Reclaiming the language of Jewish identity

The following post was commissioned by Jews for Justice for Palestinians and published on its site on Sunday 24 May 2015 as part of the JfJfP Signatories Blog series. 

As time goes on I'm attracting more and more hostility. This is not entirely unwelcome.

Nothing tells you better that you have arrived on the scene than someone taking the trouble to insult you.

It's taken me a few years of writing about Israel-Palestine to move beyond a welcoming and supportive readership of like-minded folk to something rather different.

But now it's happened.

Recently I have been described as a "traitor", a "Marxist", "narcissistic", and "shameful" because I have advocated for boycotts in support of Palestinian human rights.

One Twitter correspondent said my writing was attempting to "groom" a false conclusion, a verb we now use when describing the act of entrapping children with the intention of sexually abusing them. I'm quite sure this was the intended association.

But what is it my critics want me to be loyal to?

In their world view what should I be defending? Land grabs? Water appropriation? House demolitions? Child arrests? Judicial apartheid? Shoot to kill policing? A fifty year occupation the rest of the world says is illegal? Should I turn a blind eye when Israeli soldiers provide testimonies from the streets of Gaza that tell us how brutal their orders were towards Palestinian civilians last summer? Why have I become the 'shameful narcissist' rather than them?

I used to think that tribal loyalty as a starting point for reaching political or ethical opinions didn't really work for me. Shouldn't we draw on more objective and universal thinking? But as I started to write I changed my mind. I decided that it was more important than ever to reclaim the language of Jewish ethnic and religious identity.

Arthur Herztberg wrote in the introduction to his collection of Zionist writings in  the 1950s that Zionism was a battle for "the total meaning of Jewish history". He was right. But today you can take that thought even further.

The actions of the State of Israel have become a battleground for the meaning of Jewish history, Jewish identity, Jewish loyalty and indeed the values of Judaism itself.

How has this happened in such a short space of time?

It's long been noted that as Jews have become more secular and less religiously observant, the expression of Jewish identity has shifted from the realm of the spiritual to the territorial. The need for a Jewish Israel has become greater than the need for a Jewish God. This is particularly so when Israel is seen as the only rational response to the Holocaust and Jewish history is understood as little more than one pogrom after another.

Meanwhile, for those Jews still attending synagogue regularly, there also exists an almost unchallengeable belief that the State of Israel has become central to our understanding of Jewish identity. Belief in the inherent goodness of Israel has become a tenet of faith equal to our commitment to monotheism. We have successfully and seamlessly merged our ancient mythological understanding of the Promised Land with a 19th century blood and soil ethnic nationalism. And few appear to notice that there is the slightest thing odd about this.  

So if you have serious problems with Israel, you may as well give up on thinking of yourself as being Jewish. Both secular and religious Jews will find you difficult, if not impossible, to tolerate.

But I have been trying my best to turn all this on its head.

I want to criticise Israel not to do down the tribe but to stay loyal to it. I want to uphold the values and teaching that I think of as mine by birth and by upbringing.

Jewish nationalism, and a blind loyalty to all things Israeli, has stolen my identity and my religion.

Now I'm taking it back, one blog post at a time.

My support for Palestinian rights comes from a self-consciously Jewish starting point. When I speak out I want to put my Jewish Kippah on my head not a Palestinian kaffiyeh around my neck.

Ethnically and politically, my motivation comes from a reading of Jewish history that points towards the need for freedom, tolerance and respect for any minority group.

My outlook is informed by Judaism with its constant scriptural emphasis on compassion and care for the stranger, the widow, the orphan and the oppressed. In other words, the marginalised in every generation.

My writing has at its heart our Jewish millennial project to heal a fractured world and build a just society.

Our prophetic tradition tells me that I have an obligation to speak out when power is used to trick and steal from those who have least or when idols are proclaimed as the source of our salvation. And the fact that our Hebrew prophets were not roaring their rage at our foreign enemies but at our own religious and political leaders is another reminder of Judaism's built-in tradition of self-criticism.

As I write these words we are celebrating the festival of Shavuot when we recall the giving of the Ten Commandments to the ancient Israelites at Mount Sinai. Only fifty days previously we had been rescued from slavery in Egypt and this is the moment when a down-trodden rabble becomes a holy nation in the service of God and the ordering of a just society.

Rabbinic tradition tells us that every Jewish soul yet to be born was there at the foot of the mountain hearing the thunder, seeing the lightening and watching as Moses came down with the tablets of stone. A covenant is made which is full of expectations and responsibilities for both God and the people.

When I read through the verses in Exodus and the accompanying commentaries in my prayerbook, I see nothing that creates a requirement to defend Settlements, Checkpoints, Separation Walls, Jewish only buses or indeed the members of a new Israeli government who seem to have only a passing acquaintance with democracy and human rights.

So I'm not boycotting Jews or Judaism when I make the case for a radical change in our attitude to the Palestinian people. Rather I am upholding all I see as worthwhile, eternal and universal from my Jewish heritage and history. I do not want Jews to be powerless and insecure. There is no inherent virtue in that. But power and security cannot be ends in themselves. That is not what it means to be Jewish nor is it the teaching of Judaism.

The abuse thrown at me from my online critics may have put me 'on the scene' but it’s a scene that needs reforming.

My hope is that others will start to recognise the contradictions and inconsistencies that currently sit so centrally to their Jewish identity. A critique of Israel cannot be outlawed from our synagogues nor banned from our secular discourse.

There is a great deal of concern that lies in my desire to reclaim the language of Jewish identity. Our relationship to Israel and the Palestinians has become defining for us individually and collectively. Nothing less than the future of Judaism and the Jewish people is now at stake.

A Jewish Advent reflection

There's something utterly essential about Advent. And I say that as Jew who looks on in admiration at this season of the Christian calendar.

The journey towards Christmas, with all its expectant waiting, is heavily pregnant with hope for the future. It is an annual renewal of faith in the coming of a better time. It may be dark now but times can change. Tomorrow can be better, if we let it happen. 

For Christianity, the birth of the Messiah signifies that there is a different way of looking at the world. In that journey towards a lowly cattle shed in Bethlehem, we learn anew that the weak can be made strong, the down trodden can be pulled up high and that real power comes through the spirit and not the sword.

For me, there's a lot to be learnt from a tradition that forsakes despair and travels hopefully towards a better vision for the world. It's certainly a much needed spiritual resource for anyone involved in the issues of Israel/Palestine, especially in a year like 2014 when things just seem to go from bad to worse.

For some time now I've been on my own spiritual and political journey. It's a journey looking to rediscover a Judaism of prophetic hopefulness and justice. I'm looking for a Judaism able to critique the narrow nationalism of Zionism and reconnect itself to the best of our long learning and experience.

So for my Jewish take on Advent, I'd like to share with you one key moment on my journey. It's a moment from the summer of 2011 that's come back to me in recent days as Israeli Knesset members have been discussing the various permutations of the Jewish State bill that would clearly put non-Jewish citizens of Israel in an inferior constitutional position.

I am a religiously and politically liberal Jew, born and raised in the London suburbs and in the summer of 2011 I was just ending my last trip to Israel and the West Bank. I already had my fixed views on the Settlements. I knew they were the real obstacles to peace and the creation of a viable Palestinian State. I had seen first hand the daily oppression that the Occupation had created. 

But it turned out that there was a further stage in my thinking that had yet to take place. I still hadn't fully understood what had happened to the Palestinian people as a result of Zionism. And I was going to need help to get there. It was meeting Palestinian Christian Israelis that allowed this particular Jew to take the next step in his journey.

Our group tour had reached Nazareth, the largest majority Palestinian town in Israel, where we met Samuel and Susan Barhoum. Samuel was the Vicar of Christ Church Nazareth and Holy Family Church Reineh. Susan and Samuel are Palestinian Christians, Israeli citizens, whose families had lived in Israel/Palestine for generations.

The Barhoum’s, without the slightest rancour or anger in their voices, told us what it meant to them, and their young children, to be Palestinian citizens of Israel. Citizens who earn their living in Israel and pay their taxes to the Jewish State. And remember, Palestinians are 20% of Israel’s population within the country’s pre-1967 borders. They are the remnant of Palestinians who were mostly expelled or driven out by fear during 1947-8. Most ended up in refugee camps in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt. Those that remained were treated as ‘present absentees’ often having their land and their homes confiscated and were subject to military jurisdiction up until the 1960s.

I was familiar with the promises made in the Israeli Declaration of independence that said that the new Jewish Sate would:

"…ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex…"

Well, it was clear from Susan and Samuel that the Palestinians were still waiting.

Despite the stated intentions of 1948, every aspect of Israeli Palestinian life is disadvantaged compared to their Jewish neighbours. Susan and Samuel had plenty of first hand experience to prove it.

Education resources are consistently lower for Arab schools compared to Jewish schools. The school curriculum disadvantages Palestinian students who want to take exams to enter Israeli Universities. Their exemption from joining the Israeli army (IDF) as most Jewish students must do automatically, then leaves them disadvantaged in the jobs market, including public services, where not having an army number has become a legitimate way to discriminate against Arabs.

Meanwhile, central government funding to develop and improve Palestinian neighbourhoods is vastly disproportionate compared to Jewish towns and neighbourhoods. And then there are the marriage laws that stop an Israeli Palestinian living with their partner if they are from the West Bank. Of course as a Jew living all my life in Britain (just like my parents and grandparents) I have every right to settle in Israel tomorrow if I wanted to.

In spite of all this, indeed because of it, Susan and Samuel were working hard to build bridges between Christians, Muslims and Jews with interfaith projects particularly aimed at children and teenagers.

Getting Jews involved though was particularly challenging as Susan described to our group: "Arabs and Jews are not friends. They don’t want to connect with us."

From talking to Susan it was clear that from the Jewish Israeli perspective, making friends and socialising with Arabs is not a priority. Why bother? What’s the need? For the vast majority of Israeli Jews maintaining a separation is the preferred stand point.

And alongside the institutional and legislative discrimination, was the casual racism that pervades Israeli society and culture. Palestinian Arabs are the perennial ‘other’ in Israel. They are at best tolerated and at worst seen as a 5th column, the enemy within.

Standing outside of Susan and Samuel's church in Nazareth was the moment I took the next step in my journey. This was the moment when I knew I had finally had it with the whole Zionist project as it had played itself out over more than 120 years.

The problem was not 1967 and the Occupied Territories, it wasn't even 1947-8 and the circumstances of the creation of the Israeli State. Something in my head clicked into place and the last rags of my ultra liberal Zionism fell to the ground.

I felt a little like Charlton Heston at the end of the original Planet of the Apes film. Remember when he sees the battered and broken Statue of Liberty washed up on the beach and realises that he is not on some alien planet but his own planet Earth and it is humankind's stupidly has led to his current predicament. "You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!"

For me, in trying to find our Jewish salvation through a misguided return to an exclusive nationalism, we had blown up our own heritage and squandered what was important to us throughout our history.

My meeting with the Barhoums came back to me as I followed the coverage of the proposed Jewish State bill that will enshrine into the constitution the primacy of Israel being a Jewish state (rather than the state of all its citizens). There are many liberal Zionist in Israel and Jews worldwide who oppose this move. They have always wanted to champion the idea that Israel could be Jewish AND Democratic. But if Susan and Samuel's experience is to be taken seriously, Zionism has never succeeded in this balancing act. Perhaps a new Jewish State law would at least formalise what in reality has always been the case. Palestinians are, and always have been, second class citizens.

What is so troubling is that such a piece of legislation is being debated by the descendants of people who knew better than any other group what it meant to be a minority - distrusted, resented and unwanted by the majority.

At our tour's last night together in Nazareth I realised that I was ready to take my own small stand, and start shouting (at least in a quiet, introverted sort of way) about the perversion of Jewish values brought about by a narrow Jewish nationalist agenda. An agenda that had sent the usually reliable Jewish ethical compass into spasm.

So from my encounter with Susan and Samuel grew this blog - Micah's Paradigm Shift. It has a sub-title that attempts to capture the theme of my writing: rescuing the Hebrew Covenant one blog post at a time.

Writing the blog has brought me into contact with like-minded Jews all over the world and with Christians and Muslims who have also become my guides as I seek to find a way back out from the Jewish moral cul-de-sac that the State of Israel has become.

With Netanyahu's coalition collapsing and new elections next spring that threaten an even more intransigent Israeli government, I and many others are much in need of this season of promise. Advent may be a Christian time of expectant longing but it has plenty to say to me too as I travel a hopeful road towards a better future.

This blog post was originally commissioned as part of an Advent series of reflections being published by From Palestine with Love

Lessons from Mandela's long walk to freedom

Nelson Mandela 1918-2013

As President Obama said yesterday (Thursday 5 December), echoing words said at the death of Abraham Lincoln, Nelson Mandela no longer belongs to us but "to the ages".

I remember first becoming aware of the struggle against Apartheid in 1980 after listening to Peter Gabriel's song about the death in police custody of the black civil rights activist Steve Biko. I was playing the same song in my car last night with my son just before we returned home and turned on the television to hear the breaking news coming out of Pretoria.

'Biko' was part of my awakening to the issue of human rights as a teenager. As a student in Manchester in the mid eighties the boycott strategy of the Anti-Apartheid movement and the campaign to Free Nelson Mandela were part of my emerging political understanding of the way the world ticks. More recently, the South African story has influenced my understanding of the situation in Israel/Palestine. They are not identical scenarios but there are enough similarities to draw conclusions.

So what are the lessons we must take from Mandela's long walk to freedom?

• Palestinian violence, however provoked, will always undermine the cause of human rights and allow all resistance to be branded as terrorism and be brutally suppressed. Meanwhile, genuine grievances will be dismissed as irrelevant compared to the needs of Israeli State security.

• The campaign for freedom in Israel/Palestine must be a global call for the restoration of human rights. All the complexities and history must not obscure the basic fact that one people has been dispossessed, and continues to be discriminated against, by another people.

• Change will not come from above until politicians around the world recognise a tipping point in the public understanding of the Palestinian people and their story. The boycott, divestment and sanctions movement will create that consciousness and eventually shift the political paradigm in Israel and globally just as the same tactics did in South Africa.

• The way ahead must acknowledge the human rights of all those who call the Holy Land their home. Solving one injustice must not create another (that's what happened in 1948). This fundamental understanding of the equal worth of all humanity and the need for compassion on all sides was the outstanding contribution of Nelson Mandela in the immediate post Apartheid years. Jews and Palestinians must acknowledge each other's narrative. The future cannot be built on past hatred. However, just as in South Africa, there can be no doubt as to who has been the oppressed and who the oppressor.

Some will see this as utopian nonsense. The same was said about South Africa. Some will say that the Palestinians lack a Nelson Mandela that can unify the people and show moral and political leadership.

I strongly believe that the Palestinian Mandelas do exist. They are men and women who are currently in exile, sitting in Israeli jails, or working right now to build a non-violent worldwide campaign to liberate their people. You may want to read the statement from Marwan Barghouthi in Hadarim prison who has been in Israeli jails since 2002.

While still President of South Africa, Mandela gave a speech in December 1997 to mark the United Nations Day of Palestinian Solidarity.

"It behoves all South Africans, themselves erstwhile beneficiaries of generous international support, to stand up and be counted among those contributing actively to the cause of freedom and justice. But we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians; without the resolution of conflicts in East Timor, the Sudan and other parts of the world."

This is a statement that recognises how interconnected justice must be. It reminds us of Martin Luther King Jr's. statement that: “Justice denied anywhere diminishes justice everywhere.”

Sadly, when others, close to Mandela during the South African Apartheid struggle, speak about Israel (such as former Archbishop Desmond Tutu) they are often dismissed as over-stating their case in drawing any parallels to their own experience. That couldn't be more wrong. Tutu recognises injustice when he sees it.

As I have said many times on this blog, Jews have a right to a homeland through our historic, religious and cultural connection to the land. But it doesn't have to look like this. In fact, what Mandela's story tells us is that it can't look like this. The way in which Israel is currently constituted is ethically unsustainable and it is eating away at the soul of Judaism.

For me, and for a great many others, Mandela may belong to "the ages" but he also belongs to every struggle that has justice and human rights at its core. And that means he belongs to all those who want to see a just peace in Israel/Palestine.

In the end, as Obama said in his tribute, there is a moral arc to the universe that can be bent towards justice. Until that moment comes for Israel/Palestine we wait and we work and we take inspiration from the life of a great man.