For American Jews, Dissent Against Israel Has Become Mainstream

By Tony Karon, Tomdispatch.com. Posted September 15, 2007.

First, a confession: It may tell me that I hate myself, but I can't help loving Masada2000, the website maintained by militant right-wing Zionist followers of Rabbi Meir Kahane. The reason I love it is its D.I.R.T. list -- that's "Dense anti-Israel Repugnant Traitors" (also published as the S.H.I.T. list of "Self-Hating and Israel-Threatening" Jews). And that's not because I get a bigger entry than -- staying in the Ks -- Henry Kissinger, Michael Kinsley, Naomi Klein, or Ted Koppel. The Kahanists are a pretty flaky lot, counting everyone from Woody Allen to present Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on their list of Jewish traitors. But the habit of branding Jewish dissidents -- those of us who reject the nationalist notion that as Jews, our fate is tied to that of Israel, or the idea that our people's historic suffering somehow exempts Israel from moral reproach for its abuses against others -- as "self-haters" is not unfamiliar to me.

In 1981, my father went, as a delegate of the B'nai B'rith Jewish service organization, to a meeting of the Cape Town chapter of the Jewish Board of Deputies, the governing body of South Africa's Jewish communal institutions. The topic of the meeting was "Anti-Semitism on Campus." My father was pretty shocked and deeply embarrassed when Exhibit A of this phenomenon turned out to be something I'd published in a student newspaper condemning an Israeli raid on Lebanon.

By then, I was an activist in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, which was consuming most of my energies. Having been an active left-Zionist in my teenage years, I had, however, retained an interest in the Middle East -- and, of course, we all knew that Israel was the South African white apartheid regime's most important ally, arming its security forces in defiance of a UN arms embargo. Even back then, the connection between the circumstances of black people under apartheid, and those of Palestinians under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, seemed obvious enough to me and to many other Jews in the South African liberation movement: Both were peoples harshly ruled over by a state that denied them the rights of citizenship.

Still, this was a first. I could recite the kiddush from memory, sing old kibbutznik anthems and curse in Yiddish. I had been called a "bloody Jew" many times, but never an anti-Semite or a self-hating Jew. What quickly became clear to me, though, was the purpose of that "self-hating" smear -- to marginalize Jews who dissent from Zionism, the nationalist ideology of Jewish statehood, in order to warn others off expressing similar views.

What I like about the S.H.I.T. list's approach to the job -- other than the "Dangerous Minds" theme music that plays as you read it -- is the way it embraces literally thousands of names, including many of my favorite Jews. Memo to the sages at Masada2000: If you're trying to paint dissenters as demented traitors, you really have to keep the numbers down. Instead, Masada2000's inadvertent message is: "Think critically about Israel and you'll join Woody Allen and a cast of thousands..."

A New Landscape of Jewish Dissent

The Kahanists are a fringe movement, but their self-defeating list may nonetheless be a metaphor for the coming crisis in more mainstream nationalist efforts to police Jewish identity. The Zionist establishment has had remarkable success over the past half-century in convincing others that Israel and its supporters speak for, and represent, "the Jews." The value to their cause of making Israel indistinguishable from Jews at large is that it becomes a lot easier to shield Israel from reproach. It suggests, in the most emphatic terms, that serious criticism of Israel amounts to criticism of Jews. More than a millennium of violent Christian persecution of Jews, culminating in the Holocaust, has made many in the West rightly sensitive towards any claims of anti-Semitism, a sensitivity many Zionists like to exploit to gain a carte blanche exemption from criticism for a state they claim to be the very personification of Jewishness.

So, despite Israel's ongoing dispossession and oppression of the Palestinians in the occupied territories, then-Harvard president Larry Summers evidently had no trouble saying, in 2002, that harsh criticisms of Israel are "anti-Semitic in their effect if not in their intent."

Robin Shepherd of the usually sensible British think-tank Chatham House has gone even further, arguing that comparing Israel with apartheid South Africa is "objective anti-Semitism."

Says Shepherd: "Of course one can criticize Israel, but there is a litmus test, and that is when the critics begin using constant key references to South Africa and the Nazis, using terms such as ‘bantustans.' None of these people, of course, will admit to being racist, but this kind of anti-Semitism is a much more sophisticated form of racism, and the kind of hate-filled rhetoric and imagery are on the same moral level as racism, so gross and distorted that they are defaming an entire people, since Israel is an essentially Jewish project."

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Tony Karon is a senior editor at TIME.com where he analyzes the Middle East and other international conflicts. South African-born and raised, yet a lifelong fan of Liverpool, he offers comment and analysis -- as well as a World Cup blog -- on his own web site Rootless Cosmopolitan. He also edits Global Beat, an annotated weekly digest of international conflict coverage.

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