Authors: Cornel West
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 Jewish 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 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 citizens in forging a new Jewish democratic identity here and abroad.
Just as a new Jewish democratic identity can draw from the rich prophetic tradition of Judaism, so a new Islamic democratic identity can, and must, emerge from the rich prophetic tradition of Islam. Recent efforts to embark on democratic projects in Afghanistan and Iraq are salutary, but they must not be guided by imperial aims or informed by simplistic understandings of the
Islamic tradition. Furthermore, any attempt to democratize Islamic states or to Socratize Islam must be conversant with their recent imperial past.
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.
When modern imperial ideologies have dehumanized you and modern enterprises have exploited your labor, postcolonial situations become occasions to assert your sense of self and culture even when doing so appears backward to those who have been riding your back. Glib imitation of the West is suicide—even if recasting Islamic identity is painful, as profoundly and poignantly revealed in the great modern Islamic literature. The paradigmatic literary
figures of Samba Diallo in Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s inimitable
Ambiguous Adventure
(1983), Mustafa Sa’eed in Tayeb Salih’s powerful
Season of Migration to the North
(1969), Ken Bugul in Mariétou M’Baye’s classic
The Abandoned Baobab
(1991), and Driss Ferdi in Driss Chraibi’s canonical
The Simple Past
(1983) all lay bare the inescapable need to confront their Islamic tradition.
This noteworthy body of literature—much of it centered in the African Islamic world—deserves much more attention for those concerned about Islam, modernity, and democracy. In stark contrast to renowned literary figures like Salman Rushdie and V. S. Naipaul, these writers are sympathetic to the Islamic sources of their modern identity and to the modern sources of their Islamic identity. These works explore the profound alienation from both sources, and the necessity of building on both sources—all against the background of the West as imperial agent. As Kane writes in
Ambiguous Adventure:
The new school shares at the same time the characteristics of cannon and of magnet. From the cannon it draws its efficacy as an arm of combat. Better than the cannon, it makes the conquest permanent. The cannon compels the body, the school bewitches the soul. Where the cannon has made a pit of ashes and of death, in the sticky mold of which men would not have rebounded from the ruins, the new school establishes peace. The morning of rebirth will be a morning of benediction through the appeasing virtue of the new school.
From the magnet, the school takes its radiating force. It is bound up with a new order, as a magnetic stone is bound up with a field. The upheaval of the life of man within this new order is similar to the overturn of certain physical laws in a magnetic field. Men are seen to be composing themselves, conquered, along the lines of invisible forces. Disorder is organized, rebellion is appeased, the mornings of resentment resound with songs of universal thanksgiving.
This Islamic quest for a modern identity is situated between Good Friday and Easter, between a past of deep imperial wounds and a forward-looking resurrection. To erase the modern West is to ignore the dark predicament of the Islamic present. To wipe the traditions of Islam away would be to render themselves a blank carbon copy of a modern West that has no room or place for their complexity and humanity. Democracy matters must confront this Islamic identity crisis critically and sympathetically. In other words, there can be no democracy in the Islamic world without a recasting of Islamic identity. This new modern identity that fuses Islam and democracy has not even been glimpsed by most westerners. So it behooves us to proceed in a self-critical and open manner.
The delicate dialogue between the modern West and the Islamic world should be neither a crude clash of civilizations nor an imposition of one upon the other. Rather it should be a Socratic process of examining a rich past of cultural cross-fertilization. Just as there is a long Judeo-Christian tradition, there is a long Judeo-Islamic
tradition. The role of Islamic figures in the history of Judaic and Christian thought is immense. And the prophetic energies in Judaism and Christianity have been appropriated by many prophetic Islamic thinkers. These energies provide a hope for new democratic possibilities. This treacherous road has already been trod by towering Islamic intellectuals—like Fatima Mernissi, Mohamed Abid al-Jabri, Abdokarim Soroush, Mohamed Arkoun, Nawal El Saadawi, Anouar Majid, Tariq Ramadan, Khaled Abou El-Fadl, and, above all, Mahmoud Mohamed Taha—who all question, and examine, the modern West and Islamic traditions in order to forge a new democratic vision in the Muslim world. As Khaled Abou El-Fadl boldly proclaims in his article “Islam and the Challenge of Democracy” in the
Boston Review
(April–May 2003):