This Friday, October 8, at Noon ET, my guest for our weekly Zoom call will be Professor Omri Boehm, author of the new book, Haifa Republic: A Democratic Future for Israel. In it, Boehm argues for reviving a lost Zionist tradition, which he argues is compatible with full equality for Palestinians in one state. It’s an eloquent and provocative argument, which contains a powerful critique of the way Israeli political culture exploits the Holocaust to justify the oppression of Palestinians. As always, we’ll take your questions. Join us and you’ll also gain access to our previous conversations with Noam Chomsky, Omar Barghouti, Francis Fukuyama, Ben Rhodes, and many others.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the speech that Ted Deutch, the Jewish Democrat from Florida, gave during the recent fight on the floor of the House of Representatives over giving Israel an additional $1 billion for its missile defense system, Iron Dome.
Representative Rashida Tlaib had just noted that “Human Rights Watch and Israel’s own human rights watch organization, B’Tselem” had alleged that “the Israeli government is an apartheid regime.” Deutch was deeply offended. When his turn came to speak, he announced, “I cannot allow one of my colleagues to stand on the floor on the House of Representatives and label the Jewish democratic state of Israel an apartheid state.” He added that “we can have an opportunity to debate lots of issues on the House floor but to falsely characterize the state of Israel is consistent with, let’s be clear, it’s consistent with those who advocate for the one Jewish state in the world and when there is no place on the map for one Jewish state, that’s antisemitism.”
I’ve watched Deutch’s remarks several times and one thing is clear: He is super woke.
At first blush, that might sound strange. If “woke” is merely a pejorative synonym for “left-wing,” then Deutch’s defense of Israel wasn’t woke at all. But if you take the opponents of wokeness seriously, wokeness doesn’t just mean leftism. It refers to a style of political argument that employs accusations of bigotry to silence legitimate debates. Oppose defunding the police? Wokesters will call you a racist. Oppose late trimester abortions? They’ll call you a sexist. Oppose gender reassignment surgery for teenagers? They’ll declare you a transphobe. Once you’ve been labeled a bigot, it doesn’t matter what evidence you have on hand. The conversation is over. You must sit down and shut up.
Do leftists engage in these forms of intimidation? Yes. But because “wokeness” is so identified with leftists and with identity groups associated with the left (Blacks, women, LGBTQ people), the critics of wokeness rarely notice when Jews do the same thing to defend Israel.
Look at the Tlaib-Deutch exchange in detail. In her remarks, Tlaib didn’t merely assert that Israel was an apartheid state. She cited two significant pieces of evidence: A January report by B’Tselem, the most prominent human rights organization in Israel, entitled, “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid” and an April study by Human Rights Watch, the most prominent human rights group in the world, entitled, “A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution.” Both reports go into extensive detail to make their case. Human Rights Watch, for instance, notes that 93 percent of the land in Israel is controlled by the Israeli government, which parcels it out for development via the Israel Land Authority, which allocates almost half of its seats to the Jewish National Fund, whose explicit mandate is to develop land for Jewish—not Palestinian—use. Which helps explain why Israel has authorized the creation of roughly 900 Jewish municipalities since independence but barely any Palestinian ones, and why, although Palestinians constitute roughly twenty percent of Israel’s citizens, Palestinian-majority municipalities cover merely three percent of Israel’s land. For its part, B’Tselem observes that “Any Jew in the world and his or her children, grandchildren and spouses are entitled to immigrate to Israel at any time and receive Israeli citizenship” while “Palestinians living in other countries cannot immigrate to the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, even if they, their parents or their grandparents were born and lived there.”
These expressions of Jewish supremacy, it’s worth noting, apply not merely to the occupied West Bank, but to all the territory under Israel’s control, on both sides of the Green Line. They didn’t begin in 1967. They began in 1948.
B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch are not infallible. Members of Congress have every right to interrogate their findings. But that’s exactly what Deutch did not do. To the contrary, in almost comically woke fashion, he used an allegation of bigotry to declare the entire discussion out of bounds. “I cannot allow,” he exclaimed, “one of my colleagues to stand on the floor on the House of Representatives and label the Jewish democratic state of Israel an apartheid state.” Allow? Is it Deutch’s job to decide which topics his colleagues are permitted to discuss? “We can have an opportunity to debate lots of issues on the House floor,” he added, just not this one. Why not? Because accusing Israel of practicing apartheid is “consistent with those who advocate for the one Jewish state in the world and when there is no place on the map for one Jewish state, that’s antisemitism.”
Deutch’s speech included not a word of substantive rebuttal to the evidence Tlaib cited. His whole point was that substantive rebuttal is unnecessary because calling Israel an apartheid state (even when Israel’s own leading human rights organization does it) constitutes antisemitism. And you don’t debate antisemites. You tell them to shut up.
Had Representative Maxine Waters taken the House floor and told a colleague that she would not “allow” them to argue for funding the police because “that’s racism,” the enemies of wokeness would have howled with outrage. But they did not reprimand Deutch. Why not? Because anti-wokeness discourse includes a carve out for Israel. When people of color use allegations of bigotry to declare certain conversations beyond the pale, they’re embodying cancel culture. When Ted Deutch does it, he’s fighting antisemitism.
Which is why the entire “wokeness” debate is so dishonest. American politicians and establishment Jewish leaders aren’t derided as woke when they claim that people who support equality between Jews and Palestinians in one shared country are antisemitic. Mike Pence wasn’t derided as woke when he claimed that it is “acceptable and even fashionable to ridicule and discriminate against” conservative Christians. It may be useful to create a term for evidence-free allegations of bigotry aimed at intimidating political foes. But it’s definitely not useful to create a term that assumes that the only people who deploy this tactic are leftists, people of color, feminists, and LGBTQ people.
When people start calling Ted Deutch “woke,” let me know. Until then, I’ll avoid using the term at all.
Other stuff:
Speaking of “wokeness,” an Israeli consul-general and a Democratic member of Congress tried to pressure the University of North Carolina to cancel a class on Israel-Palestine because they called the instructors’ pro-Palestinian views antisemitic.
Last week, for the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s podcast, Occupied Thoughts, I interviewed the Mizrahi-Israeli Palestinian rights activist Orly Noy about being suspended from Facebook for comments she made supporting the Palestinian prisoners who escaped from an Israeli jail.
In Jewish Currents (subscribe), Nathan Goldman argues that Joshua Cohen’s, The Netanyahus, “tries and fails to reanimate the canonical American Jewish novel.”
On October 14 I’ll be speaking at Tufts University.
See you Friday,
Peter
I'm not keen on this characterization of wokeness, which seems to me a step or two away from calling people SJWs (as though fighting for social justice is somehow a bad thing).
I don't think the tactic are dishonest. I think they're just unwilling to entertain the sort of argumentative tactics that have favored the privileged since the first commons room opened. They cut straight to the chase and leave bigots to do their own homework on why, exactly, they're being called bigots.
Some years ago I stopped doing men's homework for them online. I'd make a point, and some jerk would come out of the woodwork and insist that I become his free librarian and tutor and sparring partner, not because he was actually interested, but because he wanted a way to defeat or derail whatever I was saying. And he would do this despite the fact that entire libraries were already available for his edification. His position would be, every time, that it was *my job* to wrestle his mind to the floor.
I refuse that notion. I already do a tremendous amount of work for free, mostly for men. Much of it sneered at, or simply not regarded as work, by men. Am I capable of having an intellectual playground fight? Or just teaching? Sure. But having spent most of my adult life being robbed of my labor and disrespected in ways I'd find not just annoying but deeply angering if I happened to need a lot more money or respect, I feel absolutely no compunction about showing up to yet again serve some bunch of men in this way.
In fact it happens so often that I'd say that if you're presenting some argument closely associated with bigotry, and you want me to believe you're not a bigot (because it's all about you and your reputation, in the end), then it's up to you to get my attention and show me that you're not in fact a bigot. Personally? I don't care. But if it matters enough to you to prove this to me, a stranger, have at it; I'll probably listen, and unlike your friends, I'll listen with an open mind. Just don't be surprised if it turns out that the explanation/justification/defense you think is totally reasonable is larded with a whole lot of deeply-held bigotries and presumptions which you haven't bothered examining.
My recent awakening about one such thing comes from subsistence gardening. Never done it before, though I've had small gardens. From here on in I'll likely be relying on food I grow myself. You spend a lot of time with land, that way; food becomes very expensive, that way. I enjoy it, and the food is excellent, but it's an immensely timeconsuming way of feeding yourself. If you're not simply maurading and trying to pull as much out of the land as possible in an industrial way, you pay a lot of attention to the land and beign to work with it, develop a relationship with it. If I were forced out of my house and into an apartment, the loss of that land would now be a significant loss. Economically, vitally -- one must eat -- but in deeper ways as well. Part of me would be gone. That relationship would be gone. And my labor with the soil and coming to know the ecology would have been for nothing: my years would be thrown out in the garbage, valued at nothing. And I can see how people might come to feel that to be picked up and moved, even to a nice place, was a deep injustice, rather than a thing that happens to people. That's after a couple of years, not generations, and without wars in defense of this patch of ground.
I'm a third-generation American Jew; there were, unsurprisingly, almost no farmers in my family before America, and I don't know any relatives who've had so much as a veg garden. My grandma had a little prune plum tree. But Jews have gotten shuffled around all the time and lived in cities, so I didn't hear anything but fascism underneath blood-and-soil rhetoric: what's one place or another, so long as you have a place, an apartment, a neighborhood. So you learn a new language, big deal.
Now I hear a thing underneath that isn't just fascism. Which is still there, of course. So if I talk with a local Trump-voting farmer and he goes on about his land I say, all right, and I understand this and that, and I see it's all real and meaningful but: you are still a frothing xenophobe and, end of day, racist. Marbled all through your talk about farms it isn't *people* you're worried about coming and taking your land: you're worried about people from particular places, who look particular ways, which you associate with particular bad things, because you learned some cartoons about why you're better than them. When in fact, just as a hundred years ago, you're most likely to be dispossessed by someone who looks very like you, and goes to a similar church, but wears highly-polished loafers.