Anti-Zionism vs. Liberal Zionism

 Of the many good things coming out of the sweeping, historic Democratic victories in the midterms last week, one of the minor but still significant ones is that they took people's minds—if only for a moment—off of the intra-party deadlock over Israel-Palestine issues that had consumed Democratic voters during the primary season (particularly in Michigan). 

I say this redirection of attention is a positive thing, not because I think Israel and Palestine are not morally important issues—they are. I say this because I see no realistic way in the world as it currently is to build a morally defensible coalition on either side of the issue that I could stand to be a part of. Therefore, I have no idea who to root for, whenever the Democratic Party is devouring itself over this issue. 

On the one hand, I have little sympathy for the single-issue anti-Israel voters on the Left. I agree that anti-Zionism is not necessarily the same thing as anti-Semitism. But any sufficiently obsessive anti-Zionism, with a broad-based political appeal, seems invariably to end up attracting anti-Semites to its banner, as a practical matter; and that's obviously already happened on both the Left and the Right. 

To retain an anti-Zionist movement that is wholly free of the taint of anti-Semitism will therefore require enormous self-discipline on the part of its leaders—as well as the constant moral courage to publicly condemn other parts of the movement that shade off into anti-Semitism. And that is precisely what we have not seen lately from the people closest to this movement in U.S. politics. 

Moreover, there seem to be some people on the radical left who are genuinely free of any racial or religious anti-Semitic prejudice—but are nonetheless so far down the rabbit hole of a revolutionary Third Worldism that they still support Hamas as a representative of the supposed "anti-colonial resistance." 

These people may not be anti-Semites in the traditional sense. But since they still endorse murdering Jews merely because they are Jews, I'm not sure it's ultimately a very meaningful distinction. 

Having said all this, on the one hand, I also do not find that there is any stripe of the pro-Israel position I can get behind either. 

I agree with liberal Zionists—such as the author of a recent New York Times guest essay—when they point out that Zionism wasn't always synonymous with the belligerent anti-Arab racism of people like Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, and Netanyahu. I also agree with this author that the obsessive anti-Zionism of the current left is probably strangling whatever hope for liberalism there still is in the Zionist project. 

But even with all that said, it strikes me that there is a basic injustice at the root of the Zionist position that even its most liberal variant cannot really get around. 

Dwight Macdonald summarized it well in his The Responsibility of Peoples: "Since 1948, some 800,000 Arab refugees, who fled from Palestine during the fighting, have been living wretchedly in camps around the country's borders maintained by U.N. charity. The Israeli government [...] refuses to let them back in and has given their homes, farms, and villages to new Jewish settlers." 

I mean, can anyone say that Macdonald is wrong here, as a factual matter? And if he's not wrong—how is anyone to defend this? 

A Zionist could say with some reason that all states are founded in injustice and dispossession, and that Israel's process of state formation was no uglier than many others (we in the United States—quite obviously—are in no position to cast the first stone). They could say that many neighboring Arab states also expelled their Jewish populations to Israel around the same time, which is just as bad.

I agree with them on both points. But it hardly adds up to a very convincing moral brief. 

I do think most people on the left are wrong to interpret the founding of Israel through the lens solely of European imperialism. I think it's better to compare the partition of the state in 1948 to the partition of India and Pakistan around the same time. After decolonization, India and Pakistan broke apart into separate Hindu and Muslim states, and there was horrendous communal violence on both sides. 

So too, there was ethnic cleansing and displacement both on the "Arab" and "Jewish" sides of the new borders in the Middle East in 1948—rather than there being one victim and one oppressor. 

It seems to me that the best argument that can be made today for the continued existence of two separate states in India and Pakistan is simply that it's unrealistic to expect the populations of these two countries to live together in peace and electoral democracy in the near future, given their history. 

So too, this is the best and only argument for the two-state solution in Israel-Palestine. 

But it seems to me that any liberal-minded person would agree that it would be better, all things considered, if India and Pakistan could live together as one unified, secular, multi-religious, and democratic state. That was certainly Gandhi's hope, before his death. 

So too, it would obviously be better if Israel and Palestine could share borders and live together as one multi-racial, multi-religious state with equal rights for all. 

Again, someone may argue that this is a practical impossibility in the near future. I will probably agree with them. 

But that's very different from insisting that Israel has a "right to exist as a Jewish state," which even the most liberal Zionists still regard as an important political litmus test. 

I think we can see the madness of this situation if we imagine if politicians on the campaign trail were all expected to repeat the formula that "Pakistan has a right to exist as a Muslim state," and if any departure from this formula were denounced as Islamophobia. 

Or, conversely, if any politician who refused to agree to the Hindutva shibboleth "India has a right to exist as a Hindu state" were accused of anti-Hindu bigotry. 

Again, it may well be possible that Pakistan's continued separate existence as a Muslim-majority state and India's as a Hindu-majority state is the best realistic solution to the countries' historic conflict and rivalry. But that's very different from saying that anyone who so much as suggests that they should peacefully re-unify someday, if they can figure out how to get along, is doing so out of anti-Muslim or anti-Hindu prejudice. 

For the same reasons, we should be clear that the secular, binational "one-state" solution is as incompatible with Palestinian Arab or Muslim nationalism as it is with Jewish nationalism. Great! For me, that's another point in its favor. 

Zionists will often say that every other state in the world is allowed to be a nation-state, so why should the Jewish state be singled out for criticism? But this is reasoning from false premises. Most nations have had to confront the fact that the Wilsonian model of the nation-state doesn't really work. Indeed, they all tend to suffer from the exact same problem Israel is facing—namely, however you draw the lines of a national boundary, there will still be linguistic and ethnic minority populations within its borders. 

These minorities may have political rights (as they do in Israel, at least within its 1948 borders—though not in the occupied territories), but still, so long as their government adheres to the "nation-state" model, they are likely to be seen in practice as second-class citizens. 

Many other states, it's true, have this problem in just as bad a form as Israel does, or worse. But that doesn't make them a model to imitate. 

Again, as with India and Pakistan, I'm open to conviction that having two separate states—one Jewish-majority and one Arab-majority—is the best realistic prospect for peace. The goal should be that everyone in the geographic region of Israel-Palestine eventually has a vote and equal rights in a democratic state of some sort. If two states are more workable than one as a way to reach this goal, then by all means, let that be the solution. 

But I don't see how anyone can move from that to saying that merely to hope for a one-state solution is somehow offensive. 

I don't in any way wish to antagonize or demean liberal Zionists. Many of them have made sacrifices for their beliefs in ways I can't begin to imagine. And we absolutely need them as part of this debate—and as part of the Democratic coalition—if Zionism is not to be represented on the world stage solely by Israel's expulsionist and expansionist extreme right. 

But I still have to tell them, in a spirit of all frankness and friendship: "I don't get it."

I don't get their position. 

I get how, in a world that often presents us with nothing but bad options, two separate states may be the least bad. I get how it's a lesser of two evils, compared to the civil war and mayhem that could result if you simply threw everyone together under one parliament in a single go. 

But I don't see how people could view the idea of a Jewish state as a positive aspiration. It sounds to me like about as good of an idea as a Muslim state like Pakistan, or a Hindu state like the BJP's version of India. 

Such things exist, obviously. There are also Buddhist nationalists and Christian nationalists and every other kind of nationalist. But none of these things seems like a good thing, to me!

A liberal Zionist friend has said to me that if people stopped talking about the scary-sounding word "Zionism," which has practically degenerated into a slur at this point, and replaced it with the words "Jewish nationalism," then no one would have a problem with it. 

I tend to disagree. I tend to think that anything called a "nationalism" already sounds like a bad idea. I can think of many kinds of nationalism in this world. But I cannot think of a single one that I would want to promote as a positive ideal. 

Some forms of nationalism—to be sure—Irish or Polish, say—can seem pretty innocuous and admirable so long as they are the underdog. But now that Irish people are marching in the streets against refugees and asylum seekers, holding signs that say "Ireland is full," one sees that any nationalism can end up taking the same bullying, chauvinistic form. 

Any attempt to equate a government and polity with a specific ethnic, racial, linguistic, or religious group is bound to end badly—no matter how sympathetic it was in its origins. 

I think Bertrand Russell's comments on this subject (in one of his essays collected in the volume In Praise of Idleness) are pretty much final: 

"Patriotism has been in many times and places a passionate belief to which the best minds could give full assent.[... I]t is all very well for oppressed nations, but [...] as soon as an oppressed nation achieves its Freedom, the nationalism which was formerly heroic becomes oppressive."

He goes on to give the receipts: "The Poles, who had the sympathy of idealists ever since Maria Teresa [...] have used their freedom to organize oppression in Ukrainia. The Irish [...] have used their freedom to pass laws preventing the publication of many good books. The spectacle of the Poles murdering Ukrainians and the Irish murdering literature makes nationalism seem a somewhat inadequate ideal for a small nation."

To this sad list, alas, I fear we can add today "the spectacle of Israelis murdering Palestinians" in Gaza and the West Bank, as yet another example of a once-heroic form of nationalism, on behalf of an oppressed and persecuted nationality, living to become its opposite—namely, a force for oppression and persecution in its own right. 

"Nationalism" seems to me an "inadequate ideal" for any nation, just as it did to Russell. It's inadequate for Pakistan, for India, and for Israel too. 

Of course, all things are relative. Both Pakistan and the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan are "Muslim states," but one is obviously a much better place to live in than the other. So too, I would a thousand—a hundred thousand—times prefer an Israel governed by liberal Zionists to one governed by people like Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. I don't for an instant pretend there is no moral distinction between them.

But is it so terrible merely to say, that in a better world, the world we may one day hope to inhabit, there would be no such nationalisms at all?