Last week the historian Martin Gilbert brought attention to an article published a couple of months back by the Independent on Sunday. He expressed a certain amount of reasonable outrage over piece in which former ambassador Oliver Miles had questioned the impartiality of the enquiry panel. It is an article that starts off reasonably. Miles makes some reasonable attacks on the enquiry and considers some of the expressed opinions of those serving on it. Gilbert – who is serving on the enquiry – is quoted as having said that Bush and Blair “may well, with the passage of time and the opening of the archives, join the ranks of Roosevelt and Churchill”. But then the article takes an odd turn. Miles states that “Both Gilbert and Freedman are Jewish, and Gilbert at least has a record of active support for Zionism.” Leaving aside the second comment abut Gilbert, what the fuck has Freedman’s ethnic background got to do with it. Miles doesn’t elaborate particularly on the implications of this, but then he doesn’t need to. Oddly enough he doesn’t meditate on the ethnic backgrounds of any White Anglo-Saxon panel members. yet for some reason it is reasonable to draw inferences about somebody’s character or viewpoint from the fact they are Jewish.

As far as Miles himself goes, this is not particularly surprising. I mean he is not the first foreign office tosser to express dodgy opinions. What is more dissapointing is that The Independent on Sunday would publish such cheap innuendo about an individuals ethnic background. Perhaps Rod Liddle will not be as out of place in the organisation as some would have you believe.

Guest Post by David Rosenberg

“To be a Jew means always being with the oppressed and never the oppressors”.

The author of these words was the Bundist Marek Edelman who has just died aged 90. He was one of the commanders of the ZOB – the Jewish Fighting Organisation that led the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943.

Edelman's funeral in Warsaw on Friday

To anti-fascists and human rights activists around the world he was a hero – plain and simple. He wrote one of the earliest Holocaust memoirs, The Ghetto Fights, which was published in Poland in 1945 and subsequently translated into several languages. It is an incredible text which pains and inspires the reader in equal measure.

After escaping the burnt-out ghetto through the sewers he continued underground anti-Nazi activity and then joined other Poles in the Warsaw Rising of 1944. After the war he saved countless more lives working as a cardiologist. In recent years he used the medical arena to make contact with Dr Mustafa Barghouti, director of the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees.

Edelman was never a Zionist, and he opposed Israel’s continued occupation of Palestinian territory. He met with Palestinian political figures and expressed support for their struggle against occupation while at the same time urging them to firmly reject terroristic methods. He angered Israeli leaders by pointedly addressing the Palestinians he made contact with as “leaders of the Palestinian Fighting Organisations”. In Tel Aviv they were indignant that such a prominent figure in the Warsaw Ghetto resistance would choose to continue to live in Poland (his homeland!) after the war – a place they regarded simply as a Jewish graveyard. Even worse, he had the chutzpah not to take his political lead from less heroic and far more reactionary Zionist spokespersons and cheerleaders.

Not that Edelman was worried. This hero of the Jewish people and of anti-fascists had long been treated as persona non grata by the Israeli political establishment and its mainstream media. Edelman would not countenance Israel’s attempt to appropriate Holocaust resistance to justify its political actions, and he said so on several occasions.

He refused to allow the historical experience of the Ghetto fighters to be claimed by any group/nation exclusively. On the contrary, he argued that this history belonged to everyone and carried a universal imperative to fight for equality, democracy, human rights and dignity wherever these were threatened or suppressed

He continued to repudiate the Zionist narrative of Jewish history with its blinkered ultra-nationalism. Instead he remained loyal to the Bund’s socialist political tradition which, as its 1938 manifesto had declared, rejected “one’s own and foreign nationalism”.

Throughout his life Edelman worked for human rights, democracy and egalitarianism. He remained sceptical of nationalism in general and critical of state power. He was a brave and forthright opponent of the Stalinist regime in Poland and, in the 1980s, actively supported the Workers Opposition Movement – KOR.

In 1988 – on the 45th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising – he snubbed the official commemoration in Poland attended by Stalinist dignitaries from Poland and Zionist dignitaries from Israel, in favour of an alternative ceremony at the Warsaw Jewish cemetery, attended by 3,000 people, where he unveiled a monument to Henryk Erlich and Victor Alter – Bundist leaders of the 1930s who had been captured and murdered on Stalin’s orders during the War.

I treasure the fact that I had the good fortune to hear Marek Edelman speak and briefly meet him in 1997 at a conference in Warsaw marking the 100th anniversary of the birth of the Bund. Naturally a lot of people wanted to speak to him. He sat, relaxed, making time for everybody. He was a hero, a fighter and a true mensch. Koved zayn ondenk (honour his memory)

The Anthem of the Jewish Partisans: Zog Nit Keyn Mol

The news has just come through that Marek Edelman, leader of the Warsaw ghetto uprising has passed away. Edelman cut his political teeth as a leader of the Jewish Workers Bund – a mass Jewish Marxist organisation – in prewar Poland – fighting against an authoritarian and anti-Semitic regime. In the Warsaw Ghetto he, along with others, lead the heroic last ditch uprising against the Nazis attempts to exterminate its inhabitants. By this point the ghettos population had been reduced to a fraction of what it had been – by death, starvation and deportation. The Nazis planned to liquidate the ghetto in 6 days. Yet a thousand Jewish fighters armed with pistols and home made weapons held out for nearly a month.

There is far more to be said than I can say right now, and I’m sure in days to come there will be a proper obituary to Edelman on The Third Estate. But for now, let us pay tribute to this brave partisan and comrade.

The proms don’t normally get much in the way of political coverage. In fact the last time they did was about a year and a half ago when Margaret Hodge decided to make some stupid announcement about them not being inclusive enough, so it was a real joy to have such a politically charged concert as the performance of Beethoven’s Fidelio last night as a highlight of the season. The opera was performed by the East-Western Divan Orchestra, which was set up ten years ago by Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said. The orchestra is made up of young musicians from around the Middle East, including members from both Israel and Palestine. Barenboim says that the idea of the orchestra was to find common ground in knowledge, and offer a chance for dialogue to young people.

Daniel Barenboim and members of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra (image taken from West-Eastern Divan Orchestra website)

In the context of the ongoing oppression in the Middle East, Fidelio is a poignant work to bring into the debate. It tells the story of Leonore, who rescues her lover from a prison, where he his being held by Rocco under the orders of the corrupt Don Pizarro. It is a story of bravery, hope, and ultimately emancipation. The political message is clear, that there is an analogy between the prisoners kept by Pizarro, and the oppression faced by the Palestinians, and yet there is rather more to the politics of this opera, and in fact the situation in Palestine, that warrants further discussion.

Beethoven is, in many ways, the first self-consciously philosophical composer of the Enlightenment era, and his philosophical concerns are tied to the idealism of the French Revolution, and later to Hegel. These may seem like big claims, not least when we are so often told that “music speaks for itself”, but the reality is that Western European music in the 19th century was completely inseparable from a number of philosophical and political debates. We would miss so much of what this opera has to say if we were unwilling to discuss it in these terms, and whilst new readings are always possible, and new significances can always be brought out, it is useful in understanding the motives of the opera to consider it in its own period and its own intellectual tradition.

The first act of the opera is concluded by a chorus of prisoners, who due to a deal Rocco has made with Leonore, are allowed out of their dungeons and into the open air. Their song of “O welche Lust! In freier Luft / den Atem leicht zu heben! / Nur hier ist Leben / der Kerker eine Gruft” [Oh, what joy! In the open air / to breathe with ease! / Only here is life / the prison is a tomb.] represents the ideals of the French Revolution, both of liberty and fraternity. The prisoners are a radical, or in fact revolutionary, collective, and this is an idea that Beethoven returns to throughout his oeuvre, most notably (and probably less successfully than the end of Act I of Fidelio) in the Finale of the Ninth Symphony. Leonore is the heroine, asserting too a revolutionary consciousness in order that she and Florestan (her imprisoned lover) may be together, where Pizarro, a signifier of the old feudal order, has previously prevented their love. And finally there is Rocco, the jailor, who in the course of the opera undergoes a complete transformation from being the bondsman of Pizarro, to becoming a collaborator with revolutionaries, for he has seen that what is being proposed is not simply humane but a path to a better, freer world.

There is lots to be taken from this opera in terms of a response to the Israel-Palestine conflict, we have to single act of bravery by Leonore, in rescuing Florestan, showing the difference that the bravery and responsibility of each person can make, we have the chorus of prisoners, who offer a glimpse of an imagined future, one in which freedom and solidarity are inextricably linked, and then most importantly Rocco shows that minds can be changed, that the possibility of a freer future is the emancipation not simply of those who are imprisoned, but of the consciousnesses of those who imprison.

Yesterday’s performance was prefaced by the showing of a film called Knowledge is the Beginning, which chronicled the progression of the orchestra from its inception in 1999 to a concert given in Ramallah in 2005. This film, like Barenboim, is relatively hard-hitting. It may not be hardcore anti-Zionism, but it is heavily critical of the Israeli government and the occupation.

(what is cut from the end of this short clip from the film is the Israeli Minister for Education accusing Barenboim of using the opportunity of receiving the award to attack the Israeli state)

Throughout the film there is yet more Beethoven, but it is never quite made explicit that Barenboim sees the politics of Beethoven as offering an ideological critique of the current state of affairs in the Middle East. Nonetheless, it is clearly important to him, although the superimposition of Beethovenian politics on the Israel-Palestine question does throw up some issues. The most notable, which came up a number of times in the short discussion after the film, is that this is possibly taking the form of colonial ideology, the idea that “we” in “the West” achieved this freedom with our bourgeois revolutions, and that maybe some place in “the East” has something to learn from it. Such an issue is backed up again by the description of music (Western classical) as a universal language, and along with that the freedom expressed in Beethoven, which is of course tied to his own time, and his own intellectual tradition is made transcendent and transhistorical.

These are easy remarks to make in an effort to discredit what the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra do, but I think our theoretical approach need be a bit more subtle than this, and the politics of this project are rather more subtle too. The point of the project is that it is not theoretical in this sense, but rather it is entirely pragmatic. If, as such, the ideas in Beethoven become a useful expression for the problems of the Middle East then we should be willing to accept them, despite the problems. The project, in offering dialogue, is not set out to offer an ideology of emancipation, but rather offers a politics of emancipation.

We should be wary of the possibility of Beethoven, or in fact Western classical music as a whole becoming an instrument of colonial discourse, but here they are being used simply because of their expressive capacity, rather than because an accurate analogy is being drawn. The consequence of this, though, is that we must do away with the notion of music as a universal language. It is only when we address each situation of oppression in its particularity and specificity, that we can come to political conclusions, and so the superimposition of transcendent notions of oppression and salvation (such as those that were inherent in French Revolutionary ideology) obscure rather than elucidate the issue at hand. Beethoven, and many revolutionaries of his era did believe in universal concepts of freedom, and universal concepts of emancipation, this is very much the essence of the idealism of that age, but we must reject the idea that these are universal, and I believe we can do this without throwing out the meaning of these works of art, and without accepting the complete enlightenment project, we can accept its striving for humanity.

The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra is an extremely important project. As Barenboim admits, it will not bring peace, but it is a step forward. It is the same bravery as Leonore, but unlike in the plot of Fidelio, it cannot bring about a revolution. Furthermore, the project is doing a great deal to repoliticise Beethoven, and music in general. That is not to say that music is being made instrumental to external political struggles, but rather that the music itself is being allowed once again to refract on to our society in a way that has been less and less common over the last fifty years.

The concert is available on view again and listen again on the BBC website for another six days.
For more information on the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra http://west-easterndivan.artists.warner.de/

The rabbi of Britain’s oldest synagogue, Bevis Marks in the East End of London, has been suspended over his participation in a protest against banks charging high interest rates.  Full detials of the story can be found at The JC here.

The rabbi Natan Asmoucha was helping lead the start of London Citizens anti-usury campaign – a combined effort across the atlantic to legislate against exploitative lending.

’10% is Enough!’  Youtube Video

Dr. Maurice Glasman defended rabbi Nathan’s actions, arguing that, “Any anti-usury campaign without involvement from the Jewish community could quickly turn anti-semitic”.  However, many in the synagogue believe that the elders have leapt upon the first excuse to settle old feuds, save money and kick out a highly thought of leader whom they believe to be displaying ‘activist tendencies’.

The appeal process continues.

Itzik Asher's Journey to the New

There is a trend these days for picking out funny bits of news and sending them around the globe, and in this week’s selection was a story from Florida. Parents have been complaining about a sculpture called Journey to the New, by Itzik Asher, which depicts an “anatomically correct man” and is situated 100 yards from a school. The statue is said to celebrate the journeys of Russian and Ethiopian Jews to Israel, but away from the idiocy of the prudish public, there is a greater political problem with this work of art.

Jews have been in Ethiopia for a very long time. In fact more than that, the Ethiopian community, the Beta Israel, is one of the oldest in the world. Far older than the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe anyway. In the 1980s and 1990s, thousands of Ethiopian Jews ended up in Israel, mainly as a result of three military operations: Operation Moses, Operation Joshua, and Operation Solomon. These were carried out due to the suggestion that the Beta Israel were under threat from political instability in Ethiopia and Sudan. These airlifts are often painted as one of the “miracles” of Israel, and the story that is less often told is the plight of those Ethiopians once they reached Israel. To start with, the Beta Israel, were told by the rabbis that they were not real Jews.

The Ethiopian Jews had to go through a process by which they were integrated into the country, and this included “symbolic circumcision.” What this means is whilst they didn’t have their foreskins cut off (many were already circumcised), blood was drawn. Excuse me if I think this is just a tad barbaric, but it sure as hell doesn’t remind me of any miracles I know of. In fact the only thing I can think of is that moment in Exodus when Moses comes down to find the ongoing worship of the golden calf: “Then Moses stood in the gate of the camp, and said Who is on the Lord’s side? Let him come unto me, And all the sons of Levi gathered themselves together unto him. And he said unto them. Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour. And the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses, and there fell the people that day about three thousand men.

Ok, so we don’t have people being killed for idol worship or orgies these days, but for some reason, the Israeli state thought that these brutal circumcisions were reasonable. This is not evening mentioning the rest of the story of the Ethiopian Jews, who were sent to live in Ma’abarot (refugee camps) which quickly became slums, and who since have suffered a great amount of racism, including complaints from parents that there are “too many Ethiopians in school classes.” The Ethiopian Jews were also forced to undertake a one and a half year “Return to Israel” course, including intensive study, and a commitment to observe orthodox rituals. More than any other Jew who wishes to settle in Israel.

The story of recent immigrants to Israel from Russia is rather different. The questions aimed at the Ethiopians are never asked of Russians. In fact Israel seemed so keen to import cheap skilled labour from Russia that they accidentally brought over a number of non-Jewish anti-semites, who were attempting to flee poverty in Russia. These Russian anti-semites then set up a fascist party, and tried to sell copies of Mein Kampf in bookshops in Israel. No circumcisions for them. And yes, the Russians have at times been persecuted in Israel, but their history is nothing like the oppression that Ethiopians have experienced.

All of this points to one thing: some old fashioned colonial-style racism on behalf of both the Israeli state and a proportion of the Israeli population. And what is worse is that it’s swept under the carpet by the myth of a miracle. Actually, on that point, no-one ever talks about those who were left behind in Occupation Solomon because they weren’t Jewish. Just like the “miracle” of the Six Day War that using conservative estimates cost the lives of 20,000 Arabs. Many people who really did need help were left behind in Ethiopia and Sudan simply because they were not Jewish. It is shameful that Israel is more concerned about people because they are Jewish than because they are human.

And so, returning to the sculpture, Journey to the New, maybe we can see that this statue is perverse. It isn’t perverse because there’s a penis on show, but rather it’s perverse because it demands that we conflate the history of the Russian and Ethiopian immigrants to Israel. It is perverse because it promotes an awful act of historical revisionism. It is perverse because it promotes the idea of a miracle of people saved, rather than people condemned to brutal rituals and racism in a moment of fear of something even worse with no thought for those who were not saved. It is only when we ask the question of whether that statue has a foreskin, that we can see the problems it holds within it unravel.

Monument at Birkenau

How much should we memorialise tragic events? Poland is home to many of the landmarks of horror associated with the Nazis. But of these arguably the two most notorious are memorialised in very different ways. Auschwitz-Birkenau is the concentration and extermination camps where over a million Jews, gypsies, communists, trade unionists and lesbians and gays were worked to death, or simply executed. It is preserved perfectly, Auschwitz converted to a museum with each block dedicated to a different aspect of either life in the camp or of the wider holocaust, whilst the larger Birkenau is simply preserved as a monument and memorial to the horror. Over the years as historians have uncovered different aspects of the story the Auschwitz Museum has gained exhibits about the experience of Roma and Sinti communities, and now has dedicated exhibitions on the particular experience of the Jews of France, Holland, Belgium, Poland, Romania and Hungary (A little known fact is that Hungarian Jews were the single largest national group executed at Auschwitz, comprising 500,000 of the 1.1million).

Extraordinary Story

A stark contrast to this is about 200 miles north in Poland’s capital. The Warsaw Ghetto is the sight of some of the greatest tragedies and greatest acts of heroism of the holocaust. All of Warsaw’s Jews, 30% of the population, where forced into an area comprising 2.4% of the its size. Tens of thousands of people died of starvation and disease. In 1943 an extraordinary armed uprising challenged the Nazi military (documented extraordinarily in this book). This remains, for me at least, one of the most inspirational single acts of the 20^th Century. Yet to look at modern Warsaw it would be hard to find traces of this story. One small section of the wall exists, hidden in a private courtyard. An old monument, built by the Soviets, stands in an obscure section of central Warsaw, attended by an old Jewish man with a stall selling dog-eared history books and odd badges. In contrast to the day trips and tours to Auschwitz that blossom around Krakow, there is no way of getting the Ghetto story, except to wander round yourself.

Ghetto Memorial

Clearly there are a number of reasons why these two sites are so different. Warsaw is a city of nearly 2million, whilst Oswiecim (OZ-VEE-TSIM – the Polish town that became Germanised in to Auschwitz) is a small town of 48,000. Clearly space was at more of a premium in post-war reconstruction. Very few remnants of the ghetto survived the reprisals of the Nazis, and the 1944 fighting in Warsaw, whereas the fleeing Nazis were unable to destroy most of Auschwitz, only able to reduce the gas ovens to piles of rubble before leaving. Clearly there was more of Auschwitz to preserve. Most people would have a sense that Auschwitz was significantly worse, that the industrial slaughter of millions is of a degree worse than the ghetto.

 Another, more cynical reason is the fact that Krakow, the nearest town to Auschwitz is Poland’s traditional tourist destination, whilst Warsaw is still developing its tourist industry. Perhaps the Ghetto tours will spring up, just like the Auschwitz ones. None of these reasons seem enough to me though. Whilst no-one expects them to go to the extremes of rebuilding the Ghetto to remember it (though that’s what they did with much of the rest of Warsaw), surely there could be more done. So, and I’m really interested in your thoughts, why is it that some things are memorialised in such detail, and others not?

There was an interesting judgment relating to faith schools today. The Jewish Free School was told by three senior judges that its admissions procedures were illegal, as the test of ethnicity amounted to racial discrimination. Now, I’ll start by saying that I think all state-funded faith schools are a fucking terrible idea. There’s absolutely no reason why our tax money should be wasted on indoctrinating kids rather than teaching them to think. But this is somewhat beside the point, as the fight against faith schools is long and hard, and here I want to consider this particular ruling. On first reading about this story, it sounded like a very good thing. The fact that there will no longer be kids being discriminated against on the basis of their ethnic origins is always a good thing

But there was also something rather worrying in the judgment: “The three judges – Lords Justice Sedley and Rimer, and Lady Justice Smith – said it was clear that Jews constituted a racial group defined principally by ethnic origin and additionally by conversion.” Those of us who spend our lives fighting against racism, both in theory and in practice, spend a great deal of time debunking the entire concept of “race”, so for judges to be making statements like this now is a huge step back. In fact, the movement from discussion of ethnicity to discussion of race here implies that these judges are quite happy, it seems, to use the terms interchangeably. So what happened to all those old arguments, all the ones that said that it was exactly this act of defining people racially that was racist.

The fact that racists use the rhetoric of race to explain what they do does not mean that in considering the actions of racists we should buy into their definitions. It is not necessary to define Jews, or any people, as a race, to show that some are being oppressed. Whilst this judgment is a good thing, and will have good effects, one can only see comments like that made by the judges playing into the hands of the right. If we are to be serious about defeating racism then we have to do away with the entire mode of thought, and not simply its concrete consequences.

Twenty people gathered in London’s East End on April 19th for a typically low key but poignant memorial ceremony. The Friends of Yiddish were marking the 66th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising – the vastly unequal battle that began on that day in 1943. Led by the youth, Jewish resistance forces in the ghetto had resolved to win “a beautiful death” as the Nazi military machine entered to unleash a final act of destruction. Fighting a guerrilla battle for three weeks as the ghetto burnt to a cinder around them, many of the fighters opted for suicide rather than be captured by the Nazis. Incredibly a few escaped through sewers.

It has become commonplace for many Israeli and ultra orthodox commentators to describe Poland as merely “a Jewish graveyard” allowing what happened there under Nazi occupation to obliterate hundreds of years of coexistence by Jews and non-Jews and centuries of Yiddish cultural creativity.

Still less are they interested that some 500 Warsaw Jews saw out the rest of the war in Warsaw itself hidden by non-Jews who risked death at the hands of the Nazi occupiers to hide them. And the sole remaining leader of the ghetto fighters, Marek Edelman, is persona-non-grata in Israel for choosing to continue to live in is homeland, Poland, after the war, and maintaining his pre-war ideological opposition to Zionism.

Mainstream commemorations by conservative Jewish institutions emphasise suffering and heroism but are replete with references to the “miracle” of modern Israel as if it is some sort of compensation for the suffering that occurred. Warmongering politicians hypocritically intone “never again”, while the Chief Rabbi and assorted worthies regularly seek to draw lessons, which usually amount to “the whole world let the Jews down. Antisemitism is still everywhere. Israel must be strong.

The Friends of Yiddish ceremony is remarkable and unique for several reasons. The contributions – songs, poems, reflections, with some English translations, are delivered in Yiddish, the daily language of the vast majority of Hitler’s Jewish victims but a language still looked down upon with contempt in Tel-Aviv. The emphasis is on resistance. Wlodka, a 77-year-old survivor of the ghetto recalls being helped over the ghetto wall a few weeks before the uprising with her twin sister – they were 11 at the time – to be hidden in a flat belonging to a Catholic family. She talks mostly about the man who bribed the guards and helped her escape, who stayed in the same flat. He was Mikhal Klepfisz a 30-year-old engineer who repeatedly smuggled weapons into the ghetto, choosing to make his last delivery as the fighting started, knowing that by going in that time he would not survive. There is no Israeli flag-waving at this ceremony. Quite the opposite. The chair of the Friends of Yiddish invokes an imaginary conversation with the victims of the Nazis as they ask those who remember them today “What have you learned from our experience?” He reminds the audience that “Resistance to occupation is not a crime” and talks about how nationalism continues to breath life into today’s hatreds.

The event concludes with participants standing not for any national anthem, Israeli or English, but to sing a defiant paean to the continuation of diaspora – Mir Zaynen Doh (We are Here), penned in the war years by Hirsh Glik, a partisan who had been incarcerated in the Vilna Ghetto in Lithuania.

The Warsaw ghetto has been in the headlines many times this year – but not in its own right – rather as a point of comparison for the horrors suffered in Gaza. Politics by analogy often fails to do justice to the detail either of the situations it aims to highlight or of those which it opportunistically calls into service. Perhaps more apposite is a reflection by a critical Israeli thinker, Boaz Evron a few years back, who observed that two tragedies had befallen the Jewish people in the 20th century – the Holocaust and the interpretation of the Holocaust. Many Jewish leaders had drawn the conclusion after the Nazis that “never again must this happen to the Jews”, while many Jewish and non-Jewish humanists, anti-racist and anti-fascists understood that this must never again happen to anybody. The Friends of Yiddish memorial was far more in tune with the latter.

Wlodka Blit-Robertson, Warsaw ghetto survivor will be reflecting on her experiences at a meeting of the Jewish Socialists’ Group on Sunday May 10^th at 7.30pm at the Indian YMCA, 41 Fitzroy Square, London W1.

Yesterday, at the Institute of Education, there was a long public meeting organised by Independent Jewish Voices (IJV), primarily as a launch for their book of articles “A Time To Speak Out“, but also as a forum for debate and discussion amongst Jews about Israel, the war in Gaza, identity, and the relationship of Jews at the edge of the community in relation to community leaders. IJV was established nearly two years ago, and in that time has been offering a platform to dissenting Jews, although admittedly those who get to speak are often of a rather academic bent. The meeting consisted of three sessions: a panel of writers of Time To Speak Out; a presentation from Miri Weingarten of Physicians for Human Rights on attacks on medical aid by the Israeli army during the recent war; and finally a talk by Uri Avnery.

Uri Avnery speaking yesterday at the Institute of Education

Over the last few years the means by which Jewish people can speak out against the actions of Israel have been greatly augmented in Britain, with groups such as Jews for Justice for Palestinians, Jews Against Zionism, and an internet presence of JustPeace being established, alongside older Jewish anti-Zionist groups such as the Jewish Socialists’ Group. In many ways IJV exists in a different space, and rather than being explicitly anti- or pro-Zionist, anti- or pro-Israel, it exists as a body of Jews who condemn the acts of Israel and wish to say publicly that Israel doesn’t speak for them. They are relative newcomers to the scene, but they do get media coverage, and as yesterday showed, are able to get significant numbers of people to their meetings.

Uri Avnery’s speech was by far the most interesting (unsurprising given he has consistently been one of the most forceful and outspoken voices for peace within Israel for decades.) He began by giving a reminder of a time he spoke in London in 1983 alongside Issam Satawi, in a meeting organised by members of the Jewish Socialist Group and Israeli ex-patriates. Satawi was assassinated a number of weeks later in Portugal. He gave an eloquent exegesis on the history of the question of Israel and the current fight for peace. The mood was pessimistic, as he stated that with a new government that includes “real fascists”, this is a “dark time for those fighting for peace.”

Avnery is interesting because he’s so completely serious about a two state solution, which of course is rather less common amongst Western lefties. But in saying this, he also clarifies “most politicians who talk about a two state solution in Israel don’t mean it; they mean something different… Any politician who talks about two states seriously is declaring war on the settlers, 250,000 very dangerous people and their allies in Israel.” He also says in no uncertain terms “Israel must go back to the borders of 1967, and East Jerusalem must be the capital of Palestine.” Such a demand goes far beyond Barak’s so-called “generous offer” that Zionists to this day laud over Palestinians for rejecting. His belief in a two state solution is not taken lightly, but he believes that the demand for a single state would lead to the further radicalisation of nationalist separatist movements.

Avnery asks the question “What was the aim of the war?” and almost comically quips “If you go to a shooting gallery, the best way win is to shoot the bullet and then draw the bullseye later.” He talks quite candidly about his own experiences as a Zionist terrorist sixty years ago, and how he knows from this that the idea that one could attack the civilian population of Gaza so much that they rise up and overthrow their government is completely ill-founded. Of course he condemns Hamas, but he offers an understanding of how and why Palestinians have been driven into a state of supporting them. You don’t hear this sort of thing from Israeli every day, as sadly Avnery is far from the norm. He closed by saying that after the dreadful results of the Israeli election in which “the left became the centre, the centre became the right, and the right became fascist,” it is more than ever necessary to reach a solution.

In many ways, though, yesterday’s event was rather contradictory. The wish of IJV to not quite have a party line in order to entice a range of Jews to become signatories of their organisation means that often they seem woefully undertheorised. On the initial panel of writers, with the exception of Eyal Weizman (whose wonderful book Hollow Land I encourage everyone to read), the views were not so much contradictory as simply not really present. Underlying a lot of the politics of IJV is the issue of Jewish identity, and sadly many of the speakers, if asked what Jewish identity was about, would give the same sort of answer you see from Zionists: something about memory and oppression rather than anything positive. Just as the feminists and gay groups of the sixties went further than just to try to end oppression in striving to define themselves, diaspora Jews should be doing this too. We don’t want the same old negative identity reinterpreted, we should demand a new critical identity. Howard Cooper was particularly unimpressive on this matter.

I’m sure that there’s a place for IJV in the movement against Israel’s actions, but I’m not sure how far it can really go. On the one hand there are people who say that we as Israel gets more and more violent we can talk more about challenging their actions on humanitarian grounds rather than on politics. In my analysis the opposite is true: Israel’s violence is obverse of its politics, and to challenge what happened in Gaza on purely humanitarian grounds not only weakens our hand, but does a great injustice to the Palestinians we hope to defend. There is a difference between striking a balance and being noncommittal.