{"id":6801,"date":"2016-12-24T12:28:51","date_gmt":"2016-12-24T07:28:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/jwt2015\/?p=6801"},"modified":"2016-12-24T12:28:51","modified_gmt":"2016-12-24T07:28:51","slug":"liberal-zionism-in-the-age-of-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/studykit\/currentaffairs\/daily-articles\/liberal-zionism-in-the-age-of-trump\/","title":{"rendered":"Liberal Zionism in the Age of Trump"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Omri Boehm<\/span><\/p>\n

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For weeks now, Jewish communities across America have been troubled by an awkward phenomenon. Donald J. Trump, a ruthless politician trafficking in anti-Semitic tropes, has been elected to become the next president, and he has appointed as his chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, a prominent figure of the \u201calt-right,\u201d a movement that promotes white nationalism, anti-Semitism, racism and misogyny. Though Bannon himself has expressed \u201czero tolerance\u201d for such views, his past actions suggest otherwise; as the executive chairman of Breitbart News for the past four years, he provided the country\u2019s most powerful media platform for the movement and its ideologies.<\/p>\n

Still, neither the United States\u2019 most powerful Jewish organizations nor Israeli leaders have taken a clear stance against the appointment. In fact, they have embraced it.<\/p>\n

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Immediately after Trump appointed Bannon, the Zionist Organization of America prepared to welcome him at its annual gala dinner, where he was to meet Naftali Bennett, Israel\u2019s minister of education, and Danny Danon, the country\u2019s ambassador to the United Nations. (Bannon didn\u2019t show up.) Ron Dermer, Israel\u2019s ambassador in Washington, publicly announced that he was looking forward to working with the entire Trump administration, including Bannon. And Alan Dershowitz, the outspoken Harvard emeritus professor of law who regularly denounces non-Zionists as anti-Semitic, preferred in this case to turn not against Bannon, but against his critics. \u201cIt is not legitimate to call somebody an anti-Semite because you might disagree with their politics,\u201d he pointed out.<\/p>\n

The alliance that\u2019s beginning to form between Zionist leadership and politicians with anti-Semitic tendencies has the power to transform Jewish-American consciousness for years to come. In the last few decades, many of America\u2019s Jewish communities have grown accustomed to living in a political contradiction. On one hand, a large majority of these communities could rightly take pride in a powerful liberal tradition, stretching back to such models as Louis Brandeis \u2014 a defender of social justice and the first Jew to become a Supreme Court justice \u2014 or Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who marched in Selma alongside the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. On the other hand, the same communities have often identified themselves with Zionism, a political agenda rooted in the denial of liberal politics.<\/p>\n

To appreciate this inherent tension, consider Hillary Clinton\u2019s words from the second presidential debate: \u201cIt is important for us as a policy not to say, as Donald has said, we\u2019re going to ban people based on a religion. How do you do that? We are a country founded on religious freedom and liberty.\u201d Here Clinton establishes a minimum standard of liberal decency that few American Jews would be inclined to deny. But she is not the incoming president. Trump\u2019s willingness to reject this standard is now a cause for alarm among Jewish communities, along with those of other American minorities.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Yet insofar as Israel is concerned, every liberal Zionist has not just tolerated the denial of this minimum liberal standard, but avowed this denial as core to their innermost convictions. Whereas liberalism depends on the idea that states must remain neutral on matters of religion and race, Zionism consists in the idea that the State of Israel is not Israeli, but Jewish. As such, the country belongs first and foremost not<\/em> to its citizens, but to the Jewish people \u2014 a group that\u2019s defined by ethnic affiliation or religious conversion.<\/p>\n

As long as liberalism was secure back in America and the rejection of liberalism confined to the Israeli scene, this tension could be mitigated. But as it spills out into the open in the rapidly changing landscape of American politics, the double standard is becoming difficult to defend.<\/p>\n

That difficulty was apparent earlier this month at an event at Texas A&M University when Richard Spencer, one of the ideological leaders of the alt-right\u2019s white nationalist agenda \u2014 which he has called \u201ca sort of white Zionism\u201d \u2014 was publicly challenged by the university\u2019s Hillel Rabbi Matt Rosenberg, to study with him the Jewish religion\u2019s \u201cradical inclusion\u201d and love. \u201cDo you really want radical inclusion into the state of Israel?\u201d Spencer replied. \u201cMaybe all of the Middle East can go move into Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. Would you really want that?\u201d Spencer went on to argue that Israel\u2019s ethnic-based politics was the reason Jews had a strong, cohesive identity, and that Spencer himself admired them for it.<\/p>\n

The rabbi could not find words to answer, and his silence reverberates still. It made clear that an argument that does not embrace a double standard is difficult to come by.<\/p>\n

Right-wing politicians and commentators in the United States have been putting pressure on this double standard for years. In her 2015 book, \u201cAdios, America,\u201d the commentator Ann Coulter wrote:<\/p>\n

Palestinians demand a right to return to their pre-1967 homes, but Israel says, quite correctly, that changing Israel\u2019s ethnicity would change the idea of Israel. Well, changing America\u2019s ethnicity changes the idea of America, too. Show me in a straight line why we can\u2019t do what Israel does. Is Israel special? For some of us, America is special, too.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Coulter gets her dates mixed up. Palestinians in fact do not demand a \u201cright of return\u201d to their pre-1967 homes, but to their pre-1948 homes. In other words, the issue isn\u2019t the occupation, which many liberal Zionists agree is a crime, but Zionism itself. Opposition to the Palestinians\u2019 \u201cright of return\u201d is a matter of consensus among left and right Zionists because also liberal Zionists insist that Israel has the right to ensure that Jews constitute the ethnic majority in their<\/em> country. That\u2019s the reason for which Rabbi Rosenberg could not answer Spencer. But if you reject Zionism because you reject the double standard, organizations such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee or the Jewish Federations of North America would denounce you as anti-Semitic.<\/p>\n

It is important to emphasize that in some crucial respects, the comparison between the alt-right\u2019s white-Christian ethnic politics and the Jewish State is not just misleading, but sinister. The history of the Jews \u2014 a tiny minority that has faced persecutions, pogroms and the Holocaust \u2014 isn\u2019t analogous to that of white Christians. This is an important qualification, and the reason for which, when Richard Spencer speaks of the alt-right as \u201ca sort of white Zionism,\u201d he is promoting a despicable lie. It must be possible to sympathize with Israel and show understanding of Zionism\u2019s historical conditions but to refuse any sympathies to the alt-right. Unfortunately, anti-Zionist critics sometimes fail to be sensitive to this distinction.<\/p>\n

But despite sympathy and solidarity with Israel \u2014 or better, because of it \u2014 any Jew who remains committed to liberalism must insist that nothing in Jewish history can allow the Jews to violate the rights of other ethnic and religious minorities, and that nothing in our history suggests that it would be wise for us to do so.<\/p>\n

This is all the more true because by denying liberal principles, Zionism immediately becomes continuous with \u2014 rather than contradictory to \u2014 the anti-Semitic politics of the sort promoted by the alt-right. The idea that Israel is the Jews\u2019 own ethnic state implies that Jews living outside of it \u2014 say, in America or in Europe \u2014 enjoy a merely diasporic existence. That is another way of saying that they inhabit a country that is not genuinely their own. Given this logic, it is natural for Zionist and anti-Semitic politicians to find common ideas and interests. Every American who has been on a Birthright Israel tour should know that left-leaning Israelis can agree with America\u2019s alt-right that, ideally, \u201dJews should live in their own country.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since this continuity is so natural, it has a long and significant history. Last April, Heinz-Christian Strache, leader of Austria\u2019s far-right Freedom Party, was embraced in Israel by top members of Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s coalition. Strache\u2019s party now celebrates mostly anti-Islam and anti-immigration policies, but it was originally founded by former Austrian Nazis. J\u00f6rg Haider, a previous leader of the party, was infamous for showing sympathy for some of Hitler\u2019s policies. Another case in point is Geert Wilders, the xenophobic far-right Dutch politician. This month, it was revealed that Wilders\u2019s visits to Israel and his meetings with Israeli personnel have been so frequent that the Dutch intelligence community investigated his \u201cties to Israel and their possible influence on his loyalty.\u201d<\/p>\n

This phenomenon has been somewhat familiar also in the United States given the close ties between fundamentalist evangelical Christians \u2014 whose views on the Jews\u2019 part in a larger messianic scheme is flatly anti-Semitic \u2014 and the state of Israel. But with Trump, this type of collaboration is introduced to the heart of American politics.<\/p>\n

Nothing demonstrates this alliance better than the appointment of David Friedman to be the United States ambassador to Israel. Friedman, an ardent supporter of Israel\u2019s occupation project, has argued that J Street\u2019s liberal Zionist supporters, who are critical of the occupation, are \u201cworse than Kapos\u201d \u2014 the Jews who collaborated with their Nazi concentration camp guards. In fact, however, it is Friedman\u2019s own politics \u2014 and the politics of the government that he supports \u2014 that\u2019s continuous with anti-Semitic principles and collaborates with anti-Semitic politics.<\/p>\n

The \u201coriginal sin\u201d of such alliances may be traced back to 1941, in a letter to high Nazi officials, drafted in 1941 by Avraham Stern, known as Yair, a leading early Zionist fighter and member in the 1930s of the paramilitary group Irgun, and later, the founder of another such group, Lehi. In the letter, Stern proposes to collaborate with \u201cHerr Hitler\u201d on \u201csolving the Jewish question\u201d by achieving a \u201cJewish free Europe.\u201d The solution can be achieved, Stern continues, only through the \u201csettlement of these masses in the home of the Jewish people, Palestine.\u201d To that end, he suggests collaborate with the German\u2019s \u201cwar efforts,\u201d and establish a Jewish state on a \u201cnational and totalitarian basis,\u201d which will be \u201cbound by treaty with the German Reich.\u201d<\/p>\n

It has been convenient to ignore the existence of this letter, just as it has been convenient to mitigate the conceptual conditions making it possible. But such tendencies must be rejected. They reinforce the same logic by which the letter itself was written: the sanctification of Zionism to the point of tolerating anti-Semitism. That\u2019s the logic that liberal American Jews currently have to fight, but it will prove difficult to uproot. Stern is memorialized in street names in every major Israeli town, and it is not unreasonable to assume that Yair Netanyahu, the prime minister\u2019s son, whose father celebrated Stern as a mythical model of Zionist struggle, is called by Stern\u2019s nom de guerre.<\/p>\n

The comparisons between Trump and Hitler \u2014 more prevalent in pre-elections articles than today \u2014 will hopefully prove entirely exaggerated. But even so, the following years promise to present American Jewry with a decision that they have much preferred to avoid. Hold fast to their liberal tradition, as the only way to secure human, citizen and Jewish rights; or embrace the principles driving Zionism. In the age of Trump, insisting on both is likely to prove too difficult to contain.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Omri Boehm For weeks now, Jewish communities across America have been troubled by an awkward phenomenon. Donald J. Trump, a ruthless politician trafficking in anti-Semitic tropes, has been elected to become the next president, and he has appointed as his chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, a prominent figure of the \u201calt-right,\u201d a movement that …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5285],"tags":[6326,6325],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6801"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6801"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6801\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}