A couple of weeks ago, I had lunch with a friend from work. It’s something that I rarely have time to do, given my insane teaching schedule, so I welcomed the opportunity to sit down and have a friendly chat. The chat, over macaroni and cheese from the Whole Foods cafeteria, was friendly enough, but soon became a little heated; not boiling hot, but maybe gently simmering. My friend is Israeli and a Zionist. I am neither. Our lunchtime conversation started to get warm when he mentioned that he had read some of my writing (about a lot of things), as if I had been keeping that a secret or that I was, or should be, ashamed of it. I had not, and I am not. In fact, he found this site through a link in my email signature, so I am certainly not keeping any secrets, and I am clearly not ashamed of what I have written.
The conversation was intense but, I thought, friendly in that way that Jews have civil-but-heated conversations. I know that Gentiles sometimes find Jewish conversations a bit too much to take, but my friend is Jewish and of an Ashkenazi background, so it never occurred to me that he would find our chat anything but friendly and normal. A few days later, he sent me an email that suggested that he did not. It was not a hostile message, by any means, but my friend took umbrage at our disagreements on Zionism, the State of Israel, and Palestinian rights and autonomy. I have heard this many times in the last two years from Jewish friends, family, and members of the community, so I decided to share my reply. The original has been lightly edited for clarity, privacy, and to correct the typos that I always make in emails.
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Thanks for your email. I’m sorry it took me a couple of days to get back to you, but I don’t usually read personal email until Friday; I’m just too busy during the week. I want you to know that I fully respect our differences of opinion. I don’t expect anyone to agree with me about almost anything – in fact, I’m skeptical of people who do, even my students. Very little of what I say outside of the classroom is ever prescriptive, and that’s pretty much how I take other people’s opinions, at least as far as those opinions are not prescriptive to me, or which have an impact on my life and security.
I have no objection to your commitment to Zionism and to your homeland and people; in fact, I salute you for it. This commitment – to homeland and people, at least – is, in my opinion, one of the foundations of a healthy community. While I might have very little affection for the United States as a geopolitical entity (a state), I have nothing but the greatest respect for American patriotism (that commitment to homeland and people) and regard it as the most powerful guarantor of its redemption and future.
Nationalism, however, is another thing. I do not share the belief that the national community (the Volksgemeinschaft) has a special mission or manifest destiny (a Sonderweg) or that the nation is a necessary, naturally occurring category of human organization. It is an artifact of 19th century European thought (something that I have studied extensively) which I do not regard as either necessary or desirable. Nationalism is, inevitably, a kind of zero-sum thinking which reduces the relationships between communities into a struggle for survival: What is good for them can only be bad for us, what is good for us can only be bad for them. I don’t buy it, and I’m not going to play that game.
That is one reason why I have no interest in Zionism – Jewish nationalism at one point in history and Israeli nationalism since 1948. “… Actually the world is not made up of ‘nations’ and fatherlands that want only to preserve their cultural distinctions, and only if it means not sacrificing a single human life,” Joseph Roth wrote in his 1927 book The Wandering Jews. “Fatherlands and nations want much more, or much less: They have vested interests that insist on sacrifices. They set up a series of ‘fronts’ to secure the ‘hinterland’ that is their real objective. Given all the millennial grief of the Jews, they still had one consolation: the fact that they didn’t have such a fatherland. If there even can be such a thing as a just history, surely the Jews will be given great credit for holding onto their common sense in not having had a fatherland at a time when the whole world launched itself into patriotic madness.”
Had he lived to see the creation of the State of Israel, I believe that Roth would have felt deeply ashamed. The Jews, or at least the Zionist Jews, did not hold onto their common sense; they deserve no credit.
Moreover, as I have noted, I am not an Israeli – the State of Israel is not my country. (Shlomo Sand is a bit of a crackpot, but I do find some of his reflections on Israeli identity insightful, especially his idea that Israelis have become something quite different from Jews.) I have no attachment to it, and no commitment to its survival, except to the extent that I wish its citizens well. I suspect that we will not be able to agree on the presumed necessity and desirability of Zionism, and I am perfectly happy to respect our ideological differences. As I said, for the most part, I don’t regard my beliefs and commitments as either necessary or objectively true, and I am not likely to accept anyone else’s as such.
I can, for example, respect the Christian faith of some of my in-laws as their way of engaging with the universe while not making it my own, and I am glad most of them respect my beliefs. That is, after all, the Jewish, or at least the Talmudic way. Similarly, I can respect the Zionist commitments of many of my relatives and, indeed, my shvesterkind, without sharing them. And I do. I am perfectly happy to disagree. I hope that you will grant me the same respect.
You should also know that I am a committed, card-carrying pacifist. In fact, I am literally card-carrying, since I am a member of a couple of pacifist organizations. I’d be happy to show you the card sometime.
You can thus rest assured that one of the first principles of my political and social belief system is that violence and war are bad. Full stop. According to Martin Ceadal, I should probably be classified as a pacificist, however, since my pacifism is somewhat in line with Bertrand Russell’s: War and violence are never absolute, or even relative, goods and they are certainly never desirable, but sometimes we are not given a choice. Peace is a positive project, not merely the absence of war, and that project would not be possible were agents of war and oppression to triumph. Thus, real pacifism sometimes demands an ethical compromise. Choosing not to oppose fascism and National Socialism, even through armed conflict, would hardly have produced any kind of positive peace.
However, that compromise demands restraint and limitation – as does the notion of “self-defence,” to which you have appealed to justify the Israeli destruction of Gaza. For example, while it might be necessary for me to deploy violence to resist an attack on my family or to defend my community, it must be proportionate to the threat and limited to the defense against that specific attack. I passionately oppose private gun ownership, “stand your ground laws,” and the idea that, once an attack has been neutralized and security restored, “self-defence” authorizes the complete destruction of the assailant.
So, while I can understand the argument that the State of Israel has a “right of self-defense” (although I do not agree that “rights,” as such, necessarily inhere to states and governments) self-defense was satisfied at the moment the 7 October Hamas attack was pushed back and the border secured. Moreover, the violence of that day occurred within a historical context; it did not begin on 7 October 2023. Hamas did not attack simply because Muslims, Arabs, and Palestinians are, to use Prime Minister Netanyahu’s words “mindless, savage beasts.” It happened for reasons – including choices taken by your country’s government going back at least to 1967, and even to 1948.
I am well-aware that you probably disagree, and that your disagreement is based on your personal experience and ideology. I am also aware that one cannot argue ideology, and that our ideological differences are irreconcilable. That doesn’t bother me; there are a great many people whom I regard highly and with whom I fundamentally disagree.
Thank you for the invitation to join you and your friends for coffee, but I must decline. For one thing, my schedule is very tight. I am also somewhat taken aback by the way you set up the invitation. “If you really wished the best for Israel, as you say you do” sounds much more like a hostile challenge than a friendly invitation. Perhaps I mistakenly read your intent, and if I did, I apologize, but it really does read like a petulant “prove it!”
You seem to be a thoughtful person, but let’s be clear here: I do not owe you anything, and I have nothing to prove to you. It sounds like an invitation to an ambush, and I have experienced so many of those in the last four decades, as a journalist, as a researcher for the Simon Wiesenthal Centre and the Nizkor Project, and as an activist that I’m not eager to do that again. You are entitled to your opinions, meyn freynd, but I’m not looking for a fight.
I do wish the best for Israelis, and I also believe that the destruction of Gaza, and the policies of the Netanyahu government are not in Israelis’ best interests. I wish the best for Israelis, but I do not wish the best for its government. I wish the best for Israelis, but no more than I wish the best for the citizens of any other country, whether that is the United States, Great Britain, Ukraine, Venezuela, Iran, Indonesia, Uzbekistan, or Canada.
The State of Israel is not special to me; I regard it as “a state like any other,” to quote David Ben-Gurion. I feel no particular attachment to it, and my interest in the State of Israel derives solely from the fact that its policies, and its claim to be the “Jewish State,” as well as the noxious Zionist demand that all Jewish life must exist in relation to and serve Jerusalem (what I call “Third Temple Judaism”), has a very real, material impact on lives and security of Diaspora Jews like me. That makes the State of Israel my business.
Again, I recognize that these are things that we simply will not agree upon. You should not expect to convince me of your rectitude any more than I believe that I could ever convince you to support Palestinian autonomy, human rights, and self-determination. As one pro-Palestine activist said of taking to his relatives: “it’s like talking to a wall, so let’s talk about something else.”
Finally, I have to address the concluding paragraph of your email. I read it as your accusation that I might be abusive and disrespectful, and that I was likely to dox, harass, or threaten you. I have no idea how you might have come to that opinion and frankly, I find it insulting.
While I debate passionately (I grew up in an Ashkenazi home with an extended family of more than 35 aunts, uncles, and first cousins), I can assure you that I would never do any such thing. A close friend and colleague has had to flee the US because he was doxed by MAGA fascists and received threats of violence against his family; I have received more death threats, threats of violence, and even an obscenely descriptive threat of anal rape from a member of Betar; I have been assaulted by skinheads. I know the reality of this violence, and I would not wish it on even my vilest enemy.
Best Regards,
MF