Jewish right not to be invested in Israel……
Preface
The previous three articles in this series focused on Israel’s claimed right to exist, and its right to exist as a Jewish ethno-state. I looked at an anti-Zionist critique of these concepts and also followed the key points in the ideological conflict over the meaning of these rights.
Rights to exist are just two elements in the arsenal of Zionist ideology. We now turn to two further concepts that are fundamental to Zionist ideology, namely the meaning that it ascribes to being Jewish and to antisemitism. The next 11 articles will address these concepts, the critique as well as the ideological struggles waged across the globe in specific countries and around specific themes of what constitutes antisemitism.
Ideologies are the logically constructed meanings that different groupings of people give to their lived experience of the world. The world that we live in is framed by the contemporary dynamics of the global capitalist mode of production and by the power and functions of the big and small nation states across the world. The meanings that we ascribe to our experiences to some extent reflect our insertion into the capitalist mode of production (i.e. where we are located in terms of the division of labour, income received and wealth accumulated in the form of assets, etc.) and our location in the hierarchy of state power (i.e. our civil and national rights and the extent to which we form part of civil society organisations that stand in a relationship of power with state and governmental structures). I say that the economy and state ‘to some extent’ influence our ideologies, because they are not the only determinants of what we think and how we consciously (and unconsciously) identify ourselves. We learn to think ideologically through our socialization and education and through our contradictory interactions with ideologies that present counter intuitive viewpoints.
Ideologies have their own conceptual elements which are logically linked to create a storyline, regardless of the location of social classes in relation to economic and political structures. The ideologies of movements like Zionism and Palestinian liberation have their own unique content and history of conceptual development, which need to be studied in their own right. Making sense of ideologies requires locating their specific contents and history within the context of dynamic political and economic structures and developments across historical time.
States are directly involved in assigning basic meaning to their citizens, i.e. identities as part of a nation. Accordingly, the first section of this article describes a framework for making sense of the crucial role played by states in assigning identity to their citizens and to those who are rightless, i.e. lack state-assigned identity rights and are actively excluded from having rights assigned to them. The second section unpacks the Zionist meaning of the terms Jewishness and antisemitism. The Conclusion sums up the important issues and introduces the topic for the next article, which is the critique of the Zionist identities of Jew and antisemite.
Interpellation and identity
The earlier articles reflected Gramsci’s notions of ideological struggle and hegemonic and subaltern ideologies, frameworks of ideas based on key elements (concepts) that are combined to give meaning to our individual lives and collective practices.
Different ideologies continually engage to develop dominant narratives in capitalist societies. Key concepts drive the coalescence of dominant ideas in society but are also a source of alternative interpretations that oppose the dominant storyline.
The challenge for conflicting social classes is to build alliances with other classes around common understanding of key concepts such as civil rights, human rights, national identity and types of state regimes. Within Marxist discourse Gramsci is important for establishing the specificity of ideas held by individuals and social classes, and the need to study the structure of these ideas, their constitutive elements and their logic that projects a specific story with its own temporal and spatial meaning.
Gramsci located ideas and ideologies as material forces in their own right, and while always contextualized in an economic and political reality, were irreducible to the economic interests of classes and political interests represented in the state. Gramsci is also important for his contention that the struggle over ideas (his ‘war of position’) is the primary form of struggle. It is only in key historical moments when material practices like armed struggle, general strikes and protests (the ‘war of movement’) have an effect on the balance of class forces.
Marxist structuralist Louis Althusser further developed Gramsci’s ideas. This sheds light on our understanding of the power of the narratives that constitute the Zionist and anti-Zionist worldviews.
In “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus” Althusser defined ideology as a subject-centred view of reality: individuals necessarily experience themselves as the subjects of their action. The scientific view understands individual and
collective identities as the outcomes of broader social, economic and political structures and struggles, a world into which individuals are born that structures the meaning of their identities. Ideologies ‘hail’ or call people out according to specific identities. In the Occupied Palestinian Territories Zionist ideology hails Palestinians as “terrorists”. The state of Israel hails Palestinian citizens within the Green Line bearers of civil rights but second-class to the Jewish nation. Capitalist states hail workers as free individuals, solely responsible for their station in life; and, capitalists are innovators and risk takers in return for which they earn their wealth.
This state-initiated and state-driven hailing is called interpellation. South African scholar Michael Neocosmos (in From “Foreign Natives” to “Native Foreigners”, pages 9 to 21) utilises the concept of interpellation to explain state-imposed identities under South African apartheid, where all migrants to cities were interpellated as foreign through the medium of tribal identification; whereas, in post- apartheid South Africa only those African migrants from beyond South Africa’s territorial boundaries are interpellated as foreign. Thus, interpellation is an important concept for analysing the current xenophobic hailing of foreign African nationals in South Africa.
According to Althusser interpellation functions through ideological state apparatuses: churches, public and private schools, the family, the legal system, the political system (including the different parties), trade-unions, the communications system (press, radio and television, etc.) and the cultural system (literature, the arts, sports, etc.). Individuals and social groups are often passive — but can also be actively involved — in the face of interpellation, and might also actively resist the state’s imposition of identity through forms of class struggle.
Critics of Althusser said he was too focused on social structure (neglecting processes of social struggle) and for collapsing civil society into the state. However, interpellation and ideological state apparatuses are useful concepts for analysing the function and impact of ideologies. These concepts are antidotes to the current dominant neo-liberal ideology according to which the state plays no constructive role in forming societies and reproducing the conditions of their continued existence. Furthermore, Althusser himself recognised the limits of a structural definition of societies — social formations are not buildings. His essay was merely a beginning to develop Gramsci’s notions further, aptly titled ‘Notes towards an investigation.’
Arguably Neocosmos has developed the concept of interpellation further. He makes the point that the power of interpellation is not internalized mechanically or automatically but is mediated by experience and politics, where politics refers not just to the state but also to the processes and struggles of extra-parliamentary formations. The character of political identity and consciousness is affected by ‘the levels of presence/absence (silence or voice) of politics in society and community (popular prescriptions) including the existence of critical intellectuals’. For Neocosmos the outcome of post-1994 South African interpellation is a post-apartheid constructed citizenship defined by indigeneity and a nation of passive consumers. The identification of people from other African countries in South Africa in recent years, as not indigenous and therefore separate from the South African nation, is a state-driven ideology. In the same way we can use the concept of ideological state apparatuses to analyse the ideological hegemony of Zionism in South Africa and elsewhere.
Meaning of the identities
A transcendent Jewish ethnos
The Declaration of Independence of the Jewish State (1948) defines a Jewish nation as existing since time immemorial, with strong references to the biblical story of Ancient Israel. In the first article in this series I referred to literature that I read as a youngster that articulated this view. The key Zionist concept of a Jewish race (or nation) is philosophically Hegelian: the German philosopher Hegel regarded a race or nation as denoting a group of individuals that are descendants of the same family, house, or tribe, united by common ancestry or blood relationship. Zionism defines a Jew within a similar framework and logic for defining any other nation. Zionism claims for the Jewish nation the natural rights accorded to all other nations.
Zionism is a secular nationalism. There was always a tension between the biblical narrative of the creation of the Jewish nation and Zionism’s assumption that this nation simply existed from the mists of past history. But dominant Zionist political parties always had strong political alliances with religious parties in the Israeli Knesset (parliament).
Zionism defines a Jew as someone born of a Jewish mother, which satisfies the secular (genetic) criteria that within each Jew there exists a Jewish ethnos that stretches back over thousands of years. Gentiles can convert to Judaism, but the orthodox rabbinate discourages this. For Zionism a Jew is defined by a blood line to his/her mother, grandmother and so on. This is an essentialist definition of a nation.
Nevertheless, the political definition of a “Jew” reverted to its religious core. Israeli historian Shlomo Sand provides a detailed conceptual and historical account of the Zionist usage of the concept ethnos to “invent the Jewish people”. However, Sand points out, when a Jew who had fought the Nazis but later converted to Christianity, applied for citizenship of Israel in 1958 his identity card stipulated “Nationality: Not Clear”.
Sand argues that the exile forms a core part of the Zionist notion of a transcendent ethnos. The Zionist historiography of the exile process, over time (and not simply as one event, i.e. the long exile) is the story of the Wandering Jew, an alien-ethnic national body that has always been on the move and needs to return to its birthplace. Sand notes that this myth has its origins in aspects of Christian thought that identified the exile as punishment of the Jews for killing Christ the Messiah. This weltanschauung provides the rationale that the Jewish ethnos remained intact during the years of exile and in 1948 the state was proclaimed as a home into which the exiles could be gathered.
This storyline is reflected in the writings of several ideologues of labour Zionism, which movement established the state of Israel and dominated the politics of the state for its first thirty years.
Aaron David Gordon (1856 to 1922), said that Jews living in the diaspora were ‘a parasitic people. We have no roots in the soil; there is no ground beneath our feet. And we are parasites not only in an economic sense but in spirit, in thought, in poetry, in literature, and in our virtues, our ideals, our higher human aspirations. Every alien movement sweeps us along, every wind in the world carries us. We in ourselves are almost nonexistent, so of course we are nothing in the eyes of other peoples either.’
Ber Borochov (1881 to 1917),recognised as the father of Socialist Zionism, identified historical economic factors contributing to Jewish uniqueness and abnormality in the diaspora, manifested through the inverted pyramid of few Jewish proletarians and a large non-productive Jewish middle class, which constituted an abnormal economic reality. Borochov contended that it was only through a Jewish political state in the eternal homeland that Jewish society would normalise, and where proletarian Zionism could contribute to a coming socialist society.
Nahman Syrkin (1868 to 1924) defined nationalism as consciousness of historical unity, argued that socialism supported national emancipation, and that Jews had to join the vanguard of socialism but without dropping their identity. The implication of this was a socialist Jewish state.
Gordon’s, Borochov’s and Syrkin’s ideas were important for the weltanschauung of the 35 000 Jewish pioneers who immigrated to Ottoman-ruled Palestine between 1904 and 1914 (the so-called Second Aliyah), one of whom was David ben Gurion. Ben Gurion’s ideas of nation building closely
resonated with the emphasis on Jewish nationalism and socialism through an emphasis on Jewish labour, expounded by Gordon, Borochov and Syrkin. In fact, Gordon’s ‘religion of labour’ and Borochov’s turning the social triangle of Jewish economic occupations right side up, were articulated as an answer to the diasporic ‘Jewish problem’ of having lost touch with the soil in which physical labour is a mediating factor.
There are other strands of Zionism which emphasise Judaism and market-driven (as opposed to social-democratic or socialist) economies. An example of the latter is the until recently ruling political force in Israeli politics, the Likud bloc (voted out of power during the June 2021 elections), which owes its historical evolution to the Herut Party, started in 1925 by Ze’ev Jabotinsky.
Likud, which has ruled for most of the period between 1977 and 2021, is a centre right coalition built around Herut. It reflects far right, pro-West and anti-socialist politics. Regardless of these different emphases Likudniks share with Labour Zionism the same assumption of a Jewish people linked to a Jewish state in its historic homeland.
Rejection of a Jewish state is antisemitic
From the inception of the state Zionists claimed that equating Zionism as a form of racism was anti-semitic, notwithstanding the positive intention of the critics to demand full civil and human rights for Palestinians alongside Jews.
During the 1990s this calling out of Zionism found support amongst intellectuals and on campuses in the US linked to demands for fundamental Palestinian civil and national rights and that universities divest from Israel. In 2002 Lawrence Summers (then President of Harvard University) observed that one could be anti-semitic in effect if not in intent. Milton Shain, who has written extensively on antisemitism in South Africa and then the director of the Kaplan Centre at the University of Cape Town, referred to an OpEd (critiquing the Zionist interpretation of the 1948 Naqba) that I wrote for the Cape Times during October 2010, as antisemitic in effect if not in intent.
Judith Butler analysed the couplet ‘anti-Israel equals anti-Jewish’ as a specific ideology of message construction and impact. Whenever the receiver of a message ‘hears’ the word ‘Israel’, or ‘Zionism’, he/she also interprets the identity interpellated as ‘Jew’, regardless of the meaning intended by the transmitter of the message. Criticism of Israel and Zionism are necessarily interpreted as criticism of Jews as a group, making the criticism antisemitic in effect.
Through the formation in 2015 of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Israel and its allies took a further step in cementing the equation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism. The IHRA consists of 34 member countries. (Neither South Africa nor any other African country forms part of this cohort, most of which are European and North and Latin American states). The IHRA members ratified a working definition of anti-semitism.
Anti-semitism is an expression of hatred toward Jews, directed toward Jewish or Gentile individuals and/or their property, Jewish community institutions and religious facilities. It gives 11 examples. Crucially the IHRA includes critiques of Israel (a Jewish collectivity) as a key example of antisemitism. It excludes criticism of Israel similar to criticisms of other countries. The exceptional treatment of Israel is antisemitic of which it gives six key examples. These six cover criticism of Israel for treating another group of people inhumanely, weaponizing the holocaust to stifle critics, acting similarly to the Nazis and causing a conflict of loyalty for Jewish citizens of other countries. A seventh example is the holding of Jews collectively responsible for actions of Israel. Thus 64 per cent of the examples involve criticisms of the State of Israel.
(Shain, referred to above, gave as an example of exceptional criticism of Israel as the global protests against its attack on Gaza in 2008 yet silence in the face of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s bombing of Kosovo, Russia’s destruction of Grozny, millions of deaths in Central Africa and hundreds of thousands displaced from the Sri Lankan conflict. He claimed that fewer than 10 000 had been killed in the Arab Israeli conflict since World War Two. Shain implies antisemitic motives driving these concentrated anti-Israeli protests).
The IHRA examples are couched in general terms: any meaning can be assigned to them. Thus, and keeping in mind the message construction ideology referred to by Butler earlier, discussing 1930s Zionist/Nazi links (in relation to the transfer of Jewish Germans to Palestine) could be construed ipso facto as evidence of antisemitism. No examples are given of the type of criticism of Israel that would be regarded as legitimate and therefore not constituting antisemitism.
In 2020 a group of more than 200 international scholars in antisemitism studies and related fields met in a series of online workshops, with different participants at different times. The outcome was the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA). JDA is endorsed by a diverse range of distinguished scholars and heads of institutes in Europe, the United States, Canada and Israel. Although JDA departs from the classical Zionist perspective that equates anti-Zionism with antisemitism it is referred to in this section because its stated intention is to improve on the efficacy of the IHRA definition of antisemitism and not as critique of the IHRA. The new effect of the JDA is that it decouples anti-Zionism from antisemitism, i.e. for the JDA it is no longer axiomatic that the BDS movement and its supporters are antisemitic. The continuity between the IHRA and the JDA examples of antisemitism is that they focus disproportionally on certain anti-Zionist and anti-Israel practices and narratives that exemplify antisemitism. The JDA still attempts to control the expression of these. The JDA’s examples of anti-Zionism converging with antisemitism are Israel depicted as ultimate evil, applying antisemitic tropes (like ‘child killing’) to Israel and its leaders, and requiring Jewish people to publicly condemn Zionism.
Israel interpellates anti-semitism through a lense on the holocaust, assuming that the Jewish nation requires political sovereignty in its own state to survive future genocidal attacks. Anti-Zionism is antisemitic because it struggles against the regime that makes Israel exclusively the nation state of those interpellated as Jews. Scholar Michael Rothberg in “Multidirectional Memory” (page 176), links the perceived risk of genocide to the perceived exceptional suffering of Jewish people. Quoting Israeli journalist and historian Tom Segev’s “The Seventh Million” (pages 329 to 330) he refers to Israeli prime minister David ben-Gurion’s presenting the holocaust as the only crime that has no parallel in human history.
In the first article in this series I referred to an example of the above by reference to a Zionist criticism of Archbishop Tutu comparing the suffering of black people under apartheid to that of Jews under Nazism. I also mentioned that Rothberg analysed this interpellation as “competitive memory”, with Jewish suffering being the context and informing the meaning of others’ suffering. Israeli psychoanalyst Iris Hefets refers to the mystique that Zionist ideology has built around the holocaust through the quasi-religious notion of ‘Shoah’ ascribed to it.
Conclusion
I want to return to the theory of ideological struggle and reflect on the analytical tools that have been used in the course of the last five articles.
Contrary to popular wisdom, the ‘facts’ do not speak for themselves. There are no pure facts. Putting the same point from a different angle, there is no fact that is not also conceptually constructed. A Zionist and a Palestinian freedom fighter will look at the facts of the 1948 struggle over the land and see two mutually exclusive realities: the War of Independence and the Nakba.
These ways of seeing are influenced and shaped by different ideologies. Ideologies are frameworks of elements — key ideas that combine to project a world view, which is the justification for and the expression of social and political practices by individuals and organised social groups. At the root of these ideological processes are the identities that are the lived experience of social agents, consciously (and unconsciously) acting in their worlds and becoming more (or less) conscious of their own and others’ practices.
Althusser developed the notion of ideological state apparatuses to explain the key role played by states in the identification of social agents — he coined the term interpellation, meaning to hail, or call a person by his/her group or class identity. Althusser is the heir of Gramsci’s notion of ‘War of Position’ — he developed concrete categories through which to ground ideological struggles by the dominant classes through what he identified as the ideological state apparatuses.
Ideological struggles are, however, not simply a question of states imposing identities on a passive citizenry. South African scholar Neocosmos has applied the Althusserian notion of interpellation to the post-apartheid identities of indigeneity and foreign Africans. Neocosmos makes the point that interpellation is a contradictory process involving at one and the same time state-imposed identities but also organised and spontaneous resistance to the imposition of these identities. Interpellation and counter-interpellation are neither mechanistic processes nor explicit discourses– they are often characterised by silences, indicating the need for conceptualising individual and collective unconsciousness in the process of individuals and groups perceiving and grasping their identities.
Assuming the process of interpellation, the remainder of the article examined the key elements of Zionist ideology, expressed in its own terms. The Zionist ideology is a about the persistence of an identity, the Jewish ethnos, through historical time and the right of the Jewish people to a Jewish state, through which they occupy and dominate the space of historical Palestine. The IHRA definition and examples of antisemitism demonstrate that for Zionists any challenge to their conception of a Jewish ethnos and a Jewish state is ipso facto antisemitic. In other words if one questions the interpellation of Jewish ethnos and Jewish ethno-state, one qualifies to be identified as an antisemite. The state of Israel, the international Zionist movement and key pro-Zionist European and North American states have all played — and continue to play — pivotal roles in conceptually developing and practically interpellating these identities of being Jewish and being antisemitic.
Understanding the Zionist identity concepts on their own terms is a necessary first step before critiquing these in the next article.
Once I have completed the critique of Zionist definitions of being Jewish and antisemitism, I will explore the concrete manifestations of these interpellations and their ideological challengers, expressed through the prism of a range of global ideological struggles between Zionist forces and anti-Zionist formations and individuals.
It is in exploring and analysing these struggles that I intend to test, and hopefully demonstrate, the utility of the concept of interpellation and its effectiveness both as an explanatory concept and a strategic tool.
Paul Hendler, Stellenbosch, South Africa.
02 March 2022
