By Marilyn Garson
Published by Circaidy Gregory Press, 2025, RRP £12.
Review by Tim Barton
One day everyone will have always been against this, is a new book by journalist Omar El Akkad. The title is taken from a tweet he posted on October 25th 2023: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” Today, one year and eight months after the raid that Hamas launched on the southern parts of Israel from within the Gazan ‘Warsaw Ghetto’, and the ‘total war’ reprisals unleashed by Netanyahu has begun to reach the point El Akkad predicted. The damage is done, there is in effect already no ‘Palestine’ in Gaza, and the West Bank, already snipped up like a paper doily, is under extreme duress.
Netanyahu’s time may soon be up, but he has done a sterling job of avoiding outstanding court dates by clinging on to his alliance with even further right-wing parties, and of reaching an explicit goal of many Zionists, the annihilation of the Palestinian Arab apartheid state.
The origins of “Netanyahu” as a family name are not irrelevant here. His grandfather was a Polish émigré to the USA, his given name Mileikowsky. As an outspoken ultra-zionist journalist he took ‘Netanyahu’ as a pen-name. It means “God gives” (or “God has given”) in Hebrew. As Aliza Abrahamovitz, an expert in the derivation and meaning of Hebrew names puts it, “the name Binyamin means ‘son of my right side’ and connotes strength and support”. It also derives from the name of the Biblical Jacob’s youngest son, of whom God says, “the Lord’s beloved one shall dwell securely beside Him; He protects him all day long, and He dwells between his shoulders.” This naming is not accidental, as Adam Shatz explicated in his review in the London Review of Books of a recent biography of Netanyahu, and his brother who was shot during the raid at Entebbe, too, was not named accidentally – Yonathan combines the Hebrew for ‘dove’ and ‘gift’ and is taken to mean ‘gift of god’. Not that non-Zionist Jews wouldn’t use what are also common enough names, but the context tells us a lot.
And that last point, that there are non-Zionist Jews – and also some Zionist Jews – who do not support taking the land God is prophesied to grant them by force, despite the Biblical promises given to Abraham, Moses, and Joshua that “To your descendants I have given this land, From the river of Egypt as far as the great river, the river Euphrates” is why this book, Jewish Not Zionist, is necessary.
This brings us to a point we must address. Religious underpinning of imperialist and colonial ethno-nationalism recurs throughout history. Indeed, the short-lived British Empire was the largest militarily and economically violent of them all, and ideologically inclusive of similarly exceptionalist views as those of every other ‘chosen people’, which of course includes the Third Reich. These political bodies take a dim view of any opposition, and are especially poisonous towards internal opposition, another reason this book is needed. In Israel’s case we need look little further than the way in which, for example, Gilad Atzmon, Jacqueline Walker, or Norman Finkelstein have been treated. The more extreme Zionists refer to ‘the wrong kind of Jew’, ‘self-hating Jews’, and occasionally drop in the odd ‘not even a Jew’, or ‘no longer a Jew’. Or even ‘Kapo jews’, a term of abuse recently used against Finkelstein, Katie Halper and Bernie Sanders.
The Russian Jew Ze’ev Jabotinsky founded a revisionist Zionist movement a century ago. The wing of Zionism he represents is fast-growing and includes the Betar movement. Betar have recently recommended lists of Diaspora Jews to be excluded from Israel. This list is growing, and clearly includes primarily out-spoken anti-Zionists. There are many non- and anti-Zionist Jews, including in Israel itself. The latter are currently mercilessly persecuted by the IDF. The October attacks differ from the Lebanon war in that that war engendered a very large anti-war movement in Jerusalem very quickly. Being attacked ‘first’ made a lot of difference, especially under the contingent political conditions in Israel and abroad at this moment, with a rise in ‘right-wing’ ethno-nationalism everywhere, and a vocal Christian Zionist movement in the USA. In 1982, Jacobo Timerman wrote “I fear that in our collective subconscious, we are not perhaps repelled by the possibility of a Palestinian genocide. I don’t believe we Israelis can be cured without the help of others”.
Local publisher, Circaidy Gregory, therefore, have published Jewish Not Zionist, by New Zealander Marilyn Garson, with an introduction by Hastings activist and co-chair of Jewish Voice for Labour, Leah Levane, at an appropriate moment in the zeitgeist. Leah explicitly voices “Jewish values that do not align with Zionism”. Zionism is stronger than ever, but voices raised against it are fast rising too. Again, I must note that Israel is hardly the only nation guilty of exceptionalist ethno-violence against it’s neighbours. Modi’s India, Putin’s Russia, and in our recent past Irish loyalists and the British state, all overstep societal norms. However, Gaza is an extreme example. Whilst El Akkad is right to criticise the hypocrisy of some who now crawl from under their rock to voice concern, many of us have indeed “always been against this”, just as we were against the Bush-Blair Iraq war.
The future for Jews everywhere is, according to some Jewish voices, imperilled by Israel’s recent, and historically not entirely exceptional behaviour. Yet it is imperative that we loudly voice that this represents by no means ‘all Jews’. Garson, whose upbringing was Zionist, traces other religious and cultural roots of Judaism to counter the ultra-zionist narratives that emerged during the nineteenth-century and, understandably, after the Shoah.
As she puts it, “it does not suffice for me to be only an anti-Zionist Jew. If the anti-Zionist Jews in this story had been driven only by a desire to disavow Israel, we would have spoken very differently and chosen different partners. Instead, AJV [Alternative Jewish Voice, New Zealand] and I have worked hard to cultivate a thoughtful, pro-Jewish voice. We have always said that no-one needs to choose between their principles and their Jewishness. A rich expanse lies beyond the fenceline of nationalism”, and “we must keep untangling Jewishness from nationalism, to ensure that Jewishness is understood by our neighbours in an inspirational, loving, forward-looking voice.”