The minefield of anti-Zionism

Lefty Jews like me who support the liberation of Arab Palestinians feel raw from the honest mistakes of goodhearted allies. Aside from some of that being ever the way in social justice advocacy, we have extra cause to respect it in this space; we know intimately how tricky the context is. Criticizing Israel well takes thoughtful care. Criticizing Zionism is walking through a minefield. I do not want to concern troll exactly how we name our opposition to the horrors of this moment, but I have to unpack it.

For my sins, I am still keeping an eye on Twitter, and a lefty I admire shared (with an appropriate note of puzzlement) this from the Torah Judaism <@TorahJudaism> Twitter account:

Weird, right? I discovered that many accounts whom I Follow on Twitter were Following this account. It exemplifies how this vital cause is cursed with an array of bad actors. We all know to look for Nazis, but few are as cautious as we need to be about other bad bedfellows.

I’m going to step back to the general challenge, then come back to Torah Judaism as an example.

How hard all of this is

I write this in a galvanizing moment of horror, with Israel’s decades of brutal apartheid military policing taking a turn toward genocide. I appreciate the care I do see lefty gentiles taking to criticize Israel’s government without stumbling into Doing Antisemitism. It is comforting to see so many of y’all taking it seriously. But frankly it is galling how despite that effort, many of y’all are nonetheless doing that so badly.

Like most lefty Jews I climbed out of the fog of Israel hardliner propaganda through a lot of homework, difficult in the face of the pervasive deceit and outright lies in all directions. It is dispiriting to see my feed full of people I respect sharing bad analogies, commentaries with implications they obviously do not intend, and errors of basic fact in this moment in which it is necessary both to stand against Israel’s crimes against humanity and to stand against antisemitism surfacing.

Zionism and anti-Zionism

In particular, talking about Zionism is not for beginners.

Israel hardliners deceitfully cast all criticism of Zionism, Israel, and Israel’s actions as antisemitism. I hate that the Anti-Defamation League is at once an essential mainstream resource tracking organized hate groups and they an untrustworthy hardline Israel propaganda outlet abusing accusations of antisemitism to smear almost all legitimate criticism of Israel. This kind of over-reading antisemitism complicates spotting when bad actors are using “anti-Zionism” as a veil over antisemitism, when there are antisemitic implications in superficially innocent commentaries. It is very easy for people rightly outraged about Israel’s actions to get drawn in.

I am not a Zionist. I respect, and can even support, some forms of anti-Zionism. For instance, I join people fundamentally critical of the global order of Westphalian nation-states, but even if one does not share that critique I think one must respect as legitimate the rejection of Zionism which emerges from it. I think Zionism misjudges what best serves the global Jewish community. And so forth. But though I am not-Zionist (maybe more precisely post-Zionist) I cannot call myself an “anti-Zionist”.

Though many horrors are committed in the name of Zionism, direct opposition to those horrors by a liberal tradition has been an integral part of the Zionist movement, from the very beginning fifty years before Israel’s founding all the way through today. Since the founding of Israel, “Zionism” has meant nothing other than wanting to preserve the state of Israel in some form. This is no idiosyncratic attempt to reframe or reclaim the word “Zionism” for my use; I don’t want Zionism. It is simply what the word means. So knowing what Zionism is, one rightly reads “anti-Zionism” as a call for the destruction of the State Of Israel.

Thus I and many other Jews get hit with a cold splash of antisemitism when we see “anti-Zionism” invoked in the name of Palestinian liberation. Unless it is framed carefully, anti-Zionism holds Israel to a unique standard, not merely criticizing the government’s policies or the state’s history but rejecting the nation as illegitimate by definition. It tells Israelis that they are wrong to love the only home they have ever known.

Insisting “no, I mean opposition to the Zionists rationalizing their brutality against Palestinians” lets the worst Israel hardliners deceitfully appropriate the meaning of Zionism, just as they keep doing with antisemitism.

Insisting “no, I mean that Zionism is bad like all nationalist ideologies” makes me ask why you said “Zionism” instead of “nationalism”.

Anyone familiar with social justice advocacy should be wary of these protestations of No, No, I Did Not Mean It That Way, Why Would You Think That?

Again, one can criticize Zionism without stepping on those landmines. Don’t get me started, I will talk your ear off. But it is rare that people step carefully enough.

I wish I could say to listen to Jews, that one can trust that anti-Zionism from Jews, at least, will not walk into the antisemitic implications in that minefield, but Torah Judaism shows how no, one cannot.

Torah Judaism

Here again is the tweet that got us started:

Zionists say that Jews must be exterminated; these are today’s Nazis.

Zionists reveal their true faces every day.

This Zionist woman, who supports Israel, says that all anti-Zionist Torah Jews should be killed in gas chambers, that Hitler should have killed them all, and that he made a mistake by not killing them all.

Leaders around the world are fueling Antisemitism by supporting Zionists.

#StopAntisemitism

[A video clip shows a few Orthodox Jewish men from behind, on a sidewalk carrying Palestinian flags, with an old woman facing them. At the start a large caption reads “Zionist attacks Jewish protesters”.]

“Zionists say that Jews must be exterminated”? The woman in the attached video clip does indeed say that she wishes all Jews had died in the Shoah. But the tweet offers its assertion that she is a Zionist without any evidence ... and then takes her as representative of all Zionists, representative of what Zionism is. Dishonest.

So who is Torah Judaism?

With the caveat that analogies between Judaism and Christianity are dangerous, I will offer one here. If one sees a group describing themselves as “Bible Christians”, one’s antennæ go up: are these “Christians” who do not consider other Christians real Christians because they read the Bible “incorrectly”?

Sure enough, Torah Judaism turn out to be Neturei Karta, an ultra-Othodox cult who think they are pretty much the only real Jews.

Other Orthodox Jewish movements, including some who oppose Zionism, have denounced the activities of the radical branch of Neturei Karta [including] for attending a 2006 holocaust revisionist conference in Iran

They are of course cultural reactionaries — sexist, homophobic, you know the drill — and they are hungry for attention. So yeah, they rhyme more than a little with the hatemongers of Westboro Baptist. The UK Guardian describes the context:

Even among Charedi, or ultra-Orthodox circles, the Neturei Karta are regarded as a wild fringe. After some of them took part in an anti-Israel rally in the United States earlier this year, an advertisement in the Orthodox press excoriated those who had joined “the enemies of our people”. It is significant that the denunciation was endorsed by most of the major Charedi groupings in New York, including some with a staunchly anti-Zionist theology, such as the powerful Satmar Chasidic sect.
[⋯]
Today, many Charedim would be more accurately described as “non-” rather than “anti-” Zionist in the strict sense. Some would call themselves anti-Zionist in that they remain opposed to secular nationalism, at the same time as they tacitly accept the existence of the state. Many go from other countries to study in the Torah academies that have proliferated in Israel.

These zealots’ beef with Zionism is it being a secular movement. They reject Jewish ethnic & cultural solidarity, insisting that only religion exactly as they practice it is authentically Jewish. Zionism is one among many reasons why they reject the legitimacy of other Jews.

Their anti-Zionism is not political but theological, unrelated to Israel’s actions. Their claims to support Palestinian liberation are a lie; they are just waiting for the coming of the מָשִׁיחַ, when they dream that they will rightly claim the land as Israel ... and purge anyone whom they do not accept as Jews.

Since that is not obvious, it lets them invite misreadings of what they are saying. One might generously misread this tweet because it is close to a legitimate point about how criticism of Israel is not an attack on Judaism:

Israel is not a Jewish state.

Judaism is an ancient religious collective.

Zionism is a nationalist movement created in 1896 by ppl who were pronounced atheists

They wanted to be called Jewish but without actually believing in Judaism

That’s Zionism

One might generously misread this tweet because it is close to a legitimate point about over-reading antisemitism:

It is wrong to say that Anti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism.

Israel is a political entity founded by non-Jewish people.

The Jewish people are an ancient religious community belonging to many nationalities around the world.

How does criticizing Israel mean hatred toward the Jews?

One might generously misread this tweet because it is close to a legitimate point about respecting al-Aqsa:

The presence of the Zionist state in the Temple Mount is unacceptable.

While Jews are forbidden from going to Al-Aqsa Mosque, we do not accept that Zionists can pretend to be Jews and do whatever they want on the Temple Mount.

What Zionists do is against the Torah and the Jewish religion. They do whatever they want in Palestine and Jerusalem. It is a great sin for a believing Jew to go up to the Temple Mount, that is, Masjid al-Aqsa.

In our religion, Judaism, it is strictly forbidden for Jews to climb the Temple Mount. JEWS can never be there to pray. Zionists and thieving settlers are infidel people who defied the Torah and entered the temple hill disguised as Jews.

One might generously misread this tweet because it is close to a legitimate point about Israel hardliners exploiting respect for Judaism to demand deference to Israel:

In Jerusalem’s Meah Shearim district, Jews set fire to a poster of Ovadia Yosef, the former chief rabbi of Zionist Israel. People like Ovadia Joseph are the showcase faces of irreligious Zionism. All they do is use Judaism for their own gain. Zionists are never Jews.

But at this point, you should be able to see what is really going on here: zealots’ wounded pride that others think differently than they do, projecting that to frame Israel as illegitimate and cartoonishly hostile.

Israel was founded by a nationalistic movement that replaces the Jewish religion with Zionism. They wanted Jews to forget G-d and Religion, & be united by land and language. To date, they have raised generations of Israelis who have a deep hatred for traditional Jews & Judaism

Of course most people cannot be expected to catch what is going on with this intra-Jewish theological weirdness at first glance. And this is characteristic of how opaque countless things are in understanding what is happening in Israel-Palestine.

But we must be smart about how many commentaries have such unwholesome implications.

Jews in the movement for Palestinian liberation

Jews who yearn for Palestinian liberation, as I do, hate how twisty all this is. The homework we did to get here was time-consuming, exacting, and emotionally wrenching. We watch friends step on landmines, and we get torn by shrapnel. We see entryist “allies” seeding the ground with more landmines.

Jews who yearn for Palestinian liberation, as I do, hate the horrors committed by Israel’s para-fascist leadership shaping Israel into a brutal apartheid state and claiming to do it in our name. They compromise our ability to face real antisemitism with their lies and deceptions muddying everyone’s understanding. I feel disgust at my own complicity with them when I fail to stand up and speak out more.

Jews who yearn for Palestinian liberation, as I do, are eager to cultivate allies we can stand with, especially in this moment. When we seem to be hairsplitting and over-sensitive, we are struggling to build a movement we can stand with.

The work before us

Surveying this minefield of accidental & deliberate antisemitism, under a thick cloud of deceit and outright lies kicked up by partisans on all sides, let us register how profoundly unfair it is that the path to Palestinian liberation winds through such difficult territory. The cause faces enough adversity without this compounding burden.

But it is the reality of the situation. The movement must step carefully. The movement needs Jews’ help doing that, both on the merits and so that we can stand with the movement in good conscience.

Many of us are eager to do more.