Anti-Semitism and Jews Behaving Badly

If, as the Zionists insist, no distinction can be made between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, then we Jews have a terrible problem

I’d much rather be writing about Palestine, and the historic shift towards a new era of struggle which has opened new roads that seemed impossible just months ago. But I don’t think I have anything interesting to add to what I’m learning by reading/listening to Tareq Baconi, Henriette Chacar, Salem Barahmeh, Mariam Barghouti, Noura Erakat, Laila Al-Arian, Mohammad Alsaafin and other young Palestinian voices. I am, though, feeling a compulsion to respond to some red herrings being tossed about by a pro-Israel establishment that has been rattled by Israel finding itself on the wrong side of America’s nascent reckoning with structural racism.

It’s far from coincidental that the Republican Party’s aversion to reckoning with America’s own systemic racism and the ugly side of the U.S. origin story is echoed in the likes of Mike Pompeo declaring anti-Zionism as, by its very nature, anti-Semitism. Those who don’t want to talk about systemic racism here don’t want us to be talking about it in Israel, either. That the right has long sought to use sensitivity to anti-Semitism as grounds to claim impunity for Israel’s human-rights abuses is not news.

Still, I’ve been loathe to center any conversation about recent event in Palestine on a few incidents of anti-Semitism on these shores that coincided with Israel’s bombarding of 2 million Palestinian refugees trapped in the besieged refugee camp. Because, as vile as any act of anti-Semitism is, it can’t be allowed to deflect from the war crimes Israel is committing in Gaza, not to mention East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Nor from the reality of Israeli apartheid, now acknowledged even by the traditionally centrist Human Rights Watch and by Israel’s leading human rights organization, B’Tselem.

As heinous as the handful of violent acts targeting Jews have been, even if perpetrated by people who imagine they’re somehow avenging Palestinians by targeting random Jews in the U.S. or UK, to put Jewish victimhood at the center of the story right now is to ignore and confuse the issue. I was going to avoid saying anything. But then I saw the furor generated by Bernie Sanders’ response to a puerile ‘gotcha’ question by my former TIME colleague John Dickerson, who doesn’t bother to critically consider the proposition on which his question is based:

JOHN DICKERSON: There are a number of liberals who use the word apartheid to describe Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, a number of them liberals in the House who use that language. The executive director of the American Jewish Congress, who handled Jewish outreach for your campaign, has said that that word, Joel Rubin, has said that using that word has increased the level of vitriol that has contributed to this anti-Semitism. Do you think those who- who share your view should not use that kind of language?

SEN. SANDERS: Well, I think we should tone down the rhetoric. I think our goal is very simple. It is to understand that what's going on in Gaza today is unsustainable when you have 70% of the young people unemployed, when people cannot leave the community, when hospitals and wastewater plants have been destroyed. That is unsustainable. And the job of the United States is to bring people together. And that is what we have got to try to do.

The idea that calling out Israel for apartheid is contributing to anti-Semitism is obviously preposterous, an opportunist move by a pro-Israel hack to roll back the recognition of the obvious by a growing number of Democrats. To many of his fans, Bernie’s response seemed to fall short of the principled approach that many have come to expect from him. Calling out Israel’s apartheid system is not, after all, a matter of incitement or rhetoric that can or should be toned down; it’s a sober and thorough assessment by leading human rights organizations, based on international legal standards, of the very nature of Israel’s system. And it describes the lived reality of millions of Palestinians. The inconvenient truth for self-styled liberal supporters of Israel, is that to talk of Israeli apartheid is simply to name the fundamentally racist system at the heart of the matter, and to accept the challenge of replacing that system with one that guarantees freedom, equality, peace and security to all who live within it.

To dim the harsh spotlight on the systemic nature of Israel’s abuses so as not to offend the perpetrators or disrupt the illusions of their allies would be a moral and political failure.

Moreover, honesty behooves us to consider what role Israel itself plays in creating a climate in which some fail to distinguish between Jews and the state that claims to act in our name. That state, after all, insists on erasing any such distinction. If you are against us, this apartheid state tells the world, you are against the Jews. So, if you’re a Palestinian child in Jerusalem or Gaza or anywhere else, and your family is being abused, murdered, dispossessed, expelled, harassed, arrested, beaten or whatever by Israeli security forces or settlers who claim to act in the name of Jews and Judaism — and they’re making clear to you every day that their system’s structural violence against you is based on the fact that you’re not Jewish — if you are that child, how likely are you to distinguish between Jews and Zionism?

If, as the Zionists and their allies would have it, no distinction can be made between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, then we Jews have a terrible problem. The name of that problem is Israel. Because Israel — sorry, Bernie, not just the Netanyahu government, but the state itself — is an apartheid entity, built on massive (and continuing) ethnic cleansing, dispossession and subordination of the indigenous Palestinian population. To the extent that we allow a racist entity that deserves to be the focus of moral outrage from people around the world to be seen to speak and act in our name, we would literally be encouraging anti-Semitism. What do we think will be the consequence of painting the choice to support the Palestinian struggle for survival and freedom as anti-Semitism? Of course, this would be foolish and dangerous, and simply wrong: Israel is an ethno-nationalist state, not a Jewish one.

If you’ve watched Shtisel (see pic at the top) on Netflix, you’ll know that it depicts a community of deeply Jewish, ultra-Orthodox Hasidim at the heart of Jerusalem who leave no doubt that they are fiercely anti-Zionist. It’s a recurring theme in the script. And it’s accurate, because the Shtisel family are part of one of the largest Hasidic factions, the Satmars, who have always rejected Zionism and the very idea of a Jewish state as false messianism, at odds with — rather than in line with — Jewish prophecy. (A view shared to varying extents by many Hasidic factions.) 

Thousands of Satmars live in Israel, but like Palestinians, they refuse to recognize the state. Nor is it simply the Hasidim. My old friend Avrum Burg, a deeply religious Jew and former Speaker of the Knesset, found himself morally compelled 18 years ago to renounce Zionism because it conflicted with his Jewish values.

And I’ve watched Peter Beinart grapple courageously and honestly to reconcile his religious and communal Jewish identity with the obligation to pursue justice for the Palestinians for whom Israel means dispossession and oppression. His recent piece on a Jewish case for a Palestinian right of return is part of a turn from liberal Zionism that has deeply unsettled the pro-Israel Jewish establishment.  

Speaking to my own experience, during my teenage years in South Africa, I had embraced the “socialist Zionism” of Habonim. Jewish survival, I’d been taught, depended on Israel, and on maintaining a Jewish demographic majority there. I was no Likudnik, of course — even as teenagers, we recognized Betar, the youth wing of the Likud movement, as a fascist movement. But we thought we were different, imagining that working the land collectively in our blue Kibbutznik shirts would lead the way to a global socialist utopia — as long as we didn’t allow our bubble to be punctured by even thinking about those erased from that rosy picture; the indigenous Palestinians who were driven from the very same land in a violent campaign of ethnic cleansing. Or if we did think of them at all, to imagine them not as our equals, as people deserving of all of the rights and freedoms we claim for ourselves as Judaism demands, but to consider them only as a dehumanized “demographic/security threat”.

So deeply ingrained and shameless is that basic, default racism that the New York Times wrote that President Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech had “infuriated some Israelis and American backers of Israel because they saw the speech as elevating the Palestinians to equal status”.

The core Zionist goal of an ethnic-Jewish majority was achieved by Israel’s founders only through committing a crime against humanity, though nobody wanted to talk about that.  We thought the Zionist “left” was different, but I eventually discovered that the Nakba was very real, and that it was carried out under the leadership of the Zionist left. Yes, it was the Betarim of the Irgun that had committed the massacre of Deir Yassein, but the massacre at Lydda was the work of the “socialist” Palmach. And the “socialist” Ben Gurion oversaw the engineering the Jewish majority that was Zionism’s core goal by driving out and preventing the return of the Palestinians who’d been the majority population inside what became Israel’s boundaries.

Even in my Zionist teens, my anti-apartheid inclinations made me especially uncomfortable about the fact that while the PLO was close to South Africa’s liberation movement, Israel was the apartheid regime’s closest ally. But there wasn’t the slightest inclination in the Zionist movement of my youth to even try to understand why Palestinians chose to fight. Understanding one’s own behavior through its effects on others is what I understand to be the basic requirement of ethical Judaism, but to do that in Israel’s case literally subverts Zionism. Consider: In 1999, during his successful campaign for prime minister, Ehud Barak was asked in a live TV interview what he’d have done if he’d been born Palestinian. He answered: “If I were a Palestinian of the right age, I would join, at some point, one of the terrorist groups.” In that moment of candor he’d revealed a profound truth — that were Israelis to find themselves in the situation they’d imposed on the Palestinians, they’d have made the same choices. But a settler-colonial mindset, which is how Israel has been built on land that was mostly owned by Palestinian Arabs before 1948, legitimizes the violence through which it prevails by dehumanizing those it seeks to dispossess or subjugate — a process that continues today in various forms all over the territory between the river and the sea.

By the time I turned 19, I realized that my anti-apartheid and socialist beliefs were incompatible with Zionism, and I left Habonim. South Africa, of course, presented me with a different option: The liberation movement led by the ANC offered an alternative I found increasingly compelling — a movement premised on the idea that all South Africans, Black and white, shared a common humanity that was denied by apartheid. White people were called on not simply to reject white domination in principle, but also to join the liberation struggle led by our Black compatriots. And the fact that so many of the white South Africans who had earned places of honor in that struggle were Jewish certainly strengthened its appeal as a vehicle to express even my own particular version of Jewishness. Israel may have been the apartheid regime’s most important friend, but when Nelson Mandela was tried in 1964, the three white men among his co-accused were all Jewish. Dennis Goldberg spent two decades in Pretoria Central prison. The exiled leadership of the ANC included the likes of Joe Slovo, Ruth First, Ronnie Kasrils, Rusty Bernstein, Jack Simons, Ray Alexander and many, many more. The ANC, it became obvious to me at age 19, was my natural political home; even my Jewish home.

The fight to dismantle Israeli apartheid and replace it with a system that guarantees freedom and equality to all who live between the river and the sea should be one in which Israelis who want to express the humanity that Zionism denies and circumscribes feel part of. As the great Aime Cesaire once reminded us, colonialism dehumanizes both the colonized and the colonizer; it is in the anti-colonial struggle that we are able to redeem our humanity.

Not only can we fight anti-Semitism while pursuing Palestinian freedom and justice; fighting for Palestinian freedom and justice is essential if we are to successfully resist anti-Semitism. Failure to combine those struggles, and deferring to the demagogues who demand silence in the face of Israel’s racist violence in the hope that this will somehow ward off anti-Semitism, will, in fact, have the reverse effect: A world waking up to the legacy of centuries of settler colonialism and its racist dehumanization of the lives of Black and indigenous people across the continents is simply not going to accept Israel’s apartheid system. And if they’re convinced (by Israel and its advocates) to accept the lie that standing up for Palestinian equality and against Israeli violence makes them anti-Semites, that will simply weaken the struggle against anti-Semitism.