Happy 60th to Israel

When I was a child, Zionism was the national liberation struggle of the Jewish people. While the United States and all other countries-including the Christian, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist countries-closed their doors to Jews seeking refuge from the murder of millions of Jews by the fascists, and while the Palestinian people's leadership used their influence with the British to ensure that Jews would not be able to settle in our ancient homeland both during and immediately after the Second World War as hundreds of thousands of survivors languished in displaced persons' camps in Europe, the Zionist movement championed the need for a state of the Jewish people with its own army and its own territory. For a people who had been stateless for twenty centuries, who were forced to depend on the often-absent "good will" of their hosts in Europe, Africa, and Asia, the prospect of a homeland, prayed for everyday by Jews around the world for two thousand years, seemed to be at once impossible and yet the only imaginable redemption from the trauma of the Holocaust and the previous centuries of suffering and insecurity.


Jews jumped from the burning buildings of Europe into Palestine not because we were servants of imperial or colonial interests, but because we were desperate and because no one wanted us or would protect us. Unfortunately and tragically, we landed on the backs of Palestinians who were already there, and we hurt many of them in our landing. So scarred were we by our own pain-having just witnessed the death of one out of every three Jews alive on the planet-that we were unable to notice or take seriously the pain that we were causing to the Palestinian people in the process. When our army uprooted Palestinians from their homes and villages, it was in the midst of a struggle for survival in which Jews were determined to be as ruthless towards others as others had been towards us.

Yet, there were alternatives. We could have remained a minority in an Arab country and hoped for the goodness of the Arab people to prevail, particularly if Jews had been able to align with Arabs in the anti-colonial struggle against the British and French. The Zionist movement could have made dramatic overtures to the feudal landlords who owned much of the land in Palestine and who feared that our ideas of socialism would lead to a revolution against their interests, though that would have furthered alienated us from the Arab masses. We could have reached out, as Martin Buber and Judah Magnes did, to a growing Palestinian nationalist movement and tried to create a bi-national state, though at the time the hostilities and acts of terror from Palestinian extremists toward the Jewish minority, and by Zionist extremists toward Palestinian civilians, made this option appear unlikely to a Jewish population that had unwisely trusted the people of Europe to act with some level of human decency, and then were betrayed and murdered. We could have rejected the Histadrut's "Jewish only" policy of membership in its powerful union and its health care system, and those efforts might actually have paved the way toward a less violent reception by the Palestinian majority. We could have put our energies into demanding that the United States open its gates and let Jews settle here, perhaps resettling Jews in Hawaii and California, though in so doing they would have had to contend against the post-WWII conviction of many Jews that only a state of our own with an army of our own could ever be trusted to provide us with security in light of the failure of the US and other Western countries to save us from fascism and its genocide, not to mention the growing conviction of many Jews that with a state of our own we could create for the first time in two thousand years a vigorous Jewish culture, a political polity that reflected our values, and a society in which Jews would not have our lives subordinated to the will of a non-Jewish majority).

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