Voices of Dissent

American Jews take on Israeli expansionism.

by Joel Tannenbaum

The history of the state of Israel is a history of victims: the millions murdered in Europe and the millions displaced in British Mandate Palestine, the shtetls in Poland destroyed by the German army and their local accomplices and the West Bank neighborhoods razed by Israeli soldiers. More recently there have been the Jews, Arabs and Christians blown apart on buses in Jerusalem and in cafés in Tel Aviv. Other victims include the history of the conflict and of the region, and the dissident voices that have demanded an end to the violence. No voice is heard less than that of the Palestinian people themselves. With the death earlier this year of Palestinian-American literary critic Edward Said, they lost their most audible advocate.

Slightly more audible, but still largely ignored, is the voice of American Jews who have consistently objected to Israel's expansionist policies and its denial of basic human rights and citizenship to Palestinians. Angels in America playwright Tony Kushner and drama critic/journalist Alisa Solomon have offered this collection of essays as a means to correct this tragic intellectual and moral deficit. Herein are the voices of academics, poets, religious leaders, activists and pundits, all of whom are American, Jewish and in some sense opposed to Israel's occupation of Palestinian territory and its treatment of the Palestinian people.

The first chapter is composed of published writing and correspondence by Jewish intellectual luminaries such as Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and Isaac Deutscher. All of them, writing in the aftermath of the Holocaust, were nonetheless scathingly critical of the militarization and forced deportations upon which the Israeli state was founded. Einstein is lauded as a hero in the pages of American history textbooks for the theory of relativity, and yet the viewpoint he espouses here, in a letter to The New York Times in 1948 co-authored by German Rabbi Leo Baeck -- "We believe that any constructive solution is possible only if it is based on the concern for the welfare and cooperation of both Jews and Arabs in Palestine" -- has been largely forgotten.

Having established much-needed historical context, Wrestling with Zion then moves on to some daring acts of historical recovery. Michael E. Staub recounts the foundation of the American Breira movement after the Yom Kippur War. Breira is Hebrew for "alternative," a conscious rebuttal to the slogan ein breira ("there is no alternative") making the rounds at the time. Ammiel Alcalay shows that hushing critics of American foreign policy with accusations of anti-Semitism was not a technique invented by the Bush administration (although they may have perfected it). On the contrary, Alcalay combs through FBI files from the late 1960s to show how, under the Nixon-era COINTELPRO program, the FBI forged letters and documents to drive a wedge between the black-Jewish alliance that had been so pivotal in the civil rights movement.

There are some misfires, to be sure: Jonathan Safran Foer, the author of Everything Is Illuminated, is out of his depth in this collection with a rambling, impressionistic account of a visit to Israel and his girlfriend's ailing parents. NYU journalism professor Ellen Willis invokes embarrassingly out-of-date psychoanalytical jargon in "Is There Still a Jewish Question? Why I'm an Anti-Anti-Zionist." Thankfully, activist Naomi Klein and novelist Susan Sontag come to the rescue respectively, situating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the context of broader global struggles for social and economic equality.

But the questions persist: Are American Jews obligated to offer uncritical support for Israeli military policy? Is criticism of the only Jewish state implicitly anti-Semitic? Social-feminist literary theorist Judith Butler offers a powerful rebuttal to the latter question in "The Charge of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel and the Risks of Public Critique."

In the most frank and fascinating chapter, "The Law of Return: A Forum," novelist Susannah Heschel, Ms. magazine founding editor Letty Pogrebin and a host of academics ask whether American Jews opposed to the occupation ought to relinquish their right to Israeli citizenship. Some say yes, some say no, some say maybe. What is so very, very valuable about Wrestling with Zion is that it has given them a forum to say all of these things where they need not be drowned out by shouted accusations of self-hatred and disloyalty.

Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Edited by Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon Grove, 320 pp., $12.95

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