What the Jewish Left Doesn’t Need is Advice that It has No Responsibility for What Zionism and Israel Has Done In Their Name

 A Reply to Shaul Magid’s Argument for Jewish Indifference to Genocide and an Evasion of Responsibility

Shaul Magid is a rabbi, Visiting Professor of Modern Jewish Studies at Harvard Divinity School, and Distinguished Fellow in Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College. Magid is also an opponent of Jewish anti-Zionism which he argues is irrelevant. Jews opposed to Zionism should turn in on themselves and ignore what is happening in their name.

In his article What Does the Jewish Left Want?, which is reprinted by Jewish Voice for Liberation, Magid argues that the Jewish left should ‘no longer focus on opposition to a state that many in the Jewish Left no longer support.’ In my response below I explain that if it doesn’t focus primarily on Zionism and the Israeli state, then this Jewish left is not only not a genuine left but it has no real purpose.

Shaul Magid

At a time when US and Western Imperialism is using Jewish people as its human shield, its moral alibi for support of the genocide in Gaza, to pretend that solidarity with the Palestinians and opposition to Zionism should be deprioritised is to do exactly what the Zionists want us to do.

It is to argue that Jews should become the bystanders to the slaughter in Gaza. Raul Hilberg excoriated, in Perpetrators, Victims and Bystanders, the ‘dull awareness’ and passive indifference of those who looked on as the Jews were exterminated in the holocaust, be they individuals or the Allied countries.

Hilberg spoke of the ‘human wall’ that bystanders had erected, of indifference and social isolation. What Magid is arguing is that Jews on the left should adopt a similar approach today. It is profoundly immoral.

Magid argued, in opposition to Jewish Voice for Peace’s statement adopting an explicitly anti-Zionist position, that they had ignored

a series of real “Zionist” possibilities where “justice and equality” were paramount.

What Magid really wants is to have his cake and eat it. His article is an exercise in self-indulgence. The real question is whether Jewish intellectuals have the courage and honesty to call Zionism out for what it is. Clearly Magid doesn’t possess that courage. Magid says

Many Jews who define themselves as anti-Zionist do not think the state of Israel should cease to exist. Rather, they contest Zionist hegemony.

If that is the case then they are not anti-Zionists and that is Magid’s problem.

For Magid the internal battle within the Jewish community takes precedence over genocide and ethnic cleansing. Is it any wonder that Palestinians get tired of this Jewish preciousness at a time when Palestinian children are being starved to death in the name of Zionism’s Jewish redemption?

If you are an anti-Zionist then Israel as a Jewish state must disappear. Not the people but the state. Israel must become normalised, like any other state. It must be a state of its own citizens, regardless of ethnicity or religion.

Magid accepts that Jewish anti-Zionists reject the idea that ‘Zionism is a requirement for legitimate Jewish identity in the twenty-first century.’’ But then he indulges in a semantic frivolity when he makes:

 ‘an important distinction... between Zionism and Israel. Israel is a country; Zionism is an ideology.’

No.  Zionism is the ideology of the Israeli state. It dictates the imperatives of Zionism, such as ethnic cleansing, Jewish racial purity, Jewish settlement at the Palestinians’ expense. This is a distinction without a difference.

What Magid demonstrates is that he rejects the special characteristic of Zionism as a settler colonial ideology whose aim was to achieve as pure a Jewish state as possible. In the words of Israel’s opposition leader, Yair Lapid:

“My principle says maximum Jews on maximum land with maximum security and with minimum Palestinians”

Quite amazingly Magid goes on to say, without so much as a flicker of awareness, that:

Like most countries Israel will choose how to govern according to will of its citizens, in Israel’s case, mostly, but not exclusively, its Jewish citizens (as those living under occupation have no political agency in the national polity), how to treat its minorities, how to deal with questions of justice and domination.

The whole point of anti-Zionism is that Israel is not like most countries. It is sui generis. Actually most countries don’t govern according to the will of their citizens but their elites and the capitalist ruling class. But let this pass. Magid is not a socialist.

In Israel’s case it pays no heed whatsoever to its Palestinian citizens. In Netanyahu’s words, ‘Israel is a state of its Jewish citizens not all of them’. That is why, being a Jewish state, it continues to dispossess what it calls Arab Israelis from their homes, in particular the destruction of the unrecognised villages of the Bedouin of the Negev such as Umm al-Hiran and Ras Jraba. Has Magid never heard of the policy of Judaisation of the Galilee and Negev, the Koenig Memorandum and Prawer Plan?

Does Magid think that there’s nothing of special interest in the fact that those living under occupation have no civil or political rights despite it being made clear that the West Bank will always remain part of Israel? Has he lost the ability to spell or even recognise the word Apartheid?

Magid quotes Joel Swanson’s assertion that

Historically, Zionism has never been one single concept. It has been a family of arguments, ... To say ‘Zionism’ without adjectives is already to erase its internal diversity.’

Here we really come to the crux of the argument. Shaul Magid’s illusion that there is a nice as well as a nasty Zionism. It is part of a ‘family’ that somehow along the way as it lost its focus or direction.

So let us spell it out for Shaul Magid who is blind to Zionism’s  racist reality. Zionism is what Zionism does. Zionism does not exist in the minds of a fragrant Jewish American Princess who still believes in fairy tales but in the settler attacks on Palestinian villages in the West Bank or the Death to the Arabs riots in Jerusalem each year.

Is there any difference between Herzog and Netanyahu, between Labour and Revisionist Zionism or did they merely argue about the means of achieving and maintaining a Jewish Supremacist state beholden to the West as an armed watchdog?

Magid clings to a Zionism that never existed. In fact cultural and socialist Zionism long ago disappeared in their own contradictions. Socialism is universal. Zionism is particularist. I realised that when I was 16 but Magid has yet to achieve political adolescence.

Magid points to a recent poll in which only a third of American Jews identify as Zionist whereas 88% support the concept of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. Clearly there is confusion among American Jews as Israel has proven beyond doubt that it cannot be both Jewish and democratic. Always it is forced to take the former path and jettison the latter, as the Jewish Nation State Law has proved.

The reality is that this was always a dishonest slogan of the hypocritical Zionist ‘left’. When confronted with a choice Zionism always preferred the Jewish to the democratic. In the words of Ahmed Tibi, an Arab member of the Knesset, Israel is Democratic for Jews and Jewish for Arabs.

It is this which has allowed Jewish neo-Nazis to become the third largest bloc in the Knesset and for Itamar Ben Gvir to become Police Minister in Israel. It is this which has led to Israeli Police acting like SS storm troopers against Israel’s Palestinian citizens. Israel is a state where torture is the norm (for Palestinians).

Yes there is massive confusion among American Jews but rather than offering clarity Magid seeks to take advantage of that confusion with his ridiculous essay.

Magid says that ‘Zionism served as an escape mechanism for Jews trying to escape a Europe collapsing around them.’ No that is absolutely not true. Haganah sent Feivel Polkes to Nazi Germany to persuade the Gestapo not to allow Jewish emigration to any place but Palestine. In exchange he offered to collaborate with them.

As a result Professor Franz Six, a senior SS official and head of Department II in the SD Main Office, who was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment for war crimes in April 1948 wrote:

Pressure is being exerted on the Reich Deputation of the Jews in Germany in order to compel Jews emigrating from Germany to head only to Palestine and not to any other country.” [The Secret Contacts, Zionism and Nazi Germany, 1933-1941, Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 5 3/4 Spring/Summer 1976]

Ha’avara, the trade agreement between Nazi Germany and the Zionist movement, agreed in August 1933, not only broke the world-wide Jewish Boycott of Nazi Germany but it worsened the position for Jews trying to escape to other countries.

The Zionist movement consistently opposed rescue to any country bar Palestine. Magid fails to understand what has been called ‘cruel Zionism.’  See my book Zionism During the Holocaust (to purchase it contact me at tonygreenstein104@gmail.com).

Magid cites Yehiam Weitz’s article, “The Positions of David Ben Gurion and Yitzhak Tabenkin Vis-A-Viz the Holocaust of European Jewry” but has failed to understand it. Weitz cites Ben-Gurion on the Jewish refugee problem thus:

‘Both during the 1930s ... and during the second half of the 1940s, after the war's end - his position on this question was determined and indisputable; Ben-Gurion definitively and often crudely opposed ameliorating the position of Jewish groups by means other than their transfer to Palestine. He felt that any 'solution of the national problem outside of Eretz Israel, or ... solving the individual's distress by ignoring the national problem ... [means] undermining the foundations of Zionism and acting  as a temptation  which  every  Zionist  must  learn to  withstand completely.'

When it came to priorities Zionism and building the Jewish state came first. Weitz quotes Ben-Gurion’s notorious statement in the wake of Kristallnacht that if:

'it would be possible to save all the [Jewish] children in Germany by transferring them to England and only half of them by transferring them to Eretz Israel, I would choose the second possibility, because before us is not only the account of these children but the historical account of the Jewish people.’

In other words the interests of building the ‘Jewish’ state took precedence over saving Jewish children from Germany. Magid could also have mentioned Boas Evron’S, Jewish State or Israeli Nation and the fierce opposition to the Evian Conference, called by Eisenhower to solve the Jewish refugee question. Of course it did no such thing but the Zionist leadership were nonetheless frightened.

What Magid didn't mention was the identification with Israel of the far and even neo-Nazi right

Evron quotes the minutes of a meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive of 26 June 1938. Ben-Gurion was unremittingly hostile as he declared that

No rationalizations can turn the conference from a harmful to a useful one. What can and should be done is to limit the damage as far as possible.

A Russia member of the Zionist Executive Menachem Ussishkin was even more forthright

He hoped to hear in Evian that Eretz Israel remains the main venue for Jewish emigration. All other emigration countries do not interest him… The greatest danger is that attempts will be made to find other territories for Jewish emigration. [my emphasis]

These positions are quite clear in the essay he referred to yet Magid scrupulously refrains from mentioning the attitude of the Zionists to saving the Jewish refugees.

Magid asks Can the Jewish Left move beyond Zionism and anti-Zionism?’ and queries whether it can ‘no longer focus on opposition to a state that many in the Jewish Left no longer support?’

Thus missing out the whole point of why Jews on the left make opposition to Israel and Zionism a central focus of their work. Of course Magid knows the reason but refrains from spelling it out. Everything Israel does is in the name of the mythical ‘Jewish people’ and Jews. It is after all a self-proclaimed Jewish state.

It is therefore incumbent upon Jewish socialists and those who are genuinely on the Jewish left to say ‘Not in My Name’. The fact that Magid resiles from this suggests that his membership of the Jewish left is ephemeral.

Of course the Jewish left can do many other things but when being Jewish is one of the primary justifications given for imperialism’s support for Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing it is rank hypocrisy and cowardice not to make that a priority. If the Jewish left cannot focus on Zionism and its claim to represent Jews then it has no relevance.

Magid says that ‘One of the fundamental differences between liberal Zionism and Jewish anti-Zionism is the exceptionalism that underlies the case of Israel’. That is of course true.  Liberal Zionists can, in theory, hold progressive positions on domestic American affairs but for Palestine there is an exception (Progressive Except Palestine). But that is increasingly untenable.

What Magid seems to be doing is providing a new way for this exceptionalism to operate by suggesting that Jews on the left simply avoid the issue altogether.

Why would Jews seek to avoid the one area where they have a contribution to make? Does he find it too uncomfortable? The difference between Magid and a self-declared Zionist is that he doesn’t openly defend the Apartheid state whereas ‘liberal’ Zionism does. Instead he makes excuses for it.

Jewish identity post-war has been forged in the crucible of Zionism. Jewish identity has changed for many a substitute religion. Without an alternative explicitly anti-Zionist Jewish identity Jewish identity become at best a self-indulgence and at worst an identity with genocide and racism.

Magid quotes Adi Ophir in his support:  “to become non-Zionist one first must become anti-Zionist.” I wonder if Magid ever thought this through? How about saying that to become a non-racist one must first become an anti-racist. Perhaps our goal is to abstain from confronting racism? This is meaningless nonsense, verbal masturbation.

The fact is that for Jews non-Zionism is, at best, a half-way house to anti-Zionism. Of course being an anti-Zionist also means taking a position against US imperialism and its use of Jews as its moral alibi.

As a final flourish Magid says that

The land between the river and the sea remains the Jewish homeland and the Palestinian homeland. But the domination of one over the other will never yield the flourishing of either.

In this Magid could not be more wrong. He equates the oppressed with their oppressors. Palestine is the home of the Palestinians. It is not a Jewish homeland. My home is where I live, Britain. The United States is the home of millions of Jews. Israel is a settler colonial state that calls itself Jewish only in the racial and ethnic sense. Israel is a state of Jewish Supremacy where Jews, not Palestinians, exercise domination.

The eventual choice that Israeli Jews face is between becoming Jewish Palestinians or leaving. That was the choice that White South Africans faced and we should not make any exception for the Zionist settlers whose crimes far exceed those of White South Africans.

Tony Greenstein