Forging New Jewish and Islamic
Democratic Identities
excerpted from the book
Democracy Matters
Winning the Fight Against Imperialism
by Cornell West
Penguin Books, 2004, paper
p116
There is no doubt that the relationship of the American empire
and the Israeli state is a special one. It was not always so.
Nor will it likely forever be so. Most American political elites
supported the Arab states in the late 1940s and early 1950s owing
to oil. In 1956 President Eisenhower ordered Israel to withdraw
from the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula, which it had invaded
and occupied, along with oil-hungry Britain and Nasser-hating
France. Israel complied. The present U.S.-Israeli alliance did
not emerge until the mid-i960s.. Soviet ties to Egypt and Syria
pushed President Johnson closer to Israel. Meanwhile, Israel's
fear of Arab threats to eliminate the Jewish state made it eager
for U.S. support. The first U.S. offensive weapons systems sale
to Israel-the A4 Skyhawk jet deal-was approved in 1965. When,
in 1967, Egypt's Nasser closed the Strait of Tiran, the waterway
that gave access to Israel's only port on the fled Sea, Israel
launched its historic preemptive attack on Egypt and Syria-an
attack that was approved by the CIA and the Pentagon during the
visit of Meir Amit (Israel's chief of Mossad) on the eve of the
action which led to the Six Days' War. The next fall the United
States sold Phantom jets to Israel, making this weapon available
for the first time to an ally outside of NATO, even before giving
it to South Vietnamese forces who were fighting a war in which
U.S. soldiers were dying daily. U.S. military sales to Israel
were $140 million between 1968 and 1970. This jumped to $1.2 billion
from 1971 to 1973. After the Israeli defeat of the Soviet client
states of Egypt and Syria in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, U.S. military
aid increased still further. In 1974 it totaled $2.57 billion.
This massive shift to support for Israel took place not because
U.S. officials were drawn to the just cause of the Israeli state
but for cold war political and geostrategic reasons. Israel, a
small and fragile state under siege, began to look like an important
ally to the American empire because of U. S. dependency on foreign
oil and fear of Soviet influence in Arab states.
Today Israel-a country of 6.5 million
people-receives 33 percent of the entire foreign-aid budget of
the American empire ($3 billion a year). Another 20 percent of
the budget goes to Egypt, in part as a payment for not attacking
Israel, and Jordan is the third largest recipient (comparable
to India!). In short, more than half the budget concerns the security
of Israel. The average African receives 10 cents a year from U.S.
foreign aid. The average Israeli receives $500 a year. Only 0.2
percent of the U.S. GNP goes to foreign aid-by this measure America
ranks last out of the twenty-two wealthiest countries in the world!
A conservative estimate of total U.S.
foreign aid to Israel since 1949 is $97.5 billion. Israel has
become a military giant (with nuclear weapons) in the Middle East,
and yet that military might and the protectorship of the United
States that has accompanied all the munitions have not come for
free. Israel has paid a price: it has no peace or real security.
Historically empires have looked to their allies to assist in
their dirty work, and Israel played a key role in some of the
most morally indefensible policies of the United States as it
waged the cold war: providing arms, training, and intelligence
sup port for the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, the Afrikaner
government of apartheid South Africa, UNITA thugs in Angola, and
repressive juntas in Guatemala. Like Turkey, Greece, and South
Korea, Israel became a frontline U.S. ally, and no other ally
in the Middle East yielded such positive results.
As this strategic alliance developed and
deepened, American elites and certain powerful factions of American
Jewish leadership became so hardened in their partnership that
they adopted a "broach no criticisms" position about
Israel's actions in the conflict with the Palestinians, a stance
that effectively silenced critics, including Jewish critics.
The painful irony is that the most significant
and powerful group of Jews outside beleaguered Israel has not
been free to engage in a robust debate about the policies of the
Israeli government. There are indeed many prophetic Jews out of
the 6.1 million Jews in America ('.8 percent of the U. S. population)
eager to pursue honest, Socratic questioning of the hard-line
position of the U.S. -Israeli alliance, but their voices are marginalized
and their motives are often maligned. Mainstream Jewish leadership
has suffocated genuine Jewish prophetic views and visions. In
this way, the most visible Jewish identity in the Diaspora appears
to many, here and abroad, to be an imperial identity whose security
resides in military might and the colonial occupation of Palestinians.
Yet in regard to domestic policy, American Jews have been the
most loyal group-other than black Americans-to support civil rights
and civil liberties. Jews have been a pillar for liberal efforts
to support social justice for all in America, yet the issue of
the Jewish state tends to muzzle their democratic energies.
p122
The two major groups of the Jewish lobby are the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee and the Conference of Presidents of Major
American Jewish Organizations. The first group consists of 60,000
members and a staff of 130 and has an annual budget of almost
$20 million. Widely known as AIPAC, it focuses on Congress, maintaining
an office near Capitol Hill. It mobilizes hard-line Israeli supporters
in nearly every congressional district and encourages its members
to make significant monetary contributions to candidates of both
parties (from conservative Republican Trent Lott to liberal Democrat
Hillary Clinton), and it can torpedo candidates who criticize
Israeli policies, like Cynthia McKinney in Georgia. The second
group is composed of the heads of fifty-one Jewish organizations,
including the three largest-the Union of American Hebrew Congregations
(1.5 million Reform Jews and their 900 synagogues), the United
Synagogue of Conservative Judaism (1 .5 million Conservative Jews
and their 760 synagogues), and the Orthodox Union (600,000 Orthodox
Jews and their 800 congregations). This group has a staff of six
and an annual budget of less than a million dollars. And despite
its political and ideological diversity, its leader for the past
eighteen years, Malcolm Hoenlein, has been dubbed "the most
influential private citizen in American foreign policy" by
a former high-ranking U.S. diplomat. His fundamental aim is the
security of the Jewish state. But the weight he puts on justice
for Palestinians is suspect-even though many prophetic Jews in
his organization want both security for Israel and justice for
Palestinians. In short, those in the powerful Jewish lobby-though
far from monolithic and certainly not an almighty cabal of Zionists
who rule the United States or the world (in the vicious language
of zealous anti-Semites)-are far to the right of most American
Jews and are often contemptuous of prophetic Jewish voices. In
fact, their preoccupation with Israel's security at the expense
of the Palestinian cry for justice has not only produced little
security for Israel but also led many misinformed Jews down an
imperial path that suffocates their own prophetic heritage.
This suffocation is seen most clearly
in the major sectors of the mass media. Mortimer Zuckerman, the
new head of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish
Organizations, owns U.S. News & World Report and the New York
Daily News. Martin Peretz, editor in chief and co-owner of the
New Republic, is a defender of hard-line Israeli policies toward
the Palestinians. The Sulzbergers, the more sophisticated and
open-minded Jewish family who publish the New York Times, house
the unofficial dean of American foreign-affairs journalism, the
bestselling author Thomas Friedman, whose misrepresentations of
the Middle East are legion (yet whose call to pull back on Israeli
settlements is courageous). Needless to add, the far-reaching
influence of the non-Jewish Rupert Murdoch (New York Post, Weekly
Standard, Fox News Channel) is enormous. He is a stalwart of the
imperial U.S.-Israeli lobby.
The dominant voices of the American Jewish
lobby have, in fact, so eviscerated their own prophetic Jewish
tradition that they have even embraced the support of conservative
evangelical Christians. How ironic it is to see this Jewish lobby
fuse with right-wing evangelical Christians whose anti-Semitism,
past and present, is notorious, and whose support for Israel is
based on the idea that the Jewish state paves the way for the
Second Coming of Christ. The recent controversy over Mel Gibson's
film The Passion of the Christ reveals the absurdity of this unholy
alliance. To worship the golden calf of power and might is one
thing. To unite with the heirs of the fundamental source of anti-Judaism
in last two thousand years of Jewish history-whose literal readings
of the New Testament reek of anti-Semitic views-is to reveal the
depths of establishmentarian Jewish capitulation to the worst
of the American empire.
The greatest Jewish philosopher of the
twentieth century-Franz Rosenzweig-put the critique of idolatry
at the center of his thought, as shown in Leora Batnitzky's brilliant
Idolatry and Representation: The Philosophy of Rosenzweig Reconsidered
(2000):
The Jewishness of a Jew is done an injustice
if it is put on the same level as his nationality .... There is
no "relationship" between one's Jewishness and one's
humanity that needs to be discovered, puzzled out, experienced,
or created .... As a Jew one is a human being, as a human being
a Jew .... Strange as it may sound to the obtuse ears of a nationalist,
being a Jew is no limiting barrier that cuts Jews off from someone
who is limited by being something else.
Rosenzweig's powerful critique of Zionism-alongside
his unequivocal support for Jewish security-is relevant for our
time. He knew that the all-too-human idolizing of land and power
trumps prophetic commitments to justice and yields little genuine
security. This kind of idolatry tends to encourage imperial ambitions
and colonial aims, as noted by Ahad Ha'am the towering critic,
more than one hundred years ago after his visit to Palestine.
He wrote:
Some of the newcomers, to our shame,
describe themselves as "future colonialists . They were slaves
in their diasporas, and suddenly they find themselves with unlimited
freedom .... This sudden change has planted despotic tendencies
in their hearts, as always happens to former slaves. They deal
with the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, trespass unjustly,
beat them shamefully for no sufficient reason, and even boast
about their actions. There is no one to stop the flood and put
an end to this despicable and L dangerous tendency.
Similarly, prophetic Jewish giants like
Albert Einstein and Leo Baeck, who in 1948 spoke "in the
name of principles which have been the most significant contributions
of the Jewish people to humanity," have chastised the myopic
approach to the conflict. As they wrote in a letter to the New
York Times in 1948:
Both Arab and Jewish extremists are today
recklessly pushing Palestine into a futile war. While believing
in the defense of legitimate claims, these extremists on each
side play into each other's hands. In this reign of terror, the
needs and desires of the common man in Palestine are ignored ....
We believe that any constructive solution is possible only if
it is based on the concern for the welfare and cooperation of
both Jews and Arabs in Palestine.
They knew that a new democratic Jewish
identity must be forged in the Diaspora that shatters all imperial
mentalities and unleashes the prophetic energies of decent, justice-loving
Jews and non-Jews. This democratic identity must mirror the very
realities that have allowed Jewish success and upward mobility
in America rights and liberties, merit and respect for all in
a democratic experiment. Would American Jews elect to live in
an America that bans interfaith marriage, guarantees a Christian
majority to keep minorities as second-class citizens, and rules
brutally over its adjacent neighbors whose property they daily
annex? Does not the Jewish state ban marriage between Jews and
non-Jews, discriminate against its Arab citizens, and subjugate
Palestinians under occupation?
American Jews have been in the forefront
of the fight for the rights and liberties of oppressed peoples,
especially blacks. Where are those same prophetic voices when
it comes to the rights of Palestinians within Israel and under
Israeli occupation? This is a moment when progressive Jews are
under severe attack and severe test. If ever there was a time
in which the best voices of the Jewish world should be heard,
it is now. The connection of much of American Jewish power to
the most conservative elements in the American elite has allowed
a downplaying of the suffering of the Palestinian people and a
willingness to view the lives of the Palestinians as of less value
than those of Jews or Americans. Thus we have the need to be at
the same time unequivocal in our support for the security of Israel
and fully committed to ending the subjugation of the Palestinians.
Prophetic Jews can maintain both the demand for Israeli security
and the call for an end to occupation, while also joining with
non-Jews who are ready to support them. They can open up possibilities
for a very important kind of progressive movement.
The tragic irony is that the deep faith
of American and Israeli Jews in the American empire is itself
idolatrous and dangerous. It is idolatrous because it makes the
U.S. helicopter gunships that patrol the Palestinian West Bank
and the U.S. -supported wall that separates Palestinians from
Israel the dominant imperial symbols of an Israel founded in the
name of the Israelite prophets. It is dangerous because it views
America as the Jewish promised land, bereft of its own deep anti-Semitic
impulses. Yet the truth is that just as the American empire chose
to favor Israel for political and geostrategic reasons, it can
abandon Israel for the same reasons. And if an oil-rich Arab country
could do imperial America's dirty work better than Israel at a
lower cost and with less controversy, Israel might well be sold
down the river. Is there not a long and ugly history of Jews in
the Diaspora - Spain, Egypt, Germany-succumbing to false security
and assimilationist illusions as they deferred to respective imperial
authorities? Is America so different? Do the depths of anti-Semitism
in Western civilization and Christian-dominated societies not
reach to the heart of America? What will happen when American
imperial elites must choose between oil and Israel? Cannot these
elites manipulate anti-Semitic sentiments among the American citizenry
the same way they fan and fuel other xenophobic fears for purposes
of expediency? The challenge of democrats is to keep track of
all forms of bigotry-including anti-Semitism-and to unsettle the
sleepwalking among the comfortable. This means working with and
alongside our Jewish fellow W citizens in forging a new Jewish
democratic identity here and abroad.
p129
The recent waves of Islamic revitalization movements-be they fundamentalist
or not-are a quest for a new identity of subjugated Muslims in
response to failed secular nationalist experiments. These nationalist
experiments-Nasser in Egypt, the shah in Iran, Saddam in Iraq-were
unable to create and sustain a workable identity for Islamic subjects
in the aftermath of imperial subjugation. And their respective
links with the Soviet and American empires during the cold war
widened the gap between the thuggish rulers and their Muslim subjects.
With the collapse of repressive secular nationalism at the top,
the Islamic revival mobilized the masses and gained state power.
This revival was guided by a particular kind of Islam-a clerical
Islam rooted in the religious identity of people and responsive
to the pervasive anxieties unleashed by the failure of secular
nationalist ideology in the wake of a colonial past.
In this sense, recent Islamic revitalization
movements are not mindless revolts against modernity or blind
expressions of hatred toward America. Their eager appropriations
of modern technology (possibly including nuclear weapons) or selective
infatuations with American culture (especially music) undercut
such fashionable clichés. Rather, turbulent rumblings in
the contemporary Islamic world-with a population of one billion
people-are fueled by fears of cultural deracination and fanned
by hopes for material security. The quest for an Islamic identity
shuns the uprootedness and restlessness of the modern West and
the licentiousness and avariciousness of the American empire.
It is similar to any other modern fundamentalist response to certain
aspects of modernity, be it Christian, Judaic, or tribalistic.
Yet religious traditions are here to stay, and the question is
how to support prophetic voices and forge democratic identities
within them in our day.
Identity in the highly developed world
is often a subject of leisurely conversation and academic banter.
In the poor developing world, identity is a matter of life and
death. Identity has to do with who one is and how one moves from
womb to tomb-the elemental desires for protection, recognition,
and association in a cold and cruel world. Like the traditions
of belief of most peoples of color in the Americas, religious
traditions of oppressed peoples in the Middle East, Africa, and
Asia posit the modern West itself as an idol to be suspicious
of and distant from. Their major exposure to and encounter with
the modern West was its imperial face-a boot on one's neck. And
although they might long for the conveniences and comforts of
modern capitalist technologies, they are mindful of Western capitalism's
sterling rhetoric and oppressive practices and they abhor the
pervasive materialistic individualism and destructive hedonism.
This is not a childish rejection of modernity but rather a wise
attempt to enter the modern world on one's own terms.
p135
Clerical Islam and legalistic Islam have a history and their history
resurfaces with power at specific moments. The present form of
clerical Islam is an authoritarian effort to secure an Islamic
identity and to run modern nation-states given the collapse of
secular nationalism and the defeat of earlier European imperialisms
in the Islamic world. Like rabbinical Judaism or Catholic Christianity,
clerical Islam is in no way the essence of Islam-or its only form.
Similarly, Islam, like all religions, has always incorporated
non-Islamic and nonreligious sources that often appear to the
believer to be purely Islamic. No modern religion can survive
without learning from modern science, modern politics, and modern
culture. Every modern religion accepts Newton's law of gravity,
Weber's role of bureaucracies, and contemporary musical instruments
in its rituals. All religions are polyvalent - subject to multiple
interpretations under changing circumstances. Islam must be understood,
by both non- Muslims and Muslims, as a fluid repertoire of ways
of being a Muslim, not a dogmatic stipulation of rules that govern
one's life. Or, to put it another way, every dogmatic set of rules
now espoused by the dominant clerics was once a challenge to an
older dogmatic set of rules.
The new dogma has simply become so routinized
and ossified that it conceals its former contingency and insurgency.
In this way, even to be a dogmatic traditionalist is to be part
of a dynamic history and ever-changing tradition. This understanding
of the fluidity of Islam is required in order for a democratic
Islam to challenge the authority of Muslim clerics and Islamic
jurists who attempt to naturalize and fossilize their prevailing
edicts and decrees. The clerics and jurists themselves constitute
forms of authority that result from earlier struggles over the
role of clerics and who can be a jurist. The fundamental aim of
authoritarian clerical Islam today is to procure an identity and
secure a stable society over against the bombardments of the modern
West, and the internal failures of past nationalist and imperial
regimes.
p136
... like Israel, Turkey is a satellite of the American empire
generally willing to do imperial America's dirty work in the Middle
East, even as America looks the other way regarding Turkey's vicious
treatment of Islamic Kurds.
Many Muslims see Turkey's model as a form
of U.S. -supported, anti-Islamic nationalism to be shunned and
rejected. Turkey's militaristic nationalism supported by the American
empire represses Kurdish nationalism with a vengeance. This replay
of European nationalist ideologies does not bode well for the
Islamic world. The same dynamic holds in Pakistan, Indonesia,
Morocco, and Egypt- all allies of imperial America. It is no accident
that when these countries, like Israel, violate international
law, imperial America looks the other way. The examples of Turkey's
seizure of two -fifths of Cyprus, Indonesia's of East Timor, Morocco's
of Western Sahara, and Israel's of Palestinian lands make the
point. Such colonial conquests do not generate a mumbling word
from imperial America in the United Nations or anywhere else.
Only when the interests of the American empire are at stake-as
in Saddam Hussein's barbaric actions in Kuwait or Kim Jong Il's
vicious threats in Korea-does U.S. moral rhetoric about freedom
surface. The repressive clerics in the autocratic Islamic states
know this-and they are right. Yet even as this clerical Islam
is attractive to many Islamic peoples in comparison to failed
secular nationalism, this same clerical Islam is ruthlessly and
horribly autocratic and is suffocating the democratic energies
in the region.
Therefore, the present task is to undermine
the authority of the Muslim clerics on Islamic and democratic
grounds. Western-style democracy has no future in the Islamic
world. The damage has been done, the wounds are deep, and the
die has been cast by the hypocritical European and nihilistic
American imperial elites. There is simply no way to turn back
the hands of time. The West had its chance and blew it.
p138
There are three basic efforts to democratize the Islamic world
by Muslims themselves. The first endeavor is to show that Islamic
legalistic conceptions of justice ('adl, or procedural justice,
and ma'ruf, or substantive justice) are compatible with democratic
conceptions of justice. This is a fascinating and pioneering attempt
to show that the Qur'an can be interpreted to support democracy.
The complex relation of justice to revelation looms large. Does
justice flow from divine revelation, or does justice exist apart
from divine revelation? Furthermore, is justice an abstract ideal
that puts forth rules that regulate a society (as the great political
philosopher John Rawls would argue), or is justice one virtue
among others to be balanced with them in the lived experience
of Islamic peoples? What if these other virtues-like piety and
temperance-downplay, contradict, or curtail democratic conceptions
of justice? The pioneering work of Khaled Abou El- Fadl here in
America best exemplifies this important tendency in contemporary
Islam, in works such as The Place of Tolerance in Islam. His article
in the Boston Review is a good place to begin:
A case for democracy presented from within
Islam must accept the idea of God's sovereignty: it cannot substitute
popular sovereignty for divine sovereignty, but must instead show
how popular sovereignty-with its idea that citizens have rights
and a correlative responsibility to pursue justice with mercy-expresses
God's authority, properly understood. Similarly, it cannot reject
the idea that God's law is given prior to human action, but must
show how democratic lawmaking respects that priority.
The second effort does away with all appeals
to Islamic law-it is an Islam without Shari'a ... Islamic women
often promote this endeavor in order to undercut the deeply patriarchal
character and content of Islamic law. On this view, Islam is more
an open-ended way of life and less a set of rules to obey. It
harkens back to the early days before the rise of clerical Islam.
It also allows a more free-flowing connection with democratic
sensibilities, much like the practice of tolerance in the first
Islamic state in 6, established by the Prophet Muhammad himself
in his compact of Medina, which insisted on mutual respect and
civility between Jews and Muslims. He enacted a constitutional
rule that was based on a principled agreement between the Muhajirun
(Muslim immigrants from Mecca), the Ansar (indigenous Muslims
of Medina), and the Yahud (Jews). This federation authorized that
the different communities were equal in rights and duties. In
this way, the first Islamic state stands in stark contrast to
the anti- Semitic practices of most of the autocratic Islamic
states of our day.
The last major effort is found in the
rich and revolutionary writings of Mahmoud Mohamed Taha (himself
murdered by the Nimeiri regime in Sudan for his visionary and
courageous works). For example, in his manifesto, The Second Message
of Islam, Taha conceives of Islam as a holistic way of life that
promotes freedom - the overcoming of fear - in order to pursue
a loving and wise life. As in the second effort, he and his disciple
Abdullahi Ahmed AnNa'im discard the Shari'a and replace it with
the Meccan revelation. Taha's conception of the good society rests
upon economic equality (egalitarian sharing of wealth), political
equality (political sharing in decisions), and social equality
(no discrimination based on color, faith, race, or sex in order
to provide equal opportunity for cultural refinement). Similar
to the Prophet Muhammad, Taha revels in difference-or promotes
diversity-in order to constitute a more fair and equal society.
Anouar Majid's superb text Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial
Islam in a Polycentric World is a must-read. In that book he writes:
My examination of postcolonial theory
and the Arab identity deployed by nationalists to counter imperialism
might... help explain why a progressively defined Islam-one that
is democratically available to all-may be a desirable option for
Muslim peoples . ... Islamic cultures-like many of the world's
cultural traditions-could help "provincialize" the West
and offer other ways to be in the world
More broadly, this book tries to challenge
secular academics to include the world's nonsecular expressions
as equally worthy of consideration and valid alternatives, and
Muslim scholars to rethink their attachments to texts and canons
that have obscured the egalitarian and viable legacies of Islam.
At the moment, those views are but voices
in the wilderness
p141
... the colossal presence of the American empire in the Jewish
and Islamic world-especially its dependence on oil-muddies the
water. It silently condones autocratic Islamic states and openly
green-lights Israeli hard-line colonial policies. And even as
it embarks on an imperial-monitored democratization in Iraq, its
heavy hand is felt among those who are glad that the dictatorial
Hussein is gone, but suspicious of U.S. strategies and goals.
The ugly effects of this heavy- handedness were expressed eloquently
by the moderate Iraqi cleric Ghazi Ajil al -Yawar, who is quoted
in an article in the New York Times Magazine: "The U.S. is
using excessive power. They round up people in a very humiliating
way, by putting bags over their faces in front of their families.
In our society, this is like rape. The Americans are using collective
punishment by jailing relatives. What is the difference from Saddam?"
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