DOWSE, Sara. US-Australian novelist: "if one more child is killed in the name of Judaism, or Israel, I can't take it"; "homeland" does not mean a "Jewish state"
Sara Dowse is a novelist and journalist. She was born in the US into a Jewish family containing secular supporters of labour or left-wing Zionism. She emigrated to Australia in 1958 and has also lived in Israel. Since the 2006 invasion of Lebanon, she has come to believe that a specifically Jewish state is “a terrible mistake”. She wrote “Sapphires”, a novel about three generations of Jewish women (see: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/encounter/voices-of-dissent/3135248 and http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/shocking-cynicism-of-a-poisoned-homeland/2009/01/07/1231004100045.html ) .
Sara Dowse on her belief “that a specifically Jewish state has been a terrible mistake” (2009): “It has taken me days to begin writing this, so horrified have I been by Israel's latest actions. My sense of justice, however - as a mother, a Jew, and above all as a human being - impels me to try. The massacre in Gaza has its roots in virulent European anti-Semitism and the 1917 Balfour declaration, when the British government promised Zionists that Jewish people would have a homeland in Palestine if Britain was victorious in World War I. The key word here is homeland, and it should be remembered that the promise was qualified by the condition that such a homeland would "not be to the detriment" of the Palestinians. The steady increase in Jewish immigration under the British mandate provoked riots and protests, but Palestinians were still in majority until, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the Zionists unilaterally declared an Israeli state… Since the 2006 invasion of Lebanon I have undergone what for me, as a Jew, has been an agonising realignment of my feelings about Israel. I have come to believe that a specifically Jewish state has been a terrible mistake. A homeland is different from a state. There have been examples throughout history and there are in our own time polities with mixed ethnic populations and official sanction for their living in harmony together. Australia is one. I don't know how it will come about - I hope with as little bloodshed as possible - but I look forward to the distant day when the land becomes a multicultural country again, perhaps as a federation, perhaps in another form, but similar to what it was before it was destroyed with the poison of ethnic territorial nationalism.” [1].
Sara Dowse on the oppression of the Palestinians (2009): “I just felt if one more child is killed in the name of Judaism, or Israel, I can't take it, I really can't take it. And this is a visceral response, but I think a genuine one, and I think a lot of people are thinking that way. The road not taken is still there; there are a lot of people in Israel who are raising the same questions that I am. If you go back to some of the earlier streams of Zionism, the revisionists, these were the most militant Zionists, and this is the ideology that is uppermost today, they believe that the Jews were promised all of Canaan, all of Palestine. That is why the idea of the two-state solution is so difficult to achieve, because merely it's argued that many, many Israelis do not accept the idea that that Palestinians should have their own state, and if you look at Gaza and if you look at the West Bank, you can see that a viable state for the Palestinians is not in the offing… Of course Jewish people should live in the land which was once called Israel, once called Judea or once called Samaria, now called Palestine. But that doesn't mean that there has to be a Jewish state in that land, and to be honest, I never really thought this through very much until quite recently I think.” [2].
Sara Dowse, as a signatory on the "Petition Against the Right of Return to Israel on Behalf of Australian Jews” (March 2010): “We are Jews from Australia, who, like Jewish people throughout the world, have an automatic right to Israeli citizenship under Israel’s “law of return.” While this law may seem intended to enable a Jewish homeland, we submit that it is in fact a form of racist privilege that abets the colonial oppression of the Palestinians.
Today there are more than seven million Palestinian refugees around the world. Israel denies their right to return to their homes and land—a right recognized and undisputed by UN Resolution 194, the Geneva Convention, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Meanwhile, we are invited to live on that same land simply because we are Jewish, thereby potentially taking the place of Palestinians who would dearly love to return to their ancestral lands.
We renounce this “right” to “return” offered to us by Israeli law. It is not right that we may “return” to a state that is not ours while Palestinians are excluded and continuously dispossessed.’ [3].
[1]. Sara Dowse, “Shocking cyncism of a poisoned homeland”, Sydney Morning Herald, 8 January 2009: http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/shocking-cynicism-of-a-poisoned-homeland/2009/01/07/1231004100045.html .
[2]. Sara Dowse interviewed by Gary Bryson in “Voices of Dissent” , ABC Radio National, “Encounter”, 22 March 2009: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/encounter/voices-of-dissent/3135248 .
[3]. Antony Loewenstein, "Prominent Australian Jews reject the Israeli "right of return", Media release, 3 March 2010: