Strange Hate by Keith Kahn-Harris

Author:Keith Kahn-Harris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Watkins Media

How Jews Lose

Jews have often been the ones who lose when left-wing politics turns selective. Increasingly, Jews need to renounce Israel and Zionism to be able to take a full part in progressive coalitions. In the US, some activists have argued for the exclusion of Zionists from demonstrations and other forms of protest, or at the very least for taking positions on Palestine regardless of whether that will effectively exclude Zionists.36 To continue to identify as a Zionist, of even the most liberal variety, can mean that every other point of political agreement is rendered irrelevant. Coalition-building is, by definition, an activity that requires a certain tolerance for difference. That it should be Zionism that provides the limit case for this tolerance raises disturbing questions over just why it represents an insurmountable obstacle.

This exclusion can also mean that Jews who refuse to renounce Zionism are excluded protection from some forms of antisemitism. Only the antisemitism that comes from the same (far-right) sources as other forms of racism can be recognised or combatted. For the rest, antisemitic attacks such as those on Zionist Jews from Muslim minorities in Europe may be seen as regrettable but inevitable given Israel’s actions. The existence of non-Zionist Jews helps to facilitate this dismissal. If some Jews are willing to renounce Israel and Zionism, then why can’t all of them? The warm reception that the anti-Zionist left gives to Jews who take this political path acts as a rebuke to the rest — if you could be more like that, not only would you be more secure, we would stand alongside you in fighting the forms of white antisemitism that do continue to exist.

Jews who refuse to renounce Zionism can become angry and resentful at the ways in which non-Zionist Jews are treated as the only Jews who really count on the left. Non-Zionist Jews are often dismissed as “AsAJews” — Jews who only identify as Jewish in order to speak “as a Jew” against Israel and the Jewish people — and treated as pariahs by Jewish communities; dismissed as not really Jewish at all. Yet the usefulness of those who speak as a Jew is not confined to the left. When Jews speak as Jews for or against a particular political position, they can be heard by non-Jews as saying that they are the only Jews who matter, the repository of Jewish authenticity. At some point or other, most of us have been AsAJews, even when we didn’t want to be.

Whatever Jews at different points on the religious/ ideological spectrum don’t share, the tendency to collude in selective anti/semitism and anti/racism is depressingly ubiquitous throughout. We allow ourselves to be used; we make the selective game worth playing. We are happy to join with our non-Jewish partners, indemnify them from antisemitism, and attack other kinds of Jews who accuse them of the same. We perform the good Jew/bad Jew dance for the delectation of humanity.

We allow ourselves to be used as a stick to beat other minorities.

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