More to say on the responses to my post, The Anti-Semites Are on My Side on These Issues, and how much should I care? First, Richard Witty never asked me to ban any commenters. What he did was suggest that I curb some of my own statements because I was in his view aiding anti-Semites. I experience some of Richard's suggestions as censorious. If I abided his advice, I wouldn't say half the stuff I do on this blog, and as I've said before, I'm learning. A great Talmudic scholar once said that one way you learn is by having dialogue with a pen.
A number of commenters accused me of Jewish chauvinism. Ed said that my unwashed tribalism has a lot to learn from the laundromat of western civilization. It's true. I have a strong tribal identification. I grew up in a very Jewish environment and part of the training was not to trust gentiles, that much, or only good gentiles. I still have that. Some Arabs I've met, I feel this fear, they secretly want to barbecue my liver. It's a tribal impulse.
The most apposite comment I thought was Otto saying, "the central underlying difficulty is talking about the chauvinistic political projects for which support is not universal, but is pervasive in a particular ethnic group." I found this very helpful. I agree entirely.
And when Ed said that Jewish Zionists have insisted on no distinction between Zionist and Anti-Zionist Jews–say, as Christians are afforded that latitude–and they've thereby caused those who are critical of Israel's policies to be forced to wear the scarlet letter A, so just wear it– again, helpful. When Walt and Mearsheimer first came out, I thought, Wow, these guys are willing to wear the scarlet letter in order to say what is true. I don't think they are willing. But god knows it's been pinned to them by puritanical Jewish critics. And one has to wonder whether that obloquy is not the price of having an open mind on this issue.
Richard Witty says that antisemitism is blaming the Jews for the wrongs of the world, having a predisposition to blame them. I agree with the definition; though he seems to want me to bear the scarlet letter, and I disagree. I don't blame the Jews for the wrongs of the world, just some of the wrongs. I like Scott's definition that includes not wanting to have any Jewish friends. I have a lot of Jewish friends. I do find the company of ethnocentric Jews somewhat suffocating, because I grew up with that.
When my wife married into my family, she said, I always heard about anti-semitism, what about anti-anti-semitism? I.e., anti-gentile-ism. The instinctual mistrust of gentiles. If you read the late Israel Shahak, you learn that the Talmud and commentaries and Jewish law are filled with contempt for gentiles, including even the commands that gentile civilians be killed in wars. Shahak also says that some of the pogroms in eastern Europe were in fact serf rebellions against the bailiffs of the slaveholders, who were Jews; and that since the middle ages, Jewish society was privileged and ceased to include peasants, had a relationship to nobility, royalty, the court. Maimonides to the neocons. I'm reading Shahak agog. I don't know how much of him to believe; I need to scrutinize his statements. But one thing I am certain of is that I grew up with complete contempt of peasants, whom my family linked to pogroms; and that the Jewish world I've always been part of is an elite one. As I say repeatedly here, I don't object to an elite per se. It seems to me that all societies have one. The issue for me in Jewish culture, as it is for Shahak, is the degree to which superior (exclusivist, chauvinist are his words) attitudes towards Arabs as gentiles and peasants have caused Zionists and their supporters to erase their humanity, and their being too. I saw this attitude all through the Lebanon war, down to the clusterbombing of farmland that went undecried by Jewish organizations (I'm sure there are some noble exceptions, IPF say). I saw this attitude at AIPAC–where they repeatedly celebrate Israel's technical and material and intellectual contributions as somehow removing any charge re its treatment of Palestinians, and you will find it in my own upbringing, where I was repeatedly informed that the Jews had made the desert bloom while the Palestinians had done nothing with that land for centuries.
I don't begrudge Jews their success in America; I don't share the resentment that I see in my comment section. This is the Jewish century, as Slezkine tells us. Priests and merchants have replaced peasants and princes. That is the way of the modern world; and Asians and a lot of other people who have embraced the value of learning will also get to participate. What I begrudge my people is the absence by and large of an ethos of leadership. The Michael Walzer quote I love to cite here is when he said We've been great at governing ourselves for 2000 years, not so good at governing others. This is not an idle issue when Jews play such a central role as political donors, and when neoconservatives helped foment a disastrous war that has left the U.S. mimicking Israel's relationship to the Arab world. As the late Norman Mailer said in the American Conservative, Hitler's negative achievement included crunching down surviving Jewish culture in his aftermath to the question, Is it good for the Jews?
Richard says that I have fed the reasoning and emotional pitch of those who wish all Jews would keep to their place. I reject the charge. I am continually quoting Jews on this blog. There are many many Jews I celebrate. They are almost all universalist Jews, Jews like Shahak who have embraced the need to recognize the humanity of Arabs. Though I also respect the many progressive Zionists who have this awareness too.
Next month Sabeel, the Arab Christian organization, is having a conference in Detroit that many Jews will be at, including the great Phyllis Bennis, Joel Kovel, Anna Baltzer, others are slipping my mind. They will be working with gentiles to try and push a just peace in the Middle East. I think this may be the heart of my Jewish problem right now, my moral exhaustion with American Jews who think that Jews alone can resolve the issues of the Middle East, who do not wish to work with non-Jews on the issues. Again I'd cite Aaron Ahuvia's comments at the Meretz site the other day, where he said that 85 percent of American Jews are committed to a two-state solution and only have to overcome the "well-funded" Land-of-Israel types in order to convey that to Congress. Peace in the Middle East is an urgent project. Apartheid looms. Yet Ahuvia I am sure won't be at Sabeel. He doesn't want to build his coalition with gentiles, Arabs, or even the unfunded Palestinian-solidarity component of American Jewry. I think there's anti-anti-semitism there.
