Mick Hartley

A long piece in Fathom (originally in Dissent) from Michael Walzer, on Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism. Worth reading in full, but here’s his conclusion:

Why not Zionism? Because the Jews aren’t a people; because they should be more cosmopolitan than anyone else; because the Zionist state has had some terrible governments; because no one should have a state (even if almost everyone does). Each of these claims can be made and reasons given, but the way they are made in the world today is bound to arouse suspicion. It is at least possible, and sometimes it seems likely, that the people making them also believe that Jews ran the slave trade, that the Zionist lobby controls U.S. foreign policy (as Representative Ilhan Omar has said), that Jews are disloyal to every country in which they live except Israel, and that Jewish bankers control the international financial system. There are too many men and women who believe these things — on the left as well as on the right. They are anti-Semites or fellow travelers of anti-Semites, and their anti-Zionism is probably tightly connected to their anti-Semitism (though there are now pro-Israel anti-Semites among, for example, American evangelicals and Eastern European right-wing nationalists).

Men and women on the left need to be sharply critical, especially critical, of other leftists who hold these views. It is obviously easier to condemn right-wing anti-Semites and pretend that anti-Semitism doesn’t exist on the left. But it does; indeed, it has been a regular topic here in Dissent (see, among other pieces, George Lichtheim, ‘Socialism and the Jews,’ July-August 1968, and Mitchell Cohen, ‘Anti-Semitism and the Left that Doesn’t Learn,’ January 2008). It may well be true that right-wing anti-Semitism poses the greater danger to Jewish well-being, but the leftist version should not be underestimated.

Still, I am sure that a lot of anti-Zionists and many leftist anti-Zionists don’t believe any of the anti-Semitic fables. Maybe they are willfully ignorant about the Jewish people, maybe they are peculiarly focused on the Jewish state; maybe they just don’t like Jews (as George Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, said about Jeremy Corbyn). Maybe. But when it comes to leftist debates about Israel, Zionism is the issue, and it is Zionism that we should talk about. For all the reasons I’ve given, what’s wrong with anti-Zionism is anti-Zionism itself. Whether you are an anti-Semite, a philo-Semite, or Semiticly indifferent, this is a very bad politics.

Walzer’s piece is part of a debate at Dissent. Reply from Joshua Leifer here, and Walzer’s response here. 

His {Leifer’s] piece reads to me like leftist boilerplate (I am sure that I’ve read similar sentences in half a dozen leftist magazines and websites, including the BDS website). It has this peculiar, but familiar, quality of treating Israel as the only agent in the Middle East. There are no surrounding countries whose politics might matter. The Palestinians are entirely passive, the victims of Israel’s evildoing.