[Salon] Anti-Zionism Is Not Antisemitism - Guest Post by Allan C. Brownfeld

[Salon] Anti-Zionism Is Not Antisemitism - micheletkearney@gmail.com - Gmail Anti-Zionism Is Not Antisemitism By Allan C. Brownfeld April 27, 2024 ——————————————————— The American Council for Judaism has, since 1942, advanced the philosophy of Judaism as a religion of universal values, not a nationality, and has maintained that Americans of Jewish faith are American by nationality , and Jews by religion, just as other Americans are Protestant, Catholic or Muslim. The Council has challenged the Zionist philosophy which holds that Israel is the “homeland” of all Jews and that Jews living outside of Israel are in “exile. In doing so, the Council has contended that its philosophy represents the thinking of the majority of Jewish Americans, a largely silent——but, in recent days, increasingly vocal—-majority, which is not represented by the organizations which presume to speak in their name. Clearly, the homeland of American Jews is the United States. In 1841, at the dedication of Temple Beth Elohim in Charleston, South Carolina, Rabbi Gustav Poznanski declared: “This country is our Palestine, this city our Jerusalem, this house of God our temple.” In recent years, there has been an effort to redefine antisemitism to include not simply bigotry toward Jews and Judaism, but also criticism of Israel and Zionism. In May 2022, Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, declared that “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism.” He argued that groups calling for equal rights for Palestinians in Israel are “extremists” and equated liberal critics of Israel with white supremacists. Even some Israelis admit that the equating of anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel with antisemitism is a tactic to silence criticism of Israel. Shulamit Aloni, a former Minister of Education and winner of the Israel Prize, describes how this works: “It’s a trick. We always use it. When from Europe, somebody criticizes Israel, we bring up the Holocaust. When in the United States, people are critical of Israel, then they are antisemitic.” To call opposition to Zionism the equivelant of antisemitism is to ignore the long history of Jewish opposition to Zionism. Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, did not believe in God or in Judaism. The state he wanted to create would be based on the idea of Jewish “national” or “ethnic” identity. In the 19th century, the Zionist idea was rejected by most prominent Jewish voices. The chief rabbi of Vienna, Mortiz Gudemann, denounced the mirage of Jewish nationalism. “Belief in One God was the unifying factor for Jews,” he declared, and Zionism was incompatible withJudaism’s teachings. For Reform Jews the idea of Zionism contradicted almost completely their belief in a universal prophetic Judaism. The first Reform prayerbook eliminated references to Jews being in exile and to a Messiah who would miraculously restore Jews throughout the world to the historic land of Israel and who would rebuild the Temple of Jerusalem. The prayerbook eliminated all prayers for a return to Zion. The distinguished rabbi Abraham Geiger argued that Judaism developed through an evolutionary process that had begun with God’s revelation to the Hebrew prophets. That revelation was progressive; new truth became available to every generation. The underlying and unchangeable essence of Judaism was ethical monotheism. The Jewish people were a religious community destined to carry on the mission to “serve as a light to the nations,” to bear witness to God and His moral law. The dispersion of the Jews was not punishment for their sins, but part of God’s plan whereby they were to disseminate the universal message of ethical monotheism. In 1885, Reform rabbis meeting in Pittsburgh adopted a platform rejecting nationalism. They declared, “We consider ourselves no longer a nation but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine…nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.” In 1897, the Central Conference of American Rabbis adopted a resolution disapproving of any attempt to establish a Jewish state. The resolution declared, “Zion was a precious possession of the past…as such it is a holy memory, but it is not our hope of the future. America is our Zion.” It was not only Reform Jews who rejected Zionism. In 1929, Orthodox Rabbi Aaron Samuel Tamarat wrote that the very notion of a sovereign Jewish state as a spiritual center was “a contradiction to Judaism’s ultimate purpose.” He noted that, “Judaism at root is not some religious concentration which may be localized and or situated in a single territory. Neither is Judaism a ‘nationality,’ in the sense of modern nationalism, fit to be woven into the three-foldedness of ‘homeland, army and heroic songs.’ No, Judaism is Torah, ethics and exaltation of spirit. If Judaism is really Torah, then it cannot be reduced to the confines of any particular territory. For as Scripture said of Torah, ‘Its measure is greater than the earth.” Those who claim that opposition to Zionism is the equivelant of antisemitism are either ignorant of Jewish history or are using such a false charge to silence criticism of Israel which, sadly, has violated Jewish moral and ethical standards in its treatment of Palestinians. Many Jewish voices warned against adopting a narrow nationalism in place of Judaism’s universal moral and ethical values. One of the leading Jewish theologians and philosophers of the 20th century, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. for civil rights for all people, said, “Judaism is not a religion of space and does not worship the soil. So, too, the State of Israel is not the climax of Jewish history, But a test of the integrity of the Jewish people and the competence of Israel.” In 1938, alluding to Nazism, Albert Einstein warned an audience of Zionist activists against the temptation to create a state imbued with “a narrow nationalism within our own ranks against which we have already had to fight strongly even without a Jewish state.” Sadly, Israel’s treatment of the indigenous population of Palestine has violated Jewish moral and ethical values. Zionist terrorism was widespread. On April 9, 1948, the Irgun and Lehi launched an attack on the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin. Situated in the hills on the outskirts of Jerusalem, Deir Yassin was of no threat to Zionist forces. Its residents were considered passive, and its leaders had agreed with those of an adjacent Jewish neighborhood that each side would prevent its own people from attacking the other. It was the Muslim Sabbath when the attack took place. All the inhabitants of the village were ordered out into a square, where they were lined up against the wall and shot. More than a hundred civilians were killed. News of the massacre spread rapidly and helped prompt a panic flight of more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. They were never permitted to return. After this terror attack Menachem Begin, the Irgun leader and later to become Israeli prime minister (referred to as a ‘Fascist’ and ‘racist’ by Albert Einstein and historian Hannah. Arendt), issued this message to his troops: “”Accept my congratulations on this splendid act of conquest…As in Deir Yassin , so everywhere, we will attack and smite the enemy. God, God Thou hast chosen us for conquest.” David Shipler, the New York Times correspondent from 1979 to 1984, reports that, “The Jewish fighters who planned the attack on Deir Yassin also had a larger purpose apparently. A Jerusalem woman and her son who gave some of the men coffee in the pre-dawn hours before their mission, recall the guerrillas’ talking excitedly of the prospect of terrifying Arabs far beyond the village of Deir Yassin so that they would run away. Perhaps this explains why the Jewish guerrillas did not bury the Arabs they had killed, but left their bodies to be seen, and why they paraded surviving prisoners, blindfolded and with hands bound, in the backs of trucks through the streets of Jerusalem, a scene still remembered with a shudder by Jews who saw it.” Many Israelis, concerned about their country’s treatment of Palestinians , lament its departure from Jewish values. Professor David Shulman of the Hebrew University notes that, “No matter how we look at it, unless our minds have been poisoned by the ideologies of the religious right, the occupation is a crime. It is first of all based on the permanent disenfranchisement of a huge population…In the end, it is the ongoing moral failure of the country as a whole that is most consequential, most dangerous, most unacceptable. This failure weighs heavily on our humanity. We are, so we claim, the children of the prophets. Once, they say, we were slaves in Egypt. We know all that can be known about slavery, suffering, prejudice, ghettos, hate, expulsion, exile. I find it astonishing that we, of all people, have reinvented apartheid in the West Bank.” Israel has occupied the West Bank in violation of international law for more than 50 years. Its indigenous Palestinian residents live under what Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, call “apartheid.” In violation of international law, Jewish settlements are being built across the West Bank. Jewish residents can vote in Israeli elections and have full legal rights, Palestinians have no such rights. I know a bit about apartheid. During the years when apartheid was in force in South Africa, my column from Washington appeared in the Afrikaans-language newspapers Beeld in Johannesburg and Die Burger in Cape Town. I had the opportunity in those years to spend some time in South Africa. My Afrikaner friends used to tell me, “We know apartheid is wrong. Unless we abandon it, our children will leave. They will go to America, Canada, Australia. We are Western Christian people who believe in freedom. We must abandon this system of apartheid.” And that’s what white South Africans did. President F.W. De Klerk made South Africa into a Western-style democracy—-and received the Nobel Peace Prize for doing so. Many people forget that during the years of apartheid Israel was a close friend of South Africa. In fact, it was South Africa which provided Israel with uranium for its nuclear weapons program. The first foreign leader to visit Israel was a pro-apartheid South African Prime Minister. It has always been my hope that a leader like President De Klerk would emerge in Israel and abandon its own undemocratic system. Instead, Israel now has a far-right government which speaks of annexing the West Bank and expelling its Palestinian residents. None of this would be possible without the massive aid received from the U.S. and the political support which accompanies it. The Oct. 7 terrorist attack upon Israel by Hamas was a terrible event. Israel had every legitimate right to respond. Unfortunately, its response has been excessive ——-destroying Gaza’s hospitals, churches, mosques and living quarters. More than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed so far and 77,000 wounded. More than 70 per cent are women and children. Famine is about to engulf the area. Without U.S. aid, Israel could not conduct itself in this way. As a result, we are now witnessing demonstrations throughout the U.S. calling for a cease fire and an end to aid to the Netanyahu government. For his part, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu described student protestors as “antisemitic mobs” and likened the demonstrations to “what happened in German universities in the 1930s.” In response, Sen. Bernie Sanders (Ind.-VT), who is Jewish and lost family members in the Holocaust, addressed this message to Netanyahu: “It’s not antisemitic to hold you accountable for your actions. No, Mr. Netanyahu, it is not antisemitic or pro-Hamas to point out that in a little over six months your extremist government has killed 34,000 Palestinians…70% of whom are women and children. It is not antisemitic to point out that your bombing has completely destroyed more than 221,000 housing units in Gaza, leaving more than one million people homeless, almost half the population.” What the future holds is, of course, impossible to say. President Biden speaks of a two-state solution, but the current Israeli government speaks of annexing the West Bank and removing its Palestinian population. Others speak of a “one-state solution,” in which all of Palestine would be united and there would be equal rights for all, Jews, Christians and Muslims. At the present time Israel is a theocracy. It is strange that American Jewish organizations advocate complete separation of church and state in the U.S.but embrace theocracy in Israel. Non-Orthodox Jews have fewer rights in Israel than anyplace in the Western world. Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist rabbis cannot perform weddings or conduct funerals in Israel Their conversions to Judaism are not recognized. Historically, there is no reason why Jews and Muslims cannot live in peace. Jews in Muslim countries never faced the discrimination inflicted upon them in much of Christian Europe. When Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492 by its Christian rulers, they were welcomed into the Muslim Ottoman Empire and other Muslim countries. Jews lived in peace in Muslim countries for hundreds of years. Ironically, the Palestinians, who had nothing to do with the Holocaust, have had to pay a high price for the sins of others. Until the advent of Nazism, Zionism was a small minority movement in most Jewish communities. Then, looking for a way to properly handle and rehabilitate the large number of displaced Jewish victims, many Jews began to view the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine as a positive possibility—-even though the Palestinians had nothing whatever to do with the tragedy that had befallen the Jews of Europe. Historian Deena Dallasheh points out that, “The Holocaust was a horrible massacre committed by Europeans. But I don’t think the Palestinians figure that they will have to pay for it. Yet the world sees this as an acceptable equation. Orientalist and colonial ideology were very much at the heart of thinking, that while we Europeans and the U.S. were part of this massive human tragedy, we are going to fix it at the expense of someone else. And the someone else is not important because they are Arabs. they’re Palestinians and thus constructed as not important.” Salim Tamari, a sociologist at Birzeit University in the West Bank, notes that, “Sending the Jewish refugees to Palestine was a byproduct of European guilt, but a hypocritical kind of guilt because they did not want to bear the social and economic cost of absorbing the refugees themselves. The vast majority of Jewish refugees who came were not Zionists. They did not have a choice about where to go.” In the view of Abigail Jacobson, a historian at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, “It’s often argued against the Palestinians , how come you didn’t accept partition? But it’s important not to read history retrospectively. When you look at the demographic realities of 1947 and the division of the land, it was 55% for the Jews and 45% for the Palestinian state, even though there were double the number of Palestinians as Jews at that point. If you were a Palestinian in 1947, would you accept that offer? One needs to remember that the Palestinian national movement was ready to accept the Jews as a minority in an Arab state.” On Dec. 4, 1945, President Harry S. Truman received Lessing J. Rosenwald, the first president of the American Council for Judaism in the Oval Office. H Rosenwald called for the admission of both Jewish and non-Jewish displaced persons to Palestine and urged that, “Palestine shall not be a Muslim, Christian or Jewish state but a country in which people of all faiths can play their full and equal part,” and that the U.S. take the lead in coordinating with the U.N. “a cooperative policy of many nations in absorbing Jewish refugees.” Rosenwald, the former chairman of Sears Roebuck, and the son of philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, who worked with Booker T. Washington after the Civil War to build schools for black children in the South,testified before the Anglo-American committee of Inquiry on Jan.10, 1946 and urged that large numbers of Jews be admitted into Palestine on the condition that “the claim that Jews possess unlimited national rights to the land and that the country shall take the form of a racial or theocratic state, were denounced once and for all.” The American Council for Judaism’s warnings about Zionism have been prophetic.Jonathan Saran, a Brandeis University historian and author of the book “American Judaism,”. Says that, “Everything they (the American Council for Judaism) prophesied—-dual loyalty, nationalism being evil—-has come to pass.” He states that, “It’s certainly the case that if the Holocaust underscored the problems of Jewish life in the Diaspora, recent years have highlighted that Zionism is no panacea.” Samuel Friedman devoted his June 26, 2010 “On Religion” column in The New York Times to the American Council for Judaism. He pointed out that, “…the intense criticism of Israel now growing among a number of American Jews has made the group look significant, even prophetic…The rejection of Zionism …goes back to the Torah itself. Until Theodor Herzl created the modern Zionist movement…the biblical injunction to return to Israel was widely understood as a theological construct rather than a pragmatic instruction…The Reform movement maintained that Judaism is a religion, not a nationality.” Since that was written, it has become increasingly clear that Israel has turned its back on traditional Jewish moral and ethical values. It has denied equal rights to Palestinians who are citizens of Israel and has provided no rights to Palestinians in the illegally occupied territories. Now, in Gaza, Israel has engaged in what more and more of the world considers Genocide. Noah Feldman, professor at the Harvard Law School and author of the book “To Be A Jew Today,” declares : “Today, many progressive American Jews find it difficult to see Israel as a genuine liberal democracy, mostly because some 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank live under Israeli authority with no realistic prospect of liberal rights.” The ahistoric declaration that “antiZionism is antisemitism” has no basis in fact or history. In fact, the opposite is increasingly seen to be true. Zionism and the state it has created represents the antithesis of genuine Judaism, something which more and more Americans of all religious backgrounds, including Jews, are coming to understand. ## ———————————— Allan C. Brownfeld is a nationally syndicated columnist and is editor of ISSUES, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism. The author of five books, he has served on the staff of the U.S. Senate, House of Representatives, and the Office of the Vice President.