A Case of the Mondays: How Zionism Broke With the Left

The progressive left has always been based on a coalition of the oppressed or marginalized; in the West, this is now taken to include the poor, women, racial minorities, and sometimes gays and lesbians. But the actual constituents of the coalition evidently change over time, as after all, originally the coalition only included the working poor and, specifically to the US, racial minorities. More importantly, the groups that are considered working poor or oppressed racial minorities change over time. A good case study for this is the experience of Jews, who the left considered a racial minority on a par with black Americans throughout the West until about the 1960s. Although at least in the US Jews still tend left, the association between them and movement progressivism is weaker for reasons that are indicative of how the left operates as a whole.

The reflexive reason is that Israeli actions became increasingly consistent with right-wing politics. In 1967, Israel turned from a perpetually threatened country to a country so strong that it could destroy its neighbors' air forces while their planes were still on the ground. Later it also became an explicitly occupying force that funded settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which from a left-wing perspective changed Zionism from an anti-colonialist or anti-racist ideology to an imperialist one. That is certainly the underlying concern of modern left-wing opposition to Israel.

But in fact, something else had to be at stake. When two countries billed as post- or anti-colonialist fight, the left tends to blame historical imperialism. When the Second Congo War tore Congo-Kinshasa apart, the left-wing response was not to blame the Rwandan Tutsis, who invaded the Congo and plundered its natural resources, or the Hutus, who were responsible to the greatest atrocities. Rather, it was to blame Western colonialism for Africa's problems and to cast the war as a scramble for resources demanded by the capitalist system. Although it was possible to narrate the Arab-Israeli conflict from a pro-Israel, anti-colonialist view, emphasizing Britain's divide and rule tactics, the left chose not to. Such a narrative would later become impossible to make because of the settlements and the brutality of the occupation, but the Western left broke with Jewish groups in the 1960s and early 1970s, before the first settlements were built.

Therefore, a better explanation for the expulsion of Jewish groups from the coalition of the oppressed has to lie in domestic trends in the United States, which held a plurality of the world's Jews. The most obvious explanation given that constraint—namely, that discrimination against Jews abated after World War Two to the point that in the US Jews were more like Italians and Poles and less like blacks and Hispanics—is helpful, but it still seems like only part of the reason.

A different part likely comes, ultimately, from different experiences with oppression. In the last six or seven hundred years, anti-Semitism has taken predominantly legal and cultural forms, reinforced by the occasional pogrom. Earlier than that it had an economic dimension—Jews were forbidden to own land—but once Europe recovered from the Dark Ages, the professions that Jews dominated, such as banking, turned them into a prosperous minority. This trend has existed since then almost continuously, with a brief break among Jewish immigrants to the United States around the turn of the 19^th century. But even then, many of the poverty-based experiences that shaped black civil rights activism just didn't exist among Jews.

Equipped with an intellectual culture closer in its emphasis on book learning to this of China than to this of the West and a skin color that made it possible for Jews to pass as gentiles in certain cases, Jews came to dominate such skilled professions as the law, medicine, and the academia. Discrimination against Jews was therefore more about explicit restrictions than about the economic impoverishment that typified anti-black racism. For example, in the 1920s Harvard moved from a purely meritocratic admission system to its current system in order to reduce the percentage of Jewish students from 25 to 15; at the time, Jews consisted of 2% of the American population. In contrast, only recently have blacks stopped to be underrepresented in American universities in general, to say nothing of elite universities.

As such, Jewish civil rights activism was predominantly legal, consisting of fights against discriminatory laws. Since most Jews at the time also came from a socialist or sometimes liberal political tradition, they naturally lent their groups—the ACLU and the Anti-Defamation League—to supporting similar equal rights struggles, primarily those of black people but sometimes also those of labor. As long as that was how left-wing activism worked, the ACLU and the ADL were natural allies of the black civil rights movement. More importantly, once black civil rights activism changed its focus to economic issues, the natural link was severed.

Although in the 1920s and 30s there was a strong socialist element to Jewish thought, by the 1950s and 60s it was replaced with straight liberalism. The most committed socialists were Zionist enough to immigrate to Israel and merge into city or kibbutz life. Anti-communist witchhunts exercised pressure to repudiate socialism. Several decades of life in the United States exercised pressure to adopt one of the two acceptable ideologies in the country, liberalism and conservatism, abetted by the fact that upward mobility plunged most Jews into the middle class. Those trends most visibly affected the ACLU, separating it from the unions.

And perhaps most importantly, after the early 60s, the most pressing legal battles were no longer racial. There was a growing realization in parts of the left, especially but not only the liberal ones, that there were marginalized groups not defined by class or race. Second wave feminism drained many Jewish liberals away from racial civil rights struggles; while within anti-racist activist groups Jews could define themselves as another racial minority, once Jewish liberals diverted their energies to other civil rights struggles the blacks who dominated the civil rights movement could now define Jews as whites. The animosity between feminists and anti-racists over who was more oppressed and therefore had a greater priority certainly didn't help.

Those blacks were certainly within reason. Jews could change their names and pass for white gentiles while blacks and the new minority in search of civil rights, Hispanics, couldn't. The Holocaust made racism generally unfashionable, but especially affected anti-Semitism. Especially after Martin Luther King's assassination, the black civil rights movement had shifted its focus to poverty-related issues, while the ACLU's civil liberties battles were increasingly class-neutral. Lacking any domestic discrimination to focus on, Jews who wanted to focus on specifically Jewish issues gravitated to support for Israel, which would've separated them from the mainstream American left, whose only involvement in foreign policy was anti-war activism, even if it hadn't entailed support for Republican hawks.

Thence by 1970s the relationship between Jews and blacks had strained to the point that the American left stopped considering Zionism an ally. American Jews have still leaned left since then, but Zionism, which historically was a left-wing movement, was tagged as right-wing.

It's important to note that it was only after domestic trends within the United States had separated Jews from the anti-racist left that the left started to view Zionism as right-wing. The Six-Day War could provide a suitable pretext for viewing Israel as an oppressor state rather than as an oppressed state, but the right-wing characteristics of Zionism, namely a singular emphasis on military service and discrimination against Arabs, date back to Israel's independence. Today's anti-Israeli leftists even trace right-wing Zionism further back than that—for example, Noam Chomsky blames Zionists for the initial friction between Jews and Arabs in the 1920s—but those interpretations only arose after the fact. As long as Zionism was considered left-wing, the left would forgive its transgressions just like it did those of other socialist or post-colonial states.

The significance of this to the left in general is that the answer to the perennial question of which groups are considered oppressed and therefore get the associated fringe benefits is determined by many things that have little to do with oppression. A group that is no longer oppressed may still receive these benefits if politically it's still aligned with other left-wing movements; conversely, a group that is still oppressed but fails to side politically with the mainstream left, or a group that is oppressed but cannot convince anyone that it is, will be perceived as not deserving any special recognition.

Comments

[Tano]

I think this is hugely overanalyzed. The "left", if by that one means some sort of an average view of a multiverse of groupings, has faded in its support for Israel in direct correlation with the the growth of the settler movement. It wasn't the 6 day war, it wasn't the shifting sands of post 60s liberalism, it wasn't the success of Jewish assimilation. So long as the Jews were fighting for their survival is Israel, they had the sympathy of the left.

Once they became an expanisiont power, embarked on this insane policy on the West Bank, they became oppressors and no longer the oppressed. Many leftists could see clearly, back in the late 70s, what Sharon was only able to get through his thick skull at the turn of the century - that the settlement program could only lead to an ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, or a permanent arpartheid system, or the end of the predominantly Jewish identity of Israel.

The "left" found the first two alternatives unacceptable for obvious reasons. They actually did support the continuation of Israel as a Jewish state. So the push, from the left, was and is for a peaceful settlement with full recognition of Palestinian rights to their own territory.

For an entire generation now, the Israeli government has alternatly engaged in peace processes or turned away from them, but throughout all those twists and turns has continued the settlement policies. As they do to this day. Despite all the arguments of what they could do, or should do, the expansion continues, the plight of the Palestinians continues to fester.

None of the rest of the factors you dicuss has anything near the relevance or importance of these realities.

[Alon Levy]

The problem with the settlement-based analysis is that the left broke with Zionism before there was a single settlement in the occupied territories. The animosity between black civil rights groups and the ADL dates back to the late 60s.

That Israel engaged in a brutal occupation couldn't matter. A lot of countries engaged in at least as brutal activities, but as long as they were labeled as left-wing, the left was silent about their abuses of power. Ho Chi Minh slaughtered 500,000 Cambodians. But he was considered opposed to US interests, so he got a free pass.

Incidentally, now that I think of it, it's possible the growing ties between the US and Israel were part of the reason behind this trend. One feature of the left is that it tends to think that what is bad for the US must be good; that's why the Guardian ran pro-Putin editorials during the Orange Revolution.

[Tano]

Alon,

I really dont know what you mean by "the left". Don't really know what I mean by it either, but my perception of the general sentiments on the port side was that criticism of Israel was not, in any substantive way at all present until the settlement movement, and the prominence of the "Greater Israel" concept were well underway.

Any animosity between blacks and the ADL is hardly relevant to the the notion of "the left" turning against zionism. You seem to be equating zionism - a specific movement relating to the state of Israel, with Judaism in general, or Jews in general. Whatever tensions existed between the black civil right movement and the ACLU, or whatever problem people like Podhoretz had with "negros" has nothing to do with the broader left's views on the Israeli -Palestinian issue.

I dont know what you refer to with regard to Ho. Maybe you are not aware, but he died in 1969, long before the disintegration of Cambodia.

I think that, with your final little paragraph, the mask comes off. There really is not much thought behind this post at all - just another over the top rant against "da left", dressed up with pseudo-historical (and largely incorrect) facts.

I really dont understand this approach. The real world is an incredibly interesting subject of study. Why waste your time (and ours) with trying to impose some simplistic, agenda-driven overlay that obscures far more than it illuminates?

[Alon Levy]

I'm well aware of Ho's death. He still managed to kill 500,000 ethnic Cambodians living in Vietnam. That was long before the disintegration of Cambodia; he did that all on his own.

[Robin]

The one major factor I think you overlook is the development of the PLO. Between the late 1960s and early 1970s the PLO wrested control away from the Arab states that had helped in its establishment. And it took on a more Guevarist character. In so doing, the Palestinian national liberation movement had remolded itself in the image of the FLN, NLF, and other third world nationalist movements the Left had come to stand in solidarity with.

I suspect that the Left was becoming wary by the time of Suez. Israel had thrown its lot in with Britain and France, even if for its own reasons. But it should be remembered that there was always a critique of Zionism on the Left--most from Jewish leftists such as I.F. Stone and left Zionists such as Arendt.

(I've never heard the reference to 500,000 ethnic Cambodians killed under Ho. Not that Ho wasn't capable of atrocities, but he usually apologized after it was over and served its political aims.)

[Hektor Bim]

This seems to me to be only a partial explanation. You only use examples from America to explain the divergence between the left and Israel. But a lot of this has occurred in Europe, and since the membership of the left in Europe is very different - (many fewer blacks and Jews), something else had to occur there. It seems to me that a lot of anti-Zionism in the American left came from the European left. Part of it has to be explained by the Soviet shift to anti-Zionism and support for Arab states as a counterweight to the US, but I think there it is also more complicated.

Your last paragraph is very interesting. It seems to me that people on the left do in fact pick out specific oppressed groups to support and ignore others. Chmosky is quite explicit on this - he deliberately attempts to counter American policy abroad and therefore focuses exclusively on the abuses of governments supported by the US. But, even this doesn't really explain everything. After all, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan are US-friendly regimes with terrible human rights records in general, and especially to oppressed minorities (Christians and Shiites and non-Muslims respectively, not to mention foreign guest workers in the Saudi case), but the American left isn't very involved with championing these groups. There is a tension between anti-imperialism and championing oppressed minorities in other countries, and it regularly comes out in the American left.

[layla]

Alon, the left focuses on Israel because they see the US as partially responsible for its crimes. And as US citizens they think they can have a greater influence on their government than they do on other governments. That is why they focus on the crimes of the US, and the crimes of countries supported by the US, and not the crimes of other countries. It has nothing to do with having a double standard.

[Melvin]

I am a white person on the ideological left. Way on back in the 1980s as a young idealistic type during the age of Reagan with my liberals views that would eventually evolved into democratic socialism, my understand of the Israeli-Arab conflict led me to embrace Socialist-Zionism. I am not Jewish at all, but I explicitly understand the links between social justice and Jewish values as being one and the same. Considering that Israel is a secular democratic state with a socialistic tradition, I find it difficult to understand why Israel is always vilified by the left.

Some right-wing Zionists, neo-conservatives, and Christian Right types accused me of being Anti-Zionist because I support the two state solution in spite of my support for Israel's many hawkish response when they are under attack. There are those on the left that accused me of being an anti-Muslim racist, a neo-con, and an apologist for imperialism with my support for Israel. Can both sides be correct?

As a democratic socialist; I despise fascism, communism, monarchies, theocracies, and capitalism. Israel are none of those things that I am opposed to. For me, it is the question of justice. This is why I support Israel. I support the Labor Party (and Meretz).