The Politically Wandering Jew

What explains the political wandering of some Jews, who seem to be sliding irresistibly to the right? Katie Ebner-Landy presents three paradoxes, which she proposes will have to be fought against to reassure left-wing Jews.

 

 

Today, somewhere on the journey between left and right, you will meet a politically wandering Jew. He is a kind of person who, having once made his home on the left, has recently packed up his things, and set off rightwards. In France, he might be called Serge Klarsfeld. In the United States, Joshua Leifer.

On September 15, the Jewish leftist magazine, Jewish Currents, held its first ever live event in New York. There, an audience heard about how right-wing parties in France, Brazil, the United Kingdom, and the United States have recently welcomed Jews with open arms and framed themselves as their new protector. The panel analyzed this phenomenon by describing how Jews were being used or instrumentalized by the right. What they did not ask is why this instrumentalization has occurred. This question requires us to flip the script and return some agency to the Jews on this journey. Why have they chosen to emigrate?

Asking this question requires us not only to look at the right, but at the left. It is not only the right that have changed their tactics, but the left that is no longer seen as welcoming. Three paradoxes can explain why.

We, on the diasporic Jewish left, must acknowledge and grapple with them, to stop them from being used against us.

1. Diaspora and nation

Nation states are an ugly way to organize the world. They are often ethnocentric, made in conditions of violence, and exclusionary of people who don’t fit – in their founding, and beyond. They are, however, the status quo; the way the world is, how it currently operates. Diaspora is a condition of living without the nation state: living in exile, among other nations. There are a few populations who currently live in diaspora, and do not have nation states. Today, this is the situation of many Palestinians. Historically, it has been the situation of the Jews.

Anti-Zionist Jewish organizers at the Jewish Currents event praised the value of diaspora: the way in which it refuses a unity between land and people, how it encourages an understanding of other people, a sharing of lifestyles, an erasure of essentialist difference. They stand here within something of a philosophical tradition. “It is a part of morality,” wrote philosopher Theodor Adorno, “not to be at home in one’s home.” These organizers critiqued the Jewish nation-state, and the ideology associated with its founding, Zionism, as philosophies which established a kind of ethnic supremacy.

The Jewish leftist is encouraged to romanticize Yiddishland and to revere the Bundists who refused the temptation of Zionism. But when it comes to Palestine, they must praise those who want a state instead

The one panel led by Palestinian organizers, on the other hand, betrayed a longing for a nation. These speakers lamented the condition of diaspora: the difficulty of representation and organization, the extreme obstacles to dignity and proper defense. One spoke about moving beyond the model of the nation-state to do so, but when pressed, could not say what this entailed. To be a Jew on the left is to have a nation and want a diaspora. To be a Palestinian is to be largely in a diaspora and want a nation.

The issue here is as much about the present as it is about the past. In the pantheon of the Jewish left, the General Jewish Labor Bund stands front and center, as a group who resisted the nationalist tug. When it comes to recounting their own history, the Jewish leftist is encouraged to romanticize Yiddishland and to revere the Bundists who refused the temptation of Zionism. But when it comes to Palestine, they must praise those who want a state instead. If there were a Palestinian Bund, things might be different: an existing movement in which to place a continuation of these diasporist dreams. But the architecture of socialist internationalism on which the Bund once relied is sorely absent. As it stands, the Jewish leftist must deny a Zionism for themselves, while encouraging one for another nation.

The French writer Jean Genet, considering the suffering he had witnessed in his trips to Palestine, anticipated this contradiction and attempted to resolve it in a pithy phrase. He would support the Palestinians right to a state, he said, until they had one. “The day the Palestinians become institutionalized, I will no longer be on their side. The day the Palestinians become a nation like other nations, I will no longer be there.” This answer, while clever, is too simplistic, as it requires us to be blind to the consequences of our political beliefs. In fact, historically, this perspective would have required leftist Jews to have supported Zionism, before the establishment of the state of Israel.

All that remains are bad options. Either the Jewish leftist is anti-Zionist, and supports a non-existent Palestinian Bund. Or they accept the bleak political realism of two nationalisms, destined to respectively solidify or create ugly nation states, which excel at prioritizing one group of people over another, on the basis of arbitrary essentialist characteristics. The mid-ground of believing in one nationalism, and chastising another, leaves the undecided Jew feeling uniquely slighted. With the left not supporting their aspirations to self-determination, the nationalism of the right is an obvious alternative. Why can they do this horrible experiment, but not I?

2. Indigeneity vs. nativism

One resolution to this difficulty is to frame Zionism as a uniquely bad nationalism: one which involved telling people in one place to go and take land in another. This is the settler colonial argument. When the uniqueness of Zionism gives way to being compared to other settler colonies, the left can say that they support all indigenous rebellions against settler colonies, and this is simply one that is currently active. But this argument runs into the problem of imagining a natural relationship between people and land rights.

Sometimes two words mean the same thing, but with different connotations. Like expat vs. immigrant, the pairing indigenous vs. native sets up a positive variant of one experience against its negative counterpart.

Those indigenous to the land – in the United States, Canada, Central America, Australia – are seen as possessing territorial rights, largely on the basis of their indigeneity. The leftist imagines the indigenous person as a person of color, who has prescriptive ownership over the places where they live. They belong to groups under threat, in which membership, as in the Navajo Nation, or the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, can be policed through blood quantum. In the eyes of the left, the indigenous are to be supported and protected.

Those who are native, or nativist, on the other hand, are coded as white. They are the male rioters who recently claimed the streets in England, they are Marion Marechal-Le Pen’s français de souche: old French stock, which prides itself as having no foreign influence. The nativist sees themselves as crusading for sovereignty against perceived foreign invaders, who can bring nothing but trouble, on a land that they have possessed for centuries. To the left, these people are the enemy and are to be challenged and reviled.

We know that this search for our unsullied origins is a dangerous game to play. It inaugurates a race to the bottom to find sources divine or scientific, in the attempt to prove that there is some concrete relation between you and a tiny parcel of earth.

Though made up of different kinds of people, these two groups share certain principles. In both cases, a connection is made between land, time, and essence. If you have been on the land for a long time, you have more of a right to it than others, the argument goes. Moreover, your presence on this land makes you someone of this land: something that can be proved by biological characteristics like blood, or skin color. In ancient Greece, this idea was known as autochthony, a word made up of “self” and “soil.” It came with a mythology which imagined people springing from trees, and fields, and rocks – like the Sparti born from a field sown with dragons’ teeth.

No matter whether it comes from someone indigenous, or native, this argument, and its mythology, should ring alarm bells for the left, due to both its essentialism, and its approach to property rights.

Now, to apply this to the case at hand. Having understood the power of this kind of rhetoric, both groups have been forced into framing their territorial rights in the language of indigeneity. At the Jewish Currents event, this led to one Palestinian speaker recounting his DNA profile. In other circles it leads to invocations of Biblical decree. We know, however, that this search for our unsullied origins is a dangerous game to play. It inaugurates a race to the bottom to find sources divine or scientific, in the attempt to prove that there is some concrete relation between you and a tiny parcel of earth.

As before, the Jewish leftist finds themselves in a curious position. Encouraged to dismiss the Israeli government’s propaganda, with its invocations of dead sea scrolls, and Judea and Samaria, they nonetheless should listen to other people’s genetic test results, proving that they, really, were here first. When the left takes this kind of essentialism seriously, it loses its power to divorce us from exclusionary claims to land, which prevent the possibility of many different kinds of people inhabiting it. When the Jewish left adopts this wholesale, it must contend with a further issue: why should they be able to say this land is theirs, but not I?

3. Oppressor and oppressed

This leads us to a third pairing, the strongest argument, which is often invoked to resolve the other two. The left is the voice for the oppressed, against their oppressors. It takes up causes around the world and serves as an advocate, it shouts for those who have lost their houses, their jobs, their lives; those who have no one to speak for them, those who are forgotten, killed, raped, marginalized, abused. It is the party of the weak against the strong, the many against the few.

A dilemma poses itself [to Jews]: Why should I stand with the left, when they want to protect those who – rightfully and rationally – say that I should fear them? Right now, the left requires this person to be brave and trusting: to think that when push comes to shove, it will be the left that will help them.

The Jews, now possessors of a nation-state, with all of its incumbent violence, are no longer the oppressed, and therefore fall outside of the left’s purview. They have moved sides from the oppressed to the oppressor, and though once a victim, are now a perpetrator. Today, they stand as a Goliath against Palestine’s slingshots.

This argument is structurally undeniable. But it provokes a number of questions for which the left needs to have clear answers, in particular, about what happens when these roles reverse. Power circulates, as Genet knew.

At the final panel of the Jewish Currents event, the magazine’s editor-in-chief asked the Palestinian organizers about fear. How, she asked, do they respond to the problem of Jewish fear. One of them replied that it is strange that this 2000-year-old problem has fallen to the Palestinians to resolve, but, given that it has, they should work to change the narrative. Another rejected the point. If you put us in a cage, if you commit genocide against us, she said, you should be afraid.

The Jew is left to quietly navigate this. Why should I stand with the left, when they want to protect those who – rightfully and rationally – say that I should fear them?

Right now, the left requires this person to be brave and trusting: to think that when push comes to shove, it will be the left that will help them. But not everyone has courage, and not everyone can trust. Rather than gambling on future support, some people find solace in a strongman, even when their avowed antisemitism is easy to unmask.

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Confused as to why national self-determination is selective, encouraged to play the spurious game of who was here first, and scared that he alone will stand without protection, the diaspora Jew looks to the right for help. It is possible, still, for the left to stop him in his tracks – but we must do more than simply reveal the darkness that awaits.

What would it take to reassure the Jewish leftist? We could begin by acknowledging that this war is not part of a struggle for socialist internationalism, but an unfolding humanitarian disaster. We could come clean about whether or not we support movements for nation states. And we could try to suggest, to both him and ourselves, that a politics of identity – whether one based in fear, or hopes for liberation – may well reproduce some of the tensions it aims to resolve.

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Katie Ebner-Landy