On Judaism and Zionism, one slight caveat

Political ideas of conflict, such as those associated with revolution, have been replaced by notions like trauma, which are merely psychological. This accompanied the shift after the period 1967-89 to the model of the Holocaust and the Gulag instead of capitalism, so that injustice is replaced by the theological/ethical concept of evil. A reflection of this on the liberal-left is the social war against racists and other people with bad attitudes, on whom all oppression is now blamed. Trauma is the psychological correlate of evil. It is totally depoliticized. This, along with economic success in the world's leading conservative power, the United States, is the reason why most Jews today are conservative. Indeed, the continuing injustice towards the Palestinians is caused more by the United States than Israel itself, which is just not that powerful by itself; it has succeeded as a neo-colonial power because it is basically the 51st state.

Astonishing is the fact that most Jews today care more about their own national, and economic and military, security than about any kind of justice. All you conservative Jews and radicals, where were you at Sinai? I was there and heard a different message. The God I heard speak there is against all forms of oppression and injustice. You're not; you're wrong; you will lose.

Evil is a moral and not a political concept. In fact, politics is realized in an enterprise that basically requires peace, which is democracy. War is what corresponds to the thinking of evil just as politics corresponds to injustice. The confusion between injustice is systematically and cynically put forth constantly by today’s “Zionists” (the scare quotes marking that this is not a national liberation movement anymore but only the defense of a police state at war against poor people at its margins) in order to claim that whoever is against what we do wants to kill us. This amounts to the refusal of all debate and so every kind of democracy or polis, every truly political society, where conflicts are acknowledged, and openly pursued as if among fellow citizens who are “friends,” not enemies. The anti-democrat says, if you criticize or disagree with me, you are my enemy, and I ought to kill you because you obviously want to kill me. Disagreement is violence. Our contemporary pacified capitalist “democracies” have this character, of systematically enforcing the identification of all political will and subjectivity with the violence of “terrorism.” “Zionist” discourse today is wholly part of that, and it exists and flourishes because of how well it matches the American right-wing liberal ethos and police state system, which is at war against parts of its own population (and potentially everyone in it).

And it precisely because the question is not whether there should be a Jewish presence in Israel/Palestine, that those who perpetrate this notion of permanent war — to defend something that is in no way threatened, Israel now being a fortress state with a wall excluding the poor people on its borders, and armed to the teeth, the world’s most militarized society, its security and that of its people is not in very much danger, and that is obvious. It has been threatened and could be by other regional nation-states, or even by ideologically driven mass movements, but the Palestinian people themselves do not threaten the everyday lives of Israeli people. The threat is economic, that of poor people in their midst, and the response has been one of military violence, with the state of Israel siding with right-wing and militarist forces the world over. This conflict is not about Judaism, except in so far as it cheapens and undermines it by committing the nation and, in the attempt at least, most Jews the world over, to injustice. It might be a good reason to want to retain some connection to Judaism but refuse identification with the Jewish people as their interests are now defined. Of course, there is an interest in their being no more Holocausts, but of course, this is misconceived because the “Zionists” think that what defines the Holocaust is that it was against the Jewish people, whereas what really defines it is some things that are very different indeed from all traditional anti-semitism and that are very much real possibilities within our world today of things that can happen to all kinds of people, as indeed they did during the war. If the right owns Jewishness, as they certainly seem to (and “ownership” is not the wrong word perhaps, because it is above all business interests that are involved here), then I shall will myself as a Jewish non-Jew. I don’t accept my identity on their terms, but I refuse to believe that they define what is Jewish. They lie.

If Jews are for the capitalist police state and its global civil war against the world’s people, include me out. Except that I can read too, and I can read the Torah, Talmud, Jewish philosophers, and other things, and I don’t see any of it as a recipe for rule of the world’s people by smug billionaires. There is the side of Pharaoh and that of the Prophets. I don’t read the Prophets as legitimating this. You are on the wrong side of us and of you.