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Table of Contents -- Next>> A
NOVUM: PROUDLY "JEWISH" ANTI-ISRAEL IDEOLOGUES Unashamedly "Jewish" anti-Israel ideologues are increasingly active, and evident, on (and off) our college and university campuses. (Indeed, much of this ISRAFAX issue [see Challenges to Jewish Identity) deals with the problem, CUR devoted a day-long international conference this August to it, and the previous issue of our lsrazine web-magazine examines it at length [click here to view].) A key issue is why such a phenomenon exists. It may be related to the prior medieval and early-modem history of the meshummad, the Jewish convert who attacked Judaism, and to the emergence in secular modernity of what the Trotskyite Isaac Deutscher, a former Jew, called-himself a proud exemplar-the "non-Jewish Jew". But contemporary self-described, proudly "Jewish" anti-Israel activists who willingly lend themselves to anti-Zionist and anti-Israel groups, are a novum, a new phenomenon. Exhibiting a psychodynamic clearly different from earlier forms of "Jewish self-hatred", the new Gestalt has something to do with the peculiar dynamics of modem, post-WWlI North American democratic assimilationism. This enables a Jewish "religious" identity to be retained, and even affinned, even as one assumes directly antagonistic personas. One can today be not only secular and "Jewish" simultaneously, but "Jewish" and progressively "anti-Zionist" at the same time. Such paradoxical amalgams, facilitated in secular America by the decline of overt, religious' anti~Semitisri1,-'are reinforced' by an all-pervasive "post-modern" ignorance:' 'Among -manymarginal Jews, this "cloud of unknowing" envelopes not only what Judaism really is, its unique beauty and power, but also historical and political knowledge generally, let alone the specifics of Zionism and the so-called "Arab-Israeli contlict". Such identity fuzziness in turn lends itself to the counter-factualities of "progressive" anti-Israel propaganda. Some marginal "Jews",
idealistic young people often discovering "causes" for the
first time, and exposed to compelling, charismatic advocacy virtuosos
(a.k.a. propagandists), are desirous-under peer-group pressures--of
being, and of being seen to be, "on the right side" of key
current issues. Simultaneously, under no overt pressure to give up their
residual and undefined "ethnic" identity, they are attractive
candidates for, and Importantly, such chameleon-like ego-identities are attractive precisely to "leaders" who have learned how to appropriate and manipulate the prevalent moral-political language of universal human rights, and to use it to valorize political movements which in fact involve terrorism, suppression of basic rights, oppression of women, antisemitism, and so on. Such movements, turned inside out, and presented as worthy causes embodying justice and equity, offer individuals who formerly would have been excluded, and identified with "the enemy", an "honored", ego-reinforcing place in a cult-like "movement"-Israel Apartheid Week, the various disinvestment and anti-"occupation" groupuscules, and so on. And this in tum validates precisely their "Jewish" identity by energizing it to oppose the distortedly misrepresented situation and policies of the particularized Jewish state which their new ideological bedfellows identify with contemporary evil. Precisely the moral certitude and dynamism of such proud" 'Jewish' anti-Jews", who can't be "antisemitic" because, after all-as they (and their objectively antisemitic handlers) unceasingly assert-they are Jewish. Politically, such identity confusion, dressed up as courageous moral commitment, is precisely what some students on campus find attractive. "Jewish" anti-Israelism, on and off campus, is a complex and often dream-like phenomenon, in which Jews, formerly identified as the evil and threatening Other, now do the work of antisemites by self-righteously ostracizing precisely the Jewish state as the political Other. Hence they play a role in a new kind of displaced-identity politics which clearly points to the Jewish state's destruction. This largely new, and indeed cult-like phenomenon, is growing, and if we fail to grapple with, let alone wilfully ignore, it, we do so at our own, and Israel's, peril. (Prof Krantz, Editor of ISRAFAX, is Director of the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research) Table of Contents -- Next>> |
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