Review: ON THE BORDER by Michael Warschawski
ON THE BORDER by Michael Warschawski
Profoundly moving, beautifully written, intellectually penetrating, On The Border by Israeli socialist Michel Warschawski, is the outstanding political memoir of the generation of sixties radicals. Warschawski is the singularly most eloquent and effective anti-colonialst leader Israel has produced. “Mikado,” as he is known, is respected internationally for his unconditional, if not always uncritical, support of and solidarity with the Palestinians.
The problem of the Zionist project, from its inception in the l9th century, until now, is that there were already Arabs living in Palestine. Theodore Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism, conducted his first Zionist congress in l897 in Basel, Switzerland. (The German Jews of Munich refused to host the congress on the grounds that they were successfully assimilated and therefore there was no Jewish question.) Afterwards the rabbis of Vienna sent two representatives to Palestine on a fact finding mission. They cabled back, “The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.”
A Polish Frenchman and the son of the chief rabbi of Strausburg, the French city on the German border, Warschawski came to Jerusalem at age sixteen just before the l967 in order to study Talmud. He was radicalized in the aftermath of the war and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza strip. Mikado became, in the words of Trotsky’s biographer, the great Isaac Deutscher, a “non-Jewish Jew” par excellence. Non-Jewish Jews live both in and apart from the dominant culture. Religion to them is superstition. Being part of a sect, Michel learned, was too narrow and confining. Warschawski is in line with the heretics, rebels, and revolutionaries of modern thought: Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Luxemborg, Trotsky, and Freud. They all went beyond the boundaries of Judiasm, finding it too narrow, archaic, and constricting.
His childhood and adolesence were steeped in memories of Nazi occupation. “Anti-facism and a deep-rooted rejection of any kind of racism were as strongly grounded in my education as the principles of religious practise…identification with the poor, the weak, and the humble was part of my Jewish identity.” After the l967 war he was, “like everyone in Israel, convinced at the time that the Arabs wanted to throw us into the sea.” He went to visit the occupied Arab city of Hebron and had a spontaneous aversion to being an occupier. His father told him “Any kind of occupation is wrong and morally corrupts those who take part in it; pray to the heavens that this one ends as quickly as possible.” Instead, the war lead “to the spectacular development of a military-industrial complex that would gradually become the main pillar of the Israeli socio-economic structure and of its political class.” . The rejectionism, expansionist intransigence, and mystico-nationalism that “promoted and defined settlement policy in the West Bank and Gaza strip…became the main obstacle to Israeli-Palestine peace.” It is this reality that shaped Warschawski’s political and moral life
In l962 the Israeli Communist Party (PCI) expelled a small group of dissidents. Their offense was to demand a more critical look at the dogmas of the international communist movement. These leftist then formed the Israeli Socialist Organization, known as Matzpen(Hebrew for “compass”), the name of their monthly journal, by linking up with “a group of oppositionist communists who, since the l930s, had challenged the whole of Stalinist policy, its crimes and betrayals, and advocated a return to the values of a democratic and truly internationalist socialism.” It was to Matzpen that Warschawski was attracted. “The organization put forward a radical critique of Zionism: breaking with the traditional line of the PCI, it analyzed the war of l948 as a war of ethnic cleansing rather than as a war of national liberation; the program of the group called for a democratization, a “de-Zionization” of Israel, and its integration into the Arab Middle East.”
From l967 on Matzpen had an impact far exceeding its numbers, which never amounted to more than fifty. Michel’s solidarity work with Palestinians began on the Bir Zeit University campus and then spread widely, “becoming a source of inspiration for young Palestinians living in the Galilee and what was left of Arab villages in the center of the country after l948.” The dominance of the PCI eventually ended, but “Meanwhile, at demonstrations, one would have to endure the insults and blows of the PCI marshalls every time militant nationalists and members of Matzpen would jointly shout the slogan: “From Hebron to Galilee - one people, one struggle, one future.”
Michel got to know Riad Abu Awad, the leader of the students’ union at Bir Zeit. Towards the end of the l970s he frequently spent nights there giving courses on the development of Israeli society or discussing Palestinian strategy and revolution. At these meetings they also organized “the participation of Israelis in the political initiatives of the students, as well as solidarity actions in Israel, focusing mostly on the struggles inside the prisons. Those evenings gave birth to the idea of opening an Israeli-Palestinian information center, inspired in large part by Riad Abu Awad.”
Thus the Alternative Information Center, the great project of Warschawski’s politcal life, came to be. They wrote in Arabic about Israel and in Hebrew about the Palestinian reality. They had a mixed group of comrades based on solid political trust. They “made widely known the activities and political positions of the new Palestinian resistance organizations as well as the Israeli left and peace movement.” Central to the project, Warschawski writes, “was the desire to work for a common strategic vision, capable in due course of mobilizing Palestinian and Israelis in the same struggle for the future.” At one point, because he helped publish in Arabic a pamphlet by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Michel was tried, convicted, and sentenced to thirty months in prison.
Isaac Deutscher lost most of his family to facism during World War II. He was not opposed to Jews going to Israel, but he told this story: If a person’s apartment is set on fire and he has to jump out the window to save himself and he lands on a passerby down below, at least he should say he is sorry. Warschawski agrees, “For there cannot be reconciliation without an acknowledgement by Israel, its leaders and its people, of the injustices committed by them in their name against the Palestinian people.”
Warschawski wrote a “letter to my comrades of the world coalition of the anti-war movement” which was published by the Beirut daily A-Safir on September l8, 2004. He observed that, “In my view, the centrality of the Palestinian question is explained by the fact that more than any other conflict on our planet, it concentrates the statkes of the global war launched by the Bush administration and its allies. In reality, the Palestinian question was the laboratory of this war. All the methods, arguments and justifications, all the images and techniques were tried in Palestine before being put into practise elsewhere in the world. If we look at the “checkpoints” in Iraq, we have to note that they are carbon copies of the “control points” in Palestine. If we also look at the terrible images of torture in Iraqi prisons, most of these are old Israeli methods. The concept of unilateralism, the declaration that the Geneva conventions, and more generally the post World War 2 political order, are no longer pertinent. The framework of Bush’s new strategy was at the heart of the Israeli policy of the last ten years. Again, since 2000 Israel has waged a preventive, global and permanent war against the Palestinians, who are more than enemies for they are perceived as an “existential threat”.
For me, an American Jew of Hungarian/Polish roots, and a sixties radical from the Trotskyist tradition, On the Border had a special resonance. I think that because of its eloquence and the universality of its message to todays radicals, it will appeal to many, should only they know about it. Read it and spread the word.
On the Border was written in French and first published in 2002 to much acclaim. It has been sensitively translated by Levy Laub and has a new introduction by the author to the English edition, a glossary, index, and a list of important dates.