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.
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Zizek's spot on: antisemitic support for Israel is exactly what we witnessed as a sweaty palmed love affair blossomed between sectors of the American religious right and Zionism in the 1990s.
American televangelist Pat Robertson (that brilliant idiot) and his fellow travelers embraced Israel without letting go of their antisemitism. 'Yes,' they argued between the lines, 'the Jews killed Christ and so on. But modern Israel plays a pivotal role in the fulfillment of apocalyptic prophecy, and must, for that reason, be supported.'
I remember one of Robertson's televised 'sermons' in which he made the tortured logic argument that a militarized and aggressive Israel 'corrects' traits anti-Semites associate with Jewish-ness. Of course, he didn't describe it this way. In his speech, the 'tendencies' and 'bad habits' weren't antisemitic fantasies but the unfortunate legacy of the collective, ancient Hebrew "decision" to choose Barabas over Christ -- a spiritually fatal error modern Israel was 'correcting' by ruthlessly fighting Islam, the foe of "judeo-christian civilization".
There are echoes of this bizarreness in American racial paternalism, particularly obvious in its pre 21st century forms (e.g., supremacist appeals to help blacks and other "little brown brothers" because of their allegedly insurmountable inferiority).
.d.
-- "Smell the outrage, 140 characters at a time!
Owen Thomas .............................. http://monroelab.net/blog/