WW COMMENTARY
Palestine, CUNY & rightwing suppression
By
Shelley Ettinger
Published May 11, 2011 10:07 PM
Playwright Tony Kushner has done some good work. His most famous plays, the
“Angels in America” cycle, were some of the first mainstream dramas
to draw attention to how the AIDS crisis was devastating the gay community in
this country. His musical “Caroline, or Change,” which I saw in
2004 during its all-too-brief Broadway run, is an honest, tough-minded yet
tender treatment of race, racism, and Black-Jewish relations in the 1960s
South.
Kushner is not a radical. He is thoroughly at home in the mainstream. Basically
he is a left social democrat, a devotee of what he sees as the potential of
bourgeois democracy while acknowledging its shortcomings, and also aware of
other possibilities and even of the ubiquitousness of anti-communism in this
country and how it has damaged and distorted culture. This brief take on his
political sensibilities, based on having read a number of his pieces and
interviews with him over the years, is offered to lead in to commenting on the
current dust-up drawing much notice here in New York.
At its meeting [on May 2], the board of trustees of the City University of New
York voted to cancel the honorary degree that John Jay College had planned to
bestow on Kushner at this month’s graduation ceremony. The reason: The
playwright is not sufficiently rabidly racistly violently Zionist.
He is a Zionist. A left-liberal Zionist, the sort who says “I love
Israel” and expresses his “strong support for Israel’s right
to exist,” but does oppose the occupation and criticize what he sees as
its worst extremes in the treatment of the indigenous Palestinian population.
Kushner has acknowledged at least some of the crimes committed during the
creation of the state of Israel. Yet “the occupation” that he
opposes is the post-1967 occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, not the larger
occupation — that is, the theft of the entire land of Palestine, on which
is imposed the Zionist state, a state that is by definition racist,
exclusionist and illegitimate.
Never forget this: Kushner, or I, or any U.S. Jew can move to Israel at any
time and get automatic citizenship. Simply because we’re Jews (and, by
the way, regardless of religious practice; smart move since most Jews are
atheists). By contrast, no Palestinian-American — not a young person
whose parent or grandparent was forced out of the family home, nor an elder who
was herself/himself driven out of the house by the terrorist thugs whose
murderous ethnic cleansing campaigns were crucial to the creation of a Jewish
state — not a single Palestinian is permitted to return home to live.
Think about that. I, someone with no tie whatsoever to “Israel,”
someone whose ancestry goes back to Eastern Europe for hundreds of years and to
Spain for hundreds of years before that, could pack up and move there tomorrow.
And be welcomed as an automatic citizen.
But my Palestinian sister whose parents still keep the key to their stolen home
in a precious box, who still yearn for home, who still grieve over their
forcible expulsion from the land their people had lived on for untold
generations — she is barred from returning. (Here I’ll point to
Susan Abulhawa’s wonderful novel “Mornings in Jenin,” which
conveys this reality in a gripping literary tour de force.)
So. Here’s a famous playwright who despite all that proclaims his love
for Israel. Who says he is “moved and excited by its culture, its meaning
in Jewish history” (which is to my way of thinking a reprehensible
sentiment since its meaning in Jewish history is a blot, a shame, a stain, a
crime against humanity, a turning away from a tradition of righteous struggle
and solidarity against oppression). Who does criticize some of its crimes, as
indeed do many Israelis, but does not at all part ways with Zionism itself, or
with a fundamental support for the Zionist state’s right to exist.
Who, furthermore, explicitly does not support the BDS — Boycott,
Divestment, Sanctions — movement, an international effort to bring
pressure on Israel to end the 1967 occupation even though that in itself is a
moderate demand and even though the BDS tactic is a time-honored one honed
during the struggle against that earlier apartheid state, South Africa; but no,
even so, Kushner opposes BDS. Here, in other words, is a friend to Israel. But
in the landscape of U.S. culture, where the ultra-right has an ever tighter
grip on consciousness and culture, even that is not good enough.
And so CUNY pulls his honor. And Kushner cries foul. In his letter to the board
expressing his dismay at the action, he asserts his “strong statement of
support for Israel’s right to exist, and my ardent wish that it continue
to do so.” He decries the BDS movement, explaining: “I have never
supported a boycott of the state of Israel. I don’t believe it will
accomplish anything positive in terms of resolving the crisis. I believe that
the call for a boycott is predicated on an equation of this crisis with other
situations, contemporary and historical, that is fundamentally false, the
consequence of a failure of political understanding of a full and compassionate
engagement with Jewish history and Jewish existence.”
The [last sentence] seems to me to smack shockingly of a Jewish exceptionalism
that objectively aligns with the base racism of the Zionist ideology rather
than conveying any meaningful point about the history of European persecution
of the Jews to which he’s obviously referring and to which Zionism was
and remains a backward, reactionary response; his view, apparently, is that
apartheid in Israel cannot be compared to apartheid in South Africa because
those imposing apartheid in Israel had terrible things happen to their
grandparents in Europe — I include his own words expressing his
unfortunate views to show how far from anti-Israel Kushner is. As he indeed
took pains to show. Which underscores how extreme is the chokehold of reaction
in every realm of this culture.
Now Facebook groups spring up. PEN, that bastion of anti-communist bourgeois
liberalism, enters the fray. No one asks why reactionary investment bankers and
bosses sit in control over CUNY, the college of New York’s working class
funded by the workers’ taxes; why the majority of the board is white when
most students are people of color; why tuition is no longer free and is in fact
about to go up drastically again, making college an unreachable dream for more
young workers.
CUNY should belong to the people of New York City. Militant students are right
now organizing to take it back, fighting alongside staff and teachers against
the vicious funding cuts and layoffs dictated by the banks. This will be a
long, hard struggle, but it can be won. When it is, when CUNY is in the hands
of the working class, I’ll love to see who that new improved CUNY chooses
to receive its honorary degrees.
This article is excerpted from Ettinger’s Read Red blog (http://readwritered.blogspot.com/).
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