An optimal anti-Zionism supersedes Palestine’s geography. It likewise transcends ethnocentric interests. Anti-Zionism is a politics and a discourse, sometimes a vocation, but at its best it is also a sensibility, one attuned to disorder and upheaval. It is a commitment to unimaginable possibilities—that is, to realizing what arbiters of common sense like to call “impossible.”
What, then, does a principled anti-Zionism look like? And what might it accomplish? Here are some suggestions:
- It is internationalist in the classic Marxist sense of the term; as such, it informs and absorbs liberation movements around the world.
- It is anti-capitalist because Palestine will be free only when nobody within its borders is exploited. (You can agitate for something less perfect, yes, but the language should reflect the limitations of that approach.)
- It recognizes that mass extinction is earth’s immediate forecast. Israel has destroyed Palestine’s environment with an array of bulldozers, munitions, and chemical weapons, along with overdevelopment to accommodate settlers. It is, in short, an ecological catastrophe requiring what Anthony Galluzzo terms a “decelerationist socialism” to avert or at least mitigate our “literal gothic nightmare.”
- It moves beyond opposition to military occupation. Decolonization is key. The difference may appear semantic, but it’s actually significant. In addition to disrupting the colonizer’s physical and political control, decolonization aims to abolish the settler’s psychic influence.
- It is feminist in both theory and practice. There’s no pre-patriarchal history in Palestine to satisfy our nostalgia, but this shouldn’t prevent us from pursuing a post-patriarchal future. It’s critical to decouple visions of this pursuit from Western orthodoxies around sex and gender.
- It opposes all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism. This principle on its own decisively rebukes Zionism.
- It is anti-imperialist. While anti-Zionism and anti-imperialism are coterminous, some elements of the pro-Palestine crowd yearn for a world the USA can dominate without Israeli interference. Other elements of the crowd have a bad habit of supporting US interventions that either benefit or directly involve Israel (as in Syria). Imperialism executes colonial fantasies of redemption; it has no place in any serious political community.
- It doesn’t reduce Palestine to a branding device that can be invoked or ignored depending on the mood of editors and prize committees, or an instrument of celebrity to be calibrated according to market fluctuations in the pundit economy.
- It doesn’t give progressive politicians a pass when they suck up to the Israel lobby.
These suggestions, I realize, risk transforming Palestine into a utopian tableau, perhaps a search for some kind of “Palestinian Wakanda,” as a prominent activist put it at a recent event I attended. There’s much to be said about the benefits that would come from basic freedoms (travel, medical care, civil rights, housing, and so forth). I see no appreciable conflict between efforts at short-term relief and long-term emancipation. Upholding principles that maintain the dignity of struggle foregrounds an effective material politics. We oughtn’t surrender notions of possibility to people who adore a stunted imagination.
Moreover, the suggestions don’t simply appeal to Palestine solidarity activists; they also demand that progressive formations take up anti-Zionism. We’re well past the point where it’s acceptable to dispose of Palestine as a matter of choice or necessity. There’s significant opposition to Israeli brutality on the US left, but hardly any consequence in electoral culture for cosigning or ignoring that brutality.
Done without care, opposition to Israeli brutality can reify other forms of oppression, or it can conceptualize Israel as an aberration from honorable American values. Israel doesn’t corrupt the United States—nor does the United States corrupt Israel. Both states originated through corruption—as paragons of foreign settlement, land theft, environmental degradation, racial inequality, and labor exploitation—a condition they mutually reproduce within and beyond their borders. Israel doesn’t distract the United States from its otherwise noble mission in the world; it helps the United States manage a world order beneficial to its ruling class.
Disrupting those benefits is easier than it might seem. We shouldn’t voluntarily concede to the oppressor, first of all. The needs of power aren’t our guidepost for liberation; our notions of justice aren’t derivative of colonial logic. At its best, a principled anti-Zionism understands that freedom isn’t merely an optimal byproduct of struggle, but its only acceptable outcome.
I greatly admire and respect Stephen Salaita’s sacrifices and steadfastness for Palestine, but I think there is too much here, at least to start. The first step must be to recover the canonical terms of Enlightenment liberalism and Jewish emancipation which followed. These have been abandoned for the golden calf of “the Jewish people,” on the left no less than the right.
The Enlightenment dissolved the pre-modern Judaic community, ruled by the rabbis and the rich, and admitted Jews to liberal society, as a religious minority, or secular citizens. Before 1914 and the political consequences of WW1, increasing acceptance of Jews on these terms was the norm. Fundamental was the rejection of “Jewish peoplehood”, in the words of the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform of American Reform:
“We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.”
Reform was socially the vehicle of the German Jewish bourgeoisie, and attained its apotheosis in the US. In the 1940s this outlook, led by Rabbi Elmer Berger, Lessing Rosenwald and others, mounted a vigorous rear-guard action against the Zionist campaign for statehood. After 1948 Berger became an outspoken advocate of Palestinian rights, lionized in the Arab world. After the June, 1967 war, Berger, with a core of classical Reform supporters, renewed the struggle. He co-authored UN GA Resolution 3379 that held Zionism was a form of racism, and wrote on it himself. The Institute for Palestine Studies published his books.
Berger, like Israel Shahak, viewed Zionism as a reaction against liberalism and assimilation, an attempt to preserve the closed, medieval Jewish world and its obscurantism view, notably its anti-gentilism. Shahak was not a Marxist, much less a Reform Jew, but considered himself a secular humanist after Spinoza, the greatest of the 17th c rationalist philosophers. He wrote acutely on Zionism as a secularization of the obscurantism of medieval Judaism. Neither Berger nor Shahak were social radicals, though they were liberals, and Shahak’s circle of supporters included Matzpen, which was Marxist.
Spinoza and classical Reform predated Marxist internationalism, which is also an important strain of anti-Zionist thought. The opposition of Zionism and internationalism emerged in the classical debates over the “national question” in the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in 1903. Rosa Luxemburg was the most rigorous internationalist, and the greatest figure of socialism’s Second International period, who famously wrote, in a 1917 letter from the jail where her opposition to WW1 had landed her:
What do you want with this theme of the “special suffering of the Jews”? I am just as much concerned with the poor victims on the rubber plantations of Putumayo, the Blacks in Africa with whose corpses the Europeans play catch. You know the words that were written about the great work of the General Staff, about General Trotha’s campaign in the Kalahari desert: “And the death rattles of the dying, the demented cries of those driven mad by thirst faded away in the sublime stillness of eternity.” Oh that “sublime stillness of eternity,” in which so many cries of anguish have faded away unheard, they resound within me so strongly that I have no special place in my heart for the ghetto. I feel at home in the entire world, wherever there are clouds and birds and human tears.
Internationalism survived WW2 and its epochal tranformations in figures like the Polish Communist Isaac Deutscher, and the French Communist Maxime Rodinson. Deutscher left Poland for England in spring 1939, survived the war, visited Israel in the early 1950s, and wrote with perfect clarity about its militarism, colonialism and nationalism. He died in August, 1967, having lived to see Zionism enter its maturity, and viewed the war as arising from Israel’s conduct.
Rodinson, a scholar of Middle East languages, survived the war in Syria. Afterward he was attached to the French embassy in Beirut; when word arrived that his parents had perished in Auschwitz, he was offered an embassy car to join “his people” in Palestine. He refused as it would violate his internationalism. In 1964 he took the negative in a debate organized by the Union of Jewish Students in France, on the proposition, “Israel is a socialist state”. On the eve of the June, 1967 war, he published “Israel, a Colonial-Settler State”, which appeared in a special issue of Sartre’s Les Tempes Modernes. His “Israel and the Arabs” appeared in 2 editions, and included a sharp criticism of Israel’s role in the origins of the June 1967 war. He passed away in 2004.
Before anti-Zionism can be anything else, it must recover its foundations in the Enlightenment and Jewish emancipation, which have been abandoned by the left, from Chomsky on down. Chomsky is a Zionist, believes in Zionist shibboleths of “the Jewish people” and the “secular Jew”, views the kibbutz, an instrument of racialist Ashkenazi Jewish settlement, as anarchism.
These illiberal, anti-modern fallacies underlie his minimal critique of “the occupation”, his rejection of the “Israel Lobby” argument about the US-Israel relationship, his opposition to BDS beyond “the occupation”, his dogged defense of the “two-state solution” etc. The whole Jewish left is comprised of such Zionist foundations and equivocal, compromised politics, notably Jewish Voice for Peace. This epic failure can be called “the end of modern Jewish history”, my term and others’, with varying interpretations. See
https://questionofpalestine.net/2013/01/15/the-end-of-modern-jewish-history/
“We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine… nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state”
CitizenC – This above quote from the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform of the American Reform Movement is by no means a rejection of Jewish peoplehood. Quite the contrary – it is an affirmation of Jewish peoplehood and the collective aspirations of the Jews. When someone declares that “we consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community”, that someone is admitting that until now (1885) the Jews considered themselves to be a nation, not merely a religious community. Moreover, there is even an affirmation that the Jews until now (1885) were concerned with the restoration of the Jewish state – a decade before the appearance of Herzl’s book, “Der Judenstaat”. The rabbis in Pittsburgh decided that they no longer consider themselves a nation, but in so doing they are admitting that other Jews do consider themselves a nation. And, since the 1999 Pittsburgh Platform, even the Reform Movement defines the Jews as a people and encourages immigration to Israel.
” traditionally Jews did consider themselves a people or nation”
And oddly enough, when other people stop considering Jews a people or nation (or un-mixable with, for whatever reason) why, so do we! Funny how that works.
Salaita has a good program. One could do much worse. He folds together all the “goods” of our present age — anti-capitalism (by which I mean at the least anti-oligarchism), anti-male-privilege (aka feminism), anti-colonialism, anti-nationalism (which fits nicely with anti-racism), pro-environmentalism (anti-human-dominance of everything),etc.
What’s not to like? And — oh yes — pro-Palestinianism as a form of anti-settler-colonialism and free association for Jews (and others) allowing Jews to feel part of or not part of any so-called Jewish people, religious grouping, etc.
That old Israeli steel industry powerhouse…..
And is S.S. trying to make Israel hating palatable? to ‘liberal’ zionists supposedly? Such a dreamer