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The Anti-Zionism Canard
By Michael Weiss / November 15, 2007
Mitchell Cohen has a fine essay in this month's Dissent about the areas of congruence, in style, rhetoric and fallacious logic, that exist between so-called "anti-Zionists" and classical anti-Semites. Cohen concludes:
If you judge a Jewish state by standards that you apply to no one else; if your neck veins bulge when you denounce Zionists but you’ve done no more than cluck “well, yes, very bad about Darfur”; if there is nothing Hamas can do that you won’t blame ‘in the final analysis’ on Israelis; if your sneer at the Zionists doesn’t sound a whole lot different from American neoconservative sneers at leftists; then you should not be surprised if you are criticized, fiercely so, by people who are serious about a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians and who won’t let you get away with a self-exonerating formula—“I am anti-Zionist but not anti-Semitic”—to prevent scrutiny. If you are anti-Zionist and not anti-Semitic, then don’t use the categories, allusions, and smug hiss that are all too familiar to any student of prejudice.
Cohen spends a few paragraphs debunking the latterday absurdities of Tony Judt, who thinks that the equation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism is a recent phenomenon, and that the notion of a Jewish state is an "anachronism" when in fact it very much of the moment. I respect Judt as an historian who provided a masterful analysis of European Stalinism. As Cohen rightly points out, this analysis was deeply enriched an understanding of how Moscow used "Zionist" as a code-word for Jew. The names Anna Pauker, Rudolph Slansky, Traicho Kostov and László Rajk may not resonate much anymore, but these were all undeviating Stalinists in charge of Soviet satellites, purged simply because of their Hebraic roots.
To understand Soviet anti-Semitism, one has to understand Stalin's lucubrations on the so-called National Question, the only work he ever produced as a pre-revolution Bolshevik that had any lasting policy impact. As a Georgian, Stalin knew that the tribalism that defined the Caucasus was anathema not only to Communist internationalism but to bourgeois nationalism as well. The "rootless cosmopolitan" was therefore the worst kind of subversive — someone without organic ties to a people or state. It did not help, of course, that more Jews became Mensheviks than Bolsheviks, especially in Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia. ("Filthy, circumcised Yid" was how Stalin once described Julius Martov, the leader of the Menshevik Party.)
Oftentimes, after World War II, the Kremlin would accuse a Jew of being simultaneously a Zionist, a Trotskyist, a Titoist, and a CIA agent, a congeries of interests that, if legitimate, would have made postwar history even more interesting than it was.
Of course, the real anachronism is the term Zionist itself, at least as it has come to mean a supporter of Israel. Zionism was a 19th and 20th century political movement that underwent multiple permutations and revisions yet always agitated for the founding of a homeland for the Jews. Now that that homeland exists and will continue to do so indefinitely, the movement has become obsolete. The messianic reactionaries of Gush Emunim or other Greater Israel chauvinists are not, properly speaking, Zionists any more than Rush Limbaugh is a "rebel colonist" as opposed to an American jingoist. Ditto the most uncompromising elements of AIPAC.
When a conservative calls a liberal who believes in socialized healthcare a socialist he is resorting to a rhetorical flourish that indicates his own tendentiousness rather than the true politics of the liberal. Socialist, when used pejoratively, conjures all sorts of images of undesirable, radical behavior. Propagators of the archaic and meaningless term Zionist are trying to conjure the same thing, but they are acting under a veil of ignorance that pretends Zionist is a polemical identifier no different than any other. Of course, there is no ethnic or racial component attached to socialist.
In fact, there is already a term in the lexicon to describe people who advocate the physical or demographic destruction of a state: anarchists. But those who target only Israel for such destruction seem to be, at their very best, selective or discriminating anarchists. And it's their discrimination that raises eyebrows and gets them into trouble.
POST A COMMENT
"I was using one aspect of Stalinism to show that there is indeed a long history of using Zionist as a sinister synecdoche for Jew."
First, let me congratulate you on your working yet another fearless
denunciation of Stalinism into a post bearing zero relevance to that
lunatic's depredations. You may rest assured that we all understand how
little you care for Uncle Joe, and may perhaps consider looking for
another historical moment to which to endlessly analogize.
Judt's point that equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism is an invention of the Israel lobby or whatever knee-jerk Jewish chauvinists he's mentally assembled outside his own besieged fortress of moral and intellectual solitude is patently false, as he himself well demonstrated in his book Postwar, which I commend highly to you. I wasn't analogizing Stalinism with today's Blame Israel First crowd; I was using one aspect of Stalinism to show that there is indeed a long history of using Zionist as a sinister synecdoche for Jew.
No one I know would support the physical destruction of a state, and if
by demographic destruction you mean anything other than extending to
all a state's citizens precisely the same standing in the eyes of the
law (which is to say, refraining from individuating citizens on the
basis of religion, genetics or culture), I don't support that either.
But then, neither does anyone else, save the genuine wackjobs who wish
harm to Jews qua Jews or Arabs qua Arabs and the imaginary denizens of
Cohen's fevered internal landscape.
Cute, coming from someone who argues that Hamas at least gets the trains to run on time, and never you mind about that driving Jews into the sea business. All bluster, right? I thought the genuine wackjobs are running Gaza.
On the other hand, increasing numbers of people think that the Israeli
model, like the former South African one, is inherently unfair. So it
is the system, not the physical state or its people, that we'd like to
see sharing space on history's scrapheap alongside apartheid and
similar excrescences of colonialism.
The invocation of South Africa customarily refers to Israeli hegemony in the occupied territories. Assuming, then, that Israel completely withdrew to the 1948 borders, would the shambolic apartheid label have any merit? Of course not, not while Arab-Israeli representatives retain seats in the Knesset and enjoy rights that blacks never did in South Africa.
As for Judt, I'm not familiar with the comments Cohen mentioned, but
may I suggest that a scholar of Judt's accomplishment probably knows
that scoundrels have sometimes used "Zionist" and "Jew"
interchangeably? I'd push for a more generous understanding of his
comment that the equation of anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism is an
historical recency-perhaps that within both the diaspora and the
yishuv, Jews argued the merits of Zionism energetically until the
Zionists sadly prevailed and embarked on the project of equating
Zionism with Judaism-rather than the self-serving and less credible one
Cohen proposes.
Well, you might familiarize yourself before dispatching that letter to Dissent. But as for your more "generous understanding," that's quite kind of you, and your "perhaps" is unnecessary because diaspora Jews did indeed argue feverishly over the prospect of a Jewish homeland. (Trotsky was notably against it until shortly before his assassination.) Cohen is not arguing that anti-Zionism is, ipso facto, a cloak for anti-Semitism; he's arguing that it can be when a certain set of argumentative conditions are met by the putative anti-Zionist. (I began my post by quoting these conditions.) Is this really such a controversial thesis? Do you suppose there might be even a handful of Jew-haters out there with enough savvy not to come right out and endorse the Protocols but to describe themselves merely as "critics" of the Israeli government as a government and not as a government consisting of and governing Jews?
Here's my suggestion: if you disagree with someone's analysis of
Israeli behavior, challenge him or her on the merits of their case.
Refrain from name-calling, which is all the cry of anti-Semitism in
this case is.
Interesting. You recently called one of our contributors a racist for suggesting that perhaps the viability of a Palestinian state ought to be questioned given recent Palestinian electoral and administrative behavior. What's the Arab version of anti-Zionism? And why can't that be advanced without all the name-calling?
Here's my generous understanding of you: the double standards you evince don't make you an anti-Semite. They just make you blind to anti-Semitism.
just one quip… zionism is not outdated. it is a movement that supports the idea (not just the establishment) of a jewish state. Modern zionist support the idea of a jewish state the same as irish nationalists support the continued existence of an irish state. this is clear in the debate over a one state solution where the zionists oppose it. if zionism were obsolete there would be no opposition. a one state solution after all is not calling for anarchy, its calling for a bi-national state.
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