PERFORMATIVE PACIFISM’S SUBTEXT: IN THE NAME OF PEACE, KILL THE JEWS
An underlying premise of the anti-Israel narrative is that, if Jews would just go like lambs to the slaughter, there would be no more war.
Silly me, scrolling social media and not expecting to find subtle calls for Jewish genocide.
On a Facebook group for liberal Christian activists, I found a meme that captures quite brilliantly a stream of “pro-Palestinian” or anti-Israel nonsense that is prevalent these days, yet another example of people who piously imagine themselves to be advocates of peace on earth advancing Orwellian baloney that would, if realized, end in genocide.
I choose this one for illustrative purposes only. Depending on how much time you spend on social media, you will find one of these every day, probably dozens or scores.
“Jewish people called the Creative Source of the Universe ‘God.’ Muslims call the Creator ‘Allah. Hindus use the name ‘Brahman,’ Taoists use ‘Tao. Yet, they are all referring to the same Hidden Universal Intelligence & Spirit. There is only ONE Source, with many different names. What is important is to live with gratitude and LOVE towards the Mysterious Source of All our Lives. Why not take the same approach to Palestine and Israel? One Nation with Two Names. All people living together as sisters and brothers in peace, with equal rights, one Holy Land, undivided?”
Isn’t that lovely? (Whatever name the anonymous author uses for God, may they be forgiven for their trespasses against the laws of capitalization. But anyway.)
This is an example of what I call “performative pacifism.” People who want to demonstrate just how gloriously principled they are will aggressively deny all reality in order to show how completely committed they are to the ultimate altruistic values.
There is no recognition of reality here — even if you are a person who believes in the underlying religious premises of this flaky meme.
There is a not-very-subtle finger waving. There is also, among people who almost certainly deny any association with racism, a pretty blatant antisemitism just below the surface. It’s those Jews (again!) who are preventing peace and coexistence, gratitude, LOVE, and living together as sisters and brothers in peace and equal rights.
There is precisely no recognition of what would happen if the border between these two places were erased, as the meme idealizes.
I wonder if people who liked this post would feel the same about erasing the borders between their country and the one next door. As a Canadian (even one married to an American!), let me tell you I’d have a big problem with that.
Even idealists who think that, say, the border between Mexico and the United States could reasonably be erased with no significant social upheaval choose to extravagantly overlook the fact that the people on one side of the border they are talking about erasing between Israel and Palestine are not huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
As we saw on October 7, a great many of the people who this infantile meme imagines “living together as sisters and brothers in peace” actually seek to rape, behead, immolate, kidnap and mass murder their Jewish “sisters and brothers.”
And, no, this is not an overstatement, an extrapolation toward an entire people based on the actions of a few (well, in the case of October 7, a few thousand).
October 7 was a tragic but tiny manifestation of what Palestinian political leaders, imams, educators, popular culture and most of society have been urging ordinary Palestinians to perpetrate for more than 75 years.
There is, in Palestine, precious little movement for “all people living together as sisters and brothers in peace.” There are, in fact, widespread, inescapable calls for genocide against Jews from top levels of Palestinian society, clergy, education system and pop culture. (I’ve done this homework for you elsewhere, but if this is news to you, you have no right engaging in this discussion.)
The finger-pointing, of course, is not at those people who started this war and perpetuate it. There is no recognition that the Palestinians are the only ones who can make peace because they are the only ones making war.
There is more to it, though. One of the underlying premises of the anti-Israel narrative is that, if the Jews would just take it, if they would just go like lambs to the slaughter like thousands of years of Western civilization have demanded and expected, there would be no war.
Few people put it quite so succinctly. But few people either put it quite as crisply as this particular meme does.
This is yet another of the countless variations of a problem I bang on about endlessly. Antisemitism is not, for the most part, people with tiki torches screaming “We hate Jews!”
It’s people purveying far more subtle, and as a result perhaps more insidiously dangerous, ideas. In this instance, it is the idea that those people, the very ones who invented the concept of ethical monotheism, are not living up to the perfection their own God demands.
The rest of us, of course, are held to no such standard. We don’t set ourselves up for failure by calling ourselves the Chosen People. In fact, if we are Christians, we can pretty much behave as we want because we have a dude who died for our sins.
This double standard is not antisemitism of the tiki torch kind. It is antisemitism wrapped in peace and LOVE. And yet it is more dangerous because, at least we know who and what we are dealing with when neo-Nazis chant “Jews will not replace us!” Memes like this use pleasant words to lull well-intentioned people into supporting the statelessness and possible genocide of Jews. Nice, huh?
Just imagine the unmitigated gall of someone pompously taking the position that Israel should eliminate its borders with Palestine based on the unbelievably stupid assumption that this would result in “one nation with two names … all people living together as sisters and brothers in peace, with equal rights.” It is clearly the imaginings of somebody with precisely no awareness of the history of the region.
But that might not be quite true.
This is the essence of performative pacifism: I am such an idealist, I foresee rainbows and harmony where others see only continued violence and death. I am just that benevolent. Call me crazy.
As I wrote in my last post, most Israelis (and most Jews) know that they have one basic choice: be strong and hated or pitied and dead.
This is why my gut response to most people who have something to say on this issue is, “Who cares what you think?” When you give precisely no evidence that you care whether half the Jews in the world, who are Israelis, live or die, why would I take seriously anything you have to say on this (or any other) subject?
Another one of the nuggets that you can extract from asinine memes like these is that it is precisely those who subscribe to liberal theologies who condemn Israelis and Zionists for (purportedly) claiming a right to the land based on biblical promises. This, of course, is yet another example of the profound ignorance of history among Israel’s critics. Try learning in history class instead of Sunday school class.
There are Zionists who subscribe to that sort of political-theological premise. But that is not at all the foundation on which the country was created (overwhelmingly by secular Jews) and people who wade into this discussion with that assumption, seeking to “prove” a supernatural underpinning of the state, prove only their own ignorance.
Hypocritically, when it suits their purposes, they themselves employ precisely this sort of supernaturalism, as this and millions of other posts online do, employing theological premises if only to wipe it in the faces of Jews.
On top of all this, there is this weird antisemitic/philosemitic paradox going on. Just as progressive leftists insist they have nothing against Jews, they just detest and seek to destroy the country where half of Jewish people live, here we have the theological variation on that theme: the Jewish people, wonderful folks that they are, literally gave us the God we worship — but the country that those people created fails to live up to the values of that God and so we condemn it to death.
And since we have chosen to make our smug declaration in a complete vacuum from historical reality, won’t it be a shock to our naïve idealism when the inevitable happens?
Erase the border between Palestine and Israel tomorrow and you would have a massacre to eclipse catastrophes of history.
And were that to happen, the people who posted and liked this sort of meme would shrug their shoulders and say, Whoops, guess we screwed up that one.
But it would be to give too much credit to think that such an outcome would be a disappointment to them.
As we see from the hateful, violent, even genocidal messaging in the anti-Israel rallies and narratives sweeping the world today, the objective of the “pro-Palestinian” movement is not peace.
Whether they are conscious of it or not, anti-Israel activists are seeking a return to a more familiar civilizational narrative.
Until 1948, Jews in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa knew their place. We kid ourselves if the absolutely fundamental civilizational narratives held by Christians and Muslims, who represent about half the world’s population, no longer hold sway over us. They do.
And what those narratives say is that Jews were, and should be, our archetypal victims.
This is absolutely inherent to Christian and Muslim theology, the idea that these people who have steadfastly rejected the “successor” religions deserve to be punished for their intransigence.
Over millennia, this theological concept has been baked into even non-theological aspects of our civilizations.
Since one of the core tenets of antisemitism is to blame the victim, we turn this around and, instead of blaming ourselves for the fact that Jews are victimized (by us and our societies) we accuse them of having a “persecution complex.”
What the “pro-Palestinian” movement seeks to do is return the world to its proper state, a time when Jews knew their place.
As a result, the sorts of memes like the one I am using as an example is not so much proof of a profoundly naïve idealism. No, whether consciously or not, it is the idea that Jews must cease to be a self-determined people able to protect themselves and return to the role our ancestors laid out for them as perpetual victims.
So the charming meme that speaks of “all people living together as sisters and brothers in peace” is really an Orwellian and slightly more polite call to, as we have also seen in a familiar refrain, “Kill all Jews.”
Do you find anything I’ve written paranoid or hysterical? Do you believe Jews (and allies like me) are exaggerating the problem?
If so, you’ve just proved my point.