The logic of today's Zionism

The twisted logic of todays’ "Zionism”:

1) Hamas committed a war crime. (Agreed).

2) Israel is justified in obliterating Gaza and making its people orphans, widows, and corpses because

3) Hamas claims to represent the Palestinians,

Israel claims to represent the Jews,

These claims cannot be questioned,

So, if Hamas attacks us we destroy those it represents,

in the name of what we believe represents us,

And all who disagree may be baited with the claim that they are traitors to that thing.

Since Israel represents and thus in some sense equals being Jewish,

All who criticize it and its actions betrays Jewish identity,

So if he is a Jew, he's self-negating (and thus self-hating),

Since criticism is attack, and cannot be allowed.

The underlying assumption is that "identities must be defended." By whom? The police and military forces claiming to represent these identities.

Their vulnerability is a call for war.

To the extent that criticism is defined as attack, disagreement as assault.

I encountered some of this in the form of a psychoanalytic scholar who once complained that an employer has stolen his "being." I guess if that happens you had better fight back in whatever way you can. War rhetoric invokes desperation. Subjects must be wary. A state and its army may be against you. (Ours, theirs, does it matter?). I also noticed that the poor fellow seems never to question himself. At least we ought to do so collectively. What do you call Jews who refuse to do this? I don't know, but I would have trouble recognizing them as being very Jewish as this way of thinking certainly isn't. But war will do that to you, and Israel has been at war since 1948.

That your identity must be defended because someone is attacking it could even be true in some sense. What one does in response, existentially/ethically, or politically, is perhaps another and harder question.

Though the people I respect have different concerns. I think of the line in Rossellini's Paisa: "These men aren't fighting for the British Empire, they're fighting for their lives." The Italian partisans were also fighting to liberate their country from an empire. American Zionists are defending an identity and ideology linked to an empire in the name of people's lives. The tragedy for the American Jewish world is that these people have allowed themselves to be drawn into America's bid for dominance in a geopolitical rivalry that pits Israel's Gulf State allies including a very repressive and reactionary Saudi kingdom against the very modern and internally contentious Iran, run by a repressive and reactionary government that the American government does not like, so we hear much about their faults and crimes, as we do about its ally, the awful Hamas. Then the warmongers say, I'm not responsible, he hit me first!

Jewish exceptionalism is a xenophobic nationalist interpretation of the covenant metaphor that supposes as fundamental not the demands of a God whose reality is universal and whose particular promises are linked to a role in that universality and a commitment to pursuits of justice that are not intelligible otherwise. This has the liability that the Volk becomes an idol and a Gemeinschaftgefuhl defined solely by its needs effectively the new worship, which as an all extremist nationalism (and fascism) is of the state. This portends the effective annulment of much of the Sinaitic Torah itself, which obligates love of the stranger, based on recognition that the soul of this people is one of exile and not even religious purity justifies an absolutized nostos. It portends no less than what the Jewish philosopher Yesheyahu Leibowitz called Jewish Nazism, which has become a specter in our time, a possibility that owes something to the problematic character of the original Zionism that owed so much to the German romantic nationalism that arose after the defeat of Napoleon's imperfect attempt to create a modern Europe based on liberty and equality instead of merely tradition and propriety. Zionism may be thought of, like the modern nation-state itself, as not necessarily evil in its most extreme corrupted form, but it allows for these horrifying possibilities we have lately been seeing.

If one Jewish life is now held to be worth an infinite number of non-Jewish lives, vengeance need acknowledge no limit. Its partisans will point to their mirroring counterpart, who may indeed think as low as the level on which they are eager to place themselves.

The logic of identity through representation also means that some people in power will be able to define what it is to be a member of the set of persons who properly claim that identity. They are policing the club. Excluded will be all those who heretically either define "being Jewish" differently (as many do) or pose it as a question that may admit of other answers (as philosophers of Judaism, refusing to bow to the demands of state partisans that they behave properly as the civil servants and ideologues they are supposed to be, must do).

I fear for the future of the Jewish people if among its leaders and thinkers no better answer is found.