[lbo-talk] Gaza and anti-Semitism

[Matthias Wasser]

On 1/15/09, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> In his NYPL debate with BHL, Zizek makes the point that anti-Semites
> can love Israel, because it collects all the Jews in a single place,
> far away, and because - and this is of course more provocative -
> creating a militarized Jewish state undoes so many of the things that
> anti-Semites despise about Jews (or their fantasy of The Jew):
> rootlessness, cosmopolitanism, intellectualism, radicalism, etc.
>

Although those features continue to haunt some of the less savory
criticisms of Israel - talk about "the Israel lobby" has a tendency to
reproduce the old slanders as well - and talk about "dual loyalties"
even more so. The Jews were always accused of disloyalty to the nation
on account of a spectral Jewish Nation, now that that's entered into
the physical world, is not the charge all the more plausible? (The
idea that America disregards "American interests" in the I/P conflict
seems pregnant with this.) Obviously Israeli Jews aren't really the
symbol for anything the Jew in Europe was for some centuries, but
certain criticisms of Israel really do mask a hatred of the latter.

There's something interesting to be said here with respect to the fact
that the Palestinians are now the paradigmatic stateless people, but I
don't know what that interesting thing is.