America's Israel
Canva Pro should require a rigorous background check
Hello all, it’s been a tough one. As a Jew, I would describe this past month as a culmination of all my oldest fears, all my regrets, a whole host of big feelings that render me unable to move, unable to log off, unable to fall asleep at night and rouse myself in the morning.
I wrote a bit about Israel a year ago in a newsletter titled Kanye Is The Least Of Our Problems, in which I discussed the relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism through the relationship between Zionism and semitism, and a lot of that still rings true to me. In the newsletter, I said the following:
The conversation on Palestine is certainly one to be had, and we want to be a part of it, but not as a means to defend ourselves against baseless harassment.
Well, I’m here now to keep that promise, to have that conversation.
Heart of the Issue:
The Israel Inside of Me
I’ve been seeking solace lately in the Jewish community in my life. I’m not sure exactly what was the final straw, it might have been an infographic circulating that boldly claimed Jews were responsible for 9/11, but I have stopped speaking about the issue with non-Jews, a practice I’ve been referring to fondly and a bit bitterly as the Goycott.
It’s a sentiment I’ve heard echoed throughout the community, that in the midst of a great tragedy, a war, deaths of loved ones, that discourse with people online treating this like the Superbowl, like for Israel, retweet for Palestine!!, is not actually something that can be borne.
Such is the tao of Judaism— we are a people destined to never forget, in a world that forgets frequently and with impunity.
The tragic irony, of course, is that this memory is often selective when it comes to the actions of Israel unto the Palestinian people.
I’ve had to reexamine my relationship to Israel recently. Before, I argued, as many argue today, that the relationship between Zionism and Semitism is more correlative than it is causative, meaning that to be a Zionist is no more a fact of Jewish life than if one chooses to keep kosher.
I think I was wrong there, I think my own blindspot was in thinking that I was totally neutral on the idea of an Israel, and that I didn’t see the relationship between an Israel and the Israel.
A lot of statements, my own included lately, have begun with As A ____; as a Jew, as a Muslim, as a Palestinian, as a Leftist, as a Woman, as a Human Being, as Someone Who Cares About This or That.
A friend of mine sent me an essay published in 1980 by Ronald Aronson called Never Again? Zionism and the Holocaust, one that I think says it better than I might be able to.
“As a Jew,” “As a Marxist” —such moral and political double-shuffling is not the way one would prefer to talk. But the desired consistency of a single voice eludes me if I write and speak honestly today. [] I admit this neither with pride nor shame, merely as a fact which emphasizes the internal tension and apparent moral inconsistency Israel’s existence imposes on so many.
It’s the as a Jew part that confounds me, leads me to question myself, it is the fundamental wrench in the way I view the conflict. I’ve often wondered in what ways the order of things that make us who we are changes how we are. Frankly, at least chronologically, I’m certainly a Jew before any political affiliation, I think I may be a Jew before I’m a woman. I was born Jewish, born into Judaism, born into the love of other Jews, and only recognized womanhood as a state of being at that young age when we gradually become conscious of the things that make us different from each other. I suppose the only thing that leaves me to be before being a Jew is being a human being.
My humanity provides me little clarity. My humanity yearns for the cessation of any violence anywhere. Humanity does not choose winners and losers. Humanity, perhaps naively, wants for everyone to know peace and happiness and a full life.
I think we often mistake a sense of humanity for a sense of morality. Morally speaking, I am acutely aware of the fact that this is not an even conflict, that Palestinians are dying in vastly greater numbers, that they are incapable of fighting the incredible military might of the state of Israel, that they are at the mercy of an uncaring government and in many ways an uncaring world.
Morality is not the fleshy mass inside us that awakens when we take our first breath, morality is not one of the many things in the list of what we are, morality is the sum of those parts. My sense of morality is a complex equation, it’s humanity + Judaism + leftism + womanhood + whiteness + class consciousness + historical understanding + circumstance + love and friendship + the worst things ever done to me + the worst things I’ve ever done + the kindness of others + all the things I know to be true + the many things I don’t know and will never know + the image in my mind of my mother and father and sister + the trust I have in others + my worst fears + my fondest memories + my favorite books and movies + snow in the wintertime + all the things I’ve forgotten and all the things I’ll never forget.
The last time I spoke to you about Israel, I quoted Foucault, I alluded to Kafka’s The Burrow, I spoke of trans-generational trauma and of the objective history of the Middle East. I spoke of Zionism as a political ideology, I spoke of Exodus and Nazism and of the objective failings of the Israeli government and I confidently stated, with statistics to back me up, that American Jews are far removed from the concept of Israel.
I think, in some ways, I was wrong. I think I was gerrymandering my own sense of morality to avoid having to think about the ways in which Israel is inside of me. In all honesty, I am afraid. When the news struck of the Hamas attack, my first gut reaction was one of grief for my people. I hadn’t truly considered, on a visceral level, what my own hopes for the liberation of Palestine actually meant in terms of both the tangible and psychological state of a people who are, at the end of the day, my own.
With that confession, I’d like to start examining some of the discourse.
If you’ve been online or consuming media recently, you’ve most definitely encountered a breadth of opinions, often diametrically opposed, all trying to argue that this is not a complex issue, that a pithy tweet or infographic is going to give you everything you need to understand what’s happening.
I’d like to begin by positing that this is untrue— if only for the fact that regardless of your own feeling on the matter, smart and empathetic people in your life who you usually trust to be ideologically lucid on every other issue are coming up with different answers from each other and/or are torn themselves.
For many, this is the first time something like this has happened, we usually, for better or for worse, find ourselves in the relative comfort of echo chambers, and over the course of a day or two, a prevailing narrative emerges.
I’ll tell you now that no such narrative will illuminate itself in this, solely for the fact that the discourse on both sides (oh, how I loathe to be a ‘both sides’ person) requires you to ignore fundamental pieces of the puzzle.
I am incapable of delivering to you a credible and nuanced understanding from the perspective of a Palestinian, so please, I beg of you, there’s much more to read on the matter there, but I can perhaps elucidate why your Jewish friends are feeling the way they are. And trust me, they are feeling.
On decrying or justifying the actions of Hamas
The Israeli narrative of this attack will paint it as an unprompted act of terroristic violence against Jews, and this is untrue. It ignores the 70 or so years of prompting, the large-scale violence against Palestinians, the casual violence of Israeli rhetoric, the fact that the life expectancy for those living in Gaza and the West Bank is dramatically lower than those in Israeli strongholds, that the Palestinian infant mortality rate is 4-5 times higher than for Israelis, the fact that there is no legitimate military recourse for a subjugated people with no real military force to speak of.
Many Palestinian Liberationist narratives will paint it as the opposite— freedom fighters logically seeking justice and liberation from an apartheid state. They will paint the actions of Hamas as justified, and will tell you it’s a colonialist, white supremacist ideology that leads you to question how that liberation is earned.
The truth is, Hamas do not operate with the moral and political clarity of the movements these rhetors will point you toward. Very simply, the flagrant acts of cruelty and apparent sadism against civilians does not freedom make. A casual glance at the founding charter of Hamas, even after its 2017 pseudo-update, finds it rife with profound antisemitic claims, including some of the oldest and most prevalent; that Jews are responsible for all the world’s ills and are in control of virtually all international organizations and governments. That liberation means the removal or obliteration of Jews.
I’m not going to get into the whole and storied history of the relationship between Israel and Hamas, it’s interesting research to do on your own, and I’m sure there will be varied opinions among my readers about the above claim of antisemitism— something that, as is often the case, is complicated to explain and hard to prove. However, one cannot deny the antisemitism at play in the language and demonstrative actions of protests around the world, and of those online. I suppose what I’m trying to get at here is that we find ourselves in an undeniable gray area, one that is actively trying to be dismissed.
It brings me to one of the fundamental misunderstandings that has been plaguing discourse— that Palestinians must or must not decry the attack committed by Hamas.
A very good point has been made by Palestinians, that forcing them to decry this violence every time they want to talk about the violence done unto them is a double standard certainly not enforced upon Israelis. It has been likened to the bizarre insistence by the mainstream media for members of groups like Black Lives Matter to condemn looting as though that has anything to do with the ideology of their movement or is somehow equal to the historic and current state-sponsored violence committed unto them. It seems an effort to undermine any productive conversation.
That being said, in the big picture, in our global historical understanding of violence and power structures, a massacre of Jewish people understandably reads as very different than most action against an oppressive force. Historically, attempting to justify indiscriminate violence against Jews reaps dire consequences. The purposefully careless rhetoric often applies both ways. “Be on the right side of history” comes to mind. Refusal to acknowledge the mountains of nuance behind these rallying cries does absolutely nothing to help us understand each other.
This brings me to perhaps the most complicated aspect of both arguments, which is the role of Judaism in Israel, and what precisely Judaism is.
On the whiteness of Jews
I suppose that for American Jews in particular, the distinct relationship between Judaism as a religious and cultural identity and as an ethnic identity is more easily understood than it is in most other places in the world. Americans, on a whole, can understand ethnicity and its relationship to a sense of place rather uniquely, because unless one is Native American, (which is a relevant conversation unto itself in terms of Palestine) American is not your ethnicity. You are Italian American, or Irish American, or Chinese American, or Korean American, or Nigerian American, or Egyptian American, to name a few.
In broader strokes, we understand race through a similar lens of emplacement and displacement. ‘African American’ here is synonymous with a racial identity, and largely exists due to the fact that any of those specific ethnic identities were stripped from Black people when their ancestors were kidnapped from their homes and forced into slavery. With that violent displacement, their familial and ancestral identities were erased. Thusly, a new identity was born, one that refers to race, one that ties race to cultural and ethnic placelessness. While, in a contemporary and very surface level understanding, ‘African American’ refers mostly to the color of one’s skin, its subtext is one of racial and ethnic power structures, in that Blackness exists as a means of distinction and otherness from Whiteness.
In that vein, I suppose whiteness is synonymous with structural power, and with the violence of that structural power. Whiteness is largely the invention of white people as a means to maintain tangible power and to justify the violence against and subjugation of others. I’ve seen whiteness debated through the lens of how flimsy it is— people arguing that whiteness didn’t always apply to Italians or to the Irish, or, in this instance, Jews, which I think ignores the fact that in contemporary American society, ethnicity and race operate much further apart from one another than in places with a more distinct and singular pervasive ethnic identity. What I mean is that I, as a Jew, benefit from whiteness as much as any other white person.
On the other hand, Judaism as an ethnic identity is similarly complex to an American understanding of race. Ethnicity, implicitly, often refers to a sense of place. Judaism, as an ethnicity, is, however, due to the intervention of time and history, placeless. I think a lot of Jews understand the fact that they are genetically and ethnically Jewish as meaning either a) Jews have been so profoundly culturally homeless for so many thousands of years that we have no real place in the world, or as b) that place is Israel.
It’s what makes the argument of ‘go back to where you came from’ a hard sell. Likening it to the French in Algeria or the British in India ignores the fact that even the words ‘french’ and ‘british’ imply that there is a place to go back to.
It’s what makes the relationship between the idea of an Israel, meaning a physical or even spiritual or ideological Jewish homeland, and the Israel, as a colonial state, complicated for the Jew who wishes to feel as if there is somewhere in the world they belong. It’s why perceived antisemitism anywhere only bolsters the idea of the necessity of Israel.
Which brings me to,
On the Jewishness of Israel
Let’s firstly address the fact that any argument for the legitimacy of the state of Israel conveniently ignores two things; the fact that the past 70 years of resistance have told us otherwise, and most basically, most fundamentally, the fact that there were already people there.
That fact paints our contemporary understanding of Zionism as a colonial mindset. There is no way to argue in favor of Israel without purposefully ignoring the legitimate Palestinian claim to that land.
Our explicit understanding of colonialism paints the existence of Israel as an indelibly colonial endeavor. White Jews with the backing of the imperialist West took the land.
I think though, our implicit understanding of colonialism has created a false narrative of what Israel is and what it represents. Colonialism is largely understood as a project which aims to increase the existing power of the colonizing state or group. When viewing Jews through the lens of their whiteness, this all fits together neatly. Of course, despite what Israel itself might have you believe, it is not a project focused on creating a progressive western society in the Middle East.
While pro-Israel arguments hinge on a denial of place, it is also true that the current and pervasive Palestinian Liberationist arguments of white supremacy and colonialist western expansion ignore a sense of time. It ignores the fact that globally and historically, Jews only really get to be white when it is convenient for legitimate imperialist powers. You can see it in the way that many right-wing antisemitic lawmakers support Israel but not the freedoms of Jews anywhere else.
The juxtaposition is similarly evident in the way many Palestinian Liberationist posts and videos and infographics include the idea that Jews showed up en masse in the early half of the 1900s and conspicuously exclude why that was.
No, Israel is not a progressive project, it is a reactionary one. This is the primary moral argument of Zionism, the primary moral argument for an Israel, it is at the very core of what the state of Israel means to Jews. From the same essay:
How is meditation about the Holocaust relevant to Israel and our thinking about it? First, the Holocaust imposes on me that I write as a Jew and Marxist, refusing to utterly condemn Israel, terribly aware that one human disaster creates another and yet unable, except in the world of pure theory and pure morality, to avoid implicating myself. Secondly, the Holocaust is in Israel, in addition to all the obvious ways, in what I regard as the only moral argument on its behalf which doesn’t mystify the facts. I have never heard the argument spelled out, but I know it deeply as a Jew. [] Let us be clear then: Israel is at root a state of desperation. It is not a “bold experiment,” but a response to the anti-Semitism which culminates in the Holocaust.
I worry we view Judaism too much from a Christian understanding of religion. I’ve often touted that Jews have a healthier relationship to religion than most due solely to the fact that we don’t proselytize, and so the insistence on expansion and bending others to our will has not been a pervasive historical problem. In layman’s terms: I’ve often felt that we largely mind our business.
I think in some ways our insularity is also our greatest flaw, now, in a post-Holocaust world. I can confidently say that we see ourselves as the remnants of a people, as the survivors. This is largely true— the Holocaust not only wiped out the majority of the Jewish population in a statistical and factual sense, but virtually every Jew that you know was personally affected by the Holocaust in some way. And, the constant fear of it being able to happen again is continually justified by the rise of alt-right fascism across Europe and the US, neo-Nazism, frequent hate crimes, and an increasingly popular denial that the first one even happened. Frankly, it is justified by the grave and flagrant antisemitism cropping up in conversations on Palestine.
Of course, the irony of the whole thing is that forgetting why Israel exists feeds directly into narratives of why it should exist. And in our desperation, Israel has made a terrible bargain, the power to ensure our safety given to us by those nations whose imperialist ideals caused our danger in the first place.
Now, we see the tragedy in the mindset of an exclusionist state of survivors, in the mindset that Jews must protect themselves no matter the cost. In the cost being other people. In the complex relationship between oppressor and oppressed. I believe last time I called it the ‘relationship between doing and being done unto.’ As Aronson says:
“Never again,” in practice, becomes again and again and again.
On moving forward
Regrettably, I haven’t come to you today with a solution to the issue of Israel. Hear me when I say this, anyone who tells you they have is lying to you, is asking you to sell your humanity and adopt a hollow morality that equates to violence + conflict + death-as-a-numbers-game-and-not-a-grievous-tragedy + winning = righteousness.
Some will tell you that if Palestinians just accept Israeli sovereignty the conflict will be over neatly and bloodlessly and all will live happily ever after. This is untrue. I believe the truth of Israel’s turbulent mandate is best exemplified by its iron dome.
The image of the iron dome is striking: a huge piece of highly advanced weaponry provided largely by the intervention of the United States, to protect Israel against the feeble rockets launched by an impoverished and impotent Gaza’s basic and crude weaponry, which in intercepting these missiles seemingly justifies its constant and desperate paranoia, constantly expecting attacks from all sides, unable to feel safe and therefore creating unsafety, fearing its neighbors and therefore making enemies of them, a panopticon, Foucault’s cruel and ingenious cage.
Some will tell you that the answer is for Israeli Jews to pack up and leave, like the French. The reality is that there is no France for Israeli Jews. There is no real ‘where they came from’ when they came as stateless refugees fleeing a Holocaust.
Two state solutions have been laughed off as impossible, we are told that animus is inevitable and justified; our government, the Israeli government, Hamas, Iran, and most of Europe will all have us believe that there is a way to win this situation. There is no winning.
I say this as nothing but a pragmatist: there is no path to victory for Hamas in a war with Israel. I say this as a Jew: there is no real winning for Israel at the cost of Palestinian lives and freedoms. I say this as a human being: the only hope is peace. Perhaps it is naive, perhaps it should be laughed off along with all other human answers to the question of war, but I choose to remember that people are people, not tacit synecdoches of their government’s worst crimes, not helpless to their worst instincts. That our first breaths of life are not drawn in difference.
Finally, as the writer of this newsletter, I say this:
Be kind to the Jews in your life, impacted by the centuries old fear of displacement and violence, show them support. Be kind to the Muslim Arabs and Palestinians and all those in your life impacted by the cruelty of Israel’s hypocrisy, show them support, be kind to each other. We are, all of us, wounded by this. We are none of us enemies by design. Don’t fall victim to those who wish to twist your morality into anything other than the sum of all your beautiful and terrible parts, into anything other than the vastness of what it is to live on earth and to feel. The cost is far too high.
With that, thank you all for reading, and, please, I pray, be well.
Works mentioned as well as interesting further reading:
Kafka’s The Burrow:
https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/campuspress.yale.edu/dist/1/2391/files/2018/12/Kafka-The-Burrow-1jcjgv3.pdf
Edward Said’s The Question of Palestine:
https://refugeeacademy.org/upload/library/The_Question_of_Palestine.pdf
Wendy Brown’s Walled States, Waning Sovereignty:
*requires JSTOR login
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv14gpj55
Ronald Aronson’s Never Again? Zionism and the Holocaust:
*requires JSTOR login
https://www.jstor.org/stable/466344