Customer Reviews

Radicals, Rabbis and Peacemakers: Conversations with Jewish Critics of Israel

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I am appalled at what Saul Freidman said about this book. Clearly he did not read the book. Norman Finkelstein has not been tormenting holocaust survivors.This is a cruel thing to say as both of Professor Finkelstein's parents were themselves Holocaust survivors. Both were in the Warsaw Ghetto and his mother was in Auschwitz. His parents lost all their surviving relatives in the holocaust. Dr Finkelstein was angry because although many Jewish organizations got rich from reparations from the holocaust, virtually none of the survivors got one penny, including Finkelstein's parents. If Freidman had read the interview with Professor Finkelstein he would know this.Instead he accuses this poor man, who has only tried to honor the memory of his parents, of tormenting Holocaust survivors. Shame on you, Saul Freidman! That is no way to treat a fellow Jew- just because he does not agree with you about Israeli policies. Friedman also lies--or has not read any of the book--on the issue of "suicide bombers." Not one of the people interviewed defends suicide bombing. Farber, Shapiro, Finkelstein, Quester and others specifically condemn the suicide bombing conducted by groups like Hamas. But they also condemn the murder of defenseless Palestinian women and children by the Israel Army--5 times as many as Israelis murdered. Steve Quester, a Jew who lived with a Palestinian family, witnessed Israeli soldiers shooting at little Palestinian children. As Jews we have to be honor our greeat ethical and religious tradition. This means we must condemn injustice even when it comes from our side. This means we must face the fact that the Israeli government has treated the Palestinians like dogs. The Jews in this book are brave enough to demand justice for all people. Dr Farber has done a great service by putting this book together. He did this out of love for the Jewish people--he wants them to live up to the high standards of justice upon which our religious tradition is based. And this book convinced me that we Jews can do that. But we must first start treating the Palestinians as our brothers and sisters. We must demand that Israel withdraw from the West Bank and remove the Jewish settlements, so that the Palestinians can have a decent amount of land to create their own state. As Americans we must tell our own government that it must say to Israel that it will reduce the billions of dollars of grants given to it every year unless it ends the Occupation. If you read this book with an open mind it will completely change the way you look at the situation in the middle east.It changed my mind. It made me realize that the Palestinians are human, it made me ashamed of what Israel has done--and it made me feel that in the name of the great tradition of Judaism (which believes that all human beings are equal--see Isaiah)I must work to help end the occupation of Palestinian land. Dr Farber's has his own perspective which he explains in the last chapter. He believes strongly in the teachings of the Biblical Jewish prophets. As Micah said in the Bible: "Act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with thy God." Farber has done that.Kudoos. He has put together an important book. Every Jew, every American, should read it.

This is a brilliant book. Before I read it I thought both Jews and Palestinians were equally to blame for the quagmire in Israel. After reading Dr Farber, Noam Chomsky, Mezvinsky, Finkelstein and the account of his experiences by Steve Quester who spent 3 summers in the West Bank risking his life to protect Palestinians, I changed my mind. I realized that what the Jewish settlers did and are doing to the Palestinians in 1948 and today is exactly what Europeans settlers did in America to the Indians--dispossessing a native people of their land, rendering them homeless, herding them into the modern reservations. In Israel the reservations are rufugee camps in the West Bank and elsewhere. Finkelstein's account of Palestinians' expulsion and dispossession in 1948, laced by Farber with accounts by observers of the 1948 war, made me want to cry.What have we done to the poor Palestinians? What have we become as Jews? We were a moral spiritual people and now most of us spend our time trying to deny that we have done anything wrong, inventing rationalizations for Israel. We claim the Palestinians were always bad, Arabs are always bad, or that there were no Palestinians in Palestine! Finkelstein--whose parents were both Holocaust survivors--demolishes this last myth. The scholars in this book are top of the field.And the book is praised by first rate scholars, as well as by the great Daniel Berrigan. It is fascinatating to get a glimpse into the souls of those Farber interviews--because his questions are probing.

Marc Elis the theolgian says we should apologize to the Palestinians, we should confess our sins. They were expelled and not allowed to return--in violation of the UN and international law. In our greed for land we HAVE sinned. In our disregard for justice and God we have sinned. Nor,as Farber shows,can the conflict be blamed solely on the the Holocaust.Most of the holocaust survivors did not want to go to Israel but to America, but Ben-Gurion opposed that.American Jewish organizations refused to fight for the right of Jews to come here. Further as Chomsky and Farber show there were other Jews like Martin Buber and Judah Magnes who proposed solutions that would enable the Jews and Arabs to share the land but the hard core Zionists would have nothing of it

I was surprised to learn that Steve Quester, an American Jew, was welcomed with open arms by the Palestinians. Quester went to Palestine with the ISM, a movement that knee-jerk Zionists disparage as pro-terrorist but his dedication to non-violence could not be clearer. The reviewers who puts down the ISM probably did not read the interviews with Quester and Adam Shapiro. Or she read them with a hardened heart.

Why are the people Farber interviewed speaking out on behalf of the Palestinians when the Jewish community is trashing them for it?? One young woman in the book, Ora Wise, is the daughter of a conservative rabbi. Her entire family is furious at her for supporting Palestinians rights to self--determination.Her father won't talk to her. It cannot be easy for these people to take the positions they do. They do it out of a sense of moral obligation. The theologian Marc Ellis says in Farber's book that many Jews of conscience choose to take positions that lead to their ostracism by the organized Jewish community. This is a lonely position to be in--hated and despised by family and friends;Ellis says they are entering into a "new exile"--from the Jewish community in the diaspora. Why? Why do they risk their lives by going to Palestine where Israeli soldiers shoot bullets over their heads or beat them with sticks? (Several, like Rachel Corrie, were even murdered by the Israeli Army.) There can be only one reason. The call of conscience is so powerful among many Jews (albeit a minority) it overwhelms the lure of security. Marc Ellis a theologian says that by standing up for the Palestinians they are saving the Jewish covenant itself, Jews' covenant with God to serve all of humanity, to serve as a light unto the nations.They carry the covenant with them into exile. It is lonely but the lives of the Jewish prophets were lonely. Farber states that he worships the God of justice rather the idol of the Jewish state.

One reviewer claimed that Jews were a majority in the part of Palestine granted.Does she not understand that is irrelevant: Jews were a minority in Mandate Palestine. They were only 30% of the population and had purchased only 6% of the land. Not everything can be bought with money. These scholars show that the Palestinians were attached to their homes and their land. Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister and architect of the Jewish state, knew that a war was necessary in order to ethnically cleanse Palestine of its Arab inhabitants. He said so in 1937:"... we have to stick to compulsory transfer of the Arabs from the projected Jewish state.."

In the end Farber demonstrates that prophetic Judaism and Zionism are incompatible. Jews cannot worship power and serve the cause of justice, the God of justice. I think his last chapter is one of the most powerful statements in the book.It is a powerful affirmation of Judaism. In fact he argues that the hard-core Zionists are self-hating Jews because they have repudiated the heart of the Jewish tradition--its prophetic core. He srgues the only way to recover this tradition is to enter into solidarity with the Palestinians, and to divorce ourselves from our modern role of defending the crimes of the powerful Jewish nation-state. That is what Isaiah would have done. For it was Isaiah who exhorted all peoples to beat their swords into ploughshares---and foresaw a time of peace when the earth would be full of the knowledge of the Lord. Farber's book is a contribution to the goal of Isaiah.

Criticism of Israel and its policies is verboten in polite company in the US. Those who doubt this need only look to the reception accorded President Jimmy Carter's tepid book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Carter makes no controversial claims. Yet we are repeatedly told that Carter is an anti-Semite and wants to destroy the state of Israel! Or consider the shameful attacks on Prof. Norman G. Finkelstein for daring to document that the Nazi genocide was being exploited, and not for the benefit of survivors, in his book The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, New Edition 2nd Edition: we are to believe he is a minimizer of the Nazi genocide, even though it is well known that both his parents were survivors of the concentration camps. All this even as toasts are raised to the plagiarist, torture-condoner, arch-Israeli-apologist Dershowitz.

The Israeli scholar Tanya Reinhart captured succinctly both the diversity and unity of the different voices in this book. She wrote:

"This is an important book....In these shameful days, when black turns white, when the most brutal leader Israeli militarism has produced is hailed as a man of peace and when standing for justice is silenced as anti-Semitism, this book is a breath of fresh air. The many voices in this book, each different, but all taking basic human values as their point of departure, reminds us that being a Jew today can mean adhering to higher principles than those dictated by the Israeli generals."

-Tanya Reinhart, Professor Emeritus, Tel Aviv University, Author of Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948 †

>>> The brilliant Pakistani scholar and Muslim M. Shahid Alam wrote:

"Now thanks to Seth Farber, we can listen to some of the leading Jewish American critics of Israel as they make the moral, legal and political case against the Israeli Occupation of Palestine and propose solutions that will allow the Jews and Palestinians to live in peace in two separate states or a single bi-national state. I can hope that his book will be read widely, and that it will persuade more Americans-Jews and non-Jews alike-to recognize the just demands of the Palestinians for an honorable existence in their own country."

-M. Shahid Alam, Professor of Economics, Northeastern University, Boston, Author of Is There An Islamic Problem

My own EMPHASIS is expressed succinctly in my Introduction and concluding essay--that Israel's treatment of the Palestinians conflicts both with international law and with the teachings of prophetic Judaism. Thus this book is also a strong affirmation of Judaism at its best. My conviction that the Jewish prophetic perspective represents the spiritual height of Judaism was shared by Reform Judaism when it was first established in Germany and the US in early 19th Century. The priority given by the prophets to universal historical justice is recognized also by Abraham Heschel in his book The Prophets. For well over a century Reform Judaism affirmed a universal messianic vision (Isaiah, Jeremiah), repudiated the idea of returning to Palestine, and reiterated the prophets' conviction that Jews had a divine mission to be a "light unto the nations." Thus prophetic Judaism testifies to a God whose essential characteristic is righteousness and who desires above all that human beings create a society based upon universal justice. Worship of the God of justice is not compatible with the idolatrous worship of a militaristic nation-state, whether that state be Israel or America--or the worship of the Roman Empire by Christians in another era. Not until after WW11 did the Reform movement affirm Zionism-- and not until after 1967 did its worship of Israel grow more numinous (more intense)than its worship of God. Thus Reform Judaism repudiated its own founding theology--beautifully codified in the 1885 Pittsburg Platform. The contributors to this book have diverse theological perspectives--many, like Noam Chomsky,are atheists or agnostics, two are Orthodox Jews. Yet almost all consider themselves Jewish in some sense.Almost all believe they have a moral obligation to protest the treatment of the Palestinians by Israel--and its support by the US government (which gives Israel $3 billion a year). (Contrary to their detractors, not one supports suicide bombings.) Each in his/her own way renounces the Biblical sin of idolatry--the worship of the State and military might;I would add,as does Marc Ellis,in place of God.

I thought this book was excellent as far as it goes: interviews with prominent anti-Zionist Jews about the Israeli-Palestinian mess. I was especially interested in the Daniel Boyarin piece, which explained Boyarin's thesis about the contrast between the gentle, nonviolent, "feminized" Jewish male of the European Diaspora, and the violent, hypermasculine Israeli male. There was also a piece about Israel having developed a "Constantinian" Judaism comparable to Christianity as the Roman state religion following Constantine, and then throughout the medieval period. These are things that have always bothered me about Israel, though I'm not certain I would go so far as to call myself an anti-Zionist. And the material on how the Zionists cynically used the Holocaust to further their cause is pretty shocking. I'd like to learn more about that.

The only thing I thought lacking in the book was an interview with Rabbi Michael Lerner, a Zionist who is critical of Israeli government. The author most likely decided not to include his voice as the Zionist position is often heard, while anti-Zionists are mostly silenced outside of left circles. However, he does articulate a left perspective on Zionism and his position is critiqued throughout the book; it seems to me under those circumstances he should have been given the opportunity to have his say. As I noted before, I'm not certain where I stand on the issue and would like to hear multiple perspectives from the left.

The preface of this book should warn us all about what is coming. In it, the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), which I feel is a major opponent of human rights, is praised and is portrayed as supporting human rights! Universities are advised to divest from Israel, an act which I consider a blow not only to peace, justice, and human rights, but also a racist attack on truth and scholarship. Israel's "failure to comply with United Nations resolutions" is used to condemn not the UN, but Israel.

There's an interview with Noam Chomsky, who seems to feel that just because America conquered some land which is now part of our country, and just because Israel defended itself against some attacks, it is unjust for America or Israel to exist today. That is totally absurd. A better way to analyze such situations is simple: ask who would own what if nobody had committed any crimes or acts of violence. The obvious answer should come as a shock only to a few fanatical antizionists: Americans would own America and Israelis would own Israel. We Americans got into fights over land that we would have bought anyway, sooner or later. And Israel got into fights over land it either already owned or would have bought, and it lost some of that land in those fights.

This arbitrary treatment of the Arab war against Israel reminds me of a test proposed by Edward Alexander: are those who demand rights for others willing to demand the same rights (not more, not less) for themselves, or for their own people?

One after another, Chomsky, Steve Quester, Joel Koval, Norton Mezvinsky, Ora Wise, Norman Finkelstein, Phyllis Bennis, Adam Shapiro, Daniel Boyarin, David Weiss, and Marc Ellis join Seth Farber in flunking this test. Some are explicit about it. For example, Boyarin says one has to "take care of the poor behavior of your own people before you worry about the poor behavior of other people."

If anyone who called me one of their people said that "we" should ignore violent attacks on me and instead investigate accusations (probably by my attackers) of bad behavior on my part, I might start to question my relationship to that person! But whether I did so or not, that person would be taking a completely arbitrary stand. A total outsider would be exposed as being arbitrary at once for ignoring crimes by one side in a dispute. Claiming to be a member of one of the two sides does not grant one immunity from any of this. Refusing to consider the crimes of one of the sides is arbitrary no matter who does it.

Still, arbitrariness is not the only problem with the book. Even the advantage of being able to describe a war as though only one of the sides is actually fighting is not enough for the contributors to this book. In addition, they simply come up with outright misinformation. And that bothers me. This book is unscholarly. It is antischolarly. And its falsehoods serve to support terrorism.

Such an approach absolutely destroys any faith I might have that I am dealing with people who are willing to sincerely deliberate issues of public policy. Basically, unless they stop feeding me intentional untruths, I won't consider any of their recommendations.

If there were just a few mistakes or exaggerations, I might let that go. But that's not the case. The book is misleading almost all the time. I'll give what looks like an innocent example. It would be innocent if it occurred just once or twice. But not when it is one of many famous untruths that have been heavily cited and criticized by honest people. Norman Finkelstein talks about the fact that Jews only owned 6% of some land when Israel became a state. He implies that Arabs owned the other 94%. Hmm, 94% sounds bigger than 6%. Maybe the Arab claim to the land was even better than that of the Jews!

But this is all nonsense. Jews outnumbered Arabs in the portion of the British Mandate that the United Nations put in the Jewish partition. It wasn't 6% Jewish. The majority were Jews (in spite of enormous efforts made by Arabs and British to keep Jews out of land the League of Nations had given Jews a right to settle in). And while only 6% of the total British Mandate soil was Jewish private property, most of that soil was state land! The Arabs didn't own much of the land either. You may want to check for yourselves what the actual amounts were, both in the entire Mandate and in the Jewish partition.

Almost every sentence is like that. The contributors know what they are doing. They feel that if they tell the truth, they have no case. That may not stop them from coming up with books like this one, but it certainly ought to stop us from recommending them.

This is a collection of the worse writing on Israel imaginable by the most immoral people imaginable. They are the people who defend the suicide- bombers, defend those who have for years attacked defenseless civilians. They include the chief ingrate of the Western world Noam Chomsky who has for years exploited American democracy and freedom while defending America's worse totalitarian enemies. It also includes the cruel Norman Finklestein who has for years been tormenting Holocaust survivors with his insane charges that they profit from the disaster which brought many of them loss of whole families.

I do not know who the shameless editor is but Mr. Farber has self- promoted by reviewing his own book on this site.

Pliny said that there is no book so bad that there is not something good about it. This book is one of the few I know which proves him wrong.