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<h1 class="page__title title balance-text" id="page-title">Liberal
Zionism and the ethnonational imperative</h1>
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<span class="field field-author"><a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/people/steven-salaita"
typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel"
datatype="">Steven Salaita</a></span>
<span class="field field-publication-date"><span
class="date-display-single" property="dc:date"
datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2015-12-30T13:36:32+00:00">30
December 2015<br>
<b><small><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/steven-salaita/liberal-zionism-and-ethnonational-imperative">https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/steven-salaita/liberal-zionism-and-ethnonational-imperative</a></small></small></small></b><br>
</span></span> </p>
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<p>I recently shared a stage with <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/columbia-university">Columbia
University</a> professor <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/people/joseph-massad">Joseph
Massad</a> and listened to him vigorously condemn anti-Semitism,
deconstructing with his characteristic acuity the problems of
conflating Jewish peoplehood with the conduct of the state of
Israel.</p>
<p>Zionists often usually charge Massad with a number of sins
including anti-Semitism, accusations raised loudly in the context
of a decade-long campaign of defamation that aimed to get him
fired.</p>
<p>Massad’s predecessor at Columbia, <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/edward-said">Edward
Said</a>, once referred to himself, proudly, as a <a
href="http://www.newstatesman.com/node/159468">Jewish
intellectual</a>.</p>
<p>Said eloquently castigated any articulation of anti-Semitism and
demanded that it be no part of Palestine’s national movement.
Zionists often deemed Said anti-Semitic and spent countless hours
attempting to get him fired, too.</p>
<p>Ali Abunimah, another Palestinian luminary, so robustly
criticizes anti-Semitism that right-wing anti-Semites accuse him
of being a covert Zionist, unaware perhaps that they’re
reproducing a feature of Zionism.</p>
<p>Last week, <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/avi-mayer">Avi Mayer</a>,
an American settler in Palestine who works for the propaganda arm
of the Israeli government-backed <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/jewish-agency">Jewish
Agency</a>, alleged anti-Semitism <a
href="https://storify.com/AliAbunimah/what-ali-abunimah-really-thinks-about-yom-kippur">against
Abunimah</a>. Abunimah’s transgression was to insist that the
Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur not be conflated with a celebration
of Israel.</p>
<p>A significant community of Palestinian intellectuals, journalists
and activists loudly disdains anti-Semitism and desires democratic
coexistence with Jews. Members of this community frequently
sustain slander as anti-Semitic and are targeted for recrimination
or even criminalization.</p>
<p>It makes no sense – except in the context of liberal Zionism,
where it is perfectly sensible.</p>
<h2>The horror of democratic coexistence</h2>
<p>That Zionists accuse adamant critics of anti-Semitism of being
anti-Semitic isn’t actually a disconnect; it is a vital feature of
Zionism, especially visible in its liberal incarnations.</p>
<p>Take Mayer’s claim against Abunimah. It’s easy (and tempting) to
dismiss it as the paranoid dishonesty of a dullard whose vapidity
surpasses his acumen, or, if we are to be more generous, as the
preening war cry of a professional colonizer, but Mayer’s
duplicity is systematic.</p>
<p>We must take it seriously even if we cannot extend the same
courtesy to its purveyor.</p>
<p>To make sense of this bizarre sensibility, we should explore how
Zionist notions of anti-Semitism function in relation to
iniquitous norms of citizenship in Israel.</p>
<p>According to the logic of settler colonization, anti-Semitism is
located not in hatred of Jews, but in the refusal to accept
Israeli iniquity.</p>
<p>Those who disassociate Israel from Judaism frequently field false
accusations of anti-Semitism. Those accusations don’t generally
result from misreading. It’s precisely the disassociation of
Israel from Judaism that so disturbs people who view Zionism as an
atavistic duty.</p>
<p>The Zionist ideal of a state exclusive to Jews, as defined by a
theocratic bureaucracy, reduces culture and history to the
fanciful motifs of ethnonationalism.</p>
<p>Jewish peoplehood is thus contingent on fealty to Israel.
Delinking Jewishness from Zionism constitutes a grievous act of
anti-Semitism. All forms of Zionism, no matter how progressive
they sound, rely on that linkage.</p>
<p>When Palestinians support democratic coexistence, which requires
equal rights and nonsectarian citizenship, they implicitly desire
the end of Zionism.</p>
<p>When Zionists reduce Israel to emblems of cultural uplift (Jewish
redemption, biblical fulfillment, ethnic refuge, enlightenment of
other nations), they elide its presence as a state that behaves in
relation to certain geopolitical realities. It becomes exceptional
and sacrosanct. It fulfills the exclusive destiny of an anointed
few, sorted from the unchosen through the blunt rites of biology.
(All forms of ethnonationalism do the same.)</p>
<p>The state’s critics, then, are not seen to be maligning unjust
policies, but as performing acts of cultural insensitivity.</p>
<h2>The Palestinian menace</h2>
<p>Those of Palestinian origin are especially prone (and vulnerable)
to charges of anti-Semitism. Israel’s propaganda technique of
conceptualizing Palestinians as beholden to <a
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/22/world/middleeast/netanyahu-saying-palestinian-mufti-inspired-holocaust-draws-broad-criticism.html">inveterate
Jew-hatred</a> initiates the oft-repeated assertion that <a
href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/israelis-are-calling-attacks-a-new-kind-of-palestinian-terror/2015/12/24/e162e088-0953-4de5-992e-adb2126f1dcc_story.html">mindless
violence</a> motivates Palestinian resistance.</p>
<p>The technique also serves a more insidious purpose. For Zionism
to function, Palestinians must disappear or become anti-Semitic.</p>
<p>The Palestinian who welcomes the opportunity to share a nation
and a national identity with Jews exposes the irreconcilable
contradiction of Zionism, that something called a “Jewish state”
can also be a legitimate democracy.</p>
<p>The Palestinian puts the Zionist in the unusual position of
exemplifying what the Palestinian is supposed to embody:
tribalism, irrationality, belligerence, fanaticism, chauvinism,
superstition.</p>
<p>It is easier to either ignore Palestinians or defame them based
on the Zionist’s peculiar obsession with ethnic purity.</p>
<p>These ethical contortions make little sense to those with
worldviews that accommodate compassion, but we’re dealing with
ethnonationalism, which values group supremacy above all other
considerations.</p>
<h2>The necessity of liberal slander</h2>
<p>In the months after being fired from a tenured professorship at
the <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/university-illinois">University
of Illinois</a> in August 2014, for condemning Israeli war
crimes, I was periodically aggravated that some commentators were
unwilling or unable to recognize that my supposedly anti-Semitic
tweets actually defend Jews against essentialism.</p>
<p>In those tweets, I warn against conflating an entire community
with the behavior of a nation-state busy showering civilians with
bombs and chemical weapons, a warning I offer in much of my work.</p>
<p>Yet <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/cary-nelson">Cary
Nelson</a>, <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/todd-gitlin">Todd
Gitlin</a>, <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/mira-sucharov">Mira
Sucharov</a>, <a
href="http://www.jewishjournal.com/david_n_myers/article/whether_you_fire_him_or_not_condemn_salaitas_words">David
Myers</a>, <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/michelle-goldberg">Michelle
Goldberg</a> and other liberal Zionist academics and pundits all
declared or suggested that I had disparaged Jews.</p>
<p>It was remarkably frustrating. These folks could obviously read,
even if not competently. They all have impeccable credentials, but
I tried not to hold that against them. I couldn’t understand their
phonic malfunction until I forced myself to think like an
apologist for ethnocracy.</p>
<p>The political identity of liberal Zionists is filled with acute
incongruity. They cannot consume or disseminate ideas without the
magical benefit of denial. Disassociating Judaism from Israel
renders Zionism superfluous. That kind of disassociation requires
one to rethink the commonplaces of Israel’s self-image. It is more
convenient to outsource failures of imagination to the
Palestinian.</p>
<p>The liberal Zionist must constantly choose between a
self-professed commitment to democracy and protecting Israel’s
reputation.</p>
<p>When pressed, the liberal Zionist always chooses to protect
Israel’s reputation. That choice defines liberal Zionism.</p>
<h2>The ethnonational imperative</h2>
<p>This mentality is evident in, say, the asinine interpretation of
<a
href="https://storify.com/AliAbunimah/what-ali-abunimah-really-thinks-about-yom-kippur">Abunimah’s
tweets</a> and in the career-long nonsense Edward Said endured.</p>
<p>Every Palestinian activist or intellectual who delinks Zionism
and Jewishness – which is to say, nearly all of us – suffers the
conflicted rhetoric of colonizers pretending to be enlightened.</p>
<p>The problem isn’t that liberal Zionists ignore what Palestinian
activists and intellectuals actually say. They listen closely, in
fact. They’re merely terrified to hear the native express a desire
for equality. If actualized, that desire would force the
destruction of an ideology they refuse to abandon.</p>
<p>I term this phenomenon the ethnonational imperative, which
explains spurious accusations of anti-Semitism not as an inability
to comprehend the delinking of Zionism and Jewishness, but as an
inclination to link them permanently and to punish those who do
not.</p>
<p>It does little good for a victim of the ethnonational imperative
to insist that he or she refuses to define a complex and
multivalent community in relation to a perpetual human rights
violator. Such insistence will only intensify accusations of
anti-Semitism.</p>
<p>I have no pithy alternative on offer. I can only represent my own
experience and identify which approaches suit me at the moment.</p>
<p>Others exist in different circumstances. I encourage them to
think closely about strategies that allow them to continue
speaking from positions of belonging and to retain the dignity of
the Palestinian struggle.</p>
<p>I will no longer respond to accusations of anti-Semitism by
appealing to my accusers’ sense of fairness or discretion. They
don’t raise those accusations to foster reconciliation or
dialogue, to use the favored parlance of the liberal Zionist. They
do it to cause harm.</p>
<p>The impulse, even when unstated, is to center themselves as
stewards of Palestine’s destiny. In the meantime, their
recalcitrance prolongs heinous suffering.</p>
<p>I am willing to work out difficult ideas with ideological
opponents, but I have no interest in forestalling the liberation
of Palestine to accommodate the colonizer’s identity crisis.</p>
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