I had no idea when I started this journal more than five months ago that it would become, in part, an extended meditation on Zionism, Jewishness, and belonging. Yet, my comments about Matisyahu last week have become characteristic of where my thoughts often go, as I reflect on the ongoing horror in Gaza. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise the War on Gaza is being waged by a state created and embodying the Zionist project, and which claims to be the historical, geopolitical agent of the Jewish people; the question of how I fit my own knowledge of myself – my identity – into this moment was bound to come up. After all, we all view the world through the lens of our identities – it is impossible not to.

We might ask “what does it mean to be human?” and ask whether the brutality of Gaza can be reconciled with our humanity, both particular and universal. The scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz, whom I have been reading these past months, focuses asks “what does it mean to be a Jew?” which I understand as a subcategory of human to which I belong, and that requires that I interrogate the war through the lens of Judaism, which I regard as a species of humanity.

Leibowitz writes that belonging, where “man is judged from the standpoint of a deified collective… This is the ethnocentric view, which regards as central a particular human collective – a people or a race…” This, he writes, is “vicious and despicable.” Moreover, it is fundamentally un-Jewish, since Jewishness is a matter of actively doing, an existential act of embodying the Torah and Jewish life.

And that is Zionism; a heresy.

25 March 2024

***

If you don’t think the United States’ abstention in the Security Council is an event of earthshaking importance, then you haven’t been paying attention. It doesn’t actually change anything in material terms, but performativity is important, and even empty gestures can be significant Performances. This is how the US government sends a signal to Benjamin Netanyahu’s rivals – and to the Israeli public – that its support is conditional on choosing a new prime minister.

Israeli policy is having a domestic cost for Biden, and he wants out of the fix that Netanyahu put him in – and quick. Already, American approval of the State of Israel’s War on Gaza has fallen to 36 percent, with three-quarters of Democrats expressing dissatisfaction. Biden will not publicly say that his support of the State of Israel is conditional. In the domestic political calculation, he very probably doesn’t believe that he can It. How determinative is that 75 percent’s opposition to the war to their voting intentions is impossible to say, and he has to consider the independents, and even the Republicans whose votes he will need in November to defeat Donald Trump. So, publicly, Biden probably believes that he has to play it safe.

But it can make his point in the backchannel, and diplomacy is conducted in backchannels. When things get particularly tense, diplomacy resorts to saber-rattling and shots across the bow. The abstention is clearly a shot across the bow, and it is not meant for Netanyahu, who wouldn’t listen anyway, but for the people around him, and especially for his coalition cabinet.

There is a lot of ambition there; some of Netanyahu’s ministers have been prime minister before and doubtless developed a taste for it, and others are convinced that they could do a better job than their boss. I am under no illusion that Benny Ganz, for example, is any kind of a dove, and there is virtually no Israeli left, but I think other politicians would be more amenable to a ceasefire and post-bellum changes, and they could then blame Netanyahu for getting them into the mess is the first place.

Ganz isn’t quite as tied to the war as Netanyahu and (a) is probably more susceptible to US pressure since he has nothing to lose, and Netanyahu has nothing to gain, (b) isn’t quite associated with the war in the first place and can leverage it as a failure of the Netanyahu government. He isn’t a peacenik, but his political calculus would give the US considerable leverage. Even Yoav Gallant, the hawkish minister of defense from Netanyahu’s own Likud Party, made conciliatory noises in his visit to Washington.

Whoever replaces Netanyahu can blame everything, even a formal 2-state arrangement on their predecessor, and that is what the US wants. The other thing is that the ICJ will likely rule against the State of Israel on the SA case, and this would give Ganz the opportunity to hang that around Netanyahu’s neck. It would hardly be an optimal situation, but it almost certainly could bring an end to the killing.

It doesn’t mean that the occupation will end, or that Palestinian statehood would be immediately achieved. It certainly does not mean that there will be a single-state solution and the creation of a true democracy in what is now the state of Israel in my lifetime (I am more likely to win the Powerball five times before I die). But I think the point is to bring about a ceasefire and maybe a withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza. That, in the end, is mostly what Washington wants.

There is a messianic/apocalyptic fantasy in some places that US policy can suddenly change 180 degrees. But that’s not how policies change.

26 March 2024

***

Being a heretic sucks, and I have a fair collection of heresies. I am reminded of this every time I stick my nose into a mainstream Jewish space – like the Jewish literature group that I was banned from last week. My heresy was not, I thought, a particularly egregious one (I chided a fellow user for equating the 7 October Hamas attack), but it was enough to get me kicked out. It’s okay; I’m used to it. And it’ll probably happen again someday.

Heresy is, however, the inevitable counterpoint to orthodoxy, and every faith and ideology has its orthodoxies. They are the necessary core of belief, like the conviction that God exists and must be worshipped in a particular way, or that democracy, or any other form of government is necessary and superior – or even that war and violence are morally wrong. Doubt and heterodoxy are the deny the unity of faith and ideology; suggesting that God might exist in different ways, and that the rituals have historical rather than divine roots, that a democracy might not be all that democratic, or that war and violence, though perhaps wrong, might be inevitable, or even necessary undermines that unity.

That is why these ideologies and movements, and even casual clubs, invariably demand public professions of faith, like the American Pledge of Allegiance or the Boy Scouts who dutifully recite “I promise, to do my best to love and to serve God, my Queen, my country and my fellowman, and live by the Scout Law.” In his novella The Right to Heresy: Castellio against Calvin, published in 1936 just as the Nazis were consolidating power in Germany, Stefan Zweig wrote that John Calvin demanded that the people of Geneva “should be officially compelled to acknowledge their acceptance of this Confession [of Faith] publicly, by oath, one after another.” Zweig notes that Calvin demanded this public confession of faith after the burning of the heretic Michael Servetus caused dissent in the city he ruled.

The statement or profession of faith is an essential feature even of movements far more benign than Calvin’s reformist Christian theocracy. Pacifism has its Peace Pledge, the Black Power movement had its upraised fist and the chant of “Black Power.” Movements create community through these gestures, and community is important, since it is always important to know who is with you and who is against you – if there is an inside, then there must also be an outside. Knowing the boundary is often a matter of life and death.

In the movement for a ceasefire – the antiwar movement, the anti-Zionist movement, the pro-Palestine movement, however one characterizes it – the statement of faith is not a formula as it is a public embrace of certain principles and vocabulary. Thus, Aaron Bushnell is a “martyr,” Hamas is a “resistance movement,” and the Israeli War on Gaza is “genocide.” To express doubt about any of these verities is to invite outrage and scorn. One social media friend put it in explicit terms: “If you don’t call it a genocide, you’re on the side of the Zionists!”

Calling the war a genocide is a test and declaration of faith – something that another social media friend drove home when they commented on one of my posts, “it isn’t a war: it’s a genocide.” Yet, here’s the thing: I am not prepared to call the Israeli War on Gaza a genocide, and I guess the time has come to confess this. I am not saying that it is not a genocide, mind you, only that I am painfully aware of my shortcomings, and I know that genocide (if it means anything) is a category of international law and historical scholarship. I am neither an expert in international law nor genocide scholar.

I do follow genocide scholarship, at least partly because my research these days focuses on Diaspora Jewish life and culture and modernism, but also, as an educator who teaches Western Civilization and 20th Century History (the last century being a century of genocides, from Armenia, to German South West Africa, to the Holodomor, the Porajmos, and the Shoah). It is too soon for most of the academic Journals (the last issue of the Journal of Genocide Studies was in 2021, for example), of course, but where the debate has been joined, there is still no consensus.

That debate is all over a forum on Gaza in The Journal of Genocide Studies this winter. It is a tricky question as Raz Segal and Luigi Daniele noted in their introduction to the forum. Both incline to regard the war, and Israeli actions as a genocide, but also the absence of consensus, “not just a divide in the field, but a deep crisis.”

Didier Fassin makes a strong case that the flat denial by some scholars that what is happening in Gaza is, or can be, a genocide reveals a crisis in the field, but the fact that he is making the case at all reveals a distinct lack of consensus. Indeed, in the same forum, Shmuel Lederman avers that Gaza is “a laboratory for genocidal violence, but that “I use this term to distinguish it from genocide per se, to refer to violence that has certain genocidal characteristics but not others.”

On the other hand, Martin Shaw notes in a short essay that “Recognizing the ‘problems’ of genocide, and especially of the international legal framework that is too often held to sufficiently define it, it is important also to address the potential of the concept once it is liberated from that framework, and to utilize it to inform a more sophisticated public discourse.” And whatever it is that I might believe, this methodological, indeed epistemological issue seems to be at the heart of the question.

So, what am I to conclude from this, except that I need to keep following the research, since the question is not fully settled, and to respect the scholarship of my colleagues who are in the midst of it. I decline to arrogate their expertise, just as I refuse to preempt the International Court of Justice’s deliberations. I simply do not have the knowledge or expertise to say for myself whether the State of Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, anymore than I have the knowledge and expertise to diagnose anyone’s illness or opine whether cold fusion is possible.

This is not to say that I deny anyone else in social media (and least of all scholars like Drs. Shaw and Fassin) the right to express their opinions that the War on Gaza is a genocide. It is a powerful word that mobilizes the weight of historical enormity and has myriad rhetorical uses. Hell, I might even share that opinion but I want to be cautious. I have seen far too many technical terms and categories voided of meaning by casual use and overuse. I remember when Critical Race Theory, for example, was a legitimate category of legal analysis, before it was hijacked to delegitimize any discussion of race and racism in American education. I would not want that to happen to the category of “genocide;” if it loses meaning, we will not be able to use it.

Yet, as someone who regards war as an obscenity (even though it might be unavoidable or necessary), I have to wonder if people believe that the Israeli War on Gaza is only bad because they regard it as a genocide, but they would not believe that it was so bad that 33,000 Palestinians have died, 75,000 injured, and 1.5 million displaced, if it was just a run-of-the-mill, obscene war  – making “genocide” an essential amplifier.

I have no doubt that I will be denounced for my heresy, and I am okay with that for, as George Orwell noted, “there is no good writing” without heresy, and I always aspire to write well, no matter how often I miss the mark.

The Right to Heresy is, of course, Zweig’s full-throated defense of heresy as an essential feature of democratic life, without it there was only Fascism, across the border in Germany, National Socialism, and Stalinist Bolshevism. Disagreement is freedom. Besides, “When I reflect on what a heretic really is, I can find no other criterion than that we are all heretics in the eyes of those who do not share our views.”

28 March 2024

***