I was interviewed for my hometown newspaper, the Montreal Gazette, about being both Jewish and pro-Palestinian. It is an honor to be included with these other shvesterkind from my hometown. I don’t know them all yet, but I will. I hope that they will accept my friend requests.
This is how we model being a “good Jew.”
I am especially honored that the author concluded his article with a quote from me. And this, really, is what it is all about:
Friedman, the Rutgers lecturer, says speaking up, and challenging the Zionist rhetoric surrounding the crisis in Gaza, is the most Jewish thing he can do right now.
“You’ve heard the expression, ‘two Jews, three opinions,’” he said. “This is the violence Zionism does to Jewish life: it tries to narrow Jewish life down to one thing. But we’ve never been one thing.
“We’re an extremely diverse, complex people who have somehow survived for 2,500 years. My goal is to help participate in the process that opens up the real diversity of Jewish life and thought, and allows us to be, in some way, what we always were.”’
***
I can understand the outrage that Zionist Jews felt at the 7 October attacks. Israelis – people whom they regard as members of their community – were killed in the Hamas offensive, brutalized, injured, and abducted. They were victims of a horrific act of violence, and many Jews, indeed most, felt a personal violation.
Likewise, I can understand the argument that the State of Israel had to defend itself and its citizens, even if I do not necessarily agree with it. (There are a great many things that I understand without agreeing with them.) Whatever one might think about the legitimacy of the State of Israel, the first obligation of any government and state is to ensure the safety and security of its citizens. One might argue with the necessity or desirability of states, both specifically and generally, but for people who do believe in their necessity or desirability a state that fails to protect its citizens is itself a failure.
So, for people who believe in the legitimacy and necessity of the State of Israel, some kind of state response to the 7 October attack was both legitimate and necessary. Just as Americans believed after the Pearl Harbor attack believed that it was right for their government to respond with force, as Ukrainians believed that it was right for their country to fight back against Russia, and as Palestinians believe that it is right to resist the State of Israel.
What I do not understand is how Zionist Jews can continue to support the war now that the security of the State of Israel is secured. I suppose many of them share Benjamin Netanyahu’s fantasy that “total victory” against Hamas is possible, despite all the evidence to the contrary. After more than four months, the best-equipped, best funded (and, by reputation, the best-trained) military force in the region still faces stiff resistance from a massively outnumbered, poorly-armed militia. Moreover, it beggars the imagination that, after the obliteration of their homes and the deaths of their friends and families, Gazans will lay down their arms. The Israeli War on Gaza is the propaganda by deed that will ensure future recruitment in Hamas.
Moreover, in the pursuit of this impossible goal, the State of Israel has killed almost 29,000 Gazans, wounded almost 70,000 others, and displaced 1.9 million.
There is a point where the sense of personal injury and violation that Israelis and Zionist Jews in the Diaspora can account for this kind of brutality, and we are long past that point. Netanyahu has flatly rejected any possibility of a ceasefire in exchange for the release of the remaining hostages and has promised to pursue the slaughter in Rafah despite rising condemnation, even from the State of Israel’s closest allies.
Yet, virtually of the Zionist Jews whom I have encountered insist that the State of Israel’s brutal war on Gaza is not only necessary, but morally “good.” The 1,100 Israeli victims of the 7 October attacks must be avenged, they invariably declare, without stopping to say what ratio of Gazan death would meet the standard of righteous vengeance: 30-to-1, 50-to-1, 100-to-1? It is as if they really do not believe these numbers represent real people.
It would be too easy to say that the Israelis and Zionists who are standing at the edge of Tophet and cheering as the IDF throws Gazans into the fire simply deny the humanity of the victims. I don’t believe that this is the case. They know that Palestinians are humans; that is why they fear them both as a collectivity and as individuals endowed with human rights. That is also why they are so insistent on justifying the morality of the bloodshed. Zionists would not waste their time if they truly believed that the State of Israel’s victims were subhuman; the judgment of the world, their neighbors, and their outraged kin would be irrelevant.
I think the truth is much darker. In the Zionist imagination, blood belonging defines all that they are. Blood belonging is identity without obligation, and it justifies anything. One need not do anything to be a Jew in this thinking; the Torah, the injunctions to pursue justice (Deuteronomy 16:20) and heal the world, living a righteous life, even a vague sense of Hillel’s rule “what is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow,” regardless of whether or not one is observant, are all irrelevant. All that matters is the blood bond, the line of descent that they believe ties them to an ancient progenitor 130 generations ago.
Belonging is descent. In this fantasy, all the people of the world belong to pedigrees, like breeds of dogs, in a constant struggle against all other pedigrees for survival and domination – humans are all either predators or prey and, citing the tragic history of our people, they are most certainly not going to be prey. So, while they might mildly regret the means, just as they might regret the death of the calf on whose veal chops they dined, they regard the State of Israel’s predations on Palestine as necessary. It is merely the natural order and, if it secures the predatory supremacy of their blood over all other human bloodlines, it is a positive good.
Blood and soil. Blut und Boden. What I do not understand is how they can live with themselves.
***
I am conscious of my complicity in Zionism. I am not a Zionist, nor am I an Israeli but, for much of my early life, at least until I was a teenager, I inhabited a Jewish diasporic culture that was mostly uncritical of Zionism without much complaint or reflection. I marched to Jerusalem, sang “Ha-Tikvah” at summer camp, and accepted the easy, casual identification with the State of Israel that was, at that time, nearly universal in Jewish life.
In so doing, I legitimized Zionism and the State of Israel, as many of my fellow Jews did and still do. And, in that way, I was complicit in machinery of the State of Israel and in the ideology that justified and justifies it. It is because of that complicity and, above all, the efforts by the State of Israel and its Zionist proxies in the Diaspora to make me complicit, that I put a considerable amount of time and energy into speaking out about the Israeli War on Gaza, and about the claims of Zionism.
Indeed, despite my best efforts to distance myself from both Zionism and the State of Israel over the last 42 years, the continued claims of Zionism have made me complicit in the State of Israel and the oppression of the Palestinian people by implication to this day. And, as Maimonides wrote in the Mishneh Torah, atonement for sins against my fellow humans is not a one-time act that I can get out of the way on Yom Kippur; it is a process of restitution that might never be completed.
So, making up for my complicity in Zionism and the State of Israel can never be “one and done,” it is a process that must continue until their transgressions end and the damage repaired. So I talk, and write, and hope by example and by argument to chip away – admittedly in a small way – at the monolith of Zionist ideology that justifies the slaughter of thousands.
But complicity is a tricky thing, and it means different things in different contexts. My acknowledgement of my complicity, as a Jew, in the ideological structures that the State of Israel mobilizes to justify its War on Gaza does not mean that Jews as a whole are collectively complicit in the brutal violence in Gaza. That violence is not the work of the Jews, but of the State of Israel, which claims to represent the collectivity of the Jewish people, even though Jews like me are not citizens of the State of Israel, cannot vote in its elections or have any input in its policies, and (in many cases) do not support it at all.
There is a difference between Jews and the complicity that many of us acknowledge in Zionism, which is one reason why so many of us are so vehemently opposed to the State of Israel, and the State of Israel, which claims to speak and act for us, even though it does not represent us in any way. This came to mind when I posted earlier today that “Being a Jew is going to be very, very hard for the foreseeable future.” I will explain more fully what I mean about that anon, but the reply of one of my interlocutors, a (now-former) social media friend chilled me to the extent that I feel compelled to reply broadly and openly.
My interlocutor replied: “I am afraid so. As it was for Germans to be German after Holocaust.” I would like you to stop and consider the full implication of that statement.
The collective complicity of Germans – the citizens of the German Republic and of the Third Reich – in the Holocaust has been widely discussed and documented by historians like Raul Hilberg and Christopher Browning. They, and other historians, have argued that the Holocaust was not a crime only committed by a few really bad people in the Nazi regime, but it was enabled by tacit approval and, often enough, the outright aid of German citizens. For whatever reasons, Germans voted for the Nazis in 1933, voted again to ratify their dictatorship a few months later, and then actively collaborated with it or passively accepted it – and the Final Solution – until 1945. What is significant about that period of German history is not how many incidents of resistance, either open or covert, there were to Nazi rule and the Holocaust but, in fact, how few. Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe he willingness of Germans (and, of course, others) to just “go along” (again, for whatever reason) with the extermination of Europe’s Jews.
My interlocutor is right that it took a long time for Germans to get past that, and it for years – at least four years, until the creation of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949 – it was, indeed, very hard to be a German. However, the equation that she is making to the plight of post-Nazi Germans to the collectivity of Jews is revealing.
While one might argue that Israeli, who voted for the current Israeli government, who are, according to the principles of democracy, represented by this government, who serve it its military and, it seems from reading Haaretz, are mostly going along with its policies and supporting the War on Gaza (for whatever reason) are complicit in the War, it does not follow that Jews, collectively, are, too. Yet, my interlocutor is explicitly comparing Germans to Jews, and not to Israelis.
My interlocutor is ventriloquizing the Maximalist Zionist line that the State of Israel is entirely coextensive with the Jewish people and equating Israelis and Jews. This is deeply troubling, and it yet another variation of the old antisemitic canard that “those Jews all stick together” and that “those Jews are an alien community in the body politic, since they only have loyalty to themselves.”
I have no doubt that many pro-Palestinians and anti-Zionists share this view: That the Jews, as a whole, are collectively complicit in the horrors committed by the State of Israel in Gaza now, and throughout the history of the State of Israel and the Occupation. I know this, since the image of THE JEW, often a recognizably Haredi Jew, frequently signifies the State of Israel in the memes that many (including some of my social media friends) often share, and in the oft-repeated platitude that “they have become what once oppressed them.” The “they” is meant to mean the Israelis, and “what once oppressed them” is meant to be the Nazis who, it turns out, did not oppress the State of Israel, but Jews before the State of Israel even existed.
This is antisemitism, pure and simple. It flattens the full diversity of Jewish life and experience and reifies it into the undifferentiated mass of the State of Israel. All Jews are complicit in the horrors of Gaza because the State of Israel is all Jews. Not only does this buy into and legitimize the claims of Maximalist Zionism, as I have noted, but it creates a simplistic caricature of all Jews and arrogates our right to speak for and represent ourselves.
I feel complicit in the Zionism that has allowed the State of Israel to gain so much traction and support in my community, but don’t tell me that I am any more complicit in the war in Gaza than the nice, white European, Christian lady wearing a keffiyeh “in support.” My interlocutor only proved that I am right to be apprehensive about the future of being a Jew by implicitly (and, really, explicitly) claiming that I am.
***
I follow Reconstructing Judaism, the organization representing Reconstructionist rabbis and congregations in North America, on Facebook. I follow because Reconstructionism is probably closest to my personal practice, and I like hearing about things that (mostly) politically progressive rabbis and congregations are up to. So, I get their updates and announcements on a fairly regular basis.
But, as I have noted elsewhere, I have been finding these updates and announcements increasingly disappointing as Reconstructing Judaism scrupulously avoids even mentioning the War on Gaza. I understand that their leadership probably believes that it is walking a fine line and, whatever their beliefs, or wherever Jewish values lead them, they are desperately trying to no offend anyone.
And that does seem desperate; deeply so. One expects our religious leaders to address the REAL questions of Jewish life at this point in history and, well, lead. Saying “everyone must answer to their own conscience” and then pretending that 27,000 Gazans have not died at the hands of a government which claims to represent all Jews does neither.
I understand where Reconstructing Judaism’s moral cowardice comes from, but that does not mean that they are not, after all, cowards.
***
One of the narratives that I see over-and-over again in social media with regard to Palestine is the one that claims to demonstrate the illegitimacy of the State of Israel by exposing the absurdity of the Zionist claim to Palestine on the basis of Jewish indigeneity to our “ancestral homeland.” The problem of indigeneity is extremely complex and I am not going to address it here. Moreover, there is a somewhat thoughtless and uninformed notion in some segments of the Jewish community that this claim of indigeneity is, in fact, the basis for the legitimacy of the State of Israel. It is something that extreme Zionists mobilize when they refer to the State of Israel as the “Third Commonwealth” (the first being the Israelite kingdoms, the second being the Hasmonean kingdom), as Benjamin Netanyahu frequently does, at least when he is speaking Hebrew to an Israeli audience.
When I am in a charitable mood, I am willing to grant that some anti-Zionists deploy this argument about the absurdity of Zionist claims of indigeneity specifically in rebuttal to this extremist rhetoric (eg. The “Third Commonwealth”) and to those comfortable, bovine people in places like Cote St-Luc, Hampstead, Short Hills, Tea Neck, Maplewood, and elsewhere who really believe that this is the slam-dunk justification for Zionism. That is why many anti-Zionists believe that exposing the absurdity of the Zionist claim to Palestine on the basis of Jewish indigeneity to our “ancestral homeland” is a definitive argument against the legitimacy of the State of Israel and, consequently, of the Zionist project. (I can almost hear the chorus of “ha-ha, charade you are.”)
Although indigeneity and the claims of a messianic return from exile were part of Zionist rhetoric almost from the beginning (really making their first full appearance at the second Zionist Congress in 1898), they were never a serious part of the Zionist project, so much as a way to mobilize European Jewish sentiment and opinion. Zionism historically mobilized other reasons and justifications, mostly the horrific antisemitic violence experienced by European Jews, later, the plight of millions of Holocaust refugees, and the models of 18th and 19th century non-state colonization efforts like Nueva Germania and Y Wladfa in South America, the Selkirk Colony in Canada, and the Trekboer settlements in the Transvaal. In fact, these are the examples that early Zionists, going back to Manuel Noah, cited. Indeed, in a letter to Theodor Herzl in 1898, Max Nordau insisted on emphasizing THESE examples because “we do not have a home and do not constitute a nation-state, let alone a great empire.”
The question of the “ancestral homeland” was merely rhetorical fluff, although Zionist leaders like Chaim Weitzmann, David Ben-Gurion, and Moshe Shertok certainly made great use of this rhetoric before 1948 to play on the (justified) guilt of government leaders in the United States, Great Britain, and France to built support for their project.
Ultimately, the legitimacy of the State of Israel is based not on vague mythical claims of indigeneity, or whether God granted the territory to people of Israel, no matter how much those cow-eyed suburban Zionists might wish. It is based on the actions of international law (UN Resolution 181) and diplomatic recognition. One might argue whether international law is just, or binding, or whether the United Nations (like the League of Nations before it) had the legitimate authority to bequeath this territory to any non-indigenous community, or whether it was a good idea at all. And I do think that we need to have this discussion because I don’t believe that it (or anything in history) is cut-and-dried.
But, it really has nothing to do with primordial ancestral claims, and I would appreciate it if Zionists and anti-Zionists would refrain from saying that it does. Moreover, exposing the absurdity of these claims is not the brilliant mic-drop that you might think it is. It is not; it is a pointless red-herring.
The question for me, then, is why so many anti-Zionists deploy this argument so often in memes – including a bizarre video currently making the rounds in which an Italian woman claims ownership of a British home in the city of Bath. (There are so many problems with that video that I would not know where to begin.) In part, I am sure, it is in response to the dense, self-satisfied thinking of those suburban Zionists who never really put much thought into anything. In part, it is a way for people who are well-intentioned, but don’t really have a strong grasp on the history of Zionism to produce themselves as clever in an “a-hah! I can prove that this is absurd and that I am smarter than you” moment. (This, after all is the main modality of social media interaction.)
But the disturbing reality is that it is often deployed to produce Zionists and, by extension, all Jews whether or not they are Zionists, as an irrational, tribal, other, tied to the myths of their ridiculous religious superstitions. After all, the history and traditions upon which the Zionist claim of indigeneity is based is not solely Zionist – it is Jewish. If it is absurd and risible, then Judaism is absurd and risible, and if those Jews (including the Zionists) persist in embracing those traditions, then they deserve our ridicule.
This is antisemitism. Indeed, it is one of the oldest antisemitic canards, dating back to John Chrysostom and Tertullian, and rearticulated in almost every generation, from Martin Luther, to Napoleon and Frederick the Great, to Henry Ford, and to the present day: Those Jews, they are a “half-savage” tribe of simpletons unwilling to give up their myths and superstitions.
And I find the persistence of this thinking, or the tolerance shown by otherwise well-meaning people who are justifiably opposed to the State of Israel and the Zionist project who share and perpetuate this narrative, deeply disturbing.
(I am well aware that I have made no friends with this.)
***
If we accept that the United States’s Middle East policy is predicated on maintaining access to petroleum and on containing Iran, then it is worth wondering how its support for the State of Israel is a part of that. I have no doubt that Washington’s support for the State of Israel is meant to ensure the US’s “vital national interests.” This is why the US became the main sponsor of the State of Israel after 1967, following almost two decades of uninterest. At the time, the main concerns of the US government – and especially the Nixon administration – were the leftist, and pro-Soviet Hafez regime and the security of the Straits of Tiran, then seemingly threatened by the apparently hostile Nasser government in Egypt.
That set the foundation for more than a half-decade of American geopolitical obsession that pretty much guaranteed that the State of Israel could get away with anything as long as it remained a guarantor of American interests in the region. However, the Cold War is long over, and while the US’s “vital interests” have not changed, how they can be secured has. Today the US has alliances with the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia, which it seems to regard as more important in containing Iran and guaranteeing oil, than the alliance with the State of Israel which is increasingly a secondary consideration.
With that in mind, I have to wonder how stable the US commitment to the State of Israel is, as the latter’s policies and War on Gaza become a liability in domestic politics and even, as Haaretz has noted, in Democratic Party discipline in an election year, AND threaten to alienate the Arab states which are now more important allies in the region. The American Jewish community is, of course, irrelevant here, since they account for about 1.7% of the electorate, and can be counted on to vote Democrat 75% of the time regardless.
American diplomacy since Nixon has been motivated more by realpolitik than ideology. The Saudis are our good friends and allies, after all, even if Saudi is an oppressive, murderous autocracy; they don’t compromise our geopolitical interests. Yet, the State of Israel just might be doing that, and I am pretty sure what Washington’s choice will be if it comes down to losing Saudi and the Gulf states or cutting the State of Israel off.
I don’t know, however, if Benjamin Netanyahu realizes this.
***
There are some memes going around with a quote attributed to David Ben-Gurion, allegedly sourced from Michael Bar-Zohar’s 1986 biography. The quote is some variation of: “We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population.”
I have Bar-Zohar’s book, and this quote, allegedly from a 1948 speech that Ben-Gurion gave to members of the IDF general staff, does not appear in its pages. I have checked a number of times, and I simply cannot find it.
The closest reference that I can find anywhere is to the Koenig memorandum, a set of secret proposals that an Israeli civil servant named Yisrael Koenig made to the Ministry of the Interior in 1976, three years after Ben-Gurion’s death. The Yitzhak Rabin government rejected the proposals. The words “terror” and “assassination” do not appear in the text, however.
I am no admirer of Ben-Gurion, and no supporter of Israeli policy with regard to Palestinian Arabs within the State of Israel’s borders or in the Occupied Territories. However, these memes, and this quote attributed to Ben-Gurion are fraudulent. They are fake news. Please be aware of that and please stop promoting this nonsense as fact.
We do not need to lie to stand up for peace, justice, and Palestinian human rights, dignity, and political autonomy. In fact, promoting lies like this weakens the case for Palestinian human rights, dignity, and political autonomy. Whenever you see a quote like this, don’t just credulously repeat or amplify it. Verify it first.
I am a historian, and I take things like sources very seriously. If you think that I am some kind of Zionist stooge doing the work of the State of Israel, then please save us both the bother and unfriend and block me without comment.
***
There are many ways to understand the phrase from the Haggadah, “next year in Jerusalem” that don’t actually include colonialism and displacing an entire people. That many Zionists and many anti-Zionists don’t understand this is merely evidence of their intellectual vacuity and of an absence of their humanity.
***