Some anti-Zionist books by Jewish authors have just been favourably reviewed in the New Statesman. The reviewer, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, embeds his comments on the individual books into a matrix of more general reflection on the relationship between Jews and Zionism. But inside his general account there are, in fact, two quite different narratives struggling to get out.
This is the first one: in Wheatcroft's view, the whole topic of Zionism is a uniquely overheated one, partly because Zionists are so partisan, and so ready to accuse those who disagree with them of being anti-Semitic or, alternatively, self-hating Jews. But they and we need to remember that right from the start, many Jews and Jewish leaders have been extremely hostile to the Zionist project. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, when Israel was established, it was morally impossible for Jews to disown it, but now once again many Western Jews are eloquently speaking out, in Jewish anguish, against the Zionist project. Their setting aside of group loyalty, and their concern for the sufferings of the Palestinians, is a fine thing: it represents a return to noble Jewish traditions of justice and individual conscience. But those Jews who originally rejected Zionism realized that it's also bad for Jews, and some of these modern writers are aware of this too. Zionism is underpinned by a particular psychology: a Jewish sense of embattled exclusion (partly the result of paying too much attention to Holocaust museums and studies and in general the whole 'Holocaust industry'). But this sense of isolation is misplaced and indeed paranoid. Jews don't need Zionism - they don't need to engage in this colonialist and imperialist project, since as a matter of fact Jews have, and always have had, plenty of friends. As Wheatcroft, a self-declared philo-Semite, remarks, 'We're all in this together'.
However, intertwined with this rather upbeat and sunlit narrative, there's another one, altogether darker and more disturbing. In this part of the story, Zionism is a brutalizing and violent ideology whose supporters falsify the history of Jewish opposition to Israel, and bully Jews and others into observing a Mafia-like code of silence about Israel's wrongdoings. In spite of this pressure, many Jews on the left are becoming hostile to Zionism, though regrettably there is no sign of this happening on the right. It is, in Wheatcroft's view, an unhealthy situation if Jews who are anti-Zionist are drawn exclusively from the left; it would be much better if an intelligent right-wing critique of Israel were also to (re)appear, thereby ensuring that opinion about Israel isn't divided into the left who are against it, and the right who support it. Wheatcroft agrees with those Jews who, from early in the 20th century up to the present day, have felt that a Jewish nationalist movement established in Palestine is a calamity for the Jewish people. As they see it, the Zionist picture of Jews in the diaspora as being homeless will encourage other people to regard the Jews in their countries as strangers, as outsiders. This will undermine the standing of Jews as citizens and nationals of the lands in which they were born, a standing which they have worked so hard to gain. Indeed Wheatcroft, as an 'old-fashioned philo-Semitic assimilationist', tells us that for some time he has believed that it would be disastrous 'if any large public controversy were to develop in which all, or even most, Jewish opinion were on one side and all non-Jewish opinion on the other', and it may be that support for Israel is just such a controversy.
Now both of these narratives seem to me to be highly questionable in their own right. Why is Jewish collective loyalty in conflict with the rulings of justice and conscience, when other national groups aren't open to this criticism? Why is it so important for Jews not to be supported by right-wingers, when many other groups have similar support without attracting similar admonition? If there is, as Wheatcroft claims, a Zionist 'code of omerta' against Jewish criticism of Israel, why are the self-described 'independent Jewish voices' whom he praises so easy to find in newsprint and in the universities?
But the most striking feature of these two narratives is that, as even a cursory analysis reveals, they contradict each other. Wheatcroft doesn't make explicit his reasons for thinking it would be so disastrous if Jews found themselves isolated in some large controversy, so that everyone else disagreed with them. But given his immediate endorsement of the view that Zionism undermines the standing of Jews as citizens and nationals in their native countries, it's hard to avoid the inference that the disaster in question would be the revival of hostility against them. Anti-Semitism is a light sleeper, he seems to imply, and Jews should be careful to avoid adopting views - such as the view that Jews have a right to self-determination - which everyone else finds abhorrent, for fear of waking it from its sleep.
I wonder if Wheatcroft would be happy to say to other minority groups (blacks, say, or homosexuals) or even to members of majority groups (such as feminist women), that they shouldn't collectively embrace unpopular views for fear of making others hate them; that the price of acceptance is and should be conformity to the dominant view? (That isn't a rhetorical question, by the way - I would truly like to know the answer to it.) But I have no reason to believe that Wheatcroft generally recommends to minority groups a political position so numbingly hostile to independent thought and progressive reform. It seems likely that this prescription is one he reserves for Jews, perhaps because hostility towards them has in the recent past been so murderous, on so huge a scale, that it's especially important to prevent it recurring. But in that case, the claims and assumptions of Wheatcroft's first narrative collapse.
If anti-Semitism is so near to the surface of Western societies that it may be revived by Jewish dissent from conventional political views, then the claim that Jews needn't feel excluded or embattled, that they shouldn't take the Holocaust as being so important and instructive an event in Jewish history, seems to be obviously false. One of the lessons of the long persecution of the Jews, culminating but not, alas, ending in the Holocaust, is that a state of your own is a very useful thing to have – it can save a lot of lives. Where Wheatcroft sees colonialism and settlers, others see a life-raft state, a place where Jews can't be persecuted and murdered just because they're Jews - or if they are, their state will defend them rather than ignore or even instigate the persecution.
Much of Wheatcroft's account of Zionism rests on a particular diagnosis of Jewish psychology as inclining to a paranoid and obsessive response to the Holocaust. But those people who are fortunate enough to have undisputed citizenship in a state the majority population of which consists of people like them are perhaps not best placed to realize what the absence of such support is like, or how significant that absence can be. Wheatcroft's view that the hard-won standing of Jews in the countries of the diaspora is still fragile, tenuous, able to be upset by controversial views or behaviour, is flatly at odds with his claim that a Jewish sense of isolation is misplaced and paranoid.
The principal reason which he gives for this latter claim, and more generally for his view that Zionism is unnecessary for the well-being of Jews, is that Jews have, and always have had, plenty of friends. I am happy to agree with him on this point. Some of these friends of the Jews I have, like many others, read about with admiration and gratitude. Others I have had the pleasure and honour to know in my own life. These are admirable and often very remarkable people, and there are many of them, spread through all societies. However it's an obvious fact that the presence of such friends has not been enough to save Jews from persecution, and worse, in the past; and it's difficult to be sure that the future will always be markedly different. In these circumstances, and in a world in which the nation-state is the normal form of political organization, Jews have both the need for, and the right of, self-determination, just as Palestinians do, just as Japanese do, just as Indians do, just as Britons do.
I don't know, and I don't believe that anyone knows, whether a time will come when Jews once again have to face murderous persecution. I certainly don't know that it won't, and I don't think that anyone else knows that either, particularly in a world in which some states explicitly threaten to wipe Israel off the map, and others countenance and foster viciously anti-Semitic attitudes. The destruction of the European Jews was not the first genocide of the 20th century, nor was it the last: racist persecution and mass murder are a part - an appalling part - of the human repertoire. In these circumstances, the light dismissal of any need for Jewish self-determination, the completely unargued assumption that Jewish group loyalty is something that justice and conscience should oppose, and the worried advice about keeping shtum so as not to annoy the goyim, constitute a set of views each one of which is independently questionable, and which jointly amount to a blatant contradiction. (Eve Garrard)