Recently the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem came out with a definition/declaration of antisemitism that challenged the now widely used definition/guidelines published ten years ago by IHRA. The original is perceived by many progressives as too restrictive of the right to criticize Israel, for some a blow to Palestinian rights to freedom of expression.
it threatens free speech and academic freedom and constitutes an attack on both the Palestinian right to self-determination, and the struggle to democratise Israel.
Van Leer, an institute that consistently supports the Palestinian “narrative” that the Nakbah of 1948 is comparable to the Holocaust of 1941-45, came out with a declaration they called the “Jerusalem Declaration” that attempted to redress the perceived restraints on legitimate criticism of Israel. (Out of lack of deference to their pretension, I will henceforth refer to it as the Van Leer Declaration.) The document was signed by over 200 scholars, many associated with some of the more extravagant forms of Holocaust inversion (the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to the Jews), but none quite so egregious as the 9-11 conspiracy friendly professor from Princeton, Richard Falk. Among the names of those well-known for the moral decency, we find Michael Walzer as a co-signer.
Cary Nelson did a long and acute critique of the Van Leer Declaration, in which he cited Michael Walzer’s presence among the signers as troubling, and Walzer responded. The following is a fisking of that response. I don’t suppose it will convince Walzer to remove his name from the list, but at least, perhaps, steer clear of such initiatives in the future.
Cary Nelson knows a lot more about antisemitism and about its various definitions than I do; many of the arguments I have made in print and in talks derive from his incisive critical work Israel Denial. But I hope he is wrong to suggest that some people have signed on to the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA) because I did.
If not co-signed (most of the signers did not look like they needed coaxing), certainly, your name gives a level of respectability to the document that it dubiously deserves.
As he says, JDA, like IHRA, can be misinterpreted. The couple of antisemitic signatories that he lists are our mis-interpreters; the organisers in Jerusalem should have rejected their signatures. But the rest of us, I assume, were working from our own experience and not from anyone elseâ€
s.
But they did not reject their signatures. Have you inquired? Have you asked them to do so?
Different experiences will produce different views on the three (not entirely different) definitions. We owe each other explanations for our own views; mutual engagement after that would be fine, but I hope that we can save our fiercer fire for the ongoing fights against Israel denial in universities, corporations, unions, and political parties here and abroad.
Agreed.
I thought that JDA offered to create a little distance, nothing more, between antisemitism and the Israel/Palestine battles. I know that the two often overlap, and I am ready to call out attacks on Zionism and Israel that are substantively antisemitic. Alan Johnson’s indictment of Labor Party antisemitism illustrated the overlap, and nothing in JDA would prevent me from recognising it. But antisemitism and Israel/Palestine donâ€
“Nothing more…” there’s the rub. For you, Michael, it’s nothing more. For Richard Falk and others that “little distance” is actually a wedge through which to drive the very discourse we all find so troubling (what you refer to as Israel Denial, what I refer to as Holocaust Inversion). Here a relevant comment by Bari Weiss on the antisemitism denial of the French court of appeal (Cour de Cassation) that found that the murderer of an elderly Jewish woman, Sarah Halimi, by a Muslim neighbor who chanted Qur’anic verses as he tortured her (while the police stood outside her door, waiting for backup) could not be tried because he has smoked marijuana beforehand:
We are suffering from a widespread social health epidemic and it is rooted in the cheapening of Jewish blood. If hatred of Jews can be justified as a misunderstanding or ignored as a mistake or played down as a slip of the tongue or waved away as “just anti-Zionism,” you can all but guarantee it will be.
This is one of the main problems we need to address, if we are, today, to recognize and oppose the “substantively antisemitic,” namely, this “widespread social health epidemic,” the waving away of Jew hatred. To rephrase Weiss, “you can be sure that “nothing more than a little distance” between anti-semitism and anti-zionism will have a truck (that’s waiting in the wings) driven through it.
Does this mean that there is no difference between the two? There certainly can be, just as there’s a difference between the run-of the mill anti-judaism of supersessionist Christians and Muslims (‘we’re up because you Jews are down’), and the exterminationist, delirious, paranoid, exterminationist antisemitism of the Nazis and the Palestinian Jihadis. (In this sense, I think both definitions of antisemitism are way too vague and partake of one of the great lexical sins of the age, the conflation of racism and prejudice.)
My activism is limited these days, but I have been involved in opposing BDS on several American university campuses and in one of the academic associations. I have found that very few of my opponents in these battles were antisemites — and calling them that was not a winning strategy. Addressing their arguments, defending the Zionist project: that was the way to win.
That makes a lot of sense. If I understand, you are largely dealing with people who have been convinced by genuine antisemites – people who want to wipe out any trace of Jewish sovereignty “From the River to the Sea Palestine will be Free!” – but are a) not themselves desirous of such a goal (think this is a [deprivation of Palestinian] human rights issue), and b) are unaware of the actual implications of the demopathic language in which the demand to destroy Jewish sovereignty has been framed. Your arguments win because they can clear that up, without offending and alienating those with whom you argue by calling them antisemites. Sound advice that, I think, many who signed the IHRA would agree with.
Consider the argument for ‘one state for all its citizensâ€
This again makes perfect sense. For cognitive egocentrist liberals, who can’t imagine a world different from their own, the demopathic argument about Palestinian rights makes sense. For someone with the basic rudiments of both historical memory (what the diaspora was like before the advent of modern liberal societies/civic polities) and an awareness of how hard it is for some cultures to adopt and sustain the rules of these civic polities (e.g. the pervasive failure so far of any Arab or Muslim nation to do so), the argument is transparently antisemitic.
But arguing that successfully depends on helping people understand that the “sharp right turn of Israeli politics” is a response to precisely the factors they ignore (or can’t see), and similarly, that the source of the argument they are adopting comes from precisely the forces (Palestinian irredentism) that are turning Israeli voters to (what they perceive as) the right. (More on this below.)
Some anti-Zionists may have signed on to the JDA because of their experience of being called antisemitic when they are sure that the label doesnâ€
This is an admirable exegetical modesty on your part, but perhaps a bit too generous. We live, I’m sure you agree, in an age when hypocrisy is rampant, when demopaths systematically use language – human rights, equality, justice for all – to which they have no commitment in principle, and use only in the pursuit of “using democracy to destroy democracy”. (This holds true for both those on the right and the left.) Since the Holocaust (lo! these 75 years), it has become taboo, politically incorrect, to openly embrace antisemitism, to which Hitler gave a very bad name.
But since 2000 (lo! these 20 years), anti-Zionism has become a popular substitute (a post-Holocaust avatar of) antisemitism, and the extensive denial of that phenomenon — what David Hirsh calls the “Livingstone Formulation” in which any complaint about anti-Zionism (comparison with Nazis, demonization, use of classic memes like blood libels) gets airily dismissed as trying to silence legitimate criticism of Israel) — has played a deeply corrosive role in debasing current public discourse and funneling waves of vicious Jew-hatred into the mainstream. Your renunciation of concern with motives (which, when it comes to generously accepting the protestations of interlocutors, you don’t renounce) actually deprives you and those who follow you of critical analytic tools.
Denying the Jewish right to political self-determination is an old Jewish position, defended within historical memory by Orthodox and Reform Jews.
That, of course, was before the Holocaust, whose historic shadow casts grave doubt on those positions. As the saying about European Jews in the late 1930s goes: “the pessimists went to Palestine, the optimists to Auschwitz.”
There are today Jewish defenders of the Diaspora, who believe that the centuries of statelessness have been a kind of moral education — and that we are now a post-Westphalian people, too good to manage the brutalities that sovereignty requires (or certain to manage them badly). We should therefore settle for something less than sovereignty in the Middle East, which would actually be, from a moral standpoint, something better.
You present this as a serious moral position. Presumably when confronted with it, you point out the moral perfectionism involved, the deeply contemptuous attitude towards gentiles (sovereignty with all its dirtiness is for goyim), the folly of being a post-Westphalian in a neighborhood where the neighbors are pre-Westphalian (indeed are in their own thirty years war right now). If Jews want to adopt such positions in search of their purity, presumably they wouldn’t dream of demanding such disarmament from fellow Jews who do not share their suicidal tendencies.
I know some non-Jews who have adopted this position, perhaps not entirely in good faith — but who knows?
Yes who knows? But who doesn’t probe to find out? It’s not like the underlying motives are so buried that they can’t be detected. I’m not saying we should put every anti-Zionist before an inquisitorial process and declare them antisemites when they fail the test. (See below)
So far as I know, none of these positions has found a place in the debates about the meaning of antisemitism which they would surely complicate. I think that “diasporism” derives from a radical misunderstanding of Jewish history. Talking about antisemitism or its Jewish version, self-hate, wouldn’t be helpful.
The complications brought on by these positions do not strike me as either impossible to resolve (on a case by case basis), nor impossible to address substantively (something, as you point out, Cary Nelson has done exceptionally thoroughly and well). The issue of the “radical misunderstanding” if Jewish history embodied in (say Judith Butler’s) “diasporism” – we never had it so good – is intimately related to the question of Jew hatred.
Obviously, many well-intentioned progressives shouldn’t be accused of either antisemitism of self-hatred just because they are naive. But at the same time – and here I think the IHRA definition is more helpful – they need to be confronted with the dangerous and troubling overlap between their well-intended moral perfectionism and the toxic Jew-hatred of those driving the goal of eliminating Jewish sovereignty (BDS).
Obviously, it is inappropriate to accuse Jews of self-hatred because of their moral aspirations and question their sincerity. But, as my father (z”l) used to say, “sincerity is the cheapest of virtues.” And if we don’t want to confront those who aggressively pursue their moral aspirations and vigorously denounce Jews who dare to defend themselves, at least shouldn’t we ask them how much of their motivation comes from shame, how much their moral perfectionism reflects a moral narcissism more concerned with
how their actions make them look in their own eyes and those of their honor-group, rather than the consequences of those actions on those for whom one is allegedly concerned and on whose behalf one claims to act.
Nothing in the IHRA definition demands that such progressives, however aggressive they are in their naivete, be accused of antisemitism. But it does permit one to ask why they are in bed with them. After all, they are in favor of introspection and self criticism, no? Or is that only for thee and not for me?
The Van Leer declaration makes such introspection far less likely.
The current debate also hasn’t focused on forms of antisemitism that have nothing to do with Israel/Palestine. In the US today, the greatest threat to Jewish life and limb comes from the advocates of “replacement theory” which holds that the Jews, through the agency of HIAS, are bringing Mexicans and Muslims into the country in order to replace, or displace, White Christian Americans. This “theory” inspired the Charlestown marchers and the murderous attack on the Pittsburgh synagogue, and it now has a foothold in the Republican Party. We would all agree that this is antisemitism, but because we are so focused on the arguments about when and whether anti-Zionism crosses the line, it hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves.
It’s hard to know what to do with such an assertion. Just two remarks.
1) The idea that the marchers in Charlestown and the murderer in Pittsburgh represent the major threat to Jews when such discourse is at the very margins of the public sphere, when, on the contrary, the anti-Zionists of BDS quality play prominent roles in our campus discussions, college and school curricula, mainstream media outlets, policy discussions, and now in the democratic party, strikes me as a very strange claim.
2) We need to distinguish between the “replacement theory” of which you speak, with its violent paranoid forms on the one hand, and people who disagree with progressive Democrats who openly embrace the ambition of bringing in enough immigrants to tip the balance against what they view as systemically racist whites.
So, a little distance would help.
If by distance you mean not jumping on people as antisemites before sounding them out… I could not agree more. If, as the Van Leer declaration does, you mean allowing the kind of vicious demonizing of Israel under the guise of human rights (apartheid accusations from people who aspire to install an apartheid regime, accusations of moral depravity from people who embrace suicide terror), then I couldn’t disagree more.
Note: For more of an argument along these lines, please see my article “Anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism” in Fathom.
For my take on the issue in Fathom, see here.
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