dispute over acreage and nothing more.
as a jewish resident of the u.s., i’d rather have lunch with baskin (who only wants the green-line-bounded 78% of the land between the jordan and the sea) than with a gush khatifnik who wants all of it. but it’s a distinction without a difference when it comes to the human rights of palestinians, whether they’re living as second-class israeli citizens, under military occupation, or as refugees from the land baskin says he doesn’t want, but is within borders he calls “ours”.
in gerangl
rozele
rozele – great post! You raise a lot of profound issues, not just about Israel/Palestine, but about the philosophy behind the whole nation-state concept. The nation-state is something we’ve grown up believing in as part of the natural order of things, but it isn’t really, is it? It’s just one of many methods of exercising power over others and aggregating wealth. The great human desire seems to be to claim a piece of this earth as absolutely, irrevocably OURS, and then set about building it up, expanding it, and defending it against all enemies, real and imagined. This must be hard-wired into our genetic code. Even the “Native Americans,” whose mythology holds that the earth is a sacred being who belongs to no one fought viciously over their respective parts of the sacred whole. What can we do about this?
The nation-state is something we’ve grown up believing in as part of the natural order of things, but it isn’t really, is it?
You’re right – it isn’t. Nation-states were in fact not the norm in premodern times. However, current international law gives nation-states certain privileges that other entities don’t have – for instance, the right to maintain armies, the right to grant and revoke citizenship, and the right to legislate without outside interference. Subgroups within nations do not have any international guarantees of these rights and, quite often, are victimized by majorities who abuse the mechanisms of the nation-state to oppress minorities.
Maybe there will come a time when the international legal system changes to one in which the nation-state is not the basic unit of self-determination and in which minorities have a meaningful method of appeal in the event of governmental oppression. However, the process of developing such a system is slow and fitful even in Europe where the supranational idea is most advanced. Until that time comes, the history of how Jews have fared as a minority within nation-states is proof that we need our own.
Jonathan Edelstein writes:
…the history of how Jews have fared as a minority within nation-states is proof that we need our own.
this was certainly herzl’s opinion, once he concluded that his preferred option of conversion and assimilation wasn’t likely to succeed. to closely paraphrase him (i don’t have the source in front of me; it’s cited in daniel boyarin’s “unheroic conduct”), ‘only then can jews become true germans’.
the question jonathan joins herzl in begging, however, is whether becoming a true german is something anyone *should* do.
jonathan seems to admit that the nation-state model is inherently ethically problematic at best – involving (at the moment) the sanction of international law for warmaking and the victimization of those within state borders who are not part of the dominant group. i would look at the past few hundred years as ample proof that nation-states are inevitably unjust and almost always murderous. as if one couldn’t guess that, given that they’re based on the myth of a perfectly homogenous population – something that has never existed.
more to the historical point, though: having a nation-state has never made any group of people safe. ask anyone from poland, viet nam, laos, or rwanda for that matter. what the urge to nation-state-hood has done, reliably, is to add more and more names to the lists of victims and perpetrators of genocide.
which is why what makes me saddest is to see someone like jonathan looking at jewish history and concluding that a nation-state is a good thing to have, rather than working to make sure that what nation-states have done to us can never be done to anyone else.
i’ll let you fill in the overused line from rav hillel.
and the worst of it is that historically stateless peoples – jews, roma, &c – have so much to offer that conversation from our history. jewish history in particular is among the best arguments against the nation-state, and a fantastic resource for alternative models of organizing human life.
just to tag a few topics in that line:
– balancing local and global scales of community
– maintaining a sense of unity between radically different cultures (ashkenaz vs. banu yisrael, for instance)
– building decentralized, autonomous institutions to meet community needs
it’s certainly not new to point out how the nation-state approach that zionism offers as a cure-all betrays jewish history. it may or may not be new to point out how explicitly assimilationist it is. in the name of jewish survival, it asks that jews become “a nation[-state] like all the others”. in other words, become goyim – “the nations” – the very definition of non-jewishness. after all, why try to solve the problem if you can become part of it? goyim nakhes indeed.
in gerangl
rozele
I understand, Jonathan. Who can deny to any people the right to seek for themselves what everyone else has or is seeking? It’s too bad we have to do our seeking in separate groups that compete violently with one another. Intra-species competition may have been good for the gene pool in the past. It becomes a threat to our collective survival when tribal groups grow into nation-states with the destructive power of nuclear weapons – or worse yet, “nucular” weapons – at their disposal, and still behave according to ancient tribal rules.
Rozele,
jonathan seems to admit that the nation-state model is inherently ethically problematic at best
Any form of government is ethically problematic. Governments are institutions that exercise power, and power is subject to abuse, especially when it is exercised in the morally ambiguous situations that all governments face. No form of government yet created – nation-states, empires, feudal states, supranational federations, or what have you – is proof against the abuse of power. No form of government is immune to warmongering, genocide, enslavement, oppression of minorities, or the other ills you mention.
You may be misunderstanding me; I’m not advocating nation-states as a “cure-all.” I’m quite aware of the abuses that nation-states can perpetrate. However, we who live under the post-WW2 international legal regime are living in a world where nation-states are privileged above other political entities, at least in terms of protection from outside interference. Personally, I don’t think this is a particularly satisfactory legal regime – I’d prefer to see the European Union expanded to include the world – but in the meantime, having a nation-state is the best protection available.
having a nation-state has never made any group of people safe. ask anyone from poland, viet nam, laos, or rwanda for that matter.
Of course nationhood doesn’t make any group of people 100 percent safe, but it provides greater safety than not having a nation. Ask the Chechens – Russia has killed one seventh of them, and nobody has lifted a finger. Ask the Tibetans, the East Timorese or the Eritreans whether they would prefer to have a nation state or not to have one, and why this is so.
(For that matter, Rwanda proves my case at least as much as yours, because the genocide there was perpetrated by a majority within a nation against a minority. The Tutsis in Burundi – a separate nation-state – were not molested at that time. So, at least in that case, national borders provided some protection to the Burundian Tutsis.)
which is why what makes me saddest is to see someone like jonathan looking at jewish history and concluding that a nation-state is a good thing to have, rather than working to make sure that what nation-states have done to us can never be done to anyone else.
Why is this an either-or choice? It’s possible to seek or protect one’s nationhood in the here and now while working to make the nation-state more just and to ultimately create a legal system that supersedes nation-states. For instance, I support several organizations that fight for the rights of non-Jewish minorities within Israel. I consider it important that a Zionist state affirm Jewish values, including just and equal treatment of non-Jews. But the imperfections of Israel (or of the United States, where I live) are not reason enough, at least to my mind, to abandon the concepts of American and Israel. Perfection is too much to demand of anyone.
and the worst of it is that historically stateless peoples – jews, roma, &c – have so much to offer that conversation from our history.
I’ve heard this argument made before – that stateless peoples are a lesson or experiment in alternative forms of community. However, I’m not a lesson, I’m a human being, and as a human being, I take considerable comfort in the fact that I have someplace to go if things get ugly where I live. How much have the Roma paid to teach this lesson to us, and is this really a cost we should willingly take on ourselves where there is an alternative?
Not to mention that diaspora Judaism was hardly innocent. How many of us had to work as landlords’ agents, court factors or usurers to survive, because those were the only ways of existence that were open to us? How many crimes were committed by those people, however unwillingly? Existence as a stateless minority entails as many moral compromises as statehood, and diasporas have less control over the compromises they are forced to make. Maybe that’s a lesson I’d rather not learn again.
in other words, become goyim – “the nations” – the very definition of non-jewishness.
Rozele, you know as well as I do that Jews have had other periods of political independence, and that diaspora Judaism is not the only historical form of Judaism. A Jewish nation-state is something different from what we had in the 1900 years before, but it’s not unprecedented and certainly not “non-Jewish.” We are a nation among nations, like it or not, and we can adapt our values to the nation-state we now control.