An alternative view

Last month I wrote a piece that was in part about the initiative by a mob of prominent British Jews, Independent Jewish Voices, to launch a statement supporting human rights and rejecting a monolithic approach to Israel on the part of ‘those institutions which claim authority to represent the Jewish community as a whole’. I had reservations about the statement, in particular the ‘support for a properly negotiated peace between the Israeli and Palestinian people’, which I took to be code for partition, but defended it from Gilad Atzmon’s criticism. I felt that if I were a prominent British Jew with 35 quid to spare, I could have signed it.

Well, I’ve just been catching up on some email and found a message from the Australian Jewish Democratic Society that Sol Salbe had forwarded, that itself forwarded a message from Independent Australian Jewish Voices, over the signatures of Peter Slezak, James Levy, and Antony Loewenstein. This group, too, has drafted a ‘Statement of Principles: A Call for an Alternative View’, that they aim to publish in the press.

Although the text of the statement parallels the IJV statement at points, it eschews the studied ambiguity of the British version. It starts out the with the claim

We are Jews of diverse opinions on the Middle East who share a deep concern about the current crisis in the region.

Very similar to the wording of the IJV statement,

We are a group of Jews in Britain from diverse backgrounds, occupations and affiliations who have in common a strong commitment to social justice and universal human rights.

Unfortuately, the claim to diversity is not as well founded in the Australian statement, because it proceeds to recognize ‘the legitimate national aspirations of both Israelis and Palestinians’ [my emphasis]. In other words, the signatories assert that the colonisers somehow have a legitimate right to self determination. And it gets worse.

We condemn violence by all parties, whether state sanctioned or not. We believe that Israel’s right to exist must be recognized and that Palestinians’ right to a homeland must also be acknowledged.

It’s hard to believe that rational people are still trying to equate the violence of the oppressed indigenous people’s liberation struggle with the colonists’ violent oppression, with the benefit of the fourth most powerful military on the planet.

And ‘Israel’s right to exist’ again rears its ugly head, as if the whole idea hadn’t been comprehensively debunked over and over again, even in the Christian Science Monitor! But Jonathan Cook provided an earlier and much more detailed and cogent critique of the demand.

In demanding recognition of its right to exist, Israel is ensuring that the Palestinians agree to Israel's character being set in stone as an exclusivist Jewish state, one that privileges the rights of Jews over all other ethnic, religious and national groups inside the same territory. The question of what such a state entails is largely glossed over both by Israel and the West.

So whoever drafted the statement clearly was not at pains to ensure that a truly broad spectrum of Jews could join them. On the contrary, although they ‘are concerned that the Jewish establishment does not represent the full range of Jewish opinion’, the diversity of signatories’ opinions is restricted to the extraordinarily narrow spectrum of those who support colonialism and ethnocracy. Indeed, they make their true objective explicit,

Uncritical allegiance to Israeli government policy does not necessarily serve Israel’s best interests. [my emphasis]

Those whose differences with the ‘Jewish establishment’ rest on principled objections to Zionism and racism are obviously unwelcome in this exclusive clique.

As the sentiments and wording resemble Antony Loewenstein’s, and the first signature on the website is his, I surmise that he had a hand in drafting it. Now it just so happens that I have written a critique of his book, My Israel question, that was to have been published in Solidarity magazine last month. I’ve kind of been waiting for the publication to come out before posting it on the web. As it only appears in paper, I don’t actually know whether it has hit the streets yet, but it certainly should have and this seems like an opportune moment to post it. In a separate entry.