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Page last updated
May 5, 2007
Understanding the conflict
On being Jewish
1. Two articles by Sara Roya) Living with the Holocaust: The Journey of a Child of Holocaust Survivors
Sara Roy, author of The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-Development, among other works, is a senior research scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University.This essay was given as the Second Annual Holocaust Remembrance Lecture at the Center for American and Jewish Studies and the George W. Truett Seminary, Baylor University, on 8 April 2002, and published in the Journal of Palestinian Studies 2002.
b) How Can Children of the Holocaust Do Such Things?: A Jewish Plea
Counterpunch, 7/8 April 2007
" Many of the people, both Jewish and others, who write about Palestinians and Arabs fail to accept the fundamental humanity of the people they are writing about, a failing born of ignorance, fear and racism... Why is it so difficult, even impossible to incorporate Palestinians and other Arab peoples into the Jewish understanding of history?"
2. Address to the South African Jewish Board of DeputiesKGALEMA MOTLANTHE, SECRETARY GENERAL OF THE AFRICAN NATIONAL CONGRESS 19 October 2002
Perceptions of the role of Jews in the struggle against apartheid. "In our movement there is a song that says, "When they call the names of the heroes of our people, will my name be called?" The roll-call of 'amaqawe' from the Jewish community is indeed long. I do not believe that it is an accident. That people of Jewish descent should be so prominent in the liberation movement says something fundamental about the compassion of Judaism."
3. How to strengthen the Palestine Solidarity Campaign Movement by making friends with JewsBy Guy Izhak Austrian and Ella Goldman
c.2,000 words
'We are two Israeli-American Jewish activists in the New York-based organization Jews Against the Occupation, JATO (which we're not speaking for in this article)... We're writing this article because it's apparent that the Palestine solidarity movement in the U.S. and Europe often stumbles over Jewish issues.'
4. Reflections of an Arab JewElla Shohat
c.1,600 words
'I am an Arab Jew. Or, more specifically, an Iraqi Israeli woman living, writing and teaching in the U.S. ...When my grandmother first encountered Israeli society in the '50s, she was convinced that the people who looked, spoke and ate so differently--the European Jews--were actually European Christians. Jewishness for her generation was inextricably associated with Middle Easterness. My grandmother, who still lives in Israel and still communicates largely in Arabic, had to be taught to speak of "us" as Jews and "them" as Arabs.'
5. Jews like usBruce Jackson
Counterpunch, 18 April 2003
c.1,400 words
In spring 2001, I started working on a book the working title of which is "Jews like us." I thought it might be useful to give some of the Jews who don't scream a chance to say what they think about being Jewish in America now. I stopped working on the book when everything got cranked up after 9/11, but I've started doing interviews again. I have basically one question I ask everybody: "You say you're Jewish. What do you mean by that?" The responses are astonishing in their variety. I'm continually amazed at the huge range of stories, opinion, and analysis. The only generalization I can make about it is this: hardly any of it comes close to the militant neocon [pro-Sharon] line.
6. A Time to Speak Out: Rethinking Jewish Identity and Solidarity with IsraelBrian Klug
Jewish Quarterly, No 188, Winter 2002-2003
c. 6,300 words
'By the same token, Jewish communities in the so-called Diaspora need to live in their here and now, 'constructing a harmony' within the world. This implies the reverse of the ethos of 'solidarity with Israel'. Instead of lumping everything together, it is time to make distinctions - between Judaism and Zionism, Israeli and Jew, the biblical and the political.'
7. Zionism's Bad ConscienceTikkun, Sept/Oct 2002
Joel Kovel
How have the Jews, immemorially associated with suffering and high moral purpose, become identified with a nation-state loathed around the world for its oppressiveness toward a subjugated indigenous people?... Jews were supposed to know better, to be better. Suffering persecution and being eternally on the margins of Europe were supposed to have made Jews more morally developed. I speak from first-hand experience, having been made to feel as a boy that I had inherited a two-fold superiority, by belonging to a people both cleverer and more highly moral than the non-Jews who surrounded us. We Jews were history's exceptions.
8. Seven Pillars of Jewish DenialTikkun, Sept/Oct 2002
Kim Chernin I am thinking about American Jews, wondering why so many of us have trouble being critical of Israel. I faced this difficulty myself when I first went to Israel in 1971. I was an ardent Zionist, intending to spend my life on a kibbutz in the Galilee and to become an Israeli citizen... The path from this troubled awareness to my later ability to be critical of Israel has been long and complex. Over the years I have spoken with other Jews who have traveled this same path, and to many more who haven't... Our inability to engage in critical thought about our troubled homeland is entangled by crucial questions about Jewish identity. Why do American Jews find it difficult to be critical of Israel?
9. Their Torah is Their ProtestYedioth Ahronot Friday, 9 May 9 2003,
pp 14-18; 80
A group of religious young people educated in the tradition of Gush Emunim lead a movement against the occupation and against Mesianic currents in their parents' generation. This fascinating piece, published recently in the Hebrew Yedioth Ahronot, was accompanied by a paid notice published in Ha'aretz stating the case of these rebels. The notice numbered 100 or so signatories. They are a younger generation rebelling against beliefs and values they were raised in - not necessarily against religious beliefs, but against the nationalistic ones that use religion to lay claim to the whole of Israel - from the sea to the Jordan river. These young people - educated and professional - are not of a single stamp but they share a humanistic outlook that causes a cleavage between them and the notion of a greater Israel.
10. A Jewish Voice Left Silent: Trying to Articulate "The Levantine Option"David Shasha
c. 1,900 words
The importance of Sephardic and Oriental Jewry in the future of peace in Israel/Palestine is generally neglected. Yet, argues the author, a Jewish Sephardic writer and thinker in New York, traditional Sephardic Judaism provided for a more tolerant and open-minded variant of Jewish existence than an Ashkenazi counterpart continually living in a world apart, utterly disconnected from European civil society.
11. The Middle East Know Respect, Know Peace - No Respect, No PeaceAn account of being an ISM volunteer by Hedy Epstein, reprinted from The Saint Louis Post- Dispatch.
c.700 words
Hedy Epstein of St. Louis is a Holocaust survivor, Holocaust educator and longtime civil rights and peace activist. Her story is featured in the Academy Award winning documentary, "Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport."
12. Zionism and the 'self-hating' Jew
Mick Finlay
A critical review of ' Jewish self-hatred as a psychological concept, examining in particular the criteria used to identify its presence in individuals. A lack of clarity over this issue means that the term is often used rhetorically to discount Jews who differ in their lifestyles, interests or political positions (particularly with respect to Israel) from their accusers.'
13. 'You're so Pretty - You don't look Moroccan'Henriette Dahan-Kalev
c. 5,500 words
The author came from Morocco to Israel as a very young girl in 1949. In this moving essay she spells out the human cost of Israeli absorption policy as the new nation was constructed: "One thing enough is clear to me: whether I am conscious of it or not, I am a product of an educational, intellectual and economic steamroller that squashed everything and left no room for any self-development outside of that of a distorting Ashkenazi, Zionist, Israeli, European hegemony."
Chapter 8 of The Challenge of Post-Zionism, edited by Ephraim Nimni, London: Zed Books 2003 and repoduced by kind permission of the publishers.
14. 'This House believes that Zionism is a danger to the Jewish people.'
Cambridge Union debate, 16th February 2006
This proposition was narrowly carried. The speeches in favour of the Proposition by Brian Klug, Daphna Baram and Richard Kuper are here. The speakers against were Ned Temko, Daniel Shek (Bicom) and Jeremy Brier.
It provoked the most extraordinary response from Melanie Philips both before the event [The Oxbridge sport of Jew-baiting, 14th Feb] and after [The closing of (some) university minds, 20th Feb] and a ferociously misleading report by Emanuele Ottolenghi entitled Jews against Jews in the Jerusalem Post on 22nd Feb which licensed some extraordinarily malicious talkback. Daphna Baram finally got a reply Who really sets Jews against Jews? published in the Jerusalem Post on 1st March.
15. Adam Shapiro interview
Tikkun July/Aug 2002
Adam Shapiro is a volunteer coordinator with the International Solidarity Movement based in Ramallah
'[T]here is a simple message for American Jews: You can be a Jew, support Israel, but oppose occupation and oppression.'
c. 4,000 words
