Denouncing critics of Israel as ‘un-Jews’ or antisemites is a perversion of history
The Guardian
The story of Jewish suffering means there is a moral necessity to fight oppression everywhere. (...)
(Text continues underneath the photo.)
Jewish American philosopher and author, Susan Neiman: ‘I’ve been accused of being a Hamas supporter, and even a Nazi.’ Photograph: Johnny Savage/The Guardian.
The story of Zuckerman and his erasure is one of many told by Geoffrey Levin in his new book Our Palestine Question, on the forgotten history of Jewish dissent in America in the decades following the founding of Israel. It is one of several accounts that will be published this year exploring the history of American Jewish opposition to Zionism and support for the Palestinian cause. (...)
For many Jews, the existential threat posed by Hamas gives Israel the right to take any measures necessary to eliminate the organisation. For others, whatever the horrors of the Hamas attack, the destruction of Gaza, the deaths of more than 25,000 people and the displacement of almost the entire population is unconscionable and cuts against the grain of Jewish ethical traditions. (...)
In 2021, an essay in the Jewish magazine Tablet labelled Jews too critical of Israel or Zionism as “un-Jews”. Three years on, it is a description that seems to have found greater resonance.
Perhaps in no country is official ostracism of “un-Jews” more entrenched than in Germany. “To be a leftwing Jew in today’s Germany is to live in a state of permanent cognitive dissonance,” says Susan Neiman, a Jewish American philosopher and director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam for the past quarter of a century. “German politicians and media talk incessantly about protecting Jews from antisemitism,” but many who “criticise the Israeli government and the war on Gaza have been cancelled and certainly attacked. I’m an Israeli citizen and I’ve been accused of being a Hamas supporter, and even a Nazi, in mainstream media. Need I add that I am neither?” (...)
According to the researcher Emily Dische-Becker, almost a third of those cancelled in Germany for their supposed antisemitism have been Jews. There is, as the Israeli-born architect and academic Eyal Weizman has acidly put it, a certain irony in “being lectured [on how to be properly Jewish] by the children and grandchildren of the perpetrators who murdered our families and who now dare to tell us that we are antisemitic”. (...)
What guided Jewish critics, particularly of Israeli policies towards Palestinian refugees, in the late 1940s and 1950s, was, as Levin shows, their attachment to Jewish traditions that reject discrimination or barbarism against any group. (...)
What makes all this particularly troubling, Neiman observes, is the upsurge in antisemitism in Germany and elsewhere. Rather than policing Jewish intellectuals and activists, “insisting on unconditional loyalty to Israel” and “downplaying the suffering in Gaza”, what is needed, Nieman argues, is to support those individuals and organisations that are building forms of solidarity that can both challenge antisemitism and anti-Muslim bigotry, and promote justice in Palestine and Israel.
Tags: #books #israel #palestine #gaza #zionism #jews #palestinians #israelis #antisemitism #bigotry #justice
There are no comments yet.