mobius1ski

Excerpts of a blog post I wrote a number of years ago are presently being circulated by Jewish conservatives in an effort to discredit me and the work I’ve done with Occupy Judaism and more broadly in the Jewish community. Unfortunately, the decontextualized text presents me as a shrill religious anti-Zionist. As such, I have penned the following response, which provides an explanation for the post and an update on my personal relationship to Zionism.

On any given day of the week, I vacillate between between a variety of positions on Israel and Zionism. I often say that I am a religious anti-Zionist, an ideological post-Zionist, a pragmatic progressive Zionist, and (mostly kidding) a Kahanist under fire. 

To be clear: I believe in the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in their ancestral homeland. I believe the Jewish people have an immutable connection to the land of Israel. And I oppose boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel that are not specifically targeted at institutions directly profiting from the occupation.

On the particular day when I wrote that post, five years ago, I was living in Jerusalem as an Orthodox yeshiva student. I spent a fair deal of time learning with haredi family members who were religiously anti-Zionist. I had just endured the second Lebanon War, and during that time, watched Israeli society completely lose its mind and any semblance of tolerance or decency towards not only anyone Arab in ethnic origin, but also those who identified Arabs as human beings created in the image of God and worthy of human and civil rights. 

In response to what was an obvious collapse of morality and Jewish values happening around us, my other friends and I organized a benefit concert for Israeli and Lebanese war victims with the express intent of promoting the Torah values that you should not take pleasure in the downfall of your enemy and that you should regard all life as a manifestation of the Divine. 

As a consequence of this, I was threatened physically, receiving death threats by email and telephone. An article was written in the Jerusalem Post alleging that I was an abettor of terrorism. A group of right-wing Jewish bloggers attacked me as a self-hating Jew and an enemy of the Jewish people. People quite literally spit in my face on the streets of Jerusalem. 

And in a moment of emotional distress, I wrote a very unfortunately worded blog post lashing out at what I saw as the utter destruction and desecration of Jewish values in the name of national and ethnic supremacism. 

Many of the sentiments in the original post I still stand by today (unfortunately, you cannot see the excerpted text in context because the original post is no longer online).  But were I asked to sign my name to those words today — were I asked even a week after I had written them — I would not.

Rather I would say, I believe strongly in the need for a Jewish state and Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel, but I do not — by any stretch of the imagination — support the policies of the government of Israel and I actively oppose the occupation of the Palestinian territories.

Ultimately, I believe that if we compromise and sacrifice our Jewish values in the name of military supremacy or mere physical survival then there is little purpose in having a Jewish state because the shared values that are the basis for our collective identity — and thus which justify our right to self-determination — will have been negated.

My distress and desperation at seeing the inability of Israel to progress beyond its status quo often leads me to question the sustainability of the Zionist project. But I will never negate the right of our people to express their self-determination through statehood, even while disenchanted with the form that statehood takes.

In other words: I am a reluctant Zionist, a critical Zionist, some days a borderline anti-Zionist, but a Zionist nonetheless — much to the chagrin of both the anti-Zionist Left and the Zionist ultra-Right.

I take that to mean that I’m doing something right.