This wave of activity has continued after the supposed ceasefire, with demonstrations and direct actions from New York to Los Angeles, Paris, Jaffa, and Tel Aviv. Most noteworthy has been a coming out of sorts of an increasingly large and vocal segment of the Jewish world that is not only opposed to the Israeli government's wars and military occupations, but critical of Zionism itself. Blockades of the Israeli consulates in Los Angeles and San Francisco were undertaken in part by members of the recently launched International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network. The occupation of the Toronto consulate was carried out by Jewish Women for Gaza, including members of the Canadian anti-Zionist Not In Our Name network.
A seven-hundredperson demonstration in New York City was organized by Jews Say No, an ad hoc group of Jewish activists, many of them longstanding critics of Zionism. The London diasporist group Jewdas used a hoax e-mail to cancel a pro-war rally called by the Board of Deputies of British Jews and received a flood of support. And the Israeli antinationalist direct action group, Anarchists Against the Wall, blockaded an Israeli Air Force base in Tel Aviv. Almost all of the most visible public events showing Jewish opposition to the latest escalation in the war on Gaza were organized and carried out largely by non- and anti-Zionist Jews (as well as those who oppose Zionism but prefer not to define their politics in relation to it).
This is no coincidence. The eight years of the current intifada have also seen the growth of the global Palestine solidarity movement and its current boycott/divestment/sanctions strategy.
At the same time Jewish criticism of Zionism has grown more widespread and vocal than at any time since Israel's founding in 1948, despite the unqualified backing the U.S. government has offered Israel since 1967. That support has been explained by Israel's advocates and defenders, as well as by Washington, as the result of the overwhelming support of U.S. Jewish communities for Israel. This is, of course, patently untrue.
As many analysts have pointed out - most recently Mearsheimer and Walt in their much-attacked The Israel Lobby & U.S. Foreign Policy - U.S. Jewish communities play a rather marginal role in fostering U.S. government support for Israel. Far more significant are the arms industry, which U.S. aid to Israel subsidizes; the oil industry, which sees Israel as a balance to the regional power of oil-rich Arab states; the Christian right, which believes Jewish rule over all of biblical Israel is a prerequisite for the Second Coming; and anti-Arab/anti-Muslim racism and xenophobia, particularly after the September 11, 2001, attacks and the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Where Jewish influence is significant - in the lobbying efforts of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, for instance it is the influence of a small number of wealthy, right-wing individuals whose politics in no way reflect U.S. Jewish public opinion, even as it is reflected in data collected by conservative pollsters.
The rhetoric of U.S. support for Israel as a response to U.S. Jewish interests and desires has, however, become less and less convincing over time. The recent rise to visibility of Jewish critiques of Zionism has taken place in a context of rising expression and acceptance of criticism of Israel within U.S. Jewish communities.
It's very hard to gauge this in a definitive way, but stories like the following, all of which I've heard since the beginning of the most recent Israeli attacks on Gaza, have not been common at any earlier time during the decade I've spent working intensively in the Jewish side of the Palestinian solidarity movement:
* The child of an educator at a Jewish private school refuses to join their family and school at a pro-war rally.
* A rabbi's wife resigns from all congregational activity after an event on nonviolence - unrelated to Palestine or Israel - is canceled by the synagogue's board.
* A Hillel officer at Columbia University publishes an essay on the contradiction between her desire to appear legitimately progressive and her job "selling" "under duress" (her words) the Birthright Israel program.
One indication of the extent of these critiques is a poll commissioned by J Street, the allegedly liberal Zionist lobby group, which finds U.S. Jews - even with a disproportionately old, wealthy, and religiously affiliated sample - strongly opposed to collective punishment and settlements, hostile to the Israeli electoral right wing, and supportive of a Fatah-Hamas unity government as a "partner for peace."
This context of comparative openness to criticism of Israel is in large part the result of years of organizing, agitation, and education by groups and networks like Jews Against the Occupation/NYC, Jewish Voices for Peace (nationwide), Jews for Peace in Palestine and Israel (Washington, DC), Jews for a Free Palestine (Bay Area), and No Time to Celebrate (nationwide), all of which have broken with the orthodoxy of the "pro-Israel, pro-peace" position to focus on justice for Palestinians.
The Zionist "pro-peace" groups, like Meretz USA, Americans for Peace Now, Tikkun, the Shalom Center, and Brit Tzedek v'Shalom, have been active primarily on paper since 2000 or as conveners of conferences with high registration fees. The "pro-justice" groups, by contrast, have been able to maintain a growing presence on the street and in the media over the nine years of the current intifada. Their structural critiques of Israeli government actions and the Zionist project have opened up space for these moderate criticisms to be spoken openly, as they were not five or ten years ago.
So why now? Why have these more "radical" voices come to the fore so strongly this winter? I believe it is because of shifts in the Palestine solidarity movement as well as in the larger political landscape of the left, and changes in Jewish thinking around identity and politics.
One source is a set of developments within the Palestine solidarity movement which have pushed the movement as a whole toward a structural analysis centered on Zionism. The outbreak of the 2000 intifada sparked a much wider awareness on the left (and beyond) of both the 1967 Occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem and the realities of the Israeli government's war on Palestinians.
A closer examination of the Oslo Accords and their role as cover for further land theft and as a means of co-optation of parts of the Palestinian leadership soon led to a shift of emphasis within the movement away from a return to the status quo of 1999. Increasing familiarity with the day-to-day experience of Palestinians (under occupation, inside Israel's 1948 boundaries, and in the diaspora) showed organizers how many elements of die present situation were directly connected, not to the war of 1967, but to that of 1948 (for example, a majority of Palestinians, including a majority of those in the Occupied Territories, are refugees from the Nakba, "catastrophe," as the 1947-48 ethnic cleansing of Palestine is known in Arabic), or to the pre-state Zionist colonization effort (for example, the role of the Keren Kayemet L'Israel/Jewish National Fund as an agent of displacement and land theft).
As a result, by the end of 2008, a significant part of the solidarity movement began to focus its attention on Zionism as such, and shape its strategy accordingly. This has taken the form of support for Palestinian civil society's call for a combined boycott/divestment/sanctions strategy, and in a reconsideration (and often rejection) of the partition ("twostate") model for a long-term solution. These shifts have involved the Jewish participants in Palestine solidarity work no less than anyone else, and have in some cases been driven or supported by their analyses of Zionism as a colonial movement (for a recent example, see Nava EtShalom and Matthew N. Lyons's 2008 essay "'Bring on the bulldozers and let's plant trees': The Problems of Labor Zionism," http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/%7Elyonsm/bulldozers.html) .
Another key element in the newly visible surge in Jewish critiques of Zionism, though one that's rarely remarked on in the liberal or progressive press, is the pivotal role that feminist and queer movements and their analyses have played in its development.
This influence is most obvious in the prominence in Jewish (and non-Jewish) Palestine solidarity organizing of groups like Women in Black; Kvisa Shchora (an Israeli queer radical group, known for their eye-catching "No Pride in the Occupation" actions); New Profile (the feminist organization largely responsible for the visibility and growth of the high school conscription resistance movement in Israel); Aswat: Palestinian Gay Women; and the International Women's Peace Service's accompaniment project in the West Bank.
All of these projects bring to the movement an orientation toward structural analysis, a core antinationalist and antirnilitarist position, and an eye to the ways that racial, economic, national, gendered, and sexual structures of power intersect and often support each other. Their sophisticated examinations of Israeli nationalism and Zionism have had an influence beyond their direct contact with other organizations.
