Monday, May 13, 2024
From Ian:
Jonathan Tobin: After 76 years of Israeli independence, Jews must still be Zionists
Jonathan Tobin: After 76 years of Israeli independence, Jews must still be Zionists
A new debate about ZionismThe Jewish Oyster Problem
The antisemitism of the Soviet Union and the reality of the Nazi Holocaust destroyed the illusions of the Socialists (or at least should have), as well as convinced Western Jews that there was no alternative to a Jewish state. And once Israel came into existence, those who feared it for secular or religious reasons generally made their peace with it.
Today, there is a new anti-Zionist movement among the Jews that gets disproportionate coverage in the corporate press, yet represents only a minority of non-Israeli Jews. Unlike past opponents of Zionism, it doesn’t oppose Israel’s existence because they have a better idea to protect Jews. Rather, these Jews who belong to groups like IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace exalt Jewish powerlessness and twist Jewish beliefs into a creed that believes Jews alone of the peoples of the world ought not to have the right of self-determination or the power to defend themselves.
It is no accident that they also traffic in antisemitic blood libels, such as the claim that Israel trains American police to murder African-Americans. As the reaction to Oct. 7 has shown, these Jewish anti-Zionists may be loud and have strong support from the mainstream media, but they have nothing to do with normative Jewish values and represent only themselves.
Yet the battle over Zionism isn’t merely this faint echo of past Jewish squabbles. Today, anti-Zionism is a main plank of leftist activists, whether they are environmental extremists like Thunberg (who want the world to give up air travel, the right to own cars, as well as to eat meat or cheese); Black Lives Matter activists in the United States who smear America as an irredeemably racist nation; or the LGBT+ community that sees Palestinians as fellow victims, even though unlike Israel but in most Arab countries, they would be in danger because of their lifestyle. Ze'ev JabotinskyRevisionist Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky (bottom right) meeting with Beitar leaders in Warsaw, circa 1939. Future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin is on the left in the first row. Source: National Photo Collection of Israel
Another variant of antisemitism
They claim to speak for human rights but have little interest in any conflict or alleged humanitarian crisis unless it can be blamed on the Jews. Like intellectuals of the early 20th century who blazed the trail for the acceptance of Nazism, they claim to be moved by the suffering of victims of war but have a curious blind spot when those victims are Jews. The plight of the hostages or those who were slaughtered in the orgy of rape, murder, torture, kidnapping and wanton destruction committed by Hamas and Palestinians on Oct. 7 move them not at all.
Their nurturing of Palestinian fantasies of Israel’s destruction is helping to doom the supposed objects of their sympathy to a future of more war, terrorism and destruction. The fact that their reaction to Hamas barbarism was not merely to oppose Israel’s justified war to eliminate a genocidal terrorist group, but to vow to “crush Zionism” and erase it from “the river to the sea,” remains proof that it is not so much an intersectional human-rights cause as it is just a new variant on the same old tropes of antisemitism. They aren’t merely criticizing an Israeli government’s policies or actions. Their problem is with the fact that there is one Jewish state on the planet.
They seem to believe the Jews are the only people on the planet whose right to self-determination deserves no respect. While they reject accusations of antisemitism, what else can you call those who discriminate against Jews and judge them by a standard they would never apply to any other people?
Jew-haters are now recirculating tropes that Soviet propagandists first issued a half-century ago to label Zionism as racism. The only rational reaction to this is for Israelis and Jews wherever they live to embrace not just the label of Zionist but the ideas behind it. Zionism recognizes age-old ties between a people and their land, and at its core is a fundamental expression of Jewish rights.
Zionism has created a nation that for all of its flaws and frailties is a unique experiment in the ingathering of a people in a democratic state. In the last 76 years, Zionist Jews have worked miracles not just in surviving wars waged by enemies bent on their elimination but also in a society capable of enormous economic, technological and cultural achievements. It should be celebrated—not reviled—and people of good will, whether Jewish or not, should know that by embracing it, they are identifying themselves with among the most just causes and most amazing stories in modern history.
Israelis are still mourning their dead since Oct. 7 while they battle Hamas and work for the safe return of the remaining hostages held captive in Gaza. But they are also celebrating a nation that needs no permission from any foreign power to exist and, false accusations of antisemites about “genocide” notwithstanding, whose conduct under excruciating circumstances has been exemplary by any standard.
Zionism isn’t dead. Nor will it be defeated by Hamas and its leftist enablers in the streets of Malmö or on North American college campuses. It is very much alive, and on Yom Ha’atzmaut—Israel’s 76th Independence Day—every Jew with a conscience and sense of self-respect should be proudly calling themselves Zionists.
The one who best answered Steiner was Isaiah Berlin, who, in a witty article called “The Cost of Curing an Oyster,” compared the exile of the Jews to a disease. “A people condemned to be a minority everywhere, dependent on the goodwill, toleration or sheer unawareness of the majority, but made aware of its insecure condition, of its constant need to please, or at least not to displease … cannot achieve a fully normal development either individually or collectively.” Exile created distortions of personality: self-insulation, anxiety, aggressive defensiveness. True, the peculiar position of the Jews as a minority on the margins of society resulted in works of genius, like Kafka, Freud, or Heine. When your life depends on understanding the whims of the majority, you develop a clear and critical view of that majority, an outsider’s perspective. But that deeper insight possessed by gifted individuals was “purchased by untold suffering of entire communities” and “could not be accepted as natural or unavoidable.” Exile, in this sense, subjected Jews to mental illness and, as mental illness sometimes does, produced works of genius. But at what cost?The Betrayal of Israel by the US Administration Is Almost Complete
“Hundreds of thousands of oysters,” wrote Berlin, “suffer from the disease that occasionally generates a pearl. But supposing an oyster says to you, ‘I wish to live an ordinary, decent, contented, healthy, oysterish life; even though I may not produce a pearl. I’m prepared to sacrifice this possibility for a life free of social disease; a life in which I need not look over my shoulder to see how I appear to others.’”
Maybe Imre Kertész, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, synthesized better the bargain that Jews needed to make. During a visit to Israel, a foreign journalist, aware of Kertész’s humanist and pacifist leanings, asked him, “How does it feel for you to see a Star of David on a tank?” “Much better than seeing it on my concentration camp uniform,” he answered.
The exercise of power is messy. Always. Not a single national liberation movement in the world was neat and blameless. Thinkers like Steiner don’t deny that. In fact, they admit to the dirty nature of statehood and consider that the only way for Jews to stay “pure” is to forego political power and submit to the rule of others. This is different than universalist utopians. Anti-Zionists who long for powerlessness don’t necessarily harbor a Lennonesque dream of “no countries and no religion.” Pointedly, they see nothing wrong in Palestinians exercising political power in the context of a Palestinian national state and even oppressing Jews—or killing them. It’s Jewish power that bothers them; it’s Jewish sovereignty that they disdain and rage against for exposing their own pretensions to moral superiority as fallacious.
That their supposed moral excellence is acquired by trading on the bodies of dead Jews doesn’t bother them, since they’ve established that playing the victim is by definition a morally superior posture. Jews need to be oppressed to produce their best.
Under the layers of intellectual distortion and self-righteousness, this pretension of moral superiority is, paradoxically, morally rotten. The carefully crafted self-image of privileged Jewish academicians, who observe the world from the heights of their tenured positions, seems ruined by Jews who refuse to be at the mercy of others. “How dare those plebeian oysters deny me the right to be a pearl? Don’t they know that they must die so that I can be an ethical beacon to the world?”
Those who criticize Israel for pushing “Jewish supremacy” are, in fact, advocating for another type of Jewish supremacy, probably more racist and self-righteous than the former. But more important than the question of whether being a Jewish oyster with or without a pearl is better, the argument that powerlessness is necessary for “the Jewish genius” to develop is factually false.
Yes, the diasporic persecution produced Freud and Kafka, but Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel produced the Bible and the Mishnah. Israeli Jews win more Nobel Prizes and gain more patents than French Jews or Russian Jews. The truth is that a people, any people, can develop its greatness only by being the master of its own destiny. True, you mess up bigger and more noticeably if you run an economy, an army, and a police force than if you run a corner store or a physician’s office. But avoiding power to avoid the problems of power is like starving to death to avoid obesity.
The anti-Zionism of powerlessness is deeply cowardly. It avoids the real challenges of power, its messiness, its insolvable moral dilemmas, and its endless shades of gray. Diasporism is a facile escape, for which someone else is expected to pay the tab. Easier to sit in judgment in an air-conditioned room at Columbia University writing about the virtues of powerlessness than to work hard to make prophetic visions a reality.
Zionism’s Israel presents a historical opportunity for Jews to deploy the values we developed in the Diaspora and move them from the abstract realm of books to the arena of real life. It may not be so pristine and pure as Steiner wanted, but that’s okay. Our values were never meant to be theoretical. They were meant as a practical guide to life in the here and now, not in the hereafter.
Refusing the opportunity and rejecting the challenge is craven. Doing so while putting other Jews at risk so that our unearned sense of our own superiority can remain intact is a morally criminal act.
The Biden administration does not appear ever to have issued the slightest threat, warning or ultimatum to the authors of the war: Hamas, Iran or Qatar.
US Senator Chuck Schumer, after declaring himself a friend and defender of Israel, suggested overthrowing Israel's democratically elected prime minister, and -- as if Israel, and not America, were within his jurisdiction -- called for new elections.
Meanwhile in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, where anti-government demonstrations began again, one of their leaders, Ami Dror, revealed on social media that the demonstrations and riots are part of a plan by the Biden administration to bring down the Netanyahu government.... The US State Department has, for more than a year, been providing financial support for protests hostile to the Netanyahu government.
Biden, it seems, is frustrated that Netanyahu is objecting to humanitarian aid -- which basically resupplies Hamas. Hamas, Israel's argument goes, released hostages only after unremitting pressure. Relieving that pressure by backing Hamas makes the probability of seeing any more hostages released less likely. Biden is also reportedly frustrated that Netanyahu, for some inexplicable reason, objects to the creation of a terrorist Palestinian state next door.
One cannot leave aside that the Biden administration, through ignoring sanctions on Iranian oil, has allowed the Iran's regime to earn up to an estimated $100 billion... Without those funds, the massacre of October 7 would not have been possible, Hezbollah would not have been able to fire so many missiles into Israel from Lebanon, and Iran itself would not have been able to launch more than 300 drones and ballistic missiles at Israel in April, and to attack US troops more than 150 times on, just since October 7, 2023 -- evidently in an attempt to drive the US out of the Middle East.
The Biden administration, it seems, does not want a definitive end of the conflict -- as with Ukraine as well -- especially if the end would entail the defeat of Hamas or Russia. Hamas is a protégé of Qatar and Iran, the world's two leading state sponsors of terrorism. The Biden administration has been rewarding them -- Iran with money and Qatar with renewing its protection by Al-Udeid Air Base, headquarters of America's CENTCOM, as well as controlling the new terror pier the US has built in Gaza At the same time, the Biden administration is falsely accusing Israel of violating human rights.
The Biden administration may even be complicit in the arrest warrants for Netanyahu and other Israeli officials that might be issued by the International Criminal Court – possibly as a way to dispense with him.
The mullahs are, in effect, using their proxies – Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and so on -- as their "human shields".
The Biden administration has placed the existence of Israel in danger to protect Biden from the dangerous voters of Michigan.
