The Cruelty Is the Point

by Adam Serwer

  But Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have been living in what has been for them an ongoing catastrophe since the founding of Israel in 1948, hemmed in by an Israeli government ideologically committed to depriving Palestinians of national self-determination, or political rights within the state of Israel, and their own ineffectual or corrupt leadership. That crisis has only worsened in the past two decades. While many left-leaning American Jews, including me, remembered the peace process as a tragic near-miss, to many Palestinians it was an insincere ruse designed to obscure an Israeli land grab.

  “As seemingly fruitless negotiations dragged on for a decade, many Palestinians came to perceive that vital segments of the 22 percent of historic mandatory Palestine composed of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem on which they had hoped to establish a sovereign state were being inexorably absorbed into Israel by this creeping process of settlement and de facto annexation,” the historian Rashid Khalidi wrote in The Iron Cage. “Equally seriously in terms of Palestinian perceptions, over this decade of negotiations (and later during the four-plus years of the intifada that followed), Israel came to exercise a far greater measure of control than ever before over the Palestinian population and over the 83 percent of the territory of the West Bank wherein, by the Oslo and subsequent accords, it had full or partial jurisdiction.”

  The bloody scenes of the Second Intifada are also a formative trauma for the Israelis who remember them. But during and after that conflict, Israeli casualties were dwarfed by Palestinian ones. Israelis deserve to live unafraid that a suicide bomber will turn the bus they ride or the restaurant they dine at into an abattoir. So, too, do Palestinians deserve a right to political representation and due process, to move through their own land without being subjected to a spiderweb of military checkpoints, and to live without the fear that regular military incursions will incinerate their loved ones and destroy their homes.

  While most American Jews maintain hope of a two-state solution, the Israeli government has created a one-state reality in which Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have few real political rights, an arrangement the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has joined generations of Palestinians in describing as a form of apartheid. Nevertheless, American Jews might have been able to continue to ignore the realities of that conflict indefinitely, hoping that peace might someday manifest—if Netanyahu and his Republican allies had not made that impossible with their shortsighted interference in American politics.

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  When Netanyahu, at Trump’s request, barred Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar from visiting Israel in August 2018, it was a logical extension of the approach he had pursued since the Obama administration. In 2015, Republicans held a special session of Congress in which they invited Netanyahu to attack Obama’s pursuit of a deal to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Opposing Obama’s policy was one thing. Inviting a foreign leader to use Congress to humiliate a sitting president was another. Accepting that invitation showed that Netanyahu was perfectly willing to use his power and prestige to aid his Republican allies, and they would happily reciprocate.

  Trump supporters have argued that Netanyahu was correct to bar Omar and Tlaib because of their support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions—or BDS—movement against Israel. But Obama was a liberal Zionist who publicly reiterated his commitment to Israeli security and statehood on many an occasion, and still, Netanyahu accepted a Republican invitation to debase him before Congress.

  Netanyahu’s strategy has paid dividends for him and for the Republican Party, but it has also made it clear to Democrats that as long as Netanyahu is in charge, the Israeli government is willing to interfere in American domestic politics on the GOP’s behalf. The Republican Party that Netanyahu has allied himself with—one that is increasingly nativist, whose leader views American citizenship in racial terms and sees American Jews as temporarily displaced Israelis, whose intellectuals treat the presence of nonwhites as a danger to the republic—is anathema to the universalist values that have allowed American Jews to make a home here.

  American Jews owe no allegiance to the Israeli state, just as Israeli Jews owe no allegiance to the United States. But they do owe something to each other, as individual members of a historically persecuted people: They owe each other solidarity against those who would oppress, marginalize, or otherwise harm them because they are Jews.

  The divide between liberal American Jews and their right-wing counterparts at home and abroad is ultimately an argument over who is shirking their obligations. The Jewish American right sees its lefty co-religionists as kowtowing to Israel-haters whose anti-Zionism is a thin cloak for anti-Semitism. The Jewish left sees the right as bolstering a right-wing nationalism that inspires the fanatics who gun down Jews at prayer in American synagogues and who are willing to ally themselves with anti-Semites all over the world as long as they support Israeli territorial maximalism.

  Trump has walked into the middle of this dispute with his characteristic sensitivity. Among the president’s genuine political skills is rubbing open wounds with salt. As with so many other things, Trump’s accusation of disloyalty toward American Jews follows the logic of Republican rhetoric across the line of plausible deniability. And as with the president’s attacks on “the Squad,” calling American Jews disloyal assumes that they are not truly American.

  Many left-leaning American Jews saw this coming. When they heard Trump tell representatives like Ayanna Pressley, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, and Tlaib to go back where they came from, they heard the echoes of powerful anti-Semites throughout history. The current Israeli government apparently heard such remarks as the endorsement of the ethno-nationalism that it also embraces.

  Prominent Republicans from the president on down have previously offered remarks that echoed the subtext of Omar’s comments, which they attacked. Trump famously told a group of Jewish Republicans in 2015, “You’re not gonna support me because I don’t want your money. You want to control your politicians, that’s fine,” and late last year told a group of American Jews that Israel was “your country.” These remarks are almost identical in substance to the most damning interpretations of Omar’s comments; they drew little complaint from the right.

  Similarly, House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy sent a tweet in late October 2018 blaming Jewish Democratic donors Tom Steyer, George Soros, and Michael Bloomberg for trying to “buy the election.” Soros has figured heavily in conservative conspiracy theories for years, with Republican pundits morphing the Hungarian American Holocaust survivor into a Nazi, a classic anti-Semitic inversion of history used to justify the invocation of Soros as a shadowy puppet master.

  McCarthy deleted the tweet only after a white supremacist committed the biggest anti-Semitic massacre in American history at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, inflamed by the conspiracy theory that formed the core of Republican messaging during the 2018 midterms: that some sinister force—likely Soros—was responsible for a Central American migrant caravan headed for the southern border. The worst single instance of anti-Semitic violence in American history did not occur during the Civil War, or at the height of nativism in the 1920s, or even during the heyday of the second or third iterations of the Ku Klux Klan. It happened in 2018, as part of a racist backlash fomented by a sitting American president who prided himself on his close ties to Israel.

  Right-wing Jews may wonder how their liberal counterparts can countenance what they see as the unapologetic anti-Semitism of Omar and Tlaib and of a left that is increasingly suspicious of symbols of Jewish pride but comfortable with icons of Palestinian nationalism. Omar has apologized in the past for using anti-Semitic language, and in 2019 both Omar and Tlaib planned to visit Israel on the invitation of a Palestinian-rights group, Miftah, which has published articles accusing Jews of using gentile blood in matzoh, an ancient anti-Semitic myth. (Not that it matters to anti-Semites, but
Jewish dietary laws bar the consumption of blood of any kind.) Miftah later apologized. The two congresswomen also support the BDS movement against Israel that the Israeli government and its supporters in both parties consider anti-Semitic. Although there are anti-Semites who support BDS, to characterize even nonviolent protest methods as inherently anti-Semitic because they target Israel is to say that no legitimate protest of the Israeli government’s actions is possible—and for some people that is the point.

  Liberal American Jews who are uncomfortable with Omar and Tlaib’s remarks and associations still regard Trumpism’s rejection of multiracial citizenship as a far more immediate threat, because it undermines what they see as the cornerstone of their acceptance in the United States. Just as Einhorn saw the principle of anti-slavery as more important than the anti-Semitism of some abolitionists, most American Jews are unwilling to sacrifice their commitment to pluralism over the anti-Semitism of some in their coalition. Tlaib and Omar make some liberal American Jews feel uncomfortable; Trump makes them feel unsafe.

  Many American Jews also regard one-sided Republican concern for anti-Semitism as a cynical attempt to pit vulnerable groups against each other, in order to exploit rifts in the Democratic coalition, and understandably refuse to participate in what they see as a disproportionately vicious response that has nothing to do with defending Jews and everything to do with demonizing Omar and Tlaib and the vulnerable minority groups they represent.

  This is not to say that nothing Omar and Tlaib have said or done is deserving of criticism, even though some of the reactions have been disproportionate to the offenses. When Republicans say “law and order,” most people on the left understand that they mean impunity for police who abuse their power, particularly against people of color. When conservatives denigrate undocumented immigrants as “illegals” and their children as “anchor babies,” liberals recognize this as an effort to dehumanize the undocumented, particularly those of Latin American origin. When Trump inveighs against “terrorism” as a justification for discriminatory policies against Muslims, Democrats recognize it as a pretext. When it comes to the insistence that American support for Israel is about money, Jewish allegiance to foreign powers, or the result of supernatural hypnosis, the implications should be similarly obvious. A left that treats anti-Semitism the way the American right treats racism, as a largely imaginary phenomenon exaggerated by bad-faith actors, is a left that has failed to oppose bigotry in all its forms.

  Both criticism of Israel in anti-Semitic terms, and attempts to conflate justifiable criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism are common, and many people on both sides of the argument are uninterested in distinguishing them unless forced to do so. Yet the longer that Israel insists on maintaining its dominance over millions of Palestinians while denying them political rights, the more urgent it becomes for uncritical supporters of Israel to characterize any condemnation of that dominance as anti-Semitic—whether it is or not.

  Right-wing Jews baffled by the calculus that Trump is a greater danger to Jews than Tlaib and Omar should consider that they have adopted the mirror image of that logic: While Trump’s decades-long adherence to anti-Semitic stereotypes makes them uncomfortable, Omar and Tlaib’s harsh criticism of Israel makes them feel unsafe. America’s embrace of Jews is, after all, an anomaly in Jewish history. Assimilated Jews have found themselves ambushed by murderous anti-Semitism in the past—Jews were among the educated and commercial elite of Germany, until they weren’t. Trump’s anti-Semitism, if nothing else, speaks to the urgency of defending Israel—anti-Semitism is permanent, they argue, and American pluralism may not be.

  Yet this uncritical embrace of nationalism has also led some Jews to describe their liberal co-religionists in terms that validate anti-Semitic perceptions of Jews more broadly; the conservative pundit Ben Shapiro has referred to liberal Jews as “JINOs” and “bad Jews” who “vote Democrat” and therefore “undermine [the Jewish people] from within.” Shapiro and his comrades seem unaware that by validating anti-Semitic stereotypes about liberal American Jews, who comprise the majority of American Jewry, they are affirming the ideological beliefs of anti-Semites while presenting themselves as worthy exceptions.

  If the vast majority of American Jews are “bad Jews,” as Shapiro maintains, then hating them is rational. This is why Shapiro, himself a frequent target of anti-Semites, has drawn the interest of white-nationalist terrorists, including Alexandre Bissonnette and Anders Breivik, and is praised on white-nationalist forums. They may not like Shapiro personally, but he is saying what they want to hear. When the president said that liberal Jews are dumb or disloyal, he was echoing a prevailing theme of right-wing Jewish discourse in the Trump era.

  Those themes are echoed by the American Jews in Trump’s inner circle. Trump’s ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, compared the liberal Zionists of J Street to Nazi collaborators before excommunicating them from the faith entirely. This kind of rhetoric offers a threefold blessing to Jew haters: It tells anti-Semites they are free to hate liberal Jews; it tells them that doing so does not even count as anti-Semitism, because their targets are not truly Jews to begin with; it redefines anti-Semitism exclusively as criticism of Israel or her right-wing defenders. Zionist gentiles, from this perspective, can have their anti-Semitism excused, while left-wing Jews who advocate for Palestinian rights or who simply oppose the occupation can be smeared as anti-Semites.

  Yet amid the mutual recriminations and accusations of bigotry that characterize the discourse over the conflict, there remain only two choices: two states where both peoples realize their nationalist aspirations, or one democratic state based on one person one vote. Anything else—further occupation, displacement, genocide, apartheid, war—is a moral catastrophe. As the more powerful actor in the conflict, Israel has the most influence over whether this story ends in further tragedy.

  Nor is it reasonable to expect Muslim or Palestinian Americans—or anyone else really, but particularly them—to be Zionists or to be uncritical supporters of policies that deny basic rights to people who share their ethnic background or religion. Netanyahu has explicitly said that Israel is “the national state, not of all its citizens, but only of the Jewish people.” Are the Israeli citizens who are not Jewish, non-Jews who live under Israeli control in the territories—or their loved ones who live elsewhere—supposed to simply accept that without protest or objection? Do American Jews—or anyone else—owe their silence to a country that has decided to maintain control over millions of people without granting them basic political rights or representation? Defending Israeli and American Jews alike from anti-Semitism is not the same thing as protecting Israeli territorial ambitions, no matter how much the Israeli and American right wish it to be so.

  Israel is a fact; it exists. The Israeli insistence on denying Palestinians the right of national self-determination they expect for themselves is, as the Israeli historian Gershom Gorenberg writes, a direct path to undoing that existence. Anti-Semites cannot be talked out of their beliefs, but the easiest and quickest way for Israel to limit the impact of anti-Israel protest movements, and neutralize the ability of anti-Semites to disguise their motives as human rights advocacy, would be to end its decades-long hegemony over the Palestinian people.

  The path that Israel’s current political leadership has chosen instead is empowering right-wing ethno-nationalists all over the world, supporting the kind of governments that make life for Jews in the Diaspora difficult. Yet believing that right-wing ethno-nationalist governments are incapable of turning on Israel is no less naïve than believing that American pluralism will last forever. It is arguably more naïve. American religious pluralism, however imperfectly practiced, is centuries older than the European commitment to purging anti-Semitism, which is younger than Israel itself.

  This is why the vast majority of American Jews have refused Republican entreaties, a dynamic unlikely to change in the near future. American
Jews will not give up the pluralism of their home in America simply to defend their Israeli co-religionists from the consequences of their illiberalism. It is an unreasonable demand, and denying it is no act of disloyalty.

  The October before the 2020 election, Trump held a public phone call with Netanyahu in which he invited the Israeli prime minister to mock his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, as “Sleepy Joe.” Trump’s smile “visibly faded” as Netanyahu dodged the offer, instead thanking the president for his support.

  A few weeks later, about eight out of ten American Jewish voters contributed to Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. The next day, as Trump was still falsely claiming victory, Netanyahu publicly congratulated Biden, referencing their “long and warm personal relationship.” It was, you might say, a lesson in loyalty.

  11

  THE CRUELTY OF

  THE COVID CONTRACT

  This piece was written just a couple of weeks before the nation watched George Floyd die on video, a police officer’s knee on his neck. When I look back at this, it reads to me like a description of the factors that would lead to the largest civil-rights protest movement in American history.

  The federal government had failed to contain the pandemic or protect the essential workers it depended on. People were stuck at home, unable to work, go out, or spend time with friends and family. Armed Trump supporters were gathering at state capitols to protest the restrictions as tyranny; they would soon be cheering police crackdowns on Americans protesting murder by armed agents of the state. Governors were essentially left to figure out on their own how to contain the pandemic in the absence of leadership from the federal government, which was too preoccupied with placating the president’s ego for public-health officials to do their jobs as effectively as they should have or wanted to. By the spring, tens of thousands of Americans had died, and many more had lost their livelihoods.