Those Who Forget the Past (48 page)

So much for the expressions of anti-Israel feeling which, as Jonathan Sacks has argued, can “shade into anti-Semitism.” Let's assume that our hypothetical critic speaks with impeccable sensitivity to Jewish concerns. Let's assume, too, that his criticism is genuinely anti-Zionist, rather than a mere objection to the post-1967 occupation or to this or that Israeli administration. He rejects—to return to the Collins Dictionary—“the establishment and support of a national homeland for Jews in Palestine.” Is he automatically an anti-Semite?

Some, including the lawyer and writer Anthony Julius, say yes. “Anti-Zionists deny Jews the right to exist collectively,” they argue, which is a hair's breadth away from the anti-Semites' denial of the right of Jews to exist at all. This is a position with enormous implications. For if anti-Zionism can be identified with anti-Semitism, then that makes Jews and Zionism identical, too. To attack one is to attack the other; there is next to no space between them. This is not an absurd claim by any means. Jewish affinity with Israel is now so widespread and entrenched, across the political and religious spectrum, that it has indeed become a central part of Jewish identity. A 1995 survey by the JPR/Institute for Jewish Policy Research found just 3 percent of Anglo-Jewry had negative feelings toward Israel. For almost everyone else, the Jewish state has become inseparable from their Jewishness. As the novelist Howard Jacobson puts it, when Jews see an attack on Israel they see an attack on “a version of themselves.” This should at least give the anti-Zionist pause: much as they may insist that they condemn only Zionists, not Jews, this is not how Jews themselves experience it. The Jewish people has made up its mind since 1945 and it has embraced Zionism. To stand against that idea now is to stand against a core Jewish belief.

Yet we should not use that fact to close down discussion. After all, it's still possible to disagree with someone, even on one of their most closely-held principles, without hating them. That should hold true for anti-Zionists, too: surely they should be allowed to disagree with Zionism without being branded a hater of Jews? Recall for a moment the Bundists, socialists, and communist Jews of the pre-Holocaust period who believed Jewish redemption would come through revolution rather than return: were they anti-Semites? Of course not. And what about the ultra-orthodox Jews who still hold that Jewish migration to Palestine represented a usurpation of God's role: it's up to the Messiah, not us, to create a Jewish state. Are these people anti-Semites? Again, no.

Yet these are not the grounds on which most non-Jews build their anti-Zionism. Rather they have different complaints —and it is here that Jews need to be subtle listeners. For some forms of anti-Zionism are different from others.

There is a variety of left anti-Zionism, for example, which sits alongside an avowed support for all other demands for self-determination. If there is a movement of national liberation, they'll back it—from Palestine to Scotland, northern Ireland to Catalonia. These people need to be asked a simple question: “if they support all these movements, why not the Jews?” Why are the Jews unique among the nations of the world in not deserving a state of their own? If no coherent answer comes back, it will be worth asking our anti-Zionist friend if his belief rests on no more sure foundation than simple discrimination against Jews—which is, of course, an element of anti-Semitism.

But he may have an answer. It may be that he says the Jews are not a nation, and are therefore ineligible to claim national rights. Since Jews are defined by their religion, a Jewish state is no more defensible than a Protestant France or a Catholic Ireland. This belief is certainly wrong-headed. As we shall see, most Jews have made the shift toward a national, rather than purely religious, identity. Besides, as the Irish case illustrates, plenty of nationalisms are outgrowths of initially-religious groupings. But is it more than wrong-headed; is it anti-Semitic? It clearly denies the right of the Jews to define themselves: if Jews say they are a nation, what right does anybody else have to refuse them and insist they are this rather than that? If the right to self-definition is honored in every other case— Palestinians and Basques and Algerians are all allowed to describe themselves and chart their own destinies, but not Jews —then we are confronted, once more, with a straightforward case of discrimination. Unless the anti-Zionist has more to say, he is at least vulnerable to the charge of anti-Semitism.

What if he does have more to say? He might accept that Jews have a right to define themselves and that, as a nation, they have a right to self-determination—and then locate his objection elsewhere. He may say, first, that the unusual element in the Jewish case—the thing that separates it from the Catalan or Scottish or any other example—is that Jewish national liberation in Palestine could only ever be achieved at the expense of another people: the Palestinians.

For some anti-Zionists it is this simple fact which blocks the Zionist claim. If Palestine had indeed been the “land without a people for a people without a land,” then there would be no reason to object. But Palestine was not empty. During the two millennia of Jewish exile a new community, even a new nation, arose there. For the Jews to have their national homeland another people would have to lose at least some of theirs. The simple, unavoidable fact of this dispossession is enough to make many write off Zionism as a moral enterprise.

Such a verdict is harsh, but is it anti-Semitic? Once again: not if applied evenly. If our anti-Zionist took the same hard line on all new societies founded by immigrants who displaced the earlier inhabitants, then he would be perfectly consistent. If he denied the right of, say, the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and whole swathes of Latin America to exist, then he would be immune to charges of anti-Semitism.

The reality, as we know, is that not many anti-Zionists take this option; not many show equal fervor in their denunciation of Washington, Sydney, or Wellington. Does this make them anti-Semites, for making such an exception of the Jewish state? That depends on whether you accept the anti-Zionist defense. It argues that there are some crucial differences in the Israeli case. First, this dispossession happened within living memory and that many of its direct victims are—unlike the native Americans, Aboriginals, and Maoris—still alive. Second, the current demand made by the dispossessed is not merely for equal treatment and rights—as it is in the United States, Australia, or New Zealand—but for national independence and statehood. It is this national character that gives the Zionist question its extra, more pressing dimension.

If this is persuasive, there is one more move our left anti-Zionist needs to make. He needs to show a consistent view that any landless people seeking a nation state would, like the Jews, be barred if their liberation entailed another's dispossession. If they are happy to agree to that, then one could hardly accuse them of anti-Jewish discrimination. Such a person is not making a special exception of the Jews, but rather of all peoples unlucky enough to seek a territory when they have none. The Roma people, should they desire a nation state, would be similarly blocked.

There is another line of anti-Zionist argument which should likewise not be instantly dismissed as anti-Semitism. There are some whose objection to the Jewish state is not so much to the displacement required to create it, as its inevitable nature once established. They say that a “Jewish state” is an ethnic construct, one which will always privilege one group of citizens over another. Its institutions, traditions, and national symbols will only ever include one section of the population— roughly 80 percent on current figures—and pointedly exclude the others. Just as if an Ireland formally designated a Catholic state would exclude and discriminate against Protestants and others, so a “Jewish state” necessarily makes second-class citizens of its non-Jews. To take one totemic example, a Jewish state must speak of the Jewish story—of exile and longing—in its national anthem. Yet how are Israel's one million Arab citizens to sing an anthem that is not about them at all?

The problem is intensified in the Zionist case because Jewishness represents what some scholars describe as a “closed” rather than “open” identity. Britishness or Americanness are open identities: merely living in the country long enough, or being born there, or acquiring citizenship, gives you membership. Jewishness is not like that. Israel's non-Jewish citizens cannot join the Jewish majority just by being there (the way, say, Britain's Jews have become British as a matter of course). Instead they would have to undergo a formal, religious conversion. This means that while Israeli status is open to all as a matter of citizenship, a fifth of the population can never feel fully Israeli as a matter of identity—for that would require identification with Israel as a Jewish state, a sentiment surely open only to Jews.

This brand of anti-Zionism, which questions Israel as a Jewishly-defined state, is probably best articulated by the Palestinian-Israeli member of Knesset, Azmi Bishara. Whether advocated by him or others, it would probably be a mistake instantly to label it anti-Semitic. So long as its exponents took a similarly harsh view of other ethnically defined states, there would be no discrimination claim to press.

Rather, Zionists may have to accept that, where proffered on principle rather than out of malice, these kinds of arguments deserve a serious answer. Both Bishara's critique of Israel as an ethnic state, and the more familiar denunciation of the upheavals of 1948, have to be confronted by those who believe in the idea, and morality, of a Jewish state.

So far that confrontation has tended to consist in questioning the premise, rather than engaging with the issue. Mainstream Zionists have rejected the allegations of dispossession in 1948—though that is becoming ever harder, thanks to Israel's own “new historians” who have done so much to uncover the “labor pains” that accompanied Israel's birth—and denied that there is anything remiss or discriminatory in Israeli democracy.

A tougher, but ultimately more rewarding response might be to admit these challenges to Zionism—and to work to craft a new Zionism that might be proofed against them. On the first matter, I have long believed that Israel should be strong enough to admit the reality of 1948—and to defend it all the same. Jews should turn to the anti-Zionists who claim that Zionism's moral claim was voided by the presence of another nation, and say: “In an ideal world, maybe. In an ideal world, perhaps national liberation would only be deemed possible when it does not entail another's dispossession. But this is not the ideal world. This is the real world, and in the middle of the twentieth century reality was all too clear to the Jewish people. We needed a home and we had every right to demand it—even if that meant forcing another people to share their land with us. Ours was the right of Amos Oz's drowning man reaching for a piece of driftwood: he is allowed to grab it, even to make another man budge up to share it. That was the nature of the Zionist crimes of 1948 (in 1967 we went further, not just asking our fellow drowner to share the driftwood—but forcing him off it and into the sea altogether). They were tough and people lost their homes, and for that Israel should make amends—through compensation, restitution, and commemoration. Let those four hundred villages that were emptied be named and marked, and let Palestinians remember what they see as the
naqba,
the catastrophe, their way. Israel and the Jews should have that reckoning with our recent past—but we don't have to renounce Zionism itself. We can still insist that the creation of a Jewish state was a moral necessity even if, like so many moral necessities, it was bought at a horribly high moral price.”

The response to Bishara will require even more radical change. It necessitates what in Northern Ireland would be called an “equality agenda”—a raft of reforms in housing, employment, government spending, and the law to end discrimination against non-Jews. But it can't end there. Israel, and indeed the wider Jewish world, needs to work out a way that the country can still remain Jewish in character—a state for the Jews—without enshrining inequality forever. Bishara's slogan is “a state of all its citizens,” which is indeed a description of most liberal democracies. Israel is currently a “Jewish state,” with all the ramifications that entails. The challenge now is surely to find a place somewhere between those two, a position which would simultaneously allow Jews to feel their Zionist need has been met—that they have their own national home—and Arabs to feel like full members of the society in which they live. Could the winning formula be “a Jewish state of all its citizens,” or is that too much of a fudge?

Either way, there is much to be done. Zionists need to stand firm against those critics who make an exception of Jews—who deny us the rights they would give everyone else—and whose language and methods, mistakenly or otherwise, play on the most gruesome memories of our past. Some anti-Zionists are anti-Semites and they should be fought like enemies.

But others are presenting us with a cogent challenge to our core values. They are asking the questions some of our long-lost fellow Jews—the Bundists, socialists, and anarchists—used to ask and would be asking now, had not so many of them been cut down a half-century ago. They are not unanswerable questions at all, but they need a response. We may not win over many of our enemies, but we shall make ourselves stronger. And there is no more Zionist project than that.

JUDITH BUTLER

The Charge of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel, and the Risks of Public Critique

[P]rofoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities. Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent.

—address by Lawrence Summers, September 17, 2002

WHEN THE PRESIDENT of Harvard University declared that to criticize Israel at this time and to call on universities to divest from Israel are “actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent,” he introduced a distinction between effective and intentional anti-Semitism that is controversial at best. The counter-charge has been that in making his statement, Summers has struck a blow against academic freedom, in effect if not in intent. Although he insisted that he meant nothing censorious by his remarks, and that he is in favor of Israeli policy being “debated freely and civilly,” his words have had a chilling effect on political discourse. Among those actions which he called “effectively anti-Semitic” were European boycotts of Israel, anti-globalization rallies at which criticisms of Israel were voiced, and fund-raising efforts for organizations of “questionable political provenance.” Of local concern to him, however, was a divestment petition drafted by MIT and Harvard faculty members who oppose Israel's current occupation and its treatment of Palestinians. Summers asked why Israel was being “single[d] out . . . among all nations” for a divestment campaign, suggesting that the singling out was evidence of anti-Semitic intentions. And though he claimed that aspects of Israel's “foreign and defense” policy “can be and should be vigorously challenged,” it was unclear how such challenges could or would take place without being construed as anti-Israel, and why these policy issues, which include occupation, ought not to be vigorously challenged through a divestment campaign. It would seem that calling for divestment is something other than a legitimately “vigorous challenge,” but we are not given any criteria by which to adjudicate between vigorous challenges that should be articulated, and those which carry the “effective” force of anti-Semitism.

Summers is right to voice concern about rising antiSemitism, and every progressive person ought to challenge anti-Semitism vigorously wherever it occurs. It seems, though, that historically we have now reached a position in which Jews cannot legitimately be understood always and only as presumptive victims. Sometimes we surely are, but sometimes we surely are not. No political ethics can start from the assumption that Jews monopolize the position of victim. “Victim” is a quickly transposable term: it can shift from minute to minute, from the Jew killed by suicide bombers on a bus to the Palestinian child killed by Israeli gunfire. The public sphere needs to be one in which both kinds of violence are challenged insistently and in the name of justice.

If we think that to criticize Israeli violence, or to call for economic pressure to be put on the Israeli state to change its policies, is to be “effectively anti-Semitic,” we will fail to voice our opposition for fear of being named as part of an anti-Semitic enterprise. No label could be worse for a Jew, who knows that, ethically and politically, the position with which it would be unbearable to identify is that of the anti-Semite. The ethical framework within which most progressive Jews operate takes the form of the following question: will we be silent (and thereby collaborate with illegitimately violent power), or will we make our voices heard (and be counted among those who did what they could to stop that violence), even if speaking poses a risk? The current Jewish critique of Israel is often portrayed as insensitive to Jewish suffering, past as well as present, yet its ethic is based on the experience of suffering, in order that suffering might stop.

Summers uses the “anti-Semitic” charge to quell public criticism of Israel, even as he explicitly distances himself from the overt operations of censorship. He writes, for instance, that “the only antidote to dangerous ideas is strong alternatives vigorously advocated.” But how does one vigorously advocate the idea that the Israeli occupation is brutal and wrong, and Palestinian self-determination a necessary good, if the voicing of those views calls down the charge of anti-Semitism?

To understand Summers's claim, we have to be able to conceive of an effective anti-Semitism, one that pertains to certain speech acts. Either it follows on certain utterances, or it structures them, even if that is not the conscious intention of those making them. His view assumes that such utterances will be taken by others as anti-Semitic, or received within a given context as anti-Semitic. So we have to ask what context Summers has in mind when he makes his claim; in what context is it the case that any criticism of Israel will be taken to be anti-Semitic?

It may be that what Summers was effectively saying is that the only way a criticism of Israel can be heard is through a certain acoustic frame, such that the criticism, whether it is of the West Bank settlements, the closing of Birzeit and Bethlehem University, the demolition of homes in Ramallah or Jenin, or the killing of numerous children and civilians, can only be interpreted as showing hatred for Jews. We are asked to conjure a listener who attributes an intention to the speaker: so-and-so has made a public statement against the Israeli occupation, and this must mean that so-and-so hates Jews or is willing to fuel those who do. The criticism is thus given a hidden meaning, one that is at odds with its explicit claim. The criticism of Israel is nothing more than a cloak for that hatred, or a cover for a call for discriminatory action against Jews. In other words, the only way to understand
effective
anti-Semitism is to presuppose
intentional
anti-Semitism; the effective anti-Semitism of any criticism turns out to reside in the intention of the speaker as retrospectively attributed by the listener.

It may be that Summers has something else in mind; namely, that the criticism will be exploited by those who want to see not only the destruction of Israel but the degradation or devaluation of Jewish people in general. There is always that risk, but to claim that such criticism of Israel can be taken only as criticism of Jews is to attribute to that particular interpretation the power to monopolize the field of reception. The argument against letting criticism of Israel into the public sphere would be that it gives fodder to those with anti-Semitic intentions, who will successfully co-opt the criticism. Here again, a statement can become effectively anti-Semitic only if there is, somewhere, an intention to use it for anti-Semitic purposes. Indeed, even if one believed that criticisms of Israel are by and large heard as anti-Semitic (by Jews, anti-Semites, or people who could be described as neither), it would become the responsibility of all of us to change the conditions of reception so that the public might begin to distinguish between criticism of Israel and a hatred of Jews.

Summers made his statement as president of an institution which is a symbol of academic prestige in the United States, and although he claimed he was speaking not as president of the university but as a “member of our community,” his speech carried weight in the press precisely because he was exercising the authority of his office. If the president of Harvard is letting the public know that he will take any criticism of Israel to be effectively anti-Semitic, then he is saying that public discourse itself ought to be so constrained that such statements are not uttered, and that those who utter them will be understood as engaging in anti-Semitic speech, even hate speech.

Here, it is important to distinguish between anti-Semitic speech which, say, produces a hostile and threatening environment for Jewish students—racist speech which any university administrator would be obliged to oppose and regulate—and speech which makes a student uncomfortable because it opposes a particular state or set of state policies that he or she may defend. The latter is a political debate, and if we say that the case of Israel is different, that any criticism of it is considered as an attack on Israelis, or Jews in general, then we have singled out this political allegiance from all other allegiances that are open to public debate. We have engaged in the most outrageous form of “effective” censorship.

The point is not only that Summers's distinction between effective and intentional anti-Semitism cannot hold, but that the way it collapses in his formulation is precisely what produces the conditions under which certain public views are taken to be hate speech, in effect if not in intent. Summers didn't say that anything that Israel does in the name of self-defense is legitimate and ought not to be questioned. I don't know whether he approves of all Israeli policies, but let's imagine, for the sake of argument, that he doesn't. And I don't know whether he has views about, for instance, the destruction of homes and the killings of children in Jenin which attracted the attention of the United Nations last year but was not investigated as a human rights violation because Israel refused to open its borders to an investigative team. If he objects to those actions, and they are among the “foreign policy” issues he believes ought to be “vigorously challenged,” he would be compelled, under his formulation, not to voice his disapproval, believing, as he does, that that would be construed, effectively, as anti-Semitism. And if he thinks it possible to voice disapproval, he hasn't shown us how to do it in such a way as to avert the allegation of antiSemitism.

Summers's logic suggests that certain actions of the Israeli state must be allowed to go on unimpeded by public protest, for fear that any protest would be tantamount to anti-Semitism, if not anti-Semitism itself. Now, all forms of anti-Semitism must be opposed, but we have here a set of serious confusions about the forms anti-Semitism takes. Indeed, if the charge of anti-Semitism is used to defend Israel at all costs, then its power when used against those who do discriminate against Jews— who do violence to synagogues in Europe, wave Nazi flags, or support anti-Semitic organizations—is radically diluted. Many critics of Israel now dismiss all claims of anti-Semitism as “trumped up,” having been exposed to their use as a way of censoring political speech.

Summers doesn't tell us why divestment campaigns or other forms of public protest
are
anti-Semitic. According to him, some forms of anti-Semitism are characterized as such retroactively, which means that nothing should be said or done that will then be taken to be anti-Semitic by others. But what if those others are wrong? If we take one form of anti-Semitism to be defined retroactively, what is left of the possibility of legitimate protest against a state, either by its own population or anyone else? If we say that every time the word “Israel” is spoken, the speaker really means “Jews,” then we have foreclosed in advance the possibility that the speaker really means “Israel.” If, on the other hand, we distinguish between anti-Semitism and forms of protest against the Israeli state (or right-wing settlers who sometimes act independently of the state), acknowledging that sometimes they do, disturbingly, work together, then we stand a chance of understanding that world Jewry does not see itself as one with Israel in its present form and practice, and that Jews in Israel do not necessarily see themselves as one with the state. In other words, the possibility of a substantive Jewish peace movement depends on our observing a productive and critical distance from the state of Israel (which can be coupled with a profound investment in its future course).

Summers's view seems to imply that criticism of Israel is “anti-Israel” in the sense that it is understood to challenge the right of Israel to exist. A criticism of Israel is not the same, however, as a challenge to Israel's existence, even if there are conditions under which it would be possible to say that one leads to the other. A challenge to the right of Israel to exist can be construed as a challenge to the existence of the Jewish people only if one believes that Israel alone keeps the Jewish people alive or that all Jews invest their sense of perpetuity in the state of Israel in its current or traditional forms. One could argue, however, that those polities which safeguard the right to criticize them stand a better chance of surviving than those that don't. For a criticism of Israel to be taken as a challenge to the survival of the Jews, we would have to assume not only that “Israel” cannot change in response to legitimate criticism, but that a more radically democratic Israel would be bad for Jews. This would be to suppose that criticism is not a Jewish value, which clearly flies in the face not only of long traditions of Talmudic disputation, but of all the religious and cultural sources that have been part of Jewish life for centuries.

What are we to make of Jews who
dis
identify with Israel or, at least, with the Israeli state? Or Jews who identify with Israel, but do not condone some of its practices? There is a wide range here: those who are silently ambivalent about the way Israel handles itself; those who only half articulate their doubts about the occupation; those who are strongly opposed to the occupation, but within a Zionist framework; those who would like to see Zionism rethought or, indeed, abandoned. Jews may hold any of these opinions, but voice them only to their family, or only to their friends; or voice them in public but then face an angry reception at home. Given this Jewish ambivalence, ought we not to be suspicious of any effort to equate Jews with Israel? The argument that all Jews have a heartfelt investment in the state of Israel is untrue. Some have a heartfelt investment in corned beef sandwiches or in certain Talmudic tales, religious rituals and liturgy, in memories of their grandmother, the taste of borscht, or the sounds of the old Yiddish theater. Others have an investment in historical and cultural archives from Eastern Europe or from the Holocaust, or in forms of labor activism, civil rights struggles, and social justice that are thoroughly secular, and exist in relative independence from the question of Israel.