September 28, 2004
By Daniel Ficheter

Playwright Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes received numerous awards in the early 1990s, including the Pulitzer Prize and several Tony Awards, and secured Kushner’s standing as one of the most prominent American playwrights of his generation. He has since established his reputation as an outspoken social critic. In 2003, Kushner and Alisa Solomon co-edited Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.

Yale Israel Journal: Some of the fifty-two contributors to Wrestling with Zion consider themselves Zionists and others do not. How significant is this divide on the Jewish Left, and does it imperil the coherence of a progressive Jewish position on Israel?

Tony Kushner: Who knows what we’re even talking about when we use the term Zionism? The term itself is so full of complexity. And so many different kinds of people have called themselves Zionists that to call yourself anti-Zionist is, in a certain sense, almost meaningless. I think that there is a very small group of Jewish Americans on the Left who feel that the State of Israel shouldn’t exist, and who will not feel any particular sadness if it’s destroyed. But I don’t actually know anyone like that. There’s no one like that in the book that Alisa Solomon and I put together, and I think that defining yourself as someone who is in opposition to an historical event that’s happened already is kind of impossible.

Groups like Brit Tzedek that have managed to form themselves as coherent entities seem to emulate groups in Israel that also decided to just put that issue aside. They have managed not to turn groups that are convened to respond to the crisis in the Mideast into debating societies about the meaning of Zionism. I was at one of the early meetings of Brit Tzedek in New York and it degenerated into this huge, long screaming fight about whether you’re a Zionist, and whether you must say that you love the State of Israel or can’t even be at the table talking, and so on. It became pretty clear that nothing was going to be possible unless we moved on.

I think people have immensely personal, un-analyzable, incommensurable feelings about the State of Israel that stem from a very, very deep love of it. Even if you think that ’47 and ’48 were terrible mistakes, you can still feel a great attachment. Most people that I know on the Left, and I think this is reflected in Wrestling with Zion, feel profoundly confused and torn about the history and the meaning of the State of Israel. I don’t know if Isaiah Berlin would say this, but I would say it: Even if the founding of Israel was in some ways a mistake, it could be a bad thing and a good thing at the same time. And it changed the way Jews would be Jews in the world. That doesn’t excuse the fact that it was founded in a program that, if you really want to be blunt about it, was ethnic cleansing, and that today is behaving abominably towards the Palestinian people. I think most people feel that since it would involve an immense amount of bloodshed and a devastating loss, it would be a great historical crime for the State of Israel to cease to exist.

YIJ: Then has the emergence of Brit Tzedek as a cohesive organization that supports a two-state solution made it more difficult for Jews who support binationalism to have an effective voice?

TK: I agree with Brit Tzedek’s position. I understand the binational idea. Gershon Scholem used to believe in it—it’s hardly an idea from the loony, anti-Semitic Left. But I don’t understand how, politically, it would become a reality at this point. It feels utopian to me. And I may be wrong about that. When somebody like Edward Said, a practically-minded man, comes around to it, I want to know more about how people propose it. But when you look at what’s happening with the settlements in Gaza now, with Ariel Sharon, you see how profoundly difficult this is going to be. It’s been made so much worse in the last four years. I don’t see how you can begin a peace process again talking about a binational state. I don’t think that many people on what’s left of the Israeli Left would agree to it. It would be the end of the Jewish state. That sort of goes back to your first question: I don’t think that anybody is ready for that. It seems to me still that you have to start out with proposing a serious two-state solution.

Eventually, of course, whatever the Palestinian state wound up looking like—it would be a pretty weird piece of real estate—ultimately the fate of Israel is as a country of the Middle East and not as a European outpost. Hopefully, Israel can find its way to a reasonable accommodation with its neighbors, and hopefully its neighbors will drop the disgusting anti-Semitism that they’ve taken up. If a Palestinian state is created, the economies have always been so deeply intertwined that one would imagine that, sooner or later, some kind of political union would make sense. It would be sort of insane not to. The world is full of tiny little countries that were split into two or three just for the sake of some idiotic, medieval fantasy of who they are. Those countries are suffering, and Israel and the Palestinians will also continue to suffer. But for the moment, I think that a two-state solution seems to make sense: a two-state solution policed by an international military entity. I don’t think that it will exist in the near future without direct international intervention.

YIJ: Some people have argued that contemporary Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism is different from classical European anti-Semitism in that the former entails some profound sense of admiration for Israel and the Jews. Does Israel deserve this admiration, and is it a vindication of Israel in some way?

TK: That’s interesting. I would be profoundly uncomfortable with saying that any anti-Semitism is anything other than a profound malformation of the human spirit. I absolutely think that the claim that there’s a line that you can draw from European fascism in the middle of the twentieth century to al-Qaeda and modern Arab anti-Semitism is just nonsensical. Of course, some of them have found The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, because idiots are always going to find The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. They will be around forever, and people will always be picking them up and reading them and using them. But I don’t think that there’s a connection. I think that it’s a very different phenomenon because the people are so different.

And it’s an interesting point that it entails a certain degree of grudging admiration. Although I don’t know—from what I remember of the reading that I did, which used to be fairly extensive, in German anti-Semitic literature, the craftiness of Jews, and the secrecy—this is not exactly new calumny. It’s been around. I think that if you talk to people who are in the occupied territories, they see the people in the IDF as being very tough, and the Palestinian men that I’ve met who call themselves “freedom fighters” see themselves as needing to be as tough as their opponent. And the reverse is true. Soldiers in Israel will tell you that they think the Palestinians are a very tough bunch of people, so they’re locked in this deadly struggle, and they kind of admire each other’s moxie, or courage, which I think frequently happens in war situations. But mostly, I think anti-Semitism is just the socialism of fools. It’s false consciousness. It’s traveling down some profoundly misbegotten road and doesn’t get anybody anywhere.

Israel is a remarkable country, and Israelis are a remarkable people, and they’ve done some remarkable things. And I love Israel. I love going there. I think it’s a beautiful and astonishing place. They resurrected a language that was purely a sacro-language and a language of prayer and turned it into a modern, living tongue. That’s astonishing. Very few people have ever succeeded in doing that. And the accomplishments of Israeli science and Israeli agriculture—all that stuff is amazing. Jews have been amazing people around the world for most of our history. We’re talented, smart people. And Israel is a democracy. It has certain anti-democratic features, but what democracy doesn’t? This country certainly has them, and God knows Britain does. Every country tortures, every country has illegal military actions—it hardly needs to be said—and every country occupies and oppresses and engages in ethnic cleansing, especially at its beginning. Israel just happened to have been founded just after the turn of the middle of the twentieth century so everybody was watching, in a way. And maybe everybody was watching in part because people hate Jews. I know that some anti-Semitism drives some of the criticism of Israel.

My feeling is that when we say that Israel is a light unto the nations, we’re still talking about Judaism, Jewish moral probity, Jewish intellectual daring, Jewish culture, Jewish art, and Jewish intellectual appetite. It’s as much from Diasporan culture as it is from Zionist culture. Maybe that’s how I should have answered your anti-Zionist question: I am completely comfortable calling myself a Diasporan Jew.

So that’s probably how I’d be comfortable with the claim. As a country in and of itself, I don’t know; I don’t see Israel as being a better country, let’s say, than Sweden or France. I mean, every country has its history. It’s certainly a functioning democracy, and I like democracies. Good for them—mazel tov. And it has retained some of its socialist features, a certain sense of the social coherence that comes from the early kibbutzniks.

There are many lovely things about it, and also a lot that is really screwed up. I think that rather than to ask if there’s anything good that can be said about it, which of course there is, we all have to be afraid of how Israeli policy towards the Palestinians is imperiling not only the actual lives and safety of the people of Israel, but the spiritual life, the ethical life of Israel. There is a terrible price to pay for sustaining an occupation. No country that’s good at it is a good country.

YIJ: Many proposals for building Middle East peace involve market integration between Israel and its neighbors: Market enterprise creates bonds between populations that don’t depend on the goodwill of political leaders. As a socialist, do you have a different vision for how economic relations between Middle Eastern countries should be organized?

TK: I’ve sort of become more and more of an evolutionary socialist and less and less of a revolutionary one. So I sort of feel like it will find itself out. But we’ve seen in very modern history that intertwined economies don’t necessarily lead to civic peace. The economies of Israel and the Palestinians couldn’t be more intertwined, and things are really bad there. I think that the United States has to maintain its position of protecting Israel until such time that it’s really, genuinely no longer necessary. That’s not going to happen for a very, very long time.

I think the United States has to keep Israel strong because Israel would be destroyed. I think that the Arab world can be expected to grow and improve if it doesn’t become the site of a new epoch of colonial misadventure, initiated by the United States.

And I think that meanwhile, a just solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is the key. The anti-Semitism that people in Malaysia now sort of use as a calling card is fueled by that conflict. I’m not saying that we deserve it. But the conflict gives credence to it. None of these people care about the Palestinians. They treat the Palestinians terribly whenever the Palestinians show up in any of their countries. Few people treat Palestinians worse than the Syrians or the Jordanians. And Palestinians don’t want to be called Arabs: They are not very fond of the Arabs either.

If the world threw its weight behind the very difficult process of actually building two viable states, each with its own integrity, and if the world created an international military body that patrolled the borders, because they can’t be patrolled by one army or another, then I think that there’s hope.

You asked what I think as a socialist. I don’t understand the economies of the Middle East. They’re so completely screwed up at this point. There’s no real industrial base. There’s just a lot of black-marketing and this bizarre situation with exporting of oil. I’d like to believe that the politics of ethnic identity, not just in that region but elsewhere, is a side-step all over the planet to economic injustice that hasn’t been dealt with appropriately. That’s the most socialist thing that I can say right now. I think that unequal development lies behind a lot of this and that eventually, Islam and Judaism and Christianity and whatever else will do whatever they’re going to do, but the fanatic adherence to these things or to national identity as the only way that you can position yourself on the face of the planet will, I think, evaporate as poverty is addressed. It’s no coincidence that these things become the most violent and vile in situations where there is great economic desperation.

We just have to understand how much it’s in our own interest to surrender some of our wealth and privilege. So I think money has a lot to do with it. It certainly has everything to do with the situation in Israel and the occupied territories. We can say that their economies are intertwined: What that primarily means is that everybody’s gardener and auto mechanic is Palestinian. That’s a kind of intertwining, but of course it’s nothing resembling equity.

It’s never been approached with a real eye towards equalizing things. Once that happens, if it ever does, then I think things will improve.