Another Time…Another Place?
“Don’t preach Zionism to me.”
Those words were not spoken by an “activist” on an American campus. They did not come from Zohran Mamdani, Abdul el-Sayed, Zack Polanski, Jeremy Corbyn or Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
They came from an Israeli student for whom “Zionism” was second nature, scarcely debatable. He said them to me in Jerusalem in fall 1972. We were in a makeshift coffee house in Hebrew University dorms on Mount Scopus. I’d been singing American protest songs to a five-string banjo, on which I could do passable fakes. But I had told him as well that I was a Zionist. So, he responded.
We had a curious discussion, my Israeli friend and I, as we began to talk about politics. I also explained that I was a socialist.
Since I lost track of him long ago, let’s just call him Moshe. He was a little older than I was. Israeli students went into the army before university. He was a Labor supporter, and an even-tempered fellow. He understood that though not hostile to Mapai’s legacy, I was to its left. Anyway, Mapai, the principal party that founded Israel, identified as socialist. We laughed when he noted that American socialists lacked any meaningful socialist option at election time while he voted for a party that both called itself socialist and virtually founded his country.
He was surprised when I told him that just after arriving to begin ulpan, some months back, I’d joined a (small) Jerusalem march supporting Arab villagers from Biram and Ikrit, who had lost homes in the 1948 war.
If he wondered – I suppose he did, maybe with bemused annoyance – what business I had marching in an Israeli protest, he didn’t say so. He would probably have ascribed it to a 20-year old’s chutzpah. But such a query would not have been entirely misplaced. Citizens alone should play determinate roles in a democratic society – most of the time. They share burdens, gain rewards from or suffer consequences for their elected government’s actions, whether or not they favor them. That’s so whether they express themselves in voting booths or in the streets. I had been a non-citizen marcher.
If he had challenged me, I’m not sure if I could have articulated a smart response back then, at least not swiftly. Perhaps I would have pointed out that a focus on who has a “right” to say what is often a shut-down mechanism – really, a “shut-up” mechanism aimed to skirt serious attention to the actual content of criticism.
Yet shouldn’t disputes about content address…content?
Well, maybe not after “identity politics” floods political and cultural debates. That era had not yet arrived when I was in Jerusalem, but when it did – and especially now – arguers, or too many of them, around the world put forth their claims increasingly by announcing: “As a so-and-so I think.…” So-and-so matters more than the validity of any contention. By being born “as a this” or “as a that” – poof! – your opinions, even incredible ones, became inviolate.
Still, no rule is fast for all times, places, circumstances. Especially if a reckless government seeks to undermine checks on rules. Or if it threatens democratic norms or the rule of law or minority rights.
The issue is more complex in the case of Israel and world Jewry.
After all, the World Zionist Organization declared decades ago that Israel should be central to Jewish lives everywhere. If so, then there can be nothing wrong if diaspora Jews speak out about Israeli policies. It may even be imperative. You can’t tell people to make something central to their lives and then add, “but you’ve nothing to say about what’s going on there.”
Unless, that is, you believe in Comintern Zionism. Comintern Zionism, you say? You know what I mean: organized partisans worldwide from whom reflexive, but not reflective obedience is expected. Like Lenin’s “internationalism” did of communists. Whoever is noncompliant faced abuse – not only verbal – from Moscow. Even more so with Stalin’s rise (the behavior preceded him). Today’s dissident Zionists are scorned as “leftists” rather than bourgeois traitors. (I am a “leftist”).
The “Centrality of Israel in Jewish Life”: in the world of real politics, centrality can’t be metaphysical but must be earned constantly. Assertions of centrality cannot flee basic questions like: what is the character of this centrality? What kind of society demands centrality? Who is demanding it for what purposes?
Answering such queries seemed relatively easy in 1968, when the WZO passed its “Jerusalem Program” asserting Israel’s centrality. It was a year after the Six Day War; it was the year before elections gave 56 Knesset seats to the Labour movement, led by Golda Meir, and 26 to Menachem Begin’s Gahal (Likud’s predecessor). Moreover, hard right Zionism had lost every election since 1949 (1933, including polls for Zionist Congresses).
***
Mustn’t exigency at least sometimes override strictures?
Netanyahu’s governments have supplied multiple, convincing examples why. They have sought unabashedly to shape the political worlds in which diaspora Jews live, regardless of the impact on those Jews of rightwing Israeli policies with only nationalist but no security rationale. The goal: yoke American and diaspora Jews – and the word Zionism – to blinkered priorities, say, in the West Bank.
Diaspora Jews can’t assess these things, you say? Well, they can make some judgements pretty well, thank you – although few of their leaders have political gumption or foresight. Few of them think politically.
Israel’s security issues are palpable, potent and, as October 7 reminded us, ought never to be underestimated. Doves who minimize them will always be unconvincing. But right-wing ideologies, nationalist and religious, aim to confuse self-defense with irridentist myth. They inevitably thwart prudent consideration of security because security is not their priority.
We are witnessing a great crisis in Jewish political culture, not only because of Israel’s recent political tilts and October 7, but thanks to decades in which efforts were made to usher American Jews into the American right all while making them appendages of the Israeli right. Among the architects: Netanyahu, American neo-conservatives (his political buddies back to the 1980s), and Ron Dermer, the former Republican minion who became Netanyahu’s right hand after working on Newt Gingrich’s “Contract for America,” one of the most destructive political endeavors in contemporary U.S. history.
American Jews need their own October 7 Commission.
***
I went to only one other rally in Israel in 1972/73. It was outside the US embassy in Tel Aviv to denounce Nixon’s Christmas bombing of Vietnam. I did attend the founding of a small Marxist-Zionist party called “Moked” in a Tel Aviv movie theater the next summer.
Here’s a very abbreviated list of events that agitated the year between the Biram and Ikrit march and the Moked meeting:
In July ’72, Sadat expelled Soviet advisers from Egypt; the Munich Massacre was in September; Black September seized Israel’s Bangkok embassy in December; in February ’73, Israel shot down by mistake a Libyan airliner over Sinai; spring brought festivities for Israel’s 25th anniversary; summer brought formative steps to create a new rightwing alliance, the Likud. I returned to the US just weeks before the October War.
Four years later Begin was prime minister, ending decades of social democratic rule. His program stated that “between the Sea and the Jordan [River] there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” (“Activists” on US campuses these days advocate the same, with one word changed).
Labor flailed after the 1977 “Upheaval.” Since then – actually, before – the Zionist left, both in Israel and in the diaspora, has been running on intellectual empty. Likewise, many social democratic parties throughout the world, beginning in the 1970s and ‘80s. And into the voids there came, from one direction, Begins, Reagans, neoconservatives, Thatchers, and Netanyahus. From the other direction – from within significant parts of the left intellectual world, especially in universities – came the cerebrally debilitating rise of post-modernist philosophizing.
Absent an egalitarian reimagination of social democracy, things were muddied further by the rise of right and left variants of populism in the later 20th and early 21st centuries. In the meantime, the world changed. (It does that). The Soviet Union’s well-deserved end might have opened space for fresh thinking on the left. But there was mostly stuttering as neoliberalism – market fundamentalism – marched in, applauding itself loudly. Even those who long opposed “communist systems” on behalf of social democratic values thrashed about in the face of the deification of “globalization” and “privatization.”
Further left, “post-colonialism” wed post-modernism, displacing older left-wing hopes of challenging inequalities through a marriage of economic and political democracy. Instead came mindless but excited visions of world combat between Gog and Magog – translated as “imperialism” and “anti-imperialism.”
In the Jewish world, throughout this time, Netanyahu’s neoconservative comrades (and monied friends of similar bent), invested heavily in fashioning younger intellectuals and journalists. This was just as a revolution in communications technology blossomed.
And in the half century following 1977, right-wing governments in Jerusalem fostered “neo-liberalism” – with, truth to tell, some allies within Labour – for pre-1967 Israel. Market fundamentalists wanted to hush talk of Zionist, oops, I mean socialist values. They hailed technology while the right continued to expropriate the words Zionist and “security.”
Neo-liberalism overwhelmed the wobbly old universe of “Labor Israel,” especially the Histadrut within Israel; the rightwing did create a welfare state but for settlers in the West Bank. Except for one shining moment – the Oslo process – the Zionist left retrieved no intellectual or pragmatic traction.
I, for one, hope Israel’s new Democratic party will.
***
Back to Mount Scopus, 1972.
When Moshe told me that he didn’t want to hear about “Zionism,” he didn’t mean Zionism. He meant the kind of heavy-handed “ideological” sermonizing that makes minds go blank.
Although he was for Labor, he didn’t want to hear all that old stuff about “socialist values.”
Not because Moshe was for or against them. He hadn’t actually given them too much thought. He hadn’t asked himself if social egalitarianism should be the moral horizon of democratic politics. When he thought of medical care, he didn’t ask if a sick person should be treated according to his or her illness or according to an individual’s wages on a labor market. (I borrow that formulation from L.T. Hobhouse, a turn of the 20th century British “social liberal.”) The two ways of doing things imply qualitatively different societies. One prioritizes human needs, the other a myth of markets; one prioritizes democratic egalitarianism, the other privatization and the dictatorship of markets.
Instead, he identified as a “bitsuist,” an “activist,” a “doer.” After all, hadn’t Shimon Peres once declared that his generation of Israelis wanted to know what to do, not what to be?
But “doing” and “being” can’t be simply severed. Today’s world – that of Trump and Putin and Xi and Netanyahu – virtually hollers that at us. When it comes to Israel, these questions must arise: What sort of society will come from Zionism? What will its relations be with the world and world Jewry? These are not novel queries. Read the debates in the 1930s between Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky.
After I arrived as a student in Jerusalem, I sensed a bifurcation – it had emerged over a long time, I learned later – within the mental universe of the mainstream Israeli left. (I exclude anti-Zionists). There were, of course, many significant differences within it, but this one seemed existential.
It can be summarized briefly as follows: a). there were those who spoke about notions of social justice but had trouble translating them into fresh, future-looking programmatic commitments. They rested a little too easily on Mapai’s laurels. And, (b). There were those who found talk about social justice just so much ideological sermonizing. They sought an intellectual off-ramp in flight from left-wing language and ideas, and often called it “pragmatism.”
In the end, “the end of ideology” in Israel really implied an end to creative left-wing ideas. Eventually, the legacy of “old Mapai” was besieged on two fronts: by the rightwing in power, which busily sought after 1977 to rewrite Zionist history to validate itself, and by those who consecrated “pragmatism” and technology.
There is, of course, nothing wrong with technology or technological innovation – so long as they are deemed to be necessary means, like an army is for a state that must defend itself, and not fetishized as ends in themselves.
The alternative: integrating technologies – and armies and markets –into values upheld by a social project bigger than them.
The stakes in what I’ve been saying were captured in a way by a public exchange in 2006, shortly before Israeli elections. Peres, identified since his youth with Labor “bitsuism” (activism), had lost his party’s leadership and decamped to Ariel Sharon’s “Kadima” party. He declared then that “We” – meaning himself and the nation – didn’t need socialist ideas, because “Our positions are taken from the Torah…The prophet Amos is our social ideology.”
A remarkably similar contention was made decades before by Jabotinsky. He lambasted “socialism” and the Histadrut on behalf of what he called “monism.” Jewish sources alone should inform Zionist economics and politics, he insisted.
Ben-Gurion, who understood that no people can live alone, retorted: all national movements mix particularism and universalism. What mattered was what combination they created.
“I am shocked at Peres,” responded Arie Lova Eliav, once Labor’s secretary-general and long a dove on Palestinian questions – back when Peres was a leading “activist” hawk in the party (that was when I warbled on Mount Scopus). “Since the establishment of the Labor party,” added Eliav, “it has been a social democratic party that was founded in order to bestow the values of justice and equality.”
A Peres spokesman countered that the ex-Labor prime minister, who was once a vice president of the Socialist International, only meant to oppose the “import” of “foreign words such as ‘social democrat.’” (Ha’aretz, March 13, 2006). Another way of putting this might have been: don’t preach socialist stuff to me.
***
Moshe and I continued our occasional chats in the Beit Café. I championed left-wing values and he was usually impatient with them, and probably a bit with me, but always in a friendly way.
Afterall, he wasn’t arguing with a Begin supporter. Once, he told me that he liked the tunes of the protest songs well enough, but found their words naïve, especially in the Mideast. (He wasn’t entirely wrong).
Nowadays, I recall – vividly, forlornly, poignantly – one particular conversation. It was about Meir Kahane, then making some headlines in Israel where he had moved and founded his Kach (“Thus!”) party. I had just interviewed him at the request of a New York-based student press service.
I’d met him before in the US and political antagonism was unavoidable. It was not just his views on Israel’s future or, fresh to my New York memory, his Brooklyn-based Jewish Defense League’s clashes with black militants (in which I found more than a whiff of bigotry, on both sides). It was not just the fact that he had written a book urging Jews to support America’s disastrous Vietnam war. It wasn’t his one-time membership in Betar, Jabotinsky’s youth movement, which to me seemed animated by a thuggish,nationalist braggadocio – an identity politics avant la lettre.
It was these. And more.
I recounted to Moshe how I had gone to Kahane’s office, just above the old Rimon restaurant off Jerusalem’s Zion Square. The rabbi, then aged 40 and still clean-shaven, and I first engaged in off-the record chit-chat. I noted how his slogan “Kach!” (“Thus!”), echoed that of the Irgun: Rak Kach! (“Only Thus!”). It had appeared on posters and in pamphlets of the 1940s with a picture of a rifle held aloft over a map of “Palestine” that included Transjordan.
Kahane feigned a chuckle and declared firmly that Menachem Begin was the noblest man in Israel. He frowned a tad when I quipped that old Israeli Stalinists – or “post-Stalinists” in today’s post-modern parlance – were gathered in a party with a name sounding similar to his, Rakach, a Hebrew acronym for “New Communist List.”
We then went on the record. The interview itself was in a cordial enough tone. I understood that as a journalist the point wasn’t to argue with my interviewee but to let him to talk.
And that he did. He elaborated with vigorous gesticulation on why all Arabs would have to be expelled from both Israel and the occupied territories. If he were a self-respecting Arab, he said, with what I took to be sham empathy, he would insist that Jews go. Therefore, Arabs had to go. I suppose he thought his self-assured charisma, sprinkled with sporadic jests about contemporary politics, would sway me.
No chance. His ideas seemed so crazed, when not simply repellant, that I asked Kahane to repeat them for surety’s sake. He left little doubt.
Just days afterwards, back on Mount Scopus, I told Moshe about Kahane’s designs. He waved them off.
“That guy is nuts,” said Moshe, “Maybe he can flaunt himself in the New York media, but here he is screwing around with [then Defense Minister] Moshe Dayan. He doesn’t grasp what he is up against. He is totally out of touch with our society. So, what if he loves Menachem Begin? If you think Begin will be prime minister, I’ll give you the address of a shrink.”
Those latter words provoke a grimace half a century later – after Begin’s political inheritor, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been Israel’s longest-serving premier and his coalition mate, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Kahane’s heir, seem together to comprise the unrepressed Id of the Zionist right. And perhaps of some self-declared “centrists,” since Israel’s political center has moved pretty far right over decades. Doesn’t everyone know that “socialist” is a dirty word? Hissed at much like “leftist” was and is among American neoconservatives?
I ran into Kahane numerous times that year, usually on the dusty, not quite paved street on which I lived in Jerusalem’s Kiryat Moshe quarter. I would be on my way to catch a bus to classes on Mount Scopus. He would be walking to Mossad Rav Kook, a congregating point for spiritual comrades in the settlers’ movement. We’d banter a bit, always politely but never with accord. “You’re a Hellenist,” he said.
***
“Don’t preach Zionism to me.”
“Don’t preach socialist stuff to me.”
How wide is the gap between these statements?
Israel’s image has crumpled throughout the world. Some consider this a problem of public relations and there is some truth to that, but only some. Obsessive anti-Zionism, sounding often like those anti-leftist fixations of neo-conservatives with a word or two changed, thrives among left-leaning academics and movements. They now have growing numbers of comrades in the American right. Often, in both left and right innuendo, old anti-Semitic tropes glide in. A little too often. They are tidied up with a famous self-exoneration: “I’m anti-Zionist, not antisemitic.” It’s hardly new. Comparisons between Israel and South Africa among “post-colonial” theorists are long-standing; so too suggestions of Jewish dual loyalties. Remember Patrick Buchanon, MAGA’s harbinger?
Yet all this skirts uncomfortable questions that real friends of a democratic Jewish state prefer to dodge – at Israel’s peril. To what extent are “public relations” – hasbara –actually crippled by Israeli policies? To what extent has Israel’s story been blurred into that of its right-wing’s fantasies?
Aren’t consequences unavoidable? The Netanyahu-Dermer strategy of identifying Israel and Jews with execrable rightwing nationalists around the world has played a mighty role in this process, along with disinterest by most of today’s Zionists in any serious engagement with the left. In today’s intellectual world, Israel has disarmed itself. There is no English language publication – or substack or other media – with heft in the Jewish world today that explores, let along struggles seriously with left-wing ideas or speaks to them.
“Left” doesn’t just mean being a dove on Mideast questions; you can be “centrist” or even “rightwing” and dovish. You don’t have to be “left” to see how blinkered Netanyahu’s policy was when he played the Palestinian Authority and Hamas against each other. You don’t have to be “left” – it does help – to see that something radically wrong produced Jewish fanatics attacking Palestinian farmers in the West Bank.
At least half Israel’s citizens (hopefully more) are expected to vote against Netanyahu and his allies this week. Two-thirds (or more) of American Jews will vote against Trump’s Republicans the following week for very sound American reasons.
To expropriate an old slogan: Netanyahu must be opposed as if Israel faced no security threats and those security threats must be faced as if there were no Netanyahu. Trump’s Republicans must be fought as if problems weren’t also coming soon to Israel’s American friends (they are) and the ideas of a democratic America and a Jewish state must be defended regardless of the Trumps-and Netanyahu – and their alliance.
A democratic Jewish state, that is. One that is faithful to its own Declaration of Independence, upholding “the full social and political equality of all its citizens without distinction of race, creed or sex.”
But best not to preach too much. Big events are at hand.
