|
|
|
|
|
TITLE: Israel Doesn't Represent All Jews |
AUTHOR: Lillian S. Robinson |
PUB: Montreal Gazette |
DATE: February 26, 2001 |
|
In Bernard Landry, Quebec will soon have a premier who stoutly affirms that to be anti-Israel is to be anti-Semitic. As a Jew deeply troubled by Israel's war against the Palestinian people, I wonder if there's one kind of nationalism Landry gets wrong, for it is precisely because I belong to the Jewish people that I feel such anguish at the crimes being committed in my name. The supporters of Israel have so long insisted that the Israeli state is the sole representative of Jewish interests, both in the Middle East and the rest of the world, that many gentiles are convinced, along with Landry, that to call Israeli policy into question is to attack all Jews. Weekly Vigil In fact, growing numbers of North American Jews are beginning to think critically about the Israeli state and, here in Montreal, we have initiated a weekly noon-time vigil on Fridays at the Israeli consulate. In 1982-83, at the time of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the massacres at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps, some Jews in the United States and Canada took tentative action - petitions, demonstrations, full-page newspaper ads - declaring, in the words of one American ad, "Menachem Begin does not speak for us." That we have had little influence, so far, on our countries' policies is woefully clear, as North American military and political aid continues to be Israel's principal mainstay. Two recent incidents illustrate the pervasiveness of the stereotype that all Jews march in lockstep with the Israeli military. After the Chretien government bravely dissociated itself from the United States and Israel in one Security Council vote, it then, with an election in the offing, offered an ambiguous statement to "the Jewish community" that some took as an apology for that vote. The second case involves Yves Michaud. Although Michaud was denounced for maintaining that "the Jews" recognize only their own suffering, not anyone else's, and that Jews, along with the other "ethnics," constitute an anti-sovereignist bloc, no one took him to task for his most anti-Semitic statement. This was made when he told a Jewish senator, Leo Kolber, that it took "you Jews" 2,000 years to have a country of "your own" while Quebecers are still waiting. Apparently, asserting that a Canadian Jewish legislator owes his allegiance to a foreign power does not count as anti-Semitism, whereas stereotypes about a "Jewish" position on Quebec sovereignty do. The silence suggests that everyone agrees that we Jews belong to Israel, and that Israel belongs to "us." Same Lesson It is ironic that North American Jews, most of whom did not directly suffer the atrocities of the Holocaust, have tended to derive the same lesson as the Israeli state from the wholesale destruction of European Jewry. "The nations abandoned us then," they argue, so "the Jewish people's only protection against anti-Semitism is to rely on our own military force." In 1991, during the Gulf War, an American rabbi even used this argument, relying on the moral authority of the Shoah to call for bombing the Iraqis into the sand. But there is another lesson to be learned from the Holocaust, one far more attuned to the ethical register of Jewish life and thought, but much harder to enact in reality. This lesson teaches us that the only way to combat anti-Semitism, the particular form of racism directed against Jews, is to combat all racism. It is precisely because "the nations" abandoned the Jews of Europe to their annihilation that Jews worldwide have to work so that no such vicious, dehumanizing conditions be allowed to flourish - against any group. If, as I believe, it is a Jewish mission to combat all forms of racism, it is clearly our responsibility to make sure that we are not ourselves guilty of it. That means not occupying the Palestinian homeland (Gaza and the West Bank), not responding to children's rock-throwing with automatic weapons, not torturing prisoners, not harassing those crossing boundaries between the occupied territories and Israel itself on their daily trips to work, not demolishing homes on bureaucratic pretexts. It's a negative list, to be sure, but it would be a beautiful beginning. - Lillian S. Robinson is principal of the Simone de Beauvoir Institute at Concordia University and a member of Montreal's Jewish Alliance Against the Occupation. END |