It’s wrong to conf late Zionism with Jewishness

A FEW weeks ago Ben Levitas, former chairperson of the Cape Council of the SA Zionist Federation, published a piece ominously titled “The clock is ticking for Jews in SA”.

While I share Levitas’s concerns about genuine anti-Semitism wherever it arises, it is unfortunate that much of his article relates to hostility towards Zionism, as opposed to hostility towards Jewish people.

Zionism is racism

Racism suggests the belief that different groups of people are or should be treated differently. This is usually coupled with a power dynamic which enables those who hold said belief to enact it as a reality between themselves and the subject of said belief.

The idea of Israel as an ethnostate with a guaranteed Jewish majority is racist. This is because the only way to institutionalise this sort of scenario is by directly and persistently discriminating against those on the land who are not Jewish.

The reason for the Law of Return, for different laws regulating the rights of Jews and Palestinians, for checkpoints, occupation, the blockade, settlements, arbitrary detentions, is all ultimately the same racist commitment to treating Jewish Israelis as first-class citizens and Palestinians as less than that.

What of Jewish safety?

Within Jewish communities, Zionism is often framed as a the simple desire for collective Jewish safety – and, of course, Jews, like all other people, deserve to be safe wherever they are. But genuine safety depends on true democracy, equal rights, freedom and dignity for all. Safety on the basis of racism will always rely on brute force, and thus only perpetuate continued systemic violence against those groups whose identities are excluded from the initially proposed safety goal.

The founding charter (1977) of Netanyahu’s Likud clearly commits to the idea of Jewish supremacy on the land of historic Palestine: “The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable and is linked with the right to security and peace; therefore, Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”

But it is not only the right wing who endorse racism as foundational to the state of Israel. Many of the earliest Zionists, who often identified themselves as socialists, were openly committed to the expulsion of Palestinians before, during and after the Nakba, rationalising this for themselves as a “necessary evil”. David Ben-Gurion, first prime minister of Israel, said the following of Palestinian resistance in 1938: “… let us not ignore the truth among ourselves … politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves … the land, the villages, the mountains, the roads are in their hands. The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country, while we are still outside.”

There are many Jewish people in South Africa who identify themselves as “liberal Zionists”, but it is long overdue that these people examine the inherent contradiction in this identity. The “liberal” paradigm is ostensibly based on fundamental commitments to the values of liberty and equality, and yet Zionism finds its foundation in the desire to empower Jewish people by disempowering non-Jewish people on the land of historic Palestine. The notion that this is justified by the history of European anti-Semitism is a notion which implies that racism against Jews is immoral but racism by Jews is not.

To be against some forms of racism and not others is to endorse a racist anti-racism. A true anti-racism therefore demands that whichever values a society affirms, it affirms for all those who are present within it. For those who endorse the liberal egalitarian paradigm, the only logically consistent way to do so is to commit to liberty and equality for all. Yet Zionism not only fails to prioritise the liberty and equality of Palestinians, but actually functionally depends on degrading it.

Levitas comments on the fact that there are many biblical and historical references to “Zion” and “Israel” which are thousands of years old. This is obviously true, but his implication – that this is evidence of an inextricable link between Jewish identity and present day Zionism – is misleading. According to Jewish tradition we are in the year 5 784 and yet it is only in the last 130 years that references to “Zion” and “Israel” have come to be used in relation to the desire for a Jewish supremacist ethnostate.

While, regrettably, some Jewish people have internalised a kind of unyielding support for the state of Israel as central to their Jewish identity, to generalise this sort of relationship as defining of Jewish identity is itself anti-Semitic, because it implies that there is something inherently Jewish about apartheid, something inherently Jewish about occupation, something inherently Jewish about genocide.

One thing that most Jewish people around the world do have in common is familial links to victims of the Nazi genocide. It is difficult to think of a position more offensive to their memory than to insist that the only legitimate expression of Jewish identity is one which foundationally commits to a decades-long campaign of racist subjugation and ethnic cleansing of another people.

It is normal for any thinking, feeling person to be resolutely opposed to Israel’s ongoing campaign in Gaza. Thus the insistence on conflating the state of Israel with the Jewish people as a whole actually proposes a basis for anti-Semitism. If it were indeed fundamental to Judaism to perpetrate genocide and ethnic cleansing, then I myself would be pretty opposed to Judaism! Fortunately, this is not the case. But it does highlight that one of the most powerful ways to prevent anti-Semitism is to clearly demonstrate that such vile actions are not at all representative of what it means to be Jewish.

I would like to form a united front with Ben Levitas against anti-Semitism in South Africa, but in order to do so we need to first agree on what anti-Semitism actually is. I think that anti-Semitism is about hatred of Jews because they are Jews. Raising the alarm in relation to increasingly prevalent anti-Zionism is not likely to achieve anything for Jewish people except the manufacturing of fear. Of course, occasionally some instances of anti-Zionist action can include an anti-Semitic component, and I am fully committed to confronting such cases head-on wherever I encounter them. However, for us to work together, my counterpart would need to be committed to the reverse, to affirm clearly where criticisms of Israel are simply valid, obvious moral objections that have nothing at all to do with the hatred of Jews.