Elliott Abrams in Fathom - American Jewish Anti-Zionist Diasporism: A Critique:
In some ways this is an old story. As soon as Zionism was invented, anti-Zionism was invented. It was mostly religious: the view that hastening the return to Zion was substituting human will for God’s, was indeed rebellion against God; God sent the Jews into exile and the messianic age would arrive when He decided. That view was largely destroyed by the Holocaust and the need for a refuge in the Jewish State. It lingers on in the views of the Satmar Hasidim and of Neturei Karta—whose positions on Israel are precisely what one now hears from the far Left. The Satmar Rabbi Aaron Teitelbaum said in 2018 that ‘We have no part in Zionism. We have no part in their wars. We have no part in the State of Israel.’
Three weeks after the 7 October massacre, Neturei Karta spokesman Rabbi Yisroel David Weiss said ‘We are crying with the Palestinians.’ He went on: ‘Judaism and Zionism are as different from each other as the earth and the sky; they contradict each other … As devout Jews, we pray to God every day for the swift removal of the Zionist state of Israel, which has caused so much bloodshed among Palestinians and Jews. We pray to God for the speedy liberation of Palestine.’
Twenty years ago, as a White House official I met with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in his residence in Amman, Jordan. He took me to his private office for a quiet talk, and that room was decorated with only two photographs. One was of Yasser Arafat. The other showed Abbas receiving an award from the rabbis leading Neturei Karta. Today we hear the same sort of language from the Left. We hear it, of course, in the eliminationist chants on college campuses: ‘From the river to the see, Palestine will be free.’ We hear it from ‘progressives’ like the author Naomi Klein, who is ‘Professor of Climate Justice’ at the University of British Columbia. Klein’s Passover message in the Guardian newspaper was that ‘We need an exodus from Zionism … too many of our people are worshipping a false idol once again … that takes our most profound biblical stories of justice and emancipation from slavery – the story of Passover itself – and turns them into brutalist weapons of colonial land theft, roadmaps for ethnic cleansing and genocide.’
This is Diasporism—the view that the creation of the State of Israel, and the entire Zionist movement, was a ghastly mistake and that Jewish life is best led in exile. ‘Zionism has brought us to our present moment of cataclysm and it is time that we said clearly: it has always been leading us here,’ Klein wrote. It’s an important point: her objection is not to one policy or one leader; as she also wrote, ‘it’s not just Netanyahu, it’s the world he made and that made him – it’s Zionism.’ The only remedy is for Jews to separate from, as the Iranian regime calls it, the ‘Zionist entity.’
More than humanity in general, Jews in particular are born to suffer - so the anti-Zionist argument seems to go - and should function as permanent canaries in the coal mine, exemplifying and reminding the rest of us of the woes of this cruel world. Israel as a successful state just offends the Wandering Jew image.
In the deepest sense, the Leftist anti-Zionists are adopting the view of the Satmar and Neturei Karta: a Jewish State cannot exist until the Messianic Age arrives because the one we have, built by men and women, is not pure enough. As Andre Spokoiny rightly described their view, ‘By virtue of their powerlessness, Jews could become the conscience of the world, the ultimate parameter of the morality of a human society. By sustaining a romance with powerlessness, and an idealisation of the lack of agency that transforms tragedy into virtue, Jewish vulnerability in the Diaspora could be reimagined as the ultimate engine of Jewish moral and intellectual genius….’ The moral blindness inherent in this view is well depicted in this vignette Spokoiny recounted: ‘Imre Kertész, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, synthesised better the bargain that Jews needed to make. During a visit to Israel, a foreign journalist, aware of Kertész’s humanist and pacifist leanings, asked him, ‘How does it feel for you to see a Star of David on a tank?’ ‘Much better than seeing it on my concentration camp uniform,’ he answered.’
Worth a read.
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