What's a Jew to Do?

The dual problem of Israel and antisemitism...

For full disclosure, I am partly of a Jewish background. My mother was a Russian/Lithuanian Jew, and I moderately attended a Reform Jewish temple as a kid up until my Bar Mitzva. I grew up with Challah bread being the default choice for sandwiches, getting to celebrate both Chanukah and Christmas, and I went through the basic cultural rituals at temple and did the Bar Mitzva thing. On my father’s side, I’m Slovenian, Polish and German, but through maternal ancestry I am Jewish.

As far as the religion itself goes, I’ve effectively been an atheist since I was a preteen, I’m not sure I ever really believed in the Jewish religion so much as moderately participated in it just because my mother had me do it. I did not ever wear a kippah outside of when I was at temple growing up. My parents also did not explicitly raise me to believe in a religion, my mother was a multiculturalist humanities type who was keen on a unitarian-like view of religion, while my dad was a skeptic society member who studied esoterica, and my parents otherwise took the general approach of “show the kid world culture and let him make up his own mind” and exposed me to various religions. But with the religion aside, I identify as an ethnic and/or cultural Jew. Like much of modern American Jewry, this comes packed with being a “mutt” of mixed descent boiling down to Eastern European heritage. In a sense this makes Jews obviously a category of White People, but it has the connotation of being “off-white”.

Of course, one can’t grow up as a Jew in today’s world without also internalizing the pretty well-established fact that your people were the targets of a massive genocide campaign by the Nazis within the living memory of people your grandparents’ age. One also becomes cognizant growing up as an American Jew that one lives in a culture in which Christianity is the default dominant religion, while Christianity has a mixed relationship with Judaism that is both dependent on it for its existence and in conflict with it, while the history of antisemitism is partly connected to Christianity. Experiencing Jews being the butt of a cheap joke in the cultural dialogue of “normie whites” and Christians comes along with this. Jews are *not* “normie whites”.

One also learns that Jews are accused of a multitude of things, from being a selfish cabal of rich people, capitalists and bankers who effectively run the world, to a cabal of radical communists who infiltrate or destroy European civilization, to generally just being crazed degenerates. The boogie Jew banker trope is an exaggeration based on historical anecdotes going back to the Middle Ages and the survival mechanisms that Jews took to in Europe and in relation to the Catholic church. The average Jew is “middle class”, far from an ultra-rich cabal, but Jewish associations with high finance have been leveraged to a point of cliche. The Jewish association with communism also is an exaggeration based on historical anecdotes about the high population of Jews among the Bolsheviks. This gets leveraged as fuel for antisemitic conspiracy theory.

What’s funny is that Jews do have a high profile in the intellectual world, but it’s roughly split between left-wing and right-wing intellectualism - it contains both prominent communist thinkers and prominent libertarian capitalist thinkers (Murray Rothbard, Ayn Rand, Ludwig Von Mises, were all Jews). The apparently high propensity within Jewry towards intellectualism and high IQ’s is also inconvenient for the “race realists” into white identity politics who put emphasis on questions of Race and IQ, as Jews and Asians are the true “master races” of statistical averages in such shallow terms. Most definitely not either Germans or Anglo-Saxons. Anti-Jewish sentiment in such a context has connotations of anti-intellectual resentment.

In a notable way, Jewry is associated with cosmopolitanism by the nature of the fact that Jews have been so spread out geographically and the history of functioning as a somewhat nomadic group or a cast out group that attached itself to some other culture. And it may very well be that in the post-WWII world, Jewry has been psychologically affected by the holocaust and has since then often vouched for or doubled down on humanist and multiculturalist perspectives, marked by a certain sensitivity about “the other”. “Cultural Jewry” in this sense has the connotation of promoting racial and ethnic and cultural intermingling and a global perspective. This inadvertently lends fuel to the notion that Jews spread “cultural Marxism” and “globalism”. But this also isn’t a universal trait of Jewry by any means, there has always been a more conservative and reactionary part of Jewry as well, and this especially rears its head in Israeli politics, which we inevitably must get to.

The establishment of the modern state of Israel, in the particular way it was done, and the conflict with the Palestinians that has brewed and escalated since then, creates a monkey wrench for “The Jewish Question”. I have never personally felt any particular attachment or loyalty to the state of Israel, nor as a secular Jew do I have any dog in a fight between Jews in a religious sense and Muslims. I recall hearing about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the news as far back as childhood memories from the early to mid 90’s. It intuitively seemed ugly from the jump, and from a secular or Atheist perspective it is incredibly easy to just say “both sides suck” on the issue. I don’t believe there is such thing as any race or ethnicity having a legitimate claim to a nation-sized territory, and I put no stock in claims based on religious identity.

But the issue runs deeper than a mere religious conflict between two religions I don’t believe in. It has political, ethnic and territorial aspects. The simple fact of the matter is that the Palestinians were pretty blatantly wronged long ago by being forcibly kicked out of their own dwellings and subjected to an apartheid style system, and that the Israeli government has resorted to escalated violence against them in response to the inevitable blowback resulting from that scenario. This has ended up turning Israel into a perpetual warzone and pouring gasoline on the fire of Islamic radicalism, while also unfortunately adding fuel to the fire of antisemitism in the process. Netanyahu and the Likud Party he represents are reactionary nationalists who believe in more or less maintaining Israel as a Jewish ethno-state and embrace a Machiavellian “victory by any means necessary” approach to the Palestinians that broaches genocide.

The problem with the Zionist rationalizations about Israel is that it amounts to a type of ethnic and/or religious nationalism, I don’t believe that such nationalism is rationally justified, including either a Jewish version of it or a Palestinian version of it. Claims of ancestral rights to land or territory, especially entire nations, inherently get negated over time by the natural flow of migration in a significant way, especially in the context of the modern global world, and Israel in particular has passed through multiple hands over many years throughout history in such a way that makes it an arbitrary judgement call to say it is properly “owned” by either Jews or Palestinians. But Israel as a modern state is definitely tied up in problematic geopolitical aspects relating to the British and America, its Jewish population is significantly European transplants, and the Israeli government has persistently dispossessed people who were occupants of at least a significant part of the territory and have done war crimes.

This may be a difficult pill for some people to swallow, but the following things can both be simultaneously true: (1) the Israeli government is a bad actor and the Palestinians are generally their victims and (2) there is an increase or resurgence in antisemitism in America and around the world in recent years. The issue is, shocker, complicated. Many of Israel’s critics are themselves Jews, and otherwise, much of it are liberal and left-wing anti-war and anti-imperialist types who have no issue with Jews. It is a cheap and lazy smear tactic to simply conflate criticism of Israel or Zionism with antisemitism. Simultaneously, it is true that people who actually are antisemites and neo-Nazis bandwagon on the anti-Israel cause, and some left-wing activist types are too dense to be able to parse the difference between principled criticism of Israel and stuff that crosses the threshold into plain old Jew Baiting.

Meanwhile, the “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory that the right often talks about is laced with antisemitism, and even a portion of the American black community says some wild things about Jews and has warmed to neo-Nazism (see Kanye West and Candace Owens). Blood liberal conspiracy talk about Jews has become pretty mainstream in conservative discourse, and the alt-right was heavily associated with people who are holocaust deniers and “Hitler was a good guy actually” types. The anti-Jewish conspiracy theories are old canards, but they carry weight with people as a lazy scapegoat explanation for what really are the problems with capitalism and a helping of good old anti-communist paranoia. The anti-Jewish canards are an old tradition, including an American one, that predates the Nazis and was influential on them.

Ironically, Israel itself in some ways mirrors the logic and tactics of the Nazis, keeping Palestinians cloistered in camps and engaging in genocidal policies towards them. The problem is that one can’t publicly criticize this without being confronted by neoconservative apologetics and the misguided abuse of antisemitism accusations. The Jewish community itself seems roughly divided on the topic between Zionists and non-Zionists. But that doesn’t stop people from automatically assuming that Jews must support whatever Israel does and trotting out tropes about self-hating Jews or “race traitors” for anyone who disagrees. This is especially annoying when it’s coming from non-Jewish white liberal centrists, deciding for us who is or isn’t an authentic Jew or what counts for respectable Jewish opinion. While pro-Palestinian sentiment has grown among the general American population, at the end of the day even the progressive left is beholden to a Democratic Party that is pro-Israel.

Now that October 7th happened, Israel has had its own 9/11 moment and escalated the situation in a way that’s worse than ever, possibly taking us even closer to the prospect of a 3rd world war, and the ideological lines have been drawn in the sand. As a result, the political ideological sphere has had a lot of people show their true colors as perfectly fine with the very things they otherwise would object to if it was done by a non-Israeli foreign dictatorship, while the political establishment has generally doubled down on its support for Israel - including Donald Trump, who is actually rhetorically pro-Israel to a point where he’s alienated the antisemitic portion of his supporters. Simultaneous to this is an increase in the pro-Palestinian left, but without it being effective at anything and practically becoming an obsessive single-issue topic.

Israel’s biggest supporters would seem to be (1) Fundamentalist Christians who don’t necessarily care about Jews so much as view them as a chess piece for the end times, or who otherwise feels some obligation to Jews due to its connection to Christianity, and naturally view themselves in opposition to Islam (2) New Atheist types following the footsteps of Christopher Hitchens, who are pretty overt western chauvinists and militaristic neoconservatives and who essentially view the Arab and Muslim world as barbarians (3) conservative and liberal centrist Jews and (4) Of course, the US foreign policy establishment itself, which selectively favors Israel as an “ally”, wrapped up in the dynamic of the old “war on terror” and various geopolitical power machinations.

In the process of this, the US government has essentially been engaging in a “war by proxy” policy of sending weapons to Israel and pledging unconditional support for it, with perhaps at best the occasional ineffective rhetorical suggestion to not kill too many civilians while helping them do just that anyways. All this while pro-Palestinian white leftists are left to virtue signal about it online or otherwise funnel their energy into Green Party mavericks such as Jill Stein, who basically functions for the election cycle as an ineffective cypher and a spotty Ron Paul type of figure for some people. The leadership of the Democratic Party shows no sign of trying to de-escalate the situation, with Kamala Harris promising to beef up the military industrial complex even more than it already is, while the progressive left is stuck voting for them or otherwise is left in a void of disenchantment with the Democrats, but without power.

Some sort of de-escalation effort is what should be on the table, but the US government is clearly more interested in joining with Israel in agitating against Iran and supporting whatever Israel does even when it violates international law and the Geneva conventions. With Israel now escalating things even further with their actions toward Syria, it unfortunately does not look like there is any solution in sight. The situation just gets worse at every turn. I’m not in the business of making predictions. But let’s try not to immanentize the eschaton or provide any further cannon fodder for actual antisemitism to rationalize itself with. Let’s not escalate further into dystopia.