Contesting Zionist identity claims
Preface
In this article I focus on a critique of Zionist claims to the identities of being Jewish and being antisemitic.
A footnote to the second article in this series referred to modes of production and forms of social reproduction as a contextual framework within which to analyse the historical emergence, and reproduction, of identities expressed as national rights, citizen (or civil) rights, human rights, and gender and sexual orientation rights should be included in this list.
While time and space does not permit me to explore the detail of this contextual framework, it is fundamental to the analyses that I develop in this series of articles.
I contend that without this framework we cannot develop an analysis of the aetiology and further development of specific historically-bound ideas about civil, national, human and gender/sexual orientation rights. Instead of grounding our analyses in factual events and tested theories, we will assume these rights as essential, and therefore requiring no explanation. This is congruent with the assumptions underlying the rights claimed not only by Zionism but by a range of ethno-nationalisms (e.g. the Alt-Right in the US) as well as by some strands of radical feminism and black liberation movements
(e.g. Marcus Garveyism in the US).
The development of specific, historical identities — like being Jewish, being antisemitic — happens in the context of historically specific modes of production and social reproduction. In the capitalist mode of production the state plays a crucial role in social reproduction, i.e. reproducing the conditions necessary for production, and this happens primarily through the identities that the state enshrines through laws and regulations that call individuals and groups. This ‘calling’ (or interpellation) is no passive process but is actively engaged by the citizenry, collectively and individually. To understand this process requires in-depth research of historical events through which interpellation happens.
Before examining these events through the prism of ideological struggle it was necessary to understand the ideology of Zionism on its own terms. I now turn to understanding the critique of this ideology, also on its own terms. The statement of identity and critique is an abstraction from the real processes of ideological struggle, but a necessary step towards understanding the syncretic unity of these struggles.
Historical invention of the Jewish people
A scientific explanation locates identities within a historical context, a particular mode of production and forms of social reproduction. The ideological state apparatuses referred to in the fifth article in this series, play a crucial role in reproducing social relationships through dominant ideologies that are internalized by vast numbers of Israeli citizens and the colonized Palestinians — many of the latter also struggle against their imposed identity. The scientific critique of the essentialist definition of Jewish identity is the same as the critique of religious theism. Namely, that it is based on dogmatic assertions, articles of faith that are not be questioned.
In addition to the conceptual critique of essentialism, Israeli historian Shlomo Sand (in “The Invention of the Jewish People” pages 129 to 250) questions the exile of the Jewish population by the Romans. Well before the first century (and destruction of the temples) large Jewish communities existed outside Judea. Evidence suggests Jews descended from converts scattered across the Middle East (including the Maghreb) and Eastern Europe. The exile myth originated in Christian ideology about Jews being punished, and from Roman and Babylonian subjugation, reflecting a spiritual state of not-salvation, and shaped rabbinical Judaism vis-à-vis Christianity’s might.
Each epoch is the context where new social forces construct identities. These processes can be understood genealogically, that is where conscious agents confront and interrogate historical identities given and received, and in the process preserve some elements, transform and abolish others, so that new collective identities emerge.[1] If communities arose outside Eretz Yisrael the conceptual link between land and ethnos is broken.
Judith Butler (in The Charge of Anti-semitism: ….., page 113) takes this point beyond passive interpellation into individual agency for creating a Jewish identity. She writes that “the argument that all Jews have a heartfelt investment in Israel is simply untrue. ……… There are sources of American Jewish identification, for instance in food, in religious ritual, in social service organisations, in diasporic communities, in civil rights and social justice struggles that may exist in relative independence from the question of the status of Israel”. This agency could fall under what South African scholar Neocosmos (referred to earlier for his use of the term interpellation to understand the aetiology of xenophobia in post-apartheid South Africa) has termed extra-state politics and popular prescriptions forged through individual and social practices (including community struggles).
Antisemitism: a negative ‘othering’
Antisemitism is a form of racism, of othering people interpellated as semites , a category that includes Palestinians and Jews. Historically antisemitism came to mean the othering of Jews, as different from “normal” citizens (the nation), malevolent to their interests, unassimilable and degrading the national
spirit and genes. Although Jews in South Africa, through mostly being categorised as “whites”, suffered no institutional and political discrimination, anti-Jewish sentiment sometimes bubbled up. In the first article of this series I referred to some incidents of antisemitism that I experienced as a teenager in my hometown.
It is critical to be clear about what constitutes antisemitism. Opposition to a political nationalist movement claiming to represent Jews is not othering Jews, but rather poses a different Jewish identity. Antisemitism has its roots in the hatred of Jews that appears to have been baked into mainstream Christian ideologies.
Christian Jew-hatred
Prior to the late-19th century, where Christianity fused with the state, it interpellated Jews as killers of Christ and therefore to be shunned, segregated in ghettoes and economically marginalised. Where Jews developed as money lenders and merchants serving the sovereigns and courts, they lived a better quality of life but remained classified as the problematic other. US scholar Sander Gilman, in “Jewish Self-hatred”, explores Jew-hatred articulated by Lutheranism in the Germanic principalities in the 17th and 18th centuries and alleges that in response these Jewish elites denied their Jewish identity (i.e. engaged in Jewish self-hatred) (Gilman also identified anti-Zionism as the modern form of Jewish self-hatred).
The historical novel “Ivanhoe” also vividly depicts the extreme othering of Jews by Anglican Christianity during the time of King Richard the Lionhearted of the Crusades. As I mentioned in the first article of this series, Jew-hatred prevailed under the Russian Tsarist state — justified by the Russian orthodox church — in eastern Europe during the 19th Century, resulting sometimes in killing of Jews (pogroms). My maternal and paternal grandparents migrated from Lithuania at the turn of the 20th Century to escape these oppressive conditions and Christian-inspired interpellations.
Antisemitism based on Eugenics
Towards the end of the 19th century there emerged an ideology of antisemitism, not based on the identification of the Jewish religion as problematic but of Jews as a cultural and biological entity. An early manifestation was the Dreyfus Affair in France. Antisemitism fused with the Eugenics pseudo-scientific movement that developed in the United States from the early 20thcentury. This took Darwin’s discovery of the evolution of the species and created a civilizational teleogy, towards the goal of which the “fittest” human social formations were said to be moving. In this framework the “Nordic” races were defined as the fittest for the development of civilization, and Slavs, Jews, Blacks, Hispanics and Southern Europeans as genetically inferior.
Jonathan Spiro and Edwin Black show Eugenics as popular amongst certain United States political and educated elites at the turn of the 19th Century. Individuals in the eugenics movement were influential in founding the National Parks in the United State. Eugenics emerged from their study of environmental conservation through culling weaker animals in an overall population. Eugenics developed to manage human overpopulation, had a limited and uneven application in the United States but was imported holus bolus into the Third Reich and came to justify the extermination of those identified as sub-humans.
Antisemitic and pro-Zionist
Being antisemitic and pro-Zionist are compatible. In 1917 British Foreign
Secretary Arthur James Balfour supported Zionism through the Balfour Declaration; 12 years earlier he had promoted the Aliens Act, aimed at curtailing immigration of Eastern European Jews, seen as an alien, unassimilable body, and needing their own state. Thanks to this mindset the United States refused to take in a ship full of refugees fleeing the Nazis. They were turned back.
Edwin Black (in his “The Transfer Agreement”) relates the 1930s Zionist and Nazi collaboration to relocate 50 000 Jewish Germans to Palestine. The context was an effective international trade boycott of Germany as a protest against Nazi antisemitism. The purpose of the joint Nazi/Zionist action was to end the boycott. Hannah Arendt (in “Eichmann in Jerusalem”, pages 56 to 67) relates that the Nazi bureaucrat Adolph Eichmann facilitated the emigration of German and European Jews to Palestine and visited the Yishuv (Jewish community) there. At his 1961 trial Eichmann claimed to have helped Zionists set up their state. In the first article of this series I related an incident in my hometown where an Afrikaans speaking antisemite encouraged me to emigrate to Israel because that’s where Jews apparently belonged.
Judith Butler, in her seminal piece referred to earlier debunks the notion of antisemitism in effect but not intent. It is abstract to separate intention from effect. People usually communicate their intentions making it possible for receivers of messages to hear different meanings from the one attributed by Summers (the University of California head who coined the phrase ‘antisemitic in effect if not in intent’). Consequently Summers, other Zionists and antisemites establish the equivalence between Israel and Zionism, and being Jewish. They police the meanings that they attribute, as ontological. They then try to implement an “outrageous censorship” to enforce this linguistic equivalence.
Post-holocaust Jewish identity
In response to Butler’s argument it might be objected that after the holocaust Jews can only be secure where they have political sovereignty — to advocate less is to wilfully expose them to attacks, making critique of Israel as a Jewish nation state effectively antisemitic. Friedman (in “Jewish identity and minority status in a democratic Palestine”) (on page 322 of “Pretending Democracy”) argues that the Zionist claim that statehood is a way out of dependence on gentile goodwill elides the fact that it is simply the same dependence in another form — the survival of the state depends on the goodwill or other strategic interests of other major powers. While the Zionist project was meant to end antisemitism it has failed to end attacks on Jews even within their state. It is plausible to think of Jewish Israelis having greater security in a fully democratic state where all peoples’ rights are equally valued and protected.
The recent Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA) definition and examples of antisemitism (referred to in the fifth article in this series) reveal both a rupture with the existing International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition but continuity with examples of anti-Zionism as antisemitism. The BDS National Committee (BNC), as the leading structure of the BDS movement, in a critique of the JDA positively identified the JDA as defining antisemitism as an essentialist view of Jews qua Jews, like any other form of racism and thereby shifting from the exceptionalist view of antisemitism. The BNC also acknowledged differentiation between anti-Zionism and antisemitism as a progressive ideological counter to the hegemonic Zionist interpellation as articulated by the IHRA.
Nevertheless the BNC, Tony Greenstein (founder of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign [PSC] in the United Kingdom [UK]) and author Tom Suarez concurred that there were significant flaws in the JDA. The declaration’s examples and guidelines of what constitutes antisemitism are all drawn vis-a-vis the Palestinian struggle yet exclude representative Palestinian input, omit mention of white supremacists and the political right as the main culprits of historical and contemporary antisemitism and attempt to control critiques of Israel and Zionism by drawing red lines between acceptable critique and antisemitic critique. While Greenstein and the BNC emphasise the ideological advances from a Palestinian perspective of the JDA, Suarez focuses on the risk that the JDA could be wielded IHRA-esque fashion to muzzle debate. For Suarez the JDA fails to hold Zionism to account as a form of racism, develops a specific definition of antisemitism separate from racism against any other group (exceptionalism), has 73 per cent of its examples of antisemitism referring to the way Israel is depicted (the IHRA has only 64 per cent of its examples of antisemitism linked to Israel), fails to give examples of supporters of Israel being antisemitic and fails to explain the codes through which it claims criticism of Israel becomes antisemitic.
The struggle against antisemitism starts with understanding what constitutes antisemitism. This requires an objective study of the meaning of racism and antisemitism as a subset of racism with its own history, most recently including the genocide of European Jewry. As Hefets (referred to in the fifth article of this series) has noted the word “Shoah” veils the genocide of the Jews with an aura of the inexplicable, and the sacred but this genocide was a modern, well-documented and researched crime about which countless books
have been written. One of these is Raul Hillberg’s magisterial study “The Destruction of the European Jews”. Others are Gitta Sereney’s studies “Albert Speer” and “Into that Darkness”. Sereny’s studies refer to other well documented sources a sample of which are Breitman’s “The Architect of Genocide…”, Butz’s “Did Six Million Die? …” , Klee at al’s “Those were the Days“ and Taylor’s “The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials”. Hefets reflects that the mysticism of the “Shoah” interpellates Jews as eternal victims, Germans as eternal perpetrators and forecloses on the possibility of any social action in response to this crime. As long as Germans observe the rituals around the “Shoah” they cannot be accused of antisemitism and can come to a comfortable arrangement with the past. When German elites articulate defence of Israel’s right to exist as a historical responsibility arising from the Shoah, they are in practice making the Palestinian people responsible for the crimes of their forefathers.
Multidirectional memory
Rothberg (referred to in the fifth article in this series,) uses the concept of memories to explain how different memories of racial and colonial violence interact and mutually influence one another’s ideological development. This concept of multidirectional memory is a twofold critique of competitive memory. US civil rights activists (like WEB Du Bois) and anti-colonial activists (like Aime Cesaire) were instrumental in awakening memories of the
holocaust through memories of slavery and colonial violence. Thus there is no hierarchy of suffering; and, our memories of trauma are always in relation to others’ trauma. Progressive political practice as part of an ideology of human liberation must include conscious dialogue between the memories of racial violence within Europe and the colonial violence outside of Europe.
How could the memories of European racial violence in Europe and its earlier manifestation in the colonies (particularly in Africa and Latin America) be developed in their universal meaning of human pain, suffering and degradation? Neocosmos calls this an understanding of citizenship constructed from below, at times in opposition to the state and at times in conjunction with it. This is an ideological struggle that operates within the confines of civil society and beyond.
Conclusion
This article has critically examined the Zionist notions of ‘being Jewish’ and ‘being antisemitic’, and found them wanting.
The Zionist definition of what it means to be Jewish, i.e. born of a Jewish mother and through her into the blood line that goes back into the mists of time, is not verified but simply stated as an article of faith. The conventional, rabbinical view is that for most of its history the Jewish people have minimised conversion and they have expanded through extended procreation of the original grouping. From a secular Zionist perspective numerical reproduction and expansion has been within a given gene pool. This flies in the face of historical evidence that indicates that for the first 800 years AD (after Christ) Judaism was one of the fastest growing religious grouping through the conversion of large numbers of followers/believers.
The Zionist definition of what it means to be antisemitic is being critical of the definition of the state of Israel as a Jewish ethno-state. Using the term ‘antisemitism’ tendentiously to label critics of Israel as antisemitic muddies the waters about the true meaning of antisemitism. In practice this can cause much confusion around the meaning of certain events which are either alleged to be antisemitic or are indeed antisemitic but this fact is hidden amidst the confusion.
Intense ideological struggles have been fought across the globe for the past 25 years over the meaning of the term antisemitism. What has been and still is at stake in these struggles is the legitimation of Israel as a Jewish ethno-state. The anti-Zionist ideological challenges are truly an existential threat to the ethnocracy regime of the state of Israel. The position that Jews could conceivably have a greater security — albeit as a minority — in a state that stood for and guaranteed the rights of all its citizens, is anathema to Zionists because for them it is ipso facto antisemitic.
The following 10 articles in this series will explore in greater detail the content of a myriad of global ideological struggles between Zionists and their opponents — particularly in the Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) movement, over the meaning of the term, ‘antisemitism’.
Paul Hendler, Stellenbosch, South Africa, 18 March 2022
[1] Cf. Stone, S 2004 Essentialism and Anti-Essentialism in Feminist Philosophy, Institute for Environment, Philosophy and Public Policy, Lancaster University (referred to earlier in connection with strands of radical feminism).
