The American Jewish Left’s Untimely Abandonment of Israel’s Leftists

The recent months of violence in Israel and Palestine have had at least one constructive consequence: a sea-change in American public opinion, spearheaded most prominently by writers and activists on the Jewish left, towards a clearer understanding of the occupation, how to pressure Israel, and what alternative political configurations of the region could look like.

This energetic reportage, activism and advocacy has taken various forms: mainstreaming U.S. media coverage of the Sheikh Jarrah protests to the devastation in Gaza, Peter Beinart’s pro-one state solution op-eds, the Human Rights Watch report calling Israeli policies in both the occupied territories and within the Green Line apartheid; the rising momentum in Congress to condition or even block U.S. arms sales to Israel.

It seems as if these debates and interventions have irreversibly changed the conversation about Israel in America. Yet, these deliberations, vital as they are, have two major faults, both grounded in the disconnection, if not alienation, flowing from their U.S.-based origins.

First, they dismiss realities on the ground in Israel and Palestine entirely, and instead offer high-minded ideological critiques. And secondly, they rarely feature or talk about a group in this conflict essential for any solution: the Israeli left.

Netanyahu is out and, for the first time a decade, left-wing parties are participating in a diverse if fragile government framed as a “coalition of change.” Now should be an obvious opportunity for the U.S. Jewish left to talk to the Israeli left and not only at it. But going by recent experience, a good faith conversation like that is depressingly unlikely to happen.

To understand more about the strangely lopsided dynamic between pro-peace, pro-justice voices in the U.S. and Israel, it’s worth delving into the U.S. Jewish left’s oeuvre.

Take self-styled activist Rafael Mimoun’s Washington Post op-ed, “Zionism cannot produce a just peace. Only external pressure can end the Israeli apartheid.”

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• Peter Beinart’s one state solution sounds so perfect it’s practically utopian
• Yitzhak Rabin is still being assassinated

The article itself doesn’t offer anything particularly new: it advocates boycotts, sanctions and blocking arms sales to Israel. All well and good. What’s disturbing about pieces like this is how their writers try to claim legitimization and authenticity to pronounce on what a better future for Israelis and Palestinians should look like.

Mimoun opens his article with, “[I]spent 12 years in a Zionist youth movement, lived for four years in Israel, and have friends and family who served” in the IDF.

Beinart, whose lapse from liberal Zionism was profiled recently in The New Yorker, grounds the title of his New York Times op-ed, “I No Longer Believe in a Jewish State” with reminiscences of walking through Jerusalem’s streets as a young adult and his family’s diaspora wanderings, before declaring the liberal Zionist project is history.

Both writers need to “place” their feet on Israeli soil before they can critique it. Their fleeting Israeli experience is the necessary ‘authenticity’ to ground their claim that the two-state solution “has failed.”

This Israeli cosplaying legitimizes Mimoun to write sentences like “Israelis think that Palestinians should blame themselves,” “if you grow up in Israel… it’s your reality. It’s a false one…but it is yours.”

These assertions strip any subjectivity or agency from residents of the region – Jewish and Arabs, and not least from those on the left to the center who would struggle to identify themselves in this sweeping description – in order to be straw men in a more glorious narrative.

And the assertion of “authenticity” shelters a paradox: although both argue for an end to Jewish privilege in Israel, their insistence on their Jewishness indicates their opinions are more legitimate, more significant, because they’re Jewish. It sometimes feels like today’s rush to a wholesale critique of Israel comes from the same urge that pushed a previous generation of Jews to stand blindly by it. Israel is still at the center of the Jewish left’s identity: even when they reject it, they are wrapped up in it.

Protesters gather in front of the Consulate General of Israel in Manhattan in support of Palestinians Credit: TAYFUN COSKUN / Anadolu Agency v<

Both writers leap from anecdote to prescription, but sidestepping the realities of living in Israel in favor of generalities. Beinart’s pieces, articulate and well-researched, do nothing to advance real solutions. His insistence on grounding his arguments in Jewish values, in religious moralizing, is a disservice for all those who aspire to live in a civil society untethered from religion – just like, in fact, the one Beinart actually lives in.

Instead of framing their objections in terms of international law, they protest against Israel because it goes against their Jewish values. But Israel’s crimes aren’t horrible because they offend leftist Jews and go against their Jewish values, they’re horrible because they go against international law.

Too many American Jewish leftists put themselves at the center of the conflict. They are the protagonists. It’s about their journey, and as they unearth “truths” about the conflict, they expect, by some miracle, for the occupation to crumble, and that if that day comes, it won’t be because of the work of decades by the Israeli left, but because Americans boycotted SodaStream.

The Israel-Palestine debate thus becomes both more parochial, and more voyeuristic, as an eager audience watches a compound familial, or tribal, drama, confession session and duel. And for the participants, it offers an inexhaustible spotlight, a refound sense of political purpose, and political cause in which they, as Jews, are always centered and see themselves as consequential.

Examine the chasm between the declarations by U.S. Jewish leftists, by turns thoughtful, tortured or glib, that BDS is the answer, or that one state is the only morally acceptable solution – and reality on the ground, the reality in which both Israelis and Palestinians live.

Demonstrators carry signs and Palestinian flags during a ‘Chicago Coalition for Justice in Palestine’ protest in Chicago, Illinois, U.S., on Tuesday, May 15, 2018.Credit: Bloomberg

On BDS: Calling for a boycott is clearly legitimate, a valid form of non-violent resistance. But reality shows quite how ineffective BDS has been, and that it only ends up hurting those who are already marginalized by, and under pressure from, the Israeli government.

On one state: While acknowledging Israel’s hard history and fractured society, it is Palestinian citizens who are leaders of Israeli parties like Ayman Odeh, or jailed Palestinian leaders like Marwan Barghouti, who advocate for equality within the Israeli state alongside a Palestinian state.

For them, a two-state solution is the only viable option because they’ve lived the Israeli reality, and know it’s unfeasible to ask a state to relinquish all its institutions, or its citizenry to relinquish its identification with statehood, because they back the same standing for a Palestinian state. They know those calling for a one-state are essentially erasing over a century of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination.

The same tendency towards blind self-righteousness, of being better allies to the Palestinians than the Palestinians themselves, was evident when Alexandria Ocasio Cortez canceled her participation in a memorial evening for Yitzhak Rabin organized by American for Peace Now, a cancellation triggered by a writer for the left-wing Jewish Currents who ‘confronted’ her with Rabin’s military record.

A wall of graffiti condolences and Peace Now stickers at the renamed Rabin Square in Tel Aviv in 1996, a year after his assassination thereCredit: Zvika Israeli, GPO

Rabin’s past is no secret. But surely the anti-occupation U.S. Jewish left is also aware that he was assassinated for negotiating peace with the Palestinians? Are they more unflinchingly “moral” than the late Saeb Erakat, who cried when Rabin was killed and posted a moving tribute to him just months before he passed away?

The key problem with the American Jewish left is that it has forsaken the Israeli left as a result of its unyielding, uninflected demand for justice for Palestine. That justice, too, is the ultimate goal of the Israeli left. But unlike their U.S. counterparts, Israeli leftists don’t have the privilege to be ideologically maximalist. They know what happens when you privilege ideological purity over participation: you leave the playing field to the nativist nationalists on the hard right.

In Israel, there has always been a furious debate over Israel’s character, laws and future. An anti-Zionist like the Joint List’s Ofer Cassif, who sits in the Knesset, speaks harshly against the Jewish state. But another anti-Zionist party, the Islamist Ra’am, is now part of the government. Issawi Freij, from the leftist Zionist Meretz party, is now a minister, and Ibtisam Maraana is now a Labor MK and head of a Knesset committee. Prime Minister Naftali Bennett needs to take the Joint List into consideration if he wants to get anything done.

Protest against the nation-state law in Tel Aviv, last month.Credit: Meged Gozani

But for U.S. Jewish leftists on social media, there’s no reason to let a changing reality threaten their received doctrine. There has been a wave of comments and articles insisting it doesn’t matter who’s in the coalition because “Bennett is more right-wing than Bibi,” and Gantz bragged about killing Palestinians. For them, it’s either the overthrow of settler colonialism and the rule of the Joint List or nothing. That is superficial, flattening and hopeless.

And it leads to a solipsism that ensures dissociation and irrelevance on the ground. Beinart’s pieces might have shaken U.S. Jews and their communities, but their reverberations barely breached Israeli shores.

There is suppression in Israel, but there’s no silencing, by force or by choice. The only people who seem to be silencing these voices, unwittingly or not, are those from the international left who disregard them to make a grander ideological point.

Israeli left-wing activists protest against the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes to make way for Jewish settlers in the annexed east Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah last monthCredit: AHMAD GHARABLI – AFP

All this is part of a pattern of dismissing the Israeli left. Rather than engaging with the voices of the Israeli left, translating its energetic discourse from Hebrew and Arabic into English and raising it up, the U.S. left prefers to overwrite it with its own words or to exclusively parade a short shortlist of “acceptable” leftist dissenters, like Breaking the Silence or B’Tselem.

They don’t engage with the hundreds of thousands of union workers, writers, doctors, teachers, activists, and everyday people within the Green Line who protested the Jewish Nation State Bill, or go out on a Friday afternoon to stand in solidarity next to their Palestinian neighbors. They seem to have forgotten that leftist governments in Israel created a welfare state, ensured individual civil rights, and leftist citizens and organizations such as Peace Now pushed public opinion towards peace time and again.

You can’t be a progressive and expect perfection, rejecting every sign of partial progress as appeasement. If you do, you’re probably sitting somewhere where you’ve never had to juggle between ensuring personal safety for you and your family and standing against injustice for someone else.

But that’s what the Israeli left has done, and keeps doing every single day. When rockets are flying in the air, the left goes out on the street, calls for the protection of all civilians, and offers solidarity with the people of Gaza. It does the incremental work on the ground while still holding on to its ideals.

Far right Israeli MK Bezalel Smotrich, center, waves an Israeli flag together with other Jewish ultranationalists during the “Flags March” next to Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate this weekCredit: Mahmoud Illean,AP

What it had to do is minimize irreversible damage: to halt assaults on the judiciary, to stop incitement against Arabs and the left, to sacrifice ideological points to oust a police minister who called on right-wing Jews to arm themselves in order to “defend” cities from Arabs.

It is the privilege, or nihilism, of leftists abroad to call this struggle for civil society deficient or meaningless.

Instead of the tunnel-vision advocacy for external pressure on Israel to install a just solution deus ex machina, or sermonizing about high-minded and fantastical conceptual solutions for real-world problems, the international left, and the U.S. Jewish left, should listen to and engage with leaders like Ayman Odeh, Nitzan Horwitz, Ibtisam Maraana and others on the Israeli left.

More than that: They should set aside their ideological purity obsessions and work, too, with Israel’s center left, who sit in the new government too. They should privilege the perspectives of the Israeli left, which actually lives this messy, dangerous and unjust reality, rather than the narratives of their own personal journeys.

‘Zionism is terrorism’: Pro-Palestinian activists protest Israel’s occupation in New York CityCredit: SPENCER PLATT – AFP

They should call a time-out on mindless repetitions of claims like “Zionism cannot produce just peace” or “Israelis are inherently right-wing.” No public is inherently left or right. It takes work. Those kinds of sweeping statement are historically ignorant, demagogic and deterministic red herrings.

During a long, dark period in opposition, the Israeli left was under sustained attack, and Israeli leftists abused, marginalized and maligned by their government and much of their society. They didn’t need then, and don’t need now, to be boycotted, dismissed or trampled on.

Instead, they should expect from those who declare such a definitive interest in Israel and Palestine, in ending the expulsions and the occupation, in the hard work of winning hearts and minds towards peace and justice – strong solidarity.

It’s surely incumbent on any progressive to advocate for the capacity of ordinary citizens to change their country for the better – and to do all they can to help, not denigrate or desert, those who do.

Etan Nechin is a Brooklyn-based Israeli writer and editor for The Bare Life Review: a Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Literature. Twitter:  @etanetan23