Since writing an article supporting the new Zionist Left, I’ve been asked what I believe about Israel and other matters. I’m not sure if the question that has come from numerous people is an accusation or an expression of interest, but I suspect it has something to do with a culture of delegitimisation that has spread from attacks against Israel to attacks against liberal Zionists. The problem is that I can’t easily answer the question about what I believe because my beliefs aren’t dogmas that can be reduced to a catechism. I have likes and dislikes that aid me in navigating my actions but like most people, my principles, attachments and ideas are part of my interior, familiar signposts that signal how to cross from one thought to another. But the question has set me thinking, and apart from my obvious attachments to family, fun and friendship, I’ve come up with the following short list of seminal ideas that make me recognisable to myself.

I start with humanism; to me, the word flows from the religious idea that we are all, each of us in our diversity, created in the divine image. All the rest is commentary, which includes a belief in democracy as the best political system to safeguard human dignity, and thinking twice and then several more times before we press the trigger and breach the human rights of an individual, a collective, or a people. The Talmudic verse that best captures this ideal is the one that regards the redemption or destruction of a single human life as a world created or destroyed. Each of us, in our singularity, is infinite, yet we so easily fall into the temptations of dehumanisation for the sake of self-affirmation.  Of late I have been trying to extend these feelings towards all creatures by limiting what I eat. This has been influenced by the ethical eating demanded of me through kashrut, the sudden death of my dog, and an encounter in Rwanda with a gorilla.

Holocaust memory; it’s a strange notion to include but it’s not out of choice. Born to Holocaust survivor parents, our generations have been witnesses to the antithesis of creation – a world of cremation where the human ideal, as embodied in the Jew, was ground to dust and ash. The moral legacies of the Holocaust command me (in the biblical sense) to uphold the very principles that were transgressed in Auschwitz. This means not being silent, standing up, speaking out.  It also means defending Jewish life when it is threatened. My questions about the Holocaust – about perpetrators, bystanders and victims; about ideologies of race and supremacy, totalitarianism and demagoguery, power and powerlessness, refugees and indifference, tolerance and exclusion, guilt and forgiveness, virtue and evil – extend to everything that has happened and not happened in the world after Auschwitz. Never Again can and has been manipulated as a slogan to justify Jewish racism and violence; for me, it evokes the activation of the principles of humanism which summons us to speak out on transgressions of human dignity and threats to life wherever and whenever.

Jewish life: I’m for chucking the fiddler off the roof and replacing sentimentality and ancestral worship with meaningful, deep Judaism. I respect pluralism and the thin or non-existent connections of Jews to their Judaism because in this age our identities are a matter of choice. The reward for being Jewish is being Jewish; there is no punishment for refusing to stand at Sinai. I revere and fear religion. Every religion is born in violence – a covenant of blood – while simultaneously empowering us to transcend and mend this world that is metaphorically and truly broken. When we surrender ourselves to a religion, we do not relinquish our free will and the difficulty of choosing between right and wrong. I believe in an interpretation of religion that affirms rather than diminishes or extinguishes the human dignity of men and women, and of peoples of other faiths or of no faith.

In my religious practice I seek sanctity, the holiness of the everyday things that we create through religious rituals of time and space, human deeds, and our mythical and real journeys. Sanctity is the opposite of sanctimony – it requires humility rather than moral certainty or claims to absolute truth. I love Jewish ritual, the Jewish Sabbath, the Jewish way. I appreciate the sanctity that all religious systems create – the kindling of light and scent, of food devoured in ritualistic ways, of sharing our offerings with family and friends, and building community through prayer and song.  The parts of scripture that most inspire me are the prophetic ideals of justice, peace and chesed (givingness), even as I know that reality will always leave these out of our grasp. I try to adhere to the extra word that distinguishes between love of peace and justice, and the relentless pursuit of it; as in, ‘Justice, justice shalt thou pursue’, and ‘Love peace and pursue it’. I also like the word, ‘Thou’ – its grandness, and Martin Buber’s philosophy of I and Thou, which speaks of the connectedness of all things animate and inanimate – us to our environment.

And Zionism; the legitimacy, morality, justness, enduring nature of Jewish national self-determination as expressed in Israel; not just as an idea, but as a place of vitality and creativity, division and dissent, ancient and renewed, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, majority and minority. I have always been a Zionist, and cannot escape its narrative and personal connections to the re-creation of Jewish life out of the ashes of the Holocaust. I have spent more than three separate years living in Israel, contemplated Aliyah, given birth there with my wife to our firstborn and encouraged each of our children to experience multiple programs in Israel so that they can become enchanted enough with the Zionist dream to develop a mature relationship with the responsibilities of power and sovereignty. I fear for Israel’s future, the consequences of a nuclear Iran run by an apocalyptic madman, the effects of the growing radicalisation of Israel’s enemies. I despise the orchestrated campaign that has turned the Jewish state into a pariah, thereby recasting elements of the nineteenth century Jewish Question into a contemporary Israel Question.

Yet it also follows from my principles that I don’t like the kind of Zionism that is narcissistic, that refuses to see the multiple narratives and complexity of the conflict, that does not accept responsibility for the consequences of Jewish statehood on its victims, that makes excuses for the occupation and minimises its devastating effects, that worships land over people, that generates a cult of the state and of the military, that treats humans as demographic ammunition, that believes peace is impossible simply because we say it is, that thinks that a Palestinian state is a generous concession rather than a moral obligation, that positions Jews as eternal victims of antisemitism while fuelling Islamophobia, that expects a partnership with the Diaspora but infantilises its supporters, that thinks a patriot can’t see through a lie, that measures loyalty by conformity and confuses love with complicity, that does not fight against the conditions that breed war and violence and then tells us we had no choice, that resorts to military daring in place of political daring, that has replaced the credo of Never Again with the pessimism of Never.

I believe, finally, that we must align our beliefs with our deeds as best we can; that is why I have dedicated my life to Jewish education; why I love the challenge of challenging a student, or travelling with them to landscapes of conflict and memory; why I have founded an Orthodox, feminist synagogue, a journal of critical Jewish thought, and a Jewish organisation dedicated to universalist social action; it is why I have consistently refuted in my writings those who demonise Zionism and treat Israel as a pariah amongst the nations, and why I will continue to speak out against the brutality of the forty year occupation and the moral imperative of ending it now; and why I believe that in the name of living up to our inner truths we must be prepared to surrender, if necessary, our scalp for the sake of preserving our mind and what it drives us to think, say, and do.

Mark Baker is Director of the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation and Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Monash University.

The uniform of a gay inmate of a Nazi concentration camp

By Mark Baker

In the centre of Berlin not far from the Brandenburg gates there is a memorial to the Holocaust made up of thousands of slab tombstones. The group of students I am guiding through Europe on a study tour of the Holocaust disperse inside this abstract cemetery, lost in the labyrinthine structure of stones and questions.

One of the questions leads us to an adjacent park where a solitary tombstone has been erected. It wasn’t there the last time I visited Berlin, in which an invisible city of memory has rapidly sprung up, of plaques, signposts and stumbling blocks that ambush you at every corner with a personalised story of terror.

The isolated tombstone on the margins of Eisenmann’s Denkmal has a window slit built into its surface. It lures you to look into the stone, like a voyeur at a peep show. The image that is projected into the void of the stone is unexpected. It is of two young men, locked in a passionate kiss in the park where we ourselves stand.

I ask one of the students in our group to read the inscription near the tombstone. His voice quivers as he reads about the laws that prohibited same sex contact. A kiss between two men was a ticket to Auschwitz. In another time, this student would have had two triangles stitched onto his uniform, a pink and a yellow one, both core elements of his identity today.

The story of the persecution and gassing of gays in Auschwitz is part of the Holocaust. Yet where it differs is that the legislation that allowed for gays to be incarcerated was not a Nazi law but based on a criminal code that extend back a century. Paragraph 175, which forbad homosexual contact, survived the murder of about 15,000 gays in Auschwitz. It remained on the statue books of Germany and other European countries, including many states in Australia, for decades after the genocidal actions against homosexuals.

When I was a student at the University of Melbourne in the late 70s, my teacher John Foster, who published his memoir before his death, faced the class at the end of a lecture on the persecution of homosexuals and with stern eyes challenged us: Is the world of Auschwitz totally disconnected from our own world?

I thought of my teacher and also my student when I learned that our new Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, is opposed to legalising same sex marriage. My reaction is perhaps inflationary given my current journey in the footsteps of the Holocaust but I would like to take her to that marginalised tombstone and ask her to peer inside the stone and face the questions it asks of us.  Whether it is for electoral gain or a personal opinion, the message she is communicating to the Australian public says something about gays, their loves and their identities that carry on the remaining vestiges of Paragraph 175.

I would like to come away from this journey by teaching my students that to commemorate means to take the stones of our invisible cities and transfer them to our contemporary lives. Many of the monuments demonstrate the power of a single individual to redirect the seemingly inexorable path of history before it has been written.  For this reason, we must speak out on behalf of those growing number of people who are privileged to live in a time when they, and their relationships, are no longer prohibited, yet suspicions about the sanctity of their love persist .The questions must be asked not only of the state, but of our own faith systems – our churches, synagogues and mosques. In my own Jewish religion, a respected Orthodox gay rabbi, Steven Greenberg, has written about how the prohibitive texts in Leviticus should be understood against the grain of its own historical context in which gay behaviour was associated with pagan worship. Today, our sexualised culture of homo- and hetero- sexuality has pagan elements, but the act of love between two people is nothing more than love. It is not for us to legislate on how these commitments should be expressed. Our religions and states would honour those who were murdered in Auschwitz by thinking about the ruptures and continuities between the past and present, and how our thoughts continue to incarcerate gays in a world of our own prejudices. It is time to eradicate the legacy of Paragraph 175, and to narrow the space that separates that solitary tombstone from all the others.

Mark Baker is Director of the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation at Monash University.

Another conscience call. Berkeley poster art, Vietnam war era.*

By Mark Baker

Anthony Frosh’s article on J Street and JCall gives everything away when he asks whether the supporters of these organisations are ‘even’ pro-Israel or whether these ‘leftists’ could better be described as ‘pro-appeasement’. It is precisely this kind of delegitimisation of progressive or liberal Zionism that the J phenomenon has come to address. For there is no escaping that the source of the opposition to the new Zionist movement conceals layers of politics – politics that on the surface are about the Israel-Diaspora relationship but push deeper into attitudes about the occupation, the Arab-Israel conflict, human rights, and the fragile prospects for an internationally-brokered peace agreement.

So let me address what I regard as some of the givens of the J movement, which includes ‘J Street’ in America, ‘JCall’ in Europe, ‘For the sake of Zion’ in America, and by implication the New Israel Fund. While each of these have distinct mandates and arise out of specific contexts, they are all organisations whose main protagonists are passionate Zionists who are deeply engaged with Israel. They are not vanished Jews who wear their Jewish identity as a convenience to bash Israel, but they are lifelong Zionists and Jewish activists. All – and I include myself in this camp – share a deep concern for the campaign to delegitimise Israel through means including boycott, divestment and sanctions; all are fearful of a nuclear Iran and the threats emanating from Ahmadinejad; all abhor terrorism and recognise the failures of the Palestinian leadership, and all are vexed by the spread of a new kind of antisemitism which sometimes, but not always, is expressed through a consuming hatred of Israel.

At the same time, as Zionists and as Jews, the supporters of these movements fear that Israel and Zionist ideology are slipping into unprecedented forms of illiberalism and political folly. They – we – fear that the occupation that has lasted almost half a century has produced a political culture which is undermining Israel’s vibrant democracy both inside and beyond the green line, or more pertinently, on that undefined line yet to be established that determines where the borders of Israel and a future Palestine will lie.

Domestically, the threat to liberal values has been unleashed by a strange coalition of forces that include ultra-Orthodox Jews, Zionist messianists and secular ultra-nationalists. Recent manifestations of this include the insidious attack on the NIF and the human rights community in and outside of Israel, the toleration of a Foreign Minister who conducts diplomacy like a bull in a china shop, violent rampages against Palestinians by extremist settlers, and rulings to evict Arabs from their homes in East Jerusalem based on principles that undermine the whole Zionist enterprise.

Zionism, as Peter Beinart argued in his myth-breaking piece in the New York Review of Books, is increasingly forcing Jews to check out their liberal values at the Zionist door. This is not a matter of shame in the sense of self-hatred, nor is it about exilic embarrassment amongst ‘our leftist colleagues’, though there’s something to be said about the dim status of our mandate to be ‘a light unto the nations’. What motivates us is a deep sense of inner moral shame about the corrosive effects of the ongoing occupation, which threaten to turn rule over the territories into an apartheid regime, an unhelpful word, but I’m only quoting the warnings of two former Prime Ministers – Olmert and Barak.

As for the third in the triumvirate, Ariel Sharon, his political volte-face in Gaza was justified with the observation that ‘what you see from there, you don’t see from here.’ This phrase is often hurled against Jews in the faraway Diaspora, even though most Israelis don’t get to see what is happening on a daily basis on the far side of the wall. We are told that we can’t understand the situation from our communities, but this is an odd argument that is selectively applied to criticism of the Right and not to moral and material supporters of the settlements. More than odd, it is morally insidious, because it undoes the very basis of a global form of citizenship – our humanity – that entitles us to form opinions and campaign for and against all sorts of issues– be it Darfur, Soviet Jewry, or the Arizona Laws.

So what it comes down to is this idea that Diaspora Jews are meant to surrender their conscience to the special relationship with Israel and act as agents of the Foreign Ministry (Lieberman) in order to defend Israel against the misguided gentiles and Jewish self-haters.  But as Bernard-Henri Levy, the French philosopher and a lifelong defender of Israel who signed the JCall petition argues: “If you believe in Zionism, Israel is a question that concerns every Jew in the world. It is impossible to tell Jews their word is crucial only when they agree with the government. In that case only supporters of the Likud around the world would have the right to speak.”

The J movement is necessary for Israel and Diaspora Jews because it gives voice to three principles:

First, it reaffirms the diversity of Zionist ideology that has always contained a multiplicity of contesting worldviews, from socialist secularism to religious messianism. Of late, it is the latter variety that has dominated the conversation, in part because of the strong Jewish identity of Orthodox Jews, and the fact that the occupation is not a problem to a majority of them. As the Orthodox Union has written in its opposition to Beinart’s piece: “From a Religious Zionist perspective, premising support for Israel on whether the Jewish State is living up to being a ‘liberal democracy’ is a recipe for trouble.”

In the face of this, I would argue that we are abandoning our Zionism if we do not create a voice that ensures that Israel lives up to its founding ideals of liberal democracy, notwithstanding the challenges of adhering to these values in situations of conflict.

Secondly, it is about not abandoning those Jews for whom liberalism, human rights, and compassionate politics is integral to their identities. Zionism has increasingly become identified with the political Right. Thus, while the rest of the world was inspired by the prospect of the first African-American to be elected to the White House, many young Jews expressed a preference for McCain in the name of their Zionism (‘mugged by reality’ they will argue). In post-election America, Obama is being portrayed by many Jews as an enemy of Israel and the Jewish people, with racist references to his middle name and a paranoid perception of his retreat at Cairo from the ‘clash of civilisations’ paradigm. Not only does the J movement challenge this perception, but it provides a bridge for Jews who want to extend their progressive and Jewish values into their Zionist loyalties. To burn this alternative bridge to Israel will render Zionism irrelevant for many young Jews whose bonds were not forged in an earlier era of imagined innocence.

Thirdly, the J movement has a crucial role to play in Zionist advocacy. Pro-Israel Jewish lobbies are as old as Israel itself, or rather as old as nineteenth century Zionism, or as old as the biblical tale of the spies. Over recent decades the establishment lobbies have veered to the right, adopting a neo-conservative line in relation to the Arab-Israel conflict. I think Frosh is correct in recognising that the alternative lobbies and signatories to petitions are calling upon their governments to pressure Israel in ways that go against the elected representatives of Israel. So let me distinguish between two aspects of the issue – advocacy and lobbying.

The best form of advocacy, in my view, is engagement through authenticity, intellectual honesty, critical reflection, and rational persuasion. Propaganda of any variety provokes counter-propaganda. A lie invites more lies. Heavy-handedness strengthens the hand of recalcitrance. None of this is conducive to peace and moderation. The conflict is not black and white, neither side is a pure victim, nor for that matter is either side free of the label of perpetrator. I can only advocate for Zion through my understanding of Zionism, which means highlighting how the delegitimisation of Israel is based on false assumptions about ethnic nationalisms and misunderstandings about the complexity of Middle Eastern politics, which resists simple categorisations of right and wrong. The J movement has created a space for this that is all too lacking in Australia.

As for lobbying governments through petitions, I concede that this is more problematic. It is not so much about undermining the democratic process from afar, as Frosh argues, because politics and our conscience knows no boundaries. But as one who cares deeply about the Zionist idea, my conscience is also pricked by my failure to throw my daily lot into the Israeli arena where I would shoulder the direct consequences of my politics. Notwithstanding these reservations, to remain silent concedes the public ground to a form of lobbying which makes our government believe they are betraying Jews and Israel by acting in accordance with their own interests and conscience to halt settlements and advance current opportunities to secure a two state solution. I want our political leaders to know that they will not be losing my vote (the so-called Jewish vote) if they pressure both parties to resume peace negotiations, or if they raise the issue of Jerusalem as a shared capital of two states. At the very least, it might protect ministers like Julie Bishop from the folly of her admission about Australia falsifying passports as an apparent means of placating Jewish voters.

The time is ripe for the J movement to strike roots in Australia. As the country that by virtue of its alphabetical ranking was the first to vote in 1947 for the creation of Israel through a partition of Palestine into two states, Australia has a special responsibility to see this conflict resolved in harmony with its initial intentions.  As a proud Australian, Jew, and Zionist, the framework of a J Street here would allow me and countless other Jews to give voice to all of these aspects of our identity. I deliberately choose the expression ‘to give voice’ because the alternative is silence in the face of other voices, a posture which will haunt us when we face a lost generation of Jews, and our own barren conscience.

Mark Baker is Director of the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation at Monash University and Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide studies.

Image source: Berkeley Daily Planet