Shlomo Sand: 'I Wish to Resign and Cease Considering Myself a Jew'
10 November 2015By Shlomo Sand
During the first half of the 20th century, my father abandoned Talmudic
school, permanently stopped going to synagogue, and regularly expressed his
aversion to rabbis.
At this point in my own life, in the early 21st century, I feel in turn a
moral obligation to break definitively with tribal Judeocentrism. I am today
fully conscious of having never been a genuinely secular Jew, understanding
that such an imaginary characteristic lacks any specific basis or cultural
perspective, and that its existence is based on a hollow and ethnocentric
view of the world.
Earlier I mistakenly believed that the Yiddish culture of the family I grew
up in was the embodiment of Jewish culture. A little later, inspired by
Bernard Lazare, Mordechai Anielewicz, Marcel Rayman and Marek Edelman – who
all fought antisemitism, nazism and Stalinism without adopting an
ethnocentric view – I identified as part of an oppressed and rejected
minority.
In the company, so to speak, of the socialist leader Léon Blum, the poet
Julian Tuwim and many others, I stubbornly remained a Jew who had accepted
this identity on account of persecutions and murderers, crimes and their
victims.
Now, having painfully become aware that I have undergone an adherence to
Israel, been assimilated by law into a fictitious ethnos of persecutors and
their supporters, and have appeared in the world as one of the exclusive club
of the elect and their acolytes, I wish to resign and cease considering
myself a Jew.
Although the state of Israel is not disposed to transform my official
nationality from ''Jew'' to ''Israeli'', I dare to hope that kindly
philosemites, committed Zionists and exalted anti-Zionists, all of them so
often nourished on essentialist conceptions, will respect my desire and cease
to catalogue me as a Jew. As a matter of fact, what they think matters little
to me, and still less what the remaining antisemitic idiots think. In the
light of the historic tragedies of the 20th century, I am determined no
longer to be a small minority in an exclusive club that others have neither
the possibility nor the qualifications to join.
By my refusal to be a Jew, I represent a species in the course of
disappearing. I know that by insisting that only my historical past was
Jewish, while my everyday present (for better or worse) is Israeli, and
finally that my future and that of my children (at least the future I wish
for) must be guided by universal, open and generous principles, I run counter
to the dominant fashion, which is oriented towards ethnocentrism.
As a historian of the modern age, I put forward the hypothesis that the
cultural distance between my great-grandson and me will be as great or
greater than that separating me from my own great-grandfather. All the
better! I have the misfortune of living now among too many people who believe
their descendants will resemble them in all respects, because for them
peoples are eternal – a fortiori a race-people such as the Jews.
I am aware of living in one of the most racist societies in the western
world. Racism is present to some degree everywhere, but in Israel it exists
deep within the spirit of the laws. It is taught in schools and colleges,
spread in the media, and above all and most dreadful, in Israel the racists
do not know what they are doing and, because of this, feel in no way obliged
to apologise. This absence of a need for self-justification has made Israel a
particularly prized reference point for many movements of the far right
throughout the world, movements whose past history of antisemitism is only
too well known.
To live in such a society has become increasingly intolerable to me, but I
must also admit that it is no less difficult to make my home elsewhere. I am
myself a part of the cultural, linguistic and even conceptual production of
the Zionist enterprise, and I cannot undo this. By my everyday life and my
basic culture I am an Israeli. I am not especially proud of this, just as I
have no reason to take pride in being a man with brown eyes and of average
height. I am often even ashamed of Israel, particularly when I witness
evidence of its cruel military colonisation, with its weak and defenceless
victims who are not part of the ''chosen people''.
Earlier in my life I had a fleeting utopian dream that a Palestinian Israeli
should feel as much at home in Tel Aviv as a Jewish American does in New
York. I struggled and sought for the civil life of a Muslim Israeli in
Jerusalem to be similar to that of the Jewish French person whose home is in
Paris. I wanted Israeli children of Christian African immigrants to be
treated as the British children of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent
are in London. I hoped with all my heart that all Israeli children would be
educated together in the same schools. Today I know that my dream is
outrageously demanding, that my demands are exaggerated and impertinent, that
the very fact of formulating them is viewed by Zionists and their supporters
as an attack on the Jewish character of the state of Israel, and thus as
antisemitism.
However, strange as it may seem, and in contrast to the locked-in character
of secular Jewish identity, treating Israeli identity as politico-cultural
rather than ''ethnic'' does appear to offer the potential for achieving an
open and inclusive identity. According to the law, in fact, it is possible to
be an Israeli citizen without being a secular ''ethnic'' Jew, to participate
in its ''supra-culture'' while preserving one's ''infra-culture'', to speak
the hegemonic language and cultivate in parallel another language, to
maintain varied ways of life and fuse different ones together. To consolidate
this republican political potential, it would be necessary, of course, to
have long abandoned tribal hermeticism, to learn to respect the Other and
welcome him or her as an equal, and to change the constitutional laws of
Israel to make them compatible with democratic principles.
Most important, if it has been momentarily forgotten: before we put forward
ideas on changing Israel's identity policy, we must first free ourselves from
the accursed and interminable occupation that is leading us on the road to
hell. In fact, our relation to those who are second-class citizens of Israel
is inextricably bound up with our relation to those who live in immense
distress at the bottom of the chain of the Zionist rescue operation. That
oppressed population, which has lived under the occupation for close to 50
years, deprived of political and civil rights, on land that the ''state of
the Jews'' considers its own, remains abandoned and ignored by international
politics. I recognise today that my dream of an end to the occupation and the
creation of a confederation between two republics, Israeli and Palestinian,
was a chimera that underestimated the balance of forces between the two
parties.
Increasingly it appears to be already too late; all seems already lost, and
any serious approach to a political solution is deadlocked. Israel has grown
used to this, and is unable to rid itself of its colonial domination over
another people. The world outside, unfortunately, does not do what is needed
either. Its remorse and bad conscience prevent it from convincing Israel to
withdraw to the 1948 frontiers. Nor is Israel ready to annex the occupied
territories officially, as it would then have to grant equal citizenship to
the occupied population and, by that fact alone, transform itself into a
binational state. It's rather like the mythological serpent that swallowed
too big a victim, but prefers to choke rather than to abandon it.
Does this mean I, too, must abandon hope? I inhabit a deep contradiction. I
feel like an exile in the face of the growing Jewish ethnicisation that
surrounds me, while at the same time the language in which I speak, write and
dream is overwhelmingly Hebrew. When I find myself abroad, I feel nostalgia
for this language, the vehicle of my emotions and thoughts. When I am far
from Israel, I see my street corner in Tel Aviv and look forward to the
moment I can return to it. I do not go to synagogues to dissipate this
nostalgia, because they pray there in a language that is not mine, and the
people I meet there have absolutely no interest in understanding what being
Israeli means for me.
In London it is the universities and their students of both sexes, not the
Talmudic schools (where there are no female students), that remind me of the
campus where I work. In New York it is the Manhattan cafes, not the Brooklyn
enclaves, that invite and attract me, like those of Tel Aviv. And when I
visit the teeming Paris bookstores, what comes to my mind is the Hebrew book
week organised each year in Israel, not the sacred literature of my
ancestors.
My deep attachment to the place serves only to fuel the pessimism I feel
towards it. And so I often plunge into despondency about the present and fear
for the future. I am tired, and feel that the last leaves of reason are
falling from our tree of political action, leaving us barren in the face of
the caprices of the sleepwalking sorcerers of the tribe. But I cannot allow
myself to be completely fatalistic. I dare to believe that if humanity
succeeded in emerging from the 20th century without a nuclear war, everything
is possible, even in the Middle East. We should remember the words of Theodor
Herzl, the dreamer responsible for the fact that I am an Israeli: ''If you
will it, it is no legend.''
As a scion of the persecuted who emerged from the European hell of the 1940s
without having abandoned the hope of a better life, I did not receive
permission from the frightened archangel of history to abdicate and despair.
Which is why, in order to hasten a different tomorrow, and whatever my
detractors say, I shall continue to write.
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