I learned this week that Senator Elizabeth Warren is a “vicious” antisemite. The news was shocking. I have had my differences with the senator and her particular brand of progressivism in the past, but I never imagined that she would promote an atavistic “Jew-hate” right out of the darkest decades of the last century. I cannot recall a single moment when she has expressed even the slightest aversion for Jews individually or collectively, let alone hate.
Yet, there it was in Newsweek on Friday, Elizabeth Warren is an antisemite. In an op-ed article, guest columnist Caroline Glick made that absolutely clear. Glick is a columnist for Israel Hayom, a free daily newspaper in the State of Israel (the Israeli counterpart of AM New York Metro, the tabloid that litters Manhattan subway floors), that the late Sheldon Adelson saved from bankruptcy with a $50 million gift and, which, in-turn, became one of the Holy Land’s biggest boosters for Donald Trump and Magaism.
Glick’s proof of Sen. Warren’s noxious Jew-hate was a speech the senator gave at J-Street’s virtual conference on 19 April, in which she suggested that the United States – by far, the State of Israel’s largest military sponsor – might consider “restricting military aid from being used in the occupied territories” because “by continuing to provide military aid without restriction, we provide no incentive for Israel to adjust course.”
I have watched Sen. Warren’s speech on YouTube several times now, looking for that gotcha moment where reveals herself and scanning the bookcase behind her for the telltale spine of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion but… nothing. She did not even say the words “Jew,” or “Jewish” once in the whole fifteen-minute address.
The senator did say that she is “committed to the US-Israel relationship, and… to Israel’s security and safety,” and continued to excoriate extremism and the intransigence of Palestinian leaders. “The West Bank is governed by a corrupted and increasingly authoritarian leadership under President Abbas,” she said. “Gaza, meanwhile, is governed by Hamas, a terrorist organization that has yet to renounce violence.” Yet, there was no suggestion that the State of Israel’s security concerns were illegitimate – she said, “no Israeli child from Beersheba should have to hide in a bomb shelter, and no Palestinian child from Hebron should be evicted from their home to make way for a settlement.” – nor did she imply that the United States would abandon one of its staunchest allies.
All that Senator Warren did was to note that it is in the national interests of the United States to see a solution to the situation in the Middle East after more than a half-century of instability, violence, and misery, and that the US government – of which she is a part – needs to find a way to restart the peace process. After so many years of failed moral suasion, and with the Israeli government’s settlement policies making the possibility of a two-state solution increasingly remote, she mused maybe it was time to, you know, try something new? And the only leverage that the United States has to pursue its vital interests, she said, is the military aid that it has been giving to the State of Israel as a blank cheque since the Cold War.*
Sen. Warren did express doubts about current Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s inclination to seek a two-state solution, and she observed that, with his corruption trial looming and the State of Israel’s political life stuck in a stalemate, something has to give – that much is true. And, to be fair, she did express an opinion of the Israeli prime minister in the same flattering terms she often used for disgraced former President Trump.
But Glick’s colleague at Israel Hayom, a Tucker Carlson wannabe named Yaakov Ahimeir, exclaimed “Elizabeth Warren’s gall knows no bounds!” For her own part, of course, Glick declared that an American Senator suggesting that the United States has its own interests, and that it might want to leverage its military aid to a stubborn ally in order to pursue those interests is “explicitly anti-Semitic.”
In some ways, it’s an old story, and one we have heard a thousand times before: criticism of the State of Israel, its representatives and proxies have told us over and over, is antisemitism. Mobilizing the maximalist-Zionist rhetoric of the IHRA “working definition of antisemitism” Glick wrote that the proof of Sen. Warren’s “Jew-hate” was her use of “a double standard to judge Israel.” Yet, the senator did not judge the State of Israel at all, nor did she deny “the Jews… self-determination in their ancestral homeland” so, even by Glick’s expansive (and self-serving) standard, the opinion that the United States should use its largesse to pursue its foreign policy goals in the Middle East hardly qualifies as antisemitic.
The central conceit of political Zionism has always been that, in the words of David Ben-Gurion, the State of Israel aspired “to be like all other nations.” This has been a basic premise of political Zionism from its inception at the end of the 19th century.
The Zionist philosopher Jacob Klatzkin opined that “In Eretz Israel the Jewish people will regain their normality.” When asked by an Englishwoman in the years before 1948 if Zionists really aspired to abandon the special state Diaspora Jewish leaders had claimed as God’s chosen people to simply become another Albania, Chaim Weitzmann cried: “Yes! Albania! Albania!” Even the Israeli Declaration of Independence founds the claim to nationhood on “the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations.”
This notion became so central to Zionist thought that even Vladimir Jabotinsky, the ideological father of Likudnik right-wing Zionism, embraced it as an essential truth. “We do not have to apologize for anything,” he wrote. “We are a people as all other peoples; we do not have any intentions to be better than the rest.”
Yet the inevitable Zionist knee-jerk reaction is that, paradoxically, to be treated “like all other nations,” the State of Israel must be above the criticism that the United States and other countries (including the State of Israel itself) regularly, if inconsistently, levy on other nations. Although the Israeli government demurred, most of the world spent the last four years offering often colorful reproaches of American policy; many countries, including the United States, have condemned the treatment of the Uyghur ethnic minority in China, and the State of Israel itself has never missed an opportunity to censure the government of Iran for its antisemitism.
Significantly, the State of Israel has steadfastly refused to condemn antisemitism in any country but Iran. Netanyahu studiously avoided mentioning his erstwhile White House pal’s flirtation with neo-Nazis and only belatedly and unenthusiastically commented on the Charlottesville White Nationalist rally four years ago (let alone call his friend Viktor Orban to account).
This double-standard is a manifestation of one of Zionism’s most cherished shibboleths: that the State of Israel is completely coextensive with the People of Israel (that is, the Jews). It is contemporary Zionism’s basic premise. “There is no value in the world higher than the nation and the fatherland,” Jabotinsky observed in the language of 1930s nationalism. “Every race possessing a definite uniqueness seeks to become a nation… A specific race can establish such an environment only in its own country, where it is master.” The corollary for Jabotinsky was that only the Jew who reinvented himself as a “Hebrew” in the fatherland really mattered; the debased “Yid” he left behind in the diaspora would simply go extinct – and good riddance. “What interest can the Jewish nation have in individuals whose supreme pride consists in the fact that they have renounced their own people?” he mused.
This quote has become something of a formula for contemporary Zionists to repeat endlessly in condemnations of any Diaspora Jew who does not step into line. Although the State of Israel and its Zionist surrogates usually avoid Jabotinsky’s more inflammatory rhetoric, they widely embrace the premise: Any Jew who has not made Aliyah, or who does not actively and unquestioningly support the interests of the State of Israel does not count as a Jew at all. In 2006, the Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua smugly told an audience at the Library of Congress, if, “in 100 years Israel will exist and … I will come to the Diaspora [and]there will not be [any] Jews … I will not cry…”
Thus, in the very twisted logic favored by Glick, it is illegitimate to criticize the state of Israel in the same terms that political leaders and private citizens the world over criticize the United States, China, Russia, and every other country, or even to suggest that the State of Israel is imperfect because such criticism somehow articulates a “double-standard.” Moreover, since the State of Israel and the People of Israel are identical – and no Jew worth the name lives beyond the country’s borders – any criticism is, ipso facto, an attack on Jews collectively, and thus the very definition of antisemitism.
The construction of “antisemitism” in Glick’s bizarre attack – now, thanks to the IHRA “working definition,” it is the “official” version – is clearly meant as rhetorical cudgel to intimidate anyone who asks too many questions or dares to look too closely at the State of Israel’s human rights abuses and brazen violations of international law. Wielding the moral enormity of the charge of antisemitism, contemporary Zionists seem to believe, is the best way to gag their critics, even if some of those critics are Jews.
This reveals what the State of Israel and the Zionist movement are prepared to do to serve their narrow national interests. If you support the State of Israel and look the other way, they are saying, then nothing that you do to Jews in the Diaspora is really antisemitism. Hungary’s Orban can promote bigoted libels against George Soros and contemplate the registration of his country’s Jews, but can inoculate himself against antisemitism simply by “pointing to Budapest’s close relations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.” The Zionism of so many Dominionist Christian nationalists makes their desire to create an Christian ethnostate acceptable because they support Israel.
Yet contemporary Zionists like Glick are willing to alienate sober and responsible allies like Sen. Warren and ostracize growing numbers Jews throughout the Diaspora, from progressives in the peace movement to activists in Habonim Dror, in a reckless attempt to shore up the defenses, pull the blinds, and avoid dealing with 53-year-old crisis that is not going to go away, however much they wish it.
If there is any comfort in this, it is that these are not the actions of a nation confident in its position, or dealing from a position of strength. It is a scorched-earth strategy, a desperate gambit by a chess player whose king is trapped in a corner and three moves from checkmate. The danger is that contemporary Zionists and the State of Israel seem fully prepared to sacrifice the People of Israel who live beyond its borders in an unwinnable game.
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* The United States government was initially reluctant to provide the State of Israel with military aid, and the Israeli government had to negotiate deals with European suppliers. It was only after the Soviet Union began overtly to support Egypt and Syria during the 1960s that the US relented.