I just completed Amos Oz's latest novel, "Judas," which I considered his best in years. It has been a big year for me in reading apostate Jewish Israeli writers, particularly Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, as I myself reached the conclusion that further US military or economic aid to Israel should be stopped, as enabling Israeli conduct in the occupied territory of the West Bank and the prison known as Gaza has no moral, political, or legal justification at this point. I feel for Oz, as Oz posits, in this novel, an Ah'had Ha'am/Chomskyesque perspective about the founding of Israel, within a narrative that parses the entire idea of who is a traitor and what constitutes treachery.
Having read Oz's novel nearly in tandem with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's "Indigenous Peoples History of the United States," which effectively reduces European Americans and, by implication, Jews who escaped Europe and other Arab nations to form and develop the nation of Israel, to the status of settler-colonialists, I am more convinced than ever that the modern originator of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, would have given up the Zionist project had he been shown the rest of the history of the 20th Century, something Shimon Peres, in his elegant long essay-book, "The Imaginary Voyage: With Theodor Herzl in Israel," also recognized--though Peres was writing in the shadow of the 1993 Oslo Agreement, and honestly thought the agreement was going to lead toward a two state solution and peace with Palestinians.* Ah'had Ha'am's more gentle cultural Zionism, which Ha'am had already begun establishing concurrently with Herzl's intellectual-political breakthrough, may have been a far more effective way of helping Jews escape the genocidal Christian-nationalist dominated Europe without making a majority of Arabs believe this was simply one more colonialist project emanating from Europe and the United States of America.
It is not that I find the Zionist project to be irredeemable as much as a tragedy of two people who have been oppressed. For surely Arabs have been repressed by European colonialism, and the strongmen dictators our nation and the nations of Europe were only too happy to support and sometimes push on Arab peoples. I have, as readers of mine know, long found both useful and essentially correct Isaac Deutscher's parable about Palestinians and Jews to be the basis for a mutual understanding for both peoples. My disengagement from Israel is based upon the fact that a majority of Israeli Jews have no belief in the power or correctness of that parable, and people such as Oz and Yehoshua (and activists such as Uri Avnery) stand as traitors to the majority of Israeli Jews, though to me, they are prophets and wisemen who are tragically ignored. And my anger at easy European criticism of Israel grows by the year as I come face to face with the fact there would have been no need for Zionism had European Christians not been so afflicted with a nationalism that too often demanded European Jews among them be oppressed and eventually killed.
* Peres' book recognizes how Herzl was himself closer to Ha'am's sensibility as Herzl's book, "The Old New Land," a novel depicting a future state for Jews in Palestine, was in fact a binational state housing Arabs and Jews that was not explicitly Jewish. Herzl's vision may therefore be said to have been "corrupted" (betrayed, in Oz's parlance throughout the "Judas" novel) by Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion, and certainly Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the latter who was an intellectual founder of the Likud Party in Israel, and who, in the 1920s and 1930s, posited a literally pro-fascist version of Zionism. In the Wiki entry, one finds Jabotinsky's position on expelling Arabs alongside his vision of a separate but equal status for Arabs in a Jewish State--showing how blind Jabotinsky was to how separate but equal "worked" in the United States with African-American descendants of slaves. I had a non-blood relative who survived Auschwitz who was a devoted Polish follower of Jabotinsky, who told me of how proud he was to wear the fascist uniform that mimicked Mussolini's uniforms for Italian fascists. This Holocaust survivor was also virulently racist who once said, at a Passover dinner, the biggest mistake "you Americans" made was freeing the blacks. Just remember that next time someone wants to tell us that having a tattoo number on your arm from Auschwitz makes you a moral beacon. :(
