A Thousand Fools and Idiots

If I had to boil down the entire message of my writings to one sentence, it would be “The failure of Zionism is the failure of Judaism.” The failure of Israel to become anything remotely like what it was supposed to be – while never ceasing to pretend that it is merely a nation state like all other states and deserves to be treated as one, is one side of this coin, and the flipside is that despite this, Jews around the world continue to be supportive of the Jewish state and of the label ‘Zionism/Zionist’. The fact that even as of this writing there hasn’t appeared to be an appreciable dent in those underlying realities amongst Jews in either camp, is further evidence of another fundamental assumption: Zionism and Judaism are the same beast, and it is misleading to try to make a distinction between them. Only the Jewish group could have given rise to such a phenomenon, and perpetuated it for so long, and this is because the only salient feature of Jewishness is abnormal psychology. No abnormal psychology, no Jewish group.o

‘Group’, ‘people’, ‘”the Jews”‘, are all misleading terms. Insofar as there is a group, it’s a group that lacks any semblance of group dynamics, with their various self-regulating mechanisms. An organic group, when put under duress, begins to function in adaptive ways, as a super-organism, in order to overcome (or at least try to) the circumstances it is being subjected to. The only strategy Jews have ever known is to endure, and they do so primarily as individuals, but also under a collective umbrella that they seem completely incapable of breaking free from.

A group is composed of individuals who exchange information. I think of it sort of like echo-location, but where the source of the signal is an individual’s actions and words, and the reflections bouncing back are the behaviors of other group members, who provide feedback – either in validation or negation of the individual’s assumptions and attitudes. The more information that is exchanged in such a way, the more accurate is the world-view, and the clearer are the conflicts, and contradictions. In some cases, it may turn out that “the group” is composed of incompatible sub-groups, and there will be schisms and “defections”. This is one form of self-regulation. A group that starts losing members, has more incentive to reevaluate its core assumptions. One key aspect here, is that it is both in the group’s collective interest, and in the interest of individual members to share accurate information. People generally are not fond of changing their minds or adopting a new outlook, but they will do so after receiving enough information, from enough sources, that confirms the need for a change. That’s how it works in organic groups. This manifestly isn’t how it works for the Jewish group, and this is the source of their misfortune (and the misfortune of other groups who’ve had to come into contact with them). A group whose members don’t exchange information, or are committed to sharing inaccurate information, can never develop that emergent property of collective intelligence.

There’s this series of short animated films from the 70s, ‘La Linea’ – or, ‘Mr. Line’ – where a cartoon character walks along an uninterrupted flat line until he encounters some kind of obstacle. These obstacles can be thought of as representing a moral dilemma for the character, and the ethical way to behave is to solve the conundrum within the parameters that the situation presents, without artificially adding elements or ignoring the elements already present. The classic gag in the series is when the character comes to a flailing halt upon discovering a gap in the line (the implication being that he would fall down off the screen if he were to step over it). This is what I mean by ethical landscape. In real life we have these encounters all the time, and there is a moral choice involved in how to deal with them. The complicating factor is that we do not fall off the edge of the world when we disregard those gaps. No thunderbolt comes down to smite us when we choose to simply step over them as though they aren’t there; and some people are less interested in learning to see those features that require you to tailor your actions to match the contours of that ethical landscape.

“Anti-Zionist” Jews are very comfortable existing within the Zionist ecosystem, collecting the crumbs that fall off the table of the Global Zionist Order. They seem to be unaware, or are just uninterested in acknowledging, the degree to which they hold a privileged position in the anti-Zionist space. Non-Jews dealing with the same subject matter feel compelled to include them within their circles, in order to avoid being targeted as anti-Semites. These Jewish anti-Zionists then parlay their elevated profile into media appearances which they use to engage in “Israel-bashing”, which is a form of misdirection. Israel is only one aspect of Zionism, and has no independent existence without the other branch of the family. The split amongst Zionist Jews who live in Israel and those who don’t is roughly 50-50 (It’s closer to 1:1 than it is to 2:1, at any rate – 6.5:5.3 million, according to 2023 statistics, and using two-thirds as an estimate of the number of non-Israeli Jews who can be classed as Zionist). To focus only on Israel is to be actively misleading. Not only does it give the impression that there is a push from within the Jewish “community” itself to rectify the situation, but it makes those who insist that Zionism should be seen as a Jewish phenomenon, not an Israeli one, seem like unreasonable bigots. So these Jewish “anti-Zionists” end up making their livelihood off of the Israeli-Palestine conflict for years, and not only are they doing nothing to bring it to a close, but quite the opposite: they are actively prolonging it by serving as a source of misdirection and obfuscation.

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People who manage to function as a “collective”, but without developing the self-regulating mechanisms inherent in organic groups, do so by maladaptive means, and the result as mentioned above is a degradation of their moral/ethical faculties. I have two concrete examples to focus on here, before returning to the main theme of information exchange. Both examples relate to documentaries by and about anti-Zionist Jews, and they highlight the ability to exist within an unhealthy framework, without it impacting one’s sense of self-worth, or presenting an ethical crisis to these individuals.

Now the filmmakers were faced with two choices. Option one: they could put a disclaimer at the start or end of the film, explaining that the events they are discussing are five years out of date, which would explain why none of the scenes they show are dated later than 2018. This would be the honest approach, but one downside to it would be that viewers might notice that the central premise of the movie: a groundswell amongst young American Jews, to take on the Zionist establishment, doesn’t seem to have been borne out by real-world events in the intervening years. Or, option two: they could try to sweep the matter under the carpet – ignore the fact that they were dealing with documentary material from half a decade ago, by avoiding putting dates on the scenes where they show large demonstrations in front of AIPAC meetings and the like; ignore the fact that organizations such as ‘Breaking the Silence’ have been around for years and have had zero impact on Israeli society; just generally, hope no one notices the overall sense that something’s not adding up.

Well, speaking for myself, that was exactly the impression I got, that something wasn’t adding up. I didn’t know what it was exactly, but the overall effect was quite disorientating. Returning to the ‘ethical landscape’ concept: supposing you had a drawing of two doors, one of which has a sign above it that reads, ‘Honest Option’, and the other has a sign that reads ‘__ Option’; would you be able to fill in the blank of what should be written on the sign over the second door? If not, I would suggest you avoid engaging in social activism, or trying to undertake any major repairs to “the world”, as you might end up doing more harm than good.

The second documentary I saw, is also of the ‘not in our name’ variety (aptly titled, ‘Not in My Name’; originally aired in late April by the Australian ABC, and recently re-broadcast by Al-Jazeera as part of their ‘Witness’ documentary series). It deals with an Australian “journalist” (whatever that label means), Antony Loewenstein, who has been not-in-my-naming professionally since the mid-2000s. He published a book in 2006, ‘My Israel Question’, which he describes as being about two things: “One, it was about what’s happening in Palestine (at the time). And also it was about the role of the Israel lobby, in Australia and elsewhere.“

The noteworthy thing about his story is that it has many more of the elements that you’d expect to find in the tale of someone who was ultimately able to reach the right conclusions. He suffered ostracism from the Australian Jewish community for his work, as did his parents. He traveled with his parents to Israel and they got to witness firsthand the realities of occupation. I would also add that he started becoming engaged in this subject at a fairly young age, and had every opportunity and incentive to emerge from the other side of this morass with a clear understanding. Despite all this, listening to him and his father discussing this “journey”, it’s clear that they are still on square one.

This book of his was published 18 years ago. In the meantime, it hasn’t occurred to him to ask why is there an Israel lobby, “in Australia and elsewhere.” At one point the father makes a comment about feeling the need for having a Jewish state so that in case “something happens”, they’ll have a place to go. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that this isn’t a concern other groups have, and they don’t live their lives with a “plan B” mentality in the back of their minds. He’s talking about the context of attitudes of his parents’ generation (the grandparents of the documentary’s protagonist); but he’s wrong to say that this context needs to be taken into account – it doesn’t, and he should have reached the point where he’s discarded it from his mind, so there’d be no chance of it coming up over the course of a conversation. It is quite remarkable that they use all the talking points, all the same framing as would someone still within the Zionist fold. This is because they are, as far as I’m concerned, for all intents and purposes still within the Zionist fold.

One question I really would like an answer to, is why was this documentary even made. Aren’t you supposed to have a story, and an engaging protagonist, in order to make a documentary about someone? What’s the story here, that he tried to get Australian Jews to reexamine their reflexive pro-Israel stance, and failed? That he’s an anti-Zionist Jew? Leaving aside the fact that there is no story, as far as subjects for a film go (and this is true for Loewensteins pere et fils) you’d be hard-pressed to find less dynamic people to put in front of the camera. These are not interesting people, and they have no story to tell, so it really does raise the question of why a film was made about them. I can sort of see it from the perspective of someone wanting to encourage Jews to come out against the dominant attitudes of their “community”. See those air-quotes around community? That’s why this an ineffective strategy. If there was a Jewish community, it would have solved the problem of Israel-“diaspora” relations long ago, and Israelis would have been made to understand that if they want to keep on living by the sword, as it were, they would have to do it solely through their own efforts with their own resources. The only strategy that can work is to confront “anti-Zionist Jews” about their role as enablers of the Zionist mainstream.

“Since October 7, I’ve been overwhelmed with literally hundreds and hundreds of media requests.” Why? What do you have to say about it that couldn’t have been said by someone who isn’t implicated in some way in what is going on? There’s a difference between times of calm and times of fighting. War gets eyeballs to the screen, and donations from the viewing public for those not too shy to ask. If you want to do the unglamorous work of advocacy during times when no one wants to take interest, then go right ahead. Once things go kinetic, do the decent thing and sit it out. It’s not your struggle, or, insofar as it is, it’s because you’re on the wrong side of it.

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Towards a Theory of Why the Field of Jewish Studies Should Be Scrapped

Getting to the main topic: what are Jewish Studies programs, why are there so many of them, and what do they teach us about the abnormal psychology of the Jewish collective. An incidental irony of the circular nature of examining the phenomenon of Jewish studies is that it highlights one of its key aspects, which is that it gets meta AF. When I started looking into it, I was expecting to find that there are quite a few of these departments or programs, but I was surprised by just how many of them there are; and how blatant is the nepotism inherent to these institutional arrangements. Not only is there the Jewish Studies field, but there’s also a related but separate field of Israel Studies, with some campuses having separate buildings for Jewish Studies and for Israel Studies. You have these entire complexes built on campuses, just because some wealthy Jewish donor had spare cash on hand to dump on a vanity project, and the college or university was like, yeah that’s a good idea, we’ll build another building named after wealthy Jewish donors, which will employ primarily Jewish staff, so they can hold symposiums to discuss why there is such a thing as anti-Semitism.

As far as numbers go, I ran a search, “how many departments of Jewish studies are there”. The top result was the website for the Association for Jewish Studies. For 2023, they listed 37 full member institutions, which were joined by a similar number of programs listed as belonging to either “associate” or “affiliate” institutions. Searching for “Israel Studies”, I found another list, with some overlap, but also quite a few separate institutions that weren’t on the first list. There is also a European directory that has other centers that aren’t on either of these two lists, such as the notorious Paideia Institute in Sweden (Motto: U Resent Us, Cuz U Ain’t Us). To state the obvious, this is a ludicrous amount of academic programs and infrastructure – far, far in excess of what could be expected to exist in a world where sanity and common sense prevailed. Ten such institutions, across the world, would be a lot. This is many multiples of that.

There are two varieties of abnormal psychology that I find particularly noteworthy, and want to point out here. One is obliviousness to the concept of reciprocity, which will be discussed later on. The second is a lack of a sense of proportion. This level of excess is very illustrative of that tendency. After Yale, Columbia, UCLA and Harvard had their Center for Jewish Studies up and running, it should have started getting a little uncomfortable to suggest opening one at Duke, for example. It always seems to have two parts, this inability to recognize when you have officially entered “enough is enough” territory. The first is reaching a point where things get obviously questionable from an ethical standpoint; the second – instead of backing off on the throttle, and aiming to have things return to normal levels, there’s an attitude of “if we stop now, it’ll look weird that we’ve done so much of it already”, so instead why not embrace the old trusted path of doubling down. If we all agree to pretend not to notice, it means no one else can notice either, because doing so would be anti-Semitic. The end result in this case is dozens upon dozens of these programs/academic institutions that can’t but help catch the attention of anyone working in a higher education setting, where everyone is already acutely aware of the degree to which external funding from donors is exerting a negative institutional influence. And the end result of that is text messages with vomit emojis in them; and the end result of that is getting fired – which helps to bring the anti-Semitism under control.

Dysfunctionality aside, and without getting into the argument about whether it makes sense to have any such departments dealing with Jewish studies as a field, it’s worth thinking about what it is that is supposedly being studied. Presumably the idea is to learn about Jewish history and culture, as a way of gaining insight into various aspects of Jewish identity. Unlike studies of other cultures, studying Judaism is more like trying to figure out a puzzle then it is about memorizing dates and the progression from one era to the next. When dealing with Russia or China or India, you wouldn’t really have ‘why’ as one of your questions. The answer to why is simply because; because they exist within a giant geographical area, over many centuries or even millennia, and there’s no reason to think that this will stop being the case within our lifetime, present conditions remaining as they are. When dealing with Jews, the question is very much why they are as they are, and why won’t they stop. But even if you disagree about that characterization, you can’t deny that Jewish history consists of a series of improbable, irreproducible circumstances, that saw Jewish groups enter into a very odd relationship with the rest of the mass of people living on this planet. Not only was it improbable and irreproducible, it was also – and this is my value judgment – harmful to their development and ultimately gave rise to an abnormal mindset.

The interplay between the two religions was crucial, and gave each of them some reason to use their relationship to the Jews as a way of legitimizing the claims of their religion over those of their rival. The toleration they both afforded to Jews allowed the development of a set of special relationships, where the Jewish population interfaced much more with the ruling classes then they did with the commoners, and engaged in ‘clerical’ occupations, rather than manual labor. The fact that the borders between the two competing realms were slightly more porous to Jews gave them an advantage in trade, and the fact that there were Jews with elevated positions in the courts of various rulers on either side of the divide made them useful in a diplomatic role. These are the external factors that created the conditions for the phenomenon of Jewishness. You can think about it yourself, see what happens if you modify or remove any one of these parameters, if you can still reach the same outcome. Bear in mind that a life of toil and subsistence has its own dynamics, and it tends to take your high view of yourself down a notch, if you are compelled to provide for yourself in such a manner; so if a large enough section of the Jewish population was engaged in this lifestyle, their attitudes would not have remained the same.

One thing that’s missing from the above inventory, that also needs to be taken into account, is the fact that Judaism is an ethno-religion. This is one of the factors that made it possible to maintain kinship ties between groups separated by vast distances. Of interest is the fact that over time, Rabbinic Judaism developed characteristics that no other ethno-religion seems to have. Ethno-religions tend to be small, tied to specific regions, and the ethnic component is more dominant than the religious component (and most of them practice a religion that is an offshoot of an already existing religion). If you compare the Karaite and Samaritan sects, they are far more typical of what an ethno-religion behaves like, including the fact that over time they tend to get smaller. The comparison to these two other Judaic sects is helpful because it shows that the idea of ‘chosen-ness’ on its own, isn’t what’s responsible for the Jewish group developing its supremacist tendencies (or at least the superiority/inferiority complex which even the ones who aren’t supremacist suffer from).

As far as declining numbers go, the Karaite population today is estimated in the tens of thousands, and Samaritans number in the low thousands, maybe even hundreds. It stands to reason that without Rabbinic Judaism, both those sects would have already disappeared. Even if it’s by negation, having something to define yourself in relation to, helps preserve a sense of identity. Same is true for Judaism, in relation to Christianity and Islam. Without those two religions doing the heavy lifting of keeping the spiritual content of their faiths alive, it’s likely there would not be a Jewish faith today that counts itself as one of the Abrahamic religions. Jewish religion developed to become heavy on rituals, artifacts, and holidays all throughout the yearly calendar, not so much as a way to facilitate a spiritual connection to the religion, but in order to preserve a sense of Jews being separate from their environment.

So, to bring it back to the context of contemporary Jewish studies, a central premise of Jewish mythology is that they kept a separate identity through their belief, culture and group cohesiveness. The truth is, they kept a sense of separateness, first by resentment (against the two other “usurping” religions), then by developing an unnatural niche for themselves in a system dominated by the religions they were supposedly so resentful of, then by developing a sort of secret society type of mentality, then by arousing hostility towards themselves which helped keep them separate from their surroundings.

As mentioned, the ethnic component of Judaism was important for maintaining a sense of kinship to groups in far off locales, but one of the outcomes of living far removed from another group, is that over time you stop appearing as though you belong to the same ethnicity. An essential component of Judaism preserving itself as a “social club”, a group that sees itself as above the level of Joe and Jane Public, was the ability to rely on the good graces of other Jews, in order to maintain trade networks, information sharing to improve competitiveness against rivals, etc. Without this, there would be no way for a Jew on one side of the world, to feel comfortable approaching a Jew on another side of the world to ask for assistance. This relationship developed into something more like a secret society than a religion or an ethnic group. The unifying factor was ‘Us’ against the ‘Goyim’. Never have in-group/out-group dynamics been more institutionalized, more on the surface, more of an end in itself, rather than a means to an end. Some groups do maintain segregation as an end in itself, and exist mostly outside of the system (think of gypsies, for example). It used to be that a lot of Jews did exist outside of the system, but the ones who didn’t seemed to have had day-jobs working in some sort of advisory role at the heart of the system, making sure there was always a special place for them within it.

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The point of “Jewish Studies” as it is practiced today is to avoid noticing all these problematic tendencies. This is especially true in the context of Israel and Zionism. One of the most disparaging labels you can ascribe to someone within Jewish culture, is ‘Nudnik‘. There are several ways in which someone can become a nudnik. One way is to have negative personal characteristics, for example by being a burden, being excessively whiny or hard to deal with. Another way, which is relevant to this discussion, is if they try to play on the sense of group belonging, in order to guilt someone into helping them. The ability of Jews to maintain their cliquishness started going into decline at some point (somewhere in the mid-17th C.; Spinoza would be a good example of someone who could see that the benefits of belonging to this club, did not outweigh the downsides).

There were many reasons for this, but an important one was the growing imbalance of power between European societies and the rest of the world. The power dynamics shifted to being contests between Christian European societies, rather than a struggle between Christianity and Islam, where sometimes one side was ascendant, and at other times the other side had the upper hand. The globalization of trade also reduced the value of having local connections in far flung regions. This led to a decrease in the ability of the Jewish religion to hold the various groups together, since it didn’t seem like they were all that beloved by Hashem, and therefore believing in His promise to them made less sense. Some individual Jews were able to succeed in these new conditions, but for the typical Jew, there was no longer any advantage to being associated with that label.

One of the truly infuriating “untruths” that Jewish Studies help perpetuate is the myth of “Jewish values”. Even if you wanted to cherry-pick a few quotes here and there from scriptures that deal with bringing light to the gentiles and focus only on them, it would still not change the fact that the overall approach that Jewish communities adopted was one of a separate existence, marked by wariness and hostility towards the rest of the world. There are no values in that, Jewish or otherwise. To quote Walther Rathenau again, from his pamphlet ‘Hear O Israel’: “Christian ethics are so self-evident to educated Jews today that they convince themselves that they can be derived from the Old Testament.” What does “they convince themselves” mean? It means that it isn’t true, but they pretend it is. You’d think that a field that purports to study a topic from inside and out, would concern itself with rooting out places where misconceptions have become ingrained. Instead, it seems that their main goal is to entrench these misconceptions so thoroughly that they become truth by dint of repetition. That wouldn’t even be so terrible, if they’d at least live their lives as though they believed in these values. The relationship of American Jews to Israel couldn’t be an any clearer demonstration of how that is not the case.

Let’s go decade by decade, and see what they managed to rationalize away:
50s: displacement and a two-tier system for Jews and Arabs, military adventurism, recruiting the Jewish diaspora to serve in their schemes; 60s: conquest of territories, occupation; 70s: settlements, first military setback, rise of fanatical right; 80s: if you haven’t gotten it by now, you’re never going to.

If they were true to their supposed values, you’d expect an observable reaction, like a Doubt-O-Meter that you could see going up, decade by decade, starting at, “I’m beginning to think these people don’t share our Jewish values”, going all the way to, “We’re raising money for the Jewish brigade that’s going to fight for the liberation of Palestine.”

So, pardon my French, but what Jewish values are you talking about, motherfucker?

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What makes it even weirder is that it’s not something that everyone chooses to ignore, so that they don’t have to acknowledge what’s going on. They talk about it incessantly, they write about it, make movies about it, turn the whole American political system into a tool to help it to continue to happen. There has never been a group that has exchanged so much information about something, while going out of its way to avoid doing so accurately. A lot of these Jewish Studies and Israel Studies centers host community events and seminars where all topics related to Jewish history and to Israel are discussed extensively. Most of it is just garbage – pure fluff, with no informational content whatsoever. Even in the rare cases where there’s someone who’s done some proper research into a topic and can actually shed some light on it, they will present it in a context that makes it lose all meaning.

I haven’t read the book, but I’ve watched a few presentations he gave on it, and to his credit I’ll say that each one of them was different and he clearly cares about the subject. He also has a fairly compelling set of protagonists in it – people who I hadn’t heard about and whose individual stories are quite interesting. The subtitle of the book is ‘Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948-1978‘. The noteworthy parts all end by the late 50s so it should have been ’48-’58. This would have been an accurate periodization, and it would have set the framing in a way that’s immediately intelligible: the Zionist cause was so firmly entrenched in American-Jewish life, already by the late 50s, to the exclusion of all else. The book ‘Exodus’ came out in ’58, and the film based on it came out two years later, by which time any debate that might have existed had already been wrapped up.

He acknowledges as much, that most of the book deals with the period up to the late 50s, but for whatever reason he tacked on a chapter at the end that deals with the post-’67 period, up to the late 70s. This give the impression of a 30-year period of ongoing internal debates, which simply isn’t the case. The accurate way to present the issues he’s discussing is by focusing on the ease with which the anti-Zionist “dissenters” were sidelined; and the degree to which a bad situation has only ever gotten worse. Even if it had been a case of the pendulum swinging towards Jewish Americans accepting a pro-Zionist outlook for a time, under normal conditions you would have expected it to swing back, and there was every reason for it to do so; but it didn’t, and in fact never has. One of the “conflicts” he describes is between Reform Jews who think Judaism should be seen only as a religion, and between ‘National’ Jews who believe that Jews should have a state. This is a reasonable debate to have, so far as it goes, but at some point it’s supposed to resolve itself, even if it means a split along ideological lines. There has never been any such resolution, and today the Reform movement is 100-percent on board with Zionism, as is every other non-Haredi Jewish group, and this while none of the conflicts that Zionism was supposed to resolve, have actually been resolved. Except for anti-Semitism, that’s been successfully eradicated.

Although the book doesn’t have a story to tell, in a broad sense (besides the incredible ease with which Zionism was able to become entrenched amongst Jewish Americans, which isn’t much of a story), he did manage to locate a number of interesting individual stories, which included getting access to people’s personal archives and taking the time to go through them. One of these people was Fayez Sayegh, who was the spokesman for the Arab League for a while. He focuses on the relationship between Sayegh and American Jews in the 50s, regarding whether you can be critical of Israel, or be anti-Zionist, without this becoming anti-Semitic. This framing is misleading in itself, because clearly the answer is yes, especially if you’re a Syrian-Palestinian who has family that was uprooted by the Zionist regime in Palestine, but leaving that aside, this is how he describes the outcome of these conversations:

These are his words; I’m not trying to make fun of how he says them, but I am making fun of what he’s saying. My central focus here is on this subversion of the information transmission mechanism, which is in place even for someone who’s not trying to be a propagandist, or to be actively misleading, but is simply not able to discuss openly and honestly the subject matter that he’s dealing with. You cannot get a clearer example of saying something, while “not actually saying anything.”

So, to answer the question: no, I do not know. What does “it’s making them uncomfortable” have to do with anything? It reminds me of those videos of hysterical people who are acting badly and when they get called out on it they resort to, “You’re making me very uncomfortable right now.”

I’d never heard of this group, and wasn’t expecting to be able to find this pamphlet he mentions, but they actually have a website, with a dedicated section linking to this and other such publications they’ve put out over the years. The one about Breira seems to have been published in 1976 (there aren’t any dates on them, but you can make an inference, based on the last year mentioned). It attacks them for being pro-PLO, and attacks their founding members for things like trying to stop arms shipments to Israel during ’73 war. This isn’t surprising, they are “Americans” for a safe Israel, after all; how can a country be safe if it doesn’t have weapons? Is Israel safer today than it was when this was written back in 1976? Just wondering; to me it seems the answer is no. Besides the booklet that deals with Breira specifically, there are two others that mention it, one from 1980, discussing the Israeli peace group, ‘Peace Now’, and one from 1987, discussing the new arrival on the scene, ‘New Jewish Agenda’.

The one that deals with Breira is notable for laying out a cast of characters, listing their associations and the organizations they’ve been part of. In this respect, I have this to say: if you think Zionist nudniks are bad, wait till you meet anti-Zionist nudniks. (There are dozens of people mentioned by name, and I’m not going to try to classify which ones specifically fit that label, but I will say that when it fits, it fits like a glove.) Reading such a comprehensive history today, it’s easy to lose sight of the amount of work that went into it. If you wanted to do something like that nowadays, you could do it in a few hours of looking up names online, but this was before the internet. Not only that, but there weren’t even digitized archives you could go to, if you were fortunate enough to have access to one. You would need to have been compiling these records on your own, for years, and archiving them in a way where you knew where everything was. This was an area where Jews did use to have a qualitative advantage: an affinity and even obsession with written material. It’s possible that an individual with a real mania for the subject matter could have done this on their own, but it seems unlikely. On the slide in his presentation where he discusses this broadside attack, he notes that there was no evidence of Israeli involvement, suggesting that such involvement was at least suspected. It’s a reasonable concern to have, given the level of effort that such a research project entailed.

What should this central actionable goal have been? Ending aid to Israel. There was no need for them to concern themselves with anything else, whatsoever. They didn’t need to have an opinion on Israel’s right to exist, let Israelis worry about that. They didn’t need to concern themselves with the fate of the Palestinians either, regardless of the sympathy they may have had for their cause. Even the issue of diplomatic backing for Israel was secondary, since it is within a country’s right to decide who it wants to side with and what causes to provide moral support to. However, this doesn’t have to extend to actual financial assistance, and without such financial aid, the cause of a Jewish ethnostate in the heart of the Middle East would have been unsustainable. This wouldn’t have been a difficult sell either, if they had committed to it for the long haul, and addressed their concerns primarily to American Jews, with an eye to their relationship with their non-Jewish neighbors: how can you look them in the eye, knowing that their tax dollars are being siphoned off to support a foreign country, especially one that claims to stand for Jewish autonomy and independence.

How do you avoid converging on an actionable goal? By making yourself believe that you should become an organization that concerns itself with multiple issues. I saw an essay by someone who was in NJA, writing shortly after the organization had been disbanded, where he says that one of the points of disagreement was about the issue of funding for Israel, which truly says it all. Just to bring this point home, take these two quotes for example, the first from the ‘Peace Now’ article (’80), and the second from the ‘NJA’ article (’87):

What can I say, at least they got tragedy and farce in the right order this time.

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I make some distinction between Jews who are on board with Zionism and those who are not. It’s a very slight distinction, and it’s getting harder to keep them apart in my head, but there is a difference between someone who can see that Israel is a murderous, fascistic country, and someone who goes out of their way to avoid seeing it, or even worse, someone who finds reason to take pride in that. There are a ton of English-language pro-Zionist videos put out by organizations and individuals. It’s pretty instructive to watch how they are trying to adapt to the circumstances of the present.

It’s quite obvious, in how he talks, that he takes the same kind of pleasure from the perversion of language, as would a mafioso telling a business owner he should “consider” a “contribution” to the neighborhood watch fund that he’s running. The reason he can take such pleasure in it, is that back then he could be fairly certain that his side was firmly in control of all aspects of the narrative, and that even if they couldn’t win everyone over with arguments, at the end of the day, actions speak louder than words, and if it had to come to that, they had the necessary muscle to overcome any obstacle that might arise.

There are people today, who are younger than he was then, trying to put out their own version of pro-Zionist spin, and you can see the way they seem to be struggling with the need to make the language fit the reality of what they’re experiencing. You can see it not in only in how they talk, the effort they have to make in choosing their words, but also how they listen to what they’re saying as they’re saying it, trying to analyze how it’s coming across, and realizing that it probably doesn’t sound terribly convincing. However, it doesn’t stop them from trying, and I find it hard to believe that they’ll reach a point when the cognitive dissonance becomes too much for them to bear. It’s the same problem of a lack of sense of proportion.

While there is a slight difference between those who are stuck with this inability to discuss things honestly, and those who’ve decided to actively weaponize their ability to say things that are untrue, as a way of trying to shape a narrative, the end result is that they’re both caught up in an artificially-constructed version of reality, and to a very large extent they are stuck with each other. The thing is that there’s a certain synergy in their efforts, and it ends up having a negative impact on real world events.

I’ll end with a few words specifically about Israelis, regarding proportions and reciprocity.

Proportions, proportionality, are clearly concepts they have trouble with, as is reciprocity in the sense that I don’t think they take into account the fact that how they treat others is how they can expect to be treated themselves. More specifically about reciprocity, in a broader context, there’s this. The whole idea behind Israel was to put an end to these special relationships. Our country, our labor, our sovereignty. It’s hard to overstate how much of the cultural and social energy of the second half of the 20th C., and up to this day, has been expended on catering to Jewish sensibilities: Hitler, Nazis, Antisemitism, Hitler; over and over and over again. One thing that struck me while looking up all these departments and centers and institutions, was how many of the names of teachers and directors sounded Israeli.

Israelis are raised on a version of history in which Jews have been blameless victims, or are at least were forced into relationships through adversity that caused them to be despised. Everybody understands that not everyone in a society can be an administrator or a professor. No one is holding a gun to your head, forcing you to take a manufactured bullshit academic position overseas. It’s true that Thai workers stole all the agricultural jobs, and Chinese and Eastern Europeans are stealing all the construction jobs, but this can’t be the only solution. You have to at least try to meet people half way. Don’t want anti-Semitism? Then don’t do things that cause it. Want to have everything be rigged in your favor? Then at least stop crying about the backlash.