For years now, I've known there was something wrong when my well-meaning
anti-Zionist Jewish friends found it necessary to join Jewish
anti-Zionist groups opposing Israel. In the US, the International Jewish
Anti-Zionist Network; in Canada, Not in Our Name; in Britain, Jews
Against Zionism -- every country has its group, usually more than one.
"I am a Jewish witness against Israel," I would be told. Sounds good,
even brave. Sand's latest deconstruction of Jewishness and Israel, How I Stopped Being a Jew (2014), makes it clear why my suspicions were well founded.
Barely
100 pages, it is a page-turner, a precis of his earlier more scholarly
works, arguing that the romantic, heroic age of Jewish nationalism, as
embodied in the creation of a Jewish state, is coming to an end. Israel
will not disappear, but it is an anachronism, an embarrassment in the
postmodern age. A reminder of the horrors of Nazism, but not as the
Zionist crafters of the "holocaust industry", or "holocaust religion",
would have it. The Zionist project is exposed by Norman Finkelstein,
Noam Chomsky, Gilad Atzmon, Israel Shamir, and many more Jewish critics
as reenacting the same policies of yesteryear. A flawed answer that is
doomed, "an insidious form of racism".
For
the Israeli Sand, the Jewish "national" identity is a fraud (an Israeli
identity is fine); the only viable Jewish identity is a religious one,
and as a nonbeliever, he logically concludes, "Cogito, ergo non sum."
Gilad Atzmon takes Sand's logic further. He tore up his Israeli passport, becoming an ex-Israeli as well as an ex-Jew.
What's
so wrong with a secular, ethnic Jewish identity? Well, it can be based
on only one of two things: persecution (being "forced" into being a Jew
whether one likes it or not, as in the Nazi's racial laws) or being
"born" into the Jewish people. The former is no longer an issue and the
latter is full of holes, and based on a dangerous myth.
When were the Jewish people invented?
Sand's
answer is simple: "At a certain stage in the 19th century,
intellectuals of Jewish origin in Germany, influenced by the folk
character of German nationalism, took upon themselves the task of
inventing a people 'retrospectively', out of a thirst to create a modern
Jewish people." For Jews, this required a homeland, and the westernized
Jewish elite were able to provide this. As the West suffered one mortal
blow after another (WWI&II), Zionism took on a new meaning. Voila! Israel.
But
the exile legend is a myth. Sand is a historian and couldn't find any
texts supporting it. The Romans did not exile peoples. "Judaic society
was not dispersed and was not exiled." Jews continued to live in the
Holy Land through thick and thin, freer under Muslim rule than
Christian, but even the latter never "ethnically cleansed" them. Most
converted to Christianity or Islam. Voila! The (Christian,
Muslim) Palestinians. However, a tiny core stuck stubbornly to the
original monotheism, nurtured by the Babylonian exile in the 6th century
BC (the only bona fide exile, the earlier Egyptian exile legend being
crafted much later, when the Torah was written down and collected in the
3rd century BC).
Jews are not a race but rather a collective of
many ethnic groups who were hijacked by a late 19th-century 'national'
movement. There is no racial or ethnic basis for being Jewish any more
than there is for being Christian or Muslim. The great majority of those
who today consider themselves Jewish are descended from converts in
Central Asia, eastern Europe and north Africa, not from ancient Hebrews
expelled from the Holy Land by the Romans. They are not ethnic
"Semites", of near-eastern origin, or ethnic anything else.
Atzmon is a noted jazz musician, and deconstructs a popular 1970s Israeli pop song by Shlomo Artzi: All of a sudden a man wakes up in the morning. He feels he is people and to everyone
he comes across he says shalom. Artzi's youth suggests Jews suddenly
became "people" thanks to the state of Israel, conflating being Jewish
with being Israeli, suggesting only Israelis can really feel free as
Jews. What Artzi ignores is that feeling proud to be an Israeli is only
for those Israelis who have "Jew" stamped in their passport, and, among
them, only those who are blind to the bloody colonial basis for this
privilege. Hardly a recipe for a healthy feeling.
Can a liar tell the truth?
Israel
is a "democratic and Jewish state" according to Israeli law. The
"Jewish" nature was first defined in the Declaration of Independence of
1948. The "democratic" character was added by the Knesset in 1985. This
is a contradiction in terms, as Jewish by definition determines the
state according to race, making it undemocratic for those in the state
not Jewish. In cartesian lingo, both 'A' and 'not A' are true.
This
flawed logic now lies at the heart of what it means to call oneself a
secular Jew, either Israeli or 'diaspora'. Sand joins other ex-Jews,
Gilad Atzmon, Israel Shamir, and Will Self, who have renounced
Jewishness, either as secularists, or as converts to Christianity,
shedding a contradictory, now empty, signifier. Given what Israel has
become, "democratic" and "Jewish" are no longer compatible. Sand rejects
the faux Jewish nationalism served up by Zionism, which excludes
non-Jews from the narrative, and is left with nothing except himself,
his books, his sense of right and wrong. A lonely world.
Atzmon takes Sand's attack on identity politics a step further, arguing in The Wandering Who
that secular Jewish anti-Zionism feeds into the Zionist narrative, the
do-gooder counterpoint to the more sinister role of the diaspora, taking
Sand's concerns to an even more uncomfortable conclusion: The Jewish
Diaspora is there to mobilize lobbies by recruiting international
support. The Neocons transform the American army into an Israeli mission
force. Anti-Zionists of Jewish descent (and this may even include proud
self-haters such as myself) are there to portray an image of
ideological plurality and ethical concern.*
Sand dismisses both religion and nationalism as the basis for his identity. Atzmon argues both are legitimate,
though they both are perverted in the case of the Israeli state.
Nationalism is an authentic "bond with one's soil, heritage, culture,
language", a cathartic experience, not at all "empty" as a signifier.
Though nationalism may well be an invention, it is still "an
intrinsically authentic fulfilling experience". It can be misused, is
often suicidal, but nonetheless, "it sometimes manages to integrate man,
soil and sacrifice into a state of spiritual unification."
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