The most striking aspect of debates like l’affaire Judt is the way they underscore the collapse of traditional distinctions between Israel and the Diaspora. Already prevalent on the Jewish Right, this confusion of boundaries has spread in the wake of 9/11 to the Left as well. The significance of automatic Israeli citizenship, and the ways in which Jews experience this “birthright” (to invoke the name of the increasingly derided Zionist educational program), have been changed to such an extent that news in Israel at times ceases to be classified as “foreign affairs.” Because non-Israeli Jews are encouraged to feel involved in Israel’s life, some tend to assume they can participate in its politics the way they do in their own home countries, whether that be Germany, the United Kingdom, Australia, or the United States. Instead of this attachment compelling them to immigrate to Israel, many members of the Diaspora are content to participate in the nation’s politics from abroad.
For members of the foreign Jewish Left, this sense of citizenship neatly parallels the strong identification with the Israeli state among conservatives in the Diaspora. In place of veneration for Jerusalem, the holy places, and the Jewish character of the Israeli state, we find on the Left a similar attachment to Israeli media and culture, and the high level of public debate that takes place in Israeli society over issues involving religion, gender, citizenship, and economics. And while both of these Israels are more figurative than literal, the material consequences of this psychic involvement are profound.
Take, for example, what many on the Right have chosen to champion as the paradigmatic instance of progressive positions on Israel: “Left anti-Semitism.” Though its promotion by conservatives is motivated in part by a desire to discredit peace advocacy, the phenomenon itself is entirely real. Attributed to progressives sympathetic to Islamist and nationalist Arab criticisms of Israel and Zionism, this genre of anti-Semitism is the least understood form of prejudice against Jewry. When viewed as opportunist in its support of Islamic and right-wing Arab views of Jews and Zionism, as a means of disguising racism as anticolonialism, left-wing anti-Semites can almost be considered false progressives who don the multicultural mantle of the Left in order to be openly prejudiced.
Jews are incited against not because they practice an inferior culture or religion, but because a key object of their faith is a state that discriminates against non-Jews—specifically, Muslims. Since the concept of the state is so integral to their religious identity, Jews are seen as being inherently biased against non-Jews. The foundational importance of the Zionist state, as an exclusively Jewish state, is often viewed by such progressives as an iconographic instance of the core politics of Jewish identity.
In short, Judaism is a synonym for racism because behind it hides Israel. Progressives aren’t supposed to like Judaism for two principle reasons: first, because Israel stands for the indivisibility of religion and state; and second, due to Israel’s official practice of discrimination against Palestinians on the basis of their ethnicity. Though Judaism is found by many progressives to be deeply problematic, both historically and theologically, the notion of returning to a promised land is less troubling than how this is understood to function as a cover for the theft of Arab lands.
In addition to collapsing the distinction between Judaism and the Israeli state, this perspective can oftentimes appear so totalizing that it denies the possibility that there might be other ways to be politically Jewish—even if Jews acknowledge the imbrication of nationalism and religion in their spirituality. Indeed, it is an unsophisticated and at times vulgar critique of Judaism that harkens back to the most primitive Marxist critiques of religion. Unfortunately, this is not the version of progressive anti-Semitism taken to task by Jewish conservatives like Alvin Rosenthal. Yet it is one of the more impoverished, but real, consequences of the global Left’s anger at Israel.
ADOPTING PALESTINE
When it was primarily the Right that identified with Israel politically, debates like l’affaire Judt were both less frequent and less intense. Although progressives began to grow increasingly skeptical of Israel in the wake of the Six-Day War, they did so under the banner of a self-conscious internationalism, so their criticism seemed abstract. The cause of the Palestinians was packed together with so many other causes in the portmanteau of the Left that it became diffuse, one instance of a worldwide problem.
As those other causes—including the peace movement, the antinuclear movement, and the women’s movement—began to lose focus, attention on Israel in-creased, particularly following its invasion of Lebanon in June 1982. But it wasn’t until the tumultuous period that followed the end of the Cold War that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians became one of the chief preoccupations of the American Left.
Even as the first intifada (1987–1991) began to decrease in intensity, its impact in the United States started to be felt more strongly. No longer having to worry so deeply about the prospect of mutually assured destruction, news-minded Americans found themselves with more time to reflect on smaller-scale conflicts around the world. The eruption of civil wars in the former Yugoslavia reminded people in the developed world how easily the veneer of civilization can wear off in the face of historically grounded ethnic antagonisms. At the same time, the tide was turning in South Africa, as the international effort in the ’80s to overturn apartheid at last seemed to be having the desired effect. Finally, the first Gulf War, waged by a multinational coalition led by the United States, brought a wide range of unfinished business in the Middle East back into the headlines.
While perhaps not a perfect storm for Israel’s political establishment, these developments overlapped in the media in a way that let potential critics connect the dots about the deeper implications of Israeli government policies, which even the good news of the 1993 Oslo Accords did little to alter. All of a sudden, in every televised image of a Palestinian teenager wielding a slingshot against an Israeli tank, many progressives took the opportunity not only to conclude that Israel was now Goliath to the Palestinian David, but also to elevate that realization into a principal political concern. Instead of continuing to be seen as a special case of widespread global problems, Israel now found itself in the bull’s-eye of an American Left that had historically neglected the Middle East.
Israel’s occupation of Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza provided an ideal point of entry for an ideological stance on the region in a way that the crude economism of the petropolitics associated with the Gulf War—NoBlood for Oil—had not. By acting the part of a confident imperial force at a time when the former Soviet empire was disintegrating and the United States was unsure of its role as the sole remaining superpower, Israel helped the Left to maintain its intellectual focus. The overlapping of religion and racism in the actions of a state unapologetically committed to the project of colonization permitted the redeployment of traditional forms of political critique, imparting a desperately needed sense of continuity amid a world transformed by unexpected ruptures. In other words, focusing on Israel became the means of demonstrating that the principle ideological concerns of the Left prior to 1989 were as valid as ever.
INTRODUCING THE MIDDLE EAST
We can more fully understand recent debates about Israel within the Diaspora when we keep the immediate post–Cold War era in mind. Although technically still recent history, the 1990s are difficult for someone living in the post–9/11 era to comprehend as anything other than the “before” to our “after.” The global political landscape changed so radically in the first years of the new millennium that it seems as though the previous decade got locked in a time capsule to be exhumed in a future where people will find it easier to identify broader trends. Yet we need to examine that period closely if we’re serious about grasping how Israel has changed.
For one thing, the allegations that Alvin Rosenfeld and others have made about “Jewish anti-Semitism” depend upon the existence of organizations on the Left that either date from the 1990s or were formed by individuals active in campaigns against the Israeli government at that time. Although rising resistance to the Bush administration agenda, particularly the war in Iraq, sharpened progressive critiques of its Israeli allies, the foundation for them was laid before 9/11. It’s true that organizations like J Street, Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, Americans for Peace Now, Israel Policy Forum, and Jewish Voice for Peace take into account how radically the American presence in the Middle East has expanded since