Philip Weiss on Obama and Zionism

I was having a conversation with another Jewcy editor last week when, apropos of an upcoming dialogue on Zionism, I mentioned the fact that I consider myself an "un-Zionist." Perhaps it's my age and make-up (I'm only a halfsy, and it's the wrong half, halachically) but I've never felt what Ruth Franklin in her review of Michael Chabon's new novel eloquently calls the "Jewish ache" that so many diasporists once had, and indeed still do. To my mind, 19th-century social thought — beginning with Marx and ending with Herzl — made one huge error in accounting for the future of human affairs: it left out the promise of the United States. (Marx was interested in our civil war, but his hope for revolution lay in Europe.)

It's not a particularly original insight to say that this country has been very good to the Jews, but I would argue — or perhaps "feel" is le mot juste — that it has been better for the Jews than Israel, which has preciptated a nationality and culture all its own.

My connection to Jewish identity and history is really rooted in rootlessness and permanent struggle — struggle not for Jewish survival, but for everything. Now, I would never presume to make a normative judgment on tribal activity based on my own idiosyncratic affinities, but those affinities, and their tropes, may be worth indicating. I'm sure I risk redundancy more than a few times here: Shrugging, Yiddishkeit humor and Jewish pessimism; the fiction of Bellow and Roth; the anti-Stalinist left, encompassing the New York intellectuals and legendary Partisan Review crowd; the famed Hungarian exodus; the Russian and Soviet Jewish experiences.

The Hungarian exodus is probably most important because Theodore Herzl was, after all, born in Budapest during its so-called "Golden Age" (1870-1910). It's rather obvious that the germ for his idea of an Altneuland, or New Old Land, was incubated and nurtured in the Old Old Land of his birth, that "Jerusalem on the Danube," which the gentile Hungarian poet Endre Ady once described as “built by the Jews for the rest of us." Imagine such a place, however short-lived, at the turn of the 20th century.

So no, I don't bridle to hear a trenchant critic of the Zionist project like Philip Weiss register optimism that the Jewish state, so far from facing extinction, is now a foregone conclusion whose primary assumptions demand rethinking:

In a Zionist history I was reading the other day, I read that the purchases of land in Palestine by Jewish agencies in the early part of the last century had covenants on them. The covenants said, This land can only be sold to Jews. (When I remember the citation, I'll stick it in.) Those covenants still exist, I'm sure. You can try and justify that type of discrimination in a million ways, but there it is. Real estate covenants barring sales to blacks and Jews are what my generation helped destroy in this country 30 years ago. Obama was borne up on that idealism, and his campaign is about bringing that idealism to America's actions in the world. He's half-everything, right? The ideology of Zionism is simply out of step with that spirit, and if Obama succeeds, Zionism will lose its hold on Jewish-American intellectual life. Without fireworks.

I think Weiss is dreaming if he believes Barack Obama's own agonies of peoplehood will lead him to adopt anything other than a firmly pro-Israel stance. It took a Republican to say the words "Palestinian statehood" in public. I may be wrong, but I doubt the first black, Democratic candidate for president will be able to just take it from there.