Monday, December 23, 2024
From Ian:
America's Electoral Moment of Clarity in the Shadow of Israel’s Black Sabbath
America's Electoral Moment of Clarity in the Shadow of Israel’s Black Sabbath
By 2023, anti-Zionism and antisemitism had become synonymous, particularly in academia, the former having become the new “honorable antisemitism.”Footnote14 Though both parties made room for bigots who did not like Jews, the big story that was being missed by too many, notably American Jews, was the growing antisemitic anti-Zionism on the left. One reason was its relative rarity in the US until quite recently: “Up to the tenure of President Barack Obama,” observes the Italian-Israeli journalist Fiamma Nirenstein, “left-leaning American Jews and Democrats were not anti-Israeli like the European left.”Footnote15Part of the Western Left is now a clear and present danger to Jews and the West
The situation worsened with breathtaking rapidity. By 2020, she detected “a new reality in which one is not a Democrat if one does not criticize Israel and will be criticized oneself for not criticizing it.” Psychologically and ideologically unprepared for being ostracized by fellow progressives, most Jews chose inertia. They simply hadn’t seen all this coming.
Nor, indeed, had most Americans. Little did they know that even before October 7, the same neo-Marxist cancer that had infected Western academic institutions and the establishment media also engulfed the publishing industry. Politically incorrect (read: not leftist) and Jewish-authored book proposals were being rejected at a more rapid pace than ever.
Writer, scholar, and publisher Adam Bellow told Tablet’s editor-at-large Liel Leibovitz that his harrowing experiences in mainstream publishing have left him deeply pessimistic.Footnote16 Classics are not reprinted, and potentially brilliant works fail to see the light of day. The loss is incalculable. Since the publishing industry keeps alive the treasures of our common heritage, its atrophy and politicization bode ill for the entire culture.
The fate of democracy, after all, is intertwined with its culture, specifically its books. As the great sociologist Irving Louis Horowitz, Hannah Arendt Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Political Science at Rutgers University and founder of Transaction Publishers in 1962, wrote shortly before his death in 2012: “Publishing flourishes best in a democratic society … . [It] also enhances democracy when decisions are made on the basis of literary merit rather than top-down legislation.” But it is a precarious balance. He worried deeply about “the delicate interaction between publishing and politics.”Footnote17 For when politically motivated censorship creeps into editorial decisions, democracy is in peril.
He knew the history. The son of poor Jewish immigrants from a Russian shtetl growing up in Harlem during the 1930s, the notoriously outspoken Horowitz would have vigorously denounced the unprecedented rise of antisemitism among publishers today. For his part, at Transaction and in his own writings, he was devoted to the preservation of Judaism. He considered it indispensable to civilization, arguing that erasing the first People of the Book from human memory amounts to humanity’s intellectual and spiritual suicide. For while a civilization that cancels the Jews might somehow survive, without liberty it is doomed.
Back in 1969, he had warned that “for the [classical] liberal society, the attitude toward Jews has become a test case of whether liberalism is possible. Insofar as Nazism, Communism, or any totalistic system is unqualifiedly victorious, Judaism will be finished.” So, too, will adherents of other faiths. “Judaism has become, perhaps against its own theological predilections, a cardinal expression of liberalism.”Footnote18
His words resonate even more powerfully today. The Jew, declared Horowitz, has historically been the one who provides “global society with an operational set of liberal values and who in turn fares best in a global society that has a vested, legitimated interest in precisely fostering open-ended values for its own thoroughly non-Jewish reasons.”Footnote19
“Revelation” seems to be a singularly apt word with which to describe what happened on October 7. The biblical root of this English word reflects the Hebrew hitgalut, meaning “to uncover something that was hidden.” In America, this was due either to the wishful thinking that enemies can be appeased if shown goodwill, or to willful ignorance and ideological myopia—often, all of the above. These all-too-human predilections, so prevalent among Western European elites, were also shared by some Israelis—until that fateful day in October. Then November 5, 2024, proved that most Americans also experienced a profound revelation. That may well be the right word to express its spiritual significance. But it is its Greek counterpart, apokalupsis, that captures the full drama. As history has demonstrated, apocalypses tend to have monumental consequences.
Didier Fassin’s orations at Princeton, like Judith Butler’s article ‘The Compass of Mourning’, continue a tradition of the American left that was initiated by Susan Sontag, who in response to accusations that Bin Laden’s terrorists were cowardly, defended their aggression, calling it the consequence of ‘specific American alliances and actions’.[lv] In Sontag’s eyes, America itself was guilty, just as Israel was, according to Butler, and French journalists in Fassin’s perspective. Until recently, it seemed that there were limits to blaming the victim. This all changed though with the left’s reaction to the rapes committed by Palestinians on 7 October.Two former sr. US officials from Biden, Trump admins call for return of hostages in joint op-ed
The first pointer was a photograph of a dead woman, taken the day after the attack on Route 232, a country road near Gaza. The victim was wearing a black dress and she had a charred face.[lvi] Gal Abdush had attended the Nova Festival, and it turned out that she had been raped and then shot. The last message she sent to her family was ‘You don’t understand.’
A two-month investigation by journalists from the New York Times, making use of GPS data from the mobile phones of over 150 people, as well as interviews with victims, therapists and soldiers, revealed that this was not an isolated rape, but ‘part of a broader pattern’.[lvii] A report released by the UN in March stated that ‘there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred during the 7 October attacks in multiple locations across Gaza periphery’, against both women and men, ‘including rape and gang rape,’ and that there was ‘clear and convincing information’ concerning ‘rape and sexualised torture’ of hostages.’[lviii]
How did the left react to these findings? More or less like the Catholic Church did to the Kielce Pogrom of 1946: violence was condemned per se, but without going into specifics. Voices that were usually forthright, such as Human Rights Watch, #MeToo and Amnesty International, chose to remain silent, and it took the UN’s organisation for women’s rights eight months to express its concern.[lix] The film Bearing Witness, which was made by Israelis using clips of drastic scenes, as well as Sheryl Sandberg documentary, [lx] was received with incredulity, and one of the more sensitive journalists who watched it claimed that he had been unnecessarily traumatised. A hundred and forty American feminist scholars, including Angela Davis, an iconic figure during the Vietnam War, spoke out against the manipulation of sexual violence (1800 people from other countries signed this letter too[lxi]), and one of them claimed that the descriptions of the rapes were not trustworthy, as they were extremely fetishistic – as if that was not the case with normal rape. The slogans ‘Believe Women’ and ‘Silence is Violence’ had suddenly ceased to be valid.
Judith Butler reacted to the whole situation like a typical 1950s policeman who had been confronted with claims of rape – she demanded proof. This led Israeli sociologist and feminist Eva Illouz to comment: ‘Judith Butler built their career off of challenging notions of objectivity, essence, and reality. Judith Butler was able to circulate a letter supporting someone accused of harassment without evidence [this concerns Avital Ronell, a professor at New York University, who was suspended after a PhD student accused her of harrassment in 2017[lxii]]. But now, they seem (for the time being) to have changed their mind. (…) They declare that were this evidence provided, they would “deplore” these rapes. The indecency of Butler’s words desecrates the blessed memory of those women who were tortured, raped, shot, or stabbed and disqualify them from being considered a feminist.’[lxiii]
Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, a historian from The New School in New York, theorises that the left’s negation of the rapes is connected with the failure of the previously described anti-discrimination programmes in the US: here too the problem hinges on the unacceptable whiteness of the victims.[lxiv] In the past, sexual violence against white women was a tool used by racists to carry out lynchings, yet today’s defenders of Hamas compare the terrorists[lxv] to Emmett Till, a black 14-year-old who was murdered in 1955 in Mississippi because he whistled at a white married woman.[lxvi] However, the problem is that these two events are fundamentally different, and we, weakened by relativism à la Judith Butler, have ever fewer tools to illuminate this difference. The dehumanisation of an antisemite
Will left-wing antisemitism become a new fashion, which will ultimately enable the progressive elite to fraternise with the masses? It cannot be ruled out, all the more so given that it is supported by a historical mechanism that has led us by the nose for a couple of thousand years. In keeping with the best definition of antisemitism that I know, proposed by David Nirenberg in his book Anti-Judaism (2015), antisemitism does not depend on one or other way of thinking about Jews, but on thinking ‘by means of Jews.’
Since ancient times, various cultures, including religions such as Christianity and Islam, have defined themselves via opposition to how they viewed Judaism. This had nothing to do with what Judaism was, and everything to do with wanting to avoid the evil which it was perceived to be.
In the age of piety, Israel was a blasphemer and an unbeliever. When secularism became fashionable, Jews were loathed as ‘dark reactionaries’. Under capitalism, they were persecuted as communists, and under communism, as capitalist exploiters. Nationalist movements were not indifferent to them either, labelling them cosmopolitans, whereas ebbing nationalism allows Jews to be stigmatised as crazed chauvinists.
We can also observe the functioning of these principles in today’s world. In a time when human rights are so highly valued, Israel has once again been cast as the villain, and we unstintingly strive to convince ourselves that we are on the right side.
Day after day, progressive newspapers – The New York Times, Gazeta Wyborcza or Oko Press – exacerbate the crisis in the Middle East, by contrasting omnipotent Israel with Palestinians who are deprived of agency. Hamas and Hezbollah are not dehumanised by Jews, who, even if they hate them, have to deal with the everyday, life-and-death consequences of their actions – but by those who treat them like non-human factors, like an element, or a natural disaster, things which cannot be asked to take responsibility for themselves.
For left-wing politics today, support for the Palestinian cause has become as important as anti-capitalism, vegetarianism, opposition to coal mining and support for the right to abortion. The left craves a simple way of looking at the world, and it needs some groups which it can hate with impunity, and others which it can bombard with love.
Jews do not need the left, for in spite of what antisemites say about them, they are a collective of anti-victims: following the greatest catastrophe in history, they took advantage of a historical opportunity to build a collective life. That is why we will never forgive them for what we did to them.
Two former senior American officials from both the Trump and Biden administrations wrote a joint op-ed in The Wall Street Journal on Monday that called for the return of the hostages held by Hamas, specifically the seven American citizens held hostage.
Robert C. O'Brien served as national security advisor under President-elect Donald Trump's first administration, and Tom Nides is the former US ambassador to Israel, who served in President Joe Biden's administration.
O'Brien and Nides wrote in the Wall Street Journal, "Excluding 9/11, this [October 7] was the largest single-day attack on American citizens by a foreign terror organization since the 1980s."
They condemned Hamas's use of hostages as bargaining chips and human shields and condemned the murder of Hersh Goldberg-Polin at the hands of Hamas terrorists before the IDF could reach him.
The two officials wrote in the op-ed, "We, like the presidents we served, don't always agree on how to serve them. But we are united in our belief that the seven US hostages still in Gaza, along with the other 93 hostages, must come home now."
They spoke of both Biden and his team's work to make a deal happen and Trump's statements that say there will be "hell to pay" if they are not returned before he returns to office. Senior officials urge hostage deal
Nides and O'Brien also wrote of the timing of a deal in The Wall Street Journal after several of Iran's proxies, including Hezbollah and Hamas, had been weakened, and Assad's regime topped in Syria.
"All parties to these negotiations must know that any agreement must include the immediate release of the American Seven. They aren’t a bargaining chip. They are our fellow citizens with names and family members who await them with unbearable pain. This Hanukkah and Christmas, these families will be forced again to sit at their holiday dinner with an empty chair at the table."
"Hamas and their backers must hear the message loud and clear: Release the Americans in the first phase of the deal. All of them. Release the American Seven and remember their names at your holiday celebrations this week: Edan Alexander, Itay Chen, Sagui Dekel-Chen, Gadi Haggai, Judi Weinstein Haggai, Omer Neutra, and Keith Siegel."
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