[lbo-talk] Rabbi Michael Lerner using the Antisemitism card against the US Green party

Angelus Novus fuerdenkommunismus at yahoo.com
Sat Feb 11 17:05:09 PST 2006


--- Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote:
> Beyond that, the Marxist left generally thinks of
> the struggle
> against the Israeli occupation as one of the most
> important struggles
> against US imperialism

There is nothing wrong with this in terms of priorities for U.S. Leftists.

However, it does not go very far in terms of explaining the often questionable motivations of activists in other countries outside of the U.S.

In Germany, for example, the sympathy for the Palestinian cause on the part of the '68 generation left was heavily tainted with anti-semitic projection (comparisons of Israel with the Nazis) and openly anti-semitic actions (such as a bomb planted by the "Tupamaros West Berlin" at the building of the Jewish Community Center in West Berlin).

When the Autonomist Antifa movement emerged in the early 90s in the wake of the German reunification, a low of that historical baggage got reevaluated, which has led to a swing of the pendulum in the oppposite direction, with support for Israel hegemonic in the radical left milieu.

My impression, however, is that other parts of the European radical left, especially in Italy, have sometimes obsessive focus on Israeli crimes that strikes me as having anti-semitic elements, even if it is not the "classical" anti-semitism that Andie refers to.

Above all else, I think if one takes seriously Liebknecht's admonition that the main enemy is in one's own land, then an excessive focus on the crimes of the United States and Israel by non-U.S. activists is, if not necessarily evidence of anti-semitism, then perhaps a sign of a certain naive social-chauvinism and limited understanding of capitalism as a social relationship, with "capitalism" as a system being understood as equivalent to the United States and Israel.

I think, for example, the condemnation of Zionism as "racism" at the racism conference in Durban is textbook anti-semitism. If Zionism is understood as the notion of establishing a Jewish homeland, then it is not qualitatively different from any other sort of nationalism, and unless the nation-state concept as a whole is condemned as racism (and I would support such a notion), than singling out Israel is definitely anti-semitic, even if one is not conscious of the anti-semitic motivation.

__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list