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Seth Farber
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Radicals, Rabbis and Peacemakers: Conversations with Jewish Critics of Israel Paperback – July 1, 2005

by Seth Farber (Author)
3.6 3.6 out of 5 stars 5 ratings
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“A valuable contribution to the contentious dialogue on an important issue. One cannot but feel great sadness and anger about what has become of the state of Israel after reading these important interviews.”—Anthony Gronowicz, author of Race and Class Politics in New York City Before the Civil War

Radicals, Rabbis and Peacemakers consists of conversations with leading intellectuals and activists who believe it is their obligation to protest Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians. Participants include Noam Chomsky; Joel Kovel; Norman Finkelstein, author; Ora Wise, activist in Jews Against the Occupation; Rabbi David Weiss; Adam Shapiro and Phyllis Bennis.

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  1. Print length
    400 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Common Courage Press
  4. Publication date
    July 1, 2005
  5. Dimensions
    6 x 0.7 x 9 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1567513263
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1567513264
  8. See all details
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Top reviews from the United States

  • Shankar Ramamoorthy
    5.0 out of 5 stars Jewish self-haters all?
    Reviewed in the United States on June 16, 2007
    Verified Purchase
    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.
    13 people found this helpful
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  • Jill Malter
    1.0 out of 5 stars Antizionist propaganda
    Reviewed in the United States on June 12, 2005
    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.
    9 people found this helpful
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  • Nora Freeman
    4.0 out of 5 stars Only one thing missing
    Reviewed in the United States on June 30, 2010
    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.
    One person found this helpful
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