"ALL CAPS IN DEFENSE OF LIBERTY IS NO VICE."

Friday, October 10, 2014

JEWISH ANTI-ZIONISM

Eylon Aslan-Levy wrote about Jews who act against Israel and its best interests:
Edward Said hoped for a one-state solution in which Jews would be a minority, despite admitting that he could not be sure of their safety – “the fate of the Jews” in an Arab Palestine worried him “a great deal.” It is difficult to believe that this concern for Jewish well-being is genuine if anti-Zionists seek to impose a solution that most Jews fear.

But Jews, too, can be anti-Zionists. Jews excel in many fields, and Israel-bashing is no exception. The Neturei Karta cult appears at virtually every anti-Israel demonstration in the world, out of a conviction that the Jews should not have a state before the coming of the Messiah. There is no shortage of Jewish far-Left radicals who endorse the boycott movement or rabble-rouse at anti-Israel demonstrations.

So are these anti-Zionist Jews anti-Semites too? There is certainly no logical reason why a person cannot be prejudiced against a group into which he was born. It is certainly possible to be complicit in one’s own oppression: women can inculcate their daughters with repressive gender norms; Malcolm X used the trope of the “house Negro” to explain the reality of acquiescence toward oppressive power structures.

But it would be a folly to label Jewish anti-Zionists as necessarily anti-Semites.

In rejecting Zionism, they repudiate a specific answer to the Jewish Question. But unlike their gentile counterparts, they are not totally indifferent to the fate of the Jewish people: they too would suffer the consequences of Jew-hatred in a world with no safe haven. Unlike gentile anti-Zionists, ready to subject hapless third-parties to the risks of their own ideological mission, Jewish anti-Zionists would at least pay some personal price for their own miscalculations (Diaspora anti-Zionists, admittedly, far less than Israelis). Their opposition to Zionism might make them misguided or naïve – I would say useful idiots – but it need not necessarily make them self-hating or prejudiced against their people.
Maybe not, but if you know where to look, there are "Jews" out there who know perfectly well what fate could await them too, and don't care one bit. They go by a mentality Winston Churchill once described - appeasers who feed crocodiles hoping they'll be eaten last.

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