'Kosherizing' the Nakba Truth, and more

Some remembrances of how a teenage Zionist in apartheid South Africa connected the dots, abandoned Zionism, and chose to fight apartheid instead

I so enjoyed kibbitzing with Matt and Daniel (in the video above) that I dug up some excerpts from my archives chronicling some of the moments and choices I referenced on the pocast:

I was no dignitary, but just as every politician visiting Israel is still taken first to the Holocaust museum at Yad Vashem, so do did my own official trip begin there in the winter of 1978 — as part of a Habonim leadership training program. The horrors memorialized at Yad Vashem pressed all the intended buttons in my 17-year-old mind, I realized a few months later, as a freshman student at the University of Cape Town, when I came very close to having the crap beaten out of me in a fight that I almost provoked when confronting Muslim students handing out leaflets marking Al-Quds day. I have had little appetite for physical confrontation since age 12, but I did not hestitate to grab the leaflets of a student named Ashraf, and throw them to the ground. He jumped at me, cursing. “You’re trying to deny my existence, you scum!” I screamed. “What about Dir Yassein?” he yelled, as he leaped towards me, restrained by his buddies as mine hustled me away, admonishing me for my provocative behavior. In truth, I hadn’t even recognized myself in that moment; it was all adrenal rage, a channeling of the “Never Again!” spirit implanted in me by what I had seen at Yad Vashem. There was no room in there to consider what might have motivated Ashraf, of course; in the face of genocide (which how the Yad Vashem programming had conditioned me to see any challenges to Israel) there was no room for debate.

Yet, Ashraf, had pressed a button. I knew exactly what he was getting at by citing Deir Yassein. In the “Socialist” Zionist movement of Habonim, we had long recognized the 1948 massacre of more than 100 Arab men, women and children in the village near Jerusalem as an ugly stain on the “purity of arms” myth in which Israeli violence was cloaked. We knew about Deir Yassein, but we could dissociate ourselves from it — or so we imagined — because it had been carried out not by the Haganah of Ben Gurion, but by an Irgun unit led by Menahem Begin. And as far as we ardent young Zionists of the left were concerned, Begin, who by then was Prime Minister of Israel, was nothing but a fascist thug and terrorist...

We in Habonim had no truck with the “fascists” of Betar, the youth wing of Begin’s movement that was now Israel’s ruling party. We stood for a “socialist Zionism” that would serve as a model to humankind of universal brotherhood and equality — thus the depths of our self-delusion. And the Betarim were the first to mock it. They, too, knew all about Deir Yassein. And they laughed at our revulsion over the massacre. “Do you think we’d ever have had a Jewish state if it wasn’t for actions like Deir Yassein?” they asked. Back then, of course, having been fed only the bubbemeis about the “miracle” in which most of the Arab population had voluntarily upped and left in 1948 to make way for an Arab invasion, I had no idea of the organized ethnic cleansing that was undertaken not only by the Irgun, but Ben Gurion’s Haganah.

(I will confess, though, that at that time, it took reading about those events from Jewish sources, like Uri Avnery, to make it emotionally safe for me to accept the truth; the conditioning had been designed to make me suspect Palestinian sources telling the same story as motivated by a Nazi-like desire to exterminate me and my kind.)

The work of Benny Morris and other Israeli historians in the late 80s made abundantly clear that Deir Yassein was no isolated aberration, demonstrating that the mainstream Haganah, at Ben Gurion’s behest, had conducted an organized and systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing to clear Palestinian Arabs off the land that would become the State of Israel. (As to the rhetorical question of the Betarim, actually, the prospects of a Jewish ethnic majority state were pretty slim under the 1947 UN Partition plan, because 45% of the population of what would have been the Jewish State was Palestinian Arab — after all, Palestinian Arabs were the majority of the total population of Palestine, and it was hard to partition a substantial Jewish majority based on the demographics facts of 1947. So, not only Begin, but also Ben Gurion, set out to change those demographic facts.

But our willingness, in Habonim, to acknowledge even what we deluded ourselves was the aberration at Deir Yassein, was unusual. We desperately need to believe a fanciful mythology about a “miracle” in which Israel overcame impossible odds (actually, the population size of neighboring countries meant nothing on the battlefield, where the armed forces Israel was able to field were more than a match for the armies sent by Arab countries) — and also a self-serving racist fable about Palestinians stupidly leaving their homes voluntarily after being instructed to do so by radio broadcasts. The reality that fellow Jews would load civilians onto trucks at gunpoint and force them out of their homes and into the oblivion of refugee life was unthinkable for Jewish supporters of Israel, because they could not recognize themselves in such actions. The idea that by its very creation, Israel had turned three quarters of a million Palestinians into refugees — and quickly legislated to deny them the right to return — is simply too distasteful to swallow. Better to imagine a bloodless birth, in keeping with what Benny Morris had called the “righteous victims” mythology.

The late Edward Said noted in 2000 that Israelis are more comfortable discussing the events of 1948 than are their most fervent American supporters. It’s worth quoting at length:

A month ago, the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz sent over a leading columnist of theirs, Ari Shavit, to spend several days talking with me; a good summary of this long conversation appeared as a question-and-answer interview in the August 18 issue of the newspaper’s supplement, basically uncut and uncensored. I voiced my views very candidly, with a major emphasis on right of return, the events of 1948, and Israel’s responsibility for all this. I was surprised that my views were presented just as I voiced them, without the slightest editorialising by Shavit, whose questions were always courteous and un-confrontational.

A week after the interview there was a response to it by Meron Benvenisti, ex-deputy mayor of Jerusalem under Teddy Kollek. It was disgustingly personal, full of insults and slander against me and my family. But he never denied that there was a Palestinian people, or that we were driven out in 1948. In fact he said, we conquered them, and why should we feel guilty? I responded to Benvenisti a week later in Ha’aretz: What I wrote was also published uncut. I reminded Israeli readers that Benvenisti was responsible for the destruction (and probably knew about the killing of several Palestinians) of Haret Al-Magharibah in 1967, in which several hundred Palestinians lost their homes to Israeli bulldozers. But I did not have to remind Benvenisti or Ha’aretz readers that as a people we existed and could at least debate our right of return. That was taken for granted.

Two points here. One is that the whole interview could not have appeared in any American paper, and certainly not in any Jewish-American journal. And if there had been an interview the questions to me would have been adversarial, hectoring, insulting, such as, why have you been involved in terrorism, why will you not recognise Israel, why was Hajj Amin a Nazi, and so on. Second, a right-wing Israeli Zionist like Benvenisti, no matter how much he may detest me or my views, would not deny that there is a Palestinian people which was forced to leave in 1948. An American Zionist for a long time would say that no conquest took place or, as Joan Peters alleged in a now-disappeared and all but forgotten 1984 book, From Time Immemorial (that won all the Jewish awards when it appeared here), there were no Palestinians with a life in Palestine before 1948.

Every Israeli will readily admit and knows perfectly well that all of Israel was once Palestine, that (as Moshe Dayan said openly in 1976) every Israeli town or village once had an Arab name. And Benvenisti says openly that “we” conquered, and so what? Why should we feel guilty about winning? American Zionist discourse is never straight out honest that way: it must always go round and talk about making the desert bloom, and Israeli democracy, etc., completely avoiding the essential facts about 1948, which every Israeli has actually lived. For the American, these are mostly fantasies, or myths, not realities. So removed from the actualities are American supporters of Israel, so caught in the contradictions of diasporic guilt (after all what does it mean to be a Zionist and not emigrate to Israel?) and triumphalism as the most successful and most powerful minority in the US, that what emerges is very often a frightening mixture of vicarious violence against Arabs and a deep fear and hatred of them, which is the result, unlike Israeli Jews, of not having any sustained direct contact with them.

For the American Zionist, therefore, Arabs are not real beings, but fantasies of nearly everything that can be demonised and despised, terrorism and anti-Semitism most specially. I recently received a letter from a former student of mine, who has had the benefit of the finest education available in the United States: he can still bring himself to ask me in all honesty and courtesy why as a Palestinian I let a Nazi like Hajj Amin still determine my political agenda. “Before Hajj Amin,” he argued, “Jerusalem wasn’t important to Arabs. Because he was so evil he made it an important issue for Arabs just in order to frustrate Zionist aspirations which always held Jerusalem to be important.” This is not the logic of someone who has lived with and knows something concrete about Arabs. It is that of a person who speaks an organised discourse and is driven by an ideology that regards Arabs only as negative functions, as the embodiment of violent anti-Semitic violent passions.

In 1979, on Yom Kippur, I read Uri Avnery’s “Israel Without Zionism,” written by an Israeli who was there, who fought in that war, and who bluntly revealed that the massacre at Deir Yassin was not an isolated incident…

The suppression of the history of the ethnic cleansing of 1948 within the Zionist movement — and its substitution by the frankly preposterous myth that had us believe that 700,000 people had turned themselves into refugees with nothing but the clothes on their backs in response to radio broadcasts telling them to do so — is premised on the idea that to admit and acknowledge what Israel had done to the Palestinians in 1948 would undermine the moral legitimacy of the State of Israel. But you have to wonder what moral legitimacy is established on the basis of falsehoods. Israelis know very well where the Palestinian refugee problem came from, and they also understand its significance in fueling the conflict. Why else, when asked what he would have done had he been born Palestinian, did Ehud Barak answer (during his 1999 election campaign), “join a fighting organization”? Barak, a bit of a weasel, really (he tried to suggest, in the wake of the Camp David debacle, that his sole purpose in negotiating with the Palestinians was to “unmask” the duplicity of Yasser Arafat), almost personifies Israel’s struggle with its bad conscience: Despite acknowledging the reason why Palestinian fight, he later insisted that Israel could never accept responsibility for having created the Palestinian refugee problem…

A Palestinian friend told me years later that Avnery was a good friend of his. Early in their relationship, Avnery suddenly realized that my friend was one of the Palestinian villagers that Avnery’s unit had forced onto trucks at gunpoint and driven out of their village near Jerusalem, forcing his family into West Bank exile. My friend poured him another drink and their friendship deepened, based on an honest reckoning with the past, with Zionism as it has been lived by its victims, and on a shared humanity.

***
There was no such thing as television in South Africa in 1967, so it was through grainy black-and-white photographs in the evening newspaper that I learned that Mirage jet fighters — the same delta-winged plane flown over my house with great, and occasionally sound barrier-breaking regularity by the South African Air Force to and from nearby Ysterplaat air base, although the ones in the paper bore the Star of David on their wing tips — had destroyed Egypt’s MiG squadrons on the ground. And with those images, and later ones of paratroopers in webbed helmets at the Wailing Wall, that I learned of the “miracle” — Israel, the tiny Jewish state whose map I knew from the blue and white money tin into which we would put a coin every Friday night after Shabbos dinner, had faced down the combined armies of its Arab neighbors, and had dispatched them within six days. And they had “liberated” our “holiest” site, an old stone wall in East Jerusalem pocked with pubic clumps of weeds, into whose cracks and crannies I was told that Jews could insert notes to be read by God — like a hotel message cubby. (Let’s just say that by the time I got there, at age 17, this bubbemeis about holy stones and a celestial post office only fueled my skepticism.) Not only that, they’d made Israel “safe” by “liberating” the whole of the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights. In six days! A miracle, like the creation story in Genesis!

Even at the age of six, my first year in big school, Israel’s victory had a profound effect on me. The previous year, I had heard my older step-brothers describe a Phys-Ed class being turned into a kind of playful pogrom, in some sort of fighting game that had pitched the Jewish boys against the rest. Being Jewish jocks, they had, according to my brothers’ account over dinner, given as good as they’d gotten, and it was a genuinely playful thing, besides — the sort of playful contest I recall from my older years that often saw a class divide on lines of “Boer against Brit,” i.e. Afrikaans kids against English-speakers, recalling the Boer War. But at six years old, the idea of a small group of Jewish boys being surrounded and set upon by their gentile classmates was absolutely terrifying.

But the news out of Israel in those mid-year months in 1967 was infinitely reassuring. Israel’s dramatic victory had proved that we, the prickly little state or the Jewish boys in their white Phys-ed (we called it PT) vests and shorts, were not to be fucked with. (I remember a similar effect a decade later, after the audacious raid on Entebbe had freed a group of passengers held on a hijacked Air France plane in Uganda — by then, my friends and I were literally accepting congratulations on Israel’s behalf.) And, I know anecdotally as much as anything else, that anyone ever called a “Jewboy” anywhere in the world walked a lot taller after the first week of June in 1967.

We were certainly granted the recognition on the playground that the epic victory demanded. The idea of Jews as being weaklings or afraid to fight was buried; white South Africa with its own narrative pitting it as an embattled minority in a sea of hostile neighbors embraced the Israeli victory as an inspiration. The word “Arab” became a pejorative, on the playground and in the classroom, signaling incompetence. “Don’t be an Arab!” I heard a teacher exclaim, more than once in response to a student’s failure to properly carry out his instructions. And, three years after the 1967 war, when the apartheid regime celebrated the tenth anniversary of South Africa’s formal independence from Britain, the ceremony in my school playground saw my Jewish friends and I, in our blue Habonim shirts and scarves and kakhi shorts, line up alongside the boy scouts and the Voortrekkers (the fascist Afrikaner youth movement) to salute the flag and proclaim our loyalty to the apartheid Republic. A regime rooted in vicious anti-Semitism and explicit admiration for the Nazis had now come to recognize Israel and its local supporters as a fighting ally in their epic struggle, couched in Cold War language, between a white minority and peoples of color.

Die Vaderland (The Fatherland), a newspaper of the apartheid regime, editorialized in 1969, on the occasion of a visit to South Africa by Ben Gurion, “When we, from our side, look realistically at the world situation, we know that Israel’s continued existence in the Middle East is also an essential element in our own security… If our Jewish citizens were to rally to the call of our distinguished visitor — to help build up Israel — their contribution would in essence be a contribution to South Africa’s security.”

South Africa and Israel became intimate allies in the years that followed the ’67 war, with unrepentant former Nazis such as Prime Minister B.J. Vorster welcomed to Israel to seal military deals that resulted in collaboration in the development of weapons ranging from aircraft and assault rifles to, allegedly, nuclear weapons. I remember well how some products of South Africa’s Jewish day-school system, where Hebrew was taught as well as the mandatory Afrikaans, finding themselvse with cushy posting during their compulsory military services — as Hebrew-Afrikaans translators for Israeli personnel working with the SADF. And that alliance raised the comfort level of the South African Jewish community in apartheid South Africa — while a handful of Jewish revolutionaries had made up a dominant share of the white ranks of the national liberation movement, they were largely disowned by the mainstream organized Jewish community, which had chosen the path of quiescence and collaboration with the regime. Their posture, and Israel’s, were now in perfect alignment.

Still, I could not conceive of Israel as in any way complicit in the crimes of South African apartheid, much less as engaged in its own forms of apartheid. After all, my connection to Israel, by the time I was 14, came largely through Habonim, a socialist-Zionist youth movement whose Zionism was infused with just the sort of left-wing universalism for which my own anti-apartheid subversive instincts yearned. My Habonim madrichim, bearded radicals from the University of Cape Town opened by mind to Marx and Marcuse, Bob Dylan and Yevtushenko, Woodie Guthrie and Erich Fromm. I already considered myself a socialist, and in my mind, Israel and Kibbutz were the absolute negation of all that was wrong with South Africa; as a stepping stone to universal brotherhood and equality as expressed in the idealism of early left-wing Zionist thinkers like Ber Borochov, A.D. Gordon and Martin Buber. It became clear to me soon enough (by the time I was 18, to be specific) that their Zionist idealism — and mine — had no connection to the reality of Israel, largely because it ignored the elephant in the room: the Arab population of Palestine.

The resistance Israel encountered from Palestinians pained me, of course — and I was especially uncomfortable about the fact that while the PLO was aligned with South Africa’s liberation movement, Israel was the most important military ally of the apartheid regime. There was not even the slightest inclination in the Zionist movement of my youth (I left because of my irreconcilable differences with the Zionist project in early 1980) to seek to understand why the other side might be fighting; that would be too subversive. (As, indeed, it soon was for me, and also cleary always had been for many Israelis: In 1999, during his successful campaign for prime minister, Ehud Barak was asked in a live TV interview what he’d have done if he’d been born Palestinian. He answered: “Join a fighting organization.” He tried to backtrack later, but in that moment of candor he’d revealed the most profound truth of the conflict — that Israelis, were they to find themselves in the situation of the Palestinians, would also have taken up arms.

My doubts had grown during a 1978/9 visit to Israel, when I heard the elders of Habonim now settled on Kibbutz Yizreel issue prescient warnings of the dangers lurking in the settlement movement that had begun in earnest following Likud’s victory a year earlier. Encouraged by a certain Ariel Sharon, Israel was fast grabbing some of the best land in the West Bank and building settlements, precisely to make it impossible to give back this land in any peace deal. Israel couldn’t afford to annex the West Bank and Gaza, they said, because that would add 4 million Palestinians to the population of Palestinian citizens of Israel, meaning the end of a Jewish majority. So by building a permanent presence to claim control over the West Bank but deny its people the rights of citizenship, they warned, Likud would turn Israel into an apartheid state. (That it already was one was an insight that only came later.)

Nor could I avoid the whiff of racial thinking all too familiar from South African official discourse when the leaders of our own movement urged us to move to a new kibbutz, Tuval, which was being built from scratch in the Gallillee, as part of an internal settlement policy to entrench a Jewish presence in a region where the birth-rate among Israeli-Arabs threatened its Jewish demographic majority .

To be sure, the Zionist ideology that I imbibed as a teenager in Habonim in South Africa in the 1970s came wrapped in a utopian-socialist package, and it was the bearded aspirant kibbutzniks of the movement’s older ranks that first introduced me to the dialectic. Our Israeli shaliach (emissary) from Kibbutz Ein Gedi on the dead sea taught me the words to the Internationale in Hebrew – all I can remember is “Kum hitnaera ka olam…” In Habonim, the obvious contradiction between the inherently cosmopolitan and universalist nature of socialism and the narrow nationalism of the Zionist project was reconciled with the notion that the Zionist dream of a Jewish state was but a stepping stone to universal socialism. (Nobody asked how the Palestinians fitted in with this version of “universal socialism.”) And when I began to demur and suggest that our values may be better applied to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, the shaliach called me a “Bundist” (a reference to the Yiddisher Arbeiter Bund, a Jewish socialist organization affiliated with the Second International that opposed Zionism and advocated Jewish emancipation via involvement in the broader socialist struggles of Europe – and by the way, the Bund was the largest political organization among the Jews of Eastern Europe before the Holocaust; the Zionist movement had attracted only a small minority).

In South Africa, of course, the liberation movement led by the ANC offered an increasingly compelling alternative that seemed to far better realize the ethical impulses that had first inspired me in Habonim. It was a movement premised on the idea that all South Africans, black and white, shared a common humanity that was denied by apartheid. Whites therefore were called on not simply to reject white domination, but also to join the liberation struggle alongside their black compatriots. And the fact that so many of the white South Africans who had earned places of honor in that struggle were Jewish certainly strengthened its appeal as a vehicle to express even my own particular version of Jewishness. Israel may have been the apartheid regime’s most important friend, but when Nelson Mandela was tried in 1964, the three white men among his co-accused were all Jewish. The exiled leadership of the ANC included the likes of Joe Slovo, Ruth First, Ronnie Kassrils, Rusty Bernstein, Jack Simons, Ray Alexander and many, many more.

Years later, following Slovo’s death, his comrades met to discuss the epitaph for his tombstone. Their first choice (which didn’t fly once it was determined that the term was inscrutable to rank-and-file Zulu- or Xhosa-speaking activists) was “Mensch.”

(More to come on all of this!)