A meditation on Zionism and anti-Semitism

ZIONISM

Zionism is a political philosophy that demands that Jewish people have their own state. Not their own homeland–their own state. The usual argument that most other major ethnicities have their own states is flatly false. Most major ethnicities have their own homelands, but not their states. The difference is not trivial. Even states that (unlike Israel) are overwhelmingly dominated by a single ethnicity are not defined by that ethnicity, at least not legally. Poland, for example, is not the state of the Polish people but a state of its citizens, the vast majority of whom happen to be Poles. The Republic of Poland IS defined by the Polish language and other aspects of Polish culture, but it is not defined as a state constituted by Poles.

Even Germany, with its racist laws about obtaining citizenship that allow people with German ancestry from centuries ago to quickly become citizens while excluding many second-generation Turks, is defined, as a nation, in terms of its citizens, not in terms of a Volk. However you become a citizen, once you get there, you’re as much a part of the state as anyone else. For that matter, the United Kingdom, while it has an established church and is defined as an Anglican state, is not defined as a state of Anglicans.

Zionism is, thus, exceptional in the modern world in its demand for a state bound to a people. That demand is intrinsically a recipe for discrimination–not just belief in being a “chosen people” and suchnot, but outright political distinction on a tribal/religious basis as the underlying national principle. Those who consistently oppose any such discrimination are therefore compelled to be anti-Zionists, even if they have sympathy for the idea of a Jewish homeland, because the Zionist ideal (and present-day reality) of a state defined by its Jewishness is inherently discriminatory.

The nonsensical conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism thus inverts the actual situation: it is pro-Zionism that is unsustainable without prejudice. That is not to say that all Zionists have a pro-Jewish or anti-Arab prejudice, for many of them are simply ignorant or confused about what’s involved; but no informed, honest argument for Zionism can avoid being an argument for prejudice. While many Americans realize this quite clearly, it is still very difficult to say so loudly and publicly in this country without serious repercussions for yourself, due to the activities of censorship squads of self-appointed American guardians of Israel, along with the monolithic position of the Beltway establishment.

I well remember, while serving on the station board of KPFA radio, manning the phones during a pledge drive. When Dennis Bernstein’s Flashpoints, the highest-pledging locally produced show on KPFA, came on, suddenly a roomful of mostly quiet phones lit up. And very soon, along came the disruptors. People would call in and start going on about how they objected to Bernstein’s treatment of Israel and his Palestinian-friendly position. Mind you, this was not a comment line: the number in question was only supposed to be used for pledging. I told as much to the disruptor whose call I fielded and quickly hung up, but other volunteers got bogged down arguing. Disruptors would ask the phone volunteers for their own opinions of Flashpoint’s Middle East coverage in an obviously deliberate attempt to prolong the conversations. The result of tying up these lines was to quite possibly create some busy signals and perhaps lose some pledges, since nearly all the phones were in use once Dennis got into his groove.

This sort of thing had been going on for a while at KPFA. I’d heard about it before, although this was my first direct experience of it. Obviously, there was a concerted campaign by some ultra-pro-Israel folks with too much time on their hands to disrupt our pledge drives at this oldest listener-sponsored station. The sheer level of contempt for free speech–and even for the very bougeois concept of freedom of association, which gives you the right to hang out with the kind of people you like and give them money for any (legal) causes you like, no matter how dubious others find them–says much, not only about Zionism itself, but of the breakdown of any sense of fair play that has been so apparent in American political discourse for the past twenty years.

Fortunately, most of the political left in this country is hip to this issue. In fact, Israel/Palestine relations form a useful litmus test for separating the anti-establishment progressives from the pro-Democratic-Party liberals. If you tune in, as I do, to a lot of left discourse, what you hear is miles apart from the clamped-down establishment take on this issue, not only in the corporate media but even in academia. Finkelstein, Walt, and Mearsheimer are not the only academics who have suffered retaliation for Israel-critical views; Noam Chomsky, for example, has been punished as much over the years on this issue as for all his other heresies combined. Even someone as widely respected as Jimmy Carter opened himself up for instant vilification the minute he understated the sad truth of the Holy Land situation in his gentle, forgiving voice.

On the American left, we hear lots about this kind of censorship, and we talk lots about the vacuum it creates, but we don’t actually experience that vacuum–because, fortunately, our own discourse is quite different. We strongly condemn the purveyors of both Zionist propaganda and Israeli state terror; the former consequently gains little foothold in our midst, even when it comes from otherwise left-leaning sources. (Granted, this is only true on the left, not in establishment-liberal venues.)

ANTI-SEMITISM

It has to be said, though, that when REAL anti-Semitism rears its ugly head–an occurence considerably more common than many seem to realize–if it is interspersed with otherwise left-leaning comments, our responses are not so clear. It is true that many of us condemn it as vigilantly and forthrightly as we would Zionism, if not more so. It is also true that enough of us express a certain level of uneasiness or even partial sympathy as to create a certain ambiguity in our communal reaction. This is precisely what “left anti-Semites” (the term strikes me as a contradiction) plug into and exploit. Not that they’re popular. It is unambiguous that leftists don’t like to have to listen to them and wish they would tone it down; but it a matter of some uncertainty whether this is due to discomfort or outright rejection.

Just today I happened upon an unmoderated posting on opednews.com, a high-traffic progressive website with an unusually high tolerance for differences of opinion, for which I myself have been known to pen articles. I took a look at it after noticing it was by Seattle writer Jay Esbe, whose quite openly anti-Semitic proclivities I had already encountered in a previous debate on the site. The piece, Everything you know is wrong, meanders through the obligatory shots at Bush & Co. before finding its true target, the Jews, e.g.:

Here, on this site, the term “Zionism” is frowned upon –currently-. Prior to simply being frowned upon, the site’s Jewish owner floated the “Z-word ban ballon” [sic]. Readers quickly shot it down. But be careful; pointing out that Jews control the media in most circles, will get you tossed off the site…because most of the bandwidth is in fact owned by Jews…but then I shouldn’t have said that. Just don’t repeat it to anyone or you’ll understand why Mel Gibson apologized so quickly.

There are laws now, but more are coming. I’m rather certain that we’ll see laws here like the laws in Europe making any questioning of the role Jews may have played in their own un-popularity, an actual crime.

My response on the opednews site ran as follows:

Esbe believes that “Jews run the media,” and posts as much on this valuable progressive site, along with other rambling anti-Semitic comments. Actually, it’s a good example of something “everybody knows” that’s wrong. The media are controlled by bankers and big corporate stockholders, most of whom are as White Anglo-Saxon Protestant as they come, some of whom are Jews, some Japanese, some Germans, etc. They are not controlled by the high-profile public media figures the public is more familiar with, a large minority of whom are, it is true, Jewish–a fact that inspires hysteria in minds that judge people in categories.

Just imagine if people got all worked up about seeing a large number of Anglo-Saxons in a particular field of endeavor. “Look at those WASPs–they’re taking everything over!” There’d be a lot of such “takeovers” to perceive.

The fundamental issue is that some people are supposed to be entitled to control things and some are not. African-Americans know this bitter truth through their historical and ongoing experience [in other words, when a few blacks achieve a highly visible place within a particular arena of American society, there's angry muttering about how they're "taking everything over"]. Jews used to be among those who were not entitled, but the ruling establishment has largely transferred them into the “privileged” group, while still keeping them out of certain social clubs. However, not everybody accepts this change. For some, it means that Jews have overrun everything and now have a stranglehold on the very system that used to lock them out.

I point this out neither to validate that imperialist system nor the set of privileges and exclusions involved. It is precisely these things that need to be attacked–not Jews, not Anglo-Saxons, not any other ethnicity or religious group. Of course Jewish people don’t deserve to be privileged over brown-skinned people. Neither did they deserve to be lumped in with them as inferiors, as they used to be.

Some decades ago, African-Americans and Jews were routinely maligned in public discourse. This was accepted. After the winning of many civil rights battles in the sixties and seventies, it thankfully became unacceptable. Then came the era of syndicated talk radio in the reactionary nineties, and open bigotry began creeping back into public life. But it returned mostly against blacks and immigrants, not so much against Jews. That’s largely because, although Jews are the most Democratic demographic group after blacks, a certain number of Jewish figures had inserted themselves into powerful positions in the Republican hierarchy, whether as office-holders, donors, or intellectuals; and, also, because most of the Right is dogmatically pro-Israel. Hence, the emergence of a situation in which Jews are immune from overtly expressed prejudice in the media, and people of color are not. Esbe takes this to be censorship of prejudice, when any person of progressive conscience would see it as a disturbing breakdown of the always-precarious barriers that had been erected against prejudice.

Prejudice, privilege, and the power structure make up the problem. Posts like Esbe’s do not contribute anything to a solution.

But not merely do they not contribute, they poison left discourse. The problem isn’t merely setting ourselves up against each other, or being “divisive”; the problem is defining issues in a reactionary and racist manner. This cannot lead to anything good for the left.

But does the left really react with the ambiguity I ascribe to it? Look at message boards, talk to people: prove to me I’m wrong. I don’t think so. In high-profile statements, maybe, opposition to anti-Semitism is cleanly maintained; behind the scenes, the uneasiness I’m referring to is quite palpable in many circles. Read the comments posted in response to my piece on opednews and see the variety of positions, some cleanly condemnatory, others not. Why are there a variety of responses to anti-Semitism? A variety of analyses of it, certainly, but a variety of left positions on a particular form of bigotry?

The ambiguous rejection anti-Semitic comments face in left discourse, while much better than acceptance, is still disheartening, even scary. They should be dismissed out of hand by such an overwhelming majority of the left community that the remaining minority would just up and leave. That is an entirely appropriate solution: when your values are fundamentally in conflict, part company. How can our values not be fundamentally in conflict with racism?

The enemy of our enemy is not our friend. Not all who oppose Bush or American imperialism can possibly be embraced by the left. We’ve never had any trouble denouncing Bin Laden and his ilk, for example. For anti-imperialist anti-Semites, we need to cultivate the same disdain.

THE ACTUAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ZIONISM AND ANTI-SEMITISM

But the reality is that, while individually many of us reject anti-Semitism, it is not clear that the American left, as a community, does so, as I think we do with other prejudices. The very bitterness of the battle over Zionism has the unfortunate effect of polarizing us into a position in which anti-Semitism is an inherent temptation, albeit in no way a necessity.

This is far from endorsing the “anti-Zionism = anti-Semitism” canard, which has made such a mockery of the very concept of anti-Semitism in recent years. Rather, it is acknowledging an obvious but underestimated fact that a materialist analysis of the actual conditions in “Greater Israel” must admit: the conflict IS primarily an ethnic and religious one based on pitting tribes of people against each other. If it were based on the humanitarian and egalitarian concepts that many of us have put forward for decades as solutions, it would not still be going on. Without ethnic hatred, there is no adequate political basis for the daily reality of that region, which would certainly collapse, regardless of who benefits economically or what powerful strings are pulled. Capitalists pull strings all over the world, but the Israel/Palestine situation is really quite unique. (Of course, the economically powerful can adapt themselves to, and exacerbate, whatever circumstances arise.)

While it is true that today, and even (more ambiguously) historically, Jewish Israelis are the primary instigators of the hatred, it would be foolish to think Palestinian Arabs and their supporters are immune to it, or that with rare exceptions it extends only to a hatred of Israeli policies. Anti-Jewish prejudice is a live and virulent force in the politics of Israel/Palestine, just as much as the anti-Arab prejudice that animates the whole Zionist project. The primary difference (and it’s a huge one) is that the Israelis are having their way and the Palestinians aren’t; thus it is mainly Israeli policies that sustain the hatred on both sides. But it’s still there.

Therefore, however much we correctly call for egalitarianism and reject both sides of the ethnic hatred, it is not possible to take a position on it that does not objectively align us with one side of the ethnic divide. Since organizations that bridge the divide are not that powerful in either community, this puts us in the uncomfortable position of having to back the demands of a group of people for reasons that repudiate the entire nature of the struggle as many of them see it–and indeed as it actually exists. At least, this is what we must do if we are to take a defensible, anti-racist position.

But where we really feel the pressure is closer to home. In the U.S., who is it that levels most of the charges of anti-Semitism? The Zionists. Who is it that most often points out their fraudulence? Progressives who are critical of Zionism. This engenders a feeling of negativity towards any charge of anti-Semitism among those progressive people who are not Jewish and not hip to the history of Jews and anti-Semitism. People like that are inherently vulnerable to anti-Semitism to begin with–just as some people try to oppose racism but end up patronizing people of color because they have not worked through their own relationship to the historical events responsible for racism and their insertion in current society. To people lacking “Jewish consciousness,” if you will, the very idea of attacking anti-Jewish prejudice begins to seem like a right-wing ploy–despite anti-Semitism’s impeccably old right-wing pedigree.

But it goes further. There is a real difference on Zionism between Jews and non-Jews–even when both support Zionism. Non-Jewish Zionists usually justify supporting Israel on strategic grounds or implicitly as a favor to “those poor Jews,” whereas Jews themselves are more likely to proclaim support for Israel as their birthright and the core of their political orientation. A hefty majority of the American Jewish community is strongly pro-Israel, even if not pro-hardliner. Certainly a progressive anti-Zionist minority exists within that community, and it includes many people of great talent and energy, but it’s not especially large. In fact, political junkies aside, even non-Jewish Americans who are in no way progressive tend to be a bit skeptical of Israel, whereas otherwise progressive Jews tend not to be. And this inclination of American Jews is reflected–even if grossly exaggerated–in the positions of various well-funded Jewish lobby and opinion-setting groups. Anti-Zionist and even anti-hardline Jewish groups do not have a comparable level of organization, clout, and money.

Thus, it is very easy to perceive the battle against Zionism, in this country, as in some sizable measure a battle against Jews. It involves going up against powerful Jewish organizations, a number of shrill Jewish voices, and the opinion of most Jews. While Zionists would get nowhere in this country without non-Jewish support, Zionism’s most conspicuous and vocal advocates do tend to be mostly Jewish. Both Jewish and non-Jewish Zionists are happy with that arrangement. And for those of us who must fight these people, this aligns us still further on the Palestinian side of the ethnic divide. “Jewishness is aligned with the right, Arabness with the left”–does that not sound plausible? Does it not express what many on the left think without saying? No one seems to think it’s the other way around–though historically, and even now, American Jews are a much more left-leaning population than American Arabs.

The temptation to admit a certain validity to anti-Jewish prejudice, even while refusing to take it to its logical conclusion, is more than some American progressives can handle. All too keenly, they feel their ethnic alignment to be, not so much with Arabs against Israeli Jews, but with Arabs against American Jews. In consequence, they lose track of the delicate necessity of being partisans for a people’s cause without being partisans of the people. Their predicament resembles that of certain would-be feminists (conspicuous among my fellow college students in the nineties) who, forgetting the egalitarian roots of feminism and its necessary opposition to all fixed gender roles and stereotypes, mistakenly believe that taking the side of a woman against a man, regardless of the circumstance, is an inherently feminist position. It is losing the principle for the cause.

Thus, while opposing Zionism on anti-racist grounds is not in any way anti-Jewish, it does make a high demand on its adherents if we wish to maintain the consistency of our anti-racist position and unambiguously oppose anti-Semitism. We are required, not merely to adopt lofty principles, but to consistently place above them the cause we fight for. This is quite a challenge in an age in which, up until quite recently, it was fashionable on the left, or what was called the left then, to disdain all principles–as if anything else ever placed a sustainable barrier in the path to reaction.