Published: 6 December 2022
Last updated: 5 March 2024
MARTIN MUNZ takes issue with PHILIP MENDES' prescription for Zionists finding a place in progressive agendas.
Philip Mendes' prescriptions for young progressive Jews in his recent article "Zionists need to show how they fit into progressive agenda" requires a response. Are his prescriptions bona fide suggestions to encourage dialogue, or are they the musings of a senior academic whose well-practiced arguments are inadequate in addressing the Israel/Palestine question which goes from bad to worse?
Mendes stigmatises arguments and discourses he disagrees with by deploying negative descriptors and superficial glosses of complex and tragic historical circumstances.
It seems unreal at this time to prescribe for young Jews "a firm two-state solution and no to both West Bank settlements and a coerced return of 1948 Palestinian refugees to Green Line Israel." Hundreds of thousands of Jewish people live in West Bank settlements, albeit illegally, while the return of Palestinian refugees is an unenforceable right. The two just aren’t equivalent. If negotiations were possible about the return of 1948 Palestinians to their former homes in Israel, it would, by definition, be by negotiation and not "coerced". After 45 years of military occupation and colonisation facilitated by Israeli governments, and a new government that includes militant secular and religious supremacists committed to the formal annexation of the West Bank and more, which remnant of the West Bank will be negotiated away by Israel?
Mendes' remarks about the origins and "real meaning" of political Zionism and the "overwhelmingly collectivist roots" of Israel are inconsistent with contemporary understandings of those things coming from many sources, including Israeli scholarship, e.g. Zeev Sternhell’s, The Founding Myths of Israel, English edition 1998.
Are young Jewish progressives helped by demonising Palestinian non-violent protest, by white-washing Israel’s militarised ethnocracy, or by denying the Palestinian experience of ethnic cleansing and discrimination now enshrined in Israeli law?
