(Jewish Group) The Left's Favorite Dirty Word

[Behind the Aegis]

(THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP! RESPECT!!)

Zionism was not always a dirty word for leftists. Communists and socialists alike supported the creation of Israel in 1948, denouncing the neofeudal Arab regimes that tried to destroy the new Jewish state. At the same time, some leftist thinkers, many of them Jews, were ambivalent about Zionism, even in the wake of the Holocaust.

In her new book, The Lions’ Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky, Susie Linfield provides a stunningly cogent account of how Jewish nationalism has troubled leftist thought from the foundation of Israel until today. Like The Cruel Radiance, Linfield’s earlier book on photography and politics, The Lions’ Den is compulsively readable and nearly always persuasive. She says correctly, “there is no other issue, either foreign or domestic, that is debated in such rancid tones” as the sinfulness of Zionism and Israel.

Yet Linfield, a leftist Zionist, insists that she is not an oxymoron or an archaism. In Israel, one can find plenty of people like her, who believe that Palestinians should have a state yet are stubbornly unwilling to commit national suicide in order to ensure that goal. “Only in the case of Israel is the eradication of an extant nation … considered a progressive demand,” she writes. The universes of alternate facts and bizarro-world perspectives that Linfield so adeptly portrays can only be explained by larger, governing fantasies about what Jews are and what they ought to be.



Linfield argues that “Israel is the Rorschach test of the left”: You see what you want to see. Her test cases, along with Arendt and Chomsky, include Arthur Koestler, I.F. Stone, Maxime Rodinson, Isaac Deutscher, Albert Memmi, and (the only non-Jew in the bunch) Fred Halliday. Her thinkers have much in common. Koestler’s, Deutscher’s, and Rodinson’s families were murdered in Auschwitz. Albert Memmi suffered from anti-Semitism growing up in Tunisia, as did Arendt in Germany. All had a sense of the threats facing the Jewish people. Yet many of them retreated from the facts of Israel’s conflict with the Arab world, even blaming Israel for that conflict, in ways that ranged from flagrantly self-contradictory to apocalyptic.

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[no_hypocrisy]

1. The concepts of Zionism and Israel have changed since first established.

My uncle and aunt were Zionists in the 30s, but were also staunch Communists. My uncle urged me to visit Israel for a summer, to work on a kibbutz where he believed equality, progressivism, and socialism (yes, he changed) existed. By the 70s, my grandfather believed that Israel should "grab all the land it can".

It's not the Israel that Herzl invoked. It's not the Israel of Exodus.

The Israel today is PARTIALLY those Israels but the Left is supposed to pretend Israel and Zionism is above reproach. No it isn't. It is still subject to behavior inconsistent with its founding and with human rights.

And yes, if Israel wants the Golan Heights, it has to negotiate (and perhaps pay) for the land.