21. Tilley and Lazare
13th May 2006
Posting 21. The Jewish-Israel Lobby category, by Bill Templer, 15 May 2006
TILLEY AND FORWARD TO A ONE-STATE SOLUTION
Virginia Tilley’s article on Hamas and Israel’s ‘Right to Exist’ in Counterpunch is strong if perhaps a bit too ‘legalistic’ and complex in argument (http://www.counterpunch.org/tilley05112006.html ). I think the core of her own concern lies toward the end:
“Carving the West Bank into cantons has eliminated any hope of a viable Palestinian state. The two-state solution is not working. In these conditions, should Hamas recognize Israel’s ‘right to exist’ if it is recognized to be eliminating Palestinian sovereignty altogether? […] The Road Map is based on the supposition that the only peaceful solution in Palestine is to establish one state for Jews and another for everyone else. If Israel’s ‘right to exist’ does not entail sustaining a Jewish majority (which necessitates discriminatory legislation, ethnic cleansing, land grabs, and social engineering), then the ethnic logic supporting two states disappears. Why agree to compose two secular-democratic states sitting next to each other in this small land? No one can articulate an answer, because ethnic demography is their only rationale. […] The entire Road Map logic has become nonsense, too.”
Virginia is the most cogent academic voice today projecting a one-state solution as the path forward, and I can recommend her The One-State Solution (Ann Arbor 2005). She tries in this Hamas article not to foreground that concern, but it is her central thrust on the Palestine/Israel question. Though she projects a democratic ‘secular’ state, I think some people inside Hamas could find her thinking quite compatible with the cultural and religious expression of Islam in a symbiotic egalitarian Arab-Jewish political frame.
In her final chapter on concrete steps, Virginia addresses the question of “what qualities of ‘Jewishness’ would necessarily be lost if Israel ceased to have a Jewish majority?” (p.220). Though “the whole apparatus of Basic Law and public policy that now privileges Jewish nationality in Israel would have to be dismantled,” the urgent question is “how the core spirit and functions of the Jewish national home—sanctuary, national expression—can be preserved while providing Palestinians and all non-Jews with full political equality.”
She goes on: “a completely ethnic-blind system would not suffice; mutual guarantees would have to ensure both Arab and Jewish collective interests, particularly in the transition. […] if Jewish life could sustain meaningful expression in a country so stabilized, the benefit to Zionism would actually be enormous, for it would defuse Israel’s daunting ‘demographic threat’ permanently, by making it meaningless. […] Debating the state’s exact design is, however, premature at this point. As in South Africa’s transition, the protagonists must sort out the new state’s design themselves through legitimate forums.” (p.221).
On p. 222 Virginia sets out some bulleted ‘provisions’ for the transition, well worth pondering. She even goes so far as to say: “sustain the Law of Return for Jews,” while heavily curtailing “the activities of the WZO and the Jewish Agency regarding the active promotion of Jewish aliyah” — and working out avenues for massive Palestinian return. The Jewish settlements in the West Bank would be absorbed into this unitary state, while eliminating “preferential access to land, water and transportation,” and any special incentives for these settlements, in a frame of working for the aim of “ethnic parity” in all spheres (p. 223).
This is not just ‘dreaming.’ Virginia is associated with the group One Democratic State (www.one-democratic-state.org ) that I have mentioned before, where you are welcome to come on board. I find Virginia’s analysis and vision as laid out in the 2005 book non-socialist,and non-populist, too little concerned with a ‘bottom-up’ movement among Palestinians and Jews for a new kind of people’s commonwealth, but that is secondary within this broader frame. Ihud in 1942 called for a “Federative Union of Palestine and neighboring countries,” grounded on a “Union between the Jewish and Arab peoples, essential for “cooperation between the Jewish world and the Arab world in all branches of life—social, economic, cultural, political.” That was the vision of Buber, Akiba Ernst Simon, Judah Magnes, Henrietta Szold and others. Their party today would be banned in Israel under Art. 7(a) of the Basic Law.
Importantly, Virginia is very careful not to demonize average Israelis, whatever their brainwashing by the powers that be. As far as I can see, she doesn’t have a class analysis of what is wrong with power and plutocracy inside Israel, but maybe that is an unfair judgment on my part.
In mild critique, I think her Counterpunch piece on Hamas does not sufficiently foreground one major aspect of Israel’s distinctive political DNA: namely that it is the state of a movement, what some theorists in Germany in the 1930s called a Bewegungsstaat. That movement is committed to the pro-active “ingathering of the exiles,” and is thus by definition a never-bounded project, where a written Constitution is also exceedingly problematic. In talking about the Israeli ethnocracy, this core aspect is essential. The Jewish Agency and Jewish National Fund (Keren Kayemet le-Yisrael) act in some ways as a state within a state inside the Israeli polity as the pincer arms of this movement of ingathering.
This is a paramount reason why Palestinians cannot ‘recognize’ the essentially borderless state. Precisely because it is the ‘state of a global movement’ to in effect imbibe and vitiate (negate) the diaspora. No polity anywhere on the planet is constituted as an ethnocratic Bewegungsstaat to pro-actively gather in, ‘return’ and reunite millions of individuals quite literally from the ‘earth’s four corners.’ In her book, Virginia does deal with the unique role of the Jewish Agency and Keren Kayemet le-Yisrael.
REVISITING LAZARE
In the related discussion on the Lobby and its reality and implications, here a quote worth pondering:
“To those who denounce the Jewish peril before you, respond by attacking capital, whatever kind it might be, Jewish or Christian. Capital without any qualifier. To those who enlist you to cry ‘Down with Israel!’ answer ‘Down with Capital! Down with property!’ and don’t go any further than that; don’t allow yourself to be distracted from your route by those who want to guide you into an impasse which will lead you to nothing. Finance, speculation, capital, property, in one word, all your enemies are not Jews, they are universal: they are Christian, Muslims, Buddhists. Be careful not to help them and to compromise the cause by unconsciously supporting theirs. They will laugh at you after you will have foolishly served them as an auxiliary, and they will profit from their victory to better enslave you.”
It is from Bernard Lazare (1865-1903), a French social anarchist and writer active in the 1890s active on behalf of many causes and very centrally engaged in the struggle against anti-semitism in France. His classic study Antisemitism: Its History and Causes (1894) is well worth reading, today perhaps especially, in part as an anarchist antidote to Shahak. This book on anti-Judaism, its discourses and practices, is one of the few by a social anarchist historian, online in full: http://marxists.architexturez.net/reference/archive/lazare-bernard/1894/antisemitism/index.htm
Its first speculative chapter seems to resonate to frequencies in Shahak’s approach in Jewish History, Jewish Religion a century later (denouncing Jewish xenophobia and exclusivism), which is why Lazare paradoxically is sometimes quoted in openly anti-semitic diatribe. Yet Lazare’s anarchy shines through his analysis, even in chap. 1. And his concomitant struggle against French anti-semitism, such as Edouard Drumont’s La France juive, a classic vicious anti-semitic work on ‘Jewish supremacy’ in France that in part inspired Henry Ford’s The International Jew. Ford’s tirade was once an insidiously influential book worth (re)reading today in the polarized light of the current Lobby discussion.
As Ford says there in Chap. 13: “Anyone who essays to discuss the Jewish Question in the United States or anywhere else must be fully prepared to be regarded as ‘anti-Semite,’ a ‘Jew-baiter.’ Nor need encouragement be looked for from politicians, people or Press. […] There is a vague feeling that to use the word ‘Jew’ openly, or to expose it nakedly in print, is somehow improper. […]
The chief difficulty in writing about the Jewish Question is the super-sensitiveness of Jews and non-Jews concerning the whole matter. There is probably not a newspaper in America, and certainly none of the advertising mediums which are called magazines, which would have the temerity even to breathe seriously the fact that such a Question exists.”
1921. Sound familiar? The abridged edition of the book is available here, side by side on the cybershelf with Shahak: http://www.abbc2.com/historia/ford.htm
Lazare initiated journalistic discussion in France on the notorious Dreyfus Affair, among the very first dreyfusards. Lazare was in some ways a follower of Bakunin, who called for a “free federation of individuals, districts, provinces, and nations within humanity,” from the grassroots up. Lazare was the first in France to call for a social revolutionary anarchist Jewish path forward as part of the young Zionist movement there.
Eleven months ago, a square Place Bernard Lazare was dedicated in his name in the 3rd arrondissement in Paris. There is an active Cercle Bernard Lazare in Grenoble, website online (www.cbl-grenoble.org ). It continues his concern for social revolution, struggle against racism, and justice in Palestine (which Lazare doubtless would have been in the forefront of today). The Cercle Bernard Lazare still looks to a two-state solution. I have little doubt Lazare would today be struggling for a path forward geared to a democratic antiauthoritarian anticapitalist unitary Arab-Jewish federative state, and beyond.
There is a Lazare Internet Archive: www.marxists.org/reference/archive/lazare-bernard A French Wikipedia entry on him: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Lazare and a short biography by Mitch Abidor: www.marxists.org/reference/archive/lazare-bernard/biography.htm Abidor states that he stuck to his class struggle beliefs, and “as a result he broke with the Zionists.” He died of cancer at the age of 38. Jean-Denis Bredin’s biographical study Bernard Lazare (1992) is available only in French, we need an English version. Jesse Cohn’s 2002 wide-ranging lecture “Anarchy in Yiddish” also looks at Lazare: http://raforum.apinc.org/article.php3?id_article=488&var_recherche=%E2%8C%A9=en
I wanted to call attention to Lazare because I think he remains a paradigm in the joint struggle for revolutionary socialism and against anti-Judaism, and a masterful critic of the construction of ‘Jewish supremacism’ in the ferment of his day.