Trump and the war of the Jews

Could the Jewish world, which is currently undergoing a process of division, go as far as an internecine war? For Bruno Karsenti, the possible election of Donald Trump to the American presidency could complete the rupture. It would make it impossible to ignore the gulf that now separates the “Jews committed to force” from the “Jews committed to law and rights”.

 

 

It is difficult to measure the severity of the earthquake that Trump’s election as president of the United States would cause in the Jewish world. What we can be sure of is that it would signal the break between two camps that are currently more opposed than ever. It would also lead to the collapse of the relatively unified foundation on which Zionist politics as democratic politics has been built in Israel, and the post-Shoah understanding of the defence of minority rights in the Diaspora, of which Jews are the driving force.

America and the Jews

With Trump as president, it’s not just that yet another illiberal regime would be added to the list of states. For the past decade, we’ve known that democratic regimes as a whole have been in steady retreat, with the rise of aggressive nationalism reinforcing this trend. The first Trump presidency has already given us a glimpse of how the world’s greatest power could cross this line. And experts agree that a second term would lead to an authoritarian, even fascist, regime.^[1] Illiberal regimes are defined by the adaptation of democratic institutions, formally preserved, to characteristic attacks on the principles of the rule of law: respect for individual and collective rights, the hierarchy of norms according to which the universal normativity enshrined in the constitution commands positive laws, and the equality of citizens before the law. In most cases, they achieve this at the relatively low cost of ad hoc constitutional reforms or, in countries where such reforms exist, by deactivating a body such as the Supreme Court, which guarantees the conformity of laws with the constitution. This would undoubtedly be the case if Trump – who has appointed ultra-conservative judges to the US Supreme Court in his first term – were to win, but on a much larger scale. For what Trump has shown he is capable of – instigating a takeover of Capitol Hill in 2021 – raises fears of deeper, more serious upheavals driven by top-down populist movements.

For Jews, such an eventuality is obviously catastrophic. And proclamations of support for Israel and promises to protect the community from antisemitic acts allegedly emanating exclusively from other minority groups designated as enemies from within will certainly not change anything. In fact, the opposite is true. Today’s illiberal regimes, as amply documented in K.^[2], virtually all have an ambivalent relationship with the Jews. The nature of this ambivalence varies according to local traditions of antisemitism, combined with the different xenophobic and racist policies of the nationalisms in question. Poland is not Hungary, and Hungary is not the United States under Trump. Nevertheless, during the election campaign, Trump expressed the ambivalent nature of his relationship with the Jews in a very direct way: he urged them to choose a side, which must be that of their protector, or risk becoming the enemy, once again becoming the corrupting elements of the real America that they are supposed to have ceased to be (and therefore must have been, although it’s not clear when).

These antisemitic remarks by the presidential candidate had the merit of making things visible. They revealed what is really at stake with Trump: a return to conditional protection, left to the discretion of the sovereign, which is precisely what the modern Jewish condition represented the overcoming of. This shift is sometimes echoed by the rulers of liberal democracies, albeit at a much lower level, but nonetheless discernible, as shown by some recent statements by the President of the French Republic^[3]. Be that as it may, the fact that this shift is taking place in the United States has a completely different significance. Home to the largest diaspora community in the world, its relationship with Israel is different from that of other Jewish centers. Whereas for the latter, in post-Shoah modernity, Israel has come to represent the optional recourse always available when the access to equality, freedom and security promised in the age of emancipation slips from their grasp – as happened in the first half of the 20th century in Europe, the United States, without denying this primary property of the Jewish state, has in turn elevated itself to the rank of second-rate support, in a way duplicated, since it can boast not only that it too shelters Jews more securely than the diasporic centers of Europe, but also that it protects the sheltered state itself. Although the situation has changed considerably in recent times – especially with regard to the first point^[4] – it has not, for the time being, altered the singularity of the relationship between the United States and Israel. It is a relationship of equals that does not exist elsewhere, manifested in the ability to fully intervene in Israeli politics, at least in its foreign policy aspect.

On the unconditional

The day after 7 October, Biden spoke of “unconditional” support for Israel. The word was shocking, interpreted as a license for a response whose violence would go criticized. But the word “unconditional” has a meaning that is not captured by geostrategic language, which simply records the balance of support and forces in the shifting framework of world space. In that language, “unconditional” means nothing more than the strongest possible support, given for an indefinite period. But the word means something else: support for Israel is unconditional, on the part of the state that knows perfectly well what unconditional means in terms of the right to exist – for individual Jews as free and equal subjects, and for the Jewish state as that unique state whose creation resulted from the European failure to respect this principle and the need to create another support, that of a refuge always open to Jews. In this sense, “unconditional” refers to rights, not to force. A right that defines the specifically modern Jewish condition, as opposed to the pre-modern condition of being subject to the conditional granting of permission to exist, and therefore of dependence.

What is really at stake with Trump is the return to conditional protection, left to the discretion of the sovereign, which is precisely what the modern Jewish condition represented the overcoming of.

In this respect, Trump’s possible victory would be a huge blow. What it would shatter is the place that the United States occupies in the representation of the post-Shoah Jewish world. In the prominent place of the consciousness of the right of the Jews to exist, the protector of the protector is reinstated in his old, non-modern guise of conditional protection. He is cast in the mold of the power that tolerates, grants, withdraws, deducts or credits this or that minority with certain capacities to act, which are never real rights, i.e. claims that they can always legitimately oppose and impose on the power in place. Illiberalism and authoritarianism affect Jews as they potentially affect all minorities. They affect them because they cause them to regress below the common grammar of emancipation that constitutes democratic nations – a grammar on which Jews have had no choice but to stake everything, given their character as a structural minority immersed in a modern political space where they were offered equality, at least legally, for the first time.

As it happens, in the current situation, this decline is also taking place simultaneously in the Jewish world. Neither Israel nor the Diaspora can escape it, and this is why opinions are now divided within each pole between those who hold on to what was legally and politically acquired in the sequence that began in 1791, crossed the abyss of the Shoah and resumed in 1948, and those who, under the guise of pseudo-realism, are ready to renounce it. For the latter, simple geostrategic thinking takes over. “Unconditional” support now refers only to the greatest force that can be conceded, as things stand, to the Jews to allow them to continue to exist, to continue to live freely and safely wherever they can. The regression to concessions is being supported voluntarily, out of a loss of consciousness, not exactly of Jewish identity, but of modern Jewish identity – the only one, incidentally, that has enabled Jews to achieve the status of legal subjects without leaving the Galut.

Israel

In Israel, the government’s policy – before the war, then during the war – as a policy of suspicion that feeds a climate of tension and anger towards Israeli Palestinians, as a policy of repression and colonization in the West Bank, and as a policy responsible for Palestinian and now Lebanese civilian casualties on a scale that the war aims do not justify, undermines democratic law. To put it bluntly, it is nationalist in a reactionary sense, in that it closes in on the Israeli nation-state, effectively “the nation-state of the Jewish people”, as the ideologically watershed Basic Law of 2018 puts it. The slope it tipped over is the one we’re now on. The identification of nation and people in Israel has more serious consequences than in any other state. It deviates from Israel’s foundation as a democratic state governed by a certain kind of rule of law. It transforms the identity of the majority, virtually or actually, into a discriminatory power within the state. And it cuts off any reference to the Jewish people as it exists in the Diaspora, essential as it is to the meaning of the Jewish state, i.e. to the very justification of its internal and external policies. In the case of Israel, this closure amounts to nothing less than self-negation. It transforms the refuge for potentially nationalizable or currently nationalized subjects of rights into a fortress for the custodians of the force accumulated through punctual pacts and revocable agreements. This force is used internally against minorities in situations of domination and externally against potential or actual enemy states. This is what we are witnessing.

The Israeli government’s policy is nationalist in a reactionary sense, in that it closes the Israeli nation-state in on itself, making it “the nation-state of the Jewish people” […]. It thus cuts off any reference to the Jewish people as it exists in the Diaspora, which is essential for the meaning of the Jewish state, i.e. for the true justification of its internal and external policies.

It is also an undeniable fact that hostility towards Israel prevails in its immediate or proximal environment, and that nothing less than Israel’s survival is at stake when violence is used. This fact has been a constant companion throughout the history of this state, which has been forced into defensive warfare, as it was again after 7 October. What is new, however, is that in the face of this proven fact and the demands it makes, the conclusion is to adopt the path of derogation from the rule of law that Israel has always honored. For then it would not be that we would have “just another” illiberal state on the world stage that would keep Israel as its name. It’s that we would now have an illiberal state that is contradictory in itself, because it would place Jews in the position of subjects of a majoritarian and nationalist policy that is incompatible with their structure as a dispersed people. More precisely, it would put them in a position incompatible with their modern identity, where it is the enhanced democratic conditions of a state committed to putting minority rights at its core, that have effectively guaranteed all Jews dispersed throughout the world to think and perceive themselves as true subjects of rights where they are, restored in their confidence in themselves and in the nations to which they belong, after the Shoah had devastated the configuration of their own world as it had opened up since emancipation.

Under the present conditions, if destiny is not sealed, the camps have already been formed, as if they were strangers to each other. Israel is in fact the scene of a split between the Jews of the post-Shoah emancipation and the Jews of the retreat, between the “Jews committed to law and rights” and the “Jews committed to force”. Or rather, between the “Jews committed to law and rights”, who justify the use of force when it should be used legitimately, and the “Jews committed to force”, who deny the law when it embarrasses them.

Diaspora

This Israeli theater of opposition can also be found in the Diaspora. The camps differ, but not in the “unconditional” support that some would give to Israeli policy and the more or less radical criticism that others would allow themselves of the Jewish state. No. But once again, the camps can be distinguished between, on the one hand, the retreat of the “Jews committed to force” into the logic of the conditional and, on the other hand, the unwavering adherence of the “Jews committed to law and rights” to the logic of the unconditional.

For the former, everything depends on the conditions of detention, accumulation and exercise of force, regardless of the resulting respect or disrespect for democratic rights. In this way, whether explicitly or not, one accepts the regression to the logic of the pre-emancipation era, accompanied only by the new fact – certainly decisive, but reinserted in a completely different issue from the one that gave rise to it – that the Jews now have a state of their own, i.e. that somewhere in the world they are the holders of a monopoly of accumulated force, which again is not evaluated in terms of respect for rights.

At the opposite end of the spectrum are the “Jews committed to law and rights”. Wherever they live, they see themselves as free and equal subjects in a world where, ideally at least, democracy can prevail. They do not deny that force exists, much less that it is essential for their protection. But they deny that the act of protection, with its attendant force, can suffice to establish the freedom and equality they claim for themselves as Jewish individuals, and thus for their people. Protection in the name of the law breaks with the dependence on pure force, which by definition remains master of itself and its exercise. Since emancipation, however, Jews have embraced a very different idea of the connection between force and rights as the path to their desired new state in Galut. For the first time, the Jews bound themselves internally to other nations, and they did so in the same movement in which they consolidated their independence as a people. It was in the name of the right of all, opposable to any sovereign, that they undertook to live and to live as Jews. And it was this same idea that was carried forward into the principle of Zionism as a modern national ideal, which, after the Shoah, became a reality with the creation of the State of Israel.

It should be noted, however, that in the Diaspora the opposition between the two types of Jews has undergone a change. Unlike in Israel, Jews there are both structurally and de facto minorities. For the diasporic Jews of the force, one consequence follows: there is in truth nothing strong about them, however peremptory and vociferous they may be. In fact, they are forced to bet everything on Israel’s strength, which is generally glorified in its power, while at the same time its objectively threatened position is underlined. But how does Israel see them, if we follow the same line of interpretation? The answer is clear: exclusively as a reservoir of support, i.e. as a reservoir of new, mobilisable forces, and not at all as what they are in modern times, namely as witnesses of a right. Of course, the Diaspora Jews are not mistaken in thinking that they support Israel by their words and deeds. But they are sadly mistaken about what “support” means when nothing of the justification of the Jewish right to self-determination, rooted as it is in the irreversible acquis of the unconditionality of rights, circulates from one space to another.

“Jews committed to law and rights” reject the idea that the act of protecting, with its attendant force, can suffice to found the freedom and equality they claim for themselves, as Jewish individuals, and therefore for their people.

What about, at the other pole, the diasporic “Jews committed to law and rights”? For them, in the current political situation, it is understandable that there is no other possible attitude than to chant that Israel counts as a pillar of the post-Shoah political world, beyond what the State of Israel has become and does, i.e. beyond its national and international mode of action, since it has closed itself, in the manner of a classical nation-state, to the nationalist identity of “the nation-state of the Jewish people”. This, if you like, is their present cry of alarm, with its impossible-to-reduce double face. The diasporic “Jews committed to law and rights” are currently the bearers of the relentless reminder that it is ultimately the right of the Jews as a transnational people in the conditions of post-Shoah modernity that establishes Israel as a “Jewish state”. Even if, in this reminder, all that’s left in our hands is the idea of Israel, which has become inescapable for the real Israel, whose actual policy has gone off the rails under the misguided Zionist impulse of its leaders.

The Jewish split

In the same sense, Trump’s election would be like crossing a threshold. It would give considerable power to the decoy which the Jews of the force have put on the market in complete defiance to the rule of law. And it would signify the brutal subtraction of the tool that, in a certain “USA, Europe, Israel” triangulation – a Western triangulation, if you like, but partially off-center, having had to extract itself from the European continent at one point of the triangle – represented one of the most unprecedented conquests of the rights of peoples in the post-1945 world. There is no doubt that the neutralization of the Palestinian question, the continued denial of the rights of this other people, despite sporadic efforts to remedy the situation, but in a post-1967 situation in which colonization has become ever more widespread, has been the main factor in Israel’s degradation. But there is also no doubt that it is only in the last two decades that this degradation has reached the stage of a marked split within the Jewish world, where two segments that seem to have nothing in common any more are confronting each other. It is clear that this development is facilitated by a global context in which illiberalism and neo-nationalism are asserting themselves as denaturing mutations of the democratic regimes themselves, while the real forces of national emancipation, based on the deepening and extension of rights, are being undermined everywhere. The fact remains, however, that such a development has its Jewish version, and that it has the effect on this very people of dissolving the relatively unified consciousness it had managed to create for itself.

The present situation, it can’t be denied, is fraught with the danger of a Jewish war. […] A war between the Jews of the world, including Israel, who are called upon to define themselves in relation to the spiritual core around which their identity as a people revolves.

With Trump’s election, the Jewish world would fracture twice, in Israel and in the Diaspora. It would see an unbridgeable gap open up between two parts of itself. Conditional logic would be re-established in what is in some ways the most important place since the founding of the State of Israel, the United States, a country where the unconditionality of the existence of the Jewish state has been thought and implemented in the most consistent way, i.e. as an inseparable question of force and rights. It would re-establish it, not exactly as a simple return to pre-modern times – this kind of cyclical repetition does not exist in history – but as the advent of a new era: That of a polarity between, on the one hand, a structurally weakened diaspora, made up of Jewish centers of varying size, but all weakened in themselves (because they are populated by Jews who are tolerated on condition that they behave in a certain way – in short, who, as Jews, have potentially been deprived of the status of subjects of rights equal to all others); and, on the other hand, a nation-state, Israel, which is home to a large number of Jews who claim to be in the majority, but which is no longer able to justify what it really means to be Jewish, in the sense of the modern condition in which the Jews have entered.

It’s impossible to hide the fact that the current situation is fraught with the risk of a Jewish war. Not just a civil war between two irreconcilable and divided parts of the Israeli national society – which does not only include Jews, although it is absolutely necessary for every citizen to think about and understand what is Jewish about this state. It’s a war between Jews all over the world, including Israel, who are called to define themselves in terms of the spiritual core around which their identity as a people revolves. For it is Jews as a whole who are divided today over the question of whether the right to be Jewish anywhere should be effectively enshrined in citizenship, or whether it should be seen as the withdrawable permission of a sovereign with changing moods (in which case the only thing that would really matter would be to choose the right one).

This Jewish war is being waged in a context in which Jews are actually at war with others. A real war, in the Middle East, against enemies whose desire to destroy them is beyond doubt; and an ideological war, in the West, where what must be countered is ultimately the denial of Israel’s right to exist in the orbit of unconditionality to which modern Jews have committed themselves. But while these two external wars make their imperatives clear, they cannot overshadow the internal war that undermines the very possibility of waging them, here and there. In this internal war, one Jewish pole seems strong, or so it proclaims, even though it no longer derives its consistency from any real right. As for the other pole, where we are trying to stand, it is struggling to gather its own forces. For it must, against all odds, redefine what it means for Jews to be nationalized in the modern age, through a democratic citizenship that enables them to stand individually and collectively in the world with unprecedented firmness; and make explicit the inner bond that the creation of a singular state like Israel, in the post-Shoah era of reconstruction of this modern condition, represents for Jews, as for all minorities, in the eyes of all. An immense task, to which Trump’s election would deal a blow of immense gravity, because it would deepen the opposition between right and force, which the Jewish conscience has the distinguished privilege of being able to overcome.

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Bruno Karsenti