Friday Call
Our call this Friday will be with Joshua Leifer, a contributing editor at Jewish Currents. Josh recently wrote a terrific piece about Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Kahanist whose openly racist party could win as many as 14 seats in November’s Israeli elections. Josh will talk about Kahanism’s new appeal, Ben-Gvir’s alliance with Benjamin Netanyahu, and why American Jewry’s most powerful organizations are staying silent.
Sources Cited in this Video
Josh’s excellent essay on Itamar Ben-Gvir.
The Tablet profile that implicitly blames Ben-Gvir’s rise on Palestinians, their political leaders, and the Israeli doves who were reckless enough to think it was possible to make peace with them.
Ta-Nehisi Coates’ essay, “The First White President,” which analyzes the tendency to blame Trump’s rise on Trump’s victims and the leftists who empathize with them.
The JTA’s Ron Kampeas on the refusal of AIPAC and other establishment American Jewish groups to oppose Ben-Gvir’s role in Israel’s next government.
Shmuel Magid’s biography of Meir Kahane.
Kahane’s debates with Alan Dershowitz in 1985 and Rabbi Yitz Greenberg in 1988.
Other Stuff
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), an exploration of the historical roots of Conservative Judaism’s hostility to radical politics.
A series of incisive analyses of the rise of armed resistance in the West Bank in 972Mag.
A terrific critique of the Washington foreign policy establishment’s tendency to conflate China and Russia.
Want to know how Saudi Arabia maintains its influence in Washington? Meet Norm Coleman.
Aaron Berman, professor emeritus of history at Hampshire College and a newsletter subscriber, has just published a new book, America’s Arab Nationalists, about the role of US intellectuals in the rise of Arab nationalism.
Correction
In this week’s video I said that establishment Jewish organizations criticized Ben-Gvir when he ran for the Knesset in 2009. I meant to say 2019.
See you on Friday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Hi. Before I get started, I wanted to mention that our guest this Friday is going to be Josh Leifer, who writes for Jewish Currents and wrote a terrific piece recently about Itamar Ben-Gvir, who I’m actually gonna be talking about in this video. But part of what I know about Itamar Ben-Gvir is really from Josh’s really terrific reporting and writing about him. And we’re going to talk about that on Friday.
Itamar Ben-Gvir is an Israeli politician, a far-right politician, who seems poised—his party—to become the third largest party in Israel’s Knesset when Israel votes in early November. Benjamin Netanyahu, who is probably the most likely person to become Israel’s next prime minister, actually helped broker the deal that made possible Ben-Gvir’s party, which expects to govern with him as coordinating the campaign with him. And Ben-Gvir—many have speculated—might end up being Israel’s next Internal Security Minister or Justice Minister.
To understand how extraordinary that is, a little bit about Itamar Ben-Gvir. Itamar Ben-Gvir is an open and proud disciple of Rabbi Meir Kahane. He has a photo of Kahane in his home. He’s called Kahane his hero. He was actually banned from serving in the Israeli military—Ben-Gvir—for being a member of Kahane’s party, Kach, which was outlawed. Now, why was Kahane’s party outlawed? Because Kahane’s party explicitly called for the expulsion of all Palestinians from Israel, and called for banning marriage between Jews and non-Jews, and banning sex between Jews and non-Jews. This is the ideological tradition that Itamar Ben-Gvir comes from. And although Ben-Gvir has tried to soften the hard edges a little bit in the way that you see with other essentially neo-fascist politicians like Marine Le Pen, or Giorgia Meloni in Italy, there’s simply no question that this is still his ideological tradition. Again, he still calls Kahane his hero, even though he says he does not. He now only supports expelling some, but not all, Palestinians from Israel—only those who claims have been disloyal to the state. He also, until 2020— Itamar Ben-Gvir had a photo in his home of Baruch Goldstein. Some of you may remember that Baruch Goldstein was settler in Hebron who, in 1994, walked into the Ibrahimi Mosque, which is adjacent to the Tomb of the Patriarchs, and opened fire, killing dozens of Palestinians.
To make things more remarkably depressing, is that the most influential American Jewish organizations—AIPAC, the American Jewish Committee, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs—have made it clear that they will not be opposing Itamar Ben-Gvir’s entrance into the next Israeli government. This comes from a story that I’ll put in the in the link by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reporter Ron Kampeas. In 2009, when Ben-Gvir was much more marginal, when his party was considered to win 1 or 2 seats, actually at that point many major American Jewish groups said he was beyond the pale. But now that he’s actually on par to gain 10, 11, 12, even 14 seats, he’s essentially too powerful to oppose. So, these organizations are now saying, well, we don’t take positions on matters internal to Israel. Israel is, after all, a democracy. Which is a ludicrous statement. First of all, it’s dubious to call a country that holds millions of people who are unable to vote under its control truly a democracy. But secondly, even if Israel were truly a democracy, these very organizations routinely condemn figures who run in democracies with a racist and authoritarian agenda, right? Whether it be Donald Trump, or Marine Le Pen, or Giorgia Meloni, or Victor Orban, part of what defending democracy requires opposing people who run in democratic elections with a frankly fascist agenda, as Ben-Gvir does. And yet because Ben-Gvir is now so mainstream, the American Jewish organizations will essentially say that it’s not their place to criticize Israel if Israelis decide to elect a fascist candidate. Of course, that would not stop them from criticizing Palestinians if Palestinians vote for parties that they don’t like, right. But this is the thing that they will retreat to.
There’s also another argument that I think you’re gonna hear more and more of as we move closer to Ben-Gvir likely coming into government. And the example I’m taking is from a profile of Ben-Gvir in Tablet Magazine. Some of you may know Tablet is a kind of right-leaning Jewish publication. And there’s a long profile of Ben-Gvir by a writer named Armin Rosen. And Armin Rosen writes: “the overlooked context for Ben-Gvir’s rise is that for the past 30 years Israel centrists sold their country on quasi utopian schemes that to many Israelis now seem far crazier than just about anything Ben-Gvir says he wants.” Let’s unpack that, what Armin Rosen is saying here. Armin Rosen is saying: well, sure Ben-Gvir may be unfortunate, but we have to understand that Israelis are voting for him because Israeli centrists were too supportive of peace with the Palestinians, too open to supporting two states, and that turned out to be a fallacy. And so, who can blame now Israeli Jews for voting for Itamar Ben-Gvir? This is essentially to say the people who deserve the blame for Itamar Ben-Gvir are Israeli progressive Jews, or actually, ultimately there are Palestinians. Because Palestinians are so menacing, because they supposedly destroyed the possibility of a two-state solution, then who can really blame Israeli Jews for supporting a neo-fascist like Itamar Ben-Gvir?
It’s very reminiscent actually of a certain kind of discourse that exists around White Christian Americans voting for Donald Trump, which you hear again and again. Which is to say, well, yes sure it’s unfortunate these people support Donald Trump—an open racist, a blithering idiot who’s trying to destroy American democracy—but after all they’re doing it because they’ve been so disrespected by the American Left, by woke people, so really who can blame them? Ta-Nehisi Coates in his fantastic essay, “The First White President,” really goes deep into exposing how absurd this argument is. But, essentially, the logic in the American context is to blame Blacks, women, LGBT people, right, for the rise of a candidate who is profoundly hostile to their humanity and their rights. And you see the same thing in this argument in Tablet that basically the people were ultimately to blame for Ben-Gvir—a man who has an openly racist agenda to them—is Palestinians, because Palestinians weren’t supportive of enough, supposedly, of a two-state solution. They haven’t been kind of compliant enough with Israel and with Zionism more generally.
The other analogy that I think is helpful in thinking about what’s happening with Ben-Gvir and groups like AIPAC, which will now not oppose him, is again to think about this phenomenon of Trump. What we have seen since 2015 is that Republican politicians and many conservative pundits and activists have progressively made more and more and more concessions to go along with Trump because they fear politically being against him. At first, they were small concessions, and then, essentially, they had to make larger and larger and larger moral compromises because that’s the nature of Donald Trump. So, ultimately, they got to the point where they had to become apologists for Trump’s incitement of an insurrection against Congress and attempt to overthrow the election in 2020. And there’s an analogy here, I think, with what’s happening with American Jewish organizations. There is ultimately no moral principle that they will stand on that will lead them to be in opposition to an Israeli government. What happens is, wherever Israel moves, you will find that these establishment Jewish organizations will move to justify it no matter what ultimately it is. So, if Israel says that it supports a two-state solution, then American Jewish organizations will champion the fact that Israel supports a two-state solution. But if an Israeli government comes in which explicitly opposes a two-state solution, as Benjamin Netanyahu’s government did, then American Jewish organizations will—instead of saying well that Israeli government is wrong—they’ll essentially retreat to the position that, well, it’s really Israel’s decision, or who can blame them because, after all, it’s the Palestinians’ fault that Israelis don’t want a two-state solution anymore.
We are now seeing that this goes all the way to Itamar Ben-Gvir. Again, an ideological disciple of a party that wants to expel Palestinians, a man who himself—Ben-Gvir—has been at the forefront of numerous violent marches demanding the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes. And I believe that were Israel to ultimately move towards larger scale expulsions—it’s important remember that there are small scale expulsions that occur all the time, including one that will expel more than a 1,000 Palestinians in Masafer Yatta, which has just been approved by the Supreme Court. But that even if Israel moves towards larger and larger scale expulsions, we now clearly can predict that these prominent American Jewish organizations—AIPAC, the American Jewish Committee, and others—will go silent or find some way of justifying it, which I would predict would ultimately be to say, well, who can blame the Israelis, ultimately, because the Palestinians have forced them into this through their armed resistance, through their unwillingness to accept the principles of Zionism and Jewish statehood, etc., etc. The same kind of logic that again and again makes the people who are victimized by the Republican party’s racism blames them for the fact that we now have a party that is trying to essentially roll back the right of Black people to vote and roll back the right of women to have an abortion, etc., etc.
This is the phenomenon we’re seeing in Israel, in the United States, and I think around the world in many ways as right-wing fascism grows and grows. The point is, if you are not willing to stand on principle against threats to democracy early on, you ultimately find yourself in a quicksand in which you were willing to accept even the most horrific violations of human rights and human dignity. And Itamar Ben-Gvir is the latest example of the fact that the American Jewish establishment is willing to do just that. I hope to see you on Friday when we’re going to talk about Itamar Ben-Gvir with Josh Leifer.
How the American Jewish Establishment Will Justify Itamar Ben-Gvir