You Might Be an Israel Firster If...

The silly argument about left-wing Jews calling right-wing Jews "Israel Firsters" has been going on for quite a while now - Jeffrey Goldberg has been raging about it here and Spencer Ackerman wrote about it in Tablet (my least favorite Jewish publication). I have no interest in weighing in on this except to say that it demonstrates the myriad of problems associated with American Zionism. Here's why.

In the simplest sense of the word, Zionism is a form of nationalism. This presents a challenge for American Jews who insist that their support for Jewish self-determination does not conflict in anyway with their loyalty to the United States. After all, how can you be a nationalist for a country in which you have never lived? Many American Jews, including me, do not speak conversational Hebrew. How can we be Israeli nationalists (Zionists) if we do not even speak the language of the nation we claim to support? It is only natural that proclamations of love for a nation that is not our own lands American Jews in trouble.  For non-Jews, in particular, the idea that Jews can be nationalistic supporters of a country they do not live in does in fact suggest dual loyalty. American Jews do not have any sort of dual loyalty, and it is the implication that they do about which Goldberg and others are understandably upset.  Yet, indignant liberal Jews should understand that the use of the phrase is not motivated by some perverse desire to depict in real life the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. When used by liberal Jewish critics, the phrase is simply designed to challenge American Jews' unthinking support for Israel and the dominance the issue of Israel has in the minds of many Jewish voters. And they certainly have a point. If you are willing to focus on issues regarding Israel, rather than poverty or education in the country in which you live, are you not, in fact, putting Israel first?

Obviously the anti-semitic and conspiratorial connotations of "Israel Firster" should be denounced and people should refrain from using it; it is blunt in lacking in nuance to say the least. Nonetheless, the hullaballoo raised about "Israel Firster" should serve as a warning to the American Jewish community that it will always be difficult to identify as Zionists without being willing to live in "the promised land."

There is No Such Thing as Diaspora!

I.
I returned from Israel in early August, and after getting off the plane my dad took me to a kosher diner; he knew I was still in culture shock. But, not even a warm bagel with cream cheese could prepare for next night's dinner - a trip to the local pizzeria.

As I opened the door to the restaurant, a former hockey teammate strode past.  I hadn't spoken to him for years, and he didn't notice me. I walked up to the counter, my hands shoved nervously into the pockets of my jeans. This was my first time ordering food in English in weeks, and I half expected the cashier to open his mouth and start speaking in that deep, throaty Hebrew to which I had grown accustomed.

"Excuse me, sir," chimed a high-pitched voice. "How can I help you?"

Looking up I saw, not the dark, heavy eye-browed man at the falafel stand in the Agnon strip mall, but a fair-haired girl who graduated from the same middle school as I.

"Emmmm......" I stuttered, unable to shake that acquired Levantine affectation from my speech. "I'm here to pick up an order for Leifer."

My former classmate did not recognize me.

"Hold on a second," she mumbled. 

I felt around in my pockets for the proper combination of bills and change with which to pay for my meal.

"That comes to ten dollars and twenty cents. Will that be all?"

Nodding, I stretched out my hand to pay, but pulled it back suddenly to remove a shekel from the pile of change. Short a dollar or two, I reached hurriedly into my back pocket to supplement my available legal tender. The multicolored bills in my wallet glared at me as I passed them over in search of the green ones.

"Here you are," I said shyly, looking down at my feet again.

She handed me the pizza box from behind the counter and I left without a recept, anxious to get back home.

In less than forty-eight hours, my home had gone from Shai Agnon Street to Lydia Lane.  Home was now just where I happened to be. Where I wanted to be did not really matter.  I've grown up in the same town my whole life, but it still does not really feel like my hometown. I have little in common with people in the neighborhood, and even our limited shared experience seems to have not endured a few years' time. I don't know very much about the people here, and they know next to nothing about me. They don't know that I read from left to right when I pray - something I do only rarely now. They don't know that I used to avoid the pepperoni even before I was a vegetarian.  They don't know that my day of rest is not Sunday, and that for me December 25th is just a day with shorter lines at the airport. All they know is that I have never been part of their community.  They haven't seen me at their churches, or at their youth-group run town carnivals.  They just know I miss school some days, for reasons undisclosed.


II. 
Halfway through my summer in Israel, now accompanied by my Israeli counterparts, I had a conversation about imagined communities. The discussion was part of a debriefing session after a lecture by A.B. Yehoshua at Haifa University. His speech had reminded me of what I read in a book I picked up in the Tel Aviv neighborhood of Neve Tzedek a few days earlier. In The Invention of the Jewish People (the book is worthless as a history of Jews or Judaism, but it is a pretty good introduction to the works of important scholars like Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner, and Eric Hobsbawn), the author, Shlomo Sand references the work of Marxist historian Benedict Anderson on nationalism: "the nation...is an imagined political community - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign."  Sand goes on to write, "indeed, every community that is bigger than a tribe or a village is imagined, because members do not know one another; such were the great religious communities before modern times.  But the nation has new tools for people's imaginary belonging to it that were unavailable to old societies." I had gotten into an argument with several of the Israelis over the law of return in Israel and the right of return for Palestinian refugees. Sitting on the ground cross-legged, in a circle with my fellow students, I leaned forward and began to speak.

"Not a single person in my family has every lived here, in Haifa. No one. Not ever. As far as I can reasonably trace my lineage, my family was never in Israel. Of course, if you assume the expulsion is factually true, then perhaps, over a thousand years ago, someone related to me was here."

I  paused briefly to wipe my brow as the biblical sun beat down on our creased foreheads.

"But none of that matters," I continued, increasingly animated. "Because, under Israeli law, I have the right to come back here and become a citizen and live. Automatically. At the same time, an Arab, whose family lived in or around Haifa before the war, and was displaced for whatever reason in 1948, does not have the right to come back and reclaim his family's home. But, I can occupy his family's home."

What had begun as a narrow, almost policy-oriented dispute had expanded to include the most fundamental questions of identity.

"Israel," I tried to argue, "is simply a political entity populated by many Jews. it is just another country, one that American Jews are not part of and should not be entitled to."

I was informed that my worldview left me with very little to offer to the program, as it was reductionist and ultimately empty. And I informed my Israeli peers that I wanted no part in their unjust state.

III.
Driving back from the pizzeria, A.B. Yehoshua's voice, from the lecture earlier that day in Haifa, reverberated in my head. As I navigated the darkened suburban streets, his white tufts of hair and claw-like fingers flashed before my eyes.

"Israel is a Jewish totality. Israel identity is total Jewish. Everything is Jewish here, Jews control Jews in Israel, never before in history did this happen!"

I pulled into my driveway, slightly panicked that I could not shake my vision of the aging writer. This must have been some kind of twisted retribution for my seditious comments throughout my trip in Israel.  The voice of the writer pulsated louder in my ears.

"Jew is a term for nationality! The corridors are religious, in and out, but once you are in, you are part of a nationality. Remember, Israel belongs first to its citizens and second to the Jewish people. This is because of identity and citizenship; they are fundamentally different. Identity is totally separate from citizenship."

By now, I had set the pizza down on the kitchen table and had begun to eat. Though surrounded by my family at the table, I was locked in the terrible, hypnotic, Zionistic trance.

"Israeli citizenship, includes seven million people, Arabs and Jews. Israeli identity, total Jewish! You cannot be total with only the religious, devoid of the national."

I took a bite of the pizza, chewing slowly and deliberately as I tried to reason with the thinker who, against my will again laid out his definitions for the terms of Jewish identity.

"Jew - person who declares themselves Jew. Zionism - the idea that Israel belongs to Jewish people. Israeli - identity and citizenship, THE TOTALITY OF JEW!"

My fork clattered against my plate and I jumped up from my seat at the table. I excused myself and slouched to the bathroom, trying to shake the last echoes Yehoshua's voice. At the sink, I splashed some lukewarm water on my face.

According to Yehoshua's reasoning, I am a national minority - a Jew in the United States - and therefore uncontroversially partial. At first glance, this would appear to be accurate. The holidays for school breaks, the national psalms, and even the food (like pizza) are not mine. My history is not included in the national mythology or state-sanctioned culture. When I sing, "My Country, 'Tis of Thee", the words do not refer to me. The land where my fathers died is somewhere in what was the Pale of Settlement, and the land of the pilgrims' pride is Israel - in Jerusalem. Back in the diaspora, I could not stop thinking that perhaps A.B. Yehoshua was right. But that was six months ago, and a lot has changed in those six months.

IV.
I used to think that even if the connection between Jews in the Diaspora and Jews in Israel was imagined - after all, we cannot all know each other - there was still a bond that transcended both the notions of nationality and religion. In Israel, I wanted to think that I had something in common with the cashier at the coffee shop, or the owner of the falafel stand in the Agnon strip mall, even if my conversational Hebrew was broken at best. I thought of Israel as the country that sleeps on my day of rest, where school is closed on my holidays. In Israel, I thought the electrician or the plumber, bus driver or garbage man, could look at me and know what I did on Friday nights, and know how I spent my Saturdays.

But the uniting factor has always been religion and not nationality.  As the saying goes, even when the Jews have not kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath has kept the Jews.  And it is precisely because Israel is a theocracy that I, as a traditionally practicing Jew, could feel at home.  Without that unifying religion, everything fractures. Take observance or ritual out of the equation, and what is left is not a nation but rather a collection of nations - Yiddish people, Mizrachi people, Ethiopian people. Together, we can call ourselves no more of a nation than Christians or Catholics can. And as much as I wish it weren't true, the ties between the disparate strains of Judaism disappear without religion.

I am not living in the "Diaspora" and my ancestors were never in the "Diaspora", for what Zionists have derided for nearly a century as the "Diaspora" is the core of my history and my culture. The foundation of my Jewishness owes far more to the Belarussian or Lithuanian shtetls than it does to the modern state of Israel. The language of my grandparents was Yiddish - killed by the Hebrew revivalists - and the language of my dreams is English.  The natural equilibrium, the homeostasis of my culture, is "Diaspora."

Thus, the Diaspora does not exist; the Jew of many nations is the historical constant. It is the advent of a modern theocratic state in what was once British Mandatory Palestine that is unnatural and deviation from the history of the Jews. Jewishness has always existed outside of Israel, and will continue to exist, even after the modern state of Israel is gone.

What It Really Means to Be a Self-Hating Jew

In the second era of Bibi, "self-hating" is the name for a Jewish critic of Israel.  Opposed to the occupation? Self-hating.  Against Orthodox dominance? Self-hating. In favor of political or religious pluralism? Self-hating. Desirous of an equitable peace process? Certainly self-hating. Yet, these concerns do not belong to the self-hating Jew; they belong to a Jew with a deep love for his religion and his people.  He may be ambivalent, but ambivalence does not negate close ties and deep affection for the Jewish state. If anything such consternation is the sign of love for Israel even greater than that of Israel's staunchest defenders, as it is the kind of concern with which one would address an errant family member.

A self-hating Jew has none of these feelings.  He squirms at the very mention of Jewish pride, the incessant rattling off of names - filmmakers, authors, lawyers, bankers.  He scowls at the constant invocation of the words "chosen people" - the very words that kept Jews separate and ghettoized for centuries. The self-hating Jew knows that he is not part of the Israeli "we", and no longer wants to be part of the Jewish "we". And who can blame him?

A self-hating Jew tries to escape the narrow tribalism that renders nearly everyone else an outsider. The self-hating Jew knows he is part of the Jewish nation, which he desperately wants to forget.  He does not, however, wish for an end to Jewry. Instead, he wishes for the end of his link to Jewry. The self-hating Jew does not criticize Israel; he no longer cares about Israel.

The paradoxical thing about the self-hating Jew is that each angst-ridden reaction to the latest Jewish outrage is another affirmation of his Jewishness.  Every time he wishes to forget his heritage, he is reminded of his membership to the wretched tribe. His self-loathing is, perhaps, the most Jewish thing about him.

And I know, because I am, and I was, him. There are times when I no longer want to be bound to the smelly morass of three thousand years of history.  I don't want Israel to speak for me, and I no longer want to speak about Israel.  Sometimes, I even want to forget that it exists.  Yet, every time I try I end up immersed in it even more.  The very fact that I've written this is proof; the self-hating Jew can never escape his Jewishness. I am, then, in a sense, stuck.

The Politics of My Generation and What it Means for the Left

That many young Americans have largely checked out of the political process is neither news nor newsworthy; however, what is worth noting is that this pervasive apathy is not the result of widespread disillusionment. Young Americans have found another way to express themselves and assert their individuality: not ideology through politics or religion, but consumption that creates ideology.

Identification with brands or products has replaced political affiliation and engagement in the political  process.  Of course this isn't new either, and Tom Wolfe has been writing about it since the 1980's with the essay, "The 'Me' Decade and the Third Great Awakening."  Yet, in the digital age, this end of ideology (and beginning of the post-ideological era) has been magnified by social media and its accompanying trends.  From Facebook posts of food from restaurants (consumption in the most literal sense) to tweets about the latest sale at some newly opened outlet, the internet has become the main vehicle for asserting one's identity - one based on products that are consumed rather than political or even religious beliefs.   Members of the Millennials, and even younger Americans, now identify themselves less by what they believe and more by what they consume partly because of the commercialization of essentially everything around them. They are constantly bombarded with the question: are you a Mac or a PC? Blackberry or iPhone?  This, naturally, doesn't end with smartphones.  Nearly all goods, from shirts to salad dressing, are taken to be the real indications of personal convictions. And, since the marketing world has been more than happy to supplant identity based on conviction or politics with identity based on consumption, purchasing a good or service is considered to be an inherently political act, imbued with ideology and conviction. It is almost as if consumers now expect that their consumption habits supply them with ideologies to match.

Though those growing up surrounded by the social media and the omnipresent online marketing blitz see their identities based firstly on what kind of phone they use or where they shop, this doesn't mean that young Americans have become more materialistic or have started to consume more. Instead, it explains why politics has been essentially eliminated from their day-to-day discourse.  One could go as far to say that this emphasis on identity based on consumption habits explains the popularization and quick corporate co-option of "The Hipster." Analyzed ad nauseam, the end of the hipster can be considered an important even in the the beginning of the new post - ideological era; a cultural phenomenon centered nearly entirely upon consumption habits (rather than music and politics like punk) was pretty much the greatest gift ever given to the corporate world. 

To avoid going the way of the hipster, the Occupy movement - and more generally the American left - must now more than ever eschew the empty lifestylism that has crippled prior radical political movements.  Yes, being vegan is important, as is buying clothes made by workers who have a say in their wages. But there must be something stronger and more substantive that unites the disparate segments of the left than merely decisions about consumption.  Buying organic food at the farmer's market rather than at Whole Foods isn't going to change an exploitive economic model, and going to a thrift store rather than the mall isn't the way to initiate a paradigm shift in labor relations.  Instead, the left must focus on ideology and politics.  One of the best things that the Occupy movement has done is that it forced into the average American's lexicon the language of class war - inequality, exploitation - and ideas of how to fight it on behalf of the 99 percent. Though the spectacle of late capitalism has sapped the public's energy for radical change, people will still be more likely to rally behind an idea - symbolized by a flag, a slogan, or a group of tents in a park - rather than a change in diet or wardrobe. 

Internationalism or International Solidarity

In the fight for Palestinian national sovereignty, the left has forgotten its commitment to internationalism.

Recent studies, such as those conducted by Republican pollster, Frank Luntz, have demonstrated that young American Jews are defecting in droves from the Zionist movement once supported by the parents and grandparents.  Peter Beinart discussed this phenomenon at length in his now well-known and often - quoted essay, The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment, writing, “For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.”  Countless surveys and polls have reaffirmed this, indicating that fewer and fewer young American Jews view the state of Israel as an important part of their Jewish identity.  According to Luntz’s study, American Jews not only “reserve the right to question the Israeli position” and “desperately want peace,” but also “empathize with the plight of the Palestinians. Beinart noted “the only kind of Zionism they [young American Jews] found attractive was a Zionism that recognized Palestinians as deserving of dignity and capable of peace, and they were quite willing to condemn an Israeli government that did not share those beliefs.”  This trend has the potential to be an enormous opportunity for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement (BDS) , as well as the broader Palestinian solidarity movement, to make significant inroads into the American Jewish community.  However, this potential will never be realized as long as the movement for peace and justice in the Occupied Territories continues to fight against one form of nationalism with another. 

At anti-war and alter-globalization demonstrations around the world, the Palestinian solidarity movement has become a fixture.  Indeed, the struggle of the Palestinians has been taken up by the left as a struggle against tyranny and imperialism, and rightfully so.  However, in entering into solidarity with those suffering in the West Bank and Gaza, many on the left have checked their internationalism at the door.  The keffiyeh, once the trademark garment of Yasser Arafat, has become a symbol of Palestinian solidarity and is ubiquitous at demonstrations.  Once a clearly nationalistic symbol, the keffiyeh has been globalized, with many of its wearers unaware of its historical and political history.  Naturally, the Palestinian flag has also become a mainstay of left-wing protests. Yet, more often than not, it is not the Palestinians who are clad in keffiyehs brandishing the black, white, green and red flag, but leftist students and activists – many of whom have never been to Israel, let alone the Occupied Territories. In fact, it is not uncommon to see at protests around the world, black-clad anarchists marching alongside billowing Palestinian flags. The left, traditionally opposed to all forms of nationalism, has embraced Palestinian nationalism and, consequently, nationalistic rhetoric and imagery.  Even those most opposed to nationalism and the power of state have accepted the language, not of a struggle for liberty and equal rights, but of hard-line and even religious nationalism. 

It appears that many on the left have forgotten that it is possible to oppose the principles of Zionism and the actions of Israel without endorsing the diametrically opposite stance from the Palestinian side of the conflict.  Last year, at the Socialism 2010 Conference, hosted by the International Socialist Organization in Chicago, a discussion to be led by speakers such as Tariq Ali was preceded by chants of “intifada now” by activists and students brandishing large Palestinian flags.  Not a single speaker took the time to remind the activists and students that the use of explicitly nationalistic language and imagery not only contradicted the idea of internationalism but also constituted the use of an equal but opposite evil to the Zionism that they claimed to oppose. 

This inability of the left to separate itself from the Palestinian nationalist camp is indicative of the broader failures of the BDS and solidarity movements. Outside of leftist circles and academia, the BDS movement is essentially non-existent.  This is particularly pronounced in the United States, where college campuses are largely the only bastions of criticism of Israel’s human rights record and its treatment of the Palestinians.   The marginalization and even isolation of the BDS and solidarity movements, evinced by the ease with which the movements are written off in both the Jewish community and the mainstream media, is precisely because it has couched the struggle in the language of nationalism rather than in the language of universal human rights. This has ostracized vast numbers of people who would otherwise be sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians, specifically young American Jews, who tend to be liberal and politically aware. 

It is necessary to understand that the same factor that causes young American Jews to oppose Israel’s actions prevents them from engaging with the BDS and solidarity movements: nationalism. Likewise, the increasingly vocal segment of the Jewish community opposed to Israeli policy is not the result of a seismic shift that has rendered these young students anti-Zionists. Rather, these young Jews have been repulsed by the belligerent and morally compromised positions of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.  Using the same terminology, albeit from the different side of the conflict, will not lure these disaffected young Jews who are often ideologically opposed to hard line nationalism. That which repulses them about the current state of Zionism is identical to that which makes the BDS and solidarity movements currently untenable.

It is one thing to condemn violence against those in the Occupied Territories, and to oppose Zionism ideologically, but it is entirely another to adopt Palestinian nationalism as a method of political resistance.  The real antidote to the poison of nationalist violence in the Middle East is not more nationalism but a renewed commitment to internationalism.

Upcoming Posts

As this blog has become a repository of my extraneous thoughts, I figured it would fitting for me to bring together these musing with my thoughts from other sources. The next several posts will be pieces that I wrote a while back, mostly about the Israeli - Palestinian conflict. I spent this past summer in Israel, so there a number things I want to say about my experience in such a violent yet simultaneously picturesque place.

I got a little a head of myself

With regard to the post below, I evidently got a little overexcited about a cool new word being used to describe contemporary class structure. And, since my copy of Dissent arrived only yesterday and because I'm still in high school, I had no idea that Guy Standing had written a whole book about the nifty little word that captured my attention a few days ago.

The New Precariat Class

A recent review in the New Inquiry of Lauren Berlant's new book, Cruel Optimism, touched on the issue of describing current class structure and socio-economic conditions in the U.S. The terms "proletariat" and "bourgeoisie" now seem wildly outdated, so Jenna Brager's usage of the term "precarait class" is a welcome addition to the contemporary left-wing lexicon. She writes:

Although the experience is different across economic and social situations, we are, at least the 99 percent of us, the new precariat class. We are frantically digging to keep the tunnel from caving in — digging for air, not treasure. And what’s really hemming us in is an unwillingness to eat dirt, to embrace precarity “as the condition of being and belonging,” instead of clinging desperately to the paradox of predictability and security — “buy this car to go to work, go to work to pay for this car.”

The rest of the article can be found here: http://thenewinquiry.com/post/15184153094/no-resolution

As the gap between the richest and the poorest has widened, it has become increasingly difficult to accurately describe class distinctions in industrialized Western societies. Even Alinsky's tripartite distinction between the Haves, Have-Nots, and Have-a-Little Want Mores seems outdated. The Occupy Everywhere movement's cry of "We are the 99 percent" seems a bit more accurate, but it should be stressed that what unites the 99 percent is more than a place on the socioeconomic ladder. A simple quantitative assessment of class distinctions lacks nuance and ignores the reality that the choice that nearly every working person faces: the choice between starvation and wage slavery. This is what truly distinguishes the 99 percent from the 1 percent.

This terrible choice is faced even by portion of working Americans sometimes referred to as working professionals. Many of these Americans make considerably more money than the U.S. median income and have assets (mostly in home equity) that are worth more than those of the average American. Considered members of the upper middle class, these people at first glance seem to have more in common with the top 1 percent of income earners than the 70 or 80 percent of individuals below them. However, this "era of precarity" has in a sense proletarianized even those once thought to be well-off. Just like their economic subordinates, these workers are similarly alienated from the work and coerced into choosing wage slavery by the nature of only existent alternatives - starvation and bankruptcy. For these members of the upper middle class are similarly "frantically digging to keep the tunnel from caving in." They may have enough money to shop at Whole Foods rather than at Shop Rite, or maybe they live in the greener parts of suburban neighborhoods. But, the fact of the matter is that even the petit bourgeoisie is subjected to the routine - what the French call metro-boulot-dodo - that dehumanizes and demoralizes.