A Blast From the Past for Rutgers

(That would be me)

In 1970 I was the Editorial Page Editor of our college newspaper, the Rutgers Daily Targum. (I’ve forgotten where the name came from.) This publication had a unique history because it was a genuinely daily publication and fancied itself to be the oldest college daily newspaper in the U.S. Rutgers also fielded a team for the first college football game (versus Princeton). Of course, everything was print then. I still remember the nights we labored in the “hot metal” type shop putting it out. Since those days, the paper has gone online. Unlike the heady days of student rebellion, the Targum’s criteria for publication has also taken on a load of bureaucratic bullshit that sadly mirrors the current mainstream media’s incapacity to deal with the neo-fascist threat of a second Trump presidency. I thought it would be fun to submit and publish what follows, but the weenies at Targum are not buying it. So here it is anyway. I’ve also sent a link to a few selected campus organizations, in frank hopes of creating a modest ruckus. I will report back on any fallout.

One Jew’s Defense of Palestine

By Max B. Sawicky (RC ’71)

It’s a pleasure to return to the pages of Targum, after oh, about 55 years. I’m delighted to see protest at Rutgers against the state of Israel’s unconscionable assault on Gaza. Call it genocide, call it ethnic cleansing, call it whatever you like: the inescapable fact is the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent people.

The U.S. government plays an essential role in this crime. What is transpiring has nothing to do with the defense of Israel, nor the eradication of Hamas. Both purported objectives are contravened by Israel’s blitzkrieg of Gaza and the rampages of Jewish settlers on the West Bank. Israel is less secure now. Its actions have united its neighbors – even historic enemies such as Shi'a and Sunni Muslims -- against it, exposed it to the risk of a multi-front war, and destroyed its international reputation. It also blackens the name of world Jewry.

The real motivations in Israel have gone way beyond self-defense: the current regime is unremittingly hostile to any accommodation with a Palestinian state, and the end of the war would start the clock on the prosecution of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for assorted personal crimes. For the U.S. government, it still agrees with Netanyahu that Israel is its “mighty aircraft carrier” in the Mideast.

In contrast, Judaism has always had something positive to offer the world:

“Judaism, throughout its long history has one purpose; to elevate humanity … We find that Judaism is focused without interruption on two things that are the foundations of the dominion of the spirit … (1) ethical sensibility (regesh ha-musari), that is “do what is good and right [in the eyes of God],” justice and righteousness (tzedek u-mishpat); (2) religious sensibility, that is, the yearnings of the human soul for the “infinite” (eyn sof), by various means, and to establish faith toward those ends.

— Rabbi Aaron Samuel Tamares, 1913. Quoted in Shaul Magid, The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance (p. 289).

Activists for Palestine who discount the humane tradition of Judaism commit a tactical political blunder, besides betraying their ignorance. There were long-standing traditions of anti-Zionism among Jews. These views abated in the face of the imperative of rescue from the aftermath of the Holocaust. Jews wanted out of Europe, there was nowhere else to go, now in Israel they are dug in and not going anywhere. That’s just a fact that no amount of chanting “From the river to the sea” will change. Accommodation and compromise determined by people on the ground is the only solution.

The Israeli historian Tom Segev has written that as late as 1800, there were maybe 70,000 Jews in Palestine. We can take this to mean that through the millennia the Biblical aspiration for a return to Israel was a spiritual feeling, not a practical intention. The chief Jewish response to Zionism was indifference. A movement did not begin to form in Europe until the 19^th Century.

Zionism as ideology is a confection of debatable religious and political motivations that did not always depend on the formation of a state that would run roughshod over the so-called “land without a people.” There was diversity in Zionism in the 19^th and 20th centuries. Jews as illustrious as Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt had doubts about the wisdom of forming an actual state in Palestine. Jews still have a home in the Diaspora, especially in the U.S. and Western Europe. Zionism in the Diaspora is fading, though unthinking attacks on Jews tend to prop it up.

A mature, radical politics would focus on Zionism as embodied in the terrible policies of the state of Israel and its accessories in the U.S. Government, not on individuals who happen to be Jewish or Zionist.

The upshot is that you can be Jewish, and even a Zionist of a sort, and refuse to endorse Israel’s awful deeds in Gaza and the West Bank. I would go so far as to say it helps. Hundreds of thousands of Israeli Jews are currently protesting to that effect. A political problem is that anti-Zionist rhetoric often slides into blanket indictments of Judaism that are adjacent to anti-Semitism. Particularly annoying, not to mention politically stupid, is the use of Jewish symbols and ancient anti-Semitic slurs to refer to Israeli policy.

The sad fact is that too many, including Jews, don’t understand the difference between a Zionist and a Jew. Zionist propaganda tries to conflate the two and claim Israel to be the world home of Judaism. In concert, Donald Trump asserts that American Jews’ loyalty properly belongs to Israel. In a recent interview with New York Times columnist David Brooks, Trump crony Steve Bannon said that American Jews will need to cleave to Christian nationalism for their own good. Who are the real anti-Semites?

Notwithstanding President Biden’s complicity in Israeli policy, the genocide charge tragically facilitates the onset of Genocide 2.0, in the revolting person of Donald Trump. There should be little doubt that a Trump victory in November would remove all restraints on Netanyahu’s government and pose grave danger to the peoples of Yemen and Iran, among a myriad of other threats.

Protests usually resume with the start of the Fall semester. Hopefully they will be bigger, rowdier, and wiser. When Richard Nixon announced his invasion of Cambodia, we shut this place down. When we occupied Old Queens, University president Mason Gross wisely declared us his “guests” and declined to call the cops. Gaza’s destruction rivals the harm suffered by Cambodia at the hands of Nixon and Henry Kissinger.

You know what to do!

Max B. Sawicky (RC ’71) was born and raised in New Jersey and is now a retired economist living in Virginia. He was Editorial Page Editor of the Rutgers Daily Targum in 1970, as well as a member of Students for a Democratic Society. He writes regularly at sawicky.substack.com.