Recovering a Liberating Vision of Jewish Self-Determination in an Age of Entrenched Apartheid

This week in North Philly Notes, Jonathan Graubart, author of Jewish Self-Determination beyond Zionism, reflects on why he no longer identifies as “pro-Israel.”

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In the early 1990s, I worked at Tikkun Magazine, then the leading liberal-left American Jewish journal. As a young American Jew whose views on Israel had recently become much more critical, I was especially attracted to a forum that challenged Israel’s occupation from an alternative “pro-Israel” perspective. Under Michael Lerner’s leadership, Tikkun provided a much-needed challenge to the American Jewish establishment on Jewish moral responsibility and ethics. I proudly aligned my critical scrutiny with a vision invested in the long-term welfare of Israel and the Jewish people at large. We were the bona fide pro-Israel Jews, while groups such as AIPAC and the ADL, who reflexively defended Israeli actions, were the false champions.

Up through the first part of the 2000s, I faithfully proclaimed my pro-Israel sentiments even as I raised more severe challenges. But like a growing number of Jews committed to justice and solidarity with the oppressed, I have stopped calling myself pro-Israel or Zionist. To begin with, the appeal to an alternative pro-Israel program is decidedly inadequate for confronting Israel’s depravities over the past two decades. As confirmed by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and B’Tselem, Israel is an apartheid state where Jewish supremacy prevails in both the occupied territories and in Israel proper. It now has a Kahanist, Itamar Ben-Gvir, as national security minister, and Bezalel Smotrich, with links to Jewish terrorists, as finance minister, whose mandate extends to the occupied territories. Ben-Gvir opened his tenure by ordering a ban on public displays of the Palestinian flag and approving harsher crackdowns of protests. Not to be outdone, Smotrich opined that the West Bank town of Huwara should be “wiped out” after it had just been subjected to settler violence. These trends confirm the haunting assessment in 2016 by the recently departed Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell:

We are at the height of an erosion process of the liberal values in which our society is based. Those who regard liberal values as a danger to the nation, the homeland and the Jewish state are the ones currently in power. They are striving to delegitimize the left and anyone who does not hold the view that conquering the land and settling it through the use of force are the fundamental foundations of Zion.

Furthermore, unlike Sternhell or Peter Beinart, I find no solace in Israel’s foundational principles. As I review in my book Jewish Self-Determination Beyond Zionism, any liberal values were dwarfed by a commitment to converting a territory that had long been overwhelmingly Arab to a hegemonic Jewish state where the Arab presence was inherently suspect. This is not to say that Israel’s current status inevitably followed from its foundation. Suffice it to note that Jewish supremacy has reigned though all of Israel’s political shifts since 1948. Thus, it is not clear what is the foundation for an alternative pro-Israel program. Fittingly, Tikkun has been supplanted by Jewish Currents as the preeminent critical American Jewish journal, which makes no pretense to providing an alternative Zionist or pro-Israel perspective.

Nevertheless, I have not joined the growing ranks of anti-Zionist Jewish dissenters for two reasons. First, neither the vast majority of Israeli Jews nor Jews elsewhere are about to renounce some form of Jewish self-determination in the territory of Israel-Palestine. Second, although the prevailing Zionist wing demanded Jewish supremacy, the umbrella vision contained appealing dimensions of liberation, egalitarianism, and a just coexistence with Palestinians. Indeed, as Noam Chomsky once remarked, Zionism attracted many Jews who aspired to a transformed Jewish society that would be part of a broader global revolution. Crucially the spirit of an alternative, solidarity-based self-determination still inspires Jewish dissenters. Hence, I regard it as urgent to develop a vision that enables self-determination to flourish for both Jews and Palestinians while categorically breaking from the imperialist and hegemonic nationalist order that has shaped the land since the 1917 Balfour Declaration.

My book reflects my effort to advance such a transformation. I recover the dissenting pre-state Zionist Jewish voices, which included Judah Magnes (a prominent American rabbi and the first chancellor of Hebrew University), Martin Buber, and Hannah Arendt. They looked to Palestine as a base for invigorating Jewish life globally, reviving Hebrew as a spoken language and developing community institutions and practices informed by the best of Jewish and outside values and traditions. In contrast to the mainstream Zionist movement, the dissenters were anti-imperialist and urged an accommodation with the indigenous Arabs. They opposed a hegemonic Jewish state because it would displace Palestinians and elevate realpolitik and state interests over Jewish renewal and social justice. Their alternative was a binational political arrangement, which featured autonomous development for each community, collective equality and shared spaces of governance and community interactions. I adapt this pre-state vision in conversation with a series of post-1967 critical voices, including Noam Chomsky, Judith Butler, Peter Beinart, and Edward Said to develop a new vision of Jewish self-determination devoted to a hybrid Jewish-universal liberation, a full reckoning of Israel’s depredations, and a just and egalitarian coexistence with Palestinians.

Because the terms “pro-Israel” and “Zionism” have become so attached to a hegemonic and unrepentant set of values, I am not seeking to rescue them. For that reason, I have titled my book Jewish Self-Determination Beyond Zionism. It is neither “pro” nor “anti” Israel but a plea for a new and inclusive program of Jewish self-determination whereby the fate of the Jewish people is attached to that of Palestinians in particular and of the global community more broadly. It is my hope that a new generation of what Arendt called “conscious pariahs,” some of whom have taken part in Israel’s ongoing and unprecedented wave of mass protests, will embrace such a program.

What Representations of Disability Add to Postcolonial Literature

This week in North Philly Notes, Christopher Krentz, author of Elusive Kinship: Disability and Human Rights in Postcolonial Literature, writes about the significance and utility of disabled characters in novels from the Global South.

About two decades ago, the scholar Ato Quayson noted that postcolonial literature is full of disabled characters, an intriguing insight that sent me searching for examples. Among those I quickly found:

• In Chinua Achebe’s classic novel about Nigeria, Things Fall Apart (1958), the Igbo clan’s formidable war medicine is associated with a one-legged woman;
• A partially deaf, cracking, impaired character narrates Salman Rushdie’s Booker-Prize-winning Midnight’s Children (1981); incredibly, he connects telepathically with other children born in the first hour of India’s independence;
• Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K (1983) focuses on a cognitively disabled man of color who traverses through a war-torn South Africa and is beset by hunger;
• Edwidge Danticat’s story “Caroline’s Wedding,” from her collection Krik? Krak! (1996) tells of a beloved Haitian-American sister in New York City who has a missing forearm;
• Anita Desai’s Fasting, Feasting (1999) recounts how an ungainly disabled daughter in small-town India is largely kept out of sight by her upper-middle-class family;
• In Chris Abani’s short novel Song for Night (2007), the narrator is a boy soldier in a war in Nigeria who has had his vocal cords severed and communicates with others through an improvised sign language;
• The narrator of Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007) is an exuberant boy in India who has a bent spine and goes around on all fours as a result of a chemical plant disaster;
• The story in Petina Gappah’s The Book of Memory (2015) is related by an albino woman in Zimbabwe who encounters both intense stigma rooted in traditional metaphysical beliefs and unexpected kindness.

And there are so many more examples! 

The examples made me realize that, far from being incidental, disabled characters are integral to the energy and vitality of literature in English from the Global South. These are great stories, and part of their greatness is how writers repeatedly deploy disability in creative, original ways. Through figures of disability, authors make any number of pressing topics more vivid, including such issues as the effects of colonialism and apartheid, global capitalism, racism and sexism, war, and environmental disaster. 

Furthermore, even at their most fantastic, such representations relate to the more than half a billion disabled people who live in the Global South, often in precarious circumstances. Disabled character can be both realistic and metaphorical.

In 2006, a few years after Quayson’s observation, the United Nations adopted its first human rights treaty of the twenty-first century: the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). I began to wonder if the prominence of disability in postcolonial literature should be linked to the gradual and global emergence of rights for disabled people—especially since both happened concurrently in the last half century or so. The representation of disabled people in this literature, I concluded, both directed and reflected this change in how disabled people are seen. 

In the last fifteen years, a new interdisciplinary field, the study of human rights and literature, has drawn connections and examined relations between fiction and human rights issues. As Joseph Slaughter puts it in Human Rights Inc., fiction—especially the bildungsroman in his case—is uniquely about rights as it typically serves to portray the relationship of an individual to society. Scholars in the field have used literature to explore the paradoxes surrounding human rights. Most of all, they show that literature can serve as a valuable form of witnessing human rights violations, making such issues more personal to readers in different times and places and compelling them to care. The first step in achieving rights, advocates realized back in the 1960s, is not laws or treaties but rather winning the public’s imagination.

While the study of human rights and literature has frequently dealt with postcolonial literature, it has not had much to say about disability. I hope Elusive Kinship can begin to fill that lacuna, enhancing our appreciation of literature in English from the Global South and nudging us toward making the world more hospitable for everyone.