From being a Zionist to becoming and anti-Zionist Jew…….
Preface
I am writing a biographocal introduction to some forthcoming articles on Jewishness, antisemitism and Israel.
In these articles I will use the term “interpellation” to describe a process of state-initiated and state-reproduced social identities. I draw this term from French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser in the 1960s, but this thought about the relationship between social structure and conscious identity (agency) goes back further to Marxist revolutionary thinker Antonio Gramsci in the 1920s.
My awareness has grown and developed over more than 50 years, from when I was a Zionist supporter of Israel during my teens, to my agnosticism in my mid-life, and now as an anti-Zionist Jew towards the end of my life.
This series of articles will locate the development of these concepts within a framework of ideological struggle between Zionism and its adherents on the one hand and the anti-Zionism of the global Palestine solidarity movement on the other. The analyses have to some extent been informed and influenced by anti-Zionist political practices of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign Cape Town, to which I belong and with the colleagues of which I participate in the activities of. That said, the analyses and conclusions are mine alone. They are motivated and ethically informed by the argument advanced by Sartre (in his 1965 essay, “A Plea for Intellectuals”) that a true intellectual is someone who “gropingly applies a rigorous method to unknown objects they demystify by demystifying themselves”, “pursues a work of practical exposure by combating ideologies and revealing the violence they mask” and despite objectively being an “enemy of the people” always adopts the side of underdog and subaltern classes in modern society.
Throughout I will interrogate both the Zionist and Palestine solidarity movement (largely — but not exclusively — Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions [BDS]-affiliated organisations) world views, and also those of the Black Lives Matter movement — the latter has arisen in response to egregious police violence against African Americans and articulates an uneven and sometimes contradictory discourse of solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. Through rational critique I will try to get to the truth. Anything less is not science but propaganda, dogma.
Becoming Zionist
During the 1950s and 1960s I was interpellated in the Paarl Jewish community as belonging to a people with a long history, watched over by the God who had chosen them. Every year the Paarl Hebrew Congregation used to present prizes to the pupils of the Cheder (Hebrew School, conducted in the afternoons, after public schools). In 1963 my prize was Howard Fast’s “Romance of a People”. The following year I received Josephine Kamm’s “Leaders of the People”
Later I read Max Dimont’s “Jews, God and History”, on recommendation from one of our elders. All these books trace an unbroken thread through Jewish communal life and individuals over thousands of years. The same elder explained that as God’s chosen people he would ensure our survival forever. This resonated when I later heard about Dimont’s “The Indestructible Jews”.
Antisemitism is a form of racism, of othering people interpellated as semites , a category that includes Palestinians and Jews. Historically antisemitism came to mean the othering of Jews, as different from “normal” citizens (the nation), malevolent to their interests, unassimilable and degrading the national spirit and genes. Jew-hatred prevailed under the Russian Tsarist state — justified by the Russian orthodox church — in eastern Europe during the 19th Century, resulting sometimes in killing of Jews (pogroms). My maternal and paternal grandparents migrated from Lithuania at the turn of the 20th Century to escape these oppressive conditions and Christian-inspired interpellations.
Although Jews in South Africa, through mostly being categorised as “whites”, suffered no institutional and political discrimination, anti-Jewish sentiment sometimes bubbled up.
During the 1960s the biology teacher at Paarl Boys High School, which I attended, once told his class — which included several Jewish scholars — that Jews were like pigs, the only difference being that they had two legs….. A Jewish friend who boarded in the local school hostel was once held down by Gentile scholars who tried to carve a star of David on his skin…… (Our elders dealt discretely with these incidents and made no public outcry, I think in order not to attract too much attention to us…
During the 1960s as a teenager in Paarl I found out one evening the contradictory responses of local antisemites to Jews and Israel. I was being roughed up by some Afrikaans-speaking youth. An Afrikaans-speaking adult intervened to stop it. On being told that I was Jewish he moved on, with the words that the Jews belonged in Israel and not South Africa, and that we should emigrate there. (Several more experiences like these reinforced the interpellation that as a Jew I belonged in Israel, and undoubtedly pushed me into joining the labour Zionist youth movement Dror Habonim). Many years later I came to understand that antisemitic Afrikaner nationalists could also be genuine supporters of the state of Israel ……
Doubting and Unbecoming Zionist
I always harboured doubts, as a young Zionist, about the notion that the “People without a Land” had finally found a “Land without People”. I distinctly remember how one day my mother responded to my Zionist ideological discourse with the statement that “we” took “their” land away from them. Ironically my nine months national service in the then apartheid South African army enabled me to distance myself from my created Zionist identity, and after I had completed military service I did not reengage with the Zionist youth movement. A further irony was that through my participation in the labour Zionist youth movement I was exposed to the thinking of Marx, Engels and other Jewish and Zionist socialists. I continued these readings at university and came to see the 1948 colonisation of historic Palestine as the primitive accumulation of capital, laying the basis for a modern capitalist state by dispossessing the indigenous inhabitants of their land.
But it would be some time before I publicly criticized Zionism and the State of Israel. This happened at a debate between myself and Dennis Davis (now a High Court Judge, and a leader of the South African Chapter of the liberal Zionist group, Save Israel, Stop the Occupation [SISO]). I was studying at the University of Cape Town (UCT) at the time. Prior to that I had been boarding at the Herzlia Jewish Day school hostel in Cape Town, but had left that for a communal house in Observatory. And I had become exposed both socially and intellectually to left-wing people and thought. The debate took place during 1978, at a time that I was discovering Marx’s concepts of primitive accumulation and I applied this to an analysis of the Nakba (the ethnic cleansing of 750 000 Palestinians from the land in 1948). This was essentially the theme of my side of the debate.
By exposing myself publicly as a Jewish critic of Israel I alienated certain members of my extended family (who stopped speaking to me) as well as people in Habonim and Jewish and Zionist leadership circles who had been acquainted with me. However, the ostracism was relatively mild and objectively it had little impact on my life as I moved infrequently in Jewish circles. I was one of those perpetual students, keeping away from the army and avoiding a productive career in what I increasingly understood to be a highly immoral (South African) society. On reflection, what was interesting was that my own internal policeman admonished me far more severely than any ‘external’ Zionist or family member. The UCT debate left me feeling exposed, vulnerable and cut off from ‘my tribe’.[1]
In the meantime I relocated to Johannesburg. I had enrolled in a neo-Marxist Honours course on South African development. Shortly after arriving there I was challenged by the local chapter of the South African Union of Jewish Students to a debate about Palestine and Israel. I declined, primarily I think because of the subjective fear of being labelled (implicitly) as a “self-hating Jew”, i.e. a particular form of anti-semite.[2]
Between 1978 and 2008 (during which both Operation Cast Lead was implemented against the people of Gaza as well as the rise of xenophobic mobs in South Africa) I was elsewhere occupied. Initially in the student anti-apartheid movement, I then pursued studies and finally got married and raised a family. But I have learnt that the psychology of being part of the Jewish tribe persists, despite one’s attempts to distance oneself from the intense moral questions regarding Israel’s policies and practices towards Palestinians.
At the height of the anti-apartheid struggle in 1989 Archbishop Tutu referred to South African apartheid as the worst form of racism since Nazism. In the same year I attended a holocaust commemoration at the Jewish cemetery in Pinelands, Cape Town. During the ceremony a speaker from the Western Province chapter of the SA Zionist Federation rejected Tutu’s comparing the suffering of black people under apartheid to that of Jews under Nazism, as diluting the value of and cheapening Jewish suffering. Scholar Michael Rothberg has analysed this interpellation as “competitive memory”, which assigns a hierarchy of values to historical trauma and suffering, with Jewish suffering being the context and informing the meaning of others’ suffering. Israeli psychoanalyst Iris Hefets, whom I met in Berlin in December 2018, refers to the mystique that Zionist ideology has built around the genocide of the Jews and the quasi-religious notion of “Shoah” ascribed to it. The religiosity around the holocaust effectively occludes research and investigation about it and interpellates it as an event involving both perpetual victims (the Jews) and perpetual perpetrators (the Germans).
Resisting Zionism
It was Rhoda Kadalie’s public attack on Archbishop Tutu that finally galvanised me into action. Tutu had come out publicly criticizing Israel for its apartheid regime on the West Bank. Kadalie, the granddaughter of Clements Kadalie, leader of the first mass trade union movement in South Africa in the 1920s, had become a public intellectual at that stage. She had participated in the United Democratic Front struggles against apartheid, and was a well-known activist for womens rights. Propagating a conservative, liberal message, she took Tutu and the ‘left’ to task for what she saw as their malicious fabrication of Israeli apartheid. I thought her ‘analysis’ reflected an extremely superficial, liberal understanding of apartheid, and resolved to write a reply to her charge in the Cape Times.
The article was published in the Cape Times during October 2010. It provoked a response from some Zionist activists in Cape Town and South Africa. I received correspondence from them in my in-box. This was an invasion of my privacy. It was a mixture of polite, paternalistic judging and vitriolic condemnation. Milton Shain, who has written extensively on antisemitism in South Africa and then the director of the Kaplan Centre at the University of Cape Town, referred to the Cape Times article as antisemitic in effect if not in intent.
What was interesting was that this provoked my own response of emotional vulnerability and guilt at “betraying my people”. These feelings existed side by side with the rational analysis that I had written, based on my being a Zionist all those years ago and the developments that I will sketch out in the forthcoming articles. It was an experience of almost the same feelings that I had after the 1978 speech at UCT. I am being open about this, aware that for Zionists reading this, this will simply be proof that I am a “self-hating Jew”. But I understand this contradictory state of being the way in which Sartre described the existential reality of the intellectuals who ally with the working classes, the oppressed and “the wretched of the earth”[3]: he wrote that the Intellectual
“is a by-product of our societies, and the contradiction within him between truth and belief, knowledge and history, free thought and authoritarianism, is not the outcome of an intentional praxis but of an internal reaction — that is to say the system of relations between mutually incompatible structures within the synthetic unity of a person. But on closer inspection we find that the intellectual’s contradictions are the contradictions inherent in each of us and in the whole society”[4]
The type of inner conflict that I have experienced — and sometimes continue to experience — is not unique to being a Jewish activist opposing the Zionist state. There is also a class component to it. As such it is a contradiction that potentially exists, albeit in a different form, in all political activists. And its immediate manifestation is psychological, that is we feel the contradiction because we are living it. I think it is important to incorporate an exploration of how and what we are feeling into our political understanding and work. I think by simply keeping up a straight face about being a ‘strong activist’, we hide the very real psychological processes that go on in many of the people we are trying to recruit, and then are less able to understand their reluctance to get actively involved in Palestine solidarity work. I think there is a need to think through the social characteristics of these feelings, i.e. those that function to quieten down the agitated emotions one feels in the light of sadistic attacks on an unarmed people, and also the effect of an indifference from an apparently numbed and unfeeling citizenry to these events. This is not unlike what we were told about how the world ignored the slaughter of our own people in the Eastern European pogroms and the Nazi gas chambers, even when they knew it was happening.
Following the publication of the article and my feelings I also decided that I needed to be engaged collectively with others in the solidarity struggle, and not be doing articles as an individual, exposed to the influence on my behaviour of these feelings. Starting with attending a boycott of Reggies Toy Shop, in 2012, I got progressively involved in Palestine solidarity formations in Cape Town. These practices included participating in and supporting BDS-type activities on the Stellenbosch University campus. Then Israel launched another brutal attack on Gaza, “Operation Protective Edge”, in 2014. I was one of the hundred thousand plus people mobilised in the Cape Town Mass March of the same year. I engaged with BDS South Africa and the National Coalition for Palestine, and participated in the Woolworths Boycott. My membership of Palestine Solidarity Campaign Cape Town represented a point of moving beyond critique of Zionism to demanding an end to Zionism.
Conclusion
Over the past seven years I have begun to understand the important function of ideological struggle in the resistance to dominant social formations and the emergence of new formations.
To anchor ideological struggle on to scientific precepts we need a view of democracy and democratic debate that makes room not only for the viewpoints of organised constituencies but also those of individuals be they intellectuals or ordinary working people.
This view of democracy includes debates internal to the Palestine solidarity movement, and not only the expression of our solidarity viewpoints in the public domain. To this end I facilitated internal debates around the efficacy of the Woolworths Boycott, the effectiveness of the National Coalition for Palestine and also the accusations made around alleged sexual harassment by the then Director of the NGO BDS South Africa (2019).
Authentic democracy requires the right of the “other” viewpoints to be heard, inasmuch as we might think that they are misplaced if not downright dangerous. History is replete with examples where unpopular views have been censored and actively suppressed, allegedly in the name of a greater good and a war against an unseen enemy.
We know some of the destructive consequences of anti-democratic regimes not only in terms of liberty but also through lives lost.
There is a saying that is apt here: “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”.
It is to help avoid pitfalls like these that I offer the forthcoming texts for public consideration.
Paul Hendler, Stellenbosch South Africa 10 December 2021.
[1] Decades later I expressed similar feelings to Steve Friedman, a vocal critic of Israel, and he coined the term “pull of the tribe”. While this is an effective abbreviation it does not capture the severe psychological effect of self-policing. Judith Butler argues that these feelings result from the outward identification of oneself as an ‘anti-semite’. She says that “no label could be worse for a Jew. The very idea of it puts fear into the heart of any Jew who knows that ethically and politically the position with which it would be utterly unbearable to identify is that of the anti-semite. It recalls images of Jewish collaborators with the Nazis”. Decades later, during our protests during Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s murderous 2014 assault on Gaza, a Jewish activist recounted how several parents of children at the Herzlia day school were deeply opposed to Israel’s actions but just the very thought of their speaking out caused them intense distress.
[2] Zionist Allan Dershowitz has called Israel critic Norman Finkelstein a “self-hating Jew”.
[3] The title of a book by Fanon, and surely applicable to the inhabitants of the Gaza open air concentration camp today.
[4] Sartre, Jean-Paul 1983 A Plea for Intellectuals, in Between Existentialism and Marxism, Verso, pages 264 to 265.
