The Guardian
Shlomo Sand: ‘I wish to resign and cease considering myself a Jew’
His
past was Jewish, but today he sees Israel as one of the most racist
societies in the western world. Historian Shlomo Sand explains why he
doesn’t want to be Jewish anymore
· The Guardian, Friday 10 October 2014 09.42 EDT
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.
• This is an edited extract from How I Stopped Being a Jew by Shlomo Sand, published by Verso at £9.99. Buy it for £7.49 atbookshop.theguardian.com. 
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