I want to offer my response to the Feeling the Hate In Jerusalem on Eve of Obama’s Cairo Address video. Phil was in Gaza when the video came in and I was editing the site by myself. I’ll admit the first time I watched it I felt shock, revulsion and then panic. I didn’t want to post it. I found the language and attitude so disturbing that I hesitated before putting it out in the world (although admittedly it was already up on youtube). I paused and thought, why post it? Is it newsworthy? I then decided to post it after realizing one thing – the anxiety I felt was in part out of recognition. I knew those people in the video, I grew up with them. And like them I was steeped in the pervasive nationalism, entitlement, and chauvinism of the Jewish community. I realized this video stood as an exposed Jewish id, displaying it for the world.
For my response I feel a need to separate out the video itself, and the response it has received. Like Phil, I agree that the video “reveals an essential component of Israeli and Zionist society that has largely been covered up,” but I’d like to take it farther. There has been much debate as to whether the people in the video were Israeli or American, and to my thinking this misses the point – they were Jewish. I don’t say that to say that they shouldn’t have been saying those things as Jews, but to say that the incredible fear, entitlement, rage and aggression on display in the video is a large part of what it means to be Jewish today in the shadow of Israel and Zionism. The uproar over the video shows that there is currently a struggle within the community over whether this is still acceptable.
First, what the video shows. Jewish writers both in Israel and the US have responded to the video by saying they recognize what they see. One interesting response came from Joshua Frazer writing on a blog for the National Jewish Democratic Council. Frazer recognizes that “One young man in the video used further racial stereotypes when discussing the President, drawing on “fried chicken..and watermelon”, using the word, “n**ger” as well. This line may have gotten a laugh out of his friends in the video, but this is the type of racial insensitivity that has festered within the Jewish community.” Village Voice writer Allison Benedikt responded to the video by sharing her own experience visiting Israel on a teen tour and training with the IDF! (an experience many other people I know have shared). Benedikt writes, “But for the purposes of this blog, all I want to say is: Send a kid from Youngstown, Ohio to Israel for the summer to connect more with her Jewish identity and put a gun in her hand, and you know what you get? The Max Blumenthal video.” And finally, Ha’aretz writer Bradley Burston expands it a bit to place the video in a broader context. He wrote about it in a thoughtful column “Loving Israel by hating Obama.” Drawing from examples in Israel and the US Burston writes, “We live at a time when an avowed Kahanist is a serving MK, when overtly anti-Arab Knesset bills blacken Israel’s name the world over, and Jewish talkbackers and bloggers think nothing of denigrating Islam and African-Americans in the name of some cockeyed personal battle against world anti-Semitism.”
The video reminded me of Avraham Burg’s writing on the Holocaust. One of the most important parts of the video to me is when one guy recites the numbers in his grandmother’s Holocaust tattoo. This amazing response is simply in reaction to President Obama applying the most subtle oratorical pressure on Israel to simply freeze illegal settlement building. And yet, I don’t blame the guy for responding this way. This is the way the entire organized Jewish community responds to the slightest challenge. Iran has become Amalek, and Obama the new Pharoah. As I said earlier I recognized this response, because I had once felt it myself. Growing up in the suburbs outside Philadelphia, in a conservative Jewish synagogue, I learned of a Jewish community perpetually under attack and outnumbered. And the response to this was always militarism and brute force. Tony Karon wrote about a similar experience on his blog last year in the exceptional post “Healing Israel’s Birth Scar.” In it he recounts a story about the effect visiting Yad Vashem had on him:
I was no dignitary, but just as every politician visiting Israel is still taken first to the Holocaust museum at Yad Vashem, so do did my own official trip begin there in the winter of 1978 — as part of a Habonim leadership training program. The horrors memorialized at Yad Vashem pressed all the intended buttons in my 17-year-old mind, I realized a few months later, as a freshman student at the University of Cape Town, when I came very close to having the crap beaten out of me in a fight that I almost provoked when confronting Muslim students handing out leaflets marking Al-Quds day. I have had little appetite for physical confrontation since age 12, but I did not hestitate to grab the leaflets of a student named Ashraf, and throw them to the ground. He jumped at me, cursing. “You’re trying to deny my existence, you scum!” I screamed. “What about Dir Yassein?” he yelled, as he leaped towards me, restrained by his buddies as mine hustled me away, admonishing me for my provocative behavior. In truth, I hadn’t even recognized myself in that moment; it was all adrenal rage, a channeling of the “Never Again!” Warsaw Ghetto spirit unleashed in me by what I had seen at Yad Vashem.
I believe this is the spirit on display in the video, and people are shocked by what it looks like.
The response to the video, and what this rage looks like, should be separated from the video itself. While the video might display the fear and aggression of the community, the response shows that things may be changing. In his second post on the video, the JTA’s Ron Kampeas points to the “separate and unequal” nature of Israeli society and admits that the response to the video is a reflection of a move within a younger generation of Jews who reject Israeli apartheid out of a belief for equal rights for all. The fact that Kampeas wrote a second post on the video is a sign in and of itself. His first simply tried to dismiss it but the second shows that he had to give it more serious consideration after seeing the debate it spawned. He writes:
Just as the TV crews made their way to the obscenely racist old Boer in covering the old South Africa, and abjured the thoughtful Wits professor; just as Radovan Karadzic’s insane musings about the non-Serbian psyche preoccupied some journalists more than the privations of ethnic Serbs in Krajina; the Max Blumenthals of the world are going to seek out the neanderthals, and this will become Israel’s image.
The obscene rantings of a few drunken frat boys, however unfair and unrepresentative, would not be getting this oxygen without the reality of unequal treatment. And the fact that Max is Jewish, I think, is also significant, just as it has been with Jon Stewart’s satirical treatment of Israel. The cognitive dissonance is not going to play with a younger generation of Jews that expects equality for all, that spends time and money calling for protections of minorities in Sudan and China.
This is a tide, and one that won’t be turned away by better Hasbara.
Whether in Israel or the US, the Jewish community has become absorbed by the militaristic mission to sustain a Jewish state by any means necessary. In the past, even recently, this mission has short circuited almost all critical thinking – whether it means defending the indefensible in Gaza, getting apoplectic when Obama suggests the settlements are not feasible, or defending the fact of special and exclusive rights for Jews in a Jewish state. The revulsion to the video may signal that our critical responses are returning to us, and not only is this mission not worth dehumanizing others to accomplish, it is not worth dehumanizing ourselves in order to carry it out.
