Congress’s Antisemitism Bill Is an Insult to Jewish History
On Wednesday, the US House of Representatives passed a bill to enshrine in law a definition of antisemitism that includes anti-Zionist messages. It’s an egregious attack on free speech — and one that gravely insults the memory of millions of anti-Zionist Jews.
Over the past two weeks, student protests over the US-Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza have been met with brutal police crackdowns. Meanwhile, the campus demonstrations have provoked hysteria among politicians and the media, who have smeared the protests as violent, antisemitic, and potentially even connected to international terror networks.
Last week, the McCarthyist meltdown reached absurd new heights last week when the House of Representatives passed a bill enshrining a legally binding definition of antisemitism that includes anti-Zionism. This past Wednesday, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved the Antisemitism Awareness Act, by a vote of 320 to 91. The bill urges the Department of Education to codify a definition of antisemitism that includes anti-Zionist criticism of Israel.
Despite the bill’s name, purporting to call “awareness” to antisemitism, its actual contents are an insult to Jewish history and historical memory, erasing decades of Jewish anti-Zionist politics. In fact, in a tragic and deeply twisted irony, the bill would desecrate the graves of millions of Jewish victims of the Holocaust, many of whom were anti-Zionists themselves.
Erasing Jewish Anti-Zionism
The Antisemitism Awareness Act directs the Department of Education to use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism when “reviewing, investigating, or deciding whether there has been a violation of title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” The controversial IHRA definition of antisemitism includes among its examples of antisemitism “the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity,” “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”
In other words, the IHRA includes anti-Zionist political speech, the dominant Jewish stance on the idea of a Jewish nation-state before the Holocaust, in its definition of antisemitism. It would, for instance, define an article I wrote last spring — which outlines the similarities between the current politics of the Israeli state and my own family’s experiences in the Holocaust and the shtetl pogroms — as antisemitic.
If passed and adopted by the US Department of Education (DOE), the act would empower the DOE to strip schools of federal funding if they refuse to repress students engaged in anti-Zionist speech, ban organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), and bar teachers and professors from endorsing anti-Zionist messages. It would further give legal cover and encouragement to university administrations and local police departments already seeking to repress anti-Zionist demonstrations.
Despite the Israeli state’s insistence on the centrality of Israel and Zionism to Jewish identity and practice, Zionism is a nationalist political movement, and a rather recent one in Jewish history. In Ten Myths About Israel, Israeli-born historian Ilan Pappé shows that before the Holocaust, Zionism was a minoritarian political movement among European Jewry.
Most European Jews, Pappe explains, held one of three other political views, all of which were non- or anti-Zionist. In Western Europe, where Napoleon’s conquests emancipated Jews from de jure oppression, Jewish people were more assimilated into their own countries’ cultural practices and identity. For these Jews, many of whom were liberals, the goal was to be accepted within these national communities, not to break off and form a new and separate one — an idea not too different from those advocated by antisemites in their home countries.
In Eastern Europe, where Jews remained subjugated under Tsarist rule — confined to the shtetls, ghettoes, and the Pale of Settlement — Jewish politics took two primary forms: socialist internationalism on the one hand, and religious orthodoxy on the other. Both were vehemently opposed to Zionism.
Working-class Jews throughout Eastern Europe played an outsize role in the militant and powerful labor movement that eventually seized power in the October Revolution. The Jewish Bund was the largest Jewish trade union movement and Jewish political party in Europe, and it fought for Jewish liberation alongside the struggle for socialism and international solidarity with other workers and oppressed peoples. In addition to the Bund, Jewish workers and intellectuals were disproportionately represented in other socialist, Marxist, and revolutionary parties like the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, as well as in communist and socialist parties outside the Russian Empire.
Against Zionism, the Bund insisted “wherever we are, that’s our homeland.” It saw Zionism as abandoning the struggle against antisemitism, which could be defeated through working-class solidarity and struggle, and overturning the political and economic conditions that fueled antisemitism. Zionists, on the other hand, accepted the basic nationalistic and racialistic premises of our oppressors: that Jews could never be safe among non-Jews and instead needed to separate ourselves.
Last, the more theologically orthodox in Eastern Europe rejected Zionism for religious reasons. Israel, the biblical promised land, could only be brought about by the messiah, not humankind. Transforming the concept of Israel into a modern nation-state-building project — let alone one requiring war, colonization, and displacement of the current population — was largely seen as anathema to religious dictates. As Pappé recounts, a prominent Hasidic rabbi declared that “Zionism [asked] him to replace centuries of Jewish wisdom and law for a rag, soil and a song (i.e., a flag, a land, and an anthem).”
Imperial powers, especially Britain, soon began to adopt their own form of Christian Zionism, having identified a potentially powerful symbiotic relationship between Jewish Zionists and Christian and imperialist interests. A Britain-aligned Jewish colony in Palestine was seen at once as an incredible geopolitical asset for the British Empire and a solution to British and other European leaders’ “Jewish problem” (i.e., antisemitic animus), all the while potentially fulfilling Christian prophecies of a Jewish-controlled Jerusalem that would bring about Armageddon.
It’s no wonder Bundists decried Zionism as “escapism,” and Jewish liberals saw it as bolstering, not opposing, antisemitism.
Suppressing Jewish Speech
The Antisemitism Awareness Act, expected to soon be passed in the Senate and signed into law by President Joe Biden, attempts to erase this history, and thereby gravely insults centuries of Jewish theology and politics. Since its founding, the Zionist movement and Israel have engaged in a global campaign to equate the political movement of Zionism with Judaism, the religion and people. In doing so, they have cynically co-opted the horrific tragedy of the Holocaust to silence critics of Israel’s apartheid system and military occupation of Palestine.
Supporters of Israel demonize Jewish anti-Zionist activists around the world as self-hating Jews, exiles from our own community. Before student protesters launched the Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia and were met with brutal police repression, the university had already banned the chapter of the Jewish Voice for Peace there.
Similarly, one of first three students to be expelled by a university for Palestine activism, an organizer at Vanderbilt, was the chair of the school’s JVP chapter and had lived in Israel for a year, where he first became an anti-Zionist after participating in anti-eviction activism in East Jerusalem. In Germany, perhaps the one country where anti-anti-Zionism crackdowns have been even more extreme than within Israel and the United States, many Jewish activists have been among those arrested and facing repression.
In fact, Jewish anti-Zionism not only has a rich history, but until the Holocaust was the dominant politics of international Judaism. While many survivors were convinced that their earlier ideas were naive, internalizing the fascist premise that Jews will never have a place in broader society, and many more were won over to Zionism in the years following the establishment of Israel, Zionism’s rise to dominance within institutional Judaism must be understood in the context of the extermination of millions of anti-Zionist and non-Zionist Jews in concentration camps.
Congress is currently seeking to pass a bill that would cast the views of millions of Jewish Holocaust victims as anti-Jewish and beyond the pale and would suppress those at schools throughout the country from freely discussing their ideas. In doing so, they are spitting on the graves of our ancestors.
Another Bogus Antisemitism Scare
I’ve been watching and thinking about the nationwide campus antiwar demonstrations in support of the suffering Palestinians of Gaza, and the appalling reaction to and “coverage” of those events. Something important needs to be addressed.
I won’t be concerned here with the violence committed by anyone, including the police, or by lesser misconduct, such as occupying and damaging buildings and other violations of university rules. It’s also irrelevant whether the demonstrations stand any chance of ending Israel’s onslaught or ending U.S. and university complicity in it, or whether most of the pro-peace demonstrators share a libertarian orientation. (Not likely.) All that is for another time.
I want to examine the overwhelming depiction of the demonstrations as nothing more than rank antisemitism – the blind hatred of all Jewish people because and only because they are – by birth, blood, belief, or practice – Jewish.
Are the demonstrations antisemitic and hence pro-Hamas, as Spiked magazine and many other observers claim? Are the protestors tapping into what CNN’s Dana Bash called “a deep undercurrent of antisemitism”? (The smears know no bounds.)
To sort this out, I thought I might employ one of my areas of expertise. I spend a lot of time watching excellent British television police dramas. I consider myself a student of British detective techniques. (The Brits take their police dramas very seriously.)
Among other things, I’ve learned that if a crime is alleged to have been committed by a particular person, but you have no damning CCTV or credible witnesses, you begin your investigation by asking if the “person of interest” has a plausible motive for the offense. If not, the chances are good that the person is innocent. People act, which means they have motives.
That’s what I want to do here regarding the campus demonstrations, which are on their face objections to Israel’s bloody (not just in the British figurative sense) seven-month campaign against the Gaza Palestinians. That campaign has taken at least 34,000 lives, injured and starved countless other people, and destroyed so many homes, hospitals, universities, and other facilities vital to life.
So here’s the detective’s challenge: why would non-Jewish pro-peace demonstrators on college campuses across the country knowingly, intentionally alienate their clearly Jewish pro-peace co-demonstrators with whom they encamp all day every day, sharing meals, having teach-ins together, and participating in ecumenical outdoor religious events, like Passover seders? Why would antisemites want to do it?
Does that sound remotely plausible? Are the Jewish students idiots who don’t recognize antisemitism when they’re supposedly drowning in a sea of it? Are the antisemites able to threaten Jewish non-demonstrators and pro-Israel demonstrators while keeping it a secret from Jewish demonstrators standing next to them? That seems unlikely.
What do they take us for – those pro-Israel alarmists, who see an existential threat to all Jewish people every day around every corner? They assume (or pretend to believe) that anti-Zionism – that is, opposition to a Jewish supremacist state – is the same as antisemitism. But a moment’s reflection reveals that this is bunk – no matter how many times Israel’s partisans say so. On a variety of grounds, many Jewish people fundamentally oppose Israel as a Jewish state. They have since the time of Theodor Herzl, the reputed founder of Zionism.
As an aside, this is not the first time that America has been subjected to a false antisemitism scare. The boy has cried wolf falsely many times before. Whenever Israel lays waste to Gaza, a sudden spike in antisemitism is reported by the Anti-Defamation League, AIPAC, and their congressional spokesmen. Isn’t that interesting? Or is it? Could it be that the Israel lobby weaponizes antisemitism to shut up anyone who would object to Israel’s crimes against humanity? (For a close look at this weaponization, see Norman Finkelstein’s Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History.)
Israel’s partisans tell us that America’s campuses today are indistinguishable from 1930s Nazi Berlin. Jewish students, they say, are routinely harassed, threatened, and assaulted. They can’t walk safely to class. The Hitler Youth rule. Really? I can’t recall newsreels from the Nazi years showing Jews and non-Jews peacefully celebrating the sabbath and Passover with open-air religious services and meals. Have you ever seen films from Nazi Germany in which Jewish Germans enthusiastically sported tee-shirts emblazoned with sayings like: “Jewish Voice for Peace,” “Not in Our Name,” “Jews for a Ceasefire Now,” and “Jews for Freedom in Palestine.” Maybe the memory is suppressed, but I’m pretty sure I haven’t.
My policy is to assume good faith in my opponents, but it’s tough in this case. I am confident that the alarmists do not believe their own words when they say that terrorists and Nazis control the universities.
So why do they say it? Because it distracts attention from Israel’s unending massacre. The apologists’ agenda is to support Israel no matter what and to explain away the palpable atrocities. It’s also an attempt to continue America’s shameful complicity.
If Israel and its supporters were truly concerned about antisemitism (rather than needing it to prevent assimilation and abandonment of Israel), they’d do some soul-searching. Israel identifies itself as the Jewish state and claims to represent “the Jewish people” – not only Jewish Israelis but Jews everywhere whether they want it or not. Thus Israel’s long mistreatment of the Palestinians encourages, at least tacitly, the relatively few antisemites, who are eager to point to anything they can use to describe “the Jewish people” as bad actors. “The Jewish state equals the Jewish people” – that’s what they’ve been told by the pro-Israel side. It’s not true, but they’re happy to believe it.
In other words, Israel’s definition of itself and its abuse of the Palestinians ratify the antisemites’ crazy ideas about the international conspiratorial malevolence and collective guilt of “the Jewish people.” Antisemites are encouraged to ignore the over-representation of Jewish Americans in the ranks of Israel’s opponents.
Israel and its supporters then aggravate matters by strategically equating odious antisemitism with honorable anti-Zionism. That in turn gives cover to the antisemites, who can hide in plain sight among the anti-Zionists.
That amounts to Israel’s protection of antisemitism!
You’d think that would be a bad thing. And it is. So why do Israel’s leaders and supporters do it? Because all that matters is the tribal sanctuary, Israel.
Sheldon Richman is the executive editor of The Libertarian Institute and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com. He is the former senior editor at the Cato Institute and Institute for Humane Studies; former editor of The Freeman, published by the Foundation for Economic Education; and former vice president at the Future of Freedom Foundation. His latest books are Coming to Palestine and What Social Animals Owe to Each Other.
No comments:
Post a Comment