Simon H.

Castillo
simoncastillo1@aol.com
Israel News - Haaretz.com

Opinion. The State of Israel vs.

the Jewish People
Israel has aligned itself with one nationalist,
even anti-Semitic, regime after another. Where
does that leave world Jewry?
Eva Illouz
An earthquake is quietly rocking the Jewish world.

In the 18th century, Jews began playing a decisive role in the

promotion of universalism, because universalism promised them
redemption from their political subjection. Through universalism, Jews
could, in principle, be free and equal to those who had dominated them.
This is why, in the centuries that followed, Jews participated in
disproportionate numbers in communist and socialist causes. This is
also why Jews were model citizens of countries, such as France or the
United States, with universalist constitutions.

The history of Jews as promoters of Enlightenment and universalist

values, however, is drawing to a close. We are the stunned witnesses of
new alliances between Israel, Orthodox factions of Judaism throughout
the world, and the new global populism in which ethnocentrism and
even racism hold an undeniable place.

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When Prime Minister Netanyahu chose to align himself politically with

Donald Trump before and after the U.S. presidential election of 2016,
some people could still give him the benefit of doubt. Admittedly,
Trump was surrounded by people like Steve Bannon, the former head
of Breitbart News, who reeked of racism and anti-Semitism, but no one
was sure of the direction the new presidency would take. Even if
Trump refused to condemn the anti-Semitic elements of his electoral
base or the Ku Klux Klan, which had enthusiastically backed him, and
even if it took him a long time to dissociate himself from David Duke –
we were not yet certain of the presence of anti-Semitism in Trump’s
discourse and strategies (especially since his daughter Ivanka was a
convert to Judaism).

But the events in Charlottesville in August 2017 no longer allowed for

doubt. The neo-Nazi demonstrators committed violent acts against
peaceful counter-protesters, killing one woman by plowing through a
crowd with a car (an act reminiscent in its technique of terrorist
attacks in Europe). Trump reacted to the events by condemning both
the neo-Nazis and white supremacists and their opponents. The world
was shocked by his conflation of the two groups, but Jerusalem did not
object. Once again, the indulgent (or cynical) observer could have
interpreted this silence as the reluctant obeisance of a vassal toward
his overlord (of all the countries in the world, Israel receives the most
military aid from the United States). One was entitled to think that
Israel had no choice but to collaborate, despite the American leader’s
outward signs of anti-Semitism.

This interpretation, however, is no longer tenable. Before and since

Charlottesville, Netanyahu has courted other leaders who are either
unbothered by anti-Semitism or straightforwardly sympathetic to it,
and upon whom Israel is not economically dependent. His concessions
go as far as participating in a partial form of Holocaust denial.

Take the case of Hungary. Under the government of Viktor Orban, the
country shows troubling signs of legitimizing anti-Semitism. In 2015,
for example, the Hungarian government announced its intention to
erect a statue to commemorate Balint Homan, a Holocaust-era minister
who played a decisive role in the murder or deportation of nearly
600,000 Hungarian Jews. Far from being an isolated incident, just a few
months later, in 2016, another statue was erected in tribute to Gyorgy
Donáth, one of the architects of anti-Jewish legislation during World
War II. It was thus unsurprising to hear Orban employing anti-Semitic
tropes during his reelection campaign in 2017, especially against
Georges Soros, the Jewish, Hungarian-American billionaire-
philanthropist who supports liberal causes, including that of open
borders and immigration. Reanimating the anti-Semitic cliché about
the power of Jews, Orban accused Soros of harboring intentions to
undermine Hungary.

Whom did Netanyahu choose to support? Not the anxious Hungarian

Jewish community that protested bitterly against the anti-Semitic
rhetoric of Orban’s government; nor did he choose to support the
liberal Jew Soros, who defends humanitarian causes. Instead, the prime
minister created new fault lines, preferring political allies to members
of the tribe. He backed Orban, the same person who resurrects the
memory of dark anti-Semites. When the Israeli ambassador in
Budapest protested the erection of the infamous statue, he was publicly
contradicted by none other than Netanyahu.

To my knowledge, the Israeli government has never officially protested

Orban’s anti-Semitic inclinations and affinities. In fact, when the Israeli
ambassador in Budapest did try to do so, he was quieted down by
Jerusalem. Not long before the Hungarian election, Netanyahu went to
the trouble of visiting Hungary, thus giving a “kosher certificate” to
Orban and exonerating him of the opprobrium attached to anti-
Semitism and to an endorsement of figures active in the Shoah. When
Netanyahu visited Budapest, he was given a glacial reception by the
Federation of the Jewish Communities, while Orban gave him a warm
welcome. To further reinforce their touching friendship, Netanyahu
invited Orban to pay a reciprocal visit to Israel this past July, receiving
him in a way usually reserved for the most devoted national allies.

The relationship with Poland is just as puzzling. As a reminder, Poland

is governed by the nationalist Law and Justice party, which has an
uncompromising policy against refugees and appears to want to
eliminate the independence of the courts by means of a series of
reforms that would allow the government to control the judiciary
branch. In 2016 the Law and Justice-led government eliminated the
official body whose mission was to deal with problems of racial
discrimination, xenophobia and intolerance, arguing that the
organization had become “useless.”
An illustration depicting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shaking
hands with Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki in Auschwitz.
Eran Wolkowski

Encouraged by this and other governmental declarations and policies,

signs of nationalism multiplied within Polish society. In February 2018,
president Andrzej Duda declared that he would sign a law making it
illegal to accuse the Polish nation of having collaborated with the Nazis.
Accusing Poland of collusion in the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities
would be from now prosecutable. Israel initially protested the
proposed legislation, but then in June, Benjamin Netanyahu and the
Polish prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, signed an agreement
exonerating Poland of any and all crimes against the Jews during the
time of the German occupation. Israel also acceded to Poland’s move to
outlaw the expression “Polish concentration camp.” Moreover,
Netanyahu even signed a statement stipulating that anti-Semitism is
identical to anti-Polonism, and that only a handful of sad Polish
individuals were responsible for persecuting Jews – not the nation as a
whole.

In July, that declaration was roundly condemned by Yad Vashem, as

well as by a group of 21 Israeli historians, members of the Academy of
Sciences and Humanities. But the stupefying result remained
unchanged, with Netanyahu, the head of the Israeli government, giving
his support to what amounts to a version of Holocaust denial.
Netanyahu the history buff could not have been unaware that, in the
words of Polish commentator Sawomir Sierakowski, “two-thirds of the
250,000 Jews who escaped during the Nazis’ ‘liquidation’ of Jewish
ghettos in 1942 had been killed by 1945, most of them by Poles or with
Polish participation.”

If Israel still had a moral standing on one topic (sadly probably the only
remaining one), it is with regard to the Shoah, but Netanyahu
undermined it by making the history and memory of the Holocaust a
politically negotiable and tradable commodity. And if that’s not enough,
earlier this month, Israel hosted Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte, a
man who has proudly compared himself to Hitler.
This is a decisive turning point for Zionism, which places Netanyahu in
an avant-garde of sorts, bringing the Revisionist Zionism he claims to
represent to the final stage of its historical logic.

As a political doctrine and practice, traditional social-democratic

Zionism had sought to find and maintain an equilibrium between three
poles: Jewish communities in the Diaspora, Israel’s security interests,
and international political alliances with the world’s strong
democracies (cooperation with rogue states was for the most part
unofficial). The memory of the Holocaust was the moral and ideological
glue supporting and holding together this tripartite structure: Diaspora
Jewry, Israel and enlightened nations were all determined that “never
again” would such a crime take place against Jews or anyone else.

Yet for the first time in its history, Israel is putting the sensibility and
interests of Jewish communities on the back burner. Israel and its
government have even shown a willingness to desacralize the memory
of the Shoah and make deals with open or hidden anti-Semites. This is a
fascinating phenomenon, one that begs the question: Why is that the
case?

Netanyahu here promotes a new vision of Zionism that demands a new

international strategy, in response. Netanyahu has a deep political
affinity to Trump, Orban and Morawiecki, and above all with Russian
President Vladimir Putin. (During this summer’s Trump-Putin summit
in Helsinki, the leaders declared their mutual admiration, which is now
on display for all to see.) Netanyahu has lost interest in the mostly
liberal American Jewish community not only because by predilection
he prefers to cultivate a few rich people rather than groups and
communities (except at election time), but also because he has a
genuine and authentic contempt for liberalism (the American Jewish
community is predominantly liberal).

His alliance with the dark leaders evoked above is not (or not only) an
opportunistic one but rather one of affinity. Netanyahu is much closer
to these leaders than he is to Ze’ev Jabotinsky (who once proposed that
every prime minister who is a Jew should have a deputy who is an
Arab, and vice versa).

All of these leaders share a nativist vision, which is to say that they
strongly oppose the ethnic, religious or racial dilution of their country
by immigrants or universalist rights. Israel has in fact long pioneered
the model to which these nations aspire: predicating citizenship on
ethnic and religious affiliation (the Law of Return), making impossible
domestic marriages between Jews and people of different religions,
opposing immigration by non-Jews and ethnic inter-mixing, even as it
seeks to preserve the mantle of democracy (mostly because the name
comes with many privileges): Israel has claimed for decades that it is
both democratic and Jewish.

For their part, Ann Coulter, a far-right American pundit, and Richard
Spencer, president of the National Policy Institute, a supremacist think
tank, often cite Israel as a model state of ethnic purity to which they
aspire (in fact Israel is far from “ethnic purity” since Arabs, both
Christian and Muslim, make up 20 percent of its population). The
nation-state law (privileging Jewish citizens over non-Jewish ones)
recently enacted in Israel is a more explicit and radical version of the
ethnic model of democracy to which the country has long subscribed.
A billboard displaying George Soros urges Hungarians to take part in a
national consultation about what it calls a plan by the Hungarian-born
financier to settle migrants in Europe, in Budapest. ATTILA
KISBENEDEK / AFP

Like the American, Hungarian and Polish alt-right, Israel wants to

restore national pride unstained by “self-hating” critics. Like the Poles,
for two decades now, Israel has been waging a war over the official
narrative of the nation, trying to expunge school textbooks of
inconvenient facts (such as the fact that Arabs were actively chased out
of Israel in 1948). In order to quash criticism, Israel’s Culture Ministry
now predicates funding to creative institutions on loyalty to the state.
As in Hungary, the Israeli government persecutes NGOs like Breaking
the Silence, a group whose only sin has been to give soldiers a forum
for reporting their army experiences and to oppose Israeli settlers’
violence against Palestinians or the expropriation of land, in violation
of international law. Purging critics from public life (as expressed in
barring the entry into the country of BDS supporters, denying funding
to theater companies or films critical of Israel, etc.) is an expression of
direct state power.

When it comes to refugees, Israel, like Hungary and Poland, refuses to

comply with international law. For almost a decade now, Israel has not
respected international conventions on the rights of refugees even
though it is a signatory of said conventions: The state has detained
refugees in camps, and imprisoned and deported them. Like Poland,
Israel is trying to do away with the independence of its judiciary. Israel
feels comfortable with the anti-democratic extreme right of European
states in the same way that one feels comfortable with a family
member who belches and gossips, losing any sense of self-control or
table manners.

More generally, these countries today share a deep common political

core: fear of foreigners at the borders (it must be specified, however,
that Israelis’ fears are less imaginary than those of Hungarians or
Polish); references to the nation’s pride untainted by a dubious past,
casting critics as traitors to the nation; and outlawing human rights
organizations and contesting global norms based on moral principles.
The Netanyahu-Trump-Putin triumvirate has a definite shared vision
and strategy: to create a political bloc that would undermine the
current liberal international order and its key players.

In a recent article about Trump for Project Syndicate, legal scholar

Mark S. Weiner suggested that Trump’s political vision and practice
follow (albeit, unknowingly) the precepts of Carl Schmitt, the German
legal scholar who joined the Nazi Party in 1933.

“In place of normativity and universalism, Schmitt offers a theory of

political identity based on a principle that Trump doubtless
appreciates deeply from his pre-political career: land,” wrote Weiner.
“For Schmitt, a political community forms when a group of people
recognizes that they share some distinctive cultural trait that they
believe is worth defending with their lives. This cultural basis of
sovereignty is ultimately rooted in the distinctive geography… that a
people inhabit. At stake here are opposing positions about the relation
between national identity and law. According to Schmitt, the
community’s nomos [the Greek word for “law”] or sense of itself that
grows from its geography, is the philosophical precondition for its law.
For liberals, by contrast, the nation is defined first and foremost by its
legal commitments.”

Netanyahu and his ilk subscribe to this Schmittian vision of the

political, making legal commitments subordinate to geography and
race. Land and race are the covert and overt motives of Netanyahu’s
politics. He and his coalition have, for example, waged a politics of slow
annexation in the West Bank, either in the hope of expelling or
subjugating the 2.5 million Palestinians living there, or of controlling
them.

They have also radicalized the country’s Jewishness with the highly
controversial nation-state law. Playing footsie with anti-Semitic leaders
may seem to contradict the nation-state law, but it is motivated by the
same statist and Schmittian logic whereby the state no longer views
itself as committed to representing all of its citizens, but rather aims to
expand territory; increase its power by designating enemies; define
who belongs and who doesn’t; narrow the definition of citizenship;
harden the boundaries of the body collective; and undermine the
international liberal order. The line connecting Orban to the nationality
law is the sheer and raw expansion of state power.

Courting Orban or Morawiecki means having allies in the European

Council and Commission, which would help Israel block unwanted
votes, weaken Palestinian international strategies and create a political
bloc that could impose a new international order. Netanyahu and his
buddies have a strategy and are trying to reshape the international
order to meet their own domestic goals. They are counting on the
ultimate victory of reactionary forces to have a free hand to do what
they please inside the state.

But what is most startling is the fact that in order to promote his
illiberal policies, Netanyahu is willing to snub and dismiss the greatest
part of the Jewish people, its most accepted rabbis and intellectuals,
and the vast number of Jews who have supported, through money or
political action, the State of Israel. This suggests a clear and undeniable
shift from a politics based on the people to a politics based on the land.

For the majority of Jews outside Israel, human rights and the struggle
against anti-Semitism are core values. Netanyahu’s enthusiastic
support for authoritarian, anti-Semitic leaders is an expression of a
profound shift in the state’s identity as a representative of the Jewish
people to a state that aims to advance its own expansion through
seizure of land, violation of international law, exclusion and
discrimination. This is not fascism per se, but certainly one of its most
distinctive features.
Trump and Putin at their joint press conference in Helsinki, in July.
Netanyahu has a deep affinity for both leaders. Doug Mills / NYT

This state of affairs is worrisome but it is also likely to have two

interesting and even positive developments. The first is that in the
same way that Israel has freed itself from its “Jewish complex” –
abandoning its role as leader and center of the Jewish people as a
whole – many or most Jews will now likely free themselves from their
Israel complex, finally understanding that Israel’s values and their own
are deeply at odds. World Jewish Congress head Ron Lauder’s August
13, 2018, op-ed in The New York Times, which was close to disowning
Israel, is a powerful testimony to this. Lauder was very clear: Israel’s
loss of moral status means it won’t be able to demand the
unconditional loyalty of world Jewry. What was in the past experienced
by many Jews as an inner conflict is now slowly being resolved: Many
or most members of Jewish communities will give preference to their
commitment to the constitutions of their countries – that is to
universalist human rights.

Israel has already stopped being the center of gravity of the Jewish
world, and as such, it will be able to count only on the support of a
handful of billionaires and the ultra-Orthodox. This means that for the
foreseeable future, Israel’s leverage in American politics will be
considerably weakened.

Trumpism is a passing phase in American politics. Latinos and left-

wing Democrats will become increasingly involved in the country’s
politics, and as they do, these politicians will find it increasingly
difficult to justify continued American support of Israeli policies that
are abhorrent to liberal democracies. Unlike in the past, however, Jews
will no longer pressure them to look the other way.

The second interesting development concerns Europe. The European

Union no longer knows what its mission was. But the Netanyahus,
Trumps, Orbans and Morawieckis will help Europe reinvent its
vocation: The social-democrat bloc of the EU will be entrusted with the
mission of opposing state-sanctioned anti-Semitism and all forms of
racism, and above all defending Europe’s liberal values that we, Jews
and non-Jews, Zionists and anti-Zionists, have all fought so hard for.
Israel, alas, is no longer among those fighting that fight.