The Anti-Zionism Canard
by Snarksmithy, 16 November 2007
Mitchell Cohen has a fine essay in this month’s Dissent about the areas of congruence, in style, rhetoric and fallacious logic, that exist between so-called “anti-Zionists” and classical anti-Semites. Cohen concludes:
If you judge a Jewish state by standards that you apply to no one else; if your neck veins bulge when you denounce Zionists but you’ve done no more than cluck “well, yes, very bad about Darfur”; if there is nothing Hamas can do that you won’t blame ‘in the final analysis’ on Israelis;
if your sneer at the Zionists doesn’t sound a whole lot different from American neoconservative sneers at leftists;
then you should not be surprised if you are criticized, fiercely so, by people who are serious about a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians and who won’t let you get away with a self-exonerating formula—“I am anti-Zionist but not anti-Semitic”—to prevent scrutiny. If you are anti-Zionist and not anti-Semitic, then don’t use the categories, allusions, and smug hiss that are all too familiar to any student of prejudice.
Cohen spends a few paragraphs debunking the latterday absurdities of Tony Judt, who thinks that the equation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism is a recent phenomenon, and that the notion of a Jewish state is an “anachronism” when in fact it very much of the moment. I respect Judt as an historian who provided a masterful analysis of European Stalinism. As Cohen rightly points out, this analysis was deeply enriched an understanding of how Moscow used “Zionist” as a code-word for Jew. The names Anna Pauker, Rudolph Slansky, Traicho Kostov and Laszlo Rajk may not resonate much anymore, but these were all undeviating Stalinists in charge of Soviet satellites, purged simply because of their Hebraic roots.
To understand Soviet anti-Semitism, one has to understand Stalin’s lucubrations on the so-called National Question, the only work he ever produced as a pre-revolution Bolshevik that had any lasting policy impact. As a Georgian, Stalin knew that the tribalism that defined the Caucasus was anathema not only to Communist internationalism but to bourgeois nationalism as well. The “rootless cosmopolitan” was therefore the worst kind of subversive — someone without organic ties to a people or state. It did not help, of course, that more Jews became Mensheviks than Bolsheviks, especially in Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia. (”Filthy, circumcised Yid” was how Stalin once described Julius Martov, the leader of the Menshevik Party.)
Oftentimes, after World War II, the Kremlin would accuse a Jew of being simultaneously a Zionist, a Trotskyist, a Titoist, and a CIA agent, a congeries of interests that, if legitimate, would have made postwar history even more interesting than it was.
Of course, the real anachronism is the term Zionist itself, at least as it has come to mean a supporter of Israel. Zionism was a 19th and 20th century political movement that underwent multiple permutations and revisions yet always agitated for the founding of a homeland for the Jews. Now that that homeland exists and will continue to do so indefinitely, the movement has become obsolete. The messianic reactionaries of Gush Emunim or other Greater Israel chauvinists are not, properly speaking, Zionists any more than Rush Limbaugh is a “rebel colonist” as opposed to an American jingoist. Ditto the most uncompromising elements of AIPAC.
When a conservative calls a liberal who believes in socialized healthcare a socialist he is resorting to a rhetorical flourish that indicates his own tendentiousness rather than the true politics of the liberal. Socialist, when used pejoratively, conjures all sorts of images of undesirable, radical behavior. Propagators of the archaic and meaningless term Zionist are trying to conjure the same thing, but they are acting under a veil of ignorance that pretends Zionist is a polemical identifier no different than any other. Of course, there is no ethnic or racial component attached to socialist.
Friday 16 November 2007 at 19:25
Something wrong here, Snark. It’s not the general argument: that is fine, but Rajk is the wrong man to pick. I am not sure Rajk was in fact Jewish but what is certain is that the leading four Stalinists in 1949, those who framed, tortured, tried and executed him - Mátyás Rákosi (president and leader), Ernö Gerö (finance), Gábor Péter (head of security) and Jeozsef Révai (culture) - all were. What is more the fact was known and remains one of the contributing causes to anti-Semitism in Hungary.
Add to this the fact that the short-lived Hungarian Bolshevik government of 1919 was also led by Jews, and - for a right wing nationalist - a demonology begins to emerge.
It is perhaps natural that the returning concentration camp and labour camp victims of WW2 should have been radicalised and become hard-line Stalinists, just as that the Moscow based Jewish communists of the inter-war Horthy era should have returned determined to change the face of a crypto-fascist state. Just as natural that the sons of Jewish bourgeois businessmen in 1919 should have been radicalised by the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Natural it might have been, but there is nothing to be gained by asserting that the Jews of the Stalinist period were merely victims. Like the rest of the human race Jews could and can act in as vicious a fashion as the worst, and so they did under Rákosi.
That is the delicate line that is consistently being trod in the Israel issue. The state comes into existence because of the special fate of the Jews, but as a state it must be judged like any other state, with the single proviso that the notion of existential danger is never absent from the memories of those who live there.
The rest is as you have it. It is, as Cohen says, the special disapproval of Zionism, the peculiar distaste with which Israel is written about, that verges on anti-Semitism, and sometimes is anti-Semitism. For the old Left this may have something to do with the disappointment of impossibly high expectations of a state composed of victims of Nazism - a disappointment in a form of utopia, if you like.
We don’t live in a world of utopias of course. Utopias and apocalypses belong in the same package. Israel is a state that can and does do wrong, but, as you say, and many in this camp have continually said, it is not an especially cursed state with an especially monstrous regime. It is a bunch of people with terrible memories. When they behave like Rákosi it is right to point it out, as indeed a good number of people in Israel do point out.
Friday 16 November 2007 at 22:28
Goddam, that’s perfect.
Anyone who attempts to convincingly oppose that without recourse to abstruse jargon and/or barefaced dishonesty has their work well and truly cut out.
Friday 16 November 2007 at 22:43
Rajk was definitely Jewish, George, and I’m not arguing the question of the tribe’s relationship to Communism. (For what it’s worth, some of the strongest Hungarian anti-Communists like Koestler started out cheering Bela Kun’s regime precisely because they saw it as the only favorable alternative to the proto-fascist Horthy.)
Also, and this cannot be emphasized enough, Cohen is not issuing a blanket defense of Israeli state policy, nor he is claiming that any criticism of Israel — or even any questioning of the legitimacy of a Jewish state — is axiomatically anti-Semitic. If he did argue this, then Tony Judt would have to be labeled an anti-Semite, which is absurd. Rather, Cohen is saying that many of today’s anti-Semites have a convenient target in Israel: They couch all of their antipathy toward the Jews in political opposition to a state.
It’s a hard thing to prove, I’ll grant, and I’m not even sure that Cohen’s necessary preconditions for judging a closet anti-Semite are sufficient ones. However, double standards are often telling, as are obsessions with the shortcomings and inherent design flaws in the single democratic country in the Middle East.
Judt’s failure of logic, it seems to me, is in thinking that binational state would not effectively spell the end of Jewish first-class citizenship. If an Arab Palestinian majority did attain control of Israel through democratic means then there is every reason to suspect that the illiberal nature of the current democracy would become infinitely worse for the very people it was contrived to protect. Imagine an electorate that votes in Hamas being granted the Right of Return. You can make a moral case for this, but what of the pragmatics and what of the urgent moral questions that they engender. Can a moral case be made for gambling with Jewish enfranchisement and Jewish lives?
Judt’s plan is a benign anti-Zionism, all right. But it is also the height of utopian foolishness.
Sunday 18 November 2007 at 2:29
George’s comment is the best thing i have read in fuckin years.
Says more in seven paragraphs than all the books on the subject written in the last 20 years.
George gets this
X
Sunday 18 November 2007 at 2:46
As George wrote, there is something new involved here - Zionism vs anti-Zionism are now about a big complex of opinions about Israel. Some are, as of old, excuses for removing Israel, butchering Jews, or taking attention off life under repression; those are no more excusable than ever. Others are more moderate.
Post-colonial, and especially post-Milosevic morality has changed the stance of the morality of the creation of Israel. If it were done today, it would be considered ethnic cleansing, wouldn’t it? So, of course, would reremoving Israel or executing a Right of Return, as the radical anti-Zionists demand, so it’s complicated.
Zionism is support for status quo, and of course it also comes in both radical and extreme stripes; most living in Israeli settlements are radical.
There’s also a post-Zionism includes those who feel Israel should end its second-class treatment of Arabs, as modern post-racist ethics require (yep, I’m in this number) and/or apologize for the ethnic cleansing involved. There are many post-Zionists of various stripes in Israel as well.
If an Arab Palestinian majority did attain control of Isra el through democratic means then there is every reason to suspect that the illiberal nature of the current democracy would become infinitely worse for the very people it was contrived to protect.
How ironic - imperialism on a Trot blog. Heh…. That, of course, depends on how it’s done. I trust you don’t feel they’re racially inferior. Note that most Palestinians don’t want to blow up Israel. Palestine is hardly a healthy democracy. If educated to understand democracy in a special immigration process, accepted in batches, and given a few years to understand democracy (as most countries do to most immigrants), I’m not seeing the problem.
Sunday 18 November 2007 at 3:09
Note that most Palestinians don’t want to blow up Israel.
Possibly, but the majority want to remove it from the map by some means, including violent, if the votes for Hamas in the 2005 elections are anything to go by. Of all the Palestinians I have met, very few favour a two state solution. Many would prefer to turn the whole of Palestine into an Islamic state, in which the Jewish and Christian minorities would be ‘tolerated’ under the dhimmi laws.
I remember here in Britain an impassioned expression of this view by Dr Azzam Tamimi, and most Palestinians in the audience, at a public meeting I went to about the time of the 2005 election. We enjoyed a lengthy eulogy for Islamic khalifates of the past, on how they had improved the human condition and were models which surpassed the decadent political structures of Western states. Now this is a man who has had plenty of time to understand democracy, participated in the process, and has a doctorate in politics from a British university, suggesting your assumptions are flawed, to put it mildly.
If you want to preserve a secular democracy, then Snark’s comments should be taken seriously.
Monday 19 November 2007 at 2:58
if the votes for Hamas in the 2005 elections are anything to go by.
As I wrote above, Palestine is hardly a healthy democracy. Most blogposts and radio interviews I heard the day they won said most Palestinians who voted for Hamas did so as a reaction against corrupt incumbents. Yep, many Palestinians want Israel gone. Many Israelis want Palestinians to be vanished too, and there are many Americans who want us to to either conquer or nuke the Middle East; fortunately, none of those are majorities.
We enjoyed a lengthy eulogy for Islamic khalifates of the past, on how they had improved the human condition and were models which surpassed the decadent political structures of Western states. Now this is a man who has had plenty of time to understand democracy,
Well, he was right. At that time the shoe was on the other foot - Middle Eastern states were advanced and moderate, and Western states backward and theocratic; it was that way, on and off, for most of a millenium.
Tuesday 20 November 2007 at 16:14
anti zionism = anti semitism
M.L. King a man who knew a thing or two about bigotry.
message to leftist anti semites i hope you enjoy the company of nazis, islmo fascist and there ilk.
f&*k off momzarm.