Showing posts with label Omri Boehm. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Omri Boehm. Show all posts

Friday, August 20, 2021

  • Friday, August 20, 2021
  • Elder of Ziyon

For decades, we have seen people who use their (real or constructed) Jewish identity to attempt to discredit Zionism.

But some of them hate Israel so much, they pretend to be Zionists in order to discredit Zionism!

From Haaretz:

Is it time for liberal Zionists, in the name of Zionism, to embrace the end of a sovereign Jewish state in Israel and instead seek the establishment of a binational one? Omri Boehm, an Israeli philosopher and associate professor at the New School for Social Research, believes so – making the case in his new book “Haifa Republic: A Democratic Future for Israel,” published this week by the prestigious New York Review Books imprint.

The book is an effort to reconcile Zionism with the diminishing prospects of a two-state solution. For decades, the Zionist left in Israel and its supporters in the Jewish Diaspora focused on the two-state solution as the only way to preserve Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. Israel’s current government, however, has no intention to advance that solution, as Foreign Minister Yair Lapid recently reminded the European Union’s foreign ministers.

Boehm argues in “Haifa Republic” that the two-state solution is now impossible to achieve, and adjures those looking to prevent an apartheid reality on the ground to think outside its confines.

The most significant conclusion he invites readers to recognize is that without a two-state solution, one must consider another option: a binational state.

Unlike most proponents of a single state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, Boehm foregrounds his binational proposal in Zionism. 
We've looked at Omri Boehm before, and his positioning himself as a Zionist now doesn't exactly jive with his previous writings.

In 2016, in the New York Times, Boehm wrote that Zionism is "a political agenda rooted in the denial of liberal politics." He clearly opposed Zionism, saying that having a nation that defines itself as Jewish is a violation of a liberal standard he made up: that liberal countries must have American-style separation of church and state. Otherwise, Boehm asserts, Zionists are hypocrites. 
Opposition to the Palestinians’ “right of return” is a matter of consensus among left and right Zionists because also liberal Zionists insist that Israel has the right to ensure that Jews constitute the ethnic majority in their country. But if you reject Zionism because you reject the double standard, organizations such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee or the Jewish Federations of North America would denounce you as anti-Semitic.
Boehm clearly rejects Zionism because of this false double standard - one that he that he defined. but that has no basis in reality.

Now he suddenly pretends to embrace Zionism - to make a faux-Zionist argument that a Jewish state must be replaced with a "binational" state with a Muslim majority that will limit Jewish rights!

This guy is a philosopher, but his logic consistently falls far short of the intellectual rigor of real philosophy.

Not surprisingly, Boehm is also an "as-a-Jew." He wrote another article where he cherry-picked Biblical sources out of context to assert, bizarrely, that Jews who consider Jerusalem to be a central component of Judaism are in fact akin to idol-worshippers. 

He asserts this insane theory, which couldn't withstand the arguments of a fourth grade cheder student, "as a Jew."

This sham philosopher creates his Jewish persona to argue against Judaism just as he creates a Zionist persona to argue against Zionism. If his arguments had merit, he wouldn't need to resort to redefining himself as a "As-a". The argument from authority (argumentum ab auctoritate) is a basic logical fallacy - and in this case it is argument from false authority, since Boehm is clearly not an authority on either Zionism nor on Judaism but he claims such authority as implicit in his arguments.








Monday, July 30, 2018

Omri Boehm, a philosopher who we have written about before, once again uses the New York Times to advance an anti-Israel argument which would receive a failing grade from any real philosophy class.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims that the new legislation simply “determined in law the founding principle of our existence.” In fact, its primary function is to build a formal foundation for Israel’s annexation of the West Bank — and for a Jewish state eventually to stretch over the whole of Palestine. 
This is an assertion for which sham philosopher Boehm brings no proof. The words of the Basic Law may make such an annexation easier - but one can argue the opposite as well, since such an annexation would cause severe problems to Israel's existence as a Jewish state. In other words, Boehm is resorting to proof by assertion, a logical fallacy that a real philosopher would never do. After all, even the most right wing portion of the Likud coalition is not contemplating annexing the entire West Bank. Boehm simply made this up.

Beyond that, Boehm contradicts himself. He also writes:

In May 1948, there were about 600,000 Jews and some 1.2 million Arabs living within Palestine’s borders. With Jews in the minority, the Jewishness of a democratic Israel could only be ensured if Palestinians had a chance at self-determination. In other words, Israel’s foundational twin pledge (to be both Jewish and democratic) was hypocritical: Arabs would be equal (in rights) so long as Jews were superior (in numbers).
He is saying that the only reason that Israel allowed for the possibility of an Arab state in 1948 was demography - because if not, then the Jews would be in the minority and therefore could not rule democratically. He does not say that the Basic Law contradicts the Declaration of Independence, but now he says that Israel is getting ready to annex the territories - which would put Israel's Jewish majority at risk, just as in 1948. But for some reason, the democracy that he implicitly agrees existed in 1948 and treats cynically for being democratic is now being considered a non-democracy and an excuse for a minority to rule a majority (or a huge minority) by denying the rights of the Arabs. The position is inconsistent - Israel cared to be a Jewish state in 1948 it is because it wanted to exclude the large numbers of Arabs, but now somehow Israel is willing to do the opposite? Boehm doesn't claim that the new law has anything really new ("The new law only exposes an old dirty truth, an unspoken quid pro quo dating back to the creation of modern Israel.")  Israel was a democracy then, it is a democracy now, and the same issues arise, yet Boehm claims that Israel now wants to act in the opposite way to solve the same problem.

Without proof.

But the biggest issue with Boehm's essay, and many other that have been written since the Basic Law passed, is this:
It implies that Israel’s Jewish identity trumps its democratic character.
There is, and always has been, a tension between the concepts of a democratic state and a Jewish state. However, tension does not mean contradiction nor does it mean negation. There is tension between free speech and laws against incitement and hate speech, there is tension between capitalism and tariffs, there is tension between freedom and security. There are lots of competing concepts that will not fit perfectly well together.

Yet for some reason Boehm and others seem to feel that the tension between the idea of a Jewish state and a democratic state are fatal - only one can exist at once. This is nonsense.

No one even bothers to define a "Jewish state" for the purpose of this argument. The state is not being run according to Jewish law, and Judaism is not the official religion of Israel. For a philosopher to claim that a state's Jewish identity trumps its democratic character, he would have to define exactly what he means - but Boehm doesn't. So we cannot really know why he thinks that it is one or the other, why the two concepts of democracy and a "Jewish state" cannot coexist, even with tension.

And the examples he gives of Israel favoring its Jewish character over its democratic character are anecdotal. If they are meant to prove his point from a logical perspective they fail miserably - another reason for an F on this essay. Because that the current Israeli government has done more for the Arab sector than any other more "liberal" Israeli governments have, which directly contradicts the entire thesis of the government passing the law in order to oppress Arabs. Cherry picking anecdotes is not a rigorous proof - it is not proof at all.

In the end, the people who pretend that the Basic Law is anti-democratic are the ones who, like Boehm, are against the very idea of a Jewish state or Zionism altogether to begin with. The law is a convenient hook to hang their hate hat, but by implying that Israel can only be democratic or Jewish, and not both, is just another way to say that a Jewish state should not exist, and that Jews have no right to self-determination in any borders.

Which is in fact an antisemitic position to take.

For all these reasons, a real philosophy professor would fail Boehm's polemic against Israel as being counterfactual, illogical and inconsistent.





We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Sunday, December 24, 2017



A year ago, I critiqued a major essay in the New York Times' philosophy section by Omri Boehm, who teaches at The New School. Using arguments that wouldn't pass a first year logic course, he argued that Zionism was racism.

Now he has moved into critiquing Judaism itself.

In an article in the Los Angeles Review of Books, which was translated and published by the major German newspaper Die Zeit, Boehm argues that thousands of year of Jewish attachment to Jerusalem is really bogus, and any Jew who thinks that Jews should control Jerusalem are tantamount to idolators.

The name of the article is "Jerusalem, Our Golden Calf."

Yes, a lesson in Judaism from a person who hates Judaism.

OK, this should be fun:

[T]he heart of our heart is the Torah, and Jerusalem is not mentioned in it even once. Other municipal centers play in the book significant theological roles: Hebron is strongly associated with Abraham’s figure; Shchem, more familiar today as Nablus, functions as the Promised Land’s gate; and it is in Beit El that Jacob is renamed, very symbolically, as “Israel.” Clearly, Moses has never heard of Jerusalem, and Joseph never dreamt of it in his dreams. As the Torah’s literary theology unfolds, Jerusalem remains conspicuously absent.
Because, perhaps, Jerusalem's role is only as the capital of the Jewish nation that had yet to be born? And its prominence is obvious to anyone who glances at the Hebrew Scriptures outside the Pentateuch? (Not to mention that Jerusalem's spiritual centrality is strongly hinted in the Bible as well, as the place that God will choose to place the Temple.)

Nah, this is not important.

 When the city does gain prominence, its role emerges directly from the Israelites’ demand to become “like all the other nations” — to be ruled by an earthly political authority, rather than directly by God (1 Sam. 8:5). Samuel interprets this request as an idolatrous act of betrayal, and God unequivocally shares the same judgment. Comparing it to the Israelites’ “worshiping other Gods” and “forsaking” him in the desert, God explains to Samuel that the Israelites are  rebelling directly against the deity: “It is not you that they have rejected; it is Me that they have rejected as their king” (1 Sam. 8:7-8). Indeed, alongside the infamous incident with the Golden Calf, the Israelites’ request to be ruled “like the nations” has become one of the Bible’s prime examples of idolatry.
One can argue as to exactly God meant when he used those words. But Boehm, knowing his readers won't bother to look up the verses, purposefully omits what God said immediately afterwards. In the very next verse, God tells Samuel "Now therefore hearken unto their voice; howbeit thou shalt earnestly forewarn them, and shalt declare unto them the manner of the king that shall reign over them."

God and Samuel definitely have a problem with the way the people request a king, but clearly they don' t have a problem with the concept of a king. After all, the Torah mentions that Israel should have a king, explicitly, in Deuteronomy 17 - even using the words that the nation will want to be like the nations around them. Choosing a king is considered one of the commandments of the Torah.

To flatly call this request "idolatry" is absurd, because this means that, according to Boehm, God is instructing the Jews to worship idols.

What does this have to do with Jerusalem? Not much. But the "philosopher" will twist the truth to pretend it is, with more absurd interpretations that fly in the face of normative Judaism:

 It is from this paradigmatic idolatrous moment that Jewish politics would be subsequently centralized in Jerusalem — a king’s earthly capital — and the city’s Temple would be built, consolidating its political-theological sway. These idolatrous origins have left on Jerusalem an enduring stain: an adequately Jewish relation to it can be at most one of ambivalent love, mixed with suspicion. Not one of enthusiastic identification.
 Not surprisingly, Boehm doesn't bring any verses from any prophets that describe this supposed ambivalence or suspicion.

It is common to mention that for 2000 years, Jews have recited Psalms 137 in wedding ceremonies: “If I forget you Jerusalem, my right hand forget its skill, my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.” But this is misleading, because for 2000 years Jews have recited this while rejecting the establishment of Jewish sovereignty over Jerusalem as an abomination. Indeed Jewish law strictly prohibits Jewish rule over Jerusalem before the Messiah’s arrival and the fulfillment of Isaiah’s aforementioned prophecy. In this light, not just Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital — but also Ben Gurion’s declaration of Israel’s independence — stand in sharp contradiction to the Jewish religion.
There is not one source in codified  Jewish law that says that Jewish rule over Jerusalem is prohibited before the Messiah's arrival. Nowhere in Maimonides' Mishneh Torah, nowhere in Shulchan Aruch, nowhere. (There have been some anti-Zionist rabbis who make such an assertion, but there is no basis in Jewish law for it.)

This entire essay is complete garbage. Boehm's entire thesis is literally made up, using cherry-picked Biblical quotes and assertions that have no basis.

And, as we have seen, even Boehm doesn't pretend to have proven that attachment to Jerusalem is akin to idolatry. He makes a false assertion that desiring a king is idolatry, he associates that with Jerusalem without any proof, and voila!  An essay that gets published in prestigious journals based on nothing but hot air.

You cannot call Boehm ignorant. He knows very well he is twisting the Bible and Jewish law in ways that are utterly antithetical to what anyone with any knowledge can see what they say. He knows very well that God told Samuel to listen to the people and establish a kingdom. He didn't stop reading the verses at the point that shows him to be a liar - he just stopped quoting them, because intellectual honesty is exactly what Boehm is not about.

He is a fraud.

However, you can call the Los Angeles Review of Books and Die Zeit ignorant for publishing such blatant lies by a confirmed anti-Zionist  a hater of Judaism, talking about Judaism and Jerusalem without doing the least amount of fact checking.

How does this happen? How can otherwise responsible publications allow something that is literally based on easily-refuted lies to be published? It isn't hard to open up a Bible and read the context of the verses, nor is it difficult to notice the other logical fallacies in Boehm's article.

The answer,  I think, is that here is another example of things that are too good to check. Jews have been wrong about the holiness of Jerusalem for thousands of years! We have a Jewish scholar who says so! And he is a philosopher, which gives him some extra special credibility, because we really don't know much about that field but it sounds really prestigious!

So I don't blame Boehm for widely spreading his anti-Israel and now anti-Jewish hate. That's what he is about. But I do blame periodicals and newspapers to blindly believe his lies without even bothering to call up a local rabbi who might know a thing or two about the Jewish scriptures to save themselves embarrassment.





We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Wednesday, December 21, 2016

The New York Times has a feature called "The Stone" which is supposed to be "a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. "

Its latest installment bashes Zionism. Philosophically, of course.

Omri Boehm,  an assistant professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research, starts off the way any good propagandist does, by defining his terms initially in order to come to his foregone conclusion:
Zionism [is] a political agenda rooted in the denial of liberal politics.
How so?
To appreciate this inherent tension, consider Hillary Clinton’s words from the second presidential debate: “It is important for us as a policy not to say, as Donald has said, we’re going to ban people based on a religion. How do you do that? We are a country founded on religious freedom and liberty.” Here Clinton establishes a minimum standard of liberal decency that few American Jews would be inclined to deny. But she is not the incoming president. Trump’s willingness to reject this standard is now a cause for alarm among Jewish communities, along with those of other American minorities.

Yet insofar as Israel is concerned, every liberal Zionist has not just tolerated the denial of this minimum liberal standard, but avowed this denial as core to their innermost convictions. Whereas liberalism depends on the idea that states must remain neutral on matters of religion and race, Zionism consists in the idea that the State of Israel is not Israeli, but Jewish. As such, the country belongs first and foremost not to its citizens, but to the Jewish people — a group that’s defined by ethnic affiliation or religious conversion.
Boehm, knowing his audience is American, purposefully defines American values as the "minimum standard of liberal decency." Which means that any country that favors one religion or national group over another is, if you buy Boehm's  definition of liberalism, indecent.

Yet Denmark, England, Monaco, Lichtenstein, and many other countries have, to varying degrees, state religions.

Many European nations have citizenship laws that favor descendants of those who originally came from their countries over all others. Germany, Hungary and Italy allow people to become citizens after many generations.

Very few nations pass Boehm's test of the "minimum standard of liberal decency."

Moreover, Israel's laws protecting freedom of religion are no less liberal than those of any other nation. While France bans burkinis and Switzerland bans minarets, Israel does neither.

Worse, Boehm's essay at no point acknowledges that Jews are not just a religion - but a nation. And the Jewish people have the same right to self-determination as any other nation.

Of course there is a tension between Zionism and liberalism, but that doesn't mean that a Zionist state must be by definition illiberal, as Boehm claims. Zionism is not by any means "rooted in the denial of liberal politics." It is an obvious lie. Zionism from the outset recognized the rights of all citizens in the Jewish state.

There is a tension between democracy and liberalism as well  - because people can vote for leaders and laws that are not liberal. There is tension between liberalism and patriotism. There is a lot of tension between classical liberalism that emphasizes liberty above all and the type of big-government liberalism espoused by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. You can find tension between liberalism and the actual practices of every nation on Earth if you bother to look. But tension does not mean that any of these other situations are the antithesis of liberalism.  A real philosopher would know that.

In fact, Boehm does know this, but he creates a false definition of Zionism as illiberal at the outset because he wants to claim that US Jews who support Israel must be betraying their liberalism by definition. And Boehm has an agenda that is more akin to propaganda than education.

Boehm, the supposed philosopher, asserts that Zionists are now flocking to support antisemites and racists and bigots, using a startling lack of logic for a philosopher, pretending that any commonality between some Israelis and European nationalist parties or Christian Zionists is proof of Zionism's inherent illiberalism.   Boehm's simplistic proofs could be summarized as "A member of Israel's ruling coalition says good things about someone whose party's origins originally included antisemitic ideas - therefore Israel itself is embracing antisemitism." His flat statements that today's evangelical Zionists are antisemitic, or that people like Geert Wilders are antisemites, are simply wrong, and yet that is a core part of his argument.

Boehm says:
 Opposition to the Palestinians’ “right of return” is a matter of consensus among left and right Zionists because also liberal Zionists insist that Israel has the right to ensure that Jews constitute the ethnic majority in their country. But if you reject Zionism because you reject the double standard, organizations such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee or the Jewish Federations of North America would denounce you as anti-Semitic.
In plain English, this means that Boehm holds that his concept of liberalism clashes with the Jewish people's right to self-determination. Since Jews aren't a nation, in Boehm's estimation, they only have religious rights, not national rights. This is arguably far more antisemitic than  anything that today's Right (not the alt-right, that Boehm takes pains to conflate with Zionism) espouses.

Yet is it Boehm's example of what he regards as the "original sin" of illiberal Zionism that proves something a little different than he intends:
[It] is Friedman’s own politics — and the politics of the government that he supports — that’s continuous with anti-Semitic principles and collaborates with anti-Semitic politics.
The “original sin” of such alliances may be traced back to 1941, in a letter to high Nazi officials, drafted in 1941 by Avraham Stern, known as Yair, a leading early Zionist fighter and member in the 1930s of the paramilitary group Irgun, and later, the founder of another such group, Lehi. In the letter, Stern proposes to collaborate with “Herr Hitler” on “solving the Jewish question” by achieving a “Jewish free Europe.” The solution can be achieved, Stern continues, only through the “settlement of these masses in the home of the Jewish people, Palestine.” To that end, he suggests collaborate with the German’s “war efforts,” and establish a Jewish state on a “national and totalitarian basis,” which will be “bound by treaty with the German Reich.”

It has been convenient to ignore the existence of this letter, just as it has been convenient to mitigate the conceptual conditions making it possible. But such tendencies must be rejected. They reinforce the same logic by which the letter itself was written: the sanctification of Zionism to the point of tolerating anti-Semitism. 
When this letter was written, Stern's assumption was that Hitler did not want to systematically exterminate the Jews, but wanted to encourage them to leave Europe.

It is truly obscene to describe Stern's desperate effort to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews from the clutches of the Nazis as an inherent Zionist affinity with Nazism. In fact, Stern was known to explicitly compare Hitler to Haman.

But  Boehm is even worse than misrepresenting Stern. Stern's offer to collaborate with Germany to save thousands of Jews was anomalous. From the right to the left, the Zionist movement opposed Nazi Germany from the beginning. Ze'ev Jabotinsky wrote strident anti-German articles. Mainstream Labor Zionists equally abhorred the Nazis. And, of course, the Zionist  Jews of Palestine actually did join the war effort against Germany, and none of them fought for Germany - unlike some other people in the region.

It is instructive that Boehm digs up this little-known episode as the paradigm of Zionism's supposed affinity with anti-semitism.

What do you call a man who generalizes about an entire group of people based on problematic anecdotes about a single member of that group?

You would call him a bigot.

You would certainly not call him liberal.

Boehm doesn't compare Israel's liberalism against that of Western Europe. He doesn't mention the undeniably liberal social policies in Israel. He doesn't mention that Israel, even while being the Jewish state, cannot discriminate against its non-Jewish citizens by law. He doesn't mention that in many ways, the "indecent" Zionist state is more liberal than the US.

Because Boehm is not a liberal. He is a bigot who is using the language of liberalism to attack and insult a specific group of people he finds distasteful, and he justifies his hate after the fact by cherry-picking examples that do not represent the group at all. And his agenda is to shame American Jews into hating the only liberal state in the Middle East and sympathize with Israel's very, very illiberal enemies.

This isn't the first time he has written for the New York Times philosophy column. By sheer coincidence, out of the four columns he has written, all four included anti-Zionist components.

This climactic essay of the series shows that Omri Boehm is projecting his own irrational and pathological hatred of Zionism onto Zionist Jews themselves.

Maybe the New York Times should start a psychology column to evaluate the underlying biases of its columnists. This sort of analysis is needed a lot more than bigotry pretending to be philosophy.




We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

AddToAny

EoZ Book:"Protocols: Exposing Modern Antisemitism"

Printfriendly

EoZTV Podcast

Podcast URL

Subscribe in podnovaSubscribe with FeedlyAdd to netvibes
addtomyyahoo4Subscribe with SubToMe

search eoz

comments

Speaking

translate

E-Book

For $18 donation








Sample Text

EoZ's Most Popular Posts in recent years

Hasbys!

Elder of Ziyon - حـكـيـم صـهـيـون



This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For over 19 years and 40,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.

Donate!

Donate to fight for Israel!

Monthly subscription:
Payment options


One time donation:

subscribe via email

Follow EoZ on Twitter!

Interesting Blogs

Blog Archive