Our Zoom call this week will be on Friday at Noon EST, our usual time. Our guest will be Yair Rosenberg, a staff writer at The Atlantic (and a gifted singer of Jewish liturgical music). Yair writes a lot about antisemitism, and sees the phenomenon differently than I do, especially when it comes to the relationship between antisemitism and Israel-Palestine. He’s also among the most influential—maybe the most influential—younger liberal Zionist writer in the United States. There’s been a lot of discussion recently about what Israel’s new right-leaning government means for its status as a Jewish and democratic state. I don’t think states built on the legal supremacy of one ethno-religious group can be genuine liberal democracies. But I suspect Yair sees things differently and I want to ask him to elaborate his views. As folks who listen to these Zoom calls know, respectfully probing the beliefs of people who hold different perspectives is kind of the point.
As usual, paid subscribers will get the link this Wednesday and the video the following week.
Sources Cited in this Video
My Jewish Currents essay on antisemitic Zionism.
The memo by Edwin Montagu, the only Jewish member of the British cabinet during World War I, opposing the Balfour Declaration that declared Palestine a Jewish national home.
Things to Read
Jewish Currents (subscribe!) inaugurates a new column called Chevruta, in which scholars of Torah and political activists discuss the contemporary relevance of a Jewish text. The first is about what Jewish law says about debt.
Last week, I wrote a New York Times column about why Republicans so often hate their congressional leaders. I also discussed the subject on MSNBC.
In Haaretz, Dahlia Scheindlin dissects the lies underlying the Israeli government’s effort to emasculate the country’s top court.
In The New York Times, Rashid Khalidi asks whether the new US embassy in Jerusalem will be built on stolen Palestinian land.
Adam Shatz memorializes an anti-fascist and anti-colonial hero, Adolfo Kaminsky.
See you Friday at Noon EST,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Hi. Our call this Friday will be back at our normal time, which is Friday at noon ET. We’ll be with Yair Rosenberg, who is a staff writer at The Atlantic who writes about antisemitism in particular, also Israel-Palestine. I think Yair, who I know personally, is probably the most influential I would say kind of younger generation liberal Zionists—I don’t know if he uses that term about himself but that’s how I would kind of analyze his writings—in the United States. And I think one of the questions that really interests me is what kind of happens to liberal Zionism in the United States. I personally think that the assumptions undergirding it are under enormous amount of strain, and it is increasingly difficult to reconcile with the kind of actual lived reality in Israel-Palestine. But I think that Yair is one of the most thoughtful and influential people who’s thinking about that question. And even though when he and I don’t agree on some kind of fundamental things, I think he’s a really important interlocutor to talk to. And I’m curious about how he sees this evolution, and also how he sees questions in the US about antisemitism where he and I also disagree in some ways. But I think hopefully that’ll make the conversation interesting.
Speaking of antisemitism, I wrote a piece last week in Jewish Currents, and I actually just wanted to talk a little bit about the ideas in that piece in this video. I’ve noticed these two parallel phenomena over recent years. One is an enormous amount of discussion about the relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. Are they the same thing? Or does anti-Zionism become antisemitism at a certain point? And on the other hand, a lot of people who are trafficking in antisemitism—Donald Trump, obviously, but also Trump-like figures, like say Victor Orban in Hungary, others on the American right—who are clearly using antisemitic tropes, showing a fair amount of resentment and hostility to the Jews in their own country. And they are clearly not anti-Zionist. They’re Zionists. They’re big admirers of the state of Israel.
And I notice that people rarely ask the question: when does Zionism become antisemitism? It’s as if that would be impossible because the two things are mutually contradictory. And what I argue is that they’re really not usually contradictory at all. Obviously not all Zionists, maybe not most Zionists are antisemites, but there is a logic, a very old and deep logic, which connects the idea of political Zionism, by which I mean support for a Jewish state, and the idea of antisemitism. And, put simply, it is that if you like the idea that countries should be dominated by a particular racial, ethnic, or religious group, they should be owned by the dominant kind of tribe in that country, and everybody else are kind of guests or second-class citizens in that territory—some people call this ethnonationalism—then you might find the idea of a Jewish state to be very admirable since Israel is built around the idea of privileging one particular ethno-religious group: Jews. But your effort to build such an ethno-state in your country—in Hungary, in France, in Germany, in the United States, which would be a white Christian state—may be very much at odds with the diaspora Jews in your country, who don’t want to live in an ethno-state. They, in fact, want to live in a state that treats all of its people, all of its citizens, at least, equally irrespective of race, religion, and sex. And so, the very ethnic nationalism that can make you and admire of the state of Israel can put you at odds with the diaspora Jews in your country who don’t want to live in a white Christian ethno-state.
And I think that’s the dynamic that you see with figures like Orban and Trump, and many, many figures on the American and European right. And it has an old history. Because one of the striking things if you look at the Zionist movement in the before the creation of the state of Israel, is that some of its most important boosters were people who were antisemitic, or at least very much had trouble with the idea of too many Jews in their own countries. And Herzel, Leon Pinsker, influential early Zionist leaders recognized this. They recognized that Zionism would be appealing to some Christian European statesman in part because those Christian European statesmen wanted the Jews of Europe to go somewhere else because they saw the Jews of Europe as troublesome in the countries in which they lived. In Timothy Snyder’s extraordinary book Black Earth, he talks about how enthusiastic the Polish government in the 1930s was about Zionism because it wanted the Polish Jews to go somewhere else—so enthusiastic that Polish military officers trained the Zionist militia, the Irgun. There’s a lot of really interesting writing about the interaction between the Zionist movement and the British during WWI. And there were a number of reasons that the British issued the Balfour Declaration, which was a hugely important moment for the Zionist movement, where Britain says it supports the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. One of that was a genuine sympathy for the travails of the Jews. Another was a kind of Christian philosemitism that said that it would be wonderful if Christians could restore Jews to their ancestral land.
But wrapped up in all of that is also the belief that you don’t want too many Jews in the United Kingdom. Arthur Balfour was very much a nativist who supported the Aliens Act as Prime Minister that shut down Eastern European immigration to Britain. And one of the fascinating documents that I was reading through in writing this essay is this memo by Edwin Montagu, the only Jew in the British wartime cabinet. And Montagu is protesting against the Balfour Declaration. And he says, ‘don’t you understand? If we declare Palestine as the Jewish national home, what does that say about whether Britain is a national home for Jews like me?’ And the truth is that his Christian Zionist compatriots who supported the Balfour Declaration partly supported it because they didn’t want ‘hordes of Jews from Eastern Europe coming to Britain. They wanted they would much prefer them to go to Palestine.’ Same thing the Polish did.
In the United States after WWII, you see this really extraordinary resistance by the American Congress to letting in Jews in displaced persons camps even after WWII because of the claim that Jews are prone to communism. And this very much influences Harry Truman. Again, it’s not that Truman doesn’t have other motivations for supporting the state of Israel. Of course he does. Again, like Balfour, he sees himself as a Christian Zionist restoring the Jews to their rightful ancestral land. But Truman also knows that he can’t let these Jews in displaced persons camps in Europe into the United States because Congress simply will not allow it. And he wants to get them out of Germany as part of the process of establishing an independent anti-communist West German state. And he realizes that basically he wants them to go to Palestine in part because he realizes they can’t let them into the United States. And many other countries are kind of making a similar kind of calculation as well.
So, the point I wanted to make in this article was that if we see a global struggle playing out in many, many countries of the world—in Europe, in United States, in Latin America, in parts of Asia, in Israel-Palestine too—between the notion of countries that should provide equal citizenship for all of their people, irrespective race, religion, and sex, and the idea that countries should be owned by one dominant ethnic, racial, religious group, it is in that struggle you often find that Zionists and antisemites will be on the same side. And that those antisemitic Zionists will be people who see Israel as a kind of a model for the white Christian ethno-state they want to create. And precisely because they are trying to create that country that in certain kinds of ways is modeled on Israel, they will be in conflict with their Jewish populations because Jews in the United States and Europe don’t want to be in the situation of Palestinian citizens of Israel, let alone Palestinian stateless non-citizens in the Occupied Territories. They don’t want to be second-class citizens in a country whose mission statement is focused on the welfare of one dominant ethno-religious group. They want to be equal citizens even though they are religious minorities.
That’s the argument that I try to make. And I’m very curious about what people think about it. And it probably will come up a little bit perhaps in my conversation with Yair, which I hope you’ll join us. That’s for paid subscribers, as always, so please consider becoming a paid subscriber and joining us Friday at noon ET. Take care.
When Zionism and Antisemitism Go Hand in Hand