“Marek, we inscribe you today into the Jewish covenant. We are imposing upon you a set of overlapping identities, inscribing you with a name of our choosing and with the ritual violence of circumcision

…We hope that you will learn to embrace this gift without thinking that you are better than others, or that your identity ought to endow you with special privileges. In particular, we are thrilled to pronounce you a Jew without the Right of Return. Your name contains our deep hope that you will explore and celebrate your Jewish identity without confusing it with nationalism.

Your last name is your mother’s -- a non-Jewish one -- by the fact of which you are ineligible for the nationalist privilege of automatic Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return. We believe that law confuses the wonderful and painful inheritance of identity with unearned advantages -- legal, political, and financial -- granted by a militarized state over other people, including so many it oppresses daily….

…We pray fervently that by the time you read this, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the settlements, the house demolitions, the violence will be history. But even then, we hope you will appreciate this absence of nationalist privilege in your inscribed identity. We hope you will work for a world where identity is explored, nurtured, critiqued, celebrated, and protected -- but not the basis for privilege, for discrimination, for money, for power.”

----From “To Our Son, Marek Alexander Barnette, on the Occasion of His Naming” by BRAD LANDER and Meg Barnette--first published in “Wrestling with Zion,” edited and with an introuction by Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon

One of the most annoying phenomenon in NYC politics is the insistence of our City Council in holding hearings and passing resolutions about all matter of issues over which they have no jurisdiction, especially international affairs. This is especially infuriating when one considers that the Council can’t manage in most instances to do decent oversight concerning those areas in which it has jurisdiction.

And yet, in my home area I’ve found the background of one candidate, Brad Lander, a matter of great concern precisely because of these matters.

Currently, an academic at Pratt Institute, Lander had an impressive track at Park Slope’s Fifth Avenue Committee in creating affordable housing under difficult circumstances. The the appalling effort of bloggers like Mole333to use Lander’s impressive track record to brand him as a tool of developers almost made me angry enough to support Lander, but then something made me even angrier.

Let me explain.

Like Lander, I’ve long believed that nationalism of any sort is, by its nature, a reactionary philosophy. Nationalism is “Us First “ held as a superior value over anything universal.

But, on the other hand, it would appear to be the way of the world. In recent years, we’ve seen the fragmentation of the USSR, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Ethiopia, and the reunification of Yemen and Germany. We need look no further than Iraq, which we occupy or Canada, which we border, to see that polities, whether hostile or civilized, have great trouble overcoming ethnic differences. Some of this we can blame upon colonialism, but whether decolonization was resolved using partition--as in Ireland, India and Israel--or not-- as in countries beginning with the other 25 letters of the alphabet-- no solution to the underlying ethnic hostilities appears to be satisfactory.

But like much which is also the way of the world, nationalism is not my cup of tea. Still, it is especially understandable among the world’s underdogs, a title to which both Jews and Palestinians can credibly lay claim.

As our President once said, “nobody has suffered more than Palestinians,” and though the full quote was later revealed to be “nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian people from the failure of the Palestinian leadership to recognize Israel, to renounce violence and to get serious about negotiating peace and security for the region,” it is quite clear that, though others in the world have surely suffered more, with far less concern about it expressed by so-called progressives, no one should envy the suffering of the residents of Gaza, even if their grievous wounds are largely self-inflicted. Starting with the rejection of partition in 1947, and continuing with the rocket attacks on Israel AFTER Israel withdrew from Gaza, the Palestinian leadership has never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. .

Less acknowledged on the progressive left are the grievous wounds of the Jews. In the lifetime of my father, European Jewry was almost literally wiped off the map, with many of the few returning survivors subjected to further pogroms until they finally got the message. During the same period, the Jews of the Arab world were almost entirely deported en masse, either by decree or unsubtle hint, without any mention of reparations, let alone a right of return.

Stalin once called the Jews “Rootless Cosmopolitans,” and the term sure has its own discrete bourgeoisie charm; we Jews are the Falashans of Ethiopia, The Mizrahi of Aleppo, the Bene Israel of Mumbai, the literary lions of the Partisan Review and the tummlers of the Catskill Borsht belt. Why would anyone trade that for something as boring and prosaic as an ethnically based nation-state? And who in the hell would serve as our volunteer firemen? People with nation-states and flags and anthems and armies are the sort we tended to look down on. If someone really didn’t like us, there was always someplace we could go.

But there came a point when the Stranger in a Strange Land stuff stopped working, even for assimilationists, because the adherents of what Bebel called "the Socialism of Fools" --AKA anti-Semitism--didn't want us to be a part of them. In the late 30s and early forties, many of the Jews of Europe found that not even copious attempts at bribery were successful in overcoming rampant xenophobia when seeking refuge as a matter of life and death. EVEN IN THE UNITED STATES.

If one had no place they could call home, one really had no place to go, except into the ovens.

Zionism, which at first didn't even posit where a Jewish state would actually be located, was Theodore Herzl's proposed solution for the insanity of trying the same thing again and again and expecting a different result. The title of his magnum opus, variously translated as "The Jewish State" and "The State of the Jews" was a pun, in that it both stated the problem and the proposed solution.

Herzl essentially said of nationalists, "if you can't beat ‘em, join em." And by joining them, he meant leaving them.

A nation-state would bring us normalcy. Normalcy, might bring an end to our lovely and enchanting Jewish Exceptionalism, but such Exceptionalism had not enchanted the world and had brought us precious little love. Normalcy was boring, but it increased one’s life expectancy.

Did Herzl win the argument? Recent events imply perhaps not…that is, until Jews consider the alternatives.

As left-writer Ellen Willis noted, “I can’t figure out what large numbers of displaced Jews could or should have done after 1945, other than parlay their relationship with Palestine and the (ambivalent) support of the West for a Jewish homeland into a place to be. (Go “home” to Germany or Poland? Knock, en masse, on the doors of unreceptive European countries and a reluctant United States?)”

Central to the concept of such a state was its function as an escape hatch. As another left-writer, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, noted, “Since being a Jew has been enough in some places to mark one for persecution or death, at least one spot on the globe should be a ticket to safety.”

This is the essence of the idea of Israel’s Law of Return. It is for Jews the equivalent of a Shelter for Battered Women. And the Law of Return cannot be discussed without mentioning the companion "Law of Refuge," which affords a right to settle in Israel to all those who are persecuted for being Jewish, even if they don't meet the religious definition. Despite Mr. Lander's assertion implying the contrary, if, Like Marek Barnette, you are Jewish enough so that Hitler would have put you in the oven, you are guaranteed refuge in Israel, and so are the non-Jewish families members of those who do meet the religious defintion.  

This concern is not, as some would have it, merely an historical one. Need proof? Last week, in Caracas, as part of a campaign of hatred encouraged by the ruling party, a group of armed men invaded a synagogue, terrorized the staff, destroyed sacred texts and defaced the building with threats of death, while the ruling party clucked its tongue while continuing to organize boycotts of Jewish businesses.

And who can forget the little Hanukah Masque of the Red Death organized by Islamic extremists at the Chabad House in Mumbai?

Meanwhile, progressives organize in support of Hamas, a group whose charter states, “the Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jews will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”

Not the Israelis, mind you, but THE JEWS.

When an Islamic fascist extremist in New York shot a little boy named Ari Halberstam who was riding is a school bus, all that extremist knew was that the bus came from an Hasidic Yeshiva. It was pure blind luck that the victim came from the Zionist Lubavich, rather than the anti-Zionist Satmar, but to the crazed gunman it didn’t make a God-damned bit of difference.

And some wonder why Jews need a right of return. Among those who wonder are some Jews, although usually they are those living in places like Park Slope rather than in Caracas or Cracow.

The only time I get really passionate about Jewish nationalism is when so-called progressives defend the national aspirations of nearly every ethnic sub-group, but shed no tears for the slaughter of Jews and Kurds. And I have a special contempt for those among this type of progressive --who, I will note, do not constitute all progressives, and who, I hope, do not constitute most of them-- who call themselves Jews.

Anti-Israel Jewish progressives come in various types. Some have no attachment to their heritage, whatsoever, but only trot out their Jewish credentials whenever the sound of their last names is needed to kosherize some Israel bashing which might otherwise appear to anti-Semitic--usually because the appearance is accurate. Members of this species include public intellectual Noam Chomsky, who will rally to the side of anyone willing to bash Israel, including, holocaust denier Robert Faurrisson, who he defended against quite accurate charges of anti-Semitism. Mr. Lander, who clearly is proud of his heritage, is NOT a part of this sorry breed.

But, anti-Israel Jewish progressives also come in more benign types; many are Jews who, like myself, embrace our heritage as rootless denizens of the best salons and the most noble causes. Most of us are not anti-Israel, but there are some among my breed, like Brad Lander, who embrace so much our noble past, that they are willing to do everything they can to preserve the status quo ante, including risking the chance that our future may never occur.

“Better,” they say, “to die on our knees than to die on our feet.”

And why should this matter in a race for City Council?

It is not merely that Brad Lander hold such beliefs---if that were the only problem, I would wait until he ran for Congress before I would bother to oppose him. The problem is that he holds those anti-Israel beliefs with such vehemence that he chooses to put them into an anthology, so that his sanctimonious, self-righteous rejection of a right which might have saved millions can be held up as an example to the world of what the “good Jews” are thinking.

Israel is living in a perilous time, and the need for it, the Law of Return and the Law of Refuge have never been greater. Sure, Israel faces far greater threats--including Jewish fascists from within--than stupid Jewish progressives. But it is one thing for Brad Lander to be writing his utopian crap as one more stupid Jewish progressive. It is a far greater menace for him to be signing anti-Israel propaganda advertisements, and writing more anti-Israel articles, and signing then as a Jewish member of the New York City Council.