The Biden 'antisemitism strategy'
completely ignores the Jewish students and educators targeted because
of their criticism of Israel
US President Joe Biden gives the
opening remarks at the Jewish American Heritage Month celebration at the
White House in Washington on 16 May 2023 (Reuters)
The Biden administration recently released
the "first-ever US National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism".
Reviewing some of the more egregious examples of antisemitism in US
history, it also emphasises cases
of "Jewish students and educators" who "are targeted for derision and
exclusion on college campuses, often because of their real or perceived
views about the State of Israel."
It continues: "When Jews are targeted because of their beliefs or
their identity, when Israel is singled out because of anti-Jewish
hatred, that is antisemitism. And that is unacceptable."
If true, this would be an important concern. However, the statement
sidesteps two related matters: first is the real history and experience
of Jewish students and educators who have been targeted for derision and
exclusion on college campuses by supporters of Israel, both Jewish and
non-Jewish, as "self-hating Jews" or as Jews who "are abetting the antisemites" because they have been critical of Israel or supportive of Palestinian rights.
The targeting of these Jewish students and educators has been ongoing
for more than two decades on university campuses, a much longer period
than the alleged targeting of ones who support Israel.
Second is the fact that Israel is singled out by its American
supporters precisely because of its Jewishness, wherein its wars,
policies, and military achievements are identified as "Jewish", an
identification that would hardly escape the legitimate charge of
antisemitism were opponents of Israel to use it.
The Biden "strategy" completely ignores the Jewish students and
educators targeted because of their criticism of Israel. It is only
concerned for those who "feel they pay a social cost if they support the
existence of Israel as a Jewish state" and never the Jewish students
"who feel they pay a social cost" for opposing or criticising the
existence of Israel.
The 'self-hating' smear
Supporters of Israel have relentlessly attacked Jewish professors
(let alone non-Jewish ones) who criticise Israel as "self-hating". Some
are appalled that there is "an even larger quantity of self-hating
Jews" among those whom they accuse of antisemitism because they support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.
Equating Jewish criticism of Israel to a form of 'Jewish self-hatred'
has been a strategy employed by the Israeli government for at least
half a century
Zionist rabbis critical of Israeli policies have also been labelled “self-hating”, as have top White House aides
who are big supporters of Israel but whom Israel’s own prime minister
described as “self-hating” for calling on Israel to "freeze" building
settlements in the occupied territories.
Equating Jewish criticism of Israel to a form of "Jewish self-hatred" is
not new but has in fact been a strategy employed by the Israeli
government itself for at least half a century.
At a 1972 conference of the American Jewish Congress held in Israel, then-Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban
explained the strategy: "The distinction between antisemitism and
anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all. Anti-Zionism is merely the new
antisemitism."
If non-Jewish critics of Israel were castigated as antisemites then
two US Jewish critics - the academic Noam Chomsky and journalist IF
Stone - suffered from a complex of "guilt about Jewish survival".
According to Eban, their values and ideology - meaning their
anti-colonialism and anti-racism - "are in conflict and collision with
our own world of Jewish values".
Eban's equation of Israeli colonial and racist policies with Jewish
tradition would be correctly condemned as antisemitic had it been done
by a non-Israeli official, as it implicates all Jews in Israel's actions
and ideals, for which the Israeli state should solely be held
accountable. Eban's insidious campaign to equate anti-Zionism with
antisemitism has now become a standard line. The current head of the US
Anti-Defamation League, Jason Greenblatt, reiterates it regularly.
Antisemitic generalisations
But the allegation that all American Jews support Israel, or that
their support of it is intrinsic to their Jewish identity, is difficult
to separate from antisemitic generalisations. Jewish identity, like all
others, is multifaceted both religiously and ethnically, let alone
geographically, culturally, and economically.
To claim Jewish identity as a synonym of Zionist ideology is something
American Jews have fought against since the birth of Zionism, and more
emphatically since the establishment of the Israeli settler colony.
If in 1949, American Jewish writer Alfred Lilienthal published his article in Reader's Digest titled, "Israel’s Flag is Not Mine", in 1950 the president of the American Jewish Committee, Jacob Blaustein,
signed an agreement with David Ben-Gurion to clarify matters that
antisemitic supporters of Israel miss. In the agreement, Ben-Gurion
declared that American Jews were full citizens of the US and must only
be loyal to it: "They owe no political allegiance to Israel."
Simultaneously, Blaustein declared that the US was not "exile", but
rather a "Diaspora", and clarified that the State of Israel did not
formally represent Diaspora Jews to the rest of the world. Blaustein
importantly added that Israel could never be a refuge for American Jews.
Even if the US were to cease to be democratic, and American Jews were to
"live in a world in which it would be possible to be driven by
persecution from America", such a world, Blaustein insisted, "would not
be a safe world for Israel either".
Instead of defending the right of Jewish students and educators to
differ with Israel, to oppose its self-arrogated claim to speak for all
Jews, and to criticise its colonial and racist policies, Biden’s
strategy contradicts the historical record and accuses them and other
critics of Israeli colonialism and racism of harassing supporters of
Israel instead.
'Singling out Israel'
There are many cases where Israel is singled out by its supporters
because of its Jewishness, while Palestinian victims and their
supporters are accused of resisting Israel on account of its Jewishness,
and not its colonial and racist policies.
For example, the Canadian-American billionaire publisher Mortimer Zuckerman
has alleged that Israel cannot make peace with the Palestinians because
they harbour "a virulent jihadist hatred of Jews and the Jewish state".
This matter, too, is ignored by the Biden strategy.
Supporters of Israel, like American academic Daniel J Elazar, argue
that Israel "was founded to rest upon Jewish values", a claim that
controversially equates the colonial principles of the Israeli state
with Judaism and Jewish identity. But he is not alone. Others like
American Rabbi Irving Greenberg, who later served as the director of the
President's Commission on the Holocaust, believed that God Himself
supported Israel in war because of his love for the Jewish people and to
make up for why He failed to defend the Jews against Hitler.
After Israel's victory in the 1967 war, Greenberg
tied the fate of world Jewry, including American Jews, to that of
Israel. He asserted: "In Europe [God] had failed to do His task....the
failure to come through in June [1967] would have been an even more
decisive destruction of the covenant."
The American Jewish writer Elie Wiesel so identified with Israeli
colonialism that he declared in 1967 those who resist Israel and fight
against it to restore their rights as enemies of the Jewish people in
its entirety: "American Jews now understand that Nasser's war is not
directed solely against the Jewish state, but against the Jewish
people."
During the 1973 war, when Egypt and Syria invaded their own territories, occupied by Israel, to liberate them, Wiesel wrote
of being for the first time in his adult life "afraid that the
nightmare may start all over again". For Jews, he said, "the world has
remained unchanged ... indifferent to our fate."
Other American supporters of Israel, like Jewish literary critic Irving Howe,
insisted that those who do not support Israel hate Jews: Israel’s
international isolation, he declared, was "sour apothegm: in the warmest
of hearts there’s a cold spot for the Jews".
Praising Israeli atrocities and wars as 'Jewish' achievements is no
different from condemning them as 'Jewish' crimes. Both are abhorrently
anti-Semitic
The recognition of Israel's policies as "Jewish" or ones enacted in
defence of the Jewish people extends beyond its American Jewish
supporters. Many American Christian fundamentalists also support Israel precisely because it is Jewish.
The Zionist conquest of the land of the Palestinians was described by
the recently deceased pro-Israel Christian fundamentalist leader Pat Robertson
as "a miracle of God". He asserted: "The remarkable victories of Jewish
armies against overwhelming odds in successive battles in 1948, and
1967, and 1973 are clearly miracles of God".
Robertson identified not only Israeli military incursions as part of
God's plan for the Jewish people, but he also depicted Israeli
achievements as Jewish achievements: "The technological marvels of
Israeli industry, the military prowess, the bounty of Israeli
agriculture, the fruits and flowers and abundance of the land are a
testimony to God's watchful care over this new nation and the genius of
this people."
The Biden strategy seems oblivious to the fact that praising Israeli
atrocities and wars as "Jewish" achievements is no different from
condemning them as "Jewish" crimes. Both claims are abhorrently
antisemitic.
'Evangelical Christian commitments'
Another plan outlined in the new Biden "strategy" is the US
government’s effort to "continue to combat antisemitism abroad and in
international fora - including efforts to delegitimise the State of
Israel." This includes "an unshakeable commitment to the State of
Israel’s right to exist, its legitimacy, and its security. In addition,
we recognise and celebrate the deep historical, religious, cultural, and
other ties many American Jews and other Americans have to Israel."
Statements like these again generalise about all American Jews by
ignoring those who lack “deep” or even shallow ties to Israel - or whose
ties to Israel compel them not to support its claims about Jews or its
policies towards Palestinians. Rather than combating antisemitism, such a
coupling of American Jews with Israel reiterates Zionist Jewish and US
Christian and Evangelical views of Jews, to which many American Jews
object.
Gallup polls
show that the majority of American Protestants who support Israel do so
because Israel is "Jewish". This applies as much to the average citizen
as to evangelical and fundamentalist Christian US presidents. In 1977, Jimmy Carter,
contrary to Blaustein's 1950 agreement with Ben-Gurion, insisted that
"our Jewish citizens" – without adding any qualification - "have this
deep commitment to Israel", which partly justified Carter’s shocking
statement that "I would rather commit suicide than hurt Israel."
Former President Bill Clinton, in turn, declared: "The truth is that the
only time my wife and I ever came to Israel before today was 13 years
ago with my pastor on a religious mission." Clinton added: "We visited
the holy sites. I relived the history of the Bible, of your Scriptures
and mine. And I formed a bond with my pastor."
Later, when the pastor became very ill, he told Clinton: "If you abandon
Israel, God will never forgive you," and that "it is God's will that
Israel, the biblical home of the people of Israel, continue forever and
ever". These evangelical Christian commitments to Israel may satisfy
many Zionists but not necessarily all American Jews.
That Biden's strategy implies that Israel's Jewish supremacy is part
of Jewish identity exposes this part of his plan as a declaration of war
on American Jews who criticise Israel
Declaring his undying love for Israel, Barack Obama understood that
Israel did not represent the Israeli people - Israeli Jews and Israeli
Palestinians - but that it represented, contrary to Blaustein’s
agreement with Ben-Gurion, the "Jewish people" worldwide. Obama
emphasised that "I am secure and confident about how deeply I care about
Israel and the Jewish people."
When German-American Jewish academic Hannah Arendt,
a critical supporter of Israel, was accused of not "loving" the Jewish
people, unlike Obama, she declared that she did not love any people as
"I love only my friends".
Biden, too,
would not be outdone when he declared that "If I were a Jew, I would be a
Zionist", implying that those American Jews who are not Zionists are at
fault. He added: "My father pointed out to me that I did not have to be
a Jew to be a Zionist."
Ironically, it is those Jews and non-Jews who insist that Israeli
colonialism and dispossession of natives has no relationship to
Jewishness, that stealing someone else's land is not an inherent Jewish
trait, who are immediately branded as "self-hating" and "antisemitic" by
those who insist on the Jewishness of Israel and on the Jewishness of
all its policies and actions.
Today, an increasing number of American Jews seek to separate
themselves from Israel, its Jewish supremacist regime, and its colonial
crimes. As they are targeted for their political positions by
pro-Israel lobbies and smeared as "self-hating", it seems an inopportune
moment for the Biden administration to defend American Jewish
supporters of Israel at the expense of American Jewish critics.
In his strategy, Biden, like Clinton, Carter, and Obama - not to mention
the Bush dynasty - wants to champion American Jewish supporters of
Israel while repressing its American Jewish critics - sending a
deplorable and hateful message.
The overwhelming condemnation of Israel as an apartheid state by the
West’s own human rights industry should have given Biden pause.
That Biden's new strategy to combat antisemitism seems to imply that
Israel's Jewish supremacy is part of Jewish identity, or the more
egregious imputation that Israeli colonialism and dispossession of
native populations are part of Jewishness, exposes this part of his plan
as nothing short of a declaration of war on American Jews who criticise
Israel, let alone those non-Jews who do so.
Zionism’s Jewish critics have attacked it for more than a century as an
antisemitic ideology, demonstrating time and again that antisemitism is
the highest stage of Zionism. Biden’s strategy only proves this dictum
once again.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.