Current Events, Episode 168

israel at war, EXPLAINED: conversations not worth having

december 17, 2023

BLOG VERSION below | PODCAST VERSION HERE

There are conversations no longer worth having because their answers have no meaningful impact. Is anti-Zionism antisemitism? Who actually hates Jews? Are Jews indigenous to Israel? Let’s stop debating these distractions.

This is an episode about why there should not be an episode about whether anti-Zionism is antisemitism. This is one of those language debates that delights in semantical luxury but has absolutely no bearing on the reality that we’re living in. It’s a question that comes up a lot, at least within the media environment in which I dwell. This war has made it seem more urgent, and it’s getting a great deal of attention. But it isn’t more urgent. In fact, it couldn’t be less. 

You’ve probably seen by now the testimony of the presidents of Penn, Harvard, and MIT before Congress. The presidents were unable to definitively say whether calling for genocide against the Jews goes against university policies, or constitutes harassment of their Jewish students, insisting instead that it would depend on the context. Much of the response has been on the question of free speech, and the sheer hypocrisy of institutions who otherwise argue that any expression of hatred, now matter how minor, is an act of violence; except, apparently, when it comes to the Jews. But splashed on the front page of the New York Times and other outlets was this question of whether speech that criticizes or condemns Zionism is also, by its nature, an expression of Jewish hatred.

Here’s the thing: it absolutely doesn’t matter. Whatever is the answer to the question, it doesn’t change the nature of the hatred pouring out against Israel, Jewish institutions, and Jews around the world. Beyond the obviously-brilliant insights of today’s podcast episode, it’s not a conversation worth having, and I’ll get to why that is.

In fact, there are a great many conversations happening right now that aren’t worth having. I define these as debates in which the answer doesn’t make a difference to what Jews are experiencing right now. As a corollary to the anti-Zionism/antisemitism debate is who is an antisemite. This is best represented right now in the figure of Elon Musk, whose tweets and policies on X, formerly known as Twitter, are spreading millions upon millions of Jewish hate posts. What does he really think of Jews? I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. The effect is the same. Emboldening the Jewish haters. Making Jews feel vulnerable, isolated, and attacked. 

Here’s another one: are Jews really indigenous to Israel or not? The hard facts are for a Jewish — previously Israelite — presence in the Land of Israel going back 3,000 years. But even if we were to conclude otherwise, that’s not going to convince 7 million Jewish Israelis to pick up and leave; and certainly not going to justify murdering all of them until they do. Both Jews and Arabs are there, have been for a long time, and aren’t going anywhere.

Hey, I’m as guilty as the next person for spilling ink — and digital audio files — on these questions. I, too, get caught up in them until I realize it’s just an intellectual exercise. These debates are fine for specialized graduate study programs. They have no importance where the rest of us live. You have my permission to not have them. You don’t need the read the articles, or respond to the posts, or engage in the debate. Today I’ll tell you why, free of charge, and you’ll thank me for getting your time back. 

I’m your host, Jason Harris, and this is Jew Oughta Know.

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You’d think that after more than two months, I’d be numb, or used to, or adapted to, the loathsome anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hatred spilling forth from American college campuses, central London, and places in between. But I’m not. It is still shocking. My own community in the Bay Area, California, has been continuously riled by nastiness, from the local school board to city councils and street protestors. A few days ago the Chabad menorah on public display in Oakland was destroyed, tossed in a lake. Graffiti was sprayed around it: “We’re gonna find you,” “you’re on alert,” and “free Palestine.” Anti-Zionist indeed.

And so, admittedly, my patience for the discourse around anti-Zionsim vs. antisemitism, which was already worn thin, has now worn out. For years now there has been a preoccupation with debating whether anti-Zionism is antisemitism. If it is, then those defending Zionism and Israel get to delight in knowing that their opponents are nothing more than Jew haters and don’t have to be engaged in their criticism of Israel. If it is not, then those opposed to Zionism and Israel get the thrill of screaming from the rooftops without having to worry about being labeled as bigots.

It’s a stupid debate. I’ll tell you why. 

First let’s take a minute to get some clarity. Is anti-Zionism automatically antisemitic? The answer is no. There are three instances in which it is not. 

The first is that you are an ultra-Orthodox Jew who only accepts the premise that the Messiah can bring about the redemption of Israel, not the secular state. In this view, only God can return the Jews to full sovereignty in their ancient land, not the promise of secular Zionism which rejected so much of religious law. Since the Messiah has not yet come, the creation of the nation-state of Israel is illegitimate. You, an ultra-Orthodox Jew, are not likely a Jew hater.

There are also people, as a Jewish educator once told me, who think they are John Lennon. The Beatle sang, “imagine there’s no countries. It isn’t hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for. And no religion, too.” So if you are someone who does not believe that nation-states should exist, that there should be no borders, no religion, no basis for of any kind for a national entity, then, sure, you can be anti-Zionist without also hating the Jews. Of course, to hold such a view would also mean that you are against the creation of a Palestinian state along those same lines.

So Orthodox Jews and John Lennon. Two narrow cases in which you can be opposed to Zionism without also being against the Jews.

There is a third case. The Palestinians themselves. In The Atlantic, Adam Serwer writes that “it is a cruel absurdity to demand of Palestinians that they not only acquiesce to Israel’s existence, but also actively support the idea of an ethnically defined state that excludes them from equal citizenship, one that was made possible only by the flight and expulsion of 700,000 of their forebears in the Nakba of 1948.” The Nakba, meaning “The Catastrophe,” has come to be a reference to the Palestinians who fled or were expelled from what became the State of Israel. Serwer emphasizes the activists and protestors demanding equal rights for Jews and Arabs in a single shared state as a solution to the conflict. Even if you disagree with such a position, he argues, it’s not an inherently antisemitic one.

And I agree with him. I quibble on one point that he misses but which I think is important. And I know this is going to be controversial, but here I go anyway: for people in the Middle East, including the Palestinians but also even the Israelis, there’s no difference between Zionist, Israeli, and Jew. They are one and the same. Sure, when a Palestinian laments the impact of Zionism on their lives, they are not attacking Judaism as a religion, or necessarily the Jewish people as Jews. And yet I’m not sure there’s much distinction. Here in the West we’re obsessed with our identities, and trained to think of them as hyphens, distinctly separate notions of belonging. Am I an American-dash-Jew or a Jewish-dash-American, things like that. But in the Middle East, it mostly doesn’t work that way. Whenever I’ve asked Israelis what makes them Jewish, they don’t understand the question. They say, “what do you mean? I’m Jewish because I’m Israeli. It’s the same thing.” 

But still, Adam Serwer, and others, make a good, broad point. And it doesn’t matter. Why not?

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I will wager that almost none of the protestors and activists we’re seeing fall into any of these three categories: ultra-Orthodox Jews, John Lennon, and Palestinians agitating for equal rights in a shared state. Okay, the Palestinian category I will concede — no doubt there are Palestinians at some of these protests. But either way, none of these rallies, especially the violent ones, are making nuanced distinctions about messianic redemption, the nature of ethnic states, or even thoughtful criticism of Israeli government policy. When you’re holding up a sign saying “Throw out your trash” and it’s a picture of a Jewish star in a garbage can, you’re not making a point about the negative effects of Zionism. You’re calling for the elimination of Jews. When you’re screaming “Palestine will be free from the river to the sea” outside a synagogue, you’re not critiquing Theodore Herzl’s vision for the Jewish homeland, you’re intentionally intimidating Jews by calling for the destruction of their nation. If this was truly about opposing Zionism, you wouldn’t see protests outside synagogues during Jewish holidays. You wouldn’t find menorahs getting vandalized and destroyed around the country. You wouldn’t find Jewish students harassed, bullied, and assaulted on campus. 

None of what we’re seeing right now has anything to do with a critique of Zionism. It has everything to do with demonizing and delegitimizing Israel as a state, and the aspirations of Jews for self-determination and their right to self-defense. Tearing down posters of kidnapped Jewish children isn’t about freeing the Palestinian people or achieving a Palestinian state or even arguing against the Israeli government. It is about dehumanizing Jews.

Resolving this question, even if we do so with airtight clarity, isn’t going to change anyone’s mind. The Jew haters won’t be convinced. They will still cling to their protestations that they’re just opposing Zionism, that actually they love the Jews. And then they’ll declare that in being called out for their bigotry, they are the actual victims of Jewish power and Jewish racism. 

So is anti-Zionism antisemitism? Not always. But right now it is. Every single protest, every single time, every single demonization and blood libel and dehumanizing act of these pretender human rights activists, is, yes, anti-Zionist, but also deeply anti-Jewish, targeted as it is at the Jewish people, their symbols, and their communities. Let’s stop letting them off the hook by pretending this is an open and unresolved debate.

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Along the same lines is the question of who is really a Jew hater and who maybe just seems like one but there is something else going on. A few weeks ago Elon Musk agreed with and promoted a tweet that accused the Jews of “pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.” Musk replied, “you have said the actual truth.” He then went on to criticize unnamed Jewish communities, the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish organization dedicated to fighting antisemitism and other forms of hatred, and other minority groups of pushing “anti-white” messages. Now, I know that Elon Musk thinks he is a picking a narrow fight with a particular Jewish organization — the Anti-Defamation League — that he has been at odds with for some time. But I don’t think that matters to those who aren’t clued into that nuance. His ownership and direct control of  Twitter, now known as X, has been directly responsible for amplifying hateful anti-Jewish posts, known white nationalists and antisemites, and other extremists.

Realizing he got himself into hot water, Musk flew to Israel, where he toured the devastated communities around Gaza with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and agreed that Hamas must be destroyed. His soul thus cleansed, his name thus cleared from any accusation, he returned home to reinstate the Twitter account of Alex Jones, a lunatic extremist who thinks school shootings are fake, and other nasty conspiracies.

Raise your hand if you think Elon Musk is never going to post anything about the Jews ever again. 

I don’t know Elon Musk, have no idea what’s in his heart, and for all I know he has been lighting the Hanukah candles every night in a sincere appreciation for the depths of Jewish history, resilience, and culture. It doesn’t matter whether he really hates Jews or doesn’t: the effect is exactly the same. Whether he hates Jews or just thinks it’s funny to troll, his behavior is the same as if he really is antisemitic. Wave after wave of nastiness directed at Jews on the platform he owns, which he has the power to stop but refuses. So let’s stop asking if he is. So, too, with all the rest. 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who is running for President on the left, may think he is just asking nuanced scientific questions, but his assertion that Covid-19 may have been engineered to avoid Ashkenazi Jews bears the same likeness as medieval charges insisting that the Jews were able to avoid the Black Plague through trickery and devil worship. It wasn’t true then and I, an Ashkenazi Jew who ended up in the emergency room with Covid, can tell you that it isn’t true now. Does RFK Jr. really hate the Jews? I have no idea. It doesn’t matter. The effect is the same.

Same with Donald Trump. Yes I know he has Jewish children and grandchildren, and the long list of ways he supported Israel — or more precisely, Benjamin Netanyahu — during his presidency. But he also invites open Jewish haters to dinner, advocates racist ideologies, hates minorities and women, and has for decades invoked invoked Jewish stereotypes. I’ve never met him, don’t know what’s in his heart, but it’s doesn’t matter. The effect is the same.

Don’t get me wrong: I am not suggesting that Elon Musk is the biggest threat facing the Jews. Maybe he’s not even a major one, just super visible. Far worse than Twitter right now is TikTok, the social media app under the thumb of the Chinese government, which is spewing billions more anti-Jewish posts. Imagine the future here: a 1.3 billion-person society with no history of antisemitism is now being inundated with anti-Jewish screeds allowed by their communist masters. Is it because the Chinese government really hates the Jews, or just sees this as a way to divide the West? I don’t know, but either way it’s terrifying.

And so I am no longer wondering whether the people who traffic in anti-Jewish ideas are, or are not, true antisemites. For all intents and purposes, for the effect their behavior has on Jews and the comfort they give to the Jew haters, they may as well be. I, for one, am no longer parsing. 

* * * * * *

There’s another debate that I used to be into but no longer think matters. Are Jews really indigenous to the Land of Israel, or did they come from elsewhere? 

Yes, Jews are indigenous to Israel. The ancient Land of Israel is where Judaism developed: its religious rituals and traditions, its texts, its cultural identities, its sense of nationhood and peoplehood, and its historical narrative. When forcibly exiled, Jews developed an immensely rich longing — through tradition and liturgy and practice — that centered on the Land of Israel as the crucible of their sense of self, communal ties, and relationship to God. 

Can I — an Ashkenazi Jews with centuries of family roots in Eastern Europe — scientifically trace my DNA back to the indigenous Israelites of 3,000 years ago? As far as I know, I cannot. But it doesn’t matter. Anyone who sincerely considers themself belonging to the Jewish nation is a part of this inheritance. Maybe my genes don’t go back to ancient Canaan. But everything about my cultural and religious identity does.

But this is another intellectual debate whose answer doesn’t matter in the context of what we’re dealing with right now. Let’s suppose that we can throw out millennia of demonstrated Jewish existence in the Land of Israel. So what? Do we say that since the Jews aren’t technically indigenous that they are so illegitimate that they have to be forced to leave Israel? All 7 million of them? Or that because they are not indigenous and therefore don’t belong, that rape and murder and torture and kidnapping children and mutilation and cruelty are all perfectly acceptable? 

The calls for “Jews to go back home” are irrational — and antisemitic — because Jews have been home in the Land of Israel for thousands of years. We never left, even if many — and at times most — were forced into exile, where we were often persecuted and oppressed. There was always at least a small group of Jews who remained. And, of course, when the Arab states wanted the Jews to “go back home,” they forced them off to…Israel. There’s a great meme going around on social media: “a billion people are about to celebrate the birth of a Jew in Israel 2,000 years ago, yet no one thinks there were Jews there before 1948.”

Jews have been in the land for a very long time. So have Arabs. I think both people have been there long enough that they don’t need their right to live there questioned. The best-case scenario is the two-state solution, in which the two people — whether indigenous or “only” thousands of years in place — will have independent states alongside each other. States that, even if they don’t like each other much, won’t wage war and terrorism against one another. 

* * * * * *

One of the stressful things these past couple of months has been the sheer assault on my senses. Arguments and debates and accusations and demonizing and criticisms coming from all sides at all times. But I’ve been trying to get better at managing the flow, and one of the ways I’m doing that is by acknowledging the debates I don’t need to pay attention to because  they don’t matter. They don’t matter because their answers don’t change anything. The people who believe that the Jews stole all the Palestinians land in 1948 aren’t going to be convinced because I show them the Egyptian Merneptah Stele from 1208 BCE, the oldest mention of the word “Israel” that we have on record, now 3,200 years ago. Elon Musk and his fellow travelers see a benefit for themselves — whatever it is — by trafficking in Jewish hatred, whether they sincerely believe it or have an ulterior motive. 

It’s not that these conversations or debates are never important, or that there can’t be a time and a place for them. I don’t think that time or place is now. Right now these debates are at best a distraction; at worst, a deliberate ploy. It would be considered racist and defamatory to call for the genocide of Jews, so the haters replace it with “Zionist.” For many people, that provides enough of a veneer of plausible deniability that they are in any way impugning Jewish People. So once again I ask you to raise your hand: do you think that once Israel is destroyed and the 7 million Jews there massacred or ethnically cleansed, that these people are going to be content? Is there any expectation that their bloodlust will be satisfied? Are they going to say, “at last we got the Zionists, now we can just leave the Jews alone”? Or, having now destroyed the Jewish state, are they going to realize they also need to destroy that local synagogues too? And then make sure their neighborhoods and cities are free of Jews? Will The Atlantic and the New York Times then have to write articles wondering how previously anti-Zionist behavior turned into outright antisemitism? It turns out it was there all along.

It’s not hard to know the difference between criticism of Israel and Jewish hatred, any more than it’s not hard to know the difference between criticizing Barak Obama’s economic policies versus the conspiracy theory that he and other black people aren’t real Americans. So let’s stop with the circular reasoning and the parsing of small nuances and the semantics. Let’s stop pretending that the insidious, ravenous hatred of Jews spilling all over our streets and inside our phones are sincere criticisms of Zionism or honest reflections about the many faults in Israeli policy. You have my permission not to engage in these debates. You have my permission to decide for yourselves what feels like Jewish hatred, and refuse to defend it before people who lack the goodwill to listen.

Disagree with me? No problem! Let me know at jewoughtaknowpodcast@gmail.com, and my website is jewoughtaknow.com. Thanks for listening everyone, Am Yisrael Chai, the Jewish People Live.

© Jason Harris 2023