This past Saturday, May 15, 2021, The Wife and I attended a pro-Palestinian protest in Albuquerque. It was a friendly and communal atmosphere, and we are honored to know two of the speakers at the rally, Samia Assed and Alan Wagman, the latter my closest friend in New Mexico. We also had a chance to catch up with another friend, and political activist here in New Mexico, Steve Cabeides, who was doing video work at the rally, which video is here. I am guessing there were about 500 or so people altogether who appeared.
Do I agree with every speaker's point and every shouted slogan? No. However, I do strongly believe we must end the nonsense about the Israeli-Palestinian issue being a "conflict," instead of saying what it is, which is Israeli oppression and displacement of Palestinians. I strongly believe it is past time for the United States to stop enabling Israeli oppression of Palestinians. We as Americans should first and foremost demand the US end all military and economic aid to Israel. All of it. And also demand an end to Israeli Defense Force cooperation with local police departments throughout the US, as the US local police don't need any additional tips on how to treat a domestic population as enemies in a war. Our local police departments have shown they are already quite capable of such misconduct and abuse.
We need to be clear the US, and the corporate powers-that-be in our nation, use Israel as its attack dog and first-use testers for advanced technological weaponry, as part of the US military-industrial complex. It is not in our interest as regular Americans, and as human beings, and is not even in Israel's interest to have such a relationship between Israel and the US. Israel has become more and more identified with forces and ideologies that are anathema to Jewish Rabbinic tradition since the Romans dispersed many Jews following Jesus' crucifixion and the Roman-Judean wars. The Israeli Jews are increasingly a people who believe in a land-based Judaism, which is more Maccabean than anything else. Rabbinic Judaism, since the first centuries after the Roman dispersal of Jews, has been a universalist religion, whose logic led to ultimately supporting a society based upon not imposing one primary religious belief nor one primary ethnicity over another--and does not rely on holding a particular piece of land based upon its religious beliefs.
It is an irony of the Zionist project that many Jews would never have embraced Zionism at all, but for the European Christian centered anti-Semitism and eventually the Holocaust. Judaism should never be conflated with Zionism, as Zionism is merely a Euro-centric political movement reacting to European anti-Semitism, and Zionism's most successful leaders, Ben-Gurion, Weizmann, and Jabotinsky, were suffused with European racist and settler-colonialist tendencies in their private journals and sometimes their public speeches and interviews. Zionism is a political-nationalist movement, not a movement based in theology. As Reb Saunders says late in The Chosen book, and I believe the film, the Messiah was supposed to lead the Jews to Judea (Palestine), not Ben-Gurion. Reb Saunders says: "God will build the land, not Ben-Gurion and his goyim." Ironic, considering how Evangelical Christians are primarily the Zionists leading on the apartheid Netanyahu is in the process of completing--and ironic for me to quote a culturally backwards, anti-feminist and anti-homosexual mind such as Reb Saunders.
I have posted my historically based views regarding Zionism before, starting here, here, here, and here. I also believe it would be useful for a lot of American Jews, who themselves are continuing to confuse their religion with a foreign nation behaving badly, to watch or re-watch Thor: Ragnarok for an allegory relevant to our current historical moment. I would not say Israelis will or should lose their land, as did Thor's people. I would say those Israeli Jews who truly have goodwill may find many Palestinian Arabs who share their goodwill, and that, Netanyahu and the majority of Israeli voters who have destroyed the two-state solution as a practical solution, should seek to embrace the bi-national state Herzl envisioned in his novel, New Old Land, and prominent American Rabbi Judah Menges also embraced during the 1920s and 1930s.
Finally, there are two Jewish Currents magazine essays well worth reading. The first is from Peter Beinart, who has completed his journey from Iraq War II advocate and near zealot Zionism to a post- and even anti-Zionist position, this time eloquently writing about the Palestinian right of return/compensation issues. The second Jewish Currents magazine essay is about the US Communist Party, Zionism and the creation of Israel, which is surprising even to me.
Postscript: Last night, I finished what may be A.B. Yehoshua's final novel, The Tunnel, now thankfully translated into English. It is another wonderful and thoughtful book from Yehosuha. As I survey the tragedy of Zionism, I see more than ever why many US centric literary critics compare Yehoshua to William Faulkner, a novelist who wrote movingly about people within a tragic, racist southern American society. I admit I have never been a Faulkner fan, but I am seeing, more than ever, how that comparison has persuasive merit. As I joke, I have been saying for the past couple of years I have been completing my reading of Yehoshua and Amos Oz as a sort of shiva I sit for Zionism and what Israel has become.
