Naomi Klein: We need an exodus from Zionism -- "The false idol"
Posted by scrabb on April 24, 2024, 5:47 pm
We need an exodus from Zionism
Naomi Klein
We don’t need or want the false idol of Zionism. We want freedom from the project that commits genocide in our name Wed 24 Apr 2024 14.27 BST Share I’ve been thinking about Moses, and his rage when he came down from the mount to find the Israelites worshipping a golden calf.
The ecofeminist in me was always uneasy about this story: what kind of God is jealous of animals? What kind of God wants to hoard all the sacredness of the Earth for himself?
A police officer detains a protester during a protest in Brooklyn, New York, demanding the US government stop arming Israel. ‘Not like other Passovers’: hundreds of Jewish demonstrators arrested after New York protest seder But there is a less literal way of understanding this story. It is about false idols. About the human tendency to worship the profane and shiny, to look to the small and material rather than the large and transcendent.
What I want to say to you tonight at this revolutionary and historic Seder in the Streets is that too many of our people are worshipping a false idol once again. They are enraptured by it. Drunk on it. Profaned by it.
That false idol is called Zionism.
Zionism is a false idol that has taken the idea of the promised land and turned it into a deed of sale for a militaristic ethnostate It is a false idol that takes our most profound biblical stories of justice and emancipation from slavery – the story of Passover itself – and turns them into brutalist weapons of colonial land theft, roadmaps for ethnic cleansing and genocide.
It is a false idol that has taken the transcendent idea of the promised land – a metaphor for human liberation that has traveled across multiple faiths to every corner of this globe – and dared to turn it into a deed of sale for a militaristic ethnostate.
Political Zionism’s version of liberation is itself profane. From the start, it required the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and ancestral lands in the Nakba.
From the start it has been at war with dreams of liberation. At a Seder it is worth remembering that this includes the dreams of liberation and self-determination of the Egyptian people. This false idol of Zionism equates Israeli safety with Egyptian dictatorship and client states.
From the start it has produced an ugly kind of freedom that saw Palestinian children not as human beings but as demographic threats – much as the pharaoh in the Book of Exodus feared the growing population of Israelites, and thus ordered the death of their sons.
Zionism has brought us to our present moment of cataclysm and it is time that we said clearly: it has always been leading us here.
It is a false idol that has led far too many of our own people down a deeply immoral path that now has them justifying the shredding of core commandments: thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not covet.
We, in these streets for months and months, are the exodus. The exodus from Zionism It is a false idol that equates Jewish freedom with cluster bombs that kill and maim Palestinian children.
Zionism is a false idol that has betrayed every Jewish value, including the value we place on questioning – a practice embedded in the Seder with its four questions asked by the youngest child.
Including the love we have as a people for text and for education.
Today, this false idol justifies the bombing of every university in Gaza; the destruction of countless schools, of archives, of printing presses; the killing of hundreds of academics, of journalists, of poets – this is what Palestinians call scholasticide, the killing of the means of education.
Meanwhile, in this city, the universities call in the NYPD and barricade themselves against the grave threat posed by their own students daring to ask them basic questions, such as: how can you claim to believe in anything at all, least of all us, while you enable, invest in and collaborate with this genocide?
The false idol of Zionism has been allowed to grow unchecked for far too long.
So tonight we say: it ends here.
Our Judaism cannot be protected by the rampaging military of that state, for all that military does is sow sorrow and reap hatred – including against us as Jews.
Our Judaism is not threatened by people raising their voices in solidarity with Palestine across lines of race, ethnicity, physical ability, gender identity and generations.
Our Judaism is one of those voices and knows that in that chorus lies both our safety and our collective liberation.
Our Judaism is the Judaism of the Passover Seder: the gathering in ceremony to share food and wine with loved ones and strangers alike, the ritual that is inherently portable, light enough to carry on our backs, in need of nothing but each other: no walls, no temple, no rabbi, a role for everyone, even – especially – the smallest child. The Seder is a diaspora technology if ever there was one, made for collective grieving, contemplation, questioning, remembering and reviving the revolutionary spirt.
So look around. This, here, is our Judaism. As waters rise and forests burn and nothing is certain, we pray at the altar of solidarity and mutual aid, no matter the cost.
We don’t need or want the false idol of Zionism. We want freedom from the project that commits genocide in our name. Freedom from an ideology that has no plan for peace other than deals with murderous theocratic petrostates next door, while selling the technologies of robo-assassinations to the world.
We seek to liberate Judaism from an ethnostate that wants Jews to be perennially afraid, that wants our children to be afraid, that wants us to believe the world is against us so that we go running to its fortress and beneath its iron dome, or at least keep the weapons and donations flowing.
That is the false idol.
And it’s not just Netanyahu, it’s the world he made and that made him – it’s Zionism.
What are we? We, in these streets for months and months, are the exodus. The exodus from Zionism.
And to the Chuck Schumers of this world, we do not say: “Let our people go.”
We say: “We have already gone. And your kids? They’re with us now.”
Naomi Klein is a Guardian US columnist and contributing writer. She is the professor of climate justice and co-director of the Centre for Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia. Her latest book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, was published in September This is a transcript of a speech delivered at the Emergency Seder in the Streets in New York City
Re: Naomi Klein: We need an exodus from Zionism -- "The false idol"
I keep trying to rein in my optimism but there really does seem to be a shifting in mainstream opinion towards the apartheid state.
It may be just temporary while they can't ignore the absolute barbarity of their current slaughter in Gaza and the West Bank combined with the arrogant dishonesty of their public voices but it really seems to be getting some traction.
I dearly hope this is the start of the end for it....no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party...So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.
A good one minute video that can be posted elsewhere
https://twitter.com/zei_squirrel/status/1782887199119184266...no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party...So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.
I'm surprised -- no amazed -- there hasn't been more reaction here
I really though Naomi Klein's speech would have elicited more of a response on TLN. I personally think it's significant and could mark a turning point in both the public's and the media's perception of the horrors being endured by the people of Gaza. Also important is the fact that the Guardian has chosen to reprint the entire speech. They would never have published such a speech (even the exact same speech) by any other figure -- but Klein is a darling of theirs and is in a unique position of sainthood. I saw her interviewed in Manchester last year by a Guardian journalist and it was a sick-making love-in. But this speech, and the decision to run it uncensored in the paper, must have caused hours of soul-searching and a knife-edge bite-the-bullet moment to go ahead. What it means is that all the media people who know what's happening in Gaza and that Israel's actions are completely beyond the pale, but have been constrained to criticise the regime (for all the usual reasons) now know the boundary of debate has been extended -- or to use another metaphor, "the shackles are off" -- and in essence they have been granted a licence to say the unsayable. Whether or not other media platforms will grasp the opportunity and take the risk remains to be seen.
I received a comment on this speech and the article from a friend, which really captured my own feeling about it in just a few words. He said it was a welcome statement, but why had it taken so long for something we all know to be true to be articulated.
Re: I'm surprised -- no amazed -- there hasn't been more reaction here
I agree with you that it's odd that this passed without much comment; coming from anyone it would have been fairly remarkable getting such coverage there but from her? Massive.
Still, normal service seems to have been resumed today:
...no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party...So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.
Re: I'm surprised -- no amazed -- there hasn't been more reaction here
You're probably right that it's significant and could even mark a turning point in left-liberal opinion, but Klein is a tame radical at the graun and they could easily cut ties with her, as they have with so many others, if the fig leaf role she's providing becomes inconvenient. I wouldn't expect this to become their editorial position any time soon...
Forgive the cynicism, I didn't disagree with anything in the speech, but I do remember her response to Oct 7th was to cry 'antisemitism' and castigate unnamed figures on the left whose alleged crime was to 'minimize massacres of Israeli civilians, and in some extreme cases, even seem to celebrate them' - https://members5.boardhost.com/xxxxx/thread/1697067368.html
The caveats mentioned by Ian and the (usual) response from Keith reinforces and only adds weight to how unexpected and politically radical this speech and its publication by the Guardian was. If you can't see that, there's something wrong with your radar.
Given that Klein, as a jew, reacted as she did to October 7 makes it all the more astounding that she now comes out (Okay, seven months later!) and makes this remarkable (I still maintain) statement. One: she didn't need to make it at all, and Two: if she felt compelled to say something could have trotted out a few platitudes and soft-soaped the atrocities being committed in her (jewish) name. But she is scathing and unremitting in her condemnation of zionism and zionists, and powerfully rejects their attempt to collate the two. Neither does she shy away from describing the horrors being carried out in her name.
And for the Guardian, of all papers, to run the speech without redactions or qualifying weasel words marks a seismic shift in their attitude and media stance. Ian says they can easily cut ties with her if they so choose, and of course they can, but why run the risk in the first place when they didn't need to do it? As I said before, this decision wasn't taken lightly. They could have either just ignored the speech or commented on it briefly and in passing. They didn't.
Keith's infantile remark is like that of a sulky child throwing its toy out of the pram. I just wish he'd grow up once in a while.
I'm not usually as convinced I'm right in my views about a news event, but with this one I have no doubts it's a landmark.
Re: Precisely why the speech and publication is significant
on April 24, 2024, 5:47 pm