Susie Linfield - The Lions Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky

THE LIONS DEN

Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Calvin Chapin of the Class of 1788, Yale College.

Copyright 2019 by Susie Linfield.

All rights reserved.

This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail (U.K. office).

Set in Scala type by IDS Infotech, Ltd., Chandigarh, India.

Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018954877

ISBN 978-0-300-22298-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In memory of my father

We are interested in history because therein are hidden the small experiences of the human race.... Within the historical failures, there is still concealed a power that can seek its correction.

Gershom Scholem

Jews and Arabs have a special reverence for the past. But they are also fatally trapped in its lies.

Shlomo Ben-Ami

It is hard to be a prophet in the land of prophets. There are too many.

Amos Oz

Do you know why we Palestinians are famous? Because you are our enemy.... Yes, the interest is in you, not me!... We are lucky that Israel is our enemy, because the Jews are the center of the world.... I do not have any illusions. The international interest in the Palestinian question is only a reflection of the interest in the Jewish question.

Mahmoud Darwish

CONTENTS

THE LIONS DEN

Introduction

A DOUBLE GRIEF , AND A HOPE

THIS BOOK GREW OUT OF SEVERAL EXPERIENCES that were simultaneously emotional and intellectual. Here are two of the most salient and painful.

New York City, 2011: I am at a dinner party with my partner and his friends, who are mostly left-wing intellectuals at the university where he teaches. These are highly informed, sophisticated, accomplished people: philosophers, anthropologists, a humanitarian-aid worker. We share a worldview, a moral sensibility, a pride in holding certain values, and a great deal of warmth.

In the course of our dinner, the name of a well-known journalistacclaimed for his writings on genocide in Africacomes up. Oh, hes a Zionist! one person says disparagingly, and the others dutifully shake their heads in condescension and dismay. There is a pause, during which I debate the pros and cons of disturbing this amicable gathering, and then I say, with a slight gulp, Well, so am I. A frozen, stunned silence ensues. I explain: I believe in a state for the Jewish people, along with a Palestinian one. The silence continues; no one addresses or looks at me, though they shoot pitying glances at my partner. (How, they seem to wonder, has he ended up with such a reactionary?) Finally, because we are all friends, we turn, abruptly and with embarrassment, to more congenial topics.

Hebron, West Bank, 2012: I am visiting Israel with an American group called Partners for Progressive Israel, which supports a two-state solution, works against the Occupation and the Likud, and is aligned with Meretz, the left-wing Israeli party. We have traveled to Hebron, a Palestinian city of about 200,000 inhabitants, in which a few hundred ultra-nationalist Israeli settlers have established themselves. Rather than representing Zionist values, as they claim, they have re-created the despised, endangered, and ghettoized position of the Jews that Zionism was designed to eradicate. Talk about the return of the repressed! Because of these few but fanatical settlers, Hebron is now divided. The Arab sector of the city is off-limits to us; my colleagues and I walk down a designated Israeli street. We Americans are surrounded by, protected by, Israeli soldiers who, I am pretty sure, would rather be anywhere but here. Palestinian boys scamper beside us, but are prevented from crossing over to our side of the street from theirs. The scene is bizarre, ludicrous, mortifying; a progressive Israel seems very far away. I am ashamed to be a Jew.

How has it come to this? How has Zionist, sometimes shortened to the disparaging Zio, become the dirtiest word to the international Leftakin, say, to racist, pedophile, or rapist? How is it that anti-Israel activists in London scream at, and assault, an Israeli speaker, though he is one of the leading architects of the joint Palestinian-Israeli Geneva Initiative, which would ensure a Palestinian state? How is it that signs proclaiming We Are All Hezbollah are brandished at supposedly left-wing demonstrations in London and New York? This is not the lunatic fringe. On the contrary: A highly respected American academic has praised Hezbollah and Hamas as progressive social movements that are part of the global left, while the leader of Britains Labour Partythe Labour Party!has described these groups as friends; Labour has recently issued a forty-one-page report on its internal problems with anti-Semitism.

On the other side: How did Israel, through the ruinous settlements project, come to recreate itself as a ghettoized minority amongst a hostile population? How did it come to deny the national rights of a neighboring people and to violently suppress themnot for a year or two, but for over a half century? How did it come to impose closures, checkpoints, house demolitions, imprisonment without trial, land thefts, torture, and murder in the Occupied Territories?

The usual answer is that the first development (antipathy to Israel) is a response to the second (its Occupation). But this is too perfunctory and at best incomplete. For many on the left are repelled not only by Israels oppression of the Palestinians; they are repelled by the existence of Israel itself. Hence the idealization, or at least acceptance, of fundamentalist Islamist groups dedicated to its eradication. Furthermore, for the past half century or so, those who define themselves as progressive have shown a startling ability to support regimes far more repressive and violent, and far less egalitarian and politically open, than Israeleven the Israel of the Occupation. (There are multiple ironies here: In the 1960s, when Israel had two above-ground Communist parties and the Baathists were torturing Iraqi Communists to death, the Left castigated Israel as fascist and celebrated Iraq as revolutionary. Today, in the midst of Syrias savage civil war, there are self-proclaimed leftists who are more sympathetic to Bashar al-Assads right to rule Syria than to Israels right to exist.) So there must be more to the story than thismore, that is, to the well-known story of the Lefts break with Israel after the latters 1967 victory and subsequent occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. There is something here that does not compute.

In the course of writing my first book, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence, I delved into the lives of Robert Capa, David Seymour (Chim), and their colleagues. I was struck by how passionately pro-Israel the Left of Capas time was, both in the 194748 Arab-Israeli wars and afterwards; this was true of photographers, journalists, writers, and ordinary Left activists.Republic and Frances Popular Front; fought fascism in Spain; and trekked through the rubble of a continent, and through the remnants of the death camps, at the end of the Second World War. For them, the creation of the State of Israel and the fight for its independence were a seamless continuation of their previous struggles; they compared the Haganah to the Loyalists in Spain.