Midstream- A Monthly Jewish Review

Winter 2010 Feature

  • Celebrating Theodor Herzl at 150 Israel at 62; Midstream at 55 by Leo Haber
  • Israel, Democracy, and the Apartheid Myth by David Saks

    Celebrating Theodor Herzl at 150 Israel at 62; Midstream at 55 by Leo Haber

    by Leo Haber

    This first Midstream issue of 2010 commemorates the 150th anniversary of the birth of Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), the Simon Bolivar, Garibaldi, Parnell, Thomas Jefferson---all rolled into one---of the Jewish people. (I chose Thomas Jefferson instead of George Washington because Herzl and Jefferson were intellectuals and authors of powerful documents that changed history—Jefferson of The Declaration of Independence and Herzl of Der Judenstaat / The Jewish State.) Liberators all, but not equal in world-wide fame.

    In 2004, Midstream commemorated the 100th yortsayt of the passing of Herzl, and I told a true story in these pages that reflects on Herzl’s limited renown even among cultured people. It is worth repeating here. We receive many new books on Jewish subjects at our magazine’s office for possible review from the major American publishers, both academic and commercial. These books are frequently addressed to Midstream, care of our parent publishing body, The Theodor Herzl Foundation. One such book came to us circa 2004 with a cover letter from the publicist of a distinguished firm urging us to review the book. The salutation to us in the cover letter read as follows: Dear Mr. Herzl.

    We were not offended. We were simply astonished at the cultural and intellectual level of some who grace the publishing industry in our country. But the fact that Midstream, ever since its inception in 1955, is the intellectual Zionist child of The Theodor Herzl Foundation has always been a matter of pride in our hearts and a telling symbol of our self-definition, our raison d’être.

    I don’t want to get too maudlin or too mystical, but I pride myself on having a small personal connection to the name Herzl. No, I’m not a relative; I’m a graduate of the Herzliah Hebrew Teachers’ Institute in New York (not the famed Herzliya High School in Israel). This school offered a full college-level four-year course in Hebrew language and literature, Tanach, Talmud, Jewish history, philosophy, Zionism, etc. Committed students often attended local American colleges (I at CCNY and Columbia) and Herzliah at the same time. The heyday of this extraordinary institution was in the first half of the 20th century before the rise of the State of Israel in 1948. Its faculty was well known in Zionist and Hebraist circles, led by its founder and dean, Moshe Feinstein, an accomplished poet writing in Hebrew in New York City. (He is not to be confused with the famed Talmudic scholar and greatest rabbinic authority of that same era also named Moshe Feinstein.) Perhaps the most popular faculty member was Daniel Persky, the leading Hebrew grammarian and Hebrew essayist in the Jewish world outside of the Land of Israel who wrote a weekly Hebrew column for Ha-Do’ar published in New York and whose vivid personality merited a lengthy interview article in The New Yorker that spread his fame in the chic American cultural world.

    Subsequently, Herzliah was absorbed by Touro College and lost its individual identity. But in the run-up to the formation of the State of Israel, it was an important Hebraist voice in America for the ideals and goals of its namesake and for the incomparable revival of Hebrew as a viable modern language at the center of Zionism and Jewish life. In short, I’ve gone from Herzliah in my youth to the Theodor Herzl Foundation that gave birth to Midstream in my doddering days, a long journey, but a unified one in names and ideals.

    The broad highlights of Theodor Herzl’s story are well known to many, if not most, cultured Jews and many non-Jews, even among those in publishing. Born in Budapest, Hungary, he completed his education with a law degree from the University of Vienna where he subsequently became a well-known playwright, essayist, and journalist. He rose to the position of foreign correspondent for a leading Viennese newspaper, Neue Freie Presse. He was a dashing figure in Viennese culture, easily assimilated to its gentile milieu though born a Jew.

    And then the assignment by his newspaper to Paris that changed his life. He was assigned to cover the notorious trial in 1894, of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army wrongly accused (as time would prove) by his army superiors of high treason. The historic antisemitism beneath the surface of French society including the army exploded for all to see. There were Dreyfusards in France who defended the hapless Jewish officer (most notably the French writer Emile Zola) and anti-Dreyfusards at every level of French culture and power. Even French Impressionist painters whom most of us admire took sides, sometimes at the cost of friendship. (Pissarro, the great Jewish artist, broke relations with Edgar Degas, the equally great painter who reviled Dreyfus the traitorous Jew and belonged to blatantly antisemitic organizations.)

    What seemed to overwhelm Theodor Herzl, the Viennese correspondent who reported in German on this trial were the raucous marching crowds in the streets of Paris carrying signs calling for “Mort aux Juives,” Death to the Jews. Not “Juif,” Jew, but “Juives,” Jews. The assimilated Herzl, uneducated in Jewish lore, unacquainted with the great Jewish texts and culture, experienced his life-changing moment. The maddened hateful crowds were not simply calling for Dreyfus’s death sentence, but for his too!

    In 1896, Theodor Herzl published Der Judenstaat, The Jewish State that proposed the formation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine as the only way to solve the Jewish Problem—the fact of being a persecuted minority wandering through countries that did not want them, denying them human rights, and ultimately either expelling them or killing them.

    Herzl was not the first to propose the ancient Land of Israel as the natural home of the Jewish people where they once were a sovereign nation and from which the colonialists of the ancient world, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and the Romans, among others, had expelled them after invasion and conquest of ancient Israel. Writers like Moses Hess, Leon Pinsker, and even George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) in her novel, Daniel Deronda, had proposed a return of the Jewish people to nationhood in Palestine (the Roman name for the Land of Israel). But Theodor Herzl was the first to organize a political movement, the Zionist Movement. Within a year of his book’s publication, he organized The First [World] Zionist Congress with delegates from Jewish communities worldwide that met in 1897 in Basle, Switzerland. Herzl was elected President of the Congress, which passed the landmark resolution calling for a free and sovereign Jewish state in Palestine. At the end of the sessions of that Congress, Herzl was reputed to have said, “In Basle I founded the Jewish state....Maybe in five years, certainly in fifty....”

    In 1899, Herzl published a novel, Altneuland, Old New Land, a kind of vision of the future Jewish state as an ideal free society. Herzl traveled to Turkey to meet the Sultan of Turkey (the Ottoman Empire) that controlled (occupied?) Palestine and also Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, seeking their support for his plan, but in vain. He also visited Palestine whose small group of Russian Jewish pioneers had antedated Herzl’s appearance on the Jewish scene as early as 1881 (some say 1878) to escape Russian pogroms and to begin reworking the land as farmers and to turn arid tracts into productive soil.

    Herzl presided over six Zionist Congresses, some of them overwhelmed by strident arguments and dissension, especially when Herzl presented a British offer of a segment of African soil as a Jewish home (The Uganda Project). This proposal was shocking to many and ultimately defeated by the passionately Jewish delegates, especially by the delegates from Russia for whom Herzl thought Uganda could serve as a temporary haven from slaughter in Russian pogroms. Fierce Russian Jewish opposition made Herzl realize that Jews steeped in their own history and culture would settle only for their own historic home, their own ancestral heritage.

    Theodor Herzl died in 1904 at the age of 44. Did he know somehow that the movement he had founded would come to fruition before mid-century—within his prophecy of fifty years? The First Zionist Congress had met under Herzl’s leadership in 1897. The U.N. Partition Resolution giving international recognition to the proposed existence of a Jewish State took place in 1947, fifty years after Herzl’s prophetic guess. The actual state was proclaimed in the following year of 1948. (The Arabs of Palestine were also given the opportunity by the Partition Resolution of 1947 to found their sovereign state in Palestine alongside the Jewish state. Sounds familiar? Yes, a two-state solution to the problem. The Jewish yishuv, community, through its leaders in 1947-48, accepted “half a loaf”; the Arab community with all its allies in surrounding Arab countries, repudiated the Partition Resolution and, instead, attacked the infant Jewish state on the day of its birth. But that’s another story, or the same story of Jewish travails throughout history.)

    Theodor Herzl’s life story reads like a Hollywood script. (But no such script would include the multiple tragedies that befel Herzl’s family long after his passing—insanity, suicide, and death in the Holocaust—but in due respect, that is not our subject here.) Herzl’s short life poses questions. How could a man of no Jewish allegiances, and with almost no Jewish learning or commitment of any kind, have turned his life so upside-down bin layla, in one single night of dreams? Is it Hollywood mush, legend, fantasy, sentimental exaggeration, or did it really happen that way? Is it little George Washingtion chopping down the cherry tree, a bube maynse? Or is it Washington rallying his troops at Valley Forge, a truly seminal event in American history? I choose to believe the narrative I’ve outlined above about Herzl until further notice. I look at the famous photos of Theodor Herzl, his distinguished bearded visage that of a noble Jewish prophet of old, and I say, Moses had his burning bush in the desert after a lifetime of Egyptian upbringing; Herzl had his brush with God in Paris, the Dreyfus trial his burning bush.

    My father, a far more learned and religious Jew than I, once discussed this very point with me. He said that we can never justify the suffering of one man like Dreyfus or the destruction of six million Jewish lives in the Holocaust, but, however beyond our comprehension, Dreyfus led to Binyamin Ze’ev Herzl and the Holocaust led to Medinat Yisrael, The Jewish State of Israel.

    In last year’s first issue, I discussed the world-wide financial downturn that did not exempt America or Israel and caused so much human anguish. I expressed my embarrassment at having to bring up Midstream’s financial plight that paled in comparison to the widespread loss of homes and jobs in America, and the deep losses of invested retirement funds. But I had no choice. We were obligated to reduce Midstream last year to four issues per annum—to quarterly size—and it hurt. A friend criticized me for being embarrassed to tell readers about the need to support the survival of our magazine amidst so many more important financial tragedies. He quoted the famous line from the Torah: lo al ha-lechem l’vado yichyeh ha-adam (Man does not live on bread alone). Another learned friend countered with a quotation from the Talmud: im ein kemach, ein Torah (If there is no flour, there is no Torah [learning]) to justify the priority of the practical necessities of life. Though job loss statistics in the U.S. have shown initial improvement as of December 2009, thank God, the worst recession in several generations still persists, and our magazine’s dire financial crisis has even gotten worse. And so I come to you again, dear readers, with embarrassment and hope for better days ahead and for strong monetary support for this unique American Jewish Zionist journal. Many of you came through for us last year, and Midstream survived with honor. We upheld Midstream’s reputation as the voice of all responsible factions of Zionism. Our Spring issue covering April, May, and June, for example, carried an incisive article defending the legality of the settlements. I noted the other day with a smile that a similar article appeared six months later in December in the pages of a distinguished competitor. Despite our loss of two issues in becoming a quarterly, we did not neglect to print articles, fiction, and poetry on the Shoah, on Yiddish, Ladino, and other Jewish Diaspora cultures, on Biblical texts and religious issues, and so on. Lord Balfour, Marc Chagall, I.B. Singer, Israel Zangwill, and other luminaries of the Jewish past ran through our pages. We are proud of our accomplishment, and we hope to do the same in the next four issues of 2010, beginning with this Winter issue, with your help.

    As in the past, we expect to set up a special page to appear from time to time in our publication that will list the names of those of our friends who are generous enough to support us with a tax-deductible contribution. All contributors will also receive formal letters of acknowledgment and thanks. Here are the designations of honor that we intend to list with gratitude:



    Friend: $36 to $99

    Supporter: $100 to $499

    Associate: $500 to $999

    Patron: $1,000 to $4,999

    Benefactor: $5,000 and above



    Please do not be terrified by the largest sums listed above. We will gladly accept any contribution, however small, with equal gratitude. Make checks payable to The Theodor Herzl Foundation / Midstream, and address your tax-deductible contributions to The Theodor Herzl Foundation / Midstream, 633 Third Avenue / 21st Floor, New York, NY 10017. Todah rabbah.• About the author
    Leo haber, editor of Midstream, was educated at C.C.N.Y. (Phi Beta Kappa) and Columbia University, earning degrees in English language and Literature, and at the Herzliah Hebrew Teachers’ Institute in New York. His novel, The Red Heifer, was published in 2001 and reissued in paperback in 2005.

    Israel, Democracy, and the Apartheid Myth

    by David Saks

    In August-September 2001, the United Nations’ World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance took place in the South African coastal city of Durban. It proved to be a traumatic event for world Jewry. Not only was the event marred by grotesque displays of naked antisemitism, but it saw the most concerted campaign yet on the international stage to stigmatize Israel as an apartheid state, the successor to the despised white minority regime that had dominated South Africa prior to 1994.

    The Israel=Apartheid accusation is a serious one. If Israel is indeed an apartheid state then, like its despised South African predecessor, its very legitimacy as a sovereign country is questionable.

    Those committed to Israel’s eradication as a sovereign, Jewish majority state are well aware of the important part a sustained international boycott campaign played in bringing down the original apartheid system. Through imposing the apartheid label, they are seeking quite clearly to turn Israel into a pariah state in the same way as happened with white South Africa. What is now at stake, therefore, is not the acceptability of this or that Israeli policy, nor is it about the future status of territories captured by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War. The very right of Israel to exist at all is being called into question—in the United Nations, within many NGOs that label themselves as “human rights” organisations, within a growing sector of the international media, and on university campuses.

    The campaign to portray Israel as an apartheid state employs a number of strategies. One is to ignore, or at best downplay, the many obvious differences that exist between apartheid South Africa and modern-day Israel, especially when these reflect any kind of credit on the latter. A second is to hone in on Israel’s failings and systematically exaggerate them, while neglecting to subject the Palestinians and its other Arab neighbors to anything like the same kind of critical scrutiny. Another effective ploy is to deliberately blur the widely differing circumstances that exist in Israel proper and in the territories captured by Israel in the 1967 war, with the extraordinary wartime conditions prevailing in parts of the latter being wrongfully depicted as applying to the whole of Israeli society.

    Finally, one finds the shameless repetition of half-truths and frequently downright falsehoods (such as the oft-repeated “93% of Israel’s land is restricted to Jewish settlement only”), combined with the misuse of out-of-date information and a refusal to recognize how Israeli society is in fact constantly changing in response to the moral and strategic challenges it faces.

    What makes confronting the charge much more difficult is the fact that outside South Africa, few people have more than a general idea of what the apartheid system was all about. This makes foisting a generic “apartheid” label on any society one does not like all that much easier, since few are in a position to provide a point by point refutation of it. Defending Israel against this dangerous accusation therefore requires a detailed grasp of what apartheid actually was.





    So What Was ‘Apartheid’?

    Pre-liberation apartheid South Africa was a society underpinned by legalized racial discrimination aimed at concentrating political and economic power in the hands of the white minority. Apartheid entailed the imposition of institutionalized race-based separation in every conceivable field, from the political arena to place of residence, citizenship, public amenities, education, politics, the labor market, and even the bedroom. The system blatantly discriminated in favor of the white minority ruling group, whether it related to land ownership, wage levels, employment opportunities, political rights, or the grossly unequal allocation of public resources. Non-whites lived in a legislative strait-jacket, their every movement controlled by patently iniquitous laws, and their natural desire to better themselves deliberately hamstrung by a system that explicitly aimed at keeping them in a state of permanent subservience.

    Apartheid in South Africa was based on color separation. It was the whites (the “Europeans”) versus the “non-Europeans” (blacks, coloreds [mixed race] and Asians, the majority of them Indians). All suffered from the legalized deprivation decreed by a South African government determined to impose white domination on the rest. In South Africa, apartheid was entrenched in the law and strictly enforced. The law not only denied the vote to black citizens, but legislated to force discrimination in every conceivable way.





    The Situation in Israel

    How much does modern-day Israeli society mirror this dismal record of legalized race-based repression and discrimination? One soon finds that even a superficial glance at the respective situations shows the comparison to be self-evidently absurd. In reality Israel, one of the most multi-racial societies in the world, goes to extraordinary lengths to ensure both tolerance and equality before the law. Its very founding Declaration of Independence specifically mandates complete equality of social and political rights to all inhabitants irrespective of religion, race, or gender.

    Jews and non-Jews in Israel attend the same public schools, vote and stand for election together, live side by side in the same residential areas, enjoy the same freedom of movement and job opportunities, make use in equal measure of public amenities such as beaches and parks and can marry or live together with one another as they choose.

    Israel’s immigration policies encourage rather than impede the influx of diverse racial groups. Amongst other things, it has facilitated the immigration of some 70,000 Ethiopian Jews and plans to absorb 30,000 more. The vast majority of the Indian and Ethiopian Jewish communities today live in Israel, as do a majority of Jews from Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Egypt and other North African and Middle East countries. All, including Circassian, Druze, Kurds, Armenians, Beduin, and other non-Jewish citizens of the Jewish State, enjoy equal rights.

    What kind of ‘Apartheid State’ actively seeks to increase its black population (and I don’t mean by importing slaves, either)? As Israeli academic Alex Yacobson points out, there has never been even a Western majority community that has been as willing to accept non-western immigrants to the extent that Israel has. Given that Israel has absorbed nearly a million Jews from Arab countries—who in terms of their ethnicity are essentially Arabs of the Jewish faith—one sees further that Israel has been the most generous of countries with regard to Arab immigration worldwide.1 All this has taken place under the framework of the supposedly ‘racist’ Zionist ideology.

    While a measure of discrimination still exists in certain areas, this is in no way comparable to the kind of oppression that existed in South Africa. In any case this is being constantly confronted and eroded through the Israeli courts, in the Knesset, and by both Jewish and Arab NGOs. To compare the inequalities within Israel to those experienced by non-whites in South Africa both unjustly exaggerates Israel’s faults and subtly belittles the iniquities of apartheid. As such, it is a cynical ploy to piggyback on the suffering of others for propaganda purposes.

    Racism does, unfortunately, exist to an extent in Israel, not only against Arabs, but also often against Jews of Arab and North African descent. Racist attitudes, however, are found to some degree in all countries. The real question that has to be asked is whether that racism is legally sanctioned. That is certainly not the case in Israel.

    In apartheid South Africa, by contrast, racism was not merely legally sanctioned but indeed was mandatory. Even whites opposed to such racist policies had no choice but to comply with them. Courts had to enforce apartheid legislation, no matter what the personal feelings of the judges might have been, universities had no choice but to base their admissions policies on racial criteria and businesses could not employ qualified blacks in senior positions.





    Israel and the Palestinian Territories

    Comparing Israel’s policies in the West Bank (Gaza having been unilaterally evacuated in 2005) to apartheid may be superficially more credible, but this too is fundamentally false. The reality is that Israel and the Palestinian territories are in a state of war, with the latter having launched countless attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians alike, both inside the territories and within Israel proper. In September 2000, the Palestinians violently brought down the curtain on the seven-year Oslo peace process by launching a full-blown terrorist war against Israel. The war has continued, with varying degrees of intensity, to this day.

    Nor has the war been about bringing an end to Israel’s presence in the territories. In February 2006, the Palestinians responded to Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza the previous year by electing to office Hamas, a radical Islamist organisation that demonizes Jews as a people and is unswerving in its commitment to eradicating the entire State of Israel through methods of violence. Since then, they have conducted a ceaseless bombardment of Israeli population centers from Gaza, as well as launching a number of cross-border raids.

    The Israelis have responded to all this with checkpoints, curfews, security fences, segregated road systems, military incursions, and other similar measures. These inevitably impact very negatively on the everyday life of ordinary Palestinians, and it is not an exaggeration to depict their situation as being similar in some respects to that experienced by non-whites under apartheid. Merely to make such an assertion, however, without comparing the respective reasons why repressive measures were in both cases instituted is unreasonable and dishonest.

    The apartheid state had no possible justification for repressing the black majority in the way that it did. Throughout the apartheid era, the liberation movements were consistent in their commitment to the values of non-racialism, democracy, and inter-group tolerance, and for the most part sought to achieve these goals by peaceful means. When they did turn to violence, it was as a last, not as a first resort, and these methods were abandoned as soon as an opportunity presented itself to negotiate a peaceful settlement of the conflict. Moreover, the violence took the form of acts of sabotage rather than indiscriminate terrorist attacks against white civilians.

    The Palestinian national struggle, even if many former anti-apartheid activists identify emotionally with it, is virtually in every way the mirror image of how the anti-apartheid movement pursued its goals. For a start, it is driven by ideologies that are underpinned by openly and unapologetic anti-Jewish racism (to see how much, one has only to glance through the founding Charter of the ruling Hamas movement and its only marginally less offensive secular counterpart, the Palestinian National Covenant). Methods of violence—and specifically terrorist violence against civilians—have been a first, not a last resort, for the Palestinian leadership. Finally, it has been blatantly undemocratic in its methods, to the extent of arbitrarily executing suspected “collaborators” and those Palestinians who have sold land to Jews, and obsessive in its determination to deny the Jewish people any share—historical or otherwise—in any part of ‘Palestine’.

    Israel’s security measures are undeniably often harsh in the way they impact on the Palestinian population. Were it the case that the Palestinians were prepared to live peacefully with their neighbors, as black South Africans have always been with regard to their white compatriots, then such polices would indeed be morally indefensible. However, it is not the case, and has not been so at least since the late Yasir Arafat walked away in 2000 from the negotiating table and launched his “Second Intifada”—itself a euphemism for the most sustained terrorist onslaught on the Israeli people since the state’s founding in 1948.

    While it is legitimate to demand of Israelis that they not go further than is necessary in ensuring their safety, and criticize them proportionately should they fail in this, it is false, even slanderous, to accuse them of apartheid-like strategies when they are facing existential threats to their very existence that have no parallel in pre-1994 South Africa.

    Discrimination in the Middle East

    Israel has its faults, but it remains the only true democracy in the Middle East, one whose laws bear no serious comparison not only with the late, unlamented white minority regime in apartheid South Africa but with practically every other country in the region.

    Widespread discrimination exists throughout the Middle East. Primarily, this is religious in nature, with the dominant Islamic faith being used in various ways to deny religious minorities, including Jews, equal status with their Muslim compatriots. It can, however, also take racial-ethnic forms, such as legalized discrimination against the descendants of Arab refugees in Lebanon and against the Kurdish minority in Syria. Gender discrimination, of course, is both notorious and ongoing throughout the Middle East.

    That being said, in a matter such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that so sorely needs a clear-headed, sober analysis to clarify the many issues involved, it does not help merely to respond to propaganda with equally one-sided counter-propaganda. Israel’s many virtues concerning its treatment of ethnic and religious minorities (especially when seen in the context of how such minorities are treated in other Middle Eastern countries) need to be publicized. This alone can go a long way towards dispelling the lurid images of a rogue racist state that its detractors have conjured up.

    In conclusion, in order to disprove an accusation that someone is a villain, it is not necessary to prove that he is a saint. In other words, it should not be required to demonstrate that Israel is a faultless utopia in order to refute charges that it is an apartheid state. Suffice it to say that comparisons between the notorious apartheid system and modern-day Israeli society are baseless, and should be dismissed for what they are—a politically motivated slur against the State and people of Israel.

    An innovative new communications tool showing the true face of the State of Israel and debunking various malicious accusations made against it has just been released by the South African Jewish Board of Deputies. Entitled ‘Let’s Talk Israel’, it is an interactive e-book that makes use of voice-overs, video footage and hundreds of carefully chosen images through which to convey a broad range of arguments and information. It can now be accessed online at http://www.letstalkisrael.com. •







    NOTES:

    1. Interview with Professor Alex Yakobson, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 11 July 2007

    About the author
    David Saks is Associate Director of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies and editor of the thrice-yearly journal Jewish Affairs. He is a frequent contributor to Jewish publications, both locally and internationally, writing on issues pertaining to Israel, Southern African Jewry and South African history and politics. His work has appeared, inter alia, in Encyclopaedia Judaica and the Routledge Companion to Jewish History and Culture. He holds an MA degree in History from Rhodes University.