I have Israeli friends. It seems strange to say that, since I seem to be setting up the classic bigot’s apologia: “some of my best friends are Jewish… Or Black… Or Gay… Or whatever.” Yet, I mention this only because many people don’t, and I believe that this is significant at this point in history, when “Israeli” has become a synonym on the left for “baby killer,” “mindless savage,” a “genocidaire.”[i]
“The Israeli” has become as much of a flattened caricature or archetype as “the Arab” or “the Palestinian” has long been in the Israeli imagination. Although Jewish writers like Yosef Hayyim Brenner in the pre-1948 Yishuv often narrated “the Arab” as a kind of “noble savage” or “soul brother,” after 1948, he (always he) was transformed into something different and altogether sinister. For the Israeli novelist S. Yizhar “the Arab” became, according to Yochai Oppenheimer, the abject, the mirror of “the inner conflicts of the Israeli soldier who tells his own story – hence the conspicuous stagnation of the Arab, and his absolute voicelessness.”
In the literary genre that I call Zionist Romance Fiction, this voiceless, often faceless (his features invariably obscured by a keffiyeh) figure is the foil of all things good and decent in the Zionist/Israeli settler psyche. In Leon Uris’s Exodus and Arthur Koestler’s Thieves in the Night, the Arab is the slavering rapist whose existence, as much as his actions, justifies the violence of the Nakba and the creation of the State of Israel. In the 1949 Hollywood film Sword in the Desert, he is a fool of questionable intelligence whose stupidity justifies his displacement. In Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer, the first feature film produced by Israel Motion Picture Studios in 1955, “the Arab” is a grunting, inarticulate, undercover Nazi (explicitly, in this case). If you have ever had occasion to watch the Israeli TV series Fauda, which glorifies Israeli security forces to a thumping electronic beat, you will know that not much has changed.
“The Arab” in literature, cinema, and the popular imagination (and even today in Euro-American popular culture) is a type, indeed an archetype. And they are not a very attractive one at that. Quite apart from the brutal rape of the Danish-Jewish kibbutznik Karen Hansen (which marks the novel’s climax) Uris declares in Exodus that only Jews are motivated by ideals; Arabs are motivated by fanaticism, greed, and vanity. Even the tragic Taha, the only Arab with a voice in the novel, acknowledges Zionist-Israeli moral superiority. Realizing that his love (or lust) for the Sabra Jordana will remain unrequited, he acknowledges “I am a dirty Arab.”[ii]
Uris went so far, in a lengthy denouement that he attributes to a fictional “Summary of the Arab Refugee Situation” presented by his character Barak Ben Canaan to the United Nations, to proclaim that the Palestinian Arabs displaced in the Nakba have nothing to complain about because the “Arabs created the Palestine refugee problem themselves.” Moreover, since “the Arab” has no individual subjectivity apart from the type, he is fungible and interchangeable with any other Arab. Thus, he doesn’t actually need Palestine:
“There is much lush, fertile, and empty land in the seven million square miles of the Arab land,” Uris’s character informs the UN. “The Tigris-Euphrates Valley, one example, has some of the richest unused land in the world. It is inhabited by a handful of Bedouins. This section alone could take not only the half million [displaced Palestinians] but ten million others as well.”
It says much about the power of popular culture that this fictional report has become a shibboleth of both Maximalist Zionism and Israeli statecraft since Exodus was first published in 1958.
Make no mistake, “the Israeli” was also a caricature in the popular imagination (in the Euro-American west, in any case) for most of the last 75 years. Uris’s Ari Ben Canaan, the resolute Irgun gunman Elisha in Elie Wiesel’s Dawn, the heroic youngsters of Sally Watson’s 1957 youth novel To Build a Land, the Marvel superhero Sabra, and Yonatan Netanyahu, the martyr-leader of the 1976 Israeli raid on Entebbe are all of a type. They are the tough-as-nails heroes who get the job done with no fuss or romance (significant in itself for what are basically romantic heroes) and they are all drop-dead gorgeous, besides. Ben Stiller lampooned the caricature in his 2008 film You Don’t Mess with the Zohan, while simultaneously somehow reinforcing it.[iii]
Suffice it to say that You Don’t Mess with the Zohan hasn’t aged very well. Indeed, while the Super Israeli archetype is alive and well in some circles like Diaspora Zionism and among militant white nationalists who celebrate the IDF’s killing skill (ask me about this latter sometime), if not so much among American conservatives (who still think that all Jews, Israelis included, are weak and shifty, but see the State of Israel and Zionism as a means to their Christian nationalist ends), “the Israeli” has come to mean something radically different among American liberals, progressives, and the left generally.
This “Israeli” is a stone-cold villain, a “baby killer,” “mindless savage,” and a “genocidaire.” In some ways, this is a complete inversion of the archetypes which obtained from about 1948 until fairly recently. Reading the memes and shares in my social media feeds, “the Palestinian,” has assumed the characteristics of the heroes of Zionist Romance Fiction: They are stalwart, brave, honorable, and their cause is endowed with righteousness by virtue of their suffering. On the other hand, “the Israeli” is now the craven, hateful, amoral-if-not-immoral embodiment of all that is evil.
Don’t get me wrong, I have no doubt about the righteousness of the Palestinian cause – all communities that constitute themselves as “a people” have a right to self-determination in their own homeland – or the courage of so many Palestinians under the incessant and brutal violence meted out by the State of Israel. What I wonder about are those Gazans who are not stalwart and honorable, the profiteers that emerge in every war, the dishonest, violent, just plain nasty people whom we find in every community. Are they redeemed by the victimization of Gaza? Are the brutal killers of 7 October elevated to the lofty heights of heroes because of the half-century-long oppression of the Occupation?
I ask because the caricature both reifies Palestinians and denies them of their humanity in their particularity. And I find myself thinking about Israelis, most of whom I do not know and have never met, and my Israeli friends.
I am as guilty as anyone of using “Israeli” as a broad category and have, over the last ten months, railed at “Israelis” as if they are a single, vast, undifferentiated mass. Indeed, a couple of weeks ago, I found myself pondering the raid by a right-wing Israeli mob incited by Israeli MKs Zvi Sukkot and Amichay Eliyahu (the latter also a member of the government) on the Sde Teiman prison to “rescue” or at least defend soldiers accused of raping Palestinian detainees. (Image above.) In the wake of the incident some Israeli politicians opined that there might not be anything wrong with torturing and raping Palestinians.
“Who are these people?!” I shouted out loud, and I meant both the soldiers and the mob… and the Israelis broadly who not only tolerated but actively condoned this. In that moment, Israelis were one vast, undifferentiated mass of craven evil in my mind. On reflection, I tried to justify my irrational thought by rationalizing it. I do believe that the Israeli culture is deeply militaristic and committed at some level to violence as both defense and justification. So, I reasoned, I could say that Israelis, as participants in that culture, are complicit in it.
It is a kind of banality of evil argument, the idea that evil is not some disembodied, metaphysical force, or even the moral deficiencies of broken, perverse people, but rather the willingness of a population, community, or group to “go along” with malevolence… For whatever reason. Hannah Arendt theorized the banality of evil as a way to understand how the civilization that produced some of the greatest art, philosophy and, let’s be honest, good in the world, could be capable of an enormity like the Holocaust.
This idea has often been taken for an argument of “collective responsibility;” after all, if the evil of the Holocaust was banal precisely because the vast majority of Germans went along with it, then the Germans are collectively responsible. That resonates with the kind of simpleminded ahistorical thinking promoted by some Holocaust scholars like Daniel Goldhagen and Deborah Lippstadt, who argue that the Holocaust occurred because Germans were (and maybe still are?) simply irredeemably bad. Period.
Not only is this a monumentally bad misreading of Arendt, who demurs to consider “evil” a transcendental, metaphysical force, and wants rather to know why a people who have produced so much that is good could have committed such a crime, but it completely misses the point of the banality of evil. And, in realizing that, I had to reconsider my outburst.
Arendt’s evidence for the banality of evil is that, while most people are willing to go along with it, to tolerate and even celebrate acts of evil like the Nuremberg Laws or the brutalization of prisoners, some people will not. In Eichmann in Jerusalem she wrote of a German soldier named Anton Schmid who saved Jews at the cost of his own life, and there are many other examples, from Dietrich Bonhoeffer to Sophie Scholl and the White Rose, to Hans von Dohnanyi, to any number of unnamed, forgotten people who resisted in some way. The fact that it was possible to make the decision to resist, Arendt writes, is proof that compliance was itself a positive choice. The guilt of the Germans who “went along” was not collective, but particular and individual, and repeated tens of millions of times over.
So it is in the State of Israel. There are dissidents – one need only read Haaretz to see this. Some, like the former IDF officer and pilot Yonatan Shapira, have courageously remained in the State of Israel to make their own moral and political Amidahs against the darkness. So many other friends have chosen yeridah, emigration and exile from the country of their birth, and from their families and friends, rather than participate in the oppression and brutalization of the Palestinian people.
Some of my friends have gone silent in social media no doubt because, while they condemn the actions of their government, they still love their country and, no doubt, because being “the Israeli” who loves their country makes them caricatures of evil in the eyes of so many. But the fact that they are there, that they exist at all, that it is possible for an Israeli to care about justice, peace, and the rights and welfare of Palestinians, both subverts the caricature and condemns those Israelis who choose to go just along with the banality of evil.
That subtlety was lost in my irrational outburst, and I regret it, but also more broadly in the flat, meme-driven politics of this historical moment. Binaries and strategic essentialisms have great value to mobilize opinion and support but, at the end of the day, they offer only conflict rather than resolution. And, in picking the side of light against darkness, we so easily forget that we are neither heroes nor villains by virtue of our identities or membership in this or that community, but by virtue of our choices.
11 August 2024
***
One of the things that nauseates me the most is the way that right-wing Zionists are so eager to condemn antisemitism on the left while not only tolerating but enabling the antisemitism of the right.[iv] David Bernstein’s 2022 book Woke Antisemitism, rushed into a new edition last December to cash in on the 7 October attack, is a fine example of this. It is one of the books that I read so you don’t have to, and its main point is not so much that progressive politics and social justice can be a vehicle for antisemitism (defined by Bernstein as anything that criticizes the State of Israel), but that progressive politics and social justice are antisemitism.
I am sure that this would have come as a surprise to those generations of Jews who worked tirelessly for social justice, like I.F. Stone, Abraham Heschel, and all the rest. Bernstein’s thinking seems to be that, since the State of Israel is premised on naked power, and that it is the embodiment of Judaism, then any opposition to naked power must ergo be antisemitic. It’s an old, painfully regressive and reactionary way of viewing the world as a collection of tribes engaged in existential, zero-sum battles for survival – Hobbes’s bellum omnes contra omnium at the level of national communities – that utterly denies liberal ideas like human rights, the shared dignity of humanity, and universalism.
Thus, according to Bernstein, contemporary antisemitism can only exist on the left and can only be fought by the right. It’s one of those absurd ideological arguments that you can’t really argue with because it basically amounts to “antisemitism bad, left bad, so left antisemitic.” If you buy the initial premise (which Bernstein never really substantiates), then you’ve already paid for the conclusion.
The fact that antisemitism does exist on the right and is on full display in the Christian nationalist/white nationalist alliance that drives both the MAGA movement and American support for the State of Israel and Maximalist Zionism, not to mention its neo-Nazi supporters, hardly seems to matter. Bernstein presents what he probably truly believes is some kind of a slam dunk.
This kind of thinking has gotten traction in recent months, particularly among Zionists in the Diaspora Jewish community because there is in fact a grain of truth to it. While antisemitism does not exist solely or even primarily on the left there is antisemitism on the left. This should not come as a surprise to anyone, since antisemitism has deep roots in Euro-American culture going back millennia. In effect, antisemitism is pervasive on the American left, as well as the American right, not because there is anything particularly antisemitic about progressive politics and social justice (on the contrary, in fact), but because antisemitism is as American as apple pie, baseball, and late-night assignations with furniture.
The problem is that the left is no more inclined to acknowledge antisemitism than the right and typically insists that it is the other side’s problem. Moreover, although criticism of the State of Israel is not – and, really, cannot – be antisemitic in and of itself any more than criticism of Great Britain is inherently anti-Anglican, there are people on the left who hold and express antisemitic ideas and are critics of the State of Israel. Often enough, their legitimate criticism of the State of Israel can become a vehicle for their antisemitism.
This is not something that we like to acknowledge.
7 August 2024
***
In all the chatter around Vice President Kamala Harris’s choice of running mate, one of the themes that keeps coming to the surface is the fact that one potential candidate, Josh Shapiro, is both a Zionist and a one-time “volunteer in the IDF.” There are a great many reasons why the Pennsylvania governor would be a poor choice for the number two spot on a Harris ticket (and he would certainly not be my favorite) but these criticisms are very revealing – of his critics and the political mood on the left, if not really of Shapiro himself.
It is worth disposing of the claim that he served in the IDF. The claim is his own and goes back to an article he wrote in 1993 about the Middle East peace process for the University of Rochester student newspaper when he was 20 years old. It is safe to say that the article was probably the kind of stupid, bombastic nonsense that political science undergrads write for their student newspaper.
In the bio note following the text, young Josh claimed to have “spent five months studying in Israel and volunteered in the Israeli army.” We can be pretty certain that the student editor didn’t bother to check his bona fides – you’d have to wonder how they would have in 1993… On CompuServe or AOL, perhaps? – and it is just the kind of boast that a snot-nosed PoliSci kid would make up to impress people. It might be hard to remember but the IDF was kind of cool thirty years ago. Certainly a lot cooler than it is today.
One must wonder, however, what Shapiro’s claimed military service could have amounted to. Given that he spent at least part of his five months working on a kibbutz and at a fish hatchery, he would have had no time for basic training, let alone actual service. Far from being some Israeli warrior, as 20-year-old Shapiro wanted people to believe thirty years ago, he was just a self-important brat writing nonsense.
As someone who wrote a whole lot of nonsense when I was 20, from political tracts to very, very bad doggerel, I hope none of it ever surfaces… Especially the poems to my girlfriend. (“In this world of lies, my love, only you are truth…” That kind of thing.)
As for Shapiro’s Zionism… Yes. He is some kind of Zionist, although he is the kind who believes (according to the Atlantic) that Benjamin Netanyahu is “one of the worst leaders of all time” and has publicly advocated for Palestinian statehood. Sure, he remains committed to the existence of the State of Israel, and his positions have historically been harder than they are now.
But here’s the thing: He’s an American Jew. And the vast majority of American Jews are Zionists. They grew up in a cultural milieu suffused with images of the blue-and-white, went to summer camps where it was common practice to sing “HaTikvah” (the Israeli national anthem) every day at sunset, recited the Prayer for the Welfare of the State of Israel in shul, and put coins in the JNF pushkes.
Virtually every Diaspora Jew has been, at some point in their lives, some kind of Zionist. I certainly was when I went on the annual March to Jerusalem and thrilled, as a pre-teen, to the 1976 rescue at Entebbe (led, by the way, by Netanyahu’s brother Yonatan). Since 1967, Zionism has been a defining thread of Jewish life in the Diaspora – very much due to the efforts of the State of Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs. It has been everywhere and unavoidable.
The bottom line is that most American Jews have some connection to the State of Israel that can be called Zionism. (I don’t regard myself as a Zionist, but I do not reject the State of Israel’s legitimacy as a state, and I am deeply concerned about the welfare of the Jews who live there. I am pretty sure that, whatever I think of myself, there are a great many people who would denounce me as a Zionist.)
What this means, and what I find so revealing, is that if we argue that Zionists must be disqualified from high public office, then we are saying that most American Jews are disqualified from public office. And that bears some thinking about.
I am not an admirer of Shapiro’s; I do not believe that he would make a good vice president or that he would help a Harris ticket, but not because he is an American Jew, most of whom are Zionists. And this latter fact is something that Americans committed to the pro-Palestinian cause (as I am) are going to have to deal with. Are we really prepared to exclude almost the whole Jewish community from the political debate and public office? Because that is what it really amounts to.
Consider your answer.
5 August 2024
[i] I find this latter particularly interesting because it sounds like the name of a gospel music vocal ensemble from the 1950s. Is that the point, I have to wonder.
[ii] Exodus is not a subtle work of literature – it is no accident that the object of Arab longing is named Jordana.
[iii] I have to digress here as note that the Super Israeli character names are always revealing. The heroes of Exodus are Ari Ben Canaan (the Eagle of Canaan) and Jordana Ben Canaan, and Sabra’s alter ego is Ruth Bat Seraph (Ruth Angel Daughter). They are meant to be types.
[iv] I am willing to entertain the possibility that there are Zionists on the left. In this case, however, I am referring to Zionists who are committed to what we would recognize as reactionary values and goals. In other words, mainstream, Maximalist Zionism.