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NY Times Op-Ed, Dec. 8, 2018
Anti-Zionism Isn’t the Same as Anti-Semitism
By Michelle Goldberg
Rashida Tlaib, an incoming Democratic House member from Michigan. She
and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota have said they support efforts to pressure
Israel economically.CreditCreditCarolyn Kaster/Associated Press
On Monday, in an interview with The Intercept, Rashida Tlaib, a Michigan
Democrat who in November became the first Palestinian-American elected
to Congress, went public with her support for the Boycott, Divestment
and Sanctions movement, which seeks to use economic pressure on Israel
to secure Palestinian rights. That made her the second incoming member
of Congress to publicly back B.D.S., after Minnesota Democrat Ilhan
Omar, who revealed her support last month.
No current member of Congress supports B.D.S., a movement that is deeply
taboo in American politics for several reasons. Opponents argue that
singling out Israel for economic punishment is unfair and
discriminatory, since the country is far from the world’s worst violator
of human rights. Further, the movement calls for the right of
Palestinian refugees and millions of their descendants to return to
Israel, which could end Israel as a majority-Jewish state. (Many B.D.S.
supporters champion a single, binational state for both peoples.)
Naturally, conservatives in the United States — though not only
conservatives — have denounced Tlaib and Omar’s stance as anti-Semitic.
It is not. The conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism is a bit of
rhetorical sleight-of-hand that depends on treating Israel as the
embodiment of the Jewish people everywhere. Certainly, some criticism of
Israel is anti-Semitic, but it’s entirely possible to oppose Jewish
ethno-nationalism without being a bigot. Indeed, it’s increasingly
absurd to treat the Israeli state as a stand-in for Jews writ large,
given the way the current Israeli government has aligned itself with
far-right European movements that have anti-Semitic roots.
The interests of the State of Israel and of Jews in the diaspora may at
times coincide, but they’ve never been identical. Right-wing
anti-Semites have sometimes supported Zionism because they don’t want
Jews in their own countries — a notable example is the Polish government
in the 1930s.
Conversely, there’s a long history of Jewish anti-Zionism or
non-Zionism, both secular and religious. In 1950 Jacob Blaustein, the
president of the American Jewish Committee, one of the country’s most
important Jewish organizations, reached an agreement with Israel’s prime
minister, David Ben-Gurion, in which Ben-Gurion essentially promised not
to claim to speak for American Jews. “Jews of the United States, as a
community and as individuals, have no political attachment to Israel,”
said Blaustein at the time.
Decades later, such a statement from the committee — or any major,
mainstream Jewish organization — would be unthinkable. A consensus set
in “that Jewish identity can be reduced to Israelism,” Eliyahu Stern, an
associate professor of modern Jewish history at Yale, told me. “That’s
something that takes place over the second half of the 20th century in
America.”
The centrality of Israel to American Jewish identity has at times put
liberal American Jews in an awkward position, defending multiethnic
pluralism here, where they’re in the minority, while treating it as
unspeakable in Israel, where Jews are the majority. (American white
nationalists, some of whom liken their project to Zionism, love to poke
at this contradiction.)
Until fairly recently, it was easy enough for many liberals to dismiss
consistency on Israel as a hobgoblin of little minds. A binational state
might sound nice in theory, but in practice is probably a recipe for
civil war. (Even the Belgians have trouble managing it.) The two-state
solution appeared to offer a route to both satisfying Palestinian
national aspirations and preserving Israel’s Jewish, democratic character.
Now, however, Israel has foreclosed the possibility of two states,
relentlessly expanding into the West Bank and signaling to the world
that the Palestinians will never have a capital in East Jerusalem. As
long as the de facto policy of the Israeli government is that there
should be only one state in historic Palestine, it’s unreasonable to
regard Palestinian demands for equal rights in that state as
anti-Semitic. If the Israeli government is going to treat a Palestinian
state as a ridiculous pipe dream, the rest of us can’t act as if such a
state is the only legitimate goal of Palestinian activism.
At times, I’ve agreed with those who see something disproportionate in
the left’s fixation on Israel. But the oft-heard argument that other
peoples are suffering more than the Palestinians can be a form of
weaponized whataboutism, meant to elide the unique role America plays as
Israel’s protector.
In an op-ed essay in The Wall Street Journal last week, Secretary of
State Mike Pompeo listed Saudi Arabia’s growing ties to Israel as a
reason not to downgrade America’s relationship with the kingdom, despite
the killing of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. If the Trump
administration is going to use our alliance with Israel as an excuse for
abandoning fundamental values, surely Americans are justified in
subjecting that alliance to special scrutiny.
Meanwhile, Israel is ever more willing to ally itself with foreign
leaders who share its illiberal nationalism, even when they’re hostile
to Jews. “In the past, Israel has always adhered to a clear policy that
it will not engage with political parties ostracized by the local Jewish
community,” Anshel Pfeffer wrote in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz last
year. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, wrote Pfeffer, “has
abandoned this policy.”
Netanyahu has nurtured a particularly close relationship with the
Hungarian right-wing populist Viktor Orban, whose government is waging a
demonization campaign against the Hungarian-born Jewish billionaire
George Soros. Just this week Soros’s Central European University
announced it has been forced out of Hungary. And Netanyahu’s office is
trying to negotiate a compromise with Hungary over the contents of a
museum that many fear will whitewash Hungary’s role in the Nazi genocide
of the Jews, essentially putting Israel’s imprimatur on a modified form
of Holocaust revisionism.
Netanyahu, then, seems to understand that being pro-Israel and
pro-Jewish are not the same thing. Liberal American Jews, particularly
younger ones, are learning that lesson as well. Some staunch Zionists
are bad for the Jews — witness Steve King, the Republican congressman
from Iowa who invokes his support for Israel when he’s called out for
his blatant white nationalism.
At the same time, people with an uncompromising commitment to
pluralistic democracy will necessarily be critics of contemporary
Israel. That commitment, however, makes them the natural allies of Jews
everywhere else.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter
(@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the
author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and
was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018
for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues. @michelleinbklyn
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