11^th November 2013
by Philip Mendes,
ABC Religion and Ethics .
Aus­trali­an and other western Jews are just as divided as the Israelis them­selves on potential solutions to the Middle East conflict.
I would estimate that about 40 – 45% of Jews support Israel without qual­i­fic­a­tion, about 50 – 55% support a two state solution upholding both Israeli and Palestini­an national rights and favour open debate on Israeli policies, and less than 1% hold anti-Zionist views.
It needs to be emphas­ized that most of the Jews who support two states are strongly committed to the well-being of Israel and Jews generally. They are no different to citizens in other liberal demo­crat­ic societies who critique the policies of their own gov­ern­ment – for example, Aus­trali­ans who repudiate the Coalition Gov­ern­ment’s policies on Indi­gen­ous issues or refugees, or Americans who oppose their gov­ern­ment’s involve­ment in Afgh­anistan or Iraq – without demon­iz­ing their entire state or nation as evil and oppress­ive.
In contrast, the anti-Zionist Jews mostly believe in the so-called “one state” solution whereby the existing Jewish State of Israel should be elim­in­ated, and replaced by an exclus­iv­ist Arab State of Greater Palestine in which Jews would be at best tolerated as a religious minority. Their viewpoint is not only tiny in Jewish com­munit­ies worldwide, but also marginal even among left-wing Jews.
As I have argued elsewhere, there is little doubt that a Greater Palestine is the ultimate political objective of the inter­na­tion­al Campaign for Boycott, Divest­ment and Sanctions against Israel (BDS). Not sur­pris­ingly within the BDS movement, the opinions of the small minority of anti-Zionist Jews loom larger than life. For example, Federal Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon has claimed that “many Jewish com­munit­ies support this work.” In fact, no Jewish com­munit­ies support the BDS. Similarly, the Mayor of Mar­rick­ville, Fiona Byrne, proudly cited support from the NSW Jews against the Occu­pa­tion group which has about 10 members, and also claimed support from “a growing number of Jews from all over the world.” In fact, the only organized Jewish community group in Mar­rick­ville, the Inner West Jewish Community and Friends Peace Alliance which is left-oriented and strongly sup­port­ive of a two-state solution, devoted con­sid­er­able time and resources to opposing the Mar­rick­ville BDS proposal during the 2011 NSW State election campaign.
Similarly, BDS cam­paign­er Professor Jake Lynch, head of Sydney Uni­versity’s Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, has responded to accus­a­tions of dis­crim­in­a­tion against Israeli Jews by citing talks at the Centre by anti-Zionist Jews such as Ilan Pappe and Noam Chomsky as evidence of a non-racist policy. But Lynch is disin­genu­ous in not acknow­ledging that virtually all the Jews hosted by the Centre have been fanatical anti-Zionists, and that the Centre has spe­cific­ally excluded any pro-Israel Jews.
Some con­ser­vat­ive Jewish com­ment­at­ors label anti-Zionist Jews as “self-hating” Jews in an attempt polit­ic­ally to discredit their arguments. Self-hatred is an alleged psy­cho­lo­gic­al condition which involves members of despised low-status racial, religious or sexual minority groups identi­fy­ing with the values and pre­ju­dices of the majority group and intern­al­iz­ing their ste­reo­types.
But quan­ti­fy­ing these views in such psy­cho­lo­gic­al terms is arguably prob­lem­at­ic. For example, one can hypo­thes­ize that there might be a link between childhood exper­i­ences of rejection or exclusion by the Jewish community and later adoption of an anti-Zionist position. But to date no empirical studies verifying such an asso­ci­ation exist. However, there is evidence that many anti-Zionist Jews have no interest in or knowledge of Jewish history, values and culture. They really don’t care what most Jews say or do. Those whose sole identity is a political one rather than a Jewish one can hardly be accused of self-hatred when they reject something to which they had no attach­ment in the first place. I per­son­ally prefer the term self-denying Jews, since anti-Zionist Jews mostly reject ethnic or cultural con­nec­tions with the Jewish community, and eschew feelings of solid­ar­ity with other Jews who are oppressed or attacked.
So why does the BDS movement highlight the views of this small group of anti-Zionist Jews who are so unrep­res­ent­at­ive of col­lect­ive Jewish opinion? There are two reasons.
The first is a con­tinu­ation of malevol­ent his­tor­ic­al practice. There has been a long history of anti-Semitism in parts of the radical Left whereby a small number of unrep­res­ent­at­ive token Jews are oppor­tun­ist­ic­ally encour­aged to exploit their own religious and cultural origins in order to vilify their own people. This happened in 1929 when American Jewish Com­mun­ists were obliged to defend the anti-Jewish pogroms in Palestine. It happened again in 1952/53 when Jewish Com­mun­ists were rolled out to endorse Stalin’s anti-Semitic Slansky show trial in Czechoslov­akia, and the so-called Doctors’ Plot. It has happened many times since 1967 when left-wing Jews have been pressured to publicly conform to the anti-Zionist fun­da­ment­al­ism of the far Left.
Radical Left groups would never employ such tech­niques against other his­tor­ic­ally oppressed nations. They would not publish the views of Indi­gen­ous Aus­trali­ans who com­pletely oppose land rights, or demand that a feminist journal publish the views of women who totally oppose abortion. They would certainly not publicize the views of Palestini­ans or Arabs who support Zionism.
The second factor is that the BDS movement attempts to use Jewish anti-Zionists as an alibi against serious accus­a­tions of anti-Semitism by arguing that Jews also share their views. But this trans­par­ent strategy is easily exposed by anti-racists. David Hirsh has noted in relation to the par­ti­cip­a­tion of a small number of anti-Zionist Jews in the British campaign for an academic boycott of Israel: “Jews too can make anti-Semitic claims, use anti-Semitic images, support anti-Semitic exclu­sions and play an important, if unwitting, part in preparing the ground for the future emergence of anti-Semitic movement.” For example, Jewish anti-Zionist groups have defended racist arguments such as the alleg­a­tion that Jews col­lab­or­ated with the Nazis to per­pet­rate the Holocaust, or that Israel is per­pet­rat­ing similar crimes to the Nazis, or that a Jewish lobby controls the inter­na­tion­al media.
Finally, our dis­cus­sion needs to return to the question of which group gets to define the meaning and content of racism. The 1999 Macph­er­son Report into the murder of Stephen Lawrence in the UK is generally acknow­ledged as estab­lish­ing that oppressed victims of racism should have that right. As an his­tor­ic­ally oppressed nation, Jews reas­on­ably claim the right to identify when criticism of Israeli policies is reas­on­able and con­tex­tu­al­ized (as expressed by the large numbers of two state Israelis and Jews we discussed above), and equally when it falls into the realm of ethno-national vili­fic­a­tion.
The fact that a small number of self-denying Jews join a movement that engages in ethnic ste­reo­typ­ing of all Israeli Jews and Jewish sup­port­ers of Israel worldwide irre­spect­ive of their political views does not provide any excuse for that move­ment’s pre­ju­di­cial behaviour.
Philip Mendes is an Associate Professor in the Depart­ment of Social Work, Faculty of Medicine at Monash Uni­ver­sity, and is the Director of the Social Inclusion and Social Policy Research Unit. He is the author of the forth­com­ing book, “Jews and the Left: The Rise and Fall of a Political Alliance.”