Media Analysis

Hell just froze over: the New York Times runs an article saying Zionism is racist

Trump’s election is having fascinating consequences. Today the New York Times ran a long piece titled, “Liberal Zionism in the Age of Trump,” by Omri Boehm of the New School saying that liberal Zionism is a contradiction: liberal American Jews have “identified themselves with Zionism, a political agenda rooted in the denial of liberal politics.”

Boehm’s most startling point is that Zionism has anti-Semitic strains, witness its collaboration with Nazis. Hannah Arendt is happy today.

The piece will greatly increase the pressure on liberal Zionists to choose one idea or the other, and to stop denying the existence of apartheid.

Boehm says white nationalist Richard Spencer helped to blow up the liberal Zionist hypocrisy in his famous encounter with a Texas rabbi when he said he admires Israel for its ethnic purity and the rabbi had nothing to say. Some of Boehm’s hammer blows:

by denying liberal principles, Zionism immediately becomes continuous with — rather than contradictory to — the anti-Semitic politics of the sort promoted by the alt-right…

insofar as Israel is concerned, every liberal Zionist has not just tolerated the denial of this minimum liberal standard, but avowed this denial as core to their innermost convictions. Whereas liberalism depends on the idea that states must remain neutral on matters of religion and race, Zionism consists in the idea that the State of Israel is not Israeli, but Jewish. As such, the country belongs first and foremost not to its citizens, but to the Jewish people — a group that’s defined by ethnic affiliation or religious conversion…

Boehm never comes out and uses the term “racist,” but he might as well.

Trump has changed the map.

As long as liberalism was secure back in America and the rejection of liberalism confined to the Israeli scene, this tension could be mitigated. But as it spills out into the open in the rapidly changing landscape of American politics, the double standard is becoming difficult to defend…

[T]he following years promise to present American Jewry with a decision that they have much preferred to avoid. Hold fast to their liberal tradition, as the only way to secure human, citizen and Jewish rights; or embrace the principles driving Zionism.

By the way, the denial of the right of return is racist:

Opposition to the Palestinians’ “right of return” is a matter of consensus among left and right Zionists because also liberal Zionists insist that Israel has the right to ensure that Jews constitute the ethnic majority in their country. That’s the reason for which Rabbi Rosenberg could not answer Spencer.

And then this verboten history: Zionists collaborated with “anti-Semitic politics.” With Nazis:

The “original sin” of such alliances may be traced back to 1941, in a letter to high Nazi officials, drafted in 1941 by Avraham Stern, known as Yair, a leading early Zionist fighter and member in the 1930s of the paramilitary group Irgun, and later, the founder of another such group, Lehi. In the letter, Stern proposes to collaborate with “Herr Hitler” on “solving the Jewish question” by achieving a “Jewish free Europe.” The solution can be achieved, Stern continues, only through the “settlement of these masses in the home of the Jewish people, Palestine.” To that end, he suggests collaborate with the German’s “war efforts,” and establish a Jewish state on a “national and totalitarian basis,” which will be “bound by treaty with the German Reich.”

It has been convenient to ignore the existence of this letter, just as it has been convenient to mitigate the conceptual conditions making it possible.

This is an opinion piece by an outsider, not a New York Times article. Hell and everything else would freeze if the NYT started writing news pieces which presupposed Zionism as actually practiced is racist. They won’t do that yet. They might conceivably start writing articles where people with that view are treated respectfully as they express it, rather than hiding the view from readers or treating people who express it as moral lepers.

Many of Boehm’s arguments have been made on the left for years, of course. The liberal Zionists chose to ignore them and talk about the two-state solution. They are losing that luxury. Though, expect some pushback from the Zionist forces inside the New York Times.

The Times would never have run this piece if Boehm were not Israeli. Just as the newspaper insisted, according to the late Tony Judt, that he identify himself as Jewish when he defended Walt and Mearsheimer in 2006. There are double standards in the press too.

255 Comments
Most Voted
Newest Oldest
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

My experience here in Santa Barbara, Calif is that unless your Zionist you can’t even get a letter2theED published
about the Balfour Declaration or London’s refusal to move its embassy. @sbnpnews under foreign pressure but yes some of Hollywood’s biggest Zionists live here

Ivanka Trump of German Czech ancestry has Right of Return but not the native Palestinian population, which unlike me and others of E. European Jewish religious heritage actually descends from Greco-Roman Judeans.

The medieval Rabbinic Jewish communities of E. Europe descended entirely from Slavic, Turkic, Germanic, and Byzantine converts to Judaism. The medieval Karaite Jewish communities of E. Europe descended entirely from Tatar, Byzantine, and Turkic converts.

Before Trump’s election the Israeli Rabbinate considered Ivanka to be Jared’s shiksa. Recently this Rabbinate strategically changed its collective mind.

http://www.jta.org/2016/12/07/news-opinion/israel-middle-east/israels-chief-rabbinate-promises-to-establish-conversion-standards-and-count-ivanka-trump-as-jewish

In my opinion this is generally a thought provoking article but the reference to the 1941 letter is flawed and counter productive. Any ‘agreements’ or representations made by Jews with / to the Nazis in post 1933 Germany were made in a murderously oppressive socio-political environment. To my mind they have as much validity as a forced confession. If you deny the clear duress and fear of the time for Jews (and others) you deny the antecedents of the Nazi holocaust. This denial only strengthens the hands of the Bebe Natanyahues of this world when they cry any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic.

I don’t think that the origin of the problem was a tactical choice in 41 but a profound matter of principle from the beginnning of Zionism. The Zionists bitterly resented and denied the anti-Semites’ claim that Jews were a destructive presence and bad influence in the Western world. On the other hand they could not agree with the liberals’ idea that Jewish people could readily be entirely fulfilled by life in the West, doing all that they ought to do and being all that they ought to be. That would make aliyah into a kind of exile, the leaving of a place of fulfilment and belonging – which to a Zionist it could not conceivably be. This meant that a Zionist, surveying the debate between anti-Semites and liberals, could not but think that the anti-S, malevolent and crazed as they all tended to be, did have a point that the liberals – well meaning but often quite incapable of seeing how right the Zionists were – could not grasp. Thus there was room for the possibility that anti-S would imply Z – there is no logical difficulty in a falsehood’s implying a truth – and create room for policy in common. The Z theory of exile was very powerful and needs to be examined carefully.

The author is correct in going back to the 1941 letter, and could’ve gone even further back in showing the symbiosis between Zionism and anti-Semitism. Take for example, that “friend of the Jewish state”, Balfour, whose Declaration is about to hit a century old: he was virulently anti-Semitic and believed strongly that Jews had no place living among Britons (thus needing a homeland… elsewhere, outside of Europe.). Even further back, the Christian Zionists who preceded Herzl by more than a century and came up with the racist slogan “a land without people for a people without a land” were also often anti-Semites (as well as garden-variety imperial racists).
The real question is: now that it can be uttered (almost) in the pages of the NYT, will the UN General Assemble get to return to its 1975 resolution (UNGA 3237) “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination” that they had to recant in 1991?