Exploring intellectually dishonest anti-Israel factions part 3: antizionist Jews and communists
By Lucy Rogers
More factions in the anti-Israel movement in Aotearoa include (a) antizionist Jews and (b) communists. I think the reasons that these factions hate Israel overlap with those of leftwing postmoderns articulated in part 1 of this series: it involves hatred of “the system” and Western culture, even though Israel is not a Western country. In the case of communists in general, the reasons for this are obvious.
As for antizionist Jews, however: I suspect that this demographic are disproportionately the descendants of Holocaust survivors, and that in a proportion of survivors trauma is so extreme that it manifests in counterintuitive ways. I am thinking of for example someone like Norman Finkelstein, himself a Jewish man whose parents survived the Warsaw Ghetto, who went on to argue that the Holocaust death toll of 5-6 million Jews was grossly exaggerated by the “Holocaust grievance industry” to justify supposed Israeli atrocities.
Finkelstein is by the way a favourite amongst a faction in the anti-Israel movement in Auckland I would describe as “classical antisemites”, because given his parentage his good faith is considered to be beyond argument. I think this is flawed reasoning, because it overlooks the possible impact of generational trauma.
I suspect that survivors of the concentration camps were confronted with such a degree of evil that they and their children could not accept that the world is incapable of change. Trauma drove them to the point that they had to believe that it is possible for human beings to avoid a recurrence of the Holocaust. In turn, that drove a proportion of them into utopian movements like communism, or in a milder form hostility to “the system”, just like leftwing postmoderns. (Antizionist Jews do not identify as “white”, but I think they see sufficient cultural similarities between themselves and Europeans for the ethnicities involved to trigger off the need to pathologise everything Israel does.)
I add in passing that as a Christian, I agree with this impulse, but that our answer is different. The answer of the Christian faith is that Christ died not just to suffer the penalty for our sins but also to supernaturally transform human hearts and change us into better people through reorienting our lives towards Him. Then, in the world to come, God will rid the world of sin and evil, and everyone lives happily ever after.
Not every antizionist Jew is as extreme as Norman Finkelstein, and of course within any demographic people’s motivations are diverse. It is important not to generalise. I think intellectual arrogance is another factor influencing the more communist-inclined antizionist Jews. (Communism has rightly been described as “the disease of the intellectual”.)
I also think that people on all ends of the political spectrum (not just antizionist Jews) seek approval from their peers, and that leftwing postmoderns see having antizionist Jews on board as useful to prove that their own views on Israel couldn’t possibly be intellectually dishonest. (See for example Asher Wilson-Goldman’s appointment as a Green Party candidate.) That means there is significant social incentive for some Jewish people to express unbalanced views on Israel.
Antizionist Jews are a tragic case. There is a significant part of me which feels very deep sympathy for people who have been driven to this point after experiencing horrors that Kiwis living in the 21st century can’t really imagine. I try not to judge, and I try to remember that intellectual honesty versus intellectual dishonesty is not a binary thing, and that people have genuine criticisms of Israel in good faith. But it is easy to say that in the abstract, when you’re not having to deal with one of these people standing in front of screaming at you, face contorted with hatred. Or when they attempt to drive you out of your job, as with Stephen Rainbow.
I have with my own eyes seen a member of an NZ-based antizionist Jewish group say on social media that she couldn’t really understand what was so bad about Stalin. I think somewhere very deep down she knows how evil he was, but she cannot accept that because it would mean abandoning her hope for a better world. I feel sad for her: I am told by people who know her that she is a lovely person.
Trauma might go some way to explaining how people get to where they’re at, but at the end of the day, we’re talking in some cases about people who are prepared to murder their political opponents. Understanding how they got there is different from it being justified. People who are so damaged that they are prepared to murder their political opponents do not come out of nowhere: the Nazi concentration camp guards will also have their own stories.
That is also not to say that all antizionist Jews are that extreme, of course: however in my view their views have arisen from something other than the honest pursuit of truth.