Jewish Anti-Zionism

Cathy Young's recent post on Eric Alterman got me thinking about Jewishness, Zionism, and anti-Semitism, but I didn't really have enough intellectual wraparound at the time to write a post about it (in other words, I'm "duh" on some of this stuff).

Well, now I have the wraparound.

Cathy's discussing a feud she's had with the Nation's Eric Alterman, which ended up getting some big media play at the time, here and here (related: "Eric Alterman and the Politics of Anti-Semitism"). The comment at the post from "Fat Man," discussing whether Alterman was a "self-hating Jew," was rather provocative:

No, Alterman is not a self-hating Jew, the only person he has any regard or love for, is himself.

What Alterman is, is a Jew hating Jew. Unfortunately, there are more than a few of them including Noam Chomsky, Tony Judt and the late (PTL) Harold Pinter.

The Jihadists love them because they conform to and prove their theology of Jewish degradation. The leftists who have taken up the support of Jihadists as their greatest cause (in order to demonstrate that their support of the Soviets was humanitarian, no doubt), are thrilled with the Jew hating Jews because they prove that there are men even more craven than the leftists.

That's some serious talk, and, again, I had no comment, but Carl in Jerusalem (discussing "baseless hatred") linked to David Solway's piece today at FrontPage Magazine, "The Beginning of the Night," so it got me thinking:

This degree of self-abhorence must be nearly unprecedented, for rarely, if ever, has an ethnic or national collective turned against an entire nation made up of people with whom it shares an ancestral tradition and a millennial archive. History furnishes many examples of a social or intellectual group targeting a particular class of a society with which it is in one way or another associated or identified. But to defame an entire country with whose inhabitants one shares a cultural or genealogical relation, to dispute its founding principles, to cast suspicion upon its moral character, to support its enemies and to question its right to existence is surely a unique phenomenon. Even those Germans horrified by the abominations of the Nazis, or Russians sickened by the excesses of the Communists, rarely went to the extremes of repudiation evinced by the truants of the Jewish faith.

The late Harold Pinter won a Nobel Prize, not for his over-rated plays, but for his anti-Israeli (and anti-American) posturing. Equally influential are fellow Jewish anti-Zionists like Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Naomi Klein, Joel Kovel, Tony Judt, Ilan Pappe, Tom Segev, Sara Roy, Henry Siegman, Avrum Burg, Jaqueline Rose and Richard Falk, to mention only a sparse handful, whose denunciation of Israel is so extreme and untextured as to be scarcely distinguishable from antisemitism.

Such apostates do not scruple to trade in apocrypha when indulging their animus against their own people, even when they can be readily exposed. In Fabricating Israeli History, Efraim Karsh has abundantly demonstrated how left-wing Israeli “New Historians” have cooked the documents they work with. The lamentable Naomi Klein falsely accuses Israel of having cynically profited from “endless war” and calls for academic and economic boycotts. Noam Chomsky’s gross fabrications have been outed by Peter Collier. The list goes on ....

What these Jewish quislings have not understood is that Jews, as Primo Levi insisted, are not permitted to forget. Survival demands that contemporary Jews retrieve the Maccabean strain in their heritage, eschew the myopia of complacency, and take the necessary measures—starting with memory and awareness—to combat a menace that remains perennial. But countering the dissimulation and calumnies of the anti-Zionists is not easy. We know that a lie repeated a thousand times becomes a truth. But it seems that a truth repeated a thousand times becomes an irritation.

Given the virulent anti-Zionist advocacy of so many prominent Jewish self-haters, one remains skeptical of ever achieving collective assent or reasonable consensus. Masking the syndrome of self-contempt as a quest for “justice,” these Jewish turncoats seek redemption in a denial of both history and genealogy. Diagnostically speaking, it is not so much a mental illness or clinical aberration we are witnessing, but a sickness in the soul supple enough to contort itself into a spurious idealism, a simulacrum of ideological nobility.


Few of these people, I suspect, have ever been viciously targeted and physically assaulted merely for being Jewish. Very few have ever lived under the constant threat of military invasion, of suicide bombers wreaking carnage in their public spaces and of randomly incoming missiles on their towns and cities as a matter of everyday existence. They hail largely from among the privileged who have been spared the traumatic experience of confronting the bloody and unflinching enmity of their antagonists. They have jobs, salaries, leisure, prestige, comfort and security. They are bubbled in their groups and organizations. Their children do not live in Sderot where an entire generation of Israeli youngsters, growing up amidst the relentless shelling of their homes and playgrounds, suffers from acute PTSD and severe psychological regression.

This state of fortunate exemption has allowed them the luxury of sanctimonious censure of those who are on the receiving end of all they have managed to avoid. Our renegades would do well to read George Steiner’s Language and Silence. Steiner writes: “If Israel were to be destroyed, no Jew would escape unscathed. The shock of failure, the need and harrying of those seeking refuge, would reach out to implicate even the most indifferent, the most anti-Zionist.”

But of course, it is not only a question of Israel. “Somewhere the determination to kill Jews,” Steiner continues, “to harass them from the earth simply because they are, is always alive.” Those Jews who affect otherwise are living in a fool’s paradise.

I'm sorting through all of this stuff myself. In fact, in the wake of Israel's Gaza campaign, and both the global parade of violent anti-Semitism, as well as the academic and journalistic abandonment of Israel, the existential question of the Jewish state seems all too real.

I'll have more later.