Book Review
Name of the Book: ‘Radicals, Rabbis and Peacemakers:
Conversations With Jewish Critics of Israel’
Edited by: Seth Farber
Publisher: Common Courage Press, Monroe, Maine, USA
(www.commoncouragepress.com)
Year: 2005
Pp: 252
ISBN: 1-56751-326-3
Reviewed by: Yoginder Sikand

Zionism’s imperialist agenda needs no elaboration. Nor
does the close symbiotic relationship that it has
consistently enjoyed with the American establishment
and, today, with the Christian Right. Much has
already been written about this. However, what these
writings leave out or else treat only summarily is the
vocal, though admittedly small and feeble, minority of
Jews, mainly representing various shades of the Left,
who are passionately anti-Zionist and are among the
most severe critics of Israel and Israeli policies.

This timely book articulates this little-known
dissident American Jewish perspective on Israel,
Zionism and Western Imperialism. In his preface, the
editor, Seth Farber, an American leftist
scholar-activist of Jewish background, berates the
vast majority of American Jews and Jewish
organisations for confusing Judaism with uncritical
support for Israel, and, in this way, supporting the
ruthless acts of terror of the Israeli state. The
ideology of the ‘Jewish state’ has, he laments, become
a surrogate religion, a substitute for Judaism.
Consequently, critics of Israel, including Jewish
dissidents, are branded as heretics. Yet, from a
strictly Jewish religious perspective, Farber argues,
the ‘worship’ of Israel that is central to the Zionist
imagination is akin to idolatry, the most heinous sin
imaginable according to the Jewish faith.

Farber sees his book and the voices of American Jewish
critics he captures herein as what he calls an
affirmation of the moral and spiritual tradition of
Judaism, which, he argues, is threatened with
extinction by Israeli and pro-Israeli American
policies. Some of the people he interviews are
religious, practising Jews. Others are Jewish only in
name. All, however, register their dissent in the name
of, and at least partly for, their Jewish-ness itself.
Almost all of them are unanimously opposed to the
Israeli occupation of Palestine, support the
Palestinian uprising as a just and moral struggle
against oppression and condemn Israel and its American
patron, likening their policies to South African
apartheid. They are all bitterly critical of the
notion that a Jewish state in Palestine is the
solution to the “Jewish Problem”, which is essentially
a White Christian creation. Some of them call for the
annihilation of Israel as a state, while others demand
a secular state or a bi-national state in Palestine
for all people living there. They fiercely denounce
what they decry as the myth of Israel’s eternal
innocence, so central to Zionist, Christian
fundamentalist and American neo-conservative
discourse. Likewise, they critique what they describe
as the myth of Israel as the only ‘democratic’ or
‘progressive’ state in the Middle East, which is
supported by the memory of the Holocaust which is
routinely mobilised to provide sanction to the Zionist
imperialist project.

The more religious among the Jewish dissidents who
speak out in the pages of this book dismiss the
notion, so basic to Zionist and Christian
fundamentalist ideology, of ‘God’s Covenant with
Israel’, through which the Zionist project has sought
to provide Biblical ‘religious’ sanction for the
illegal occupation of Palestine. This covenant, these
critics contend, is not a promise for privilege, but,
rather, a call to serve others, which, they point out,
is hardly consistent with robbing others of their
lands, which is precisely how the state of Israel came
into being. They see their denunciation of Israel and
of America’s uncritical support to the Zionist state
as an expression of their commitment to the memory of
past Jewish suffering by denouncing crimes committed
by Israel on the Palestinians. Some of them mince no
words in calling Israel a terrorist state, bent on the
destruction of the entire Palestinian people. Those
who, like themselves, who seek to remain faithful to
this tradition, must, they insist, speak out against
Israeli crimes. Conversely, they argue, Jews who
uncritically support Israel, the majority among the
American Jewry, are actually betraying their own
religion by sanctioning oppression.

These critics of Israel and Israeli oppression see
their task as a continuation of the prophetic
tradition in their own religion, rather than being a
betrayal of it. Being true to this tradition requires
them to denounce their co-religionists who
passionately back the Zionist state. Most American
Jews, they argue, have ‘displaced their relation with
God’ by substituting Israel in God’s place, and, as
Farber aptly puts it in his preface, ‘the vicarious
identification of most American Jews with the state of
Israel has eclipsed their recognition of their
identity and vocation as the people of Israel who are
bound by an ancient covenant to the God of all
nations’. Their sanction to the oppression of the
Palestinians by the American-backed Israeli state,
they insist, is ‘a suicidal abnegation of Jewish
identity […], a manifestation of Jewish self-hatred,
precisely because of the fact that […] it is not
possible to consider Judaism without justice’. Hence,
they call for Jews to denounce Israeli crimes in order
to be true to their own Jewish faith and to the God of
justice. Prophetic Judaism, Farber paraphrases them as
saying, inspires them ‘to seek God’s justice, not to
subordinate the good of humanity to the maintenance of
tribal or national allegiances, not to commit the sin
of idolatry to worship the state as God and Master’.
The ‘cult of Israel’ which, they argue, most American
Jews follow in pace of Prophetic Judaism, is, they
insist, a crime against God and the Jewish faith and
its moral heritage and spiritual ideals.

A brilliant critique of the Zionist project argued
from a Jewish religious perspective is provided by
Joel Kovel, a noted American Jewish political
scientist. He takes on the notion of Jewish
exceptionalism (reflected in the belief in the Jews as
God’s chosen people, possessors of a particularly high
moral, ethical and religious standard), which Zionism
builds on but which he dismisses as primitive tribal
logic and as ‘Zionist perversion’. He goes so far as
to call for the annihilation of the Israeli state and
what he calls the Israeli ‘settler-colonial society’,
equating it with apartheid South Africa and the Warsaw
ghetto. He insists that the state of Israel is
illegal, built on the robbery of other people’s lands,
a product of the machinations of Europeans, including
European Jews, for whose crimes Arabs were forced to
pay for no fault of their own. Hence, he stresses,
Israel is essentially a racist construct and a product
of white racism. He pleads with his fellow Jews to
realise that Zionism is a ‘horrible mistake’
tantamount to ‘ethnocracy’ and to acknowledge ‘how
stifling Zionism is to the notion of Judaism’. He also
condemns the notion of Greater Israel, so dear to
white Christian fundamentalists and Zionists, seeing
it as akin to a call for extermination of Palestinians
and others opposed to the Christian fundamentalist and
Zionist agenda.

A similar critique of Zionism from within the Jewish
religious framework is offered by Daniel Boyarin, an
Orthodox Jew and professor of Talmudic Culture. He
denounces the Zionists’ literalist interpretation of
the Torah that is used to justify Israeli crimes,
including expansionism, invasion of other countries
and widespread killing and torture of non-Jews,
stressing that this has led to racism, xenophobia and
militarism. Likewise, another Orthodox Jew, Rabbi
David Weiss speaks about his own group of practising
Jews, Neturei Karta, who have consistently been
opposed to the state of Israel. Arguing from a
religious perspective, he claims that God gave the
Children of Israel the land of Palestine many
centuries ago but on the condition that they should
live up to the covenant they established with Him—to
establish justice and love throughout the world.
However, since they failed to do so, God sent them
into exile. Hence, the Rabbi says, the notion of the
Return and of the state of Israel are clearly opposed
to the Will of God. Instead, he argues, the Jews must
reconcile themselves to being in ‘exile’, without a
country of their own, because exile, he says, is for
them a ‘time of mission’, ‘an opportunity for Jews to
fulfil the mission to the nations’, providing ‘light’
to all, in contrast to the terror and violence that,
he says, the state of Israel has for decades been
relentlessly promoting and engaging in. In fact, the
Rabbi argues, Zionism is aimed at transforming the
Jews into a ‘Godless people’, with the state of Israel
taking the place in the hearts and minds of Jews that
is rightly God’s. Zionism is, he minces no words in
saying, the ‘diametric opposite of Judaism’.
Accordingly, he exhorts faithful Jews to ‘pray to G-d
for the speedy and peaceful dismantling of the state
of Israel’.


Other American Jewish voices contained in this book do
not argue from a strictly Jewish religious perspective
but, nonetheless, provide valuable perspectives on the
Zionist project. Noam Chomsky offers a brilliant
critique of the American-Israeli nexus and suggests a
political set-up similar to the Ottoman millet system
as a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Stever Quester of ‘Jews Against Occupation’ expresses
his solidarity with the Palestinian resistance
movement, seeing it as an anti-imperialist struggle.
Norton Mezvinsky, professor of History, speaks out
against American media reporting on Israel and
Palestine, which he sees as totally uncritical of the
former. He boldly denounces the powerful influence of
the Zionist lobby in American politics, including
neo-conservative Jews in the present Bush
administration as well as the enormously powerful
Christian Zionists. He rightly sees them as major
forces behind American imperialist aggression,
directed particularly against Muslim countries.

Ora Wissa, founder member of the Ohio State Committee
for Justice in Palestine, decries US policy and what
he calls Israeli colonialism and the ‘unconditional
loyalty’ of the overwhelming majority of American Jews
to Israel. He sees Zionism as a ‘fascistic definition
of Jewish identity and Jewish community’, based on the
fallacious notion of the Jewish community being
inseparable from the state of Israel. In this way,
Zionism is, he insists, leading to the destruction of
the diversity and continuity of Jewish critical
thought. Like several other scholar-activists who
speak out in this book, he sees Zionism as a racist
project and as wrongly equating the oppressive
conditions under which European Jews had to live for
centuries in white European Christian lands with the
experience of Jews in non-white countries, such as the
Arab world or India, where Jewish minorities were
always much better treated. Hence, non-white Jews, who
are the majority among the worldwide Jewish community,
are wrongly taught that the Holocaust or European
Jewish history is their history.

Repeating many of the points that Wissa makes but
amplifying some of them further, Normah Finkelstein,
son of a Warsaw ghetto and Auschwitz concentration
camp survivor, debunks the Zionist myth that Palestine
was an empty, barren land, devoid of people, before
the Jews came to populate and ‘civilise’ it. He
denounces what he sees as the repellent chauvinism of
Zionism, the belief in the uniqueness of Israel and of
the suffering of the Jews, the hatred inherent in
Zionism for non-Jews (‘Gentiles’), particularly
Muslims orArabs as well as the violent crimes
committed by the Israeli state and civilians against
the Palestinians ever since the illegal founding of
the state of Israel.

This remarkable book is a real eye-opener, and no one
interested in Middle Eastern affairs, international
relations more generally as well as inter-faith
relations can afford to miss it. Besides forcefully
denouncing Zionism and American imperialism it also
indirectly critiques radical Islamist demagogues, many
of whom see all Jews as necessarily anti-Muslim and
even as evil and Satanic. The power, passion and
sincerity with which the people interviewed in this
book speak are enough to debunk that fallacious
theory. Collectively, they point to what Marc Ellis,
professor of Jewish Studies, who is also interviewed
in this book, says is the urgent need for
‘revolutionary’ Jews, Muslims, Christians and others
committed to a more just world to struggle together,
each inspired by their own prophetic traditions.