A Zionist Thaw?
It’s common knowledge that the Israeli occupation, and Israel in general, are Third Rails in US public discourse — touch them and die (politically, anyway). Through a peculiar combination of (1) commemoration (some would say exploitation) of the Nazi epoch, (2) down-n-dirty realpolitik in DC, and (3) the strong Biblical literalist strain in American culture (which lends Israel and Israeli place-names tremendous resonance in the hearts/minds of many Americans), Israel has become not merely a satrapy, a costly base from which to project US power in the Middle East, but a powerful emotive icon. It has joined a list of sacralised memes such as The Flag, The Troops, The Founding Fathers — which cannot be criticised w/o branding the critic a heretic, subversive, and (in this case) a suspected antisemite. The staggering fact of $2B or more in annual subsidy from the US to its client state is camouflaged by layer upon layer of Biblical mystique and Hollywood sentimentality.
The situation is only made more vexed by the genuine antisemitic, anti-Jewish strain in the vulgar US ultraright (mirrored by the British BNP and various skinhead/neoNazi groups in Germany, Switzerland, France etc). As long as a rabble of useful idiots continues to “discover” the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (that moldy oldie) and publish the same old wild rants about Jewish Bankers Controlling the World, it is easy for the AIPAC/ADL coterie to paint the picture of a dangerous world full of frothing antisemites, with Israel the only safe haven for world Jewry. Anyone who names the Israeli Occupation for what it is — a classic colonial land grab and the establishment of an Apartheid state — is immediately and conveniently lumped with the Jewish Bankers fantasists. You’re either with Israel, or against Jews. Unlike the Anglo-Christian US neocons who whined and fretted, “Why do they hate us?”, the Israel lobby has the answer already prepared and well documented by history: They hate us because we are Jews — just like they always have.
This leaves critics of Israeli policy ironically more vocal, free, and radical within Israel itself than in the US: articles are routinely published in Ha’aretz that would never be allowed past the editor of any reputable US daily. In the US, Israel and Israeli policy are lost in a kind of time warp or Moebius strip; the $2B/year goes on being approved, year after year, the US continues to abstain from any UN resolution criticising Israel’s invasion of Palestine and the resulting human rights abuses, US politicians go on making the ritual Israel visit and photo-op. And anyone who complains about this state of affairs is branded either a Jew-hater or a Self-Hating Jew, isolated and ostracised.
This state of affairs has obtained at least since the Six Day War; as N Finkelstein pointed out, the beatification of Israel in the US public mind did not really begin until the nouveau state had “made its bones” and proved its muscle by soundly defeating its opponents back in 1967. But Finkelstein of course is persona non grata to the majority of American Jews. I have personal friends who refuse even to read his book The Holocaust Industry because they “know it is anti-Semitic”. Ironically, Raul Hilberg (revered by Holocaust historians for his monumental and magisterial study of the Nazi era) thought Finkelstein’s work on “The Holocaust Industry” was sound; but this has not prevented the AIPAC/ADL echo chamber from declaring Finkelstein a non-person — or a “self-hating Jew”.
I was also struck by the fact that Finkelstein was being attacked over and over. And granted, his style is a little different from mine, but I was saying the same thing, and I had published my results in that three-volume work, published in 2003 by Yale University Press, and I did not hear from anybody a critical word about what I said, even though it was the same substantive conclusion that Finkelstein had offered. So that’s the gist of the matter right then and there. […] Well, Finkelstein — I believe Finkelstein was criticized mainly for the style that he employed. And he was vulnerable. And it was clear to me already years ago that some campaigns were launched — from what sector, I didn’t know — to remove him from the academic world. Years ago, I got a phone call from someone who was in charge of a survivors’ group in California who told me that Finkelstein had been ousted from a job in New York City at a university — actually, a college there — and this was done under pressure.
(Raul Hilberg, pbuh, died in August of this year; this quote is from a radio interview with Democracy Now!) A longer interview by Hilberg with a Brazilian journo is available at NF’s own web site — well worth a read.
Israel’s special status as Caesar’s Wife — and as a money laundry for the US arms industry — has been part of our political landscape for so long now that it is hard to imagine things could be different. It is one of the hot-button topics, right up there with abortion and gun control: friendships have ended and marriages foundered on the issue of excessive (or insufficient) empathy with the Palestinians. The successes of the “Israel Lobby” in DC are legendary; it seems that no US politician who hopes to remain in office can challenge the official mythology of Plucky, Embattled Little Israel, Menaced on All Sides by Swarthy Savages. The US is even now making noises about inviting Israel into NATO — which presumably will entail some awkward acronymic revision as NASMRSTO, the North Atlantic and Southern Mediterranean/Red Sea Treaty Organisation.
But in the last year or so there are signs, surprisingly, of a possible thaw in the frozen terrain of discourse in the US. Norman Finkelstein’s tenure denial, largely inflicted by external lobbying by AIPAC and allies (including a particularly personal and unpleasant attack campaign by the notorious Dershowitz), was not accomplished quietly and swept under the rug. Finkelstein — known for his grit and stubbornness if not for his delicate tact — fought it doggedly and won a Pyrrhic victory:
In exchange for his immediate resignation from DePaul’s faculty, DePaul would essentially admit that Finkelstein had met the University’s tenure and promotion requirements (”Professor Finkelstein is a prolific scholar and an outstanding teacher”), while also providing Finkelstein with an undisclosed amount of money, along with a backhanded acknowledgment of the public outrage that had been generated in response to the tenure denial (”We understand that Professor Finkelstein and his supporters disagree with the University Board on Promotion and Tenure’s conclusion that he did not meet the requirements for tenure.”) Well, the obvious reason Finkelstein and many of his supporters disagreed with the University Board on Promotion and Tenure’s conclusions is because Finkelstein consistently earned among the highest, if not the highest, teaching evaluations in the political science department for six years in a row. Coupled that with the five books which he has published to international acclaim, the most recent being his Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History with the University of California Press, which Dershowitz’s campaign of abuse and vilification could not censor, one might naturally understand why Finkelstein and his supporters have drawn the logical inference that something else-other than the usual DePaul standards-might have been in play.
(the rest of this article by Matthew Abraham is well worth a read as it goes into the specific irregularities of De Paul’s tenure denial, Dershowitz’ personal war with Finkelstein — who shredded Dershowitz’ book The Case For Israel with vindictive accuracy — and the rest of the back story).
Robert Jensen wrote about the implications of Finkelstein’s case for academic freedom; and he was right.
In the United States there are fewer and fewer spaces where truth-telling is possible. Electoral politics has become a poll-driven, sound-bite enterprise. Mass media specialize in the superficial and shallow. Universities, though dominated by corporate money and the corporate mentality, still provide one of the few remaining spaces for open and honest engagement. Protecting that space is important not only for those of us in the privileged position of faculty, but for the society more generally.If Norman Finkelstein is denied tenure by DePaul, it won’t be because he was irresponsible but because he took his responsibility too seriously. If he is denied tenure, the loss will be not only Finkelstein’s and DePaul’s but also the larger project of real academic freedom and responsibility.
We could regard De Paul’s settlement and Finkelstein’s departure as a sad day for academic freedom, and in a sense it is. But the terms of his departure — the private settlement, the non-disclosure agreement — suggest that the institution had to climb down, “pay damages” or the equivalent, and admit that the tenure denial was unjust. I cannot offhand recall another case involving an outspoken critic of Israel and AIPAC at a major academic institution, in which the institution had to suffer the embarrassment of (effectively) bribing the wronged party to leave quietly. It would be far more satisfactory if the upper management of De Paul had stuck to fundamental principles of academic freedom and refrained from interfering with the tenure process; but it is something (and something new, I think) that they experienced bad publicity, embarrassment, and financial loss as a result of their misconduct.
During the same eventful period of the last 2 years, another surprise was sprung: two inoffensive academics, Mearsheimer and Walt, wrote an article which after causing quite a ruckus by its appearance in the LRB, became a book; Philip Weiss had this to say about it:
Walt and Mearsheimer’s book on the Israel Lobby is being published today. I finished it last night. I said before that it was historic, but I did not realize quite what it was till I put it down: a great work of American muckraking in the tradition of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (the meatpacking industry), Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (pesticides), and Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed (Detroit). An overkill moral beauty aimed at an outrage, some day this book will be legendary and dated. Young people will ask, What was all the fuss about? Were politicians really blacklisted for criticizing the settlements? You will tell them yes. Then they’ll pull down a yellowed copy of this book from your shelf and find it mechanical and dated.The reason it will seem dated is, it will have done its job. Ralph Nader once feared for his life; today carmakers advertise the safety of their cars, and Mike Kinsley calls Ralph “Saint Ralph.” With this book, two great foreign-policy scholars have thrown their bodies down. What you see here is their life work. They are willing to sacrifice reputation and future-career-arc for this study, and by book’s end, there is a tremendous sense of calm and achievement, when having made their case they restate their intellectual goal: to restore American foreign policy in the Middle East to its senses.
For more detail and backstory, consult the Wikipedia Summary of the Mearsheimer/Walt Controversy
The furore over Mearsheimer and Walt’s analysis of the pro-Israel lobby in US politics continues. But regardless of the outcome, or of history’s judgment on their work, the very existence and openness of the furore — and the publication of their book by a reputable press — are signs of changing times. Confirming this notion we find Tony Karon, writing at TomDispatch: Is a Jewish Glasnost Coming to America?:
First, a confession: It may tell me that I hate myself, but I can’t help loving Masada2000, the website maintained by militant right-wing Zionist followers of Rabbi Meir Kahane. The reason I love it is its D.I.R.T. list — that’s “Dense anti-Israel Repugnant Traitors” (also published as the S.H.I.T. list of “Self-Hating and Israel-Threatening” Jews). And that’s not because I get a bigger entry than — staying in the Ks — Henry Kissinger, Michael Kinsley, Naomi Klein, or Ted Koppel. The Kahanists are a pretty flaky lot, counting everyone from Woody Allen to present Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on their list of Jewish traitors. But the habit of branding Jewish dissidents — those of us who reject the nationalist notion that as Jews, our fate is tied to that of Israel, or the idea that our people’s historic suffering somehow exempts Israel from moral reproach for its abuses against others — as “self-haters” is not unfamiliar to me.
[…]
What I like about the S.H.I.T. list’s approach to the job — other than the “Dangerous Minds” theme music that plays as you read it — is the way it embraces literally thousands of names, including many of my favorite Jews. Memo to the sages at Masada2000: If you’re trying to paint dissenters as demented traitors, you really have to keep the numbers down. Instead, Masada2000’s inadvertent message is: “Think critically about Israel and you’ll join Woody Allen and a cast of thousands…”
Karon goes on to dissect one of the most popular tropes:
I’d agree that the Nazi analogy is specious — not only wrong but offensive in its intent, although not “racist”. But the logic of suggesting it is “racist” to compare Israel to apartheid South Africa is simply bizarre. What if Israel objectively behaves like apartheid South Africa? What then?
Actually, Mr. Shepherd, I’d be more inclined to pin the racist label on anyone who conflates the world’s 13 million Jews with a country in which 8.2 million of them — almost two thirds — have chosen not to live.
Although you wouldn’t know it — not if you followed Jewish life simply through the activities of such major Jewish communal bodies as the Conference of Presidents of American Jewish Organizations and the Anti-Defamation League — the extent to which the eight million Jews of the Diaspora identify with Israel is increasingly open to question (much to the horror of the Zionist-oriented Jewish establishment). In a recent study funded by the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies (an important donor to Jewish communal organizations), Professors Steven M. Cohen and Ari Y. Kelman revealed that their survey data had yielded some extraordinary findings: In order to measure the depth of attachment of American Jews to Israel, the researchers asked whether respondents would consider the destruction of the State of Israel a “personal tragedy.” Less than half of those aged under 35 answered “yes” and only 54% percent of those aged 35-50 agreed (compared with 78% of those over 65). The study found that only 54% of those under 35 felt comfortable with the very idea of a Jewish state.
And only a few years ago, in the summer of 2001, rabbinical scholar Marc Ellis could stand before a convocation of progressive and liberal rabbis and say openly:
It is a strange feeling to stand before a gathering of rabbis and speak of my vision for the future of the Jewish people, especially during a time when helicopter gunships are more and more defining the trajectory of Jewish life. In my youth, my own rabbis, first at an Orthodox synagogue and then within the conservative movement, did not have to warn us against such abuse of power. Like most Jews in America, using tanks and aerial bombardment to quiet resistance in villages, towns and cities was reminiscent of the horrors of World War II; the assault on a weak defenseless people gathered in ghettos and surrounded by superior power reminded Jews in America of the fate of European Jews in what later became known as the Holocaust.
Presumably Dr Ellis has long ago been placed on the S.H.I.T. list by the lunatic fringe. But as far as I know he was not booed off the stage, and is still a respected professor at Baylor — in fact, when last Googled he was Director of the Centre for Jewish Studies at that institution.
These are small signs, to be sure. There is little indication that the trajectory of Occupation will change, that the government of Israel can escape from the ratchet effect of its own policies, or that the massive annual subsidy and weapons sale from the US to Israel will stop this year or next year. But there does seem to be a thaw of sorts, a kind of “Prague Spring” moment which could lead to a saner and more open public discourse on the Special Relationship between the US and its Middle Eastern client.
Further reading on Jewish dissent, both Diasporic and Israeli
See also the anthologies The Other Israel and Wrestling with Zion.
Another interesting test case is coming up even as I complete this article: Lawmakers threaten to withdraw funding from Columbia University for permitting Iranian president Ahmadinejad to speak. Glenn Greenwald opines at Salon.com:
All of the hysteria over Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speaking at Columbia University is so tiresome for so many reasons, beginning with the fact that it is all rather transparently motivated by exactly what Juan Cole says: “The real reason his visit is controversial is that the American right has decided the United States needs to go to war against Iran. Ahmadinejad is therefore being configured as an enemy head of state.”
[…]
But what is new, and what most certainly is worth commenting upon, is this extremely disturbing report from The New York Sun regarding the threats made by Democratic State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver to use state power to punish Columbia for inviting a speaker whom Silver dislikes. Silver — who, among other things, has long been a leader in efforts to free convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard from prison — did not even bother to disguise the threats he was making[…]Silver sounds like two-bit hooligan making not-so-veiled threats to Columbia (”Obviously, there’s some degree of capital support that has been provided to Columbia in the past. These are things people might take a different view of”) for committing the crime of inviting a speaker whom Silver finds offensive. Is there anyone who fails to see how dangerous and improper this is — not to mention unconstitutional — that government officials threaten and punish universities for hosting speakers whom the officials dislike? Do we want our universities to be able to provide speaking venues only to individuals who are approved by the likes of Sheldon Silver and Dov Hikind?
What Greenwald touches on only tangentially and inferentially is Silver’s connection to AIPAC, ADL, and JDL (Likudist formations in the US). Instead of stating openly that Silver’s remarks adhere to a Likudist line, Greenwald implies it by bracketing him with the notorious Hikind — a weaselly tactic which I have to deplore, as it brings back a bad taste of the wicked old McCarthyist guilt-by-association slander campaigns. But in the frozen atmosphere to which I refer above, it is next-to-impossible for a reputable journalist to say: this politician is a known Likudnik and in my opinion his public stance in this matter reflects Israeli state policy more than the interests of his borough, city, or state. Despite Mearsheimer and Walt’s best efforts, pointing out even the obvious daily workings of the Lobby (which should be as matter-of-fact a feature of political commentary as pointing out the workings of the oil lobby, the gun lobby, the pharmaceutical lobby, the Christian Right lobby) is not yet polite dinner table conversation. The thaw hasn’t progressed that far yet. It will be interesting to watch the Columbia case, and see if the Lobby can get away with punishing a public institution for upholding academic freedom in an allegedly open society. Even GW Bush distanced himself from the threats, making an official statement on Fox News that America “is confident enough to let a person express his views.” Stay tuned to find out how Columbia responds to the threats and how the US media cover the story.
skol:
I saw Ahmadinejad speak. Boy was that a pisser. The president of Columbia took up a chunk of the president’s time with a really insulting diatribe. Of course, he kept going on and on about free speech, free speech, free speech. I wish someone had something to say about dignity. He was shaking through, so I have to wonder if part of his job depended on it… or maybe he just liked the thrill.
25 September 2007, 8:19 amAnyway, that public institution did not hold up any academic freedom. It was a turkey shoot: put the guy on the defensive (it didn’t work), and hear him go on about the holocaust. The only QA questions asked were about the holocaust and nukes, yet judging by the applause Ahmadinejad got at the end (which didn’t quite drown out the booing, but did win that lil competition), I think most of the cards passed up to the speaker with their questions might have been asking some more pertinent and more interesting questions. It was completely undignified.
RK:
I’m kind of disinterested in the Columbia case because it was such a PR stunt/slamfest for Columbia’s president and others. They do deserve some credit for at least doing an invite and letting the Iranian president speak; that in itself was a risk of course. I only heard the first 5 minutes live and haven’t gone back to the rest so I may be wrong, but gee whiz. I can’t see the Columbia event as centering on the issue of academic freedom. It could have, but it seemed to be just a good chance for academics (academic politicos really) to play tough and mouth off for some of the folks you talk about in this piece IMHO. Thanks for the essay above, I can’t even talk about this stuff in my “liberal” church.
25 September 2007, 11:38 amrootlesscosmo:
I’m struck (as an old CPer) by the eerie resemblance between knee-jerk Israel-defending and the kneejerk USSR-defending I used to practice: the foundational belief in encirclement by hostile neighbors, the refusal to credit or even read any criticism, the wholesale ascription of evil motives to critics even (or especially) from within one’s own camp, the private acknowledgment that all is not well, tightly linked to the strict prohibition on saying so in the enemy’s hearing (”objectively aiding imperialism/anti-Semitism”) etc. So Karon’s allusion to glasnost, and DeAnander’s to the Prague Spring, seem to me particularly apposite.
(NB: Tony Karon, quoted in DeAnander’s post, has a blog called “Rootless Cosmopolitan;” I’m a different person, though it’s cheering to find someone else proudly claiming that identity, which began as a term of Stalinist abuse.)
25 September 2007, 4:43 pmDeAnander:
@rootless a pleasure to see you here, comrade
how about the knee-jerk husband-defending of battered wives, before they finally snap and leave? the private acknowledgment that things are amiss, but staunchly keeping up a respectable face to the outside world?
sunk emotional costs? investment trap? fear of losing what little identity, solidarity or protection the marriage/citizenship/loyalty offers?
is it parallel or comparable?
25 September 2007, 6:02 pmRB:
New Mideast /US discourse…I favor that and the end to Isreali subsidy,arms, and more. Isreal is the Pentagon’s strategic deterrance “in case satellites go out the subs/Isreali nukes to attack Russia”–War does not pay! /AE Muste.
25 September 2007, 6:08 pmStop the fighting start the thinking….end reliance on fossil fuels…and take power from the Corp. MIC by reconstruct the economy–democratic socialism.
No more Profit-nationalize oil etc. investments = points toward sustainability -redesign standards if they past the test of education, necessities for humans to live and the enviroment, hopefully the coming singularity in computer speed will help.
Cooperate n make life eaiser…take out the power/control freaks by eliminte greed-minumum/ maximun wage,pay caps..an economy for efficiency-justice-humanitarian goals..we need Finkelsteins, Ward Churchills destiny in the hands of Progressive writers and watch-dog Journalists.
rootlesscosmo:
Nice to be at a site that Safari, poor timid thing, doesn’t shy away from.
how about the knee-jerk husband-defending of battered wives, before they finally snap and leave? the private acknowledgment that things are amiss, but staunchly keeping up a respectable face to the outside world?
sunk emotional costs? investment trap? fear of losing what little identity, solidarity or protection the marriage/citizenship/loyalty offers?
All these make psychological sense (Twisty, at I Blame the Patriarchy, calls the husband-defending “not my Nigel”) but don’t directly address the political history that Zionism and Communism shared. In both cases an explicit assertion was being made that workers, because they were workers, or Jews, because they were Jews, owed their primary loyalty either to the international proletarian movement (”the workers have no country”) or to the Jewish state, projected or actual. Workers in Britain, France, and elsewhere struck and mutinied in 1918-19, refusing to be sent to fight against the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War, and many of those workers formed the core of the European Communist Parties that emerged in the early 20’s; for them it was perfectly obvious that the USSR was the workers’ homeland and that its defense was the first obligation of a Communist. (This was explicitly stated in the 21 Principles that every CP had to affirm in order to affiliate with the Comintern.) This then led, inevitably I think, to a situation in which “internationalism” came to be equated with unquestioning support for Soviet state policy, internal and external, since the possibility that the interests of the world’s workers could diverge from the state interest of the SU was excluded a priori. (In “Heir to an Execution,” Abe Osheroff, Spanish Civil War and WW2 vet and former friend of Julius Rosenberg, acknowledges without apology that he would have been proud to be asked to convey secret information to the Soviets during or after the war; whatever Julius or Ethel Rosenberg actually did, the politics of the period clearly implied that a Communist had a duty to redress the power imbalance between existing Socialism and the imperialist enemy, by whatever means might come to hand.)
And similarly Zionism, from its earliest days, declared that Jews could never be full citizens of any country not their own, could never feel entirely safe from persecution, because anti-Semitism was ineradicable in even the most enlightened of liberal democracies. (Or under Socialism, which is why Jewish Socialists and Communists rejected Zionism from the beginning.) This is vigorously denied, just as Communists used to deny that their special relationship to the USSR placed them in any kind of ambiguous position; but it follows inexorably from the political first principle that class or Jewishness transcend national identity. A Russia populated by Russian citizens (without regard to national ancestry) or an Israel populated by Israeli citizens (ditto, and also without regard to religious allegiance) would be “normal” nation-states, as indeed Russia seems to be becoming; by “normal” is not meant “virtuous” or “harmless,” naturally. But the largest national minority in the US consists of people born in Mexico, or to Mexico-born parents, yet we never hear of the “Mexico lobby,” though no doubt there’s a busy trade office in Washington. Likewise there’s no “Turkey lobby” in Germany, no “Portugal lobby” in Switzerland, etc. etc. The reason, I’d suggest, is that Portugal and Turkey and Mexico are nations, not international causes; Germans or Turks or Mexicans living abroad aren’t obliged to defend every act of their respective governments, or to accuse those government’s critics of harboring some special, specially wicked animus toward them. I think this peculiar problem derives from the pernicious identification of a nation-state with a worldwide movement.
25 September 2007, 7:00 pmDeAnander:
I think this peculiar problem derives from the pernicious identification of a nation-state with a worldwide movement.
as for example the self-identification of Americans of “America” with “freedom and democracy” — which produces the same repressive atmosphere: “you are not allowed to criticise your country, for that is anti-freedom and anti-democracy”?
25 September 2007, 7:09 pmDeAnander:
wow… I own almost $6000 worth of Israel? I had no idea
There is something ironic here. In the wild fantasies of the vulgar antisemite, “Jewish Bankers” control all the world’s money and squeeze the poor by usury (loan sharking). Yet here is Israel, begging for loan guarantees, unable to manage its own economy, floundering into debt and recession right along with the US. So much for the almighty Jewish Banker of popular fiction.
But where are all those wingnut opponents of Big Gummint and welfare handouts? Why are they not squawking from every media perch?
Ah, but that’s different. Welfare handouts often go to brown people, and that’s bad. Handouts to Israel go to the worthy project of suppressing and expropriating brown people; sometime in the last 70 years Jews became Officially White Persons (no matter how some revanchists in the White America movements may bluster in their marginalised publications and rallies). So it’s not really welfare, but a Good Cause. It all makes sense.
25 September 2007, 8:07 pmR. B.:
….and I forgot to add to my post on Democratic Socialism, that this is supposed to be the 21st century already….there is a priority to maintain a sustainable world economy…war is an ancient method to solve problems used by barbarians…profit is barbaric…the goal/guidelines for investment should be humanitarian sustainability, equality, wealth(?) w/o plunder and no exploitation….take away power/control by “reconstruct the economy” democratic socialism/ Zinn People’s Untold History….
25 September 2007, 8:57 pmStan:
No doubt rootless has a point, and an interesting one at that about world movements embodied as states (I hope we can explore this theme further). The other aspect of the Zionist lobby’s influence within the US is the perfectly antidemocratic methods we employ to run elections here. State-by-state winner-take-all for the highest office in the land, no proportional representation, unlimited cash from “private” sources to fund the campaigns, and highly restricted ballot access laws across the board to prevent anything breaking up the dominant duopoly. Jewish identification, not yet as thawed as it could be, with Israel, and concommitant swing concentrations of Jewish populations in big electoral states, along with swing populaitons of Christian millenarians in the red-state southern corridor, make it very difficult for members of the duolpoly, who are always contesting for the federal government, to oppose this extremely aggressive lobby (note the treatment of Cynthia McKinney, even by her own party).
25 September 2007, 9:01 pmLinda c:
De,
Thanks, again, for another wonderful thought provoking work. You gave me much needed “fuel for the fire”, that I have been building recently, and added titles to my “must read” list.
26 September 2007, 2:03 pmrootlesscosmo:
as for example the self-identification of Americans of “America” with “freedom and democracy” — which produces the same repressive atmosphere: “you are not allowed to criticise your country, for that is anti-freedom and anti-democracy”?
I think by and large this stuff has more in common with the old colonialist “civilizing mission” than with genuinely trans-national ideologies like Communism and Zionism. Even Henry Luce, as I remember the old monster, never expected Europeans and Asians to put their admiration of “Americanism” ahead of their patriotic loyalty to their own countries.
26 September 2007, 5:36 pmStan:
Here is the article.
1 October 2007, 10:26 amDeAnander:
more in common with the old colonialist “civilizing mission” than with genuinely trans-national ideologies like Communism and Zionism
ah but isn’t the Christian Mission (the Catholic — as in kata + holos — Church and its descendants) also a trans-national ideology? and it’s the Christian Mission that underlies the mission civilisatrice…
all monotheistic religions that claim a universal revelation and have an evangelical bent seem to me to qualify as trans-national ideologies…
2 October 2007, 3:40 pmStan:
That the two are secular 20th C movements is significant, but even more so (citing Marxism-Leninism, for there are many communisms, including religous and anarcho-communisms) that the transnational movements demanded the subordination of the movement to the interests of one modern state.
I am not any clearer than that, but cosmo’s comparison is extremely interesting. There are, of course, tremendous contrasts between Zionism and ML; but the distortions in the ostensible central missions (protection of the Jews, and liberation of the proletariat) by this peculiar similarity definitley warrant a deeper look into these dynamics.
My own experience as an alumnus of the CP (even post -USSR) was one that is probably not that dissimilar to the experience of many ardent Zionists… and for me, the contradictions of that experience — even as a one-time true believer — opened the path for my own departure.
This may be a dynamic that is facilitating the “thaw.” We all have limits on our endurance to deny.
No doubt Zionism has taken European white supremacy to its bosom, and adopted the mission civilisatrice verbiage to rationalize its genocide against the Palestinians. In this there is a continuity of the civilized vs savage meme. Zionism is a colonial settler movement, after all.
But ML was not. That’s what makes cosmo’s comparison so interesting. It may have something ot tell us about organization. Again, I am only thinking vaguely on this and could be out in left field (wouldn’t be the first time). (:
2 October 2007, 6:03 pmrootlesscosmo:
I am not any clearer than that, but cosmo’s comparison is extremely interesting. There are, of course, tremendous contrasts between Zionism and ML; but the distortions in the ostensible central missions (protection of the Jews, and liberation of the proletariat) by this peculiar similarity definitley warrant a deeper look into these dynamics.
Stan: thanks for the hat tip, and I’d just add that the specific analogy I was drawing was between Zionism and Communism-in-practice, i.e. (roughly) the Comintern from the early 20’s, and then the looser network of “Moscow-allied” parties that survived, though shrinking year by year, into the perestroika years. M-L as a politics is connected with this but (as Trotskyists and others have been saying for decades) not the same thing.
DeAnander: yes, “universalist” religions do transcend national frontiers; usually, though, they insist (how accurately is another matter) that they’re concerned only with matters of faith and doctrine, not worldly things like war and commerce and tax collection. Zionism and Communism, on the other hand, challenged the nation-state in the explicitly political sphere: the complement of “the workers have no country” was “the USSR is the country of all the world’s working people,” and the complement of “Jews have no safe home in the lands of the Gentiles” is the Law of the Return.
Finally: I don’t want to put more weight on this analogy than it will carry. It started with my noticing the similarity of language and tone between the defenders of Israel and my old comrades’ defense of the USSR; the differences are clearly important too.
2 October 2007, 7:56 pmStan:
When I was CP-ing, even after the CP/CoC split of 1991, the party’s constitution still stated that we were obliged to defend “the first country of socialism, the USSR.”
Weird, eh. It was gone, but we were still defending it (and the old heads were hoping for its restoration by parliamentary means).
The tricky part was, just from the perspective of one who was active in the party, there was a great deal of truth in the party’s criticism of anticommunism as it related to the demonized (and decontextualized) western history of the Soviet Union. On the other hand, one felt compelled to add some “balancing” toward the positive when the subjects were broached of Stalin’s terror during the late 30s and the brutality of collectivization. Oddly enough, one of the accomplishments that we refelxively cited was industrialization… because we were completely in the industrial “development” paradigm. Gus Hall said he dreamed of the US as one vast construction site, when he envisioned a public works jobs bill.
It put one in the uncomfortable place of attempting to fight one propgandistic history with another; but more importantly, from the standpoint of the party member, it led us to see everyone who was perceived as being to our right or left as enemies, even as we were constantly directed to support the Democratic Party (a “pressure” politics inherited directly from the Comintern).
In the end, one was either driven further and further into the party as other relationships disappeared or became instrumental to mass work (a manipulative mindset, not unlike sales)… or one finally had to leave.
Thank goodness for feminism, in my case. It had enough of a purchase on my own intellectual framework that it led to my break with the party, which proved to be extremely hostile to feminism — which caused it to adopt a similar Comintern “moderation” by embracing a highly economistic, liberal brand of feminsm based on purely juridical equality.
Even later, as I re-affiliated with another ML organization (one that was far more self-critical than the CP, and that took pains to avoid sectarian quarrels with others), this question of feminism was one that was being addressed with little enthusiasm or depth, and the fealty to “development” (or technological optimism) remained a doctrinal constant (padded by a tolerated minority in the organization that was fairly alarmed by the mounting empirical research on biospheric destruction).
For the record, the comrades at the latter organization did excellent mass work, mostly outside the framework of class struggle (antiracism and antiwar), and in organizations that were not “democratic centralists.”
There were breaks in these walls, but the organization itself was captured in-practice by “democratic centralism,” a bureacratic model that will always stifle initiative among its members; and it was constrained by yet another reality — one that Joaquin Bustelo has remarked on at length — the fact that there is no self-conscious working-class movement in the US, and hasn’t been for many decades. When your raison d’etre is class struggle, this is a pretty big constraint.
At this point, the analog might be separating, but I thought I’d just scribble out some of my own experiences as a way of thinking out loud about this.
What De identifies as a Zionist Thaw — and I want to again cheer this piece — strikes me as not merley important, but pivotal given how simultaneously central and invisible Zionism has been in the formulation of US foreign policy in three crucial stages, beginning in 1948, then 1967, then 1973. We may now add 2001.
If there are indeed similarities between the experience of being a Zionist activist outside the mother country and being a US Marxist-Leninist, then there may be some insights available about how to turn up the heat on this thaw.
Caffeinated ramblings at 5 AM.
3 October 2007, 4:15 amrootlesscosmo:
one of the accomplishments that we refelxively cited was industrialization
That, and universal health care, and education, and democratized culture. (Satirized in the British film “I’m All Right, Jack” as “Think of all those wheat fields… and ballet every evening.”) A lot of those achievements (like “clean” industrial development because environmental destruction was a consequence of capitalist profit-seeking) were much less clear-cut than we claimed; citing them also implied (though this was never said explicitly) that the crimes of Stalinism were somehow the necessary price of rural electrification and the Bolshoi. In general there was a tendency in Marxism to assume that the historical necessity of an event could be demonstrated by pointing out that it happened.
In the end, one was either driven further and further into the party as other relationships disappeared or became instrumental to mass work (a manipulative mindset, not unlike sales)
Yes indeed. The fortress mentality not only made everyone outside an enemy (or an object of manipulation), it also nurtured an inward-looking, wrong-end-of-the-telescope attitude in which the Party seemed like an important political force, when in truth it was a tottering anachronism, kept going only by the huge efforts of its members. An organization that boasted of its “scientific” analysis spent much of its time denying evidence and refusing to analyze its own practice.
If there are indeed similarities between the experience of being a Zionist activist outside the mother country and being a US Marxist-Leninist, then there may be some insights available about how to turn up the heat on this thaw.
Could be, though as best I can tell, and contrary to the Reaganite myth, the USSR (etc.) collapsed mostly as a result of internal weaknesses and antagonisms. Something similar might lie ahead for Israel, but not, I think, as long as the US keeps supporting it with money and weapons and diplomatic cover. (Maybe Israel is the GDR in this historical analogy?) Also worth recalling is that the post-Soviet reality, from Eastern Europe to Mongolia, isn’t very pretty; the world will probably be a safer place when Israel finally ends the Occupation and stops menacing its neighbors, but a glance at the politics of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria is… not cheering.
3 October 2007, 11:21 amLegume Sam:
Stan said:
In understanding the role of the Soviet Union, I tend to rely upon the works of Kees van der Pijl, who outlined a history of “capitalist discipline,” based largely upon the spread of alienation and commodification throughout and into the things of this world.
For van der Pijl, the history of “capitalist discipline” tended (until recently) to create three different types of government:
1) the “Lockean heartland,” the primary imperialist states of the capitalist system, which for their part have instituted a veneer of civil rights within their boundaries while conquering the world outside them for profit;
2) the “contender states,” that part of the world outside the “Lockean heartland” which has declared itself capable of defying the imperialist regimes of the “Lockean heartland.” Typically, the “contender states” (from Napoleonic France to the Kaiser’s Germany to the Soviet Union to the Nazis, to name just four) employ draconian forced-march methods to “catch up” with the “Lockean heartland” in capitalist development.
3) the “third world,” that part of the world which lies as an open zone of extraction for the the “Lockean heartland.”
Now, in his most recent text, van der Pijl theorizes that this whole system is falling apart today, into a number of centers which compete with each other: the US versus Europe versus Russia versus China and so on. The main dislocation in this regard was the disappearance of the Soviet Union as a “contender state.”
At any rate, the “communism” of the period before 1991 was basically marxism yoked to the duties of a “contender state,” the catching-up in (capitalist) development being part of the spread of “capitalist discipline” across the world.
As for rootlesscosmo’s speculation of why the Soviet Union disappeared, van der Pijl confirms it:
Well, my own speculation as regards the whole “Lockean heartland” versus “contender state” frameworks, is that the “contender states” played a valuable function in the maintenance of capitalist discipline in the “Lockean heartland.” Anti-communism was a valuable disciplinary tool; it kept the global working class in line and justified phenomena such as the CIA-aided overthrow of Joao Goulart (to name just one example) in Brazil in 1964 despite the fact that Goulart was nowhere near being a “communist” of any sort, or even that he was not compliant with Western imperialism.
Fast-forwarding to the present, there were secret directives all through the ’90s specifying a need for a new enemy for the US given the prior disappearance of the USSR. After all, spreading “our brand” of capitalist discipline is easier when petty resistance can be quieted by the invocation of enemy threats. Israel’s “enemies” serve the function of this need for a new enemy. So don’t expect the imperialists to make peace in the Fertile Crescent any time soon, at least not of their own volition; endless war is still the regime’s glue.
3 October 2007, 1:37 pmDeAnander:
In general there was a tendency in Marxism to assume that the historical necessity of an event could be demonstrated by pointing out that it happened.
which leads me right back to the theology of predestination and the belief that whatever happens, happens because it is God’s Will. in each case there is a narrative of Sin (bad things that They do, which happen because They are Sinful, and the negative consequences are the just results of their sin) vs Virtue (bad things may accidentally happen because of Good Intentions that lead Us to actions, which we had no choice in enacting because of Historical Necessity or God’s Will, and the negative externalities are either denied or spun into some kind of warped benefit).
this same pair of narratives, in which causality is eagerly pursued in critique of the Other’s actions and their consequences, but happily tossed out the window in favour of denial or predestination in the case of our own, seem to be present — a pre-requisite in fact — in all authoritarian systems of thought.
the marxist trope that rootless [great to see ya here, btw!] points out above seems structurally identical w/idiocies like Fukuyama’s “End of History” meme. capitalism is dominant because capitalism is destined to be dominant; the fact that it is destined to be dominant is proven by the fact that it is dominant. or: women are destined to be subservient to men because men dominate women, and that’s just how it is. or: it’s the price of Progress, history marches on, blah blah.
in other words, predestination or Historical Necessity is the ultimate My Dog Ate It for authoritarians who need to justify bad actions and their painful consequences.
I offer along these lines the latest (imho way creepy) justification and explanatory narrative of Anglo/Euro supremacy:
Gregory Clark’s new book — have to admit I have not had time, energy, or stomach to engage deeply with his argument, he lost me when he asserted that Britain gained very little directly from its colonies. Most of Britain’s gains actually came from Britain’s internal processes of economic change. This strikes me as so patently ludicrous that I find it hard to take the author or his work seriously; but many people (whiteboys especially) will, because he asserts a virtuous narrative of genetic and cultural superiority to account for present western/anglo hegemony. In other words, mission civilisatrice meets Dawkins meets The Bell Curve. By naturalising Western hegemony into whitefolks’ genome and cultural tradition he — essentially — invokes predestination and explains the present power relations of the globe as inevitable. His solution appears to be to re-tool the cultures of the third world to make them more Anglo (hence the M.C. overtones). I feel (a) an urge to tear this argument to shreds and (b) a lack of time in which to do so. Maybe a feature FS article for some future date?
3 October 2007, 2:44 pmLegume Sam:
As De said:
Or, to put it differently, capitalism is destined to be dominant because the public is not supposed to seriously, vividly, and really imagine bringing into being a system that is radically uncapitalist. Historical “actually existing socialism” ended up in the capitalist swamp of mixed economies because, as Stalin’s “socialism in one country,” it had to adapt itself to the circumstances faced by a contender state. Venezuelan Bolivarian “socialism” is today an attempt to dig out of that swamp.
Recently I posted a rant on Docudharma/ DKos which attempted to finger “realism” as the ideology which attempts to restrain the imagination necessary to break out of the ideology of (to use De’s words) “that’s just how it is” — “that’s just how it is” meaning “don’t imagine it being differently, just adapt.”
3 October 2007, 4:26 pmStan:
Here is a link for van der Pijl; quite interesting… thanks Sam.
3 October 2007, 6:23 pmLegume Sam:
Why, you’re welcome… the key van der Pijl text (to my imagination) is Transnational Classes and International Relations, a rather thin (and densely phrased) book that is worth every one of the many pennies I had to lay out to get it…
3 October 2007, 6:41 pmDeAnander:
attempted to finger “realism” as the ideology which attempts to restrain the imagination necessary to break out of the ideology
on a side note, this issue of the constraining of the public imagination seems very important to me, and explains e.g. the controversial status of anthropology and palaeology. surveys of different cultures, especially “exotic” cultures and among these, especially indigenous and pre industrial cultures, are potentially very threatening to authoritarians because they offer alternative models and narratives for “how to live” and “what people are for,” from outside the constrained official realm of discourse.
this perhaps explains the vexed (and heated) debates that still rage over the work of Margaret Mead, the present controversies over J Diamond’s books, the popular wrangle over the Pleistocene Overkill and the health and longevity of gatherer-hunters, the importance (and controversy) of “primordial matriarchy” theory for feminists, the brutal contempt and cultivaged ignorance of industrialists and colonialists wrt “savages,” ongoing wrangles about the extent of warfare in the Neolithic, and so on. why should the lifeways of remote, outgunned, extinct or struggling peoples be of such burning interest to thinkers in the metropoles? why should these discussions arouse such passion? what each of these controversies entails at its core is a struggle over the possibility of imagining human life in a form other than patriarchy, Enclosure, wage labour, anglo supremacy, cut-throat competition, industrial capitalism, etc.
Enclosers don’t only seek to enclose land, property, information; they seek to enclose the future and the imagination. it is not just the “superiority” of the colonists’ lifeway and hence their “right” to dominate that they insist on; they insist on inevitability, that history could have taken no different course.
so it’s perhaps wholly appropriate that the global justice movement’s slogan for the last few years has been “Another World is Possible” — since this is exactly what authoritarians rigidly and punitively deny, the slogan is radical and defiant on a deep and meaningful level. as the book Threatening Anthropology documents, even studying and writing about other human worlds that were actual — if such writing widened the realm of the possible too far — became “subversive” and targeted for suppression. the authoritarian’s credo is that no other world is possible or ever will be, in other words that resistance is not only futile but fantastical, delusional.
this makes the study, preservation, and defence of indigenous peoples and their languages and cultures — and the rigorous study of not only pre-capitalist but (especially) pre-industrial and pre-agrarian/imperial paleoanthropology — important in a more than charitable or general sense. the existence of each of those “other human worlds” is one important line of defence against totalising ideologies. it reminds us that things do not have to be as they are.
even outside the human realm, the bio sciences are constantly under strain from ideological Enclosure — as a charming book details which I recently pushed into Stan’s hands with rave reviews: Liasons of Life by Wakeford is a brief and very readable layperson’s history of the embattled field of symbiology (the study of symbiosis and cooperation in biotic systems). suffice it to say that biology research which reinforced capitalist/patriarchal dogma in modelling all natural relations as hierarchical, winner/loser, individualist/isolating and predatory, was (and still is) privileged, funded, and taught preferentially — to the point of suppression of publications and wrecking of careers — over research into the role of symbiosis in evolution and ecosystem function. it seems obvious that there was/is a kapu in operation that prohibits exploration of this realm of science precisely because it would offer analogies and models outside the Enclosers’ terms of reference, i.e. provide intellectual tools for imagining Another World as Possible.
it also explains the necessity for constant demonisation of e.g. Cuba, and to a (somewhat) lesser extent the Euroland social democracies, in the US press. it cannot be admitted that these societies work in any practical way, or that the people in them enjoy anything like a good life, because they represent alternatives to the totalising neolib model peddled by the US elite. like the Great Wall of China in the heyday of the mandarins, these Enclosures of the imagination ensure that the peons will never see or hear of any alternative to the rule of their masters; the ideal world of authoritarians is a Truman Show in which only they sit on the outside, pulling the strings.
3 October 2007, 7:48 pmLegume Sam:
thanks for the book references, De.
I’m definitely interested in how romanticism (as a subversive doctrine, with its emphasis upon the imagination) echoes throughout the disciplines — sixteen years ago I applied to the University of New Mexico’s Department of English to study Romantic literature (I was accepted, but granted no teaching associateship). Even Engels, in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, admits that “in its theoretical form, modern Socialism originally appears ostensibly as a more logical extension of the principles laid down by the great French philosophers of the 18th century,” and some of these philosophers, utopians such as Charles Fourier, were part and parcel of the literary tradition of romanticism.
3 October 2007, 8:11 pmskol:
I just saw an episode of the Colbert Report where Colbert interviews Mearsheimer. You can see it through CC’s clumsy video interface here. Maybe a little silly, but maybe it’s a little sign of the times, too.
4 October 2007, 12:55 amDeAnander:
Grand old man of Israeli dissidence, Uri Avnery on Walt and Mearsheimer:
Avnery continues, further on:
He recounts his personal experiences of being prevented from speaking, or protested, in the US — as a member of the Israeli Knesset! … well worth a read.
Meanwhile, the Lobby continues to blacklist public speakers who are too sympathetic to the Palestinians: Nobel Laureate Desmond Tutu Rejected by U St Thomas, MN, Will Not Speak on Peace and Justice:
Other cases in which academics have been punished for criticising Israel.
An additional layer of irony of course is provided by the long tradition of cosmopolitan European and Russian Jewry as a culture of scholars, writers and academics who were frequently found on the leading edge of thought and philsophy labelled “subversive” and banned or repressed by State powers of their time.
4 October 2007, 4:29 pmDeAnander:
I can’t resist quoting Juan Cole’s comment on the D Tutu incident:
footnote
5 October 2007, 3:48 pmDeAnander:
Interview with Mearsheimer and Walt
22 October 2007, 2:32 pmDeAnander:
Excellent essay by Tony Karon on the panic of Likudniks at their diminishing credibility with their core demographic: Jews are becoming disenchanted with Zionism, as Daniel Pipes bewails in a recent [unintentionally comic] op/ed.
Hat tip to RootlessCosmo, who is not the same person as Tony Karon despite the coincidence of nomenclature
23 October 2007, 4:49 pmStan:
http://www.muzzlewatch.com/
25 October 2007, 7:42 pmDeAnander:
specifically this encouraging news from muzzlewatch
30 October 2007, 4:09 pmJorge:
Lovely country, Israel. See this for an eye-opener:
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/newsfull.php?newid=54431
Sex slavery and Israel’s failure to fight the growing trade
Excerpt:
Last year, the United Nations named Israel as one of the main destinations in the world for trafficked women.
By Emile Tayyip
Last year, the United Nations named Israel as one of the main destinations in the world for trafficked women, according to the BBC.
Israel has also been named as an offender in the annual U.S. State Department‘s Trafficking in Persons (Tip) report, which condemned the Jewish state for not fully complying with the “minimum standards” to eliminate sex trafficking.
According to Canadian journalist and social activist Victor Malarek, “newspaper ads from modeling and employment agencies promise exciting jobs, but the women are duped… They must submit, or they are raped, beaten and tortured. There are between 5,000 and 10,000 trafficked women in Israel and more than 280 brothels in Tel Aviv alone. It is a human rights issue the Jewish community knows about. They have a voice and they must use it.”
29 November 2007, 12:43 pmCurt:
Has anyone noticed the way Biden has been treated by Israel this past week? Damn, I had been thinking for the past few years that the US has only been pretending that it is Israels largest occupied terrortorry. This past week they have done such a good job of pretending to be under Israeli control the it makes me wonder if they are pretending to be under Israeli control becasue they really are under Israeli control.
12 March 2010, 4:42 am