( Contending Mondernities ) – The expansion of authoritarian, semi-fascist tendencies at home and abroad has now moved into the 21st century’s second quarter, the most conspicuous example of which is the ongoing mass-carnage in, and of, Gaza, carried out by Israel, yet fully enabled by the US and Europe. This multi-state global development renders it Kosher to suggest something that might previously have been shrugged off, namely, that Judaism is being creepingly occupied by Zionism in a manner resembling Israel’s ever-deepening occupation of chiefly the West Bank, yet other areas as well.
Unlike the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPTs), Judaism is a domain that exceeds material and geographic boundaries. Yet it is nonetheless being taken over in a similar fashion to the way in which Israel labors to transform the OPTs into an Israeli Judea/Samaria (the West Bank’s biblical name)— ultimately yearning for total annexation. This attempted devouring of Judaism aims to transform—on a global scale no less—the terms “Jew” and “Zionist” and “Judaism” and “Zionism” into outright synonyms. While the material exercise of Zionism between the Jordan Valley and the Mediterranean Sea chiefly aims at cleansing from the territory (non-Jewish) Palestinians, it concurrently colonizes Judaism from the inside effectively everywhere on earth where organized Zionism is operative.
Defending these dour propositions begins with a candid acknowledgment that the democratic credentials of both the historical and contemporary Euro-Zionist movement have long been wanting. For instance, no form of meaningful referendum among world Jewry—to determine democratically, say, the precise manner in which Zionism would represent itself among competing Jewish schools—was ever contemplated comprehensively or satisfactorily.
The principal Zionist tenet ought to be explicitly reiterated here precisely because Zionists outside Zion tend to both camouflage and evade it: the Jewish People were exiled from their land and have yearned since then to return to it. Political Zionism by now is over 140 years old while Israel’s—manifestly discriminatory— “Law of Return” is 76. Even so, 54% of world Jewry continue to opt for a non-return to Zion, and in doing so counter in-effect head-on the foundational thrusts underlying Zionism, that is, “negation of the exile” (shlilat hagalut) and “liquidation of the exile” (hisul hagalut). This state of affairs has been long materializing notwithstanding that Israel—in coordination with a rainbow of Zionist bodies worldwide—has incentivized Aliya/migration to Israel (in order to further deepen and expand the Palestinian erasure) by lavishly streamlining the financial, legal, and bureaucratic hurdles to migration. This Zionist malfunction does not seem mysterious. Let us ask all fair, analytic, and modestly objective observers:
Are you capable of identifying since 1948 to date a minority community worldwide whose legal, cultural, economic, religious, financial, social, and political position among its surrounding majority community matches the success, location, and sociopolitical position of minority Jewish communities in Western Europe and the USA? The answer is likely to be no. By application of the most elementary comparative terms, it is uncontroversial to determine that Jews in the USA and Western Europe are probably the single most successful, thriving, privileged, and secure/protected minority community on earth. This also helps explain why the majority of members affiliated, either formally or ideologically, with the organized, hegemonic Jewish communities there continue to embody what David Ben-Gurion—the single most important and influential Zionist in history—helped to term “Armchair Zionism.”
The material exercise of Zionism between the Jordan Valley and the Mediterranean Sea…colonizes Judaism from the inside effectively everywhere on earth where organized Zionism is operative.
“Armchair Zionism” is a term coined to capture the disposition and practices of the very many Jewish individuals (outside Zion) who somehow continue to succeed acrobatically to: (1) eat the cake (that is, live fairly comfortably far away from the war-torn Middle East) and (2) have it too (that is, being de-facto non-Zionists as a consequence of evasive manoeuvres and rationalizations utilized to bypass Aliya, i.e., the empirical schlepping of one’s Zionist self to Zion in compliance with the chief Zionist tenet). Armchair Zionists thus tend to zealously and vocally “talk the talk” yet refrain nonchalantly from walking (their very own!) walk. Such a position would have been less unsettling had this state of privileged insincerity (perhaps hypocrisy?) taken place within some harmless neutral zone; yet it is far from being so. This state of affairs is instead exercised at the direct and inevitable expense of Palestinians for one simple reason: armchair Zionists—including those who have never set foot inside Israel/Palestine—enjoy more rights between the river and the sea than all Palestinians, including those who have never set foot outside the territory.
The discriminatory privilege bestowed by Israel transnationally upon armchair Zionists worldwide unfortunately does not end here; it additionally maintains a lethal relationship with the lingering phenomenon of antisemitism. That has been so particularly since the 2016 introduction of “the working definition of antisemitism,” drafted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). The Israeli and Zionist struggle against real and fanciful manifestations of antisemitism has been directed at a single target: the equation of (left) anti-Zionism with antisemitism. In this context, right-wing White supremacists can act with considerable impunity (including when they murder Jews) and their antisemitism remains of peripheral concern to the Israeli/Zionist mobilization. As of late, this struggle/campaign has been irrationally obsessed with the newly-elected New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, before he even had a chance to engage in actual deeds as Mayor, and who has been the target of Islamophobic attacks by gatekeepers of acceptable speech on Israel as if it is the embodiment of “the Jews.”
A core notion that has anciently nourished racism generally, and antisemitic racism in particular, is Guilt by Association, namely, the misguided view that random members of a given ethnic, religious, or racial group are guilty of unjust or criminal acts solely because they share affinity/affiliation with perpetrators who have actually committed such acts. Accordingly, to blame Jews collectively and trans-historically for the (Pegan-Roman) crucifixion of Yeshua (יֵשׁוּעַ) grows from the dynamics of guilt by association. Another paradigmatic example transpired in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in NYC (2001) when physical harm was inflicted upon random and innocent Muslims across America (and also upon American Sikhs whom the incited mob perceived as Muslim). Dynamics of guilt by association have catastrophically surfaced in recent terrorist attacks in the cities of Manchester and Sydney (by self-proclaimed “pro-Palestinians”) vis-à-vis random local Jews. Alas, Armchair Zionists have tragically succeeded in injecting into this horrible context genuinely grave complications.
Ever increasingly during the 21st century, the organized Zionist-Jewish community across Euro-America opted to associate itself willingly and openly with (Apartheid) Israel and its government, irrespective of Israel’s acts—mass killings of Gazan women and children included (that seem to render Israel a morally-unliveable space). Ephraim Mirvis meanwhile, the Chief Rabbi of Britian—who happens to be a former Israeli settler—explained unequivocally that Zionism and Judaism are Siamese twins: “one can no more separate Zionism from Judaism than separate the City of London from Great Britain.” An event promoting “real estate sales” in West and (occupied) East Jerusalem was outrageously held inside a synagogue in Queens, New York. An event promoting American-Jewish Zionist immigration to Israel and the OPTs was shockingly held inside a Manhattan synagogue. Prior to his murder, Rabbi Eli Schlanger—who was leader in the Chabad-Lubavitch congregation in Bondi, Sydney—recklessly disseminated on social media offensive photos and videos of himself (in Israel’s Channel 14) smiling and hugging heavily-armed Israeli soldiers amidst a genocide. This does not change at all the fact that Rabbi Schlanger, an unarmed civilian in Sydney, was murdered by a terrorist action. Simultaneously, however, it also does not negate the fact that his rather narcissistic conduct as a public religious figure increased needlessly and carelessly risks to members of his congregation (who hold a diverse range of ideological positions).
Such wilful, voluntary, open, public association with manifestly anti-Palestinian Israeli policies—let alone explicit embracing of military perpetrators—runs the risk of rendering obsolete the very notion of Guilt by Association since its foundational underlying rationale rests on the presumption of disassociation between perpetrators and random members of similar identity/affinity. Armchair Zionists thus assist to unleash —hopefully unintentionally and unconsciously —formidable existential dangers to the individual and collective lives of all Jews, yet primarily to democratic non-Zionist Jews who innocently mind their prosaic lives countless miles away from Zion/Israel/Palestine.
Can the creeping occupation of Judaism by militant ethnonationalist Zionism be disrupted somehow? Can Judaism undergo some de-colonization, liberation, and restoration of democratic civic equality such as the one that for example prevailed during the American Civil Rights Struggle of the 1960s?
Against the incessant gaslighting that Israel and armchair Zionists perpetrate for their own sectarian ends and benefits, it is possible to also identify young, courageous, democratic Jews throughout Euro-America who tirelessly labour to revive the (otherwise self-evident) notion that they do not live in “exile” but are part and parcel of their struggling civil societies, standing shoulder to shoulder with other minority groups. In doing so, democratic non-Zionist Jews retrieve and refashion from their global Jewish history positive notions of “diasporism” that include—among many other things—steadfast resistance to Israel’s brutal conduct vis-à-vis the Palestinians. They do so while also marshalling support for the Palestinian struggle for equal human rights and self-determination.
Can the creeping occupation of Judaism by militant ethnonationalist Zionism be disrupted somehow?
Such young democratic Jews are all too often forced to confront their own parents from my own, rather pathetic, generation. I describe us this way because we have largely failed our children and were unsuccessful in fashioning for them renewed Jewish notions of an inclusive, progressive, and democratic forms of (pre-Zionist or post-Zionist) Jewish peoplehood that they themselves appear to aim for. There are many such younger Jewish groupings, so only a sample can be named here explicitly: the British Na’amod, Progressive Jews for Justice in Israel/Palestine, Jewish Students’ Kehillah and Jews for Justice for Palestinians; the Israeli Mizrahi Civic Collective, Rabbis for Human Rights Smol Emuni (Faithful Left), and Academia for Equality; the American Halachic Left, IfNotNow—and many more particularly throughout North America. I hope and pray daily that such young Jews will “be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28). Their (possible) failure may otherwise mean a full-fledged occupation and colonization of Judaism by Zionism.
Reprinted with the author’s permission from Contending Mondernities
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