don’t tell Jeremy Ben Ami

NOVANEWS

Bibi Netanyahu announces another bout of settlement expansion in East Jerusalem, Barack Obama announces that American and Israeli values are unified and inseparable, and Jeremy Ben Ami, eminence grise of capitalist retrenchment and toned-down Israeli neo-colonization, and head of the J Street colonialism-lite lobby, steps up to the plate to offer some tribal kibitzing and kvetching over the “success or failure of the State of Israel,” and alongside it the “the heart and the soul of the Jewish people.” I wonder if Ben Ami has been reading Hegel.

It is bad enough that Ben Ami insists on creating, re-creating and re-inscribing that bastard child of Romantic nationalism, the “Jewish people.” I recognize no such entity. Worse still that he wants to endow them/us with a “heart and soul,” and yet worse that he wants to weave that soul tightly together with the “success or failure” of Israel which is heading pell-mell towards genocide or shoah redux or both.

But Ben Ami goes from worse to worse to worst. He asks us to “reject out of hand” the notion that criticizing the “government of Israel” exhibits “disloyalty to the State of Israel or to the Jewish people.” There’s a safe space for dissent: loyalty to the “Jewish people,” alongside loyalty to “the State of Israel,” the sovereign state of the Jewish people, according to Israeli juridical practice.

This leaves us in a muddle. According to that state’s own practice, loyalty to it means one must have loyalty to – and thereby believe in – that misbegotten chimera, the Jewish people. Names don’t mean much to me, and if Israel can re-constitute itself as the state of its citizens as well as those of the occupied territories and the refugees, or the state of two national groups, each with collective rights within it, that’s fine, but I do not appreciate Ben Ami tasking me with loyalty to the antisemitic invention of European racists and their epigones and accommodators.

Ben Ami rambles about “the tradition of open debate that is a hallmark of Jewish history and Israeli democracy,” which I must have missed sometime between the outlawing of anti-Zionist parties, the hounding of Matzpen into exile, the repression of the Israeli Mizrahi Black Panthers, and the effective expulsion of Azmi Bishara from the country, never mind the near-lynching of Haneen Zoabi in the Knesset for daring to think, and to act on the conviction inherent in that thought, that the inhabitants of Gaza shouldn’t be treated like zoo animals barred from the usage of their own sea lanes.

Nor do I appreciate Ben Ami alchemizing Jewish history into some unequivocal source of pride, like there’s something to be “proud” of in the words and actions of Chaim Weizmann, David Ben Gurion, or Henry Kissinger. Ben Ami does not mean that. He means the “free debate” that were he alive at the time he would have spurned as heresy, and which he implicitly spurns in the damnation-by-ignorance of the real debate going on elsewhere that if an Israeli state for the Jewish people means dispossession, ethnic cleansing, torture, and occupation, maybe that state was a mistake, not to say a crime.

And what is the cause of concern? Ben Ami quotes Shimon Peres: “We’re galloping at full speed toward a situation where Israel will cease to exist as a Jewish state.” Heaven forefend. Ben Ami then comments on the “many of us who fear the demise of the Zionist dream that we and our families have worked for over a century to realize” – the dream of European and American Jewish capitalists seeking to export the European Jewish rabble to the Levant, the dream of the Ashkenazi “new class” incubated in the Histadrut which took over the heights of an Israeli society and economy built on piles of Palestinian bones and the forced exile of Arab Jewry, and then the dream of American Zionists with complexes about effeminacy and intellectualism, and a fucked-up relationship to a marauding murderer state in the Middle East, who could trade in their working class histories, their suffering, their shtetl mentalities, the memory of theshoah, to join white people: the colonizers, the elite, the powerful, the rich, the racist, the murderers. Aime Cesaire wrote,

No one colonizes innocently, that no one colonizes with impunity either; that a nation which colonizes, that a civilization which justifies colonization and therefore force-is already a sick civilization, a civilization which is morally diseased, which irresistibly, progressing from one consequence to another, one denial to another, calls for its Hitler, I mean its punishment.

Don’t tell Ben Ami.

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *