Opening Address
The International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network is very proud to be the major sponsor of this event. IJAN is a network of anti-Zionist Jews with chapters in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, the Twin Cities, and Atlanta. Chapters are growing in New Orleans, Washington D.C. and New York. Internationally, we have chapters in France, Spain, Switzerland, England, and support and work building in Argentina, Scotland and Ireland, The Netherlands, Germany, Austria and Belgium, in 48. We do our work as part of the movement in solidarity with the struggle for Palestinian self-determination and also as people who have an independent case against Zionism.
While material circumstances make Israel the most difficult place for IJAN to organize, we have been most tentative about organizing in the United States – despite the fact that the U.S. is arguably the most important place to organize, outside of Israel. The United States, historically, has been Israel’s most important ally. The U.S., as we all know, has consistently provided Israel with political, economic and military support that makes its ongoing colonization of Palestine operable. Without a major swing in the direction of public opinion in this country, the government has no incentive to hold Israel accountable for its actions. And, of course, another crucial reason to build AZJ discourse and organizing here is that the United States has the largest concentration of Jews in the world outside of Israel.
These are three logical, and fairly obvious reasons to organize in the U.S. However, the U.S. is also one of the most difficult places to organize. It’s difficult because we are living inside of the most powerful military and political force in the world. It’s difficult because the movement in this country has been systematically destroyed for four decades, leaving a lack of continuity in struggle. It’s difficult because many of us function in an economic and political climate that deprives us of the resources that make the work more possible.
And yet, here we are. IJAN put out a call, and people from around the country, many of them young people, who wanted to organize as anti-Zionist Jews, came together to make this happen. There are people involved from Chicago, the Twin Cities, Maine, Atlanta, New Orleans, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. There have been a core group of about 30 people working to make this event happen for months. Why? Why are people so invested? Why does it matter?
Just by being in this room together, we’ve already accomplished something; this conference has been announced in the local mainstream Jewish media, every national Jewish organization knows that we are here, and the word is out in Palestine, in the UK and Europe and articles about it have already been translated into French and Spanish. We are here three days after the close of the 36th Congress of the WZO held in Jerusalem. But for the first time in over 100 years, the gathering of this institution founded to institutionalize support for Israeli state building did not go uncontested. We have successfully communicated – at least to those that portend to speak for all Jews – that there is no unified Jewish community or people that Zionism professes and that the State of Israel represents. Many Israeli institutions were already in place by the time Palestinian land was taken by force. This is a level of organization that suggests that any challenge to it will need to be organized, and we need to organize to be able to challenge the impact of these organizations.
Why does it matter? It matters to our humanity. Not in a philosophical sense, but in a real sense. It goes against the grain of human nature to be idle when life and well-being are unnecessarily truncated or diminished. It matters for the same reason that the destruction and death and division in Iraq matter. In addition to more than a million human lives unnecessarily lost there, one of the oldest civilizations on the planet has become a war zone; and now much of that gift of our collective history sits in rubble at a US soldier’s feet.
It matters because people lose lives and the human family loses entire peoples. We don’t want to lose the Palestinian people. We don’t want to lose any people. We don’t even want to lose the languages and meaningful ways of our peoples. Israel takes lives as a means of holding on to the power it wields, and Zionism usurps language, accent, culture, place, and re-writes history. Israel mostly takes Palestinian lives, but it doesn’t mind taking Turkish, British or American lives if it needs to. And Zionism overwrites Palestinian presence on the land, and also Jewish histories, languages, cultures.
It matters because after 1000 years of persecution and dislocation in Europe, after being specifically targeted with the aim of annihilation, a terrible thing happened. That trauma resolved itself in trauma. That violence resolved itself in violence. The creation of a colonial oppressive state that threatens the ethnic cleansing of a people as an outcome of Jewish history is not a success. A success is to find a way to be in the world that shows an understanding of what that history taught us. To reproduce persecution and dislocation is a sorrowful defeat. For those individuals, for those that share that history, and for all those that bear the brunt of such awful violence on a daily basis in its myriad forms.
It matters because we don’t want a homeland for a people without a home; we want to live in the world with our fellow human beings in dignity and respect. Our history of rootlessness is ours, and we don’t want it erased, washed over with blood and made unavailable to us.
It matters because I received a call from inside of Israel a couple of days ago from one of the founders of the Israeli Black Panthers, an organization of Mizrahi Jews inspired by the civil rights movement here in this country to fight against the racism of both the Israeli occupation of Palestine and between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews. He has been doing this work for a long time, and he called to tell me that now is the time. The Zionist fear inside of Israel is unprecedented, and the time for public opinion in the United States to impact what is possible is now.
Its actually looking more and more like Israeli violence cannot go on interminably, and that’s what makes coming together now so important and inspiring.
The 2010 U.S. Assembly of Jews: Confronting Racism and Israeli Apartheid is not only a conference: we are here together marking a moment in history, naming a departure from, the history of the last 100 years. We are carving out spaces to challenge the singularity of Jewish belief and identity that Zionism has so successfully imposed. We are carving out space in public opinion to reject the anti-Semitic premises Zionism promotes that Jews will only ever be safe if we are alone, separate, and isolated from our fellow human beings. We are carving out space to say that the spectrum of Jewish politics does not range only from the Zionist left to the Zionist right; there are those of us who refuse to justify the colonization of a land, full of people, for the purposes of having access to state power under the pretense that this violence will make us safe. We are carving out space in the popular movements of our time for Jews to participate fully, and as an organized force, the struggles for justice, equality, dignity, and the ability to live without State violence.
Accountability of Israeli, US government and international Zionist support for Israel will not come from a shift in US policy but through shifting American public opinion and debate, fomenting popular movement, using international and US legal sanctions and supporting the Palestinian call for BDS. What’s exciting about being here with you all is that we have an opportunity for making headway on all of these fronts. We will hopefully be able to good work this weekend to forward BDS and other campaigns aimed at holding Israel accountable. In terms of shifting American public opinion and debate, this Assembly reflects a significant departure from Zionism that has been building since the second Palestinian intifada broke the stranglehold of the Oslo accords. In popular discourse, the term ‘anti-Zionism’ is still used to stigmatize, but now the word is not shunned from our vocabulary; its addition to the lexicon is a significant step forward.
Our commitment is first and foremost to Palestine solidarity. And there are Jewish claims against Zionism. Still barely exposed in European Jewish discourse, or outside of Israel more broadly, is the extensive displacement and alienation of Mizrahi Jews (Jews of African and Asian descent) that resulted from Israeli state building. In some cases the association with Israel as a Jewish state created divisions in Arab states that were not there previously. In other cases, Israel actively fomented mass movement of Arab Jews to Israel, to populate the country with Jews and create a Jewish-based economy. Emanating from the same racist orientation that would allow the colonizing of a land in the first place, Arab Jews have largely been torn from their own histories, languages, traditions and cultures and marginalized within Israeli society.
Zionism also perpetuates Jewish exceptionalism and tells a version of Jewish history that is disconnected – not only from the histories Jewish Arab peoples – but from the history and experiences of all people. By exceptionalizing the Nazi genocide, European Jews are also set apart from the victims and survivors of that and other genocides instead of being united with them.
As we carve out spaces where this information becomes more available, we also hope to give them shape – to deepen, clarify and explore an anti-Zionist Jewish politic and discourse premised on commitments to challenge racism, colonialism and imperialism. We know some things about the shape of this politic already that can serve as guideposts as we work. One of the principle reasons why there has been a need to carve this space at all is the need for a politics that distinguishes itself from “soft”, “liberal” or “left” forms of Zionism for which peace is implemented as a strategy for maintaining an exclusive Jewish state. Peace for us is not a strategy; normalizing unequal relations of power does not make them go away. On the contrary, it is when oppression and occupation stop that the conditions are created for resolution and, then, a society premised on equanimity. Zionists profess that this is backwards because they start with the assumption that there must be an exclusive Jewish state, and therefore they act in self-defense as the eternal Jewish victim. As long as they start with the assumption that an undemocratic, exclusive state, built on someone else’s land through expulsion and force, is the starting point, peace will be impossible. It is only through acknowledgement of this wrongdoing, and stopping the ongoing process of colonization that peace becomes possible.
Another important distinguishing factor of the anti-Zionist politic we have come to explore and build is that it is not racist or anti-Semitic. There are some forms of anti-Zionism, including Jewish forms of anti-Zionism that are racist and anti-Semitic. There is no need to, or benefit in, denying 1000 years of Jewish persecution and dislocation in Europe in order to challenge the State of Israel. Likewise denying the Nazi genocide of Jews, feeding anti-Semitic images of global power and control or conspiracy are all ultimately tinged with the same racism that the Palestinian people are struggling against. We claim our position as Jews in this struggle because we stand in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for self-determination from a specific location in which we as Jews also have our independent claims against Zionism.
And then there is the question of HOW we can do the work with the most clarity and integrity. Our collective presence in this room, the people here tonight, reflects the movement we are a part of and the world we wish to live in. This is not an exclusively Jewish space, but a space created so that Jews may be in conversation with each other and all who are interested in supporting the organizing of anti-Zionist Jews as part of the broader Palestine solidarity movement and anti-racist, anti-imperialist organizing in the United States. That’s a good first step toward; a politic of solidarity and joint struggle cannot be developed in isolation. And hopefully we deserve the trust that is extended to us when people come to join a largely white, European group to discuss their own role in solidarity and in supporting the building of movement.
This is not a ‘dialogue’ to promote ‘peace’. This is an exchange of trust between those with varying access to power and privilege who have voiced and shown their commitments to justice and resolution. Palestinians have an investment in Jews really understanding what is needed in order for their contributions to be the most useful. When Jews aren’t clear — either about their own confrontation of Zionism, or about the precedence of the demands of the Palestinian grassroots struggle — Jewish participation threatens to muddle rather than clarify and strengthen the Palestine solidarity movement. We must be cautious to not presume that our commitment and investment in overcoming Zionism suggest “equality” in the struggle; overstepping our actual role in the movement undermines Palestinian leadership in their own struggle, thus reinforcing the centralization of Jewish voices that Zionism promotes and racism suggests. Likewise, equating the need for Palestinian liberation and the safety with safety of most Jews in contemporary Western countries is inaccurate.
Our point of reference is always those most impacted by Zionism. Zionism has been created in such a way as to be a political danger to Arab people and Islam, thereby making of Arabs and Muslims who understand this danger, adherents to an anti-Zionist politic. Likewise, many of the people here in this room understand the dangers Zionist ideology and practice pose to Jewish people and to Judaism, thereby drawing them toward an anti-Zionist politic.
This is perhaps one of the most contested political battles of our time, and this is not a safe space: this is a political and highly contested space. Over the weekend there may very well be people who are angry, offended and afraid that there be a consolidation of AZ politics – both generally and as a force in the United States. It may be that those people are also here, sitting here with us. Some of them may be here to listen and watch; some of them may be here to divide and disrupt. The Assembly organizers have been completely explicit about for whom this gathering is intended, our goals for gathering. I urge everyone to spend a few minutes tonight to read your program book and familiarize yourself with the assumptions and expectations that will guide our conduct in the time we are spending together. If anyone finds themselves unable to follow this guide, they will have more free time available to spend somewhere else.
There are many people here who have joined us this weekend who are exploring anti-Zionist politics. It is important, in order to meet our goals for the Assembly, and as a political act, that we preserve this space for AZists to be in discussion with each other. I say this explicitly because we can assume that it won’t be easy. On the contrary, it is our political task to protect it.
Its important for us to remember that Jewish anti-Zionism is not an identity, but a politic to develop and actualize and a location from which to challenge Zionism. It is a very concrete reminder of the privilege that many of us in the room have, that we might think that coming together as AZJ would mean coming to a safe space. It is a reminder of our privilege that a threat to our safety as AZJ perhaps has never come up until we have attempted to gather in a national forum. For the Palestinian people who challenge Zionism, in Palestine, that threat is a part of every waking moment and during the sleeping hours.
It is the potential strength of organizing together as anti-Zionist Jews that has mobilized the Jewish Community Relations Council, the Anti-Defamation League and American Jewish Committee to coordinate a response to this Assembly from organizations local to national and from Ameinu to ZOA. Our opposition is strong and real, and is inevitably present in the room with us today. It will make its presence known in various forms in our workshops and major sessions, at the door, across the street, at the USSF, and as we continue with our daily organizing in the places we live and work.
That is the fight, in concrete forms, and the context in which we do our work together here. This pressure will only continue to escalate in the near term as Israel holds firmly onto the vestiges of power and control that are unsustainable. And in turn, we are building together a politic and discourse, ways of organizing, and forms of activism to support the end of the ongoing colonization of Palestine in the near term, and the waning influence of Zionism, direct or indirect, on us all. We have a special opportunity to do this in person with each other this weekend. Welcome again to the 2010 U.S. Assembly of Jews.