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Liberal Zionism in the Age of Trump
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371
Sea of Galilee, Israel.
PAOLO PELLEGRIN / MAGNUM PHOTOS
December 20, 2016
The Stone
By OMRI BOEHM
For weeks now, Jewish communities across America have been troubled by an
awkward phenomenon. Donald J. Trump, a ruthless politician trafficking in
anti-Semitic tropes, has been elected to become the next president, and he
has appointed as his chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, a prominent figure
of the alt-right, a movement that promotes white nationalism,
anti-Semitism, racism and misogyny. Though Bannon himself has expressed
zero tolerance for such views, his past actions suggest otherwise; as the
executive chairman of Breitbart News for the past four years, he provided
the countrys most powerful media platform for the movement and its
ideologies.
Still, neither the United States most powerful Jewish organizations nor
Israeli leaders have taken a clear stance against the appointment. In fact,
they have embraced it.
Immediately after Trump appointed Bannon, the Zionist Organization of
America prepared to welcome him at its annual gala dinner, where he was to
meet Naftali Bennett, Israels minister of education, and Danny Danon, the
countrys ambassador to the United Nations. (Bannon didnt show up.) Ron
Dermer, Israels ambassador in Washington, publicly announced that he was
looking forward to working with the entire Trump administration, including
Bannon. And Alan Dershowitz, the outspoken Harvard emeritus professor of law
who regularly denounces non-Zionists as anti-Semitic, preferred in this case
to turn not against Bannon, but against his critics. It is not legitimate
to call somebody an anti-Semite because you might disagree with their
politics, he pointed out.
The alliance thats beginning to form between Zionist leadership and
politicians with anti-Semitic tendencies has the power to transform
Jewish-American consciousness for years to come. In the last few decades,
many of Americas Jewish communities have grown accustomed to living in a
political contradiction. On one hand, a large majority of these communities
could rightly take pride in a powerful liberal tradition, stretching back to
such models as Louis Brandeis a defender of social justice and the first
Jew to become a Supreme Court justice or Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who
marched in Selma alongside the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. On the other
hand, the same communities have often identified themselves with Zionism, a
political agenda rooted in the denial of liberal politics.
To appreciate this inherent tension, consider Hillary Clintons words from
the second presidential debate: It is important for us as a policy not to
say, as Donald has said, were 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. Trumps 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 thats defined by ethnic affiliation or
religious conversion.
As long as liberalism was secure back in America and the rejection of
liberalism confined to the Israeli scene, this tension could be mitigated.
But as it spills out into the open in the rapidly changing landscape of
American politics, the double standard is becoming difficult to defend.
That difficulty was apparent earlier this month at an event at Texas A&M
University when Richard Spencer, one of the ideological leaders of the
alt-rights white nationalist agenda which he has called a sort of white
Zionism was publicly challenged by the universitys Hillel Rabbi Matt
Rosenberg, to study with him the Jewish religions radical inclusion and
love. Do you really want radical inclusion into the state of Israel?
Spencer replied. Maybe all of the Middle East can go move into Tel Aviv or
Jerusalem. Would you really want that? Spencer went on to argue that
Israels ethnic-based politics was the reason Jews had a strong, cohesive
identity, and that Spencer himself admired them for it.
The rabbi could not find words to answer, and his silence reverberates
still. It made clear that an argument that does not embrace a double
standard is difficult to come by.
Interactive Feature | Sign Up for the Opinion Today Newsletter Every
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editorial board and contributing writers from around the world.
Right-wing politicians and commentators in the United States have been
putting pressure on this double standard for years. In her 2015 book,
Adios, America, the commentator Ann Coulter wrote:
Palestinians demand a right to return to their pre-1967 homes, but Israel
says, quite correctly, that changing Israels ethnicity would change the
idea of Israel. Well, changing Americas ethnicity changes the idea of
America, too. Show me in a straight line why we cant do what Israel does.
Is Israel special? For some of us, America is special, too.
Coulter gets her dates mixed up. Palestinians in fact do not demand a right
of return to their pre-1967 homes, but to their pre-1948 homes. In other
words, the issue isnt the occupation, which many liberal Zionists agree is
a crime, but Zionism itself. 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. Thats the reason for which
Rabbi Rosenberg could not answer Spencer. 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.
It is important to emphasize that in some crucial respects, the comparison
between the alt-rights white-Christian ethnic politics and the Jewish State
is not just misleading, but sinister. The history of the Jews a tiny
minority that has faced persecutions, pogroms and the Holocaust isnt
analogous to that of white Christians. This is an important qualification,
and the reason for which, when Richard Spencer speaks of the alt-right as a
sort of white Zionism, he is promoting a despicable lie. It must be
possible to sympathize with Israel and show understanding of Zionisms
historical conditions but to refuse any sympathies to the alt-right.
Unfortunately, anti-Zionist critics sometimes fail to be sensitive to this
distinction.
But despite sympathy and solidarity with Israel or better, because of it
any Jew who remains committed to liberalism must insist that nothing in
Jewish history can allow the Jews to violate the rights of other ethnic and
religious minorities, and that nothing in our history suggests that it would
be wise for us to do so.
This is all the more true because by denying liberal principles, Zionism
immediately becomes continuous with rather than contradictory to the
anti-Semitic politics of the sort promoted by the alt-right. The idea that
Israel is the Jews own ethnic state implies that Jews living outside of it
say, in America or in Europe enjoy a merely diasporic existence. That is
another way of saying that they inhabit a country that is not genuinely
their own. Given this logic, it is natural for Zionist and anti-Semitic
politicians to find common ideas and interests. Every American who has been
on a Birthright Israel tour should know that left-leaning Israelis can agree
with Americas alt-right that, ideally, Jews should live in their own
country.
Since this continuity is so natural, it has a long and significant history.
Last April, Heinz-Christian Strache, leader of Austrias far-right Freedom
Party, was embraced in Israel by top members of Benjamin Netanyahus
coalition. Straches party now celebrates mostly anti-Islam and
anti-immigration policies, but it was originally founded by former Austrian
Nazis. Jörg Haider, a previous leader of the party, was infamous for showing
sympathy for some of Hitlers policies. Another case in point is Geert
Wilders, the xenophobic far-right Dutch politician. This month, it was
revealed that Wilderss visits to Israel and his meetings with Israeli
personnel have been so frequent that the Dutch intelligence community
investigated his ties to Israel and their possible influence on his
loyalty.
This phenomenon has been somewhat familiar also in the United States given
the close ties between fundamentalist evangelical Christians whose views
on the Jews part in a larger messianic scheme is flatly anti-Semitic and
the state of Israel. But with Trump, this type of collaboration is
introduced to the heart of American politics.
Nothing demonstrates this alliance better than the appointment of David
Friedman to be the United States ambassador to Israel. Friedman, an ardent
supporter of Israels occupation project, has argued that J Streets liberal
Zionist supporters, who are critical of the occupation, are worse than
Kapos the Jews who collaborated with their Nazi concentration camp
guards. In fact, however, it is Friedmans own politics and the politics
of the government that he supports thats 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 Germans 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. Thats the logic that liberal
American Jews currently have to fight, but it will prove difficult to
uproot. Stern is memorialized in street names in every major Israeli town,
and it is not unreasonable to assume that Yair Netanyahu, the prime
ministers son, whose father celebrated Stern as a mythical model of Zionist
struggle, is called by Sterns nom de guerre.
The comparisons between Trump and Hitler more prevalent in pre-elections
articles than today will hopefully prove entirely exaggerated. But even
so, the following years promise to present American Jewry with a decision
that they have much preferred to avoid. Hold fast to their liberal
tradition, as the only way to secure human, citizen and Jewish rights; or
embrace the principles driving Zionism. In the age of Trump, insisting on
both is likely to prove too difficult to contain.
Omri Boehm is an assistant professor of philosophy at the New School for
Social Research. He is the author of The Binding of Isaac, a Religious
Model of Disobedience and, most recently, Kants Critique of Spinoza.
Now in print: The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments, an
anthology of essays from The Timess philosophy series, edited by Peter
Catapano and Simon Critchley, published by Liveright Books.
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modal-lightboxmodal-lightbox
Sea of Galilee, Israel.
Paolo Pellegrin / Magnum Photos
December 20, 2016
The Stone
By OMRI BOEHM
For weeks now, Jewish communities across America have been troubled by an
awkward phenomenon. Donald J. Trump, a ruthless politician trafficking in
anti-Semitic tropes, has been elected to become the next president, and he
has appointed as his chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, a prominent figure
of the alt-right, a movement that promotes white nationalism,
anti-Semitism, racism and misogyny. Though Bannon himself has expressed
zero tolerance for such views, his past actions suggest otherwise; as the
executive chairman of Breitbart News for the past four years, he provided
the countrys most powerful media platform for the movement and its
ideologies.
Still, neither the United States most powerful Jewish organizations nor
Israeli leaders have taken a clear stance against the appointment. In fact,
they have embraced it.
Immediately after Trump appointed Bannon, the Zionist Organization of
America prepared to welcome him at its annual gala dinner, where he was to
meet Naftali Bennett, Israels minister of education, and Danny Danon, the
countrys ambassador to the United Nations. (Bannon didnt show up.) Ron
Dermer, Israels ambassador in Washington, publicly announced that he was
looking forward to working with the entire Trump administration, including
Bannon. And Alan Dershowitz, the outspoken Harvard emeritus professor of law
who regularly denounces non-Zionists as anti-Semitic, preferred in this case
to turn not against Bannon, but against his critics. It is not legitimate
to call somebody an anti-Semite because you might disagree with their
politics, he pointed out.
The alliance thats beginning to form between Zionist leadership and
politicians with anti-Semitic tendencies has the power to transform
Jewish-American consciousness for years to come. In the last few decades,
many of Americas Jewish communities have grown accustomed to living in a
political contradiction. On one hand, a large majority of these communities
could rightly take pride in a powerful liberal tradition, stretching back to
such models as Louis Brandeis a defender of social justice and the first
Jew to become a Supreme Court justice or Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who
marched in Selma alongside the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. On the other
hand, the same communities have often identified themselves with Zionism, a
political agenda rooted in the denial of liberal politics.
To appreciate this inherent tension, consider Hillary Clintons words from
the second presidential debate: It is important for us as a policy not to
say, as Donald has said, were 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. Trumps 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 thats defined by ethnic affiliation or
religious conversion.
As long as liberalism was secure back in America and the rejection of
liberalism confined to the Israeli scene, this tension could be mitigated.
But as it spills out into the open in the rapidly changing landscape of
American politics, the double standard is becoming difficult to defend.
That difficulty was apparent earlier this month at an event at Texas A&M
University when Richard Spencer, one of the ideological leaders of the
alt-rights white nationalist agenda which he has called a sort of white
Zionism was publicly challenged by the universitys Hillel Rabbi Matt
Rosenberg, to study with him the Jewish religions radical inclusion and
love. Do you really want radical inclusion into the state of Israel?
Spencer replied. Maybe all of the Middle East can go move into Tel Aviv or
Jerusalem. Would you really want that? Spencer went on to argue that
Israels ethnic-based politics was the reason Jews had a strong, cohesive
identity, and that Spencer himself admired them for it.
The rabbi could not find words to answer, and his silence reverberates
still. It made clear that an argument that does not embrace a double
standard is difficult to come by.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/09/08/opinion/100000003889944.embedd
ed.html
Right-wing politicians and commentators in the United States have been
putting pressure on this double standard for years. In her 2015 book,
Adios, America, the commentator Ann Coulter wrote:
Palestinians demand a right to return to their pre-1967 homes, but Israel
says, quite correctly, that changing Israels ethnicity would change the
idea of Israel. Well, changing Americas ethnicity changes the idea of
America, too. Show me in a straight line why we cant do what Israel does.
Is Israel special? For some of us, America is special, too.
Coulter gets her dates mixed up. Palestinians in fact do not demand a right
of return to their pre-1967 homes, but to their pre-1948 homes. In other
words, the issue isnt the occupation, which many liberal Zionists agree is
a crime, but Zionism itself. 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. Thats the reason for which
Rabbi Rosenberg could not answer Spencer. 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.
It is important to emphasize that in some crucial respects, the comparison
between the alt-rights white-Christian ethnic politics and the Jewish State
is not just misleading, but sinister. The history of the Jews a tiny
minority that has faced persecutions, pogroms and the Holocaust isnt
analogous to that of white Christians. This is an important qualification,
and the reason for which, when Richard Spencer speaks of the alt-right as a
sort of white Zionism, he is promoting a despicable lie. It must be
possible to sympathize with Israel and show understanding of Zionisms
historical conditions but to refuse any sympathies to the alt-right.
Unfortunately, anti-Zionist critics sometimes fail to be sensitive to this
distinction.
But despite sympathy and solidarity with Israel or better, because of it
any Jew who remains committed to liberalism must insist that nothing in
Jewish history can allow the Jews to violate the rights of other ethnic and
religious minorities, and that nothing in our history suggests that it would
be wise for us to do so.
This is all the more true because by denying liberal principles, Zionism
immediately becomes continuous with rather than contradictory to the
anti-Semitic politics of the sort promoted by the alt-right. The idea that
Israel is the Jews own ethnic state implies that Jews living outside of it
say, in America or in Europe enjoy a merely diasporic existence. That is
another way of saying that they inhabit a country that is not genuinely
their own. Given this logic, it is natural for Zionist and anti-Semitic
politicians to find common ideas and interests. Every American who has been
on a Birthright Israel tour should know that left-leaning Israelis can agree
with Americas alt-right that, ideally, Jews should live in their own
country.
Since this continuity is so natural, it has a long and significant history.
Last April, Heinz-Christian Strache, leader of Austrias far-right Freedom
Party, was embraced in Israel by top members of Benjamin Netanyahus
coalition. Straches party now celebrates mostly anti-Islam and
anti-immigration policies, but it was originally founded by former Austrian
Nazis. Jörg Haider, a previous leader of the party, was infamous for showing
sympathy for some of Hitlers policies. Another case in point is Geert
Wilders, the xenophobic far-right Dutch politician. This month, it was
revealed that Wilderss visits to Israel and his meetings with Israeli
personnel have been so frequent that the Dutch intelligence community
investigated his ties to Israel and their possible influence on his
loyalty.
This phenomenon has been somewhat familiar also in the United States given
the close ties between fundamentalist evangelical Christians whose views
on the Jews part in a larger messianic scheme is flatly anti-Semitic and
the state of Israel. But with Trump, this type of collaboration is
introduced to the heart of American politics.
Nothing demonstrates this alliance better than the appointment of David
Friedman to be the United States ambassador to Israel. Friedman, an ardent
supporter of Israels occupation project, has argued that J Streets liberal
Zionist supporters, who are critical of the occupation, are worse than
Kapos the Jews who collaborated with their Nazi concentration camp
guards. In fact, however, it is Friedmans own politics and the politics
of the government that he supports thats 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 Germans 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. Thats the logic that liberal
American Jews currently have to fight, but it will prove difficult to
uproot. Stern is memorialized in street names in every major Israeli town,
and it is not unreasonable to assume that Yair Netanyahu, the prime
ministers son, whose father celebrated Stern as a mythical model of Zionist
struggle, is called by Sterns nom de guerre.
The comparisons between Trump and Hitler more prevalent in pre-elections
articles than today will hopefully prove entirely exaggerated. But even
so, the following years promise to present American Jewry with a decision
that they have much preferred to avoid. Hold fast to their liberal
tradition, as the only way to secure human, citizen and Jewish rights; or
embrace the principles driving Zionism. In the age of Trump, insisting on
both is likely to prove too difficult to contain.
Omri Boehm is an assistant professor of philosophy at the New School for
Social Research. He is the author of The Binding of Isaac, a Religious
Model of Disobedience and, most recently, Kants Critique of Spinoza.
Now in print: The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments, an
anthology of essays from The Timess philosophy series, edited by Peter
Catapano and Simon Critchley, published by Liveright Books.
