| Fear of the Other Conference papers |  |
| Fear of the Other Conference papers | |
I speak here as someone who has always been located within the traditional, orthodox Jewish community, who has always identified visibly as Jewish and who finds himself caught between various rocks and hard places. As an academic working, amongst other things, to oppose racisms and social oppression, it is ‘obvious’ that I should oppose Israel’s actions in oppressing Palestinians, as indeed I do. As a Jew born within a decade of the end of the second world war and the founding of the State of Israel, with family and friends living there or from there, it is ‘obvious’ that I should feel a powerful emotional pull towards Israel and wish to see it survive and safely grow, which again I do. What is so difficult to countenance is that for each community, that of leftist critics of Israel and that of traditionally- and communally-minded diaspora Jews, it is hard to be identified with the other without it smelling of weak-mindedness or more active betrayal. In one place people look with puzzlement on my Jewish practices and my acceptance in what is apparently a straightforwardly Zionist community; in the other, they think I have been distracted by my academic privileges to forget how the world treats us, to overlook anti-Semitism, or even to become a ‘self-hating Jew’.
There can be little doubt that it is much easier to be pessimistic about the mainstream Jewish community’s capacity to tolerate dissent over Israel and or to free itself from demonising assumptions about others, particularly the Palestinian, Arab and Muslim ‘others’ who are being constructed as its foes. In the light of this, the question facing the panel ‘How can we tackle racism against Arabs, Muslims and Jews, whether in the outside world or within their own ranks?’ has a rather dismal answer –‘we can’t’. However, in these few minutes’ introduction, I am going to try to wish this answer away, a least to a small degree, by identifying a few interstices that can be explored, maybe opened up, in order to make space for a constructive critique of Israel and for opposition to racism in our own midst. There are many things to be said about practice here which no doubt we will return to in the discussion and which Edie is particularly well qualified to talk about, being of the long term banging-one’s-head-against-a-brick-wall brigade –I am not unrealistic about the magnitude of the task. But I want to restrict myself to making a few observations, or maybe articulating some dilemmas, and perhaps one principle around Jewish ethics. Some of these speak outwards, some inwards to the community itself.
The first and perhaps main observation concerns a point made yesterday, about rigid perceptions, this time not about dissent within Israel, but about the diaspora Jewish community. I want to note that there is a powerful tendency amongst those who stand outside the organised Jewish community, whether Jewish or non-Jewish themselves, to see uniformity where there is diversity, and to misread –out of ignorance or wishfulness, I think- Jewish religious politics. Mostly, the consequence of this is to miss the possibilities for alliances and progressive moves, but sometimes the tendency to align with any apparent dissenters leads to odd judgements. For example, I have witnessed amongst some radical secular Jews a perverse celebration of those ultra-orthodox Jews who oppose the existence of the State of Israel. I expect that it seems like a brave move for orthodox Jews of that kind to speak out in that way when the common presentation of orthodoxy is that it is homogenously supportive of the right-wing settler movement. What is not noted is the cynical opportunism of many of these groups, combined with their exclusivity and disdain for anyone outside their ranks and channelled into a messianism that is not any the less fervent because it is non- or anti-Zionist, and that is sufficiently distorted from the traditional values of Judaism to allow them to call fellow-Jews ‘Nazis’. Their hatred for the State of Israel does not mean that they wish to replace it with a democratic, pluralistic state in which all will have equal rights, including women and non-Jews: theirs would be a theocracy and the same leftists who welcome them into the anti-Zionist struggle (where these particular ultra-religious groups have been from the start, on grounds having nothing to do with the treatment of the Palestinians) would be demonstrating against it.
Of much more promise is the heterogeneity that can be found in the mainstream orthodox community. In my own community, for example, which is affiliated to the mainstream orthodox movement in this country, the United Synagogue, there are views on Israel that range pretty much across the whole spectrum with the exception that I doubt there is anyone who wishes to see Israel destroyed. For some, it is true, every act in the Land of Israel is in pursuit of a Divine plan; but for others every action of the current and recent Israeli government is an act of brutality. This claim of diversity, I realise, is at variance with my earlier point about being positioned awkwardly by the community, but it is nevertheless accurate and means at least that there are some progressive positions on which movement can in principle be built.
The next issue relates to the ‘self-hating Jew’, an allegation applied for many centuries to critics of Jewish life and more recently of Israel. This calumny is really used, over and over again. Those of you that follow the Jewish press will know of a recent example in attacks on the Israeli writer Amos Oz by Rabbi Jeffrey Cohen, the usually intelligent and thoughtful Rabbi of Stanmore Synagogue, and Melanie Philips, a rather better-known and less thoughtful journalist. Oz had identified the disputes over the recent pull-out from Gaza as reflecting within Israel a battle for authority between the democratic state and the fanatical religious right who are trying to coerce the majority. Reading this as an attack on religious Jewry, Rabbi Cohen called him a ‘Jew-hating Jew’; Phillips, reading Oz’s piece as an attack on Israel, said he was an exponent of ‘anti-Israel bigotry’ and had a ‘pathological disdain for his own people’. This is the right wing turning on any expression of dissent, it is true, and as such it looks like more evidence of the impossibility of criticism from within the Jewish community. But without denying the force of this, I want to pick up a feature of this ‘case’ that surprised many of us -the response from within the mainstream, which has been much stronger than one might have predicted. The Jewish Chronicle (in which Melanie Phillips is a monthly columnist) ran an editorial powerfully defending Oz and supporting his comments, also pointing out that he was writing in an Israeli context in which much stronger criticisms of Israel are printed than is the case here. And last week, again in the Jewish Chronicle, Jonathan Freedland wrote a column praising Oz as someone who ‘speaks with a clarity and humanity rarely heard on either side of the bitter Israeli-Palestinian conflict’. Freedland’s piece ends with the following more general point, addressed, it must be remembered, to a mainstream Jewish readership: ‘Oz himself is used to such vilification and those who make a progressive case for Israel should get used to it, too. Suggest that an end to the occupation and greater regard for human rights are, in fact, in the practical and moral interest of Israel itself –a country whose fate matters to you deeply- and eventually you’ll be called a fifth columnist or a Jew-hating Jew.’ So my point is that this happens, the writing off of dissent as neurosis or betrayal is a common strategy of the intolerant right; but it doesn’t have to stick, it can be resisted and occasionally there are platforms on which to do so and voices that speak out against it.
Finally in these preliminary remarks, there is something else that anti-racist practice amongst Jews can build on, usually known as ‘Jewish ethics’ –a favourite topic in the orthodox community. This is a large subject, too easily reducible to simplified ideas about treating others with respect and so on (not that this would be a bad thing, within and outside the Jewish community). I want here only to take up one difficult point around Jewish religious exclusivity, the idea of the ‘chosen people’, and to connect it with what is regarded as a fundamental Jewish value, that of Hachnassat Orchim, hospitality, which is associated with the patriarch Abraham, regarded as the originator of Judaism. It should be noted in passing that whereas later Biblical injunctions to treat the stranger well are premised on the notion that Jews ‘were a stranger in a strange land’ and hence know what it is like to be oppressed –a position which resonates with the idea that Jews should not treat others badly because we have experienced anti-Semitism and hence are especially attuned to suffering- Abraham predates the Jews’ experiences as slaves and hence his hospitality (meted out to the angels who come to predict the birth of his son) is gratuitous. Moreover, it is linked to the notion of justice: these same angels warn Abraham of the impending destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and Abraham then argues with God about the justice of destroying ‘the righteous with the wicked’. So the Hachnassat Orchim that is a basic value of Judaism is not contingent; it is an absolute principle, a defining feature of the way the world ought to be.
In a paper from 1960 on ‘religion and tolerance’, Emmanel Levinas (using gendered language) picks up this idea and writes, ‘The welcome given to the Stranger which the Bible tirelessly asks of us does not constitute a corollary of Judaism and its love of God… but it is the very content of faith. It is an undeclinable responsibility… Before appearing to Jews as a fellow creature with convictions to be recognised or opposed, the Stranger is one towards whom one is obligated. The Jewish faith involves tolerance because, from the beginning, it bears the entire weight of all other men.’ How does this square with the problematic notion of being the ‘chosen people’ that Levinas also discusses in this article? Referencing the idea that the world and the Torah were created as ‘paths to peace’, Levinas goes on to argue that the sense of being chosen ‘expresses less the pride of someone who has been called than the humility of someone who serves… In Judaism, the certainty of the absolute’s hold over man –or religion- does not turn into an imperialist expansion that devours all those who deny it. It burns inwards, as an infinite demand made on oneself, an infinite responsibility.’ What I like about this, what I can see as a useful strand in the battle to create a Jewish community able to deal wisely with its beliefs and to look outwards and not so fearfully at others, is its rigorous acceptance of the idea of a mission that has its own inexorable dynamic. It is not that the Jews have to take on the whole burden of humanity –that would simply reiterate the claim that the Jews are specially chosen to be superior, that (in a neat reversal of anti-Semitic discourse) we alone amongst the peoples are responsible for everything that happens. It is rather that a thrust of Judaism is to tackle the internal tendency to repudiate the other –internal here referencing something both individual and communal- by demanding that the other is recognised; that is, that its otherness is tolerated. ‘It burns inwards,’ Levinas writes, ‘as an infinite demand made on oneself, an infinite responsibility.’