Palestinian-Israeli conflict: Break out of exclusive ethno-nationalism for transversal solidarities across borders | Nira Yuval Davis

I watched and listened to Naomi Klein’s speech at the People’s Seder and her call for American Jews’ exodus from Zionism in NYC [1] and felt nostalgic and sad. When I first left Israel in 1969 to the USA and discovered Jews, including a reform Rabbi, who defined their Jewishness in fighting against the Vietnam War rather than by keeping kosher or supporting Israeli Occupation, I felt elated. Till then I saw the range of choice of Jewishness as stretching between being a Zionist of some kind and/or being an Orthodox Jew of some kind. I decided to focus my PhD dissertation on different radical Jewish groups in the US who went beyond these boundaries within which I grew up in Israel. [I never published the dissertation as a book but it’s available in the British Library].

As a result, I have come to define myself as a diasporic Israeli Jew, a neo-Bundist who sees people abandoning exclusive rights for a territory and thus not see all Others as a potential threat, as the only long term solution for not only all forms of racism, including antisemitism, everywhere but also as the only way the Palestinian-Israeli conflict can be resolved long term – a separation between collective rights and exclusive ethno-nationalism, the breakup of the holy trinity of people, state and territory. Or, as the Australian Aboriginals articulate this, that we belong to the land, not the land belongs to us.

My PhD work focused on groups of young Jews who were trying to fight against the hegemony of Zionism in post-1967 American Jewry – the same aim that the participants in the People’s Seder or the Jewish demonstrators against AIPAC are trying to do today. I wish so much they had succeeded then, for probably some of the horrors of today would not have happened, and the way forwards for some kind of a solution based on peace and social justice, whether as one or two democratic states between ‘the river and the sea’ would have been possible. Maybe.

Unavoidably, I have to mention here also the issue of antisemitism. I’ve dedicated a lot of my adult life to both teach and fight against antisemitism as well as other forms of racism but also against the conflation of antisemitism and critique of Israel and Zionism (see, for example my 1984 article on this in Spare Rib, updated and debated in issue 126 of Feminist Review in 2020). The demonstrations and occupations in many American universities and colleges are directed against the horrors of what is being done by Israel to Gasa and the Palestinians. Only those who are interested in suppressing or distracting this political message and conflating non-critical solidarity with Israel as the only non-antisemitic position possible would call these demonstrations antisemitic.

This does not mean that there are no unacceptable behaviours by some – as far as I understand a small minority – participants in these demonstrations that move between actual antisemitic behaviours of violence and/or denunciation of all Jews (although these come much more often from the Right than the Left) to, more commonly, of an unacceptable attitude of – ‘if you’re Israeli, or even Jewish – I’ll treat you with suspicion until you prove to me that you oppose what is happening in Gasa and support the rights of the Palestinians’ – a form of ‘you’re guilty until you prove your innocence’ which should be the other way around. Unfortunately, this form of racialisation has been supported for many years by the Israeli lobby and in recent years by the IHRA definition of antisemitism which has been adopted by many organizations and governments, which defines Israel, as the ‘collective Jew’ and equates between critiques of Israel and Zionism and antisemitism. Tony Lerman has written beautifully and persuasively about this in his book ‘Whatever happened to antisemitism’.

But there is also another layer which we need to consider when we examine the mood and confrontations in these demonstrations, and this is the important symbolic role Palestinians and their occupation, apartheid, progressive domicide and genocidal war by Israel is playing in the contestation between the global South and the global North. I’ve written about it in my 2023 Sociology journal article on ‘Antisemitism is a form of racism – or is it?’ (which Polity Press has asked me now to expand and update into a book). While the Holocaust, as the ultimate form of genocidal racism against the Jews, which took place in Europe, has been recognized post WW2, and reparations – both individual and collective to Israel (as a self-assumed representative of all Jews whether or not they are Zionist) have been offered and paid, the domicidal and genocidal, let alone ecocidal, effects of colonialism and imperialism in the global South have never been offered any compensation and reparation (except, of course, to the owners of slaves after the abolition of slavery). The resistance movement of this by people from the global South and the global Left is gaining strength all the time, as it should. Unfortunately, as part of the perceived privileged West, in combination with Israel’s role in the ME, Jews are sometimes caught in the middle of this contestation, often in some zero-sum game that if one recognizes antisemitism one is an anti-global Southerns racist and vice versa.

The way forward is not to get caught in this corrosive destructive ‘game’ but to create transversal solidarities across borders and boundaries with those with similar values, defend universal human rights and engage in transnational politics of care. Only in this way constructions of ‘common sense’ which have been reinforced for many years to the divisive detriment of all racialised people can have a leverage to be changed and transformed.

(Author: Nira Yuval-Davis is Professor Emeritus, Honorary Director of the Research Centre on Migration, Refugees and Belonging (CMRB) at the University of East London)

[The above facebook post by Prof Nira Yuval Davis is reproduced here in Public interest and is for educational & non commercial use]