12 March 2022
“The explosion of interdisciplinary research in law contributes to the variety of legal scholarship. So does the contrast between “inside” and “outside” thinking in law schools where we try both to equip people for practice and effectiveness within existing institutions and for roles as critics, institutional reformers, and scholars who may explain and analyze in terms quite different from those in the minds of actors operating within existing legal systems.”
Martha Minow, “Archetypal Legal Scholarship: A Field Guide”, 63(1) Journal of Legal Education, pp.65-69.
The New Israel Fund is an American Jewish Zionist organization that operates in Israel. Founded in 1979 the organization’s declared objectives are to support Israel and advance democratic values in the country. In 2010 its board of directors voted to upgraded its agenda by explicitly relating to the Palestinian population in the country, that forms about 20% of Israel’s pre-1967 population. The New Israel Fund also wishes to help in reaching peace between Israel and its neighbors.
The concept of Zionism in “Western”[1] countries, particularly in the United States and Britain, has had and continues to absorb positive connotations. For Palestinian ears, heart, and mind the idea and its application are reprehensible, irredeemable, and abolitionable.
The first significant diplomatic acceptance of Zionism was the 1917 British Balfour Declaration which recognized the right of 10% of the population in Palestine for a “National Home”, and is rightly considered as the imperial foundation of Israel in the Arab region, the bizarre idea of constituting a state in a distant place to attract Jewish religious or ethnic communities from around the world.[2] Popular and intellectual opposition by Palestinian Arabs to this scheme was overwhelming, rational, and justified, before and after the tragic events of the Second World War. The consequences of ethnically cleansing more than two thirds of the Palestinian people by Israeli / Zionist forces during the 1948 war has diminished for a while the most genuine aspect that could undermine Zionism’s legitimacy. Hence the insistence on Palestine as an empty land and the passionate advocacy for the “fleeing argument” to justify the perpetrated war crimes and crimes against humanity. Two ideas that had been for decades most popular in the United States and its American Jewish Zionist community.
For various mystic and opportunist political reasons, Zionism and the support for Israel remain a mainstream political agenda, specially in the United States and Britain. The current American President Joe Biden proudly accepted his introduction at AIPAC’s 2009 annual conference as a Zionist. Following Sheldon Adelson’s donations and extreme religious ideology the Republican party has transformed since the mid-1990s into a parrot of Israeli mythology. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair represented Israel as head of the Quartet.[3] British Prime Minister Boris Johnson wrote to conservative MPs Friends of Israel that he opposes the International Criminal Court’s jurisdictions ruling regarding Israel.[4] The current leader of the British Labour party Keir Starmer has launched a purge campaign against supporters of Palestinian rights in his party as an act of vengeance against his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn.[5]A continuation of the unreasonable campaign levelled against the progressive leader in the British Labor party.[6]
Samantha Power disavowed any comments not in total support of Israel to secure an official position in the American government.[7] Dennis Ross mediated diplomatic engagements in the Middle East involving Israel while ideologically committed to this country.[8] Senior Pentagon official Douglas Feith wholeheartedly reflected on Menachem Begin’s Zionist legacy.[9] Thomas Friedman’s writing about Israel in the New York Times dwarfs any imagined propaganda, except when he accidentally reveals Israel’s actual behavior.[10] Human Rights Watch’s Eric Goldstein who edited the organization’s report about apartheid Israel reached this conclusion with significant difficulty to him personally.[11]
Zionism in its formative stages and following the creation of the state of Israel had attracted sympathy and support from the left in the discussed countries, despite today’s overwhelming solidarity expressed in these circles for Palestinian rights, in varying articulation of their nature and scope. Noam Chomsky was raised in a Zionist household and at a certain stage considered the Israeli Kibbutz, a symbol of dispossession for Palestinians, as a potential model for universal socialism. I doubt Chomsky continues to advance this position, which undermines his admirable persistence in opposing American foreign policy. Michael Walzer, a key figure in the American left and one of the founders of Dissent Magazine has been and remains a vocal supporter of Israel fundamentally challenging critiques of a perceived long-distance source for national emotions. Before the formation of the Holocaust and the state of Israel as central elements of American Jewish identity,[12] much of the left in that country had provided it with favorable adjectives on various grounds, mostly ideological, a-historical, and illogical.[13]
In numbers, wealth, political organization as well as impact, and cultural presence the American Jewish community supportive of Israel overwhelm Palestinian Americans, the only group that could counter the images and myths dominating Palestine’s history and contemporariness prevailing in the United States. It is only in the academy that Palestinian and other American intellectuals have generated a sphere of knowledge production that is independent from the malign discourse of the political arena. Nevertheless, even this space of research has been trailing behind decades of American indoctrination about Israel’s unique enlightening role in the region and is inevitably affected and at times shaped by it.
In response to the limited but important development in the American academy with regard to understanding Palestine, a series of centers dedicated to the study of Israel have been established. One of the most important of them is the center at Harvard University that former Dean of the Law School Martha Minow (2009 – 2017) who taught there since 1981 helped in founding. It is led by distinguished Harvard Law School Professor Noah Feldman. This center is exemplary in its quest to represent Israel as it was once perceived in Academia and as it remains to be considered in the dominant political conversation.
Probably one of this center's main sources of inspiration is the Israeli – American legal historian Pnina Lahav who wrote the celebratory biography of Shimon Agranat, the first and most important American Jewish turned Israeli Supreme Court Judge (1948 – 1976).[14] Lahav is also the author of a similar recent book about a figure that continues to capture the imagination of many American Jews, Golda Meir,[15] whose famous denial of the existence of a Palestinian people marked her, Israel’s and American Jewry’s understanding of self and other. The perseverance of the research centre is admirable, even if not rigorous, as nothing will distract it from its objective and purpose. The fact that a former Israeli Attorney General agreed with Amnesty International’s findings about Israel’s apartheid (2022), and another one recently resigned from his position as Supreme Court Judge because of problematic substantive adjudication and daunting procedural management will not divert the Harvard research center from its designated agenda. It is a mockery to intelligence at any level.[16]
The New Israel Fund serves to fulfil the various components of American Jewish identity without carrying the burden of responsibility imposed by the Question of Palestine. Both the organization and most of its Israeli Jewish counterparts feed each other’s mutual psychological needs that do not exceed imagined righteous self-perception. The recently discovered apartheid status in the entirety of historic Palestine by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International and the outlawing of six leading Palestinian civil society organizations by the Israeli government have been received by New Israel Fund with deafening silence amounting to complicity. Similar to most of Israeli Jewish society and the American Jewish community supportive of Israel, also New Israel Fund would like to make Israel a better place without engaging with the basic premise of the Palestine issue. Facing up to the imperatives of historical and contemporary memory as well as justice could undermine the rational for New Israel Fund’s existence which reinforces the Jewish supremacy in the country.[17]
Rising up from the destruction of their community upon the founding of Israel, the remaining Palestinians in Israel found themselves under a military rule (1948 – 1966) of a state that they did not speak its language and fearful of its objectives. An iron fist of control and domination contributed to producing a subdued generation that engaged in a similar mode of politics. While the Israeli Communist Party was one of the political forces that attempted to challenge Israeli policies at that time, it also de-politicized the remaining Palestinians by invoking to the dispossessed community exaggerated dozes of World War Two arguments, accepting Zionist patriotism, and underscoring the reactionary nature of Arab regimes.
Today, as in then, the space to engage in independent and genuine intellectual and political Palestinian activity in Israel remains extremely limited. It may arouse the suppressed within Israeli Jewish society and elsewhere. For the Israeli Jewish society, Israel’s righteousness as a state of the Jewish people or a Jewish and Democratic state, that are only semantically distinguishable, is morally attainable and historically secured. The academic procedure at Israel’s institutions of higher learning and its social fabric will raise substantial difficulties to advance any genuine historical research from a Palestinian perspective. The government’s policy will remain both blunt and elusive considering the Palestinians in Israel as a collective underclass.
Accepting Israel’s and its Israeli Jewish society’s basic assumptions about the nature of a polity in Palestine by Palestinian politicians in the Knesset is self-defeating, pragmatically confusing, and historically flawed. Bragging about such positions, as MK Mansour Abbas has been doing only recently, accelerates his political performance from unconvincing lobbying to sheer contemptable collaboration.[18] It is in this context that we should understand ignoring the increasing apartheid claim against the state of Israel by him and other Palestinian politicians. However, in the public sphere of this community the apartheid understanding of Israel not only reflects deep seated awareness, but was also welcomed as a belated but important acknowledgment of the reality on the ground.
Martha Minow and Noah Feldman, Harvard Law School, 2010
[1] In addition to its geographic and substantive vagueness, the term “West” in American political vocabulary tolerates a precise articulation of America’s nature. It is comprised of “We”, that is the American government, and “East” which refers to New York’s Wall Street. When adding the “Ern” America’s behavior at home and abroad becomes clearer, as the three letters denote “Ear” (American intelligence agencies) and “Ruin” which illuminates destruction. The amount of knowledge about America and its actual character in foreign affairs in the Arabic speaking world is embarrassing at best even for those who consider themselves critical of American foreign policy.
[2] Early American theological liberal enthusiasm about Zionism can be found in Kemper Fullerton, “Zionism”, 10(4) Harvard Theological Review, pp.313-335 (Oct. 1917). See also Alexander Marx, “Aims and Tasks of Jewish Historiography”, 26 American Jewish Historical Society, pp.11-32 (1918). Herzl and Zionism are not mentioned in this article, although the author discussed European historiography of Jewish communities.
[3] Anshel Pfeffer, “Tony Blair Just Endorsed Netanyahu’s World View”, Haaretz, 23 April 2014; “Tony Blair: I am a passionate believer in Israel”, The Jewish Chronicle, 24 November 2016.
[4] Rob Merrick, “Boris Johnson condemns International Criminal Court Palestine investigation as ‘attack on Israel’, The Independent, 14 April 2021.
[5] Keir Starmer, “Why my Labour party will always stand up for Israel”, The Jewish Chronicle, 17 November 2021; Mattha Busby, “Director Ken Loach says he has been expelled from Labour”, The Guardian, 14 August 2014; Ken Loach, “Democracy is dead in Keir Starmer’s Labour”, The Guardian, 28 September 2021.
[6] Kevin Rawlinson & Pippa Crerar, “Jewish newspapers claim Corbyn poses ‘existential threat’”, The Guardian, 26 July 2018.
[7] Evan Osnos, “In The Land of the Possible”, New Yorker, 15 December 2014.
[8] Dennis Ross & David Makovsky, “Be Strong and of Good Courage: How Israel’s Most Important Leaders Shaped Its Destiny”, (Public Affairs, 2019).
[9] Douglas Feith et al, Menachem Begin’s Zionist Legacy (Koren Publishers, 2015).
[10] American Jews supporters of Israel are often sensitive when the issue is discussed in conjunction with their American citizenship and patriotism.
[11] Eric Goldstein, “Say Israel is committing apartheid? It’s not a decision we reached lightly”, HRW, 27 April 2021. On 6 September 2010 George Soros’s Open Society Foundations announced that it will provide Human Rights Watch with 100$ million in funding for the next ten years. It was after a series of convictions for insider trading that Soros personally endured before French courts. Soros is known for his serious reluctance to discuss Israel’s human rights violations and his subtle support for the country given his sensitivity to arousing anti-Semitism sentiments. The current Executive Director of Human Rights Watch Kenneth Roth edited the organization’s 1990 report relating to Israel’s suppression of Palestinian uprising in the 1967 occupied territories. It was a foundational period that marked the beginning of a diffirent Israel for the human rights organization and its employees.
[12] See Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (University of Washington Press, 1996); Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Mariner Books, 2000); Gal Beckerman, “American Jews Face a Choice: Create Meaning or Fade Away”, New York Times, 12 November 2018.
[13] Amy Kaplan, Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance (Harvard University Press, 2018).
[14] Born to a Russian Jewish family, Agranat immigrated with his family from Chicago to Palestine in 1930. The second American Jewish turned Israeli Supreme Court Judge is Neal Hendel who was appointed in 2009.
[15] Pnina Lahav, The Only Woman in the Room: Golda Meir and Her Path to Power (Princeton University Press, 2022). See also Sarah Schmidt, “Hagiography in the Diaspora: Golda Meir and her Biographers” 92(2) American Jewish History, pp.157 – 188 (2004).
[16] Watching Minow and Feldman speak one is instantly reminded of the sitcom Rhoda (1974 – 1978) and Bruce Springsteen’s song They Brought Death to My Hometown (2012).
[17] As observers of Palestinian American academic work and activism, we are consistently amazed by the effort to advance Israeli sources to counter arguments in the United States. While the predicament of discussing Palestine in the United States is familiar, we don’t think that it could be redeemed by sharing arguments generated in Israel. See Dan Rabinowitz, “The Right to Refuse: Abject Theory and the Return of Palestinian Refugees”, 36(3) Critical Inquiry, pp.494 – 516 (2010); Ilan Pappe, “What is Left of the Israeli Left? (1948 – 2015)” 22(1) The Brown Journal of World Affairs, pp.351-367 (2015).
[18] We should note that the alliance between some Palestinian Arab feminists and Zionist Israeli Jewish feminists is also regressive considering the development that have affected feminism in the past 30 years or more.
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