In 1994 I enrolled in a
postgraduate course in philosophy at a British University. On my first day at
the University I had to complete a few routine administrative duties such as
registering my name with the philosophy department and meeting my supervisors.
I was also told that I had to join the student union. Being a subservient type,
I walked over to the Student Union hall where I soon realized that the task was
slightly more complicated than I had expected. There were a plethora of student
unions to choose from: The Black Student Union, The Asian Student Association,
The Socialist Students, The Gay Student Society and more. Confused, I asked for
assistance. They asked where I was from. When I told them “Israel,” I was told
that the “Jewish Student Union” was my home.
It was then, at the Student
Union Hall, that I first encountered the identity split between Israel and the
Jewish Diaspora. It would take some time before I was able to define this
binary tension in philosophical or post political terms and before I understood
the Jewish dilemma in terms of Nationalist/Identitarian dialectics. Two decades
later, the political battle now going on in America is basically an extension
of that internal Jewish debate.
Back in 1994 I didn’t see any
reason to join the Jewish Student Union. I had never identified ‘as a Jew’ and
Judaism meant little to me. Israel was my place of birth. My ‘identity’ as I
then saw it was geographically oriented. Fortunately, I managed to complete my
postgraduate course without becoming a ‘union member.’ But my thoughts about
that morning at the student union hall have evolved into a few controversial
books and hundreds of papers on ID politics and the current Identitarian
dystopia.
In 2011 I wrote The Wandering
Who? A Study of Jewish Identity Politics. The premise of the book was that if
Israel defines itself as the ‘Jewish State’ then we have to dissect the meaning
of the J-Word. We have to grasp how Judaism (the religion), Jews (the people)
and Jewishness (the spirit, ideology and culture) relate to each other and how
these terms influence Israeli politics and the activities of the Jewish Lobby
around the world. Instead of studying ‘Zionism,’ an archaic term that is not
relevant to most Israelis, my book focused on Jewish identifications. I did not
address the problematic question of ‘who and what Jews are,’ I tried instead to
find out what those who call themselves Jews identify with.
While this question is
certainly germane to an understanding of Israel and the Middle East conflict,
it is also crucial to an understanding of the current American dystopia.
Instead of asking ‘who Americans are’ let us explore what Americans identify
with.
In the post-political era,
America is divided into two camps, let’s call them Americans and Identitarians.
Americans see themselves primarily as American patriots. They often subscribe
to a nationalist populist ideology and, like the Israelis, identify with a
piece of geography. On the other hand, Identitarians are primarily liberals and
progressives. They identify themselves in biological and sociological terms,
and they see themselves first as LGBTQ, Latino, Black, Jewish, feminist etc.
Their bond with the American nationalist ethos is at most secondary and often
non-existent.
This division in America
between ‘nationalism’ and ‘identitarianism’ is similar to the dichotomy I
observed at the student union hall in 1994. In fact, Israel has become a prime
model for American nationalists. Similarly, it is Jewish progressive ideology
that inspires Identitarians globally and in America in particular. It is the
pervasiveness of Jewish ideologies within both nationalist and Identitarian
discourses that sustains the dominance of Jewish and Israeli political
institutions in American politics.
The Israeli Lobby’s hegemony
over American foreign policy and its force in advocating policies that favor
Israel has been widely recognized. Numerous studies on the topic have been
published, such as: The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (Prof John Mearsheimer
and Prof Stephen Walt), The Power of Israel in The United State (Professor James Petras).
Alison Weir’s website, If Americans Knew routinely presents a
devastating chronicle of Israeli intervention in American politics. The Washington Report
on the Middle East Affairs has been producing outstanding
work as well. The crucial question is, why have Americans let this happen?
My study of Jewish ID politics
suggests that America isn’t just influenced by one Jewish lobby or another. The
entire American political-cultural-spiritual spectrum has been transformed into
a internal Jewish exchange. Most American do not see the true nature of the
battle they participate in and, for the obvious reasons, their media and their
academics do not help. It is more convenient to keep Americans in the dark.
America is rapidly moving
towards a civil war. The divide isn’t only ideological or political. The split
is geographical, spiritual, educational and demographical. In a Voxarticle
titled, “The Midterm Elections Revealed that America is in a Cold Civil War,”
Zack Beauchamp writes, “This is a country fundamentally split in two, with no
real room for compromise.” Of the midterm election Beauchamp reports that
“American politics is polarized not on the basis of class or even ideology, but
on identity… One side open to mass immigration and changes to the country’s
traditional racial hierarchy, the other is deeply hostile to it.” He correctly
observes that “Republicans and Democrats see themselves as part of cultural
groups that are fundamentally distinct: They consume different media and attend
different churches; live in distinct kinds of places and rarely interact with
people who disagree with them.”
Despite this American schism,
Israel and its Lobby are somehow able to influence both sides, managing to
finding pathways to the secluded corridors of both parties. Although Democrats and
Republicans can no longer talk to each other, it seems that both are happy to
talk to Israel and the Lobby. And it is at AIPAC’s annual conference that these
political foes compete in their eagerness to appease a foreign state. This
anomaly in American politics demands attention.
As a former Israeli, I had not
observed the effects of the Israel/ Jewish Diaspora dilemma until I had my
experience at the Student Union Hall in Britain. Israel was born with the
Zionist desire to eradicate the identity of Jews as cosmopolitans. Zionism
promised to bond the Jew with the soil, with a territory, with borders. Thus,
it is consistent with the Zionist paradigm that Israel is notorious for its
appalling treatment ofasylum seekers, immigrants and, of course, the indigenous
people of the land. Israel has surrounded itself with separation walls. Israel
deployed hundreds of snipers in its fight to stop the March of Return – a
‘caravan’ of Palestinian refugees who were marching towards its border. Israel
has been putting into daily practice that which Trump has promised to deliver.
For a Trump supporter, Israel’s politics is a wet dream. Maybe Trump should
consider tweaking his motto in 2020 into ‘Let’s make America Israel.’ This
would encompass building separation walls, bullying America’s neighbors, the
potential to cleanseAmerica of the ‘enemy within,’ and so on. It is not
surprising that in 2016 Trump beat Clinton in an
Israeli absentee exit poll. The Israelis do love Trump. To them,
he is a vindication of their hawkish ideological path. Although during the
election Trump was castigated as a vile anti-Semite and a Hitler figure by the
Jewish progressive press, once elected, Fox News was
quick to point out that Trump was actually the ‘First Jewish President.’
We can see that Israel, Trump
and his voters have a lot in common. They want militant anti immigration
policies , they love ‘walls,’ they hate Muslims and they believe in borders.
When alt right icon Richard Spencer described himself on Israeli TV as “a White
Zionist” he was actually telling the truth. Israel puts into practice the ideas
that Spencer and Trump can so far only entertain. But the parallels between
Israel and the Trump administration’s Republican voters is just one side of the
story.
In my recent book, Being in
Time – A Post Political Manifesto, I point out that while the old, good Left
tried to unite us by insisting that it was not important whether one was Black,
a Woman, a Muslim, a Jew or Gay; in the class war, we were all united against
capitalism. It was the new Left that taught us to speak ‘as a’: as a Jew, as a
Gay, as a Black and so on. Instead of being one people united in the struggle
for justice and equality, within the post political realm we are pulled into
endless identity battles.
Seemingly, this Identitarian
revolution has been inspired by a few Jewish ideological and philosophical
schools including, most importantly, the Frankfurt School. Truth must be said,
when it comes to ID politics, Diaspora Jewish ideologists are often slightly
more advanced than others, not because Jews are more clever than anyone else
but simply because Jews have engaged in identity politics far longer than
anyone else. While Gay identity politics is about four decades old and Feminism
is maybe a century old, Jewish identity politics started in Babylon two and a
half millennia ago. In fact, Judaism can be realised as an exilic Identitarian
project. It deliberately and carefully sustains Jewish cultural, spiritual and
physical segregation.
Although Jews often drop their
religion and dispose of God, many cling to Jewishness. For one reason or
another, Jews often choose to operate within Jews- only political cells such
as Jewish Voice for Peace, Jewish Voice for Labour and
so on. These Jewish bodies tend to preach inclusiveness while practicing
exclusivity.
So it is hardly surprising that
Jewish Identitarian philosophy and Jewish Identitarian success provides the
model that inspires most, if not all, Identitarian politics within the New Left
milieu in general and the current Democratic Party in particular. This isn’t
the place to discuss at length or in depth the reasons behind Jewish identitarian
success, however, it should be mentioned that while most Identitarians are
taught to celebrate victimhood, to blame others for their misfortune, Jewish
Identitarianism has a subtle dynamic balance between victimhood and
entitlement.
Naturally, Jewish ideologists
are at the helm of the Identitarian revolution. Maybe more well known is the
fact that a chief funder of that revolution is financier George Soros and his
Open Society Institute. Soros may genuinely believe in the Identitarian future:
It is cosmopolitan, it is global, it defies borders and states but far more
significantly, it also serves to divert attention from Wall Street and
capitalist crimes: as long as Identitarians fight each other, no one bothers to
fight Wall Street, Goldman Sachs and corporate tyranny. Soros didn’t invent
this strategy, it has long been called ‘divide and conquer.’
The abovesheds light on the
depth of influence of Jewish politics in America. While Israel is an exemplar
of contemporary Republican goals, Democrats are emulating Jewish Diaspora
identitarianism. The two contradictory Jewish ideologies are each well-
ensconced within the two rival ideologies that are tearing America apart. The
red Republican counties want America to be Israel Again. Thelarge metropolitan
areas near America’s coasts have adopted the twelve tribes of Israel model – a
loose Identitarian coalition threatened by Samaritans, Canaanites, Amalekites
or as Hillary Clinton calls them the ‘basket of deplorables.’
The story of Jewish political
strength in America doesn’t end there. A New York Jew can easily metamorphosize
from an hard-core Identitarian into rabid Zionist settler and vice versa, but such a manoeuvre is not
available to ordinary Americans. White nationalist Richard Spencer can not make
the political shift that would turn him into a progressive or a liberal just as
it is unlikely that a NY transsexual icon would find it possible to become a
‘redneck.’ While Jewish political identity is inherently elastic and can morph
endlessly, the American political divide is fairly rigid. Jewish ideologists
frequently change positions and camps, they shift from left to right, from
Clinton to Trump (Dershowitz), they support immigration in their host counties
yet oppose it in their own Jewish State, they are against rigid borders and
even states in general, yet support the two state solution in Palestine
(Chomsky). Gentiles are less flexible. They are expected to be coherent and
consistent.
It was this manoeuvrability
that made PM Netanyahu’s 2015 speech in front of a joint session of Congress a
‘success,’ although it might well have been considered a humiliation for any
American with an ounce of patriotic pride. As we wellknow, Bibi can communicate
easily with both Republicans and Democrats just as he cansimultaneously
befriend Trump and Putin. He deploys snipers at the Gaza border with orders to
kill while considerately peppering his statements with LGBTQ human rights
advocacy. Not many Americans have dared to address this topic, but I believe
that there are some who, by now, can see the situation clearly.
It was the Israeli in me who
saw the disparity between ‘Israeli’ and ‘Jew’ at the Student Union Hall because
I was raised as an Israeli patriot. I was trained to love and even die for the
soil I mistakenly believed to be mine. As an Israeli, I was also trained to
think tribal but speak universal, and I learned how to whine as a victim yet
exercise oppression. But at a certain point in my life, around my thirties, I
started to find all of it too exhausting. I wanted to simplify things. I
demoted myself into an ordinary human being.