There is No Place for the Palestinians of Gaza to Go

Vijay Prashad

February 14, 2024

Palestinians inspect the damage following an Israeli airstrike on the El-Remal aera in Gaza City. Photo by Naaman Omar apaimages.

On February 9, 2024, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that his army would advance into Rafah, the last remaining city in Gaza not occupied by the Israelis. Most of the 2.3 million Palestinians who live in Gaza had fled to its southern border with Egypt after being told by the Israelis on October 13, 2023, that the north had to be abandoned and that the south would be a “safe zone.” As the Palestinians from the north, particularly from Gaza City, began their march south—often on foot—they were attacked by Israeli forces, who gave them no safe passage. The Israelis said that anything south of Wadi Gaza, which divides the narrow strip, would be safe, but then as the Palestinians moved into Deir-al-Balah, Khan Younis, and Rafah, they found the Israeli jets following them and the Israeli troops coming after them. Now, Netanyahu has said that his forces will enter Rafah to combat Hamas. On February 11, Netanyahu told NBC news that Israeli would provide “safe passage for the civilian population” and that there would be no “catastrophe.”

Catastrophe

The use of the word “catastrophe” is significant. This is the accepted English translation of the word “nakba,” used since 1948 to describe the forced removal that year of half of the Palestinian population from their homes. Netanyahu’s use of the term comes after high officials of the Israeli government have already spoken of a “Gaza Nakba” or a “Second Nakba.” These phrases formed part of South Africa’s application to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on December 29, 2023, alleging that they are part of the “expressions of genocidal intent against the Palestinian people by Israeli state officials.” A month later, the ICJ said that there was “plausible” evidence of genocide being conducted in Gaza, highlighting the words of the Israelis officials. One official, the Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said, “I have released all restraints” (quoted both by the South African complaint and in the ICJ’s order).

Netanyahu saying that there would be no “catastrophe” after over 28,000 Palestinians have been killed and after two million of the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced is puzzling. Since the ICJ’s order, the Israeli army has killed nearly 2,000 Palestinians. The Israeli army has already begun to assault Rafah, a city with a population density now at 22,000 people per square kilometer. In response to the Israeli announcement that it would enter Rafah city, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC)—one of the few groups operating in the southern part of Gaza—said that such an invasion “could collapse the humanitarian response.” The NRC assessed nine of the shelters in Rafah, which are housing 27,400 civilians and found that the residents have no drinking water. Because the shelters are operating at 150 percent capacity, hundreds of the Palestinians are living on the street. In each of the areas that the NRC studied, they found the Palestinian refugees in the grip of hepatitis A, gastroenteritis, diarrhea, smallpox, lice, and influenza. Because of the collapse of this humanitarian response from the NRC, and from the United Nations—whose agency UNRWA has lost its funding and is under attack by the Israelis—the situation will deteriorate further.

Safe Passage

Netanyahu says that his government will provide “safe passage” to the Palestinians. These words have been heard by the Palestinians since mid-October when they were told to keep going south to prevent being killed by the Israeli bombing. Nobody believes anything that Netanyahu says. A Palestinian health worker, Saleem, told me that he cannot imagine any place of safety within Gaza. He came to Rafah’s al-Zohour neighborhood from Khan Younis, walking with his family, desperate to get out of the range of the Israeli guns. “Where do we go now?” he asks me. “We cannot enter Egypt. The border is closed. So, we cannot go south. We cannot go into Israel, because that is impossible. Are we to go north, back to Khan Younis and Gaza City?”

Saleem remembers that when he arrived in al-Zohour, the Israelis targeted the home of Dr. Omar Mohammed Harb, killing 22 Palestinians (among them five children). The house was flattened. The name of Dr. Omar Mohammed Harb stayed with me because I recalled that two years ago his daughter Abeer was to be married to Ismail Abdel-Hameed Dweik. An Israeli air strike on the Shouhada refugee camp killed Ismail. Abeer was killed in the strike on her father’s house, which had been a refuge for those fleeing from the north. Saleem moved into that area of Rafah. Now he is unsettled. “Where to go?” he asks.

Domicide

On January 29, 2024, the UN special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, Dr. Balakrishnan Rajagopal wrote a strong essay in the New York Times called “Domicide: the Mass Destruction of Homes Should be a Crime Against Humanity.” Accompanying his article was a photo essay by Yaqeen Baker, whose house was destroyed in Jabalia (northern Gaza) by Israeli bombardment. “The destruction of homes in Gaza,” Baker wrote, “has become commonplace, and so has the sentiment, ‘The important thing is that you’re safe—everything else can be replaced.’” That is an assessment shared across Gaza amongst those who are still alive. But, as Dr. Rajagopal says, the scale of the destruction of housing in Gaza should not be taken for granted. It is a form of “domicide,” a crime against humanity.

The Israeli attack on Gaza, Dr. Rajagopal writes, is “far worse than what we saw in Dresden and Rotterdam during World War II, where about 25,000 homes were destroyed in each city.” In Gaza, he says, more than 70,000 housing units have been totally destroyed, and 290,000 partially damaged. In these three months of Israeli fire, he notes, “a shocking 60 to 70 percent of structures in Gaza, and up to 84 percent of structures in northern Gaza, have been damaged or destroyed.” Due to this domicide, there is no place for the Palestinians in Rafah to go if they go north. Their homes have been destroyed. “This crushing of Gaza as a place,” reflects Dr. Rajagopal, “erases the past, present, and future of many Palestinians.” This statement by Dr. Rajagopal is a recognition of the unfolding genocide in Gaza.

As I speak with Saleem the sound of the Israeli advance can be heard in the distance. “I don’t know when we can speak next,” he says. “I don’t know where I will be.”

 

The Killing Fields of Gaza

John Wight

No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the atomic bomb. —Theodor Adorno

 

Israeli destruction of the Gaza Strip, Oct. 17, 2023. (Fars Media Corporation, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed tirelessly to be acting in the name of the Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust with Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.

In truth, the actions of his regime and military these past few months has placed them much closer to the guards than the inmates at Hitler’s death camps during this dark period in human affairs.

In other words, and put more simply, when your response to genocide is more genocide, you become precisely that which you claim to be against. This is precisely where we are now after four months of the IDF’s murderous and wholly indiscriminate military campaign against the people of Gaza.

Throughout, and to its eternal shame, the West along with Arab governments in the region have stood by and offered nothing in the way of serious and meaningful intervention. Supine and tepid calls for humanitarian pauses, temporary cessations, ceasefires, the provision of humanitarian aid; all have dropped and evaporated like snowflakes on the ground, such has been their impotence.

The result is 13,000 Palestinian children being thus far sent to their deaths under the missiles and bombs of a 21st century military machine in the hands of a government comprised of men with 14th century minds.

Netanyahu and his supporters will not be happy until the history, culture and entire existence of the Palestinians are relegated to the museum. This is both evident and implicit in the mad slaughter they have and are currently engaged in.

A twisted conception of the world as being fashioned on the basis of might is right and racial hierarchy has throughout human history produced monsters. And in this respect, Benjamin Netanyahu is merely the latest in a long line.

In this respect, too, he has inflicted a moral injury on every one of us still in possession of a beating heart and a conscience, not to mention consciousness.

In Washington there currently resides not the leader of the free world, but a man engaged in an exercise of trying to cover his own arse. Biden’s cognitive decrepitude is only matched by his moral turpitude; his lack of scruples only matched by his surplus of hypocrisy.

Light projection, Washington, D.C., Dec. 31, 2023. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

In providing Netanyahu with a blank cheque in Gaza in terms of military aid, while at the same time urging restraint, his is an administration with an ocean of blood on its hands and a desert of credibility. “Hell is empty and all the devils are here,” Shakespeare warned in words that are eminently applicable now, today, as these words are being written.

What Israel’s genocidal slaughter has done, over and above the destruction of Gaza and its people, is pull back the flowery curtain of human rights, democracy and international law to reveal the savage beasts of hegemony, militarism and white supremacy that in truth underpins the West’s engagement with the rest of the world, particularly the global South.

“The last Christian died on the cross,” Nietzsche claimed, and who could possibly argue that the most prominent misanthrope in world philosophy was wrong in that assertion?

Joe Biden could quite literally pick up the phone and put a stop to this now. With the requisite political will and basic common decency, he could halt the arms transfers to Israel and order an immediate ceasefire.

That instead he is allowing this madness to go on is a grim legacy that will forever define both him as a man and his tenure as president of the United States.

Turning to the U.K., the unelected incumbent in Number 10, Rishi Sunak, is what happens when a political system is allowed to become the wholly owned subsidiary of a country’s banking and financial sector. Mediocre is the very best that can be said of a small man with even smaller ideas.

His opponent Sir Keir Starmer, meanwhile, seems intent on arriving in Downing Street after this year’s general election on a wave of lethargy rather than euphoria.

“Reds under the bed” has been replaced by “anti-Semites under the bed,” with he of the lacquered bouffant eagerly embracing the role of a latter day Matthew Hopkins, infamous 17th century English witchfinder general.

With his ongoing defenestration of the Labour Party of any residual dissenting voices when it comes to the U.K. riding shotgun for Israel, Starmer’s time as leader of the opposition has drilled home the profound truth that tyranny is less the product of totalitarian political systems and more the product of the totalitarian ideas that sustain political orthodoxy in any given space and time.

And whenever those ideas come under challenge, said democracy is exposed as a cloak behind which mendacity resides, ruthlessly seeking malcontents to expose and miscreants to punish.

In Sunak and Starmer, Netanyahu has himself patsies on whom he could not be more reliant. It is why when voters across the U.K. are asked to make a comparison come polling day later this year, on the issue of foreign policy at least they would be wise to ponder the words of Gore Vidal, one of the greatest wits in the history of American letters.

Vidal: “One does not bring a measuring rod to Lilliput.”

 

Unions must go beyond calling for a cease-fire in Gaza

Jeff Schuhrke

 

 Thousands of pro-Palestine Americans march from Bryant Park to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) Headquarters in New York City, led by labor unions calling for a ceasefire on December 21, 2023 in New York, United

Four months into Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza that has killed over twenty-eight thousand Palestinians, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) — the US labor federation whose member unions represent 12.5 million workers — issued a statement on February 8 urging a negotiated cease-fire to end the violence.

The move came after over two hundred US unions and labor bodies — including national unions like the United Electrical Workers (UE), American Postal Workers Union (APWU), United Auto Workers (UAW), International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT), National Nurses United (NNU), Service Employees International Union (SEIU), National Education Association (NEA), Communications Workers of America (CWA), and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) — had already made cease-fire calls of their own. Many unions, especially at the local level, have also expressed solidarity with the Palestinian liberation movement.

With the backing of the AFL-CIO and the nation’s two largest unions (NEA and SEIU), support for a cease-fire is now the mainstream position of the American labor movement. Given US labor officialdom’s history of providing substantial political and material aid to the state of Israel — along with its frequent partnering with US empire (which I examine in my forthcoming book, Blue Collar Empire) — this is a remarkable development highlighting the power of rank-and-file organizing to push union leaders on critical issues, and signaling the possibility of building a more internationalist labor movement.

Now, the task for rank-and-file members who successfully organized to get their unions to issue cease-fire statements increasingly is to translate that commitment into concrete action to stop what the International Court of Justice considers Israel’s plausible acts of genocide. Across the US labor movement, networks of pro-Palestine workers are continuing to organize to get their unions to cut economic ties with Israel, put pressure on political candidates and elected officials, and interrupt the flow of union-made weapons and research to the Israeli military.

Rank-and-file pressure

“I thank our UAW members for speaking out and pushing us to come out in support of a cease-fire,” Shawn Fain, the UAW’s president, said at a December 14 press conference. “It was the right thing to do.” Fain and the union’s International Executive Board had voted to endorse a cease-fire two weeks earlier, after several locals and UAW Region 6 and Region 9A had already done so — efforts that were encouraged by the newly formed national rank-and-file group UAW Labor for Palestine.

SEIU’s national leadership similarly called for a cease-fire following months of grassroots member organizing. Last fall, multiple SEIU locals around the country began signing onto a widely circulated labor movement cease-fire petition, and the SEIU-affiliated Starbucks Workers United issued a Palestine solidarity message on October 20 condemning “the occupation, displacement, state violence, apartheid, and threats of genocide Palestinians face.” SEIU members with the rank-and-file group Purple Up for Palestine began circulating a petition urging the union’s leadership to demand an end to US military aid to Israel.

By mid-December, SEIU’s largest affiliate — the 450,000-member 1199 SEIU — adopted a cease-fire resolution. Finally, on January 22, SEIU president Mary Kay Henry released a statement on behalf of the union’s two million members calling for a cease-fire and for “a sustained end to decades of occupation, blockades and lack of freedom endured by the Palestinian people.”

Within the NEA, several locals and statewide affiliates like the Oregon Education Association and Massachusetts Teachers Association endorsed the labor movement cease-fire petition last fall. This apparently prompted the national leadership of the three million–member union to issue a statement on November 7 that seemingly urged a cease-fire but deliberately avoided using the word. “Regardless of what you call it, the killing of innocent people must stop,” the NEA statement said.

Soon after, rank-and-file NEA members with Educators for Palestine started a petition and sent an open letter to the union’s leaders demanding they more clearly support a cease-fire. On December 8, NEA president Becky Pringle tweeted that “the need for a ceasefire in Gaza is growing” and said “there is no tenable military solution to this crisis.” A spokesperson for the union later confirmed to me that “President Pringle’s call for a ceasefire is the position of the NEA.”

It also took months of rank-and-file pressure for the AFT’s executive council to unanimously pass a resolution on January 29 favoring a “negotiated bilateral cease-fire.” AFT president Randi Weingarten has long been one of the most pro-Israel voices in the US labor movement. Last fall, as several AFT locals like the Chicago Teachers Union and state affiliates like AFT-Oregon signed onto the labor movement cease-fire petition, and as some of the union’s members and locals criticized AFT leadership’s pro-Israel positions, Weingarten called for a “humanitarian pause” in Gaza.

On December 13, a group of rank-and-file AFT members interrupted Weingarten at a public event in New York to demand she and the rest of the union’s leadership call for a cease-fire. A few weeks later, Weingarten tweeted that she now supported a “bilateral, negotiated ceasefire” — the same position the union’s executive council would formally adopt at the end of January.

Although several locals of other unions like UNITE HERE, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) have called for a cease-fire, the national leaders of those unions so far have not followed suit. The national leadership of the 1.4 million–member Teamsters has also been silent on the bloodshed in Palestine. In early November, the rank-and-file group Teamsters Mobilize (TM) brought a cease-fire resolution to the annual convention of the reform organization Teamsters for a Democratic Union. But the measure, which also urged an end to US military aid to Israel, met resistance at the convention and was tabled. TM has since turned the resolution into a petition for rank-and-file Teamsters and supporters to sign.

After the AFL-CIO-chartered Thurston-Lewis-Mason Central Labor Council in Washington state unanimously adopted a cease-fire resolution on October 18, the national AFL-CIO stepped in to overrule the measure because it did not align with the federation’s position at the time. Nevertheless, other central labor councils around the country soon passed their own cease-fire resolutions, including the Western Mass Area Labor Federation, Austin (Texas) Central Labor Council, and San Antonio Central Labor Council. The resolutions in Austin and San Antonio led to the Texas AFL-CIO becoming the first state labor federation to adopt a cease-fire measure in late January, followed by the national AFL-CIO’s own cease-fire call a little over a week later.

From statements to action

Many Palestine solidarity activists in the labor movement want their unions to go beyond cease-fire statements. They point to the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, as well as to a call to action issued by a coalition of Palestinian trade unions on October 16, which urges organized labor around the world to oppose military aid to Israel and not to manufacture or transport arms for the Israeli war machine. The call has been taken up by unions and union members in countries like Belgium, Japan, the UK, Colombia, Italy, Australia, and Spain.

For US unions like the UAW — which has thousands of members in weapons factories making the bombs, missiles, and aircraft used by Israel, as well in university departments doing research linked to the Israeli military — the Palestinian trade union call to action is particularly relevant. When the UAW’s national leadership came out in support of a cease-fire on December 1, they also voted to establish a “Divestment and Just Transition Working Group.” The stated purpose of the working group is to study the UAW’s own economic ties to Israel and explore ways to convert war-related industries to production for peaceful purposes while ensuring a just transition for weapons workers.

Members of UAW Labor for Palestine say they have started making visits to a Colt factory in Connecticut, which holds a contract to supply rifles to the Israeli military, to talk with their fellow union members about Palestine, a cease-fire, and a just transition. They want to see the union’s leadership support such organizing activity.

“If UAW leaders decided to, they could, tomorrow, form a national organizing campaign to educate and mobilize rank-and-file towards the UAW’s own ceasefire and just transition call,” UAW Labor for Palestine members said in a statement. “They could hold weapons shop town halls in every region; they could connect their small cadre of volunteer organizers — like us — to the people we are so keen to organize with; they could even send some of their staff to help with this work.”

On January 21, the membership of UAW Local 551, which represents 4,600 autoworkers at Ford’s Chicago Assembly Plant (who were part of last year’s historic stand-up strike) endorsed the Palestinian trade unions’ call to not cooperate in the production and transportation of arms for Israel. Ten days later, UAW Locals 2865 and 5810, representing around forty-seven thousand academic workers at the University of California, passed a measure urging the union’s national leaders to ensure that the envisioned Divestment and Just Transition Working Group “has the needed resources to execute its mission, and that Palestinian, Arab and Muslim workers whose communities are disproportionately affected by U.S.-backed wars are well-represented on the committee.”

Members of UAW Locals 2865 and 5810 at UC Santa Cruz’s Astronomy Department have pledged to withhold any labor that supports militarism and to refuse research collaboration with military institutions and arms companies. In December, unionized academic workers from multiple universities formed Researchers Against War (RAW) to expose and cut ties between their research and warfare, and to organize in their labs and departments for more transparency about where the funding for their work comes from and more control over what their labor is used for. RAW, which was formed after a series of discussions by union members first convened by US Labor Against Racism and War last fall, hosted a national teach-in and planning meeting on February 12.

Meanwhile, public sector workers in New York City have begun their own campaign to divest their pension money from Israel. On January 25, rank-and-file members of AFSCME District Council (DC) 37 launched a petition calling on the New York City Employees’ Retirement System to divest the $115 million it holds in Israeli securities. The investments include $30 million in bonds that directly fund the Israeli military and its activities. “As rank-and-file members of DC 37 who contribute to and benefit from the New York City Employees’ Retirement System and care about the lives of working people everywhere, we refuse to support the Israeli government and the corporations that extract profit from the killing of innocent civilians,” the petition states.

In an election year when President Joe Biden and other Democratic candidates will depend heavily on organized labor for donations and especially get-out-the-vote efforts, rank and filers are also trying to push their unions to exert leverage on the president by getting him to firmly stand against the ongoing massacre in Gaza. NEA members with Educators for Palestine are calling on their union’s leaders to withdraw their support for Biden’s reelection campaign until he stops “sending military funding, equipment, and intelligence to Israel,” marching from AFT headquarters to NEA headquarters in Washington, DC on February 10 to assert their demand. Similarly, after the UAW International Executive Board endorsed Biden last month — a decision that sparked intense division within the union — UAW Labor for Palestine is demanding the endorsement be revoked “until [Biden] calls for a permanent ceasefire and stops sending weapons to Israel.”

As the rank-and-file organizers in these various unions understand, while statements calling for a cease-fire are significant in themselves, they are ultimately only tools to facilitate further organizing and action. Through its collective power, there is much more the labor movement can do to stop the unfolding genocide in Gaza and to push for peace, freedom, and justice for Palestinians and working people everywhere.

 

Palestinians flee as Israel orders evacuation of besieged Nasser Hospital

Aljazeera

A man inspects the damage in a room following Israeli bombardment at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, Gaza, in December 2023 [File: Stringer/AFP]

Dozens of Palestinians have been seen leaving the besieged Nasser Hospital in Gaza’s southern city of Khan Younis after Israeli forces ordered the evacuation of the complex, but health officials say thousands, including critically ill patients, remain inside.

Video footage shared with Al Jazeera showed crowds of displaced people, who had been sheltering inside the hospital, leaving on Wednesday. A doctor wearing green hospital scrubs walked ahead of the crowd, and some carried white flags.

Israeli forces ordered the evacuation of the complex on Tuesday. In a post shared on the social media platform X on Wednesday, the army said, “Hamas continues to conduct military activities” in the hospital, an unsubstantiated claim Israel has made about other Gaza health facilities it has raided during its months-long war.

The Israeli military – which used drones and loudspeakers to tell people to leave Nasser Hospital – said it opened “a secure route” to allow civilians to exit, while medics and patients could remain inside.

However, witnesses and medical NGO Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres, or MSF) said those sheltering inside were afraid to leave after reports people were shot on the way out. The Israeli army also fired on people inside the hospital, including a doctor and a nurse.

More than 2,500 people are still inside the complex, including displaced people, patients, medics and their families, Gaza Health Ministry spokesperson Dr Ashraf al-Qudra said late on Wednesday.

The situation at the hospital was already critical but the last 24 hours have made things on the ground even more “scary”, MSF’s Guillemette Thomas told Al Jazeera.

“The situation is really critical for the patients and we are worried about the future,” she said. About 400 patients are in a critical condition at the hospital, she added.

World Health Organization spokesperson Tarik Jasarevic said Israel has denied the UN agency access to Nasser Hospital since January 29.

“We tried several times to go there, but our requests have been denied. We heard reports about some 400 patients still being there, that 10 people have been killed, that a warehouse has been destroyed,” he told Al Jazeera.

‘They opened fire’

Dr Ahmed al-Moghrabi, the head of plastic surgery at Nasser Hospital, recorded a message from inside the facility when Israel’s evacuation orders came in.

“[The Israeli army] sent a hostage with cuffed hands into the hospital asking him to tell us that we should evacuate. And when people started really evacuating, they opened fire and they shot at the people. And they killed the hostage [they had sent inside], as well,” he said.

Speaking to Al Jazeera late on Wednesday, he said thousands of people, including critically ill patients, are being delayed at Israeli checkpoints as they try to flee the area. He also described the situation at the hospital as “dangerous”.

Nasser Hospital, the largest health facility in southern Gaza, has been under siege for three weeks. The bodies of several people killed by Israeli sniper fire in the hospital compound have been lying on the ground for days as it is too unsafe to reach them.

At least three people have been killed by Israeli snipers near the facility in the past 48 hours, according to the Palestinian health ministry.

 

The forgotten history of American Jewish dissent against Zionism

Shaul Magid

 

American and Israeli Jews protest outside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's New York hotel in support of democracy for all in Israel-Palestine, September 19, 2023. (Gili Getz)

What is happening to the Zionist consensus? If you read much of the Jewish media, especially post-October 7, it appears to be alive and well, with most Jews understandably and passionately coalescing around the trauma induced by the Hamas-led attack. But something else seems to be afoot, especially in the shadow of Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza, which has taken over 28,000 lives and is showing no signs of letting up.

Among Israeli Jews, the feasibility of the war’s objectives are appearing increasingly uncertain, and an internal debate is percolating as to what the “day after” will look like. In the United States, the influence of progressive Jewish groups protesting the war and demanding a ceasefire has grown exponentially since the war began. These internal struggles around Israel’s future long pre-date October 7, and run much deeper than strategic questions about a single war.

In the world of letters, a plethora of books by Jewish authors have appeared in the last two years sharply criticizing Zionism itself, some even rejecting it.[1] The most recent example, which I review here, is Geoffrey Levin’s excellent new book “Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent 1948-1978,” explaining how the Zionist consensus is not only being challenged today, but has been questioned in America for decades.

The relationship between memory and history — the former often taking the form of ritualization, the latter documentation — underlies conventional notions of how we view the past, implying that writing history primarily requires the act of remembering. What is often forgotten, though, is that forgetting is as important to history as remembering; it is the curation of a narrative, and narratives are, by definition, selective. We choose what to remember, sometimes how to remember, and thus we also decide what to forget, intentionally, as an act of erasure.

One is reminded of the importance and precarity of forgetting when reading Levin’s new book, as he examines what he calls “the hidden history of conflict between American Jewish liberalism and Israeli policy — one long lost in sweeping generalizations about relations between these two poles of post-Holocaust Jewish life.” I think Levin is being too kind: it is, in fact, the story of American Jewish dissent against Zionism, and later Israel, from the 1930s to the present.

Why, then, does he only cover 1948 to 1978? The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 of course changed the nature of the debate, and in many cases quelled anti-Zionist sentiment among many American Jews after the fog of the Holocaust, the massive refugee crisis in Europe, and ultimately the emergence of the Jewish nation-state — but not completely. And 1978 was the first full year of the Likud party’s takeover after being elected the year before to replace what was, until then, a country run by the socialist-Zionist Labor government. Looking back, after many twists and turns, that year may be the germ-cell of where the country is today.

Forgotten figures, forgotten distinctions

The forgotten story resurrected by Levin is replete with many figures, once quite popular, today largely unknown: Don Peretz, William Zuckerman, Irving Engel, Fayez Sayegh, James Marshall, Morris Lazaron, Lessing Rosenwald, Sharon Rose, and Aviva Cantor. These are cutting room floor figures for most Jews today, even those who know a fair amount about American Judaism or Zionism. And in tracing these figures, Levin shows how, for years, one was able to be non-Zionist or anti-Zionist, or take part in anti-Zionist activities, without being deemed antisemitic.

Few people will know, for example, that Jacob Blaustein — who helped forge the alliance between American Zionists and David Ben Gurion at the Biltmore Conference in May 1942 — was not really a Zionist; if Blaustein is known at all today, it is as a kind of American Zionist hero of sorts. Blaustein remained close friends with figures like Elmer Berger, who together with Lessing Rosenwald, led the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism, which was against the existence of a Jewish state before and after its establishment.

Meanwhile, few will recall that most of the members of the 1970s Jewish protest movement Breira (Alternative), which was deeply critical of Israel and was shut down by a fierce negative campaign by the American Jewish establishment, were actually Zionists. Or that Fayez Sayegh, the most popular pro-Palestinian Arab spokesperson of his generation, was not considered antisemitic even by his Zionist detractors.

Perhaps the most central figure is Don Peretz and organizations such as the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the decidedly non-Zionist group (which Blaustein also headed) that was the most powerful U.S. Jewish organization in the postwar period. The AJC was non-Zionist in that it was not in principle against the Israeli state, even as it was harshly critical of the treatment of the Palestinian minority inside Israel; but the organization was opposed to Jewish nationalism being the raison d’etre of American Jews. In a certain sense, the AJC made an important distinction between the national identity of Jewish Israelis and nationalism (Zionism) as an identity for diaspora Jews — a distinction that has been forgotten.

Today, this distinction may sound dissonant because the Zionization of American Jewry and America more broadly intentionally collapsed any possibility of being non-Zionist and pro-Israel — that is, making Israeli identity and American Jewish identity categorically separate. Israel’s 2018 Jewish Nation-State Law codified this when it declared the State of Israel to be the “nation-state of the Jewish people,” assumingly whether they live there or not. Yet, ironically, this claim seems to undermine precisely what Ben Gurion wrote to Jacob Blaustein in an oft-cited letter from 1950, insisting that “Israel does not demand the loyalty of non-Israeli Jews.” Such a statement made by Israel’s first Prime Minister would likely be considered anti-Zionist today.

We don’t know all this, and much more, because many American Jewish historians don’t want us to. It upsets the narrative of the so-called “Zionist consensus,” a product of the 1970s projected backward to suggest all that precedes it is merely “antiquarian,” or intellectual refuse for a few scholars and archive rats with time on their hands. It shouldn’t interest us, they argue, because those debates have been decided. Levin deftly and with scholarly precision presses the “undelete” button and suddenly, as if in a hologram, a world largely forgotten pops back into focus.

The roots of a rebellion

Levin does not write “Our Palestine Question” as a partisan. It is the work of an adept historian, based on archival research and sound historical method, and its tenor is not ideological or histrionic. But that doesn’t mean it has no presentist concerns.

One way to frame the presentist agenda is by voicing two concerns many pro-Israelists often articulate: first, “Let us look forward and not back; why relitigate old debates when the problems we face are real and pressing?”; and second, “How can this younger generation of American Jews turn against Israel, and why do they rebel against the Zionist education we prepared for them?”

The first question can begin to be addressed by evoking William Faulkner’s famous quote, “The past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past,” or Benedetto Croce’s quip, “All history is contemporary history.” But how so? The claim to only want to look forward and not back is a sleight of hand, because it is premised on the lens of forgetting — a narrative curated for decades precisely to remember only part of the past and then claim it is comprehensive, or at least what is “useful.” But as Levin shows, once you open the historical archive, one often sees that what is inside is not that different from what one faces now.

The stock answer to the second question, that young American Jews are seduced by “woke” leftism, is convenient but unsatisfactory. While many of them may identify with the radical left, the fact is that they see a very different Israel than the one their parents fell in love with.

One of the salient points in Levin’s book is in showing how anti-Zionism between 1948 and 1978 was concerned with two distinct and only somewhat overlapping issues: first, the threat that Jewish nationalism posed to the Americanization, or assimilation, of Jews; and second, the way that Zionism as an ethnocentric illiberal project would not see to the just rights of the Arabs inside the state, from Ben Gurion’s refusal to allow Palestinian refugees to return in 1948 to the numerous land seizures facilitated by the 1950 Absentee Property Law and other methods.

For some non- and anti-Zionists, the liberal Judaism they espoused could not bear the weight of Jewish people’s shift from being a persecuted people to becoming a persecuting people. Zionists in Palestine such as Martin Buber acknowledged this, yet from their European experience and perspective, there was no alternative but to try and fight the tide of ethnonationalism. American Jews did have an alternative — America itself — and thus for many the fight was not against Zionism as much as for Judaism.

From rejecting Zionism to saving it

Here we see a crucial difference between Don Peretz and Elmer Berger. Peretz came from a strong Zionist background and was intimately engaged with the Yishuv — Palestine’s Jewish community — in the pre-state years. He saw firsthand the expulsion of Palestinians, the liquidation of their villages, and the state of the refugee camps, which he visited many times. He returned to the United States and wrote a dissertation in 1955, which he published as a book three years later: “Israel and the Palestine Arabs.” Whatever one makes of it, Peretz’s anti-Zionism was not a leftist call for universalism, it was the work of one deeply committed to Jewish responsibility and a Jewish future.

Similarly, Levin extensively examines the Yiddishist turned English publisher William Zuckerman, who founded the popular Jewish Newsletter in 1948. Not anti-Zionist per se, Zuckerman used his pen to castigate Israel’s moral failing in its treatment of the Palestinian minority. He described himself as “pro-Israel but anti-nationalist,” making another useful distinction that is now in the dustbin of history.

Throughout the early period of the state, there was a concerted effort on the part of the Israeli government to wage war against such critics, including trying to get Peretz fired from the AJC and Zuckerman fired from the London-based Jewish Chronicle. They were partially successful in the former (Peretz’s position was downgraded) and successful in the latter (Zuckerman was kicked out). This persecution was standard procedure with Israel intent on determining the tenor of American writings about the state’s affairs, curating a pro-Israel position long before the word “hasbara” came into play. The relationship between Israel and American Zionism was thus always hierarchical, policing voices that the former saw as threatening. But Peretz and Zuckerman were formidable foes and frustrated Israeli apologists for decades.

Berger was different. His anti-Zionism was an extension of the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform, Reform Judaism’s emblematic position that Jews were not a nation but carriers of a religious tradition. Berger did not focus much on the oppression of the Arab minority, although later in his career he moved in that direction; it is not that he didn’t care, but rather that his anti-Zionism was more about pro-Americanism for Jews. For this reason, Israel seemed to care less about him.

The final vestiges of the anti-Zionist front seemed to collapse after the 1967 Six-Day War, but not quite. While the victory might have put an end to the fear of a second Holocaust at the time, it was simultaneously the beginning of the military occupation, which in some way proved what Peretz, Zuckerman, and an aging generation feared: a more permanent instantiation of Jewish domination over the non-Jewish minority.

The response in Israel was swift. By the third week of June 1967, a leftist group known as Matzpen (The Compass) was already calling for an end to the occupation, which most Israelis at the time were calling liberation. The American Jewish response took a bit longer to congeal. As the settlement group Gush Emunim (the Bloc of the Faithful) took form in early 1974 following the Yom Kippur War, a group of young Jews in America, many from the New Left, and mostly Zionists, formed the Breira movement to oppose the entrenching occupation and fledgling settlement project. The same year, a young scholar named Noam Chomsky published his book “Peace in the Middle East,” which was met with harsh criticism from the mainstream. Most American Jews were unwilling to hear that the miraculous victory of June 1967 had a dark underside. That would change.

Levin’s chapter on Breira, which improves on previous studies thanks to more open access to its archives, documents how the movement sparked other similar youth movements nationwide focused on opposing Israel’s occupation. In some way, Breira is the real forerunner of contemporary progressive movements like IfNotNow, Jewish Voice for Peace, and others like them.

But there is an important distinction: almost all Breira members were Zionists. They were the children of the first wave of American Jewry’s Zionization, brought up on the vision of Israel as miraculously “making the desert bloom,” and all watched Otto Preminger’s film “Exodus.” Most were New Left liberals, many even radicals, but publications like the Jewish Liberation Journal led by Aviva Cantor was Zionist to its core. There were exceptions, such as Sharon Rose of the Jews for Urban Justice and the Brooklyn Bridge Coalition. But saving Zionism, not undermining it, was the raison d’etre of these groups. And yet, they were ravaged by the Jewish mainstream.

Restoring a Jewish ethos

Something has clearly changed in our time, and this is what raises the second question about why young American Jews today are questioning Zionism and even abandoning Israel. One possibility is that the New Left critics of Israel during the 1970s adopted the progressive ethos of Peretz, Zuckerman, et al and dropped the anti-Zionism. The present generation, in contrast, has adopted a New Leftism now refurbished as Critical Race Theory or anti-colonialism, and that has largely dropped the reflexive Zionism of those in Breira — in some way re-creating a wheel that was seemingly erased from history.

Why did this happen? Many younger millennials and Gen Zers were brought up with the previous generation’s romantic view of Zionism, but the post-2000 Israel they saw no longer cohered with that vision. For them, 1967 was not liberation but domination. Yet most had never heard of Don Peretz, William Zuckerman, or James Marshall — so where could they turn?

In this sense, “Our Palestine Question” can serve as a corrective. If a member of IfNotNow or JVP were to pick up Levin’s book, they might find much to relate to and learn from those he examines. The point is not to turn the newly non- or anti-Zionists into Zionists, nor is the point is to revive the non- or anti-Zionism of another era. Rather, the point is to inspire them to make their position more deeply rooted in a Jewish ethos informed by tradition and political theory from their community. Calls for “Decolonizing Palestine” and the radical progressivism of some of their peers are important, but there is a deeper, more Jewishly informed alternative to Zionism as it exists today that awaits re-examination, even if critically so.

The time of Peretz, Zuckerman, and Blaustein was a time of Ben Gurion, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and 1967. Ours is the time of Ben Gvir, Hamas, and October 7. For many young American Jews, liberal Zionism doesn’t work because they see a different Israel that is not going back to a place where perhaps it never was, even as we mourn the deaths of innocent Israelis, many of whom were peacemakers, and innocent Palestinians who are victims of the ongoing war in Gaza.

Yet the many titles published in the past two years, including Levin’s, should tell us something about the stability of the Zionist consensus, even in this time of darkness. To begin to think our way out of this, or perhaps more deeply into it, we need to look back at the cutting room floor of the American Jewish historian, or press the “undelete” button on our screens.

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[1] Here are just a few of the titles: Omri Boehm’s “The Haifa Republic” (2021), Jonathan Graubert’s “Jewish Self-Determination Beyond Zionism” (2023), Daniel Boyarin’s “The No-State Solution” (2022), “Unacknowledged Kinships: Postcolonial Studies and the Historiography of Zionism,” Vogt, Penslar, Saposnik eds. (2023), Arieh Sapoznik’s “Zionism’s Redemptions” (2022); Amnon Raz-Krokotzkin’s “Mishna Consciousness Biblical Consciousness: Safed and Zionist Culture” (2023) [Hebrew]; Atalia Omer’s “Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians” (2019), Mikhael Manekin’s “The Dawn of Redemption: Ethics and Tradition in a Time of Power” (2023); my “The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance” (2023); Marjorie Feld’s “The Threshold of Dissent: A History of Jewish American Critics of Zionism” (2024); and Oren Kroll-Zeldin’s “Unsettled: American Jews and the Movement for Justice in Palestine” (2024).