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It’s hard to analyze public questions with dispassion and wisdom in today’s brutal cacophony of social media driven public conversations. It’s hard to do that when you bring deeply felt and even personal commitments to the questions at hand, though I seldom write about things I don’t have strong beliefs about. I wanted to share a few thoughts about the current arguments about anti-Semitism and Zionism.
There are a lot of American Jews at this moment who feel like they are seeing a wave of unconcealed anti-Semitism that they haven’t seen in their lifetimes.
Is that really true?
As the Israel-Hamas war grinds forward an emanation of that conflict is playing out in the United States with protests and counter-protests, fights over symbolic public actions, manifestos and public letters. Each in turn spurs a public debate about just what was going on in this or that social media viral video. Social media amplifies and accelerates every cut and thrust. What is anti-Semitic, what is simply protests against a war with harrowing numbers of civilian casualties? We see the same well-worn public debates, or rather yelling matches, about what’s anti-Zionism and what’s anti-Semitism, whether anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.
It may help to start with some definitions and history, their relevance and often irrelevance.
Zionism was a political-ideological movement within the late 19th century and early 20th century Judaism dedicated to the creation of a national community or state (not necessarily the same thing) in Palestine. The whole idea began as quite controversial within Judaism. Its most zealous advocates couldn’t really argue with those who noted what seemed like the absurdity of the whole idea. The man normally considered the founder of political Zionism (the kind focused on building a state), Theodore Herzl, famously said: “If you will it, it is no dream.”
In other words, let’s not let the laughable improbability of the whole idea get in our way.
In a sense though, in the early 21st century, Zionism itself is a misnomer. Zionism was an ideology dedicated to building a Jewish national community or state in Palestine. But there is a Jewish state in Palestine. The questions of desirability and probability that occupied Jews for the better part of a century are now basically moot. It’s there and has been there for 75 years. Roughly half the world’s Jews live in Israel. The great majority of the rest live in the United States. In the US there is a small minority of anti-Zionist Jews, often very visible and vocal. It’s also true that probably the majority of American Jews have been increasingly alienated from the policies of Israel’s more and more right-wing governments. But that country does exist and there’s little doubt that the great majority of American Jews — even the many who don’t spend much time thinking about the country at all — would be highly disturbed if it were to stop existing or if it’s existence came under some decisive threat. This doesn’t require any belief in or acquaintance with the ideology of Zionism, which is almost comically complex and elaborate. It’s just a country that’s there. It’s where half the world’s Jews live.
Here we get to what I think is one of the key elements of the case.
Given what I’ve said above, if anti-Zionism is sufficiently fiery and totalizing in the public square, it can’t help but feel to many Jews like it is bristling with hostility toward Jews. Because who are we actually talking about? Jews. That doesn’t mean that the political opinion is necessarily driven by hostility to Jews as Jews, or the mythologies, metaphors and conspiracy theories of traditional anti-Semitism. That is at least clearly not the case with most of the Jews who are anti-Zionists. But how can these niceties not get lost in the mix in moments of chaos, violence and anger? And not only for Jews feeling threatened but for those on the other side as well.
In recent days we’ve seen numerous Jewish synagogues, restaurants, businesses and cultural centers shuttered over bomb threats, vandalized or covered with anti-Semitic graffiti. In one particularly rich example, vandals spray painted “Free Palestine” on the Sholem Aleichem Cultural Center in the Bronx. This incident requires a bit of acquaintance with the last couple centuries of Jewish history to fully appreciate. Sholem Aleichem (author of the stories which are the basis of Fiddler on the Roof) is primarily known as an exponent of Yiddish literature, though he also advocated for an early variant of cultural Zionism. In other words, while it seems next to impossible that the vandal had any idea of these distinctions, that center is all about Judaism and Jews and not at all about Zionism and Israel, let alone its government’s current policies. But that’s kind of the point. Everything Jewish gets caught up in the flood. The language, cadence and ideational world of anti-Semitism are simply too ready at hand in Western culture and now in many ways in global culture generally not to get swept into the mix when conflicts involving Jews grow this intense.
Is this the fault of people — sometimes themselves Jews — who believe that the founding ideology of Zionism was simply wrong? No. Or not exactly. These distinctions simply get obliterated in the storm. In the day or two after October 7th I turned down an interview with the head of a prominent Jewish organization because I would not be able to talk to that person without noting and discussing my frequently stated belief that they frequently try to police public discussions about Israel as part of their fight against anti-Semitism. And that simply wasn’t a conversation I felt comfortable having at that moment. In the last weeks I’ve realized that my own distinctions are simply obliterated in the heat of the storm.
Which brings us to a related but distinct issue.
In the first hours after Hamas’s massacres in southern Israel on October 7th, a number of voices in the United States, often on campuses or far left organizations, released statements arguing that Israel bore “full responsibility” for the loss of life. Numerous similar responses and statements argued that despite the violence and horror of the killings they were either justified or at least could not be questioned because they constituted “resistance” to “white settler colonialism.” One prominent American racial justice advocate argued that Zionism and Israel itself were projects focused on “expelling people based on their physical proximity to whiteness.” The conflict, this advocate argued, was fundamentally about white supremacy.
These comments have been widely criticized in the United States, not least as anti-Semitic. One NYU law student lost a lucrative job offer over it. But I want to focus on a different aspect of this rhetoric.
You cannot look at the range of inhabitants of Israel and all the Palestinian territories together and think the conflict is fundamentally or consistently about skin color. Many Ashkenazi Jews [i.e. from European backgrounds], in American terms, look white. But more than half of Israel’s Jewish population is descended from Jews from the Arab and Islamic worlds. There are many Palestinians and Israeli Jews who could not be readily identified as one or the other by physical appearance or skin color alone.
Racism has had a life in Israel’s history among Jews from the beginning of the state’s history. Just before and after the country’s founding in 1948, Israel took in and re-settled a massive influx of Jews from the Arab and Muslim worlds. Most were fleeing either formal expulsion or rising harassment and threat in their native countries. The Ashkenazi founders of the country were deeply committed to these people as Jews. They were also very eager to solidify the country’s Jewish majority. But they also saw them as deeply backward. This was less racial than cultural. But it cast a long shadow over Israel’s subsequent history. These Mizrahi Jews were generally relegated to the Israel’s periphery, both literally and figuratively. That eventually broke the founding community’s hold over Israeli politics because these marginalized Mizrahi Jews eventually became stalwarts of what became the Likud party.
Jews from Ethiopia, most of whom arrived in Israel in the 1980s and early 1990s, have also faced racism in Israel — in this case something more accurately described as racism. But that is far from the entirety of the story. Successive Israeli governments also spent vast sums of money and diplomatic capital airlifting roughly one hundred thousand of these Jews from Ethiopia to Israel. The country’s history and origins simply can’t be squared with this cookie-cutter story of white supremacy which is very much an American one.
For many, privileging Jews over non-Jews is a sufficient offense in itself. We certainly see that today in the grinding story of the West Bank where the most feral settlers are continually squatting on Palestinian land, living in Israeli settlements which are themselves at least officially illegal, going on wilding expeditions against Palestinian villages and more. But it is a different story, with its own history and villainies. It’s not a carbon copy of America.
Another example.
Israel’s origins are inextricably tied to the history of colonialism. It began when Palestine was ruled by the Ottoman Empire and then got a critical assist when its administration was taken over by Great Britain after the First World War. Indeed, key aspects of land settlement and defense mirrored European colonialism. But if Zionism was merely a colonialist venture it was that rare colonizing project with no colonizing power behind it. More to the point, Jews believed they were descendants of the land’s original inhabitants, most expelled by various colonizing powers and empires, anywhere from 1,500 to 2,700 years ago. And they were mostly right, though how relevant that was after spans of at least 1,500 years was and is a matter of intense and very legitimate disagreement.
Each question I’ve dipped into here is a matter of endless complexity and controversy. I have no interest or ability to litigate them here. My point in raising them is to note something different. Most of these criticisms and justifications flooded in before Israel even began its retaliatory campaign against Hamas in Gaza. Most projected American ideas about white supremacy or European colonialism more broadly on to a conflict with which they are at best imperfect matches. You could listen to these and think the entire matter was a replay of the US civil rights movement or that Israel was simply another Rhodesia which for whatever reason had managed to last an extra half century beyond its expiration date. These arguments were and are put forward if not to justify the intentional slaughter of 1,400 civilians then at least to explain it as an inevitable result of the fact that Israel should have never come into existence in the first place.
If the victim was never legitimate in the first place, or should never have been there, the whole story turns on its head.
What these all amount to, whatever the particulars of each argument, is a kind of erasure of Jews’ experience as distinct people and one that lived as, at best second, class citizens in the countries of their birth for centuries and millennia. They, or rather we, become a kind of collateral damage in a monochromatic liberationist storyline, often preached in slogans, chants and affirmations, in which our story somehow does not make the cut or gets rendered into a kind of special pleading.
This is its own kind of erasure, being turned into constructs and pawns in other people’s stories, that is historically familiar and from which anti-Semitism of the traditional sort has never been far distant. Adding to the sting for many American Jews is the fact that most imagined that the civil rights struggle in the United States is one they were on the right side of; similarly, for many, Israel’s endless occupation of the 1967 territories was already a matter of frustration and embarrassment. But somehow the slaughter of more than a thousand Israelis, followed by a mix of justification and indifference from what seemed like allies, just put the whole matter in a different light. After a few days the whole thing seemed to be treated as old news.
I see a lot of anti-Semitism in the country at the moment. But it’s not only that. I’m not sure it’s mainly that. It’s as much that Jews are swept up into other people’s storylines, ones not of their own making. But in the thrust and cut of history these distinctions fall away. Suddenly people are looking over their backs because of their surnames or places of worship when they never quite imagined that was possible.