[lbo-talk] Gaza and anti semitism

farmelantj at juno.com farmelantj at juno.com
Thu Jan 15 12:42:21 PST 2009


See my Marxmail post at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism/2008-June/030714.html

There, I gave a brief history of cooperation between Zionists and anti-Semites over the past century.

Jim F.

-- "James Heartfield" <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> 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."

Yes, that's right. I think one of the Trotskyist writers on Israel (Uri Aveneri, Nathan Weinstock, Ilan Pappe?) made a similar point, that in cultivating the land and creating a state, the Jews ceased to be Jews, because rootlessness was the sine qua non of their identity (drawing on Abram Leon's arguments in The Jewish Question.

Trotsky saw Zionism as an adaptation , not an alternative, to anti Semitism, because it accepted the common proposition that gentiles would never accept Jews in their midst. As a socialist, he had to believe that a progressive solution would leave questions of origin behind, workers having no country. That was why he saw the plan for a zionist state as a 'Bloody Trap', a grandiose ghetto - which was far-sighted.

But you ought to be careful. anti Semites love Israel the same way that Israelis love Gaza - they see it as a prison to put the hated enemy into, and as we know, the ghetto can be the original model for the concentration camp.

I think the question of anti Semitism today is not so hard to understand (and not that different from hostility to Muslims). People are given to big conspiracy theories because they experience life as a chaos, over which they have little control. Their vague anger at big business and speculators has no clear target. They resent being drawn into the middle eastern quagmire, and the Israeli state looks increasingly like a dangerous ally.

Lots of people without thinking too hard about it imagine they see the Israel lobby behind America and Britain's troubles in Iraq, just as they believe stories about all the Jews taking the day off when the Twin Towers came down. Israel's war against Gaza is grotesque, and protestors have learned to shrug off the argument that criticism of is not allowed because it is supposed to be anti Semitic, even when some among them trade in anti Semitic sterotypes, like Italian shop workers union arguing that Jewish-own shops' goods are 'tainted with blood'.

Its understandable that passions are high when Israel is slaughtering people in their hundreds (now thousands) and in anger some are tempted to short-cut the argument by lashing out at the Jews. There was a time when left-wing criticisms of Israel were largely inspired by anti-imperialism, on the understanding that the Zionist state was a cats-paw of the US. But with most demonstrators today calling on the 'International Community' to restrain Israel the critics reverse the plarity: they see the hand of the Israel lobby in US policy. The devious Jew becomes the architect of oppression. But then that's what anti Semitism is, 'the socialism of fools', as August Bebel said.

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