Israel Shahak - Politics and Works

Politics and Works

Shahak first became concerned about Israel’s direction because of David Ben-Gurion's statement during the 1956 Suez War that Israel was fighting for "the kingdom of David and Solomon." In the 1960s he became involved in the Israeli League Against Religious Coercion. In 1965, he began his political activism against “classical Judaism” and Zionism. That year he wrote a controversial letter to Haaretz alleging he had witnessed an Orthodox Jew “refusing to let his phone be used on the Sabbath to help a non-Jew who had collapsed nearby,” beginning a still continuing debate on Orthodox Jewish attitudes towards non-Jews.

Following the 1967 Six-Day War, Shahak disavowed his affiliation with the League Against Religious Coercion, stating they were "fake liberals" who used liberal principles to fight religious influence in Israeli society, but failed to apply them to Israeli treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Shahak then became active with the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights and was elected its president in 1970. He remained a “moving spirit” of the organization for many years. The League for Human and Civil Rights, composed of Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel, protested and publicized Israeli policies towards Palestinians and provided some legal and other aid to them. In 1969 Shahak and another Hebrew University faculty member staged a sit-down protest against the Israeli government jailing Palestinian students under emergency administrative detention regulations. During ensuring years he supported Palestinian students efforts to achieve equal rights at Hebrew University. In 1970 he established the Committee Against Administrative Detentions.

Shahak began publishing translations into English of Hebrew press accounts of Israeli activities he considered unjust or illegal, in order to publicize them to the wider world, and especially the United States. He sent his reports to journalists, academics and human rights campaigners, drawing attention with titles like “Torture in Israel,” and “Collective Punishment in the West Bank.” During the 1970s and ensuring decades he went on a number of speaking tours to universities, churches and other institutions in the United State and met privately with members of Congress and officials of the State Department. He became a well-known activist in international circles, co-authoring papers and giving joint speaking engagements with American political dissident Noam Chomsky, and winning plaudits from Jean Paul Sartre, Gore Vidal, Christopher Hitchens and Edward Said.

Topics on which Shahak wrote included suppression of freedom of speech and political activity, land ordinances and confiscation, living restrictions, home destruction, unequal pay and work restrictions, emergency defense regulations, torture of prisoners, collective punishment, assassinations, discrimination in education and deprivation of citizenship. These activities earned Shahak great hostility in Israel and he even received death threats. After the 1982 Lebanon War he also wrote of Israeli abuses in Lebanon. Shahak promoted the theory that Israel's religious interpretation of Jewish history led it to disregard Arab human rights. He also began to argue that Zionism was a "regime based on structural discrimination and racism." Reviewer Sheldon Richman explains that for Shahak, Zionism was both a reflection of, and capitulation to, European antisemitism, "since it, like the anti-Semites, holds that Jews are everywhere aliens who would best be isolated from the rest of the world." In 1994 he published Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, in 1997 he published Open Secrets: Israel's Nuclear and Foreign Policies, and in 1994 he published Jewish Fundamentalism In Israel, co-authored with Norton Mezvinsky. In the introduction to the 2004 version of the book, Mezvinsky wrote that "We realize that by criticizing Jewish fundamentalism we are criticizing a part of the past that we love. We wish that members of every human grouping would criticize their own past, even before criticizing others."

In his last years, Shahak criticized hypocrisy in the Palestinian national movement, and the radical left for its uncritical support of the movement, publishing letters in Ha'aretz and Kol Ha'ir. In an obituary published in The Nation, Christopher Hitchens wrote that Shahak's home was "a library of information about the human rights of the oppressed", and that

The families of prisoners, the staff of closed and censored publications, the victims of eviction and confiscation--none were ever turned away. I have met influential "civil society" Palestinians alive today who were protected as students when Israel was a professor of chemistry at the Hebrew University; from him they learned never to generalize about Jews. And they respected him not just for his consistent stand against discrimination but also because--he never condescended to them. He detested nationalism and religion and made no secret of his contempt for the grasping Arafat entourage. But, as he once put it to me, "I will now only meet with Palestinian spokesmen when we are out of the country. I have some severe criticisms to present to them. But I cannot do this while they are living under occupation and I can 'visit' them as a privileged citizen."