Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on March 7, 2020

This weeks AIPAC conference in Washington wrestled with the crisis facing the Israel lobby: the growing partisanship of Israel support. AIPAC featured many Democratic politicians, and its panels offered appeals to progressives, though AIPAC is a rightwing organization (as the young Jewish group IfNotNow reminds us).

In an AIPAC forum on Progressive Zionism, Rabbi Noah Zvi Farkas said that Zionists could make common cause with leftwing groups by sharing their vulnerability and pain and trauma from Jewish history as a persecuted minority, and in that way other marginalized and historically-oppressed groups will related to them.

Farkas serves a Los Angeles-area conservative congregation and is on the board of the Zionist group Zioness along with the Clintonite leader Ann Lewis.

Here are some of the rabbis comments. First, Zionism is progressive because it answers the question, How do Jews find security after thousands of years living on the margins of society?

The question Ive always been thinking about is, How Zionism itself is a progressive value. Not necessarily the specific policies in Israel that make Israel a progressive nation. Or the specific policies that have yet to be realized in Israel that could make it a more progressive nation. But the idea that Zionism itself is a progressive value because Zionism is the idea that each and every one of us has a place to live in the world. And each and every one of us has a right to not feel other-ed by the larger society in which we live. And for the Jewish person, and in the Jewish heart, that idea is Zionism. That is the answer to the question of, What do we do after thousands of years living on the margins of society?

Farkas said that the reason young Jews are critical of Israel is that they are surrounded by progressives who deal in negativity: tearing down whats around you. He tries to offer a more constructive path of using Jewish tradition to build the democracy you want to see in the world.

When you think about why young Jewish progressives feel against or negatively about Israel, or have apathy or distance from Israel, so much of it is because they take their cues from this deconstructive progressive body politic. I think the way you engage them is by engaging their allies, by engaging the historically marginalized, the black and brown people, the LGBTQ people, and that you have to get into relationship with them, and to bring them along in the process of a positively constructive progressive movement. Thats some of the work were doing in Zioness.

Farkas never spoke about Palestinian persecution or Palestinian conditions.

He repeatedly cited the need for Zionists to build relationships with leftwingers.

Our biggest mistake in the last 15 years is we have ignored progressives, we have ignored historically marginalized people. We made the story of Zionism only about us and the Jewish people, which of course it has to be in chapter 1 of that book. But chapter 2 of that book is how the Exodus story matters to other people. Because we were not in those spaces we didnt go to Black Lives Matter meetings when they first started, we didnt sit with Occupy when it first started the only people who showed up in those spaces were people who wanted to demonize Israel. And they built relationships, and because of those relationships, they shared their own vulnerability and through that shared vulnerability they came to policy positions that other, demonize and hate people like you and people like me.

Zionists need to work with the left on leftwing issues, then make the turn and show that Jews are vulnerable too.

What progressives Zionists need to do is show up in those meetings, not to engage on our issues yet, but to engage on those issues, create the shared vulnerability, open the door, create those relationships, and then make the turn and tell them about our pain.

And when we do that they will actually listen to us, because progressives respond I respond, I think you respond to someone elses pain. And if we do that, we can create the relationships and build the progressive Zionist movement that is still missing in this country

Farkas advised a Wesleyan University student who said she was caricatured as a Trump supporter and not welcome at the animal-rights club to hang in there:

The number one thing as a progressive you can lean into is empathy and pain and trauma. you can show them, those who claim to be progressive, that all voices should be heard, and that your voice matters, and your shared vulnerability matters. And youre not asking them to support what you believe, but youre asking them to at least understand emotionally what youre going through, and then that is how you begin to build that relationship and hopefully it will change over time.

No one can tell a discriminated-against individual that theyre not experiencing hatred, Farkas went on. As a Jew if I experience something as antisemitism, then its antisemitism. The same goes for the gay person experiencing homophobia, a woman experiencing misogyny.

And its working, Farkas says. Zioness is a progressive organization that has built alliances on progressive issues and gotten some allies to shut up about their anti-Zionism.

Were getting bigger and bigger across campuses and in fact were neutralizing some opposition that we never thought we could neutralize before. That doesnt mean they are going to be Zionists themselves but weve gotten several major black preachers for example who are friends of mine who are working on homelessness issues with me in Los Angeles they dont preach against Israel any more. Theyre not Zionists, theyre not going to come but theyre not preaching BDS any more. And thats because weve developed relationships. Im working on racial discimination in the homelessness sector in the Los Angeles with them, for them as a partner. Thats what Zioness does. We show up and we create proximity being in intimate relationship with other peoples pain and that is what creates the opportunity for them to actually hear our pain and our desires.

Asked why AIPAC was a good place for progressives to invest precious resources, Farkas said that the only way to get power in the U.S. if you werent born into a wealthy zip code or inherited certain privileges is to organize. And: AIPAC is the greatest organizing machine of the Jewish people in the United States.

(The obvious critique of Farkass statements is that AIPAC is a very powerful organization indeed that operates by directing funds toward politicians who support occupation and ethnic cleansing, and its power is actually derived from many people born into wealthy zipcodes. This is the fundamental paradox of the Israel lobby, that it draws on a history of Jewish persecution and marginalization to justify the exercise of corrupt and brutal power. I wonder how many progressives even want to hear from Zionists who fail to acknowledge that Palestinians under occupation have no rights.)

Original post:
Zionists can find allies on the left by sharing Jewish pain and trauma, AIPAC is told - Mondoweiss

Category: Zionism
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