News outlets are describing Iran’s attack on the State of Israel as a “retaliatory strike.” This means that they are responding to the State of Israel’s bombing of the Iranian embassy in Damascus. So, by any standard, the State of Israel “started it.”
I find the moral math fascinating. The State of Israel, its Zionist proxies, and its sponsor governments, insist that it has a “right to self-defense” that includes the invasion and the slaughter of noncombatants in its unwinnable and unrealistic War on Gaza. Yet, the State of Israel, its Zionist proxies, and its sponsor governments insist that Iran’s attack on the State of Israel, in retaliation for the air strike on its, does not fall under the rubric of this “right of self-defense” and is somehow morally objectionable.
I know that this is what they are saying, but I cannot quite understand how they can say this. Surely, if a country’s “self-defense” is a “right,” then it is inherent to all people and governments. A right cannot be a right, in fact, unless it is universal; if it is not, it is privilege. So, any justification of the State of Israel’s “right to self-defense” would necessarily be a justification of Iran’s “right to self-defense.” In fact, this justification should be endlessly discursive, going back to the original unprovoked attack on some geopolitical entity.
As problematic as the Categorical Imperative is, I do find that it has the value separating morality from religion and “rights” from privilege and power. I would be interested to know how the pious moralists who now condemn Iran manage to do without it.
14 April 2024
***
One thing that troubles me is the narrative, often repeated in social media, that the State of Israel is the most evil, brutal, oppressive regime in history. Setting aside my objections to the very idea of “evil” as some kind of transhistorical, metaphysical force, I can only say: Not even close. I dislike the oppression Olympics, but since this narrative depends on such thinking, I will engage with it for a moment.
While the State of Israel’s policies with regard to the Palestinian people is disgracefully oppressive, and its War on Gaza is brutal atrocity, it does not even rank in the historical top ten of evil. I mean, is Netanyahu’s regime really worse than the Roman Empire that slaughtered and enslaved millions, almost destroyed the Jewish people, and fed criminals to wild animals? Than the civilized Europeans who massacred the inhabitants of Acra, exterminated 90 percent of the Indigenous people of the New World, and depopulated Africa for slaves? Than the King of Belgium and the Kaiser of Germany who murdered hundreds of thousands in Africa, or the Turkish Sultan who destroyed Armenia?
Than Stalin’s Soviet Union and Nazi Germany?
Think about what you are saying. One can certainly make a case that the State of Israel is an evil, brutal, oppressive regime, but I am not even sure one can argue that it is worse than Putin’s Russia, the perpetrators of Bucha and the routine murderers of political dissidents.
I am more interested in asking why people are claiming that the State of Israel is the most evil, brutal, oppressive regime in history. Is it just a matter of their historical ignorance being mobilized in the passion of the moment? Or is there something else here, that is mobilizing an ancient hate and an atavistic fear of the evil “other?” Think about it.
14 April 2024
***
Ione Belarra, a member of the Spanish Cortes from the Podemos Party said this week that “Israel is competing with Nazism for first place in the league of horror in the history of mankind. We demand a stop to genocide now.”
I do not believe that criticizing the State of Israel is antisemitism, nor do I believe that accusing it of genocide – as the government of South Africa has done at the International Court of Justice – is antisemitism. I don’t even believe that comparisons of anything to the Holocaust, even Israeli policies, is antisemitic. Belarra’s statement, however, is antisemitic. Moreover, I believe that this was her intent.
For someone to say that “Israel is competing with Nazism for first place in the league of horror in the history of mankind” is, quite frankly, to ignore the history of mankind. Belarra is really saying here that the State of Israel’s War on Gaza is not only comparable to the Holocaust, but that it is nigh on equal to the Holocaust. Thus, it is worse than the Armenian Genocide, Holodomor, the Rwandan Genocide, the genocide of the Indigenous people of the Americas, which wiped out 90 percent of the population of the Western Hemisphere within a century after contact (and which her country was one of the main perpetrators), and any number of other genocides through “the history of mankind.”
To recap: the Holocaust was the intentional and systematic extermination of 10 million Jews, Roma, Slavs, and other people deemed undesirable by the Nazi regime, not in the wake of the German war effort, but often at cross-purposes with it. This was a horror that began, at the very least, with the Nuremburg Laws of 1935, Kristallnacht three years later, and culminated in the killing fields of Aktion Reinhard, concentration camps where inmates were worked to death, and specially built death camps whose only purpose was to murder as many people as possible with industrial efficiencies.
The State of Israel’s War on Gaza is a horror. Tens of thousands of people have been killed and injured and two million displaced while the IDF pursues an unwinnable war against Hamas. We can compare this war to the Holocaust – indeed, we must – but when we do that, we can only conclude that it cannot be equated with the Holocaust, nor even with the Armenian Genocide, Holodomor, the Rwandan Genocide, nor the genocide of the Indigenous people of the Americas. I do not play Genocide Olympics, but Belarra very clearly does.
And her point in this is plainly and blatantly antisemitic. On one hand, it is a form of Holocaust Denial. As bad as the Israeli War on Gaza is – and it is indeed horrific – there is no evidence of death camps, slave labor, human medical experiments, or the explicit and intentional extermination of a population. I am appalled at the 33,000 deaths in Gaza, and every one of those is a crime, but the toll does not equal the two-thirds of the Jewish and more than half of the Romani population of Europe exterminated by the Nazis.
To say that it does is both evidence of utter ignorance and rank stupidity, and it minimizes the real horror of the Holocaust, and all of the other great “horrors in the history of mankind” that Belarra conveniently and blithely glosses over many of which were perpetrated by her own people. This is, moreover, a rhetorical positioning that seeks to deny the reality of the Holocaust because “those Jews are just as bad as the Nazis (so, maybe they deserved it after all).”
That I have seen Facebook friends sharing a meme with this quote is just that more evidence that the term “genocide” has been flattened into meaninglessness, and their eagerness to blame the Jews, who were the victims of the Holocaust, and not the State of Israel for Gaza. If you see this quote and share it approvingly, I can assure you that I will unfriend you without notice. I have no desire to be associated with either the spectacularly stupid or antisemites.
13 April 2024
***
Zionism is undoubtedly settler colonialism. Political Zionism defined its project in explicitly colonial terms from the very beginning (Herzl’s Der Judenstaat and the founding of the World Zionist Organization in 1897) and the people who immigrated to and built the Second Yishuv were, indeed, settlers and called themselves that. In this sense, Zionism was no different from other settler colonialist projects, like the Welsh Y Wladfa and German Nueva Germania colonies in South America in the 19th century. Indeed, Herzl himself cited both of these settler colonies, and the settlement of the American West as models for Zionism.
However, the term “settle colonialism” also refers to the creation of European settler colonies in the New World and Oceania in the 16th to 19th centuries. While these colonies (British North America, New France, New Spain, Australia, etc.) bear some similarities to the settler colonialism of the late-19th century (including Zionism), they were also quite different. For one thing, the settler colonies of the 16th to 19th centuries were projects directed or underwritten by powerful European empires, rather than relatively small private associations. And that is an important nuance elided by the term “settler colonialism.”
Without acknowledging this the term can imply that the Zionist Project – managed by the WZO and the Jewish Agency and funded by the Jewish National Fund – was in fact an imperialist project in the same way as the creation of the British North American colonies and New Spain. In which case, one would have to ask what was the Imperial power behind the Zionist project? Throughout its history, Great Britain’s attitude to Zionism alternated between indulgence and hostility, and the United States was entirely indifferent.
When I have asked people who deploy the term “settler colonialism” and equate the Zionist project with the genocide of Indigenous Americans in the colonization of the Americas (for example) which imperial power they believe directed or underwrote the settlement of the Yishuv, very often – about half the time – they tell me that it was “rich European Jews.” When I have asked them how these “rich European Jews” were (or are) an imperial power like Great Britain and France, they invariably cite the Rothschilds and the “international Jewish banking conspiracy.”
This bears considering. If you have never thought about what terms like “settler colonialism” mean, and what libels you might be unconsciously promoting, please stop and think about it. While Zionism certainly was a settler colonialist project, not all settler colonialist projects are, or have been the same, and it is important to acknowledge this. If you believe that Zionism was a settler colonialist project just like British North America and New France and was directed and underwritten by an imperial power that happened to be a conspiracy of “rich European Jews,” then please go away. You are an antisemite.
Nuance is important.
12 April 2024
***
There’s a meme going around featuring a quote from Miriam Margolyes about how she is ashamed of the State of Israel. I am a great admirer of Margolyes’s work, and I would never presume to tell her how to feel, but I want to be very clear about something: I am not ashamed of the State of Israel, and I am deeply offended by the suggestion that I should be.
I am not an Israeli. I have never voted in an Israeli election. I have never set foot in the State of Israel. What the State of Israel does, for good or ill, has nothing to do with me. Its accomplishments – and it has a few of these – are not my own, and nor are its failures and crimes.
I can no more feel ashamed by the actions of the State of Israel than I can of the actions on Uzbekistan, Tesla Corporation, or OJ Simpson.
Yet, to suggest that I should be ashamed of the State of Israel is a deeply antisemitic libel. It insinuates – indeed, it declares – that, simply by virtue of being Jewish, I am directly complicit in the actions of the State of Israel (to recap: a country in which I do not have citizenship, voting rights, or any actual connection). While this is a narrative that Zionists have promoted for generations, entirely without my consent and endorsement, it is a blatant lie.
I reject it and, if you have any respect for me, and other people like me, as a friend, as a writer, as a Jew, as a person, you will reject it, too.
11 April 2024
***
I spoke to a reading group at a United Church in Montreal yesterday about Gaza, Zionism and things Jewish. It was not the kind of group that I often find myself in, thought I was invited by an old high school friend. (To be clear: She is not old, I am.) But it was also amazingly gratifying and gave me hope. These were people, in many cases very much unlike me, who are desperately trying to navigate these difficult times and seeking to be good. “Good,” in the fullest sense of righteousness, is not a term we use much these days; we tend to privilege more politicized ideas of commitment, and notions of performative politics. I have no doubt about this group’s commitments, but it struck me how eager they are to start from a place of good/righteousness and move out from there.
I often forget, myself, that this is where all politics – which is, after all, the expression of the ethical in the social – must begin. Yet here I was meeting these good people, in so many ways so different from me, seeing their faces, and remembering that my politics mean nothing if it is not an expression, a continuation of tzedek, chesed, and tikkun olam.
Levinas tells us that ethics and humanity are inseparable, and both begin face-en-face avec l’autre.
11 April 2024
***
We have been saying “next year in Jerusalem” every Pesach for almost 2,000 years. That should have ended with the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, and the possibility that we could all celebrate our seder in David’s City. Yet, we still say it, and we still set out a glass of wine for Eliahu the Prophet, the herald of the Messiah? Why?
Because the redemption that we hope for when we say “next year in Jerusalem” is not political, or national. It has nothing to do with nations and states, but with a promise of creating a better world. It is a moral and ethical Jerusalem, one that we have not yet attained, but one for which we yearn. A better world.
8 April 2024
***
I think often about the Akeda, the Biblical story of the Binding of Isaac. Apart from the fact that I believe that most people get the meaning of the story wrong – it is, I believe, the story of God proving his commitment to Abraham and not a test of Abraham’s commitment to God – it does reveal something about Bronze Age Hebrew history. Namely, that human sacrifice was not a practice unknown to our distant ancestors.
There is much in the Tanakh about Moloch and the Tophet, but the Akeda is the only place where we know that one of our ancestors accepts human sacrifice as an acceptable practice. Abraham does not protest; he simply gathers up the necessities for the ritual and brings his son to Mount Moriah. This suggests to me that our Bronze Age ancestors knew and practiced human sacrifice – it might have been an exceptional ritual, but it was part of their world.
Significantly, it never happens. God provides a substitute, proving that he will not go back on the Covenant, and there is never another Hebrew/Israelite human sacrifice. I can only speculate that the reason that this story survives in our scriptures is that it represents the faint memory of an epochal moment in our distant past, sometime before the Bronze Age Collapse of c. 1200 BCE, when we abjured the practice – something that many of our Canaanite neighbors would not get around to for another 600 years, or more.
I like to think that this is one of the first moments where we inscribed what we are and what we would be: Hebrews, Israelites, and their descendants do not practice human sacrifice.
Jews do not sacrifice children. To do so is to not be a Jew.
8 April 2024