Anti-Zionism Is Not Anti-Semitism – The Atlantic

2023/11/08 1 Comment

Important distinctions:

On October 7, the Islamist militant group Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip, killed more than 1,400 people in Israel. Israel responded with military operations that have killed several times that number of Palestinians in Gaza, a territory described by Human Rights Watch as an “open-air prison” as a result of an Israeli and Egyptian blockade. In both cases, most of the casualties are civilians. The conflict has reverberated into other areas of the world, including the United States, where anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim incidents have included the killing of a 6-year-old Palestinian American boy. The bloodshed has revived the perennial debates about anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.

“Look, it’s clear that the hardened anti-Zionists from the far left are the photo inverse of the white supremacists from the far right,” Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt told CNN’s Dana Bash earlier this week. “There is no argument anymore that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, that is as plain as day. And to think that extremism only comes from one side of the spectrum is a joke.” Greenblatt’s sentiments were echoed among supporters of Israel, including in publications such as The Wall Street Journal and The Jerusalem Post, which editorialized that “to deny the Jewish people, and only the Jewish people, a right afforded to all nations—is to discriminate against Jews.”

The claim that “there is no argument anymore” is curious. Even within the ADL, staffers have objected to the argument that anti-Zionism is necessarily anti-Semitism, as Jewish Currents reported last year.

Political Zionism, defined concisely, is the belief that the Jews should have a Jewish state in their ancestral homeland. Anti-Zionism, in similarly brief terms, is the opposition to that belief. It should be no surprise that most Palestinians and those who sympathize with their plight are anti-Zionist. “The Arab has been on the receiving end not of benign Zionism—which has been restricted to Jews,” Edward Said wrote in The Question of Palestine, “but of an essentially discriminatory and powerful culture, of which, in Palestine, Zionism has been the agent.”

There are certainly forms of anti-Zionism that are anti-Semitic, such as the belief that Jewish Israelis should all be expelled or killed or that they should be forced to live as second-class citizens under an Islamist government. Storming the tarmac at an airport in Dagestan in the hopes of participating in a mob lynching of passengers arriving from Tel Aviv, or vandalizing synagogues in Madrid and New York in response to the Israeli government’s actions, or threatening Jewish students with rape and murder, are clear expressions of hatred toward Jews. Americans, both Jewish and not, can underestimate how common anti-Semitism remains in the rest of the world.

But there is nothing anti-Semitic about anti-Zionists who believe that the existence of a religious or ethnically defined state is inherently racist, and that the only real solution to the conflict is, as the Palestinian American advocate Youssef Munayyer writes, “equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians in a single shared state,” with a constitution that would “recognize that the country would be home to both peoples and that, despite national narratives and voices on either side that claim otherwise, both peoples have historical ties to the land.” Perhaps you think this idea naive or unrealistic; that is not an expression of prejudice toward Jews.

For one thing, there were prominent Jewish advocates for this idea before the founding of Israel, such as Hannah Arendt and Martin Buber. In 1921, the Jewish philosopher Ahad Ha’am wrote that Arab Palestinians “have a genuine right to the land due to generations of residence and work upon it. For them too this country is a national home and they have the right to develop their national potentialities to the utmost.” There are also some prominent Jewish supporters of a single binational state today, such as the former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg. The Jewish American writers Tony Judt and Peter Beinart have also made the case for a one-state solution.

I should say here that I do not have an answer to this question. Two states or one, my preference is for both Israelis and Palestinians to be able to live freely and in peace and equality, in whatever arrangement allows them to do so.

Nevertheless, it is a cruel absurdity to demand of Palestinians that they not only acquiesce to Israel’s existence, but also actively support the idea of an ethnically defined state that excludes them from equal citizenship, one that was made possible only by the flight and expulsion of 700,000 of their forebears in the Nakba of 1948. It is not anti-Semitic to want equal rights in the land you share with others, and to oppose a political arrangement that has resulted in what Israeli human-rights groups justifiably describe as a form of apartheid. While Jewish Israelis retain their rights wherever they go within Israel’s borders, Palestinians are subject to draconian restrictions on their lives and freedoms depending on their location.

“My mom was born and raised a mere 10-minute walk from my childhood home, but my father’s family is from Tulkarem, a small city in the West Bank. And so my dad, my siblings, and I have West Bank IDs while my mom, a Jerusalemite, has a Jerusalem ID,” the journalist Abdallah Fayyad wrote in The Boston Globe in 2021, describing life in his childhood neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. “That meant that while my mother had a right to live in Jerusalem, the rest of us were only guests in our own home, living there because we renewed travel permits that technically allowed us only entry into Jerusalem, not a permanent stay.”

Palestinians in the West Bank who have been displaced at gunpoint by Israeli settlers, Palestinians in Gaza who have watched their children die in Israeli missile strikes, Palestinians who have been evicted from their homes in Jerusalem as part of an effort to Judaize the city—are none of these people allowed to question whether a Jewish state is an optimal arrangement for them? Are none of their relatives, friends, and loved ones abroad allowed to do so?

Nor is the question of national self-determination as straightforward as the Post would have it. Since the beginning of the occupation in 1967, maintaining the Jewish character of the state of Israel has required an extraordinary amount of violence, because Jews are not a clear majority in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank put together. Even if they were, however, it is not as though Palestinian demands for equal rights would cease. Opposing that violence, or believing that it stems from the state having a specific ethnic character, is not a form of bigotry. It is not “self-determination” if you are determining the fate of your neighbors because they lack the same rights as you.

In the United States, the ADL itself has highlighted those on the far right who believe “they are fighting against demographic and cultural changes that are destroying the ‘true America’—a white, Christian nation,” and who want Jews to “either leave the country or be converted.” Sadly, this is a racist chauvinism that echoes sentiments expressed by politicians in the current Israeli government.

Few Americans who are not themselves white nationalists would think it prejudiced for those who are not white Christians to oppose such an arrangement in the U.S., least of all Jews.

Obviously, there are factors in Israel that make a commitment to one state with equal rights for all more complicated than in the United States, where the concept is foundational even if the execution is not. For generations, Palestinians have borne the brunt of the violence of war, occupation, and discrimination. The near-destruction of European Jewry is less than a century old, and the flight (both voluntary and involuntary) of the Mizrahim, who make up the largest portion of Israel’s Jewish population, from other Middle Eastern and North African countries is younger than that. Fears and grudges build up over years of conflict and separation, making the personal and emotional connections necessary for such reconciliation difficult, although brave souls on both sides of the divide are trying.

The ideal version of the one-state solution also remains unpopular for now among both Israelis and Palestinians (except for Arab citizens of Israel). You may think it impossible. You may prefer a different outcome. You may think it is dangerous. But the vision itself is not an expression of anti-Jewish hatred and should not be treated as such.

The effect of equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism is to silence the criticism of the Israeli government by Palestinians and their advocates. Characterizing all such criticism as an inherent form of bigotry is used to justify the exclusion of such critics from mainstream society, to suspend them from their schools, or to fire them from their jobs. But it is not anti-Semitic to want equal rights for all in Jerusalem, in Tel Aviv, in Gaza, in Ramallah. That is, after all, what generations of Americans have sought in their own home.

Adam Serwer is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Source: Anti-Zionism Is Not Anti-Semitism – The Atlantic

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Serwer: The Right to Free Speech Is Not the Right to Monologue

2022/09/10 Leave a comment

Good and thoughtful commentary:

In august, the author Salman Rushdie was stabbed in the neck. The novelist has spent decades living under the threat of a hit put out by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989. The religious directive was a response to Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, which Khomeini regarded as blasphemous. For many, the attack was an opportunity to reflect on the importance of free expression, and a reminder of the clear distinction between speech and violence.

For others, it was an opportunity to remind others of the clear distinction between speech and violence, which is something that all those snowflake libs, who are sort of like the fanatic who stabbed Rushdie in the neck, should take to heart.

“We live in a culture in which many of the most celebrated people occupying the highest perches believe that words are violence,” Bari Weiss wrote on her Substack, citing no one in particular. “In this, they have much in common with Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.” She added that “of course it is 2022 that the Islamists finally get a knife into Salman Rushdie. Of course it is now, when words are literally violence and J.K. Rowling literally puts trans lives in danger and even talking about anything that might offend anyone means you are literally arguing I shouldn’t exist.”

As an outlet, The Atlantic attempts to provide readers with a broad spectrum of perspectives based on shared values. One of these values is freedom of speech, a principle to which I and all of my cherished colleagues are deeply committed. The assassination attempt on Rushdie was a direct attack on that freedom, and it should be no surprise that writers here have a great deal to say about it. But I must respectfully disagree with some of my colleagues about the conclusions they have drawn from the attack, linking contemporary left-wing discourse with a fundamentalist theocrat’s call for assassination.

My colleague Graeme Wood pointed to Jimmy Carter’s 1989 op-ed criticizing Rushdie to argue that “over the past two decades, our culture has been Carterized. We have conceded moral authority to howling mobs, and the louder the howls, the more we have agreed that the howls were worth heeding.” He acknowledged, however, that “since the attempt on Rushdie’s life, almost no one has advanced these arguments,” meaning a link between the emotional injury of blasphemy and the very literal violence of murder. If our society were truly “Carterized,” I would have expected instead to have seen some prominent American figures make the argument Carter did decades ago.

Another one of my colleagues, Caitlin Flanagan, settled for an exegesis of the views of the Twitter user @MeerAsifAziz1, whose account no longer exists. She argued that “the culture of free speech is eroding every day,” and offered a hypothetical example: “Ask an Oberlin student—fresh outta Shaker Heights, coming in hot, with a heart as big as all outdoors and a 3 in AP Bio—to tell you what speech is acceptable, and she’ll tell you that it’s speech that doesn’t hurt the feelings of anyone belonging to a protected class.”

I’ll make no secret that I believe the focus on the misguided egalitarianism of undergraduates at private colleges has been disproportionate. People like this exist, though, and it’s fair to criticize them. What I frankly find puzzling is presenting this hypothetical student as the avatar of the idea that dangerous speech and ideas must be suppressed, when in statehouses and governors’ mansions, politicians who have the authority to enforce their ideas about censorship with state power are actually putting them into practice. Unlike the hypothetical Oberlin student, these officials are real, and the threat they pose to free speech is not only clear and present, but backed by a certain level of popular demand.

I agree with Weiss and Wood and Flanagan that there is a bright line between speech and violence that must be respected, and that trying to kill someone for offending you is monstrous. Speech is not violence, and to argue so is to imply that violence is an appropriate response. The unacknowledged reality of these three essays, however, is that what I just stated remains the broad, widely held consensus in American life, from right to left. Americans simply do not live under anything resembling the kind of repression in which people are killed for blasphemy with state or popular support.

Weiss, Wood, and Flanagan also noted the objection of a group of writers and thinkers to the PEN association bestowing an award on Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical publication that terrorists attacked in 2015 over its caricatures of the Muslim prophet Muhammad, murdering 12 people, including several staff members, police officers, a maintenance worker, and someone who was visiting that day. The letter signers described the massacre as “sickening and tragic” while criticizing PEN for “valorizing selectively offensive material: material that intensifies the anti-Islamic, anti-Maghreb, anti-Arab sentiments already prevalent in the Western world.”

Weiss attacked the “civic cowardice” of those who objected, while Flanagan wrote that these writers were pressuring the organization to “abandon its mission” of protecting freedom of expression. Wood described the writers’ position as muddling “the distinction between offense and violence, and between a disagreement over ideas and a disagreement over whether your head should remain attached to your body.”

I would not have signed that letter if asked, not only because I do not sign open letters, as a matter of preference, but because I believe that blasphemy is a human right, and that the message that PEN was sending with the award was an endorsement not of Charlie Hebdo’s content but of the staff’s bravery in the face of an attempt to silence them through murder. But just as I have no objection to the award, I have no issue with people criticizing it because they do not want it to be interpreted as an endorsement of the racist caricatures Charlie Hebdo is known for, even accepting that they are intended with a layer of irony. (I’m not sure how many of the people disseminating these images are aware of the irony.) These may be mutually exclusive positions, but both are consistent with respecting free speech. Indeed, both the writers of the letter and its critics are arguing that there are things you can say but should not.

One of the significant measures of free speech in a given society is how people deal with blasphemy—whether religious offense provokes state censorship or violence. America has a relatively strong record in that respect in comparison with much of the rest of the world, while clearly faltering in others. The suggestion here, however, is that the writers who objected to the award granted to Charlie Hebdo are in some sense justifying the massacre, and therefore defending the notion that violence is an appropriate response to offensive speech. But surely one can defend the right of Nazis to publicly protest while rejecting the tenets of national socialism. If I cannot defend the fundamental right of a speaker to be offensive while objecting to their speech, then what am I actually defending?

In this case, the rights being asserted seem to be the right to be offensive, and the right of the offended to shut up and like it. The former combined with the latter is not an assertion of the right to free speech so much as a right to monologue, which I do not recognize.

The American culture of free speech is indeed under threat, as Flanagan argued. Free speech requires a robust exchange of views without the coercion of threats and violence, and self-censorship in response to social pressure is a genuine risk. Yet by definition, there is no free speech if one person is allowed to make an argument and another is not allowed to object to it. Nor has there ever been a time in American history when freedom of speech was not threatened with proscription by the state, or when one could express a controversial opinion and not risk social sanction. In short, the culture of free speech is always under threat.

In almost every era of U.S. history, the bounds of free expression have been contested. In the founding era, patriots tarred and feathered royalists. Before the Civil War, southern states passed laws that could be used to prosecute the dissemination of abolitionist literature and sought to prevent the Postal Service from delivering antislavery pamphlets, saying they would foment insurrection by the enslaved. Mobs followed the abolitionist Frederick Douglass across the North, throwing rotten eggs, stones, and menacing slurs at the orator at speaking events.  After Reconstruction, white supremacists destroyed the office of Ida B. Wells’s newspaper, The Free Speech and Headlight, following the publication of an editorial arguing that lynchings of Black men accused of raping white women were in fact punishment for consensual relationships. The Red Scares of the 20th century saw Americans forced from their jobs and prosecuted for leftist beliefs or sympathies on the grounds that those were tantamount to a commitment to overthrowing the government. Out of that crucible emerged a civil libertarian concept of free speech that many have mistaken for timeless rather than a product of a certain history and a particular arrangement of political power. The idea that certain forms of speech or expression justify or provoke violence, let alone that blasphemy does so, is not an invention of modern social-justice discourse.

Every generation faces a different challenge when it comes to freedom of expression. Ours includes not only the widespread and growing campaign of state censorship led by Republican lawmakers, but a social-media panopticon that can both deny us the privacy necessary to come to our own conclusions and inhibit the courage necessary to express them. Most of us are not meant to be privy to every misguided utterance of a stranger, nor are we meant to have our errors or worst moments evaluated publicly by people who learned of our existence only as the focus of political propaganda, as the subject of ridicule, or as acceptable targets in pointless feuds between online cliques. (Although it must be said, there are those who thrive in such conditions, and have successfully exploited them for fame, profit, and status.)

Yet, as Aaron R. Hanlon recently wrote in The New Republic, this wave of censorship laws in Republican-controlled states bears scant mention among many of the most prominent self-styled defenders of free speech, or at least, far less than the tyranny of the ratio. But we do not become little Rushdies when our inboxes and mentions are inundated with deranged filth from disturbed strangers, as a result of the public-facing profession we chose and the technological advancements that make us more accessible to such people.

It is not minimizing the power of digital mobs to say that spending decades with the state-backed threat of an assassin’s blade at your throat is coercion of a different magnitude. The wrath of an online mob can be harrowing: harassment, outrageous falsehoods, and threats are not pleasant to bear, and can threaten not just your mental health but your livelihood, and in extreme cases your safety. To pretend that seeking to avoid such an experience does not condition what people say and how they act would be foolish. But to pretend that this is a left-wing ideological phenomenon rather than a structural one, when educators, medical providers, election officials, and others from all walks of life are being driven underground by right-wing influencers who can conduct a mob like an orchestra, would be equally foolish.

The United States is living through the largest wave of state censorship since the second Red Scare. Beyond the plague of education gag laws restricting the teaching of unpleasant facts about American history, conservative judges seek to rewrite constitutional free-speech protections to punish the “liberal” media, and conservative states pass laws against public protest and immunize from liability those who would run over protesters with their cars, while law-enforcement organizations hope to use civil lawsuits to sue demonstrations against police brutality out of existence. Conservatives have sought to fire librarians and purge public libraries of books they deem controversial by categorizing them as obscene, as state officials try to punish teachers who provide their students with public information that allows them to access samizdat from libraries in states where it is not forbidden. Not only do abortion bounty laws seek to enforce silence around reproductive health, lest a person discussing the subject prick the ears of some snitch seeking a payday, but the overturning of Roe has coincided with explicit attempts to criminalize speech about abortion. In the strongest labor market in a generation, billionaires seek to use their power and authority to crush workers organizing for better conditions and a living wage.

There is no shortage of major free-speech issues to address in America today, but many of us in the writing profession are primarily concerned with our social-media experience, because that is what we most directly and frequently encounter. Instead of recognizing that the warped behavioral incentives created by social media are a structural problem, we tend to blame the people online who annoy us the most. In many cases, those defending “free speech” are not defending freedom of expression so much as seeking the power to determine which views can be publicly expressed without backlash, and which can be silenced without reproach. When we speak of an idealized past without chilling effects, we are simply imagining a time when the social consensus was repressive and stifling for someone else.

These conflicts are far more complex precisely because there is no clear line where social pressure from those exercising their rights of free speech and association crosses over into censoriousness. State censorship and violent compulsion are relatively easy to identify and oppose, if not always easy to prevent. When does accountability become harassment? When does protest become coercion? What views should be acceptable to state in polite society, and which should be appropriately shunned by decent people? When does a voice of criticism become the howl of a mob? When does corporate speech become corporate censorship? No society in human history has ever had simple answers to these questions. In a free society, sometimes people will choose to be horrible, and there is little to do other than make a different choice and counsel people to do the same.

Presenting these dilemmas as similar to an attempt to silence someone with a theocratic death mark is trivializing, and ahistorical. There has never been a golden age when anyone could say what they wanted without consequence, only eras in which one shared perspective was dominant. Though nostalgia may cloud our perceptions, those times were no more free, even if politics, ideology, or self-promotion might compel us to remember otherwise.

Source: The Right to Free Speech Is Not the Right to Monologue

Filed under Religion Tagged with ,

Serwer: Whoopi Goldberg’s American Idea of Race

2022/02/05 Leave a comment

Good thoughtful analysis and commentary, and the importance of understanding historical experiences:

It made sense, to the New York Daily News sports editor, that these guys dominated basketball. After all, “the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind and flashy trickiness, artful dodging and general smartalecness,” not to mention their “God-given better balance and speed.”

He was referring, of course, to the Jews.

In the 1930s, Paul Gallico was trying to explain away Jewish dominance of basketball. He came up with the idea that the game’s structure simply appealed to the immutable traits of wily Hebrews and their scheming minds. It sounds strange to the ear now, but only because our stereotypes about who is inherently good at particular sports have shifted. His theory is not any more or less insightful now than it was then; his confidence should remind us to be skeptical of similar, supposedly explanatory arguments that abound today.

Looking back at old stereotypes is a useful exercise; it can help illustrate the arbitrary nature of the concept of “race,” and how such identities shift even as people insist on their permanence and infallibility. Because race is not real, it is malleable enough to be made to serve the needs of those with the power to define it, the certainties of one generation giving way to the contradictory dogmas of another.

Whoopi Goldberg, the actor and a co-host of The View, stumbled into a public-relations nightmare for ABC on Monday when she insisted that “the Holocaust wasn’t about race.” After an episode of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert aired in which she opined that “the Nazis were white people, and most of the people they were attacking were white people,” she was temporarily suspended from The View. She has apologized for her remarks.

I don’t mean to pile on Goldberg here, who I think is struggling with an American conception of “race” that renders the anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust illegible. I regard her remarks not as malicious, but as an ignorant projection of that American conception onto circumstances to which it does not apply. In America, distinctions among European immigrants that were once considered deeply significant dissolved in the melting pot, leaving an absence in popular memory that might explain their salience elsewhere, and how someone could be seen as white in America and yet still be subject to persecution based on their “race.”

The Nazi Holocaust in Europe and slavery and Jim Crow in the United States are outgrowths of the same ideology—the belief that human beings can be delineated into categories that share immutable biological traits distinguishing them from one another and determining their potential and behavior. In Europe, with its history of anti-Jewish persecution and violent religious divisions, the conception of Jews as a biological “race” with particular characteristics was used by the Nazis to justify the Holocaust. In the United States, the invention of race was used to justify the institution of chattel slavery, on the basis that Black people were biologically suited to permanent servitude and unfit for the rights the nation’s Founders had proclaimed as universal. The American color line was therefore much more forgiving to European Jews than the divisions of the old country were. But they are branches of the same tree, the biological fiction of race.

In the United States, physical distinctions between most Black and most white people have misled some into thinking that the American conception of race is somehow more “real” than the racial fictions on which the Nazis based their campaign of extermination. Applying the American color line to Europe, the Holocaust appears merely to be a form of sectarian violence, “white people” attacking “white people,” which seems nonsensical. But those persecuting Jews in Europe saw Jews as beastly subhumans, an “alien race” whom they were justified in destroying in order to defend German “racial purity.” The “racial” distinctions between master and slave may be more familiar to Americans, but they were and are no more real than those between Gentile and Jew.

Adherence to religious belief was not required to be subject to Nazi persecution, and unlike some prior moments in European history, conversion was insufficient to escape danger. Jewish ancestry was enough, because it was ancestry—a person’s “race”—that made someone inescapably Jewish. In his infamous memoir, Adolf Hitler regretted that, early in life, he’d seen anti-Semitism as persecution of a people on the basis of religious belief, which he thought wrong. He later came to think of this as a Jewish lie to hide the reality that the Jewish people were a separate “race” whose goal was to enslave the rest of mankind. It should not be lost that enslaving all of mankind is a concise summary of Hitler’s own political project.

“Judaism predates Western categories. It’s not quite a religion, because one can be Jewish regardless of observance or specific belief,” my colleague Yair Rosenberg wrote. “But it’s also not quite a race, because people can convert in! It’s not merely a culture or an ethnicity, because that leaves out all the religious components.”

This is all true, but Black Americans are not really a “race” either, and the borders of Black American identity can also be difficult to define or agree upon. To some extent, shared history, culture, and ancestry exist, but as the scholars Karen and Barbara Fields write in Racecraft, the very concept of race implies a material reality where none exists. Most American descendants of the emancipated have white ancestry, and millions of white Americans with African ancestry have no knowledge of it. “Race is not an idea but an ideology. It came into existence at a discernible historical moment for rationally understandable historical reasons,” the Fieldses write, “and is subject to change for similar reasons.”

It is not necessary for race to be real for racism to be real. It is only necessary that people believe race to be real. When people act on fictions, those actions have repercussions even if the underlying belief is false—even if the people know that the underlying belief they are acting on is false. The fact that anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jewish control of the media, of governments, and of financial institutions are untrue does not rob them of their explanatory power for those who choose to believe in them. For Thomas Jefferson to know, somewhere in the disquiet of his own conscience, that slavery was a “cruel war against human nature itself” did not in and of itself grant freedom to those he owned as property.

“The people who settled the country had a fatal flaw. They could recognize a man when they saw one. They knew he wasn’t—I mean you can tell, they knew he wasn’t—anything else but a man; but since they were Christian, and since they had already decided that they came here to establish a free country, the only way to justify the role this chattel was playing in one’s life was to say that he was not a man,” James Baldwin wrote in 1964. “For if he wasn’t a man, then no crime had been committed.”

To this, we could add Jean-Paul Sartre’s observation that “if the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.” Race allows humanity to keep inventing, in language that can bend the most rational minds, groups of people whose supposed characteristics justify whatever cruelty we might wish to indulge.

Adam Serwer is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers politics.

Source: Whoopi Goldberg’s American Idea of Race

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , ,