The Israeli assault on Gaza continues. In the last few days, it is increasingly acknowledged that Israel is quite purposely directing attacks against civilian populations, actively hindering the work of international humanitarian agencies, and even shelling local offices of the United Nations.
What’s on my mind today, though, is something larger – the discussion that is beginning to take place about not only Zionism as a political agenda but about the whole idea of ‘a people’, and how identity in general functions to both include and exclude.
My ex-father-in-law is a radical active in the Palestine solidarity movement. He also identifies as a Jew. Though non-religious and coming from a family of Jewish-American Communist Party activists, Jewishness is a key part of his identity, marking both a history of anti-semitism, a history of a particular set of struggles, and a particular intellectual and cultural tradition that is distinct. Together with other anti-Zionist Jews, he’s worked to build Independent Jewish Voices, an organization committed to solidarity with Palestinians living under Israeli occupation and with challenging the all-too-prevalent notion that criticism of Israel or the questioning whether Israel should exist as a state is synonymous with anti-semitism.
Anyway, he works as a union researcher but is perhaps best known among radicals around the world for his massive email list, through which he sends out, across the globe, news and opinion pieces from around the world on a wide range of issues of interest to radicals. Lately, of course, the vast majority of this has been on the Israeli assault and the struggle for Palestine.
And two things in particular that have struck me.
The first is an article coming out of the UK’s Palestine solidarity movement. Here, Francis Clark-Lowes decides it is time to cross lines and force questions, no matter what accusations of anti-semitism might follow. He argues, basically, that Israel – and by extension Zionism – has been so overwhlemingly defended by Jewish communities in Europe and North America, that he cannot any longer distinguish ‘the Isreali state’ from Jewish public opinion. Meaning, basically, that it is no more wrong to say ‘Jews collectively are responsible for the genocide in Gaza’ than it is wrong to hold Europeans collectively accountable for colonialism.
Here’s a summary, in his own words, of where Clark-Lowes believes we need to go:
· A recognition that Jewish identity has become inextricably linked with Zionism.
· An acceptance that Jews are collectively responsible for what is happening in Israel/Palestine, just as we [the British], as a nation, accept our responsibility for the empire and slavery.
· A renunciation of the right of return and the right to Israeli nationality.
· An acceptance that ‘the Holocaust’ (in inverted commas and with a capital H) has become a kind of religion, an instrument of propaganda, an abusive mythology.
· A recognition that accusing people of hating Jews is usually a way of stopping them speaking.
· A recognition that the Zionist project is incompatible with respect for the human rights of Palestinians. Israel has got to go.
· A recognition that Jews, as a collective, exercise immense, and quite disproportionate, power in the world, and that this power is being abused.
It’s a strong statement, and one that is uncomfortable to read. Indeed, he states explicitly that it was uncomfortable to write.
Now, I’m not going to get into taking this apart and teasing out the various things Clark-Lowes writes. More interesting to me is that this came from my ex-father-in-law only a day after I read an interview he gave to Gilad Atzmon, jazz musician and anti-Zionist activist in London.
Atzmon has renounced his Jewish identity. For him, to identify as a Jew is to identify as a part of a ‘chosen people’ which is to support, however unwittingly, the Zionist project. For Atzmon, to define oneself as a Jew is to concede that Jews are different, Jews are special – a necessary foundation to the concept of chosen people and a main pillar of Zionist ideology. So the interview is really focused on this question of identity, and the relationship between identity and politics. For Atzmon, the only possible identity is universalist, and the first step to anti-Zionism is renunciation of one’s Jewish identity; for Sid, Jewishness does have meaning, and has a particularly important political meaning in the struggle against Israel.
An interesting discussion, and one I encourage folks to read. Obviously, it’s a discussion that goes far beyond Israel or Jewishness. It’s a discussion about identity.
We make our place in the world by identifying ourselves with certain things and against other things – whether those boundaries be marked by ethnicity, religion, politics, or preferred colour of socks. In anthropological terms, we form tribes – collective groupings that help us place ourselves in a world that is simply too big and too complex to understand. So. Are such tribes ultimately exclusionary and divisive? Or do such tribes ground us in the world? Is the drive to separate and identify something innate? Or something that can be abandoned? Or – more to my thinking – are tribes always and everywhere a muddling of all the above?
These are interesting questions to play with. Atzmon, clearly, has decided that a Jewish tribalism is inherently destructive – and I presume he would argue the same about any collective based on a religious or cultural or ethnic characteristic. OK. But what about political characteristics? Or cultural mores? Are these any less ‘tribes’, with any less significance to thier members and with any less possibility for exclusion? Or are they something different altogether? Can we distinguish tribes we believe are based on choice from those we believe people are born into? And if so, where exactly do we mark those lines between different categories of characteristics? Is there always and easy-to-see dividing line? Can we opt-out of communities we are identified with? What’s the relationship between how we identify ourselves and how we are identified by those close to us and how we are seen by the world at large?
All this is rolling around in my head today. I am thinking of Sam movies, Metal: a headbanger’s journey and Global Metal, in which anthropologist and metalhead Dunn talks about the global tribe defined by a music – a global tribe I count myself a part of. I am thinking of my own Catholic upbringing, and the fact that I still feel very Catholic despite the fact that I do not have any religous life to speak of. I am thinking about Noel Ignatiev and the folks around Race Traitor who are grappling with how all these questions play out in the power and privilege of whiteness.
War, identity, power, collective, security, tribe. There is much here to consider, much here to challenge ourselves with, much thinking and re-thinking. But that is not to say there are answers. But that’s OK. I’m not really looking for answers. I am, however, very interested in the questions, and the ways in which different people confront these questions generally, and the ways particular activisits - Jews, non-Jews, former-Jews – confront these questions in the specific context of Israeli occupation and the Zionism that underpins it.
