A friend sent me a DM in response to my post this week about performative politics, asking why I will not display the Palestinian flag in my profile, and while I will not wear a keffiyeh, despite my support for Palestinian autonomy and human rights and my opposition to the policies of the State of Israel. These are legitimate questions and, since this is not the first time that I have been asked them (though usually civilly as my friend did), it seems appropriate to answer publicly. I must insist, however, that these are my reasons, and I do not regard them as a universal rule. We all have to navigate difficult waters, and this is only how I do it.
I dislike flags. All flags. While I can appreciate the aesthetics of flag design, I am put off by the meaning and purpose of flags – and this applies no national and non-national flags equally. Historically, flags had a solely military purpose, meant to rally and organize troops as they flew above the “fog of war” on the battlefield. The original flags were thus military and aristocratic standards, like Rome’s Imperial Eagle, the flags of the Chinese banner system, or the pennons of medieval European knights. In that sense, flags have always signified not just allegiance, but obedience and submission to authority.
Over time, flags evolved to suit other purposes, like the Jolly Roger that signaled piracy and violence, and the red or black banners that announced the enemy could expect no quarter. The legendary Welsh labor leader Dik Penderyn flew a red flag in the Merthyr Rising of 1831, bequeathing to the world a universal symbol of revolution. But, for the most part, flags evolved to signify the national state and, more importantly, the nation that aspired to statehood in the 19th century. Germany had a national flag (and, Gotthold Lessing noted, a “national literature”) before it had a national state. Theodor Herzl sketched out a proposal for the flag of the State of Israel a half-century before it existed.
Flags are symbols of nations and peoples and serve to indicate the legitimacy of those communities, among all communities. The Roma have a flag, even though they do not have or desire a territorial state or a government. There is a Gay Pride flag that denotes the shared existence of the LGBTQ Community. Palestine, denied a state and its own territory by the State of Israel, has the flag that has become so ubiquitous in social media.
Yet flags represent communities, nations, and peoples in two senses: both as a signifier and as a surrogate that flattens their complexity and diversity. The myth of the Red Flag flying in the vanguard of the Revolution, for example, is one of revolutionary unity and unanimity and, once the myth has been inscribed, it legitimizes the purge of deviants, revisionists, and heretics. The flag of the United States has so flattened the American community that to not show it appropriate obeisance and deference is to invite social death.
So, I am wary of flags, and no less so of the Palestinian flag. While I advocate for Palestinian autonomy, statehood, and human rights, does this flag represent that cause, or the Palestinian people, or one faction or another – some of which I abhor – in that struggle? Am I signaling support for Hamas, whose crest prominently features the flag? I fully respect Palestinians’ display of the flag, since it signifies their community, and they can choose how they are part of it and what it means to them. But I won’t take that choice from them and, as an outsider, determine its meaning on their behalf. That feels like cultural colonialism to them.
So, too the keffiyeh. I remember the first keffiyeh that I ever owned. My parents brought it back from their one visit to the State of Israel more than a half century ago. It became a cherished object that, I imagined, put me in contact with an exotic land and people. And I remember wearing it at play when, as a white kid growing up in the suburbs, I channeled all of the racist Arab tropes of the 1970s in cosplay avant la letter. The thought of that frankly nauseates me now, especially when I remember how my parents tried to discourage my performances and pleaded for me to show Arabs some respect.
I could not don a keffiyeh today without recalling that. It would be an act of exoticization and consumption of the other. I don’t show my support for Black Lives Matter by parroting the stereotypes of African American dress, and I don’t show my support for LGBTQ rights by dressing up like the Village People. How would I feel if a Gentile donned a shtreimel to show their opposition to antisemitism.
The keffiyeh is not mine to wear. I have not earned it by my membership in the community of the Palestinian people, or by suffering the brutal oppression that Palestinians have suffered and continue to suffer. By appropriating one of their symbols, which individuals may or may not choose to wear, this comfortable, white, middle class, Jewish intellectual living safely thousands of miles from the ruins of Gaza, would only be mocking them.
16 June 2024
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My reply to a friend’s personal message about Zionism…
To begin with, I acknowledge the State of Israel’s “right to exist,” although, I wouldn’t put it in those words, since I do not believe that rights inhere in geopolitical entities like states. I would say that “the State of Israel legitimately exists.” Its legitimacy is absolutely explicit and legal, established in UN Resolution 181. That cannot be gainsaid, nor should it. Besides, Resolution 181 also establishes the legal legitimacy of a Palestinian state.
However, I do not consider myself a Zionist, although I might have been in 1947, and before the adoption of the Jerusalem Program in 1953. While I certainly acknowledge the legitimacy of the State of Israel, I reject most of the premises of Zionism, and all that follow, so I can’t, simply enough, be a Zionist.
There are two sides to Zionism; the ideology and the movement. You are quite correct that the movement existed historical to advance the ideology, although even this latter has changed a fair bit since the Zionist project was successful and resulted in the creation of the State of Israel, which forced the Zionist movement to move the goalposts and redefine the project. That project now is to advance the interests of the State of Israel.
With regard to the ideology, it is a subset of nationalism: the notion that “the nation” is the natural and necessary organizing principle of human communities and the subsequent premise that all “nations” must have their own territory. The idea really took root in Europe in the 19th century (and following the French Revolution) when tradition principles of human organization (the “divine right of kings,” feudalism/manorialism, absolutism, etc.) became bankrupt. Thus, we have to understand nationalism as the ideological intersection of the ideas of the national community (die Volksgemeinschaft) and the homeland (das Heimat).
Zionism is explicitly based on and draws its authority from nationalism, and its consequent premise is that the Jews comprise a Volksgemeinschaft that must reside in their Heimat. Since I reject the claims of nationalism – I do not believe that “the nation” is the natural and necessary organizing principle of human communities – I consequently reject the claims of Zionism.
So, while I absolutely agree that the State of Israel exists like all other states, I don’t believe that the Zionist project is, or was, necessary or even desirable. And while, yes, the State of Israel is as legitimate as any other state (I would argue that, as a positive creation of international law, it might even have greater legitimacy), I think that the question is HOW it should exist?
And that’s a tricky one. As you note, the State of Israel is a religiously-exclusive ethnostate, like Mauritania, Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc. Ethnonationalism frankly nauseates me – and that applies to Japanese, Chinese, Indian, etc. ethnonationalism – so the fact that the State of Israel is an ethnostate is nauseating. I would like it not to be. On the other hand, if we claim to respect the right of peoples and communities to self-determination, then does that not mean that we must respect their self-determination to live in an ethnostate? I leave aside the philosophical questions about how one articulates self-determination, but is seems that, if the people of Iran want to live in an Islamic republic governed by religious law, then I do not have a say in that.
And the same goes for the State of Israel; if Israelis are collectively determined to live in a religiously- exclusive ethnostate, then it is not my place, or anyone else’s, to deny them that right. We can question how they treat others, and hold them to their obligations under international law and treaties to respect human rights and the self-determination of other communities – and there are mechanisms for that – but if we acknowledge that Israelis comprise a “people,” then that gets a bit complex for liberals like me.
So, I don’t believe that people who acknowledge the State of Israel’s legitimacy are necessarily Zionists. I think we have to go a bit deeper and read why Zionists (in the Jerusalem Statement) say about themselves, and what the State of Israel, in its “Basic Law: The Nation State of the Jewish People” says about itself. There have been many kinds of Zionism over the years, from a Zionism that did not demand a national territory, to a Zionism that did not demand that the national territory had to be in Palestine, to a Zionism that sought coexistence and a “state for two nations,” as Martin Buber put it, to many other things.
Today, however, the meaning and content of Zionism has narrowed to two variations on the ideology. The first is Maximalist Zionism, which posits that the State of Israel and the People of Israel are completely coextensive, that to be a Jew, one must also be an Israeli, or at least an Israeli-in-waiting, that all Diaspora Jews must be obedient to the State of Israel, as the geopolitical agent of the People of Israel, and those who are not are thus not part of the community. I also call this Third Temple Judaism in its religious manifestation.
The other variation is Liberal Zionism, which exists only in the Diaspora, unlike Maximalist Zionism, which exists both in the State of Israel and the Diaspora. This mostly cleaves pretty closely to the Jerusalem Program and holds that the State of Israel must exist to ensure the future of Jewish life and, while it insists that all Jews, regardless of where they life, have a moral obligation to ensure the security and health of the State of Israel, they do not believe that it is completely coextensive with the People of Israel. Liberal Zionists believe that Diaspora Jewish life is possible. They also tend to promote labor Zionist ideas that have been a dead letter in the State of Israel for decades, and the State of Israel that they believe exists today is not actually the one that exists. They regard Benjamin Netanyahu and the brutal oppression of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories as an aberration from “real Zionism,” and that it can be fixed with a “more humane Occupation,” as Shaul Magid puts it.
As for Zionism being the movement that finally convinced the UN to make or allow or give birth to the state of Israel… I think it’s a bit more complicated than that. The UN, and particularly the US and the USSR, had a lot on its mind. The British wanted to retreat from their mandate as the costs of maintaining control over Palestine exceeded their resources. It is no accident that they retreated from India and Palestine in the same year. That would have created utter chaos in a region strategically important to everyone. Nobody wanted a regional war right next to the Suez Canal and the Iraqi oil fields. Establishing self-rule seemed like a good idea.
The other thing was the Holocaust refugee crisis. There were 1,000,000-1,500,000 Jewish refugees in DP camps throughout Southern Europe (more recent estimates are more than 2 million) who had nowhere to go. They couldn’t go home, and neither the US nor the USSR wanted them; W.L. Mackenzie King certainly didn’t want them, as “one is too many.” So there was a pressing need, three years after the liberation of the Camps, to find a place for them. Palestine, which already had a Jewish local administration (the Jewish Agency) on the ground, and which would, from a legal perspective (as the UN understood it) seemed like a good place to dispose of them.
15 June 2024
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A friend brought this meme to my attention this morning, and I have already seen it three more times since then. It seems to purport to be a kind of gotcha: “See? SEE? Not even Theodor Herzl, the founder of Political Zionism believed that God gave Palestine to the Jews! SEE?!” Well, no… He didn’t. He doesn’t even mention God in his manifesto Der Judenstaat, except once… dismissively, in a quote. What’s more, he was even open to considering other locations for the “Jewish State,” including Uganda, although he rejected them.
The thing is, memes like this seem to exist to promote the idea that Zionism is a species of religious fanaticism and, by extension, Jews are irrational, atavistic religious zealots. That, in itself, is an antisemitic narrative – and old one that goes back centuries – and it is nauseating to see the ease with which many anti-Zionists are willing to deploy it.
The fact is that the vast majority of the founders of the Zionist movement were non-religious or atheists. Few, if any, of them believed that the Covenant had anything to do with the creation of a “Jewish State.” They were secular men (almost all men) embedded in the nationalist discourses of their time. The creation of a “Jewish national home” was mandated, they believed, by necessity, history, and culture, and not by God.
Make no mistake: There is a Religious Zionist movement today which claims a divine mandate to Eretz Zion, but it is a fairly recent innovation, dating really to the 1970s. Initially, however, most Orthodox Jewish religious leaders rejected Zionism out of hand, believing that it usurped the Messiah. Even today, many (if not most) Hasidic communities, like the Satmars in the Diaspora and even some in the State of Israel itself, deny Zionism and the authority of the State of Israel.
So God has never really had anything to do with Zionism and the State of Israel.
The creator of this meme, and all the people who shared it approvingly, would know that if they actually had any knowledge of what Zionism is, apart from the word and their preconceptions. This is a problem, in fact; Zionism has become such a heated term that few people who use it have any knowledge of its history and content. It is just a word to them that means “evil” without context.
And this narrative, that Zionism is a species of religious fanaticism, simply allows them to rearticulate the old antisemitic canard that Jews are irrational, atavistic religious zealots, unable to see reason and unable to action with common human decency.
11 June 2024
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Social media demands performativity; we see this in virtually every region of the environment, from music Facebook groups where everyone has to demonstrate their superior knowledge and virtuosity, to the inevitable reply-guy who is compelled to offer his contrary hot-take on anything anyone posts.
Our politics are performative, where we must be seen with a Palestinian, Ukrainian, Israeli, or whatever flag in our profile pictures, or with images wearing keffiyehs, kippehs, or whatever. I will never display a flag in my profile picture, nor do I own (or wish to own) a keffiyeh, although I recognize that my ongoing commentary is just as performative.
That thought leapt to mind just yesterday, when I read the comment on someone’s share of one of posts where they said (I am paraphrasing): “See! This is a good Jew!” I can assure you that I am not writing these posts to be someone’s “Good Jew;” in fact, the notion that this might have become my value in the market of social media self-commodification comes as a shock. It makes me queasy enough that I really am considering silencing myself in social media. I don’t want to be someone’s token “Good Jew.”
And performative social media politics also demands ritualized political gestures from others as a condition of our respect. Over the last weeks, I have lost count of all the DMs and comments that I have received from people chiding me for NOT displaying the Palestinian flag, or for not posting a selfie wearing a keffiyeh, or for not using the word “genocide” in my posts. Because of these things, I have been reminded, I can’t be taken seriously and, even, I must be soft on Zionism and the State of Israel. (“Typical Jew,” one former Facebook friend put it before I unfriended them.”)
So, when I see the social media mania for harassing celebrities and public figures for not making a public statement in support of Palestine and against the War on Gaza – for failing to enact a suitably performative politics – my skin crawls. How do we know what these people believe or do outside of social media? How do we know that they are not funding WCK and MSF and quietly influencing their professional milieu in the interests of peace. Why do we insist that the only legitimate politics is publicly “taking a stand?”
“Taking a stand” without cost, boycotting without inconvenience, posting performative selfies is, in fact, the easiest, cheapest politics one can do. Let’s not assume that it is the sine qua non of commitment.
During the 1930s and 1940s, the great Italian campionissimo of cycling Gino Bartali worked tirelessly and quietly for the antifascist and anti-Nazi resistance. He would go on long training rides, carrying secret messages and documents stuffed into the frame of his bicycle, riding through Blackshirt and Nazi roadblocks in Tuscany and Umbria. He never spoke of this, and nobody knew until his role was revealed when he was an old man. in 2010, a decade after his death, it was revealed that he had sheltered a Jewish family in his cellar.
Bartali never spoke of this; he never called attention to himself. He was the campionissimo dei campione but I am sure that, today, someone would call him out for not posting a special anti-fascist frame on his profile picture.
10 June 2024
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