How Israeli Liberal Voices Police Criticism of Zionism

Raja Shehadeh – perhaps the greatest living Palestinian writer – does not need my words here to defend himself: his writing, his voice, speak for him better than I ever could. But the recently published column by prominent Israeli journalist Nadav Eyal about Shehadeh deserves examination, not because of what it tries to say about Shehadeh, but because of what it tells us about how Israeli liberal voices try to police criticism of Israeli policies – and of Zionism.

Shehadeh was recently interviewed for The New York Times podcast, The Interview. A child of Palestinian refugees from Jaffa, Shehadeh recounts how he would gaze from afar – from the hills of Ramallah, where his family was exiled – at the twinkling lights of Tel Aviv, mistakenly thinking he was looking at the lost coastal lights of Yaffa. This humanistic gaze, soaring above the hills, seeing through the borders carving up this land, is one of the hallmarks of Shehadeh’s writing.

In a segment of the interview dealing with the possibility of coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians – a coexistence Shehadeh deems not only possible but essential – he says: “there were times in Palestine when the Jews and the Arabs lived together amicably and peacefully, and they were important times.” 

The interviewer responds that a prevailing perception is “of the conflict as being thousands of years old, when the reality is it’s a little over 100 years old. And there’s a long history of what you just described.” Shehadeh replies: “Palestine has always been a place for three religions, and the three religions lived side by side and enriched life… And now one religion is trying to dominate and say it’s the only one that is going to be allowed in that land, and that’s perverse.” The interviewer responds: “What you’re describing is Zionism” and asks Shehadeh to share his personal experience dealing with “Zionism as a political project.”

The above-quoted exchange – fair-minded and innocuous as it is – was somehow sufficient for Eyal to respond to with deep shock, in an impassioned column on his Substack: “This was not a slip of the tongue. It was a clear statement. One religion. Dominating the others. Deciding who will be ‘allowed.’ ... Shehadeh framed his argument in explicitly religious terms - about Jews as Jews.” About the interviewer, Eyal wrote that “he smuggled in a definition of Zionism that bears little resemblance to reality, implying that Zionism is about religious domination.”

In his column, Eyal sets the record as he sees it: Jewish supremacy between the river and the sea? Not at all. The State of Israel provides “full freedom of religion” and is the only one (!) in the history of the land (except for the British Mandate) to have done so. Zionism and religious domination? Not at all. Zionism “was born as a secular, national, and largely liberal movement.” According to Eyal, the New York Times “launders” and “normalizes” Shehadeh’s (supposedly false) accusations as if there is any connection between the lived experience of Palestinians and “religious domination” by Jews over their lives.

One can, of course, go back in time – as Eyal does – to the very birth of the Zionist movement and reflect on the genuinely complex relationship that has always existed between that “secular, national, liberal” movement and Judaism. But even if one does look back through history, what will be found is, for example, David Ben-Gurion (secular and national indeed, not quite liberal) testifying in 1937 before the British Peel Commission that “Our Mandate is the Bible.” Indeed, at the very least, it is appropriate to speak of an intricate relationship between the political project of many Jews – Zionism – and the religion of those same people – Judaism. Or, as Professor Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin aptly put it: “God does not exist, but he promised the land to us.”

In any case, we do not live beside such an imagined secular cradle. We live in an Israel where the prime minister addresses the nation and the army, commanding to “Remember what the Amalekites did to you”(Deuteronomy 25:17); the minister of national security is Itamar Ben Gvir (“I am the political echelon, and the political echelon permits Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount”); division commanders in the Israeli army are religious-nationalists whose operational orders for attack on Gaza read “We will destroy him and his memory... and will not return till they are wiped out, he will take vengeance on his enemies and make atonement for his land and people” (Psalms 18:38; Deuteronomy 32:43); and the state is very busy with the freedom of Jewish worship – in Palestinian cities such as Hebron and Nablus.

Who else does not live beside that imagined secular-Zionist cradle? Palestinians. Those whose dispossession is a central project of the State of Israel, of Zionism, of the Jewish people dwelling in the Land of Israel. 

Dispossession from the first Nakba of 1948, through the Palestinian praying by the roadside and run over by a Jewish-Israeli-soldier-settler, as recently caught on video, and into the future – as the great project of “Judaizing” the land is anchored in Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People and is being realized not only in Judea and Samaria, the Negev, and the Galilee but also in what remains of the Palestinian cities after the Nakba. 

In one of those cities – the one from which Shehadeh’s family was exiled – that process is now led by a religious Torah core group (Gar’in Torani).

Israel, which delights in emphasising its status as “the Jewish state” – the only one in the world – which seamlessly speaks in the name of the entire Jewish people, is the one that persistently blurs the line between “Israel” and “the Jews” whenever it suits – and cries “antisemitism” based on convenience.

Who does not blur between Israel and Judaism? Shehadeh. Asked about this explicitly, here is his answer: “I’ve always felt that Jews are just members of a religion and it has nothing negative about it and nothing in enmity with me. But Zionism, which is trying to use the religion to promote a certain political project, is an enemy to me. The two are separate in my mind entirely. I find it very strange when people say that criticism of Zionism is antisemitic. I understand that it’s a political device in order to scare people into not attacking Zionism and calling them antisemitic if they do.”

Hagai El-Ed is a writer based in Jerusalem. He tweets @HagaiElAd.

This is a translation by the author from Hebrew of a piece originally published at Ha'aretz.

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