The
Progressive Assault on Israel
A
movement that can detect a racist dog-whistle from miles away is strangely deaf
when it comes to some of the barking on its own side of the fence.
Opinion
Columnist
·
Feb. 8, 2019
It happened again last month in
Detroit. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators seized the stage of the National
L.G.B.T.Q. Task Force’s marquee conference, “Creating Change” and demanded a
boycott of Israel. “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” they
chanted — the tediously malign, thinly veiled call to end Israel as a Jewish
state.
They were met with sustained applause
by the audience at what is the largest annual conference
of L.G.B.T.Q. activists in the United States. Conference
organizers did nothing to stop the disruption or disavow the demonstrators.
For Tyler Gregory, neither the behavior
of the protesters nor the passivity of the organizers came as a surprise.
Gregory is executive director of A Wider Bridge, a
North American L.G.B.T.Q. organization that works to support Israel and its gay
community. In 2016, his group hosted a reception at the Task Force’s conference
in Chicago. The event was mobbed by some 200 aggressive demonstrators,
and Gregory and his audience had to barricade themselves in their room while
those outside were harassed.
“Whether
you believe in the concept of intersectionality is beside the point,” Gregory
told me recently, referring to the idea that the oppression of one
group is the oppression of all others. “If this is your value system, you are
not following it. As Jews we were denied our safe space. We were denied our
place in a movement that fights bigotry.”
Scenes
of the kind that played out at the L.G.B.T.Q. conferences — not to mention
college campuses across the United States — are familiar to anyone involved in
the politics of the American Jewish community. They have burst into wider
consciousness in recent months, thanks to revelations that Jewish organizers of
the 2017 Women’s March were deliberately sidelined,
excluded and attacked by some of its founders, at least one of
whom, activist Tamika Mallory, is an unapologetic admirer of
Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam’s unapologetically anti-Semitic leader.
They have also burst into Congress,
largely as a result of the election of Democratic Representatives Rashida Tlaib
of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. Both women support boycotts of Israel.
Both have also written tweets with
distinctly anti-Semitic undertones.
Far from being reproached or condemned by their party, as Iowa’s Steve King was
by Republicans, they have become Democratic rock stars. (Omar, to her credit,
recanted her tweet; Tlaib did not.)
Progressives — including presidential
hopefuls Cory Booker, Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren — also united behind
Vermont’s Bernie Sanders in a failed bid to block a Senate bill, passed on
Tuesday, that includes an anti-B.D.S. measure prohibiting federal contracts
with businesses that boycott Israel, ostensibly on free-speech grounds. One
wonders how these same Democrats feel about, say, championing First Amendment
protections for bakers who refuse to make cakes for gay couples.
All of this is profoundly unsettling to
a Jewish community that has generally seen the Democratic Party as its
political home. That’s not because American Jews are unfamiliar with the
radical left’s militant hostility toward the Jewish state. That’s been true for
decades. Nor is it because American Jews are suddenly tilting right: Some 76
percent voted for Democrats in the midterms.
What’s
unsettling is that the far-left’s hostility is now being mainstreamed by the
not-so-far left. Anti-Zionism — that is, rejection not just of this or that
Israeli policy, but also of the idea of a Jewish state itself — is becoming a
respectable position among people who would never support the elimination of
any other country in any other circumstance. And it is churning up a new wave
of nakedly anti-Jewish bigotry in its wake, as when three women holding rainbow
flags embossed with a Star of David at the 2017 Chicago Dyke March were ejected
on grounds that the star was “a trigger.”
How did this happen?
The progressive answer is
straightforward: Israel and its supporters, they say, did this to themselves.
More than a half-century of occupation of Palestinian territories is a massive
injustice that fair-minded people can no longer ignore, especially given America’s
financial support for Israel. Continued settlement expansion in the West Bank
proves Israel has no interest in making peace on equitable terms. And endless
occupation makes Israel’s vaunted democracy less about Jewish
self-determination than it is about ethnic subjugation.
There’s more to the indictment, but
that’s the nub of it. It would be damning if it were true, or even half-true.
It’s not.
A few facts ought at least to stir the
thinking of those who subscribe to the progressive narrative. Israel's enemies
were committed to its destruction long before it occupied a single inch of Gaza
or the West Bank. In proportion to its
size, Israel has voluntarily relinquished more territory taken in war than any
state in the world. Israeli prime ministers offered a Palestinian state
in 2000 and 2008; they were refused both times. The government of
Ariel Sharon removed every Israeli settlement and soldier from
the Gaza Strip in 2005. The result of Israel’s withdrawal allowed Hamas to
seize power two years later and spark three wars, causing ordinary Israelis to
think twice about the wisdom of duplicating the experience in the West Bank.
Nearly 1,300 Israeli civilians have been killed in Palestinian terrorist attacks
in this century: That’s the proportional equivalent of about 16 Sept. 11’s in
the United States.
Also: If the Jewish state is really so
villainous, why doesn’t it behave more like Syria’s Bashar al-Assad or Russia’s
Vladimir Putin — both of whom, curiously, continue to have prominent sympathizers and apologists on
the anti-Israel left?
None of this is to embrace the “Likud
narrative” of the conflict, or support the policies of Benjamin Netanyahu, or
reject the idea of Palestinian statehood, or suggest that Israel is above
criticism and reproach. For the record, I support a two-state solution, just as
I supported Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip when I was the editor of
The Jerusalem Post.
What it is to say is that
the Israel-Palestinian conflict is far more complicated than the
black-and-white picture drawn by Israel’s progressive critics. But the deeper
flaw in progressive thinking on Israel — the flaw that has resulted in this
efflorescence of bigotry — isn’t that it rests on a faulty factual foundation.
It’s that its core intellectual assumptions are wrong and rotten.
The
first assumption is that Israel’s choices toward the Palestinians aren’t
agonizingly hard (as they are for some of the reasons mentioned above), but
actually are quite easy — just a matter of stopping settlement construction,
reaching a reasonable settlement with the Palestinians, making peace, and
living relatively happily ever after. But this is a caricature, and it’s one
that quickly descends to calumny: That is, the idea that Israel’s failure to
make the “right” choice is proof of its boundless greed for Palestinian land
and wicked indifference to their plight.
Next is the belief that anti-Zionism is
a legitimate political position, and not another form of prejudice.
It is one thing to argue, in the moot
court of historical what-ifs, that Israel should not have come into being, at
least not where it is now. It is also fair to say that there is much to dislike
about Israel’s current leadership, just as there’s much not to like about
America’s. But nobody claims the election of Donald Trump makes America an
illegitimate state.
Israel is now the home of nearly nine
million citizens, with an identity that is as distinctively and proudly Israeli
as the Dutch are Dutch or the Danes Danish. Anti-Zionism proposes nothing less
than the elimination of that identity and the political dispossession of those
who cherish it, with no real thought of what would likely happen to the
dispossessed. Do progressives expect the rights of Jews to be protected should
Hamas someday assume the leadership of a reconstituted “Palestine”?
Then there’s the astounding view that
anti-Zionism bears only a tangential relationship to anti-Semitism. Hatred of
Jews is a shape-shifting phenomenon that historically has melded with the
prejudices of the time in order to gain greater political currency. Jews have
been hated for reasons of religion, race, lack of national attachments, and now
an excess of national attachment. The arguments for hating Jews vary; the
target of the hatred tragically remains the same.
Of course, it’s theoretically possible
to distinguish anti-Zionism from anti-Semitism, just as it’s theoretically
possible to distinguish segregationism from racism. But the striking feature of
anti-Zionist rhetoric is how broadly it overlaps with traditionally
anti-Semitic tropes.
To say, as progressives sometimes do,
that Jews are “colonizers” in
Israel is anti-Semitic because it advances the lie that there is no ancestral
or historic Jewish tie to the land. To claim that Israel is committing genocide in
Gaza, when manifestly it is not, is anti-Semitic because it’s an attempt to
Nazify the Jewish state. To insist that the only state in the
world that has forfeited the moral right to
exist just happens to be the Jewish state is anti-Semitic, too: Are Israel’s
purported crimes really worse than those of, say, Zimbabwe or China, whose rights
to exist are never called into question?
But
the most toxic assumption is that Jews, whether in Israel or the U.S., can
never really be thought of as victims or even as a minority because they are
white, wealthy, powerful and “privileged.” This relies on a simplistic concept
of power that collapses on a moment’s inspection.
Jews in Germany were economically and
even politically powerful in the 1920s. And then they were in Buchenwald.
Israel appears powerful vis-à-vis the Palestinians, but considerably less so in
the context of a broader Middle East saturated with genocidal
anti-Semitism. American Jews are comparatively wealthy. But wealth
without political power, as Hannah Arendt understood, is a recipe for hatred.
The Jews of the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh are almost surely
“privileged” according to various socio-economic measures. But privilege didn’t
save the congregants of the Tree of Life synagogue last year.
Nor can the racial politics of the
United States or any other country be projected onto the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, as some have desperately sought to do. Nearly half of all Jewish
Israelis have Middle Eastern roots; some, in fact, are black. Martin
Luther King Jr. preached nonviolent resistance; Yasir Arafat practiced terrorism.
The civil rights movement was about getting America to live up its founding
ideals; anti-Zionism is about destroying Israel’s founding ideals.
As
for the oft-cited apartheid analogy, black South Africans did not have a place
in the old regime’s Parliament, as Israeli Arabs have in the Knesset; nor were
they admitted to white universities, as Israeli Arabs are to Israeli
universities. Israel can do more to advance the rights of its Arab citizens
(just as the United States, France, Britain and other countries can for their
own minorities). And Israel can also do more to ease the lives of Palestinians
who are not citizens. But the comparison of Israel to apartheid South Africa is
unfair to the former and an insult to the victims of the latter.
None of this should be hard for most
progressives to understand. Indeed, progressives have no trouble spotting
anti-Semitism when it emanates from the political right — the effigies of
George Soros, the attacks on “globalists” with names like Blankfein and Yellen,
the social media memes borrowed from neo-Nazis. Yet it seems that a movement
that can detect a racist dog-whistle from miles away is strangely
deaf when it comes to some of the barking on its own side of the fence. And
even when it does hear it, it doesn’t have the sense to banish it.
This
is dangerous, and not just to Israeli and American Jews. In Britain, the Labour
Party is now led by a militant anti-Zionist whose deep-seated
anti-Semitism occasionally slips out. And yet Jeremy Corbyn
remains in firm control of his party, is reshaping it in his image and may yet
become Britain’s next prime minister.
The prospect of Corbynism coming to
America may still seem remote. But that can’t be counted on in an era of sharp
and rapid polarization. When New York Representative Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez tweeted recently
about the “honor” of her “lovely and wide-reaching conversation” with Corbyn,
it was a sign either of indifference or purposeful alliance that ought to
profoundly alarm every sensible Democrat worried about the ideological
direction and moral health of the party. Now is the time for party leaders to
make sure that doesn’t happen by insisting that anti-Zionism has no more a
place in the Democratic fold than any form of prejudice.
American democracy is already in
jeopardy for having one party that has surrendered to the politics of ethnic
bigotry disguised as social concern. To have two such parties would be fatal.