I am not a Zionist. It feels weird to have to say that – JD Vance-level weird – considering that I am pretty public about my opposition to the State of Israel and contemporary Zionism. Yet, I know that I am always suspect by virtue of the fact that I am Jewish and that I am not generally inclined to just step in line with the usual brand of anti-Zionism.

Still, I can assure you that I would not have been a Zionist in 1897, when the World Zionist Organization was formed. I share today many, if not most, of the objections that the great pacifist and anarchist thinker Rabbi Aaron Samuel Tamares had to Zionism at its inception more than a century ago. Nor would I have been a Zionist in 1927, when Joseph Roth wrote his book The Wandering Jews, an put into words what I most certainly would have believed at the time (and indeed do today):

“Because actually the world is not made up of ‘nations’ and fatherlands that want only to preserve their cultural distinctions, and only if it means not sacrificing a single human life. Fatherlands and nations want much more, or much less: They have vested interests that insist on sacrifices. They set up a series of ‘fronts’ to secure the ‘hinterland’ that is their real objective. Given all the millennial grief of the Jews, they still had one consolation: the fact that they didn’t have such a fatherland. If there even can be such a thing as a just history, surely the Jews will be given great credit for holding onto their common sense in not having had a fatherland at a time when the whole world launched itself into patriotic madness.”

Yet, I can assure you that I would almost certainly have been a Zionist in 1947.

I can almost hear the silence and the sense of betrayal. For most people who support Palestinian autonomy and human rights today, and who oppose the State of Israel’s brutal War on Gaza (including a good many Jews), Zionism means only one thing: evil. For them, it will be as if I have confessed some heinous crime.

In a way, it makes sense; the meanings of Zionism have been flattened into a caricature over the last couple of decades, not least due to the efforts of the propagandists for the State of Israel and their proxies in the Diaspora Jewish community. It also reflects the narrowing of the Israeli political culture since 1977, when it took a hard swing to the right with the ascension of the crypto-fascist former terrorist Menachem Begin and his hard-right Likud Party.

Overnight, the soft-leftish Labor Zionist Mapai party (or Labor, or Alignment, or whatever they called themselves) that had dominated Israeli politics for almost three decades was reduced to a rump that managed to form the government in eight of the last 47 years. The Zionism that has motivated Israeli politics and dominated Israeli opinion for almost a half-century is the descendant of the Revisionist Zionism of Vladimir Jabotinsky and Avraham Stern that wanted all enemies of “the Jewish State,” including other Jews, dead, openly dreamed of enslaving Palestinian Arabs, and revered Mussolini.

It is fair to say that David Ben-Gurion’s Labor Zionism and the Political Zionism of Nathan Birnbaum and Max Nordau had their own issues and were never particularly enamored of the Arab population of Palestine – when they even deigned to acknowledge that anyone actually lived there at all – but even they were never as brutally committed to ethnic cleaning and murder as the Revisionists. Indeed, the purity of the Volksgemeischaft in its Heimat – the animating ideas of 19th and 20th century European tribal nationalism – were always the central goal of Revisionist Zionism, as they are today.

Their project was not merely the creation of a “Jewish State,” but the creation of a “new race” of “Hebrews” who would dominate the Holy Land like Artur de Gobineau’s “natural aristocrats” and leave the degraded, subhuman “Yids” of the Diaspora behind. That’s what made them “revisionists.”

The mere fact that they called themselves revisionists should be an indication that there were all kinds of other Zionisms whose premises they flatly rejected. In addition to Labor Zionism, Political Zionism, and the latter’s offspring General Zionism, there was a whole Zionist bestiary that few people who condemn Zionism today would even recognize.

There was a Cultural Zionism, which sought to rebuild the national traditions of the scattered and oppressed Jewish people by revitalizing our language and culture and restoring a connection to Eretz Zion without necessarily creating a national polity there. There was a Territorial Zionism, which sought to create a self-governing Jewish homeland somewhere, but not necessarily Palestine – Mordecai Manuel Noah thought that Grand Island in Lake Erie would do just fine, and he bought most of the land on the Island to make it happen.

There was even the binationalist Zionism of the Ihud movement, founded during the darkest days of the Shoah, which sought to build a state in Palestine where Jews and Arabs could live together as equals. The philosopher Martin Buber, one of Ihud’s founders and leading lights, saw no contradiction in being a Zionist who imagined, as he wrote, “a land of two peoples.”

Indeed, it has only been in the last few decades, as Likudnik reactionary politics have become hegemonic in the State of Israel, that the possible Zionisms have narrowed down to two. There is the Maximalist Zionism that imagines that the State of Israel is exactly coextensive with the Jewish people – that Israeli and Jew are one and the same, and if one does not blindly serve Jerusalem, one simply is not a Jew. The ideological and geopolitical goal of this Zionism is nothing less than making the State of Israel the center of Jewish life as a rebuilt Third Temple, and the restoration of the Israelite kingdom of David and Solomon which, according to myth, reached to the Euphrates in the north and into Gilead, Ammon, and Aramea hundreds of miles east of the Jordan River.

The other type of contemporary Zionism exists only in the imagination of Diaspora liberals who believe that Israelis, on the whole, share their values, and that the State of Israel is still animated by the hard work of kibbutzniks in bucket hats committed to equality, decency, and peace. This American liberal Zionism has no basis in reality and was intentionally shaped by the State of Israel through decades of JNF pushkes, tree planting, Birthright, “Jerusalem of Gold,” and a concerted propaganda campaign. It exists only to serve the Maximalist Zionism of the State of Israel and is just as noxious.

But none of that existed yet in 1947; the State of Israel did not yet exist as anything more than a possibility, and there were so many directions in which it could go. On the day that the State of Israel declared its independence in 1948, the philosopher Simon Rawidowicz, himself no Zionist, greeted the birth of the new Jewish state by observing that our “mothers and fathers always blessed a child: May he grow up to be a Jew, an honest Jew, a good Jew;’ we should also say the same prayer in the State of Israel: ‘May he grow up to be a Jew.’”

At that time, there was still the possibility that it might.

Also at that time, in the three short years following 1945, there were as many as 1.5 million Holocaust survivors still languishing in refugee camps throughout southern Europe. Another million were homeless vagabonds trying to find the remnants of their families and communities in Poland, Germany, and France – and nobody wanted them.

The United States, constrained by the quotas of the 1924 Immigration Law and the deep-seated antisemitism of senior Truman administration officials didn’t want them. When asked how many Jewish refugees Canada would take, Frederick Blair, the Government head of immigration, said “none is too many,” establishing the tenor of Canadian policy. France wanted the refugees gone, and so did Britain.

… And there was nowhere for them to go. After surviving years of unimaginable horror in the Third Reich’s ghettoes, killing fields, work camps, and death camps, very few had any homes left. In his 1963 memoir The Truce, Primo Levi wrote of his tortuous ten-month journey home through Eastern and Central Europe after his liberation from Auschwitz. He was lucky; he had a home in Turin.

For others, “home” was a place in Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, Lithuania, where their Christian neighbors turned them over to the Nazis for extermination and, often enough, volunteered to serve their new masters as SS guards at the death camps, eager leading Jews to the crematoria. In his book Neighbors, the historian Jan T. Gross documents the massacre of the Jews of Jedwabne, Poland, not by the Nazis, but by their Christian neighbors in 1941. Even the Nazis found their savagery excessive. They could not go home.

The policy of Britain’s 1939 White Paper, enacted to appease Arab leaders following the bloody uprisings of the 1930s, was in effect in 1947. Just as the Holocaust began, and the Jews of Europe needed a place to escape to, Britain prohibited Jewish immigration to Palestine. You can be sure that I would have done everything that I could in those years to aid the Haganah’s efforts to smuggle Jewish refugees into Palestine. And I would have worked tirelessly and advocated – as I do now for peace and Palestinian autonomy and human rights – for the settlement of the millions of unwanted Jews in Palestine.

Where were they to go?

Imposing such a large refugee and immigrant population on Palestine was certainly an injustice. Even today, refugee resettlement and mass immigration are a hardship resisted by communities around the world. And it certainly could have been accomplished more fairly and more peacefully, but the civil authorities of Palestine – the British Mandatory administration – were not interested in humanity, or fairness or peace.

So, when Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist eminence grise who negotiated for international support for an end to the British Mandate and the creation of a “Jewish State,” emerged from a successful meeting with President Harry Truman, he said this: “I am glad that the President has chosen the lesser injustice.” Because leaving millions of Holocaust survivors homeless, or living indefinitely in displaced person camps, or in the British concentration camps in Malta for attempting to break the White Paper blockade, would have been an injustice.

In 1947, creating the State of Israel as the only haven for these people was a bad option – it certainly meant displacing Palestinian Arabs – but it was the best of many bad options, and the future had not yet played out where that decision would lead to the antidemocratic, messianic brutality of the State of Israel today. It was not something that I could have foretold, and it was certainly not what I would have expected. It was still possible, at the moment of its birth, that the State of Israel might grow up to be “a good Jew.”

It did not, and that is a tragedy. It is also why, although I would probably have been a Zionist in 1947, I cannot ever be one now.

16 August 2024

***

I would not have thought, when I started writing this journal ten months ago, that I would have spent so much time writing and thinking about antisemitism. My first thought last October was to push back against the notion, promoted by the State of Israel and its Zionist proxies, that advocating for peace and demanding that the plight of Palestinian people, both in Gaza at this moment in history, and more broadly, was somehow “un-Jewish” and, perversely enough, inhuman.

My thought at the time was that, if I could speak out as a Jew for humanity, justice, and peace – for chesed, tzedek, and shalom – I could really be the kind of Jew that I want to be. And, I hoped, maybe I could contribute an example of a kind of thoughtful, engaged Jewishness and Judaism that would resonate with my landsmanner. Maybe, by being so public, other Jews who felt isolated by the oppressive weight of hegemonic Zionism in our community, might feel a little less alone. Maybe we could use this to think about ways of being Jewish that do not include blind obedience to Zionism and the State of Israel.

I don’t know if I have been successful in any way – I don’t know how one gauges that kind of thing – but I do like to think that I have contributed something to the conversation. And what I hope for the most is that I have been a comfort to some of my fellow Jews in these dreadful, dark times.

Hannah Arendt, a philosopher whose wisdom guides me, wrote in the introduction to Men in Dark Times, that “even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and that such illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time span that was given them on earth – this conviction is the inarticulate background against which these profiles were drawn.”

I am neither a great thinker, nor much of what might be called a “leading light.” The best that I can offer is to kindle some of that “uncertain, flickering, and often weak light” that of which Arendt speaks in the hope that, brought together with the flickering, often brighter lights of others, perhaps even some whom I might inspire, we might light our way together.

Yet, I did not expect to be fighting the battle against the darkness of antisemitism at the same time. I have never believed that righteous and justified criticism of the State of Israel is, in any way, antisemitic. The State of Israel is not all Jews, even if a good many Jews live there, so how could it be? Yet my fight against Zionism and Israeli war and oppression has also become a battle against that old hate.

Opposition to the State of Israel and its War on Gaza did not create antisemitism, as Benjamin Netanyahu, his gang, and his enablers and proxies claim; nor is it motivated by antisemitism, as much as they might want to believe that they are the sum total of the Jewish People. Yet, antisemitism is and has always been there; it is baked into the clay of our culture. It is the ink deep in the palimpsest of Euro-American history that will always seep through and stain the surface. And many people who oppose the State of Israel and Zionism – and many more who support them – also hate Jews. Whatever good they bring to the fight is inevitably tainted by this atavistic hate.

As the atrocities in Gaza draw on to almost a year, as the Palestinian people wait in agony for succor and liberation, as the leaders of our country speak “ceasefire” out one side of their mouths and “business as usual” out there other, we find ourselves in a pit of helpless frustration. We have dug-in for a drawn-out war of attrition against war and oppression and, as we have done that, some of us – even many of us – have begun to mine that layer of hate that underlies so much of our shared, Euro-American cultural history and shoveled it to the top.

So, here I am, confronting that old enemy, clothed in jackboots, white robes and, more often, in the polo shirts and tennis sweaters of the restricted country clubs and the Sunday best of the good Christian neighbors who would rather we did not live on the same block.

This was unexpected.

15 August 2024

***

“The Jews are just bad,” a now-former Facebook friend just posted.[i] “I know what you mean,” said a commenter. “That’s unfair, but you can understand why Palestinians hate Jews,” said another commenter who is on borrowed time on my friends list.

Here’s the thing: Antisemitism is hate, pure and simple, whether the antisemite is a neo-Nazi, a Christian nationalist, a Zionist, an anti-Zionist, or even a Palestinian. While one might understand where Palestinian antisemitism comes from (and it is a thing), for example, that does not excuse it, any more than gender anxiety and the crisis of white masculinity excuses misogyny and homophobia.

One of the things that many people get wrong about antisemitism is that it is not a character flaw, or an example of poor taste; it is an ideology deeply ingrained in Euro-American (Christian) culture. Moreover, opposition to the State of Israel’s War on Gaza did not create antisemitism in the Euro-American world.

Antisemitism did not suddenly emerge fully-grown from the head of Zeus on 7 October 2023 – it has always been there. And, most gentiles, including many, if not most of my gentile friends, hold uninterrogated antisemitic ideas. Antisemitism is not a binary, were all the bad guys are antisemites and all the good guys aren’t – there are many shades of antisemitism (many more than 50) ranging from the unconscious “othering” of Jews (using terms like BC/AD and “the Old Testament,” insisting that we need “accommodations” to enjoy our cultural citizenship) to raging, genocidal antisemitism.

George Orwell and James Baldwin, two writers and thinkers whom I revere, were both antisemites, so was Louis-Ferdinand Celine and Adolph Hitler. But they were different kinds of antisemites. The former mobilize the unconscious antisemitism embedded in our culture but can be asked to interrogate it and move beyond it. For the latter, antisemitism is a part of their identity and worldview.

Yet, many of the former have mobilized their unconscious, uninterrogated, antisemitic beliefs, often (ironically enough) with the aid of Israeli propaganda and Maximalist Zionism, which equates the State of Israel with all Jews and Zionism with Judaism. They have unthinkingly, uncritically and frankly, simplemindedly taken the Zionist bait and swallowed it whole.

Don’t do that. If you feel comfortable enough to publicly say things like “The Jews are just bad,” then I will conclude that you are simply an irredeemable Jew-hater and not worth my time. If you find yourself unconsciously thinking about “those Jews,” then spend some quality time about why you are othering “those Jews,” and where this impulse comes from before you say anything using the word “Jew,” “Jews,” or “Jewish.” If you don’t know where to go with that, send me a PM and ask.

If you believe that antisemitism does not exist, that it does not factor into the political and other decisions of even good people, or that you could not possibly be an antisemite, then you probably are – unconsciously and unthinkingly.

So, think about it.

18 August 2024

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[i]  I unfriend explicit antisemites without explanation or warning.

***

Image: Holocaust survivors at the Displaced Persons Camp on the site of Bergen-Belsen protest the arrest and imprisonment of the SS Exodus passengers and crew in 1947.