I was reading Ruth Marcus’s Op-ed in the Washington Post on Friday, and I could not keep from laughing. It wasn’t a particularly cheery laugh, more of a rueful, emotionally bereft, ironic snigger. There was nothing terribly surprising in the column; if you have followed Marcus’s work, you probably know what I am talking about. She claims to be a liberal – and she certainly is, of the Malthusian stripe – but her liberalism consists mostly of lecturing the masses (or at least the Post’s liberal readers) like some kind of a media Solon from the heights of the Acropolis about how they (we?) are too liberal, and need to get on the straight and narrow of conventional hierarchies rather than pursuing things like economic and social justice. We won’t beat Trump, after all, if we anger the mythical white working class (which is all-in with Maga, if it exists at all).
On Friday, Marcus’s point was to express her outrage that the State of Israel has been called to account for its actions in Gaza before the International Court of Justice at The Hague. The court’s decision to proceed with the South African case against the State of Israel, the headline to her column read “is a perversion of justice.” (Remember: Marcus is the Deputy Editorial Page Editor, that means that she signed-off on the headline as an accurate distillation of her point.)
Marcus’s main point seems to be that the term and concept of “genocide” was coined by a Holocaust survivor named Raphael Lemkin, so how dare they?! The South African case, Marcus, writes “is a perversion of the term. It would be appalling applied against any state, but it is especially offensive wielded against Israel — a country that was forged in the ashes of the worst genocide in human history, that was one of the early signatories to the genocide convention and that is now responding to the greatest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.”
In effect: “the Jews were victims of genocide, so how can a country that claims to represent all Jews be genocidal?” Yup. You read that right. It is a variation of the kind of thing that I have sometimes heard some of my less enlightened fellow Jews say in other contexts: “We are victims of bigotry, so how can I be a bigot,” said one old man explaining that refusing to serve African Americans is not racism. “It’s just good business.” And how, one woman once protested, could calling Arabs “towelheads” be racist, since we suffered the Holocaust? “They all a bunch of ignorant savages, anyway.”
The very real sufferings of the Jewish people, through millennia of antisemitism and one of the most horrifying genocides in human history is, in the minds of people like this – and Marcus – transformed into a blanket exemption from any charge of racism, a kind of “get of jail free” card. This is not something that all, or even most Diaspora Jews endorse, and it is not a solely Jewish rhetorical alchemy either. The canard that “the Irish were slaves, too, so there is no such thing as racism” is ample evidence of that. Indeed, the least enlightened, most ignorant, and arrogantly supremacist members of virtually all communities are always happy to tell you that their hatred of the other is justified by their persecution.
In Marcus’s case, it is aggravated by a strong sense of Zionist and Israeli exceptionalism. The great Zionist myth is that they want Israel to be treated as “a country like any other;” yet Zionists like Marcus bristle when anyone suggests that the State of Israel should be treated as “a country like any other.” To be clear: Any country that killed 26,000 people in a territory that it illegally occupies, and displaced two million other noncombatants, in a space of four months, while members of its own government called for blatant ethnic cleansing would come under scrutiny. Russia did, and so did Myanmar. But Marcus wants the State of Israel to be an exception because a Polish Jewish lawyer – who was not even an Israeli – invented the legal category of genocide.
That it is a legal category, moreover, is the point. One cannot simply brush aside a criminal accusation because the accused is entitled to special treatment, for whatever reason, as Marcus and many Zionists seem to suggest. Genocide is a crime under the international Convention that the State of Israel not only signed but championed in 1951. Once an accusation has been made, it is up to the court to determine whether to proceed with the case, to deliberate, and then to pass judgment.
This is no “travesty of justice,” rather it is how justice, in the form of international law, works. It is, however, a refutation of the Zionist and Israeli exceptionalism that the State of Israel and its mouthpieces like Marcus insist upon. And the fact that the State of Israel is being treated as “a country like any other” – like it has always claimed that it wants to be treated – is what really galls them.
***
The International Court of Justice’s ruling today is disappointing. Like most of my friends, I had really hoped that it would call for a ceasefire, as it did in Russia’s war against Ukraine. Instead, it ordered the State of Israel, to “take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope of Article II of this Convention.” It seems like such weak tea after the IDF has killed 26,000 Gazans, with more than 70,000 injured and missing.
It might have been too much to expect the Court to order an immediate ceasefire in this provisional ruling, however. The instrumentalities of the ICJ judges are obscure to me and, unlike many people in social media, I don’t claim to be an expert on international law and its adjudication. So it seemed wise to read the full text of the interim judgment.
It is, in fact, a very revealing text. The court agreed to hear South Africa’s case and passed almost all of its intermediate measures by a majority of fifteen votes to two, with Judge Julia Sebutinde of Uganda and Judge Ad-Hoc Aharon Barak dissenting, or by sixteen votes to one, with only Judge Sebutinde dissenting. On two of the measures, in fact, calling on the Israeli government to ensure aid shipments to Gaza and to “take all measures within its power to prevent and punish the direct and public incitement to commit genocide in relation to members of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip,” Judge Ad-Hoc Barak voted with the majority.
As I said, unlike most people in social media, I do not claim to be an expert on international law and its adjudication, or on Ad-Hoc Judge Barak’s intentions, but this seems significant to me. Does this suggest that the Israeli Ad-Hoc Judge concedes that there has been a “public incitement to commit genocide in relation to members of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip?” I recognize that the members of the ICJ deliberate according to their conscience, and not according to instructions, and that Ad-Hoc Judge Barak, a former President of the State of Israel’s Supreme Court, has rarely been a friend of Benjamin Netanyahu and his ilk; but he seems to be saying something here that will be hard for the State of Israel to brush aside.
Indeed, the court’s order that the State of Israel take measures “to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope of Article II of this Convention” and to ensure the preservation of evidence of these acts strikes me as highly significant. The vast majority of the judges on the panel – including the American, German, and Australian judges – are placing the State of Israel on notice. I might well be wrong, but they seem to be saying that “we haven’t decided yet if this is genocide, but many of these acts are certainly genocidal, and you would be well-advised to dial it back before we come to our final opinion.” The final order, requiring that “the State of Israel shall submit a report to the Court on all measures taken to give effect to this Order within one month as from the date of this Order” seems to support this. Given Netanyahu’s open-ended timeline, this order seems loaded with legal threat.
It comes as no surprise that Netanyahu has denounced the decision and brushed the ICJ’s orders aside; there is no timeline in which he and his militaristic rump would look into their souls and have a change of heart. And it is deeply disappointing, after almost four months and 26,000 Gazan dead, that the Hague did not call clearly for a ceasefire.
Yet, it is clear that the State of Israel has few friends in the highest court of international law so committed that they will allow it carte blanche – not even its sponsors like the United States and Germany. And, by accepting the South African case and issuing its “provisional measures,” the Court is explicitly saying “we don’t know yet if this is genocide, but it seems to be going that way.”
Whatever happens, the State of Israel is more isolated now than it ever has been in its history – largely by its own government’s doing – and it and the ideology of Zionism will always be associated with genocide. That bears thinking about. International law matters; that is why we have all been watching these proceedings, and will continue to. The State of Israel is a creation of international law, and its leaders ignore that at their peril. After all, what international law makes, it can unmake.
***
I am not an optimist. I would like to say that I am a realist but, realistically, it is probably more accurate to say that I am a pessimist. I do not believe that the arc of the moral universe “bends toward justice.” To a considerable extent, this is an occupational hazard of being a historian – indeed, a historian of the 20th century and modernity. That was the century of progress, a “progress” that killed hundreds of millions of people in two world wars, resulted in the extermination of tens of millions more in deliberate acts of genocide, enslaved billions as workers to supply the white masters of the earth with cheap consumer products and the “good life,” and inaugurated the inevitable heat death of our planet.
I have spent enough of my professional life studying the prophets of progress to know that it is an empty promise. Lewis Mumford was wrong; Thomas Malthus was right. I have even come to the point that I now regard the messianic vision of Marxism as overly-optimistic, idealistic nonsense. There is no moment of revolutionary liberation at the end of human history; there never has been. There is only history.
It does not “get better,” it gets different. As the history of my people has shown, from the catastrophes of 70 CE and 135 CE, through our wanderings as the reviled of the Earth, detested by the Christian majority, driven into ghettos, denied citizenship in our host societies, and then denied our very existence in the Shoah, humans do not get better. Despite the myths that we tell of ourselves, we did not collectively become witnesses of injustice who spoke truth to power, and we did not fulfill the mission of a “nation of priests” who would be a “light unto the nations.”
Collectively, we desired, more than anything, to be a “nation like any other.” And, by “any other,” in 1948 we doubtless had the examples of recent history in mind: Fascist Italy, the Soviet Union of Holodomor, Great Britain of Jallianwala Bagh, the United States of the Great West, France of Algeria, Indochina, and L’Affaire Dreyfus. The history of peoples is not, nor has it ever been, a history of progress, or of realizing our greater humanity, but of exacting vengeance.
The imagined and often real oppression of peoples and nations that demands our liberation and entitles us to a “place in the sun” (as German imperialists so vividly put it) – the Christian martyrs in the arena, the Americans struggling under the imperial yoke, Russians struggling under the Tsar, the Voortrekkers forced into the interior, and the Jews slaughtered in the pogroms – calls out for justice, but only produces revenge.
That is the lesson of history that we see in Zionism and the State of Israel. There is no progress, and there never is progress; only the abject failure of my people to live up to our own standards and to fulfill our vocation. Moshiach is not coming; in any event, the lesson of our own scriptures is that his arrival will always be out of reach until we make ourselves worthy of redemption. And this we have not done.
This is my Jeremiad.
***
Opposition to Zionism and the State of Israel is not antisemitism. I think that has to be emphasized over and over. Demanding an end to the War on Gaza, and end to the Occupation, for the freedom and autonomy of the Palestinian people, even advocating for the end of the State of Israel as a religiously-exclusive ethnostate, does NOT make you an antisemite. None of us should tolerate the libels directed against us by the State of Israel and its Zionist proxies.
Having said all of that, antisemitism is a real thing. It is an ideology that has animated violence, oppression, and genocide for centuries (and, depending on how you define it, for millennia). Antisemitism has not suddenly disappeared just because the State of Israel and its Zionist proxies have appropriated the accusation and politicized it as a means to deflect criticism and justify its oppression of the Palestinian people.
Moreover, while demanding an end to the War on Gaza, and end to the Occupation, for the freedom and autonomy of the Palestinian people, even advocating for the end of the State of Israel as a religiously-exclusive ethnostate, does not make one an antisemite, there are antisemites who are using their opposition to the war to promote their antisemitism. Some are doing this cynically and regard the war as an opportunity to advance their case against “the Jews.” Some are doing this out of ignorance; they do not themselves understand the difference between the State of Israel and the People of Israel. Some, while legitimately opposed to the war and the oppression of the Palestinian people, see their cultural, un-interrogated antisemitic assumptions confirmed in the actions and policies of the State of Israel.*
These ways of thinking are, I believe, shared by a tiny minority of anti-Zionists, pro-Palestinians, and opponents of the State of Israel’s War on Gaza. But they are there. And one of the most aggravating things that I have to deal with, apart from the invective directed against me by Zionists within my own community, is the antisemitism casually deployed by some opponents of the State of Israel, and often left unchallenged – even by people who do not share those antisemitic views.
We have an ethical obligation to oppose hate. Speaking out against the oppression of the Palestinian people does not give anyone the right to be an antisemite, nor does it allow you to give it a pass.
***
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that John Fetterman and Joe Manchin have refused to support a two-state solution for Palestine. The two-state solution is, of course, highly problematic, unlikely, and of doubtful success, but that is not why Fetterman and Manchin won’t support it. Judging from their language – Fetterman’s office said that the senator “strongly believes that this resolution should include language stipulating the destruction of Hamas as a precondition to peace” – their refusal to support the resolution has nothing to with the merits of a two-state solution, and everything to do with kowtowing to the State of Israel. The Israeli government wants a no-state solution, where Palestinians remain stateless, surplus population, a resource of guest workers, and nothing more. And that is what these Republicrats want, as well.
That they are agents of the State of Israel is beyond doubt. That they are Christians who claim to speak on behalf of the “Jewish people and their welfare,” as Fetterman said, by supporting the State of Israel is beyond contemptuous and insulting. But it is worth noting that antisemites on the right and left have often accused American Jews of “divided loyalties” because many are Zionists. Would they say the same of these Gentiles?
***
It will probably disappoint some of my friends that I find that most of the descriptive categories that we apply to events, both historical and contemporary, have serious limits. They are useful in that they allow us to compare, contrast, and analyze, but only if we recognize that they are always highly contingent and dependent on subjective judgement.
The American Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the Sexual Revolution were all revolutions, but they were revolutions in different ways. Democracy, as understood by the slave-owning, universally-male leaders of at least one of those revolutions, meant something different than the democracy that is under threat today. The “War of the Ancients and Moderns” was a rather different thing, with different kinds of casualties, than the Great War.
Having said that, these categories often have both discursive and rhetorical value (recognizing, as I do, that you and I might typically use the words “discourse” and “rhetoric” in radically different ways – “radical,” too, for that matter). We can only talk about things when we can create groups, sets, and subsets that create the order and agreement that we need to have a conversation. After all, what was the best band in history, red or chocolate?
Yet, we can only have a meaningful conversation when we agree that these categories, groups, sets, and subsets are contingent, ephemeral, subject to discourse and ideology, and not universal. Their value is that they help us understand reality as we encounter it, not that they are, themselves, reality.
***
Another one from antisemitism hit parade: “Jews are white Europeans.” Many are, to be sure; about 50-65% of the current Jewish population are Ashkenazi Jews. The rest are Mizrahi Jews, Bukharan Jews, Ethiopian Jews, even Malabar and Kaifung Jews and, quite explicitly NOT EUROPEAN. I saw this gem posted by a Gentile of European descent as his proof that THE JEWS are evil colonialists (not just Zionists or Israelis, but all Jews, dont’cha know) because “European” is shorthand for both “evil” and colonialism. (And did I mention that the poster was a white Gentile of European descent?)
And while Ashkenazi Jews trace their cultural heritage to Europe (“Ashkenaz” was a term that medieval and early-modern Jews used to refer to western Europe, especially where France and Germany are today), not all Ashkenazi Jews are, in fact, white. And, personally, I think of myself as more of an ecru.
Like I said: There are a lot of stupid people out there.
***
Some classic antisemitic shibboleths: “Jews are not (or not the only) semites, so there is no such thing as antisemitism.” “Judaism is a religion and not an ethnic group, nation, culture, or race, so hating Jews is not racism.” If your friends say things like this, they are antisemites. If you believe or tolerate things like this, you are an antisemite. If you hop onto to this thread and try to defend things like this, I will summarily unfriend you.
***
* Antisemitism is deeply ingrained in Euro-American Christian culture. Let’s not ignore that.
Brilliant writing! I’m a fan.