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Congress’s Antisemitism Bill Is an Insult to Jewish History [1]

['Oren Schweitzer', 'Tyler Austin Harper', 'Jared Abbott', 'Fred Deveaux', 'Cori Bush', 'Shawn Fain', 'Shaul Magid', 'Ben Burgis', 'Richard Seymour', 'David Rosenberg']

Date: 2024-05

Despite the bill’s name, purporting to call “awareness” to antisemitism, its actual contents are an insult to Jewish history and historical memory, erasing decades of Jewish anti-Zionist politics. In fact, in a tragic and deeply twisted irony, the bill would desecrate the graves of millions of Jewish victims of the Holocaust, many of whom were anti-Zionists themselves.

Last week, the McCarthyist meltdown reached absurd new heights when the House of Representatives passed a bill enshrining a legally binding definition of antisemitism that includes anti-Zionism. This past Wednesday, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved the Antisemitism Awareness Act, by a vote of 320 to 91. The bill urges the Department of Education to codify a definition of antisemitism that includes anti-Zionist criticism of Israel.

Over the past two weeks, student protests over the US-Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza have been met with brutal police crackdowns. Meanwhile, the campus demonstrations have provoked hysteria among politicians and the media, who have smeared the protests as violent, antisemitic, and potentially even connected to international terror networks .

Erasing Jewish Anti-Zionism

The Antisemitism Awareness Act directs the Department of Education to use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism when “reviewing, investigating, or deciding whether there has been a violation of title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” The controversial IHRA definition of antisemitism includes among its examples of antisemitism “the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity,” “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”

In other words, the IHRA includes anti-Zionist political speech, the dominant Jewish stance on the idea of a Jewish nation-state before the Holocaust, in its definition of antisemitism. It would, for instance, define an article I wrote last spring — which outlines the similarities between the current politics of the Israeli state and my own family’s experiences in the Holocaust and the shtetl pogroms — as antisemitic.

If passed and adopted by the US Department of Education (DOE), the act would empower the DOE to strip schools of federal funding if they refuse to repress students engaged in anti-Zionist speech, ban organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), and bar teachers and professors from endorsing anti-Zionist messages. It would further give legal cover and encouragement to university administrations and local police departments already seeking to repress anti-Zionist demonstrations.

Despite the Israeli state’s insistence on the centrality of Israel and Zionism to Jewish identity and practice, Zionism is a nationalist political movement, and a rather recent one in Jewish history. In Ten Myths About Israel, Israeli-born historian Ilan Pappé shows that before the Holocaust, Zionism was a minoritarian political movement among European Jewry.

Most European Jews, Pappe explains, held one of three other political views, all of which were non- or anti-Zionist. In Western Europe, where Napoleon’s conquests emancipated Jews from de jure oppression, Jewish people were more assimilated into their own countries’ cultural practices and identity. For these Jews, many of whom were liberals, the goal was to be accepted within these national communities, not to break off and form a new and separate one — an idea not too different from those advocated by antisemites in their home countries.

In Eastern Europe, where Jews remained subjugated under Tsarist rule — confined to the shtetls, ghettoes, and the Pale of Settlement — Jewish politics took two primary forms: socialist internationalism on the one hand, and religious orthodoxy on the other. Both were vehemently opposed to Zionism.

Working-class Jews throughout Eastern Europe played an outsize role in the militant and powerful labor movement that eventually seized power in the October Revolution. The Jewish Bund was the largest Jewish trade union movement and Jewish political party in Europe, and it fought for Jewish liberation alongside the struggle for socialism and international solidarity with other workers and oppressed peoples. In addition to the Bund, Jewish workers and intellectuals were disproportionately represented in other socialist, Marxist, and revolutionary parties like the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, as well as in communist and socialist parties outside the Russian Empire.

Against Zionism, the Bund insisted “wherever we are, that’s our homeland.” It saw Zionism as abandoning the struggle against antisemitism, which could be defeated through working-class solidarity and struggle, and overturning the political and economic conditions that fueled antisemitism. Zionists, on the other hand, accepted the basic nationalistic and racialistic premises of our oppressors: that Jews could never be safe among non-Jews and instead needed to separate ourselves.

Last, the more theologically orthodox in Eastern Europe rejected Zionism for religious reasons. Israel, the biblical promised land, could only be brought about by the messiah, not humankind. Transforming the concept of Israel into a modern nation-state-building project — let alone one requiring war, colonization, and displacement of the current population — was largely seen as anathema to religious dictates. As Pappé recounts, a prominent Hasidic rabbi declared that “Zionism [asked] him to replace centuries of Jewish wisdom and law for a rag, soil and a song (i.e., a flag, a land, and an anthem).”

Imperial powers, especially Britain, soon began to adopt their own form of Christian Zionism, having identified a potentially powerful symbiotic relationship between Jewish Zionists and Christian and imperialist interests. A Britain-aligned Jewish colony in Palestine was seen at once as an incredible geopolitical asset for the British Empire and a solution to British and other European leaders’ “Jewish problem” (i.e., antisemitic animus), all the while potentially fulfilling Christian prophecies of a Jewish-controlled Jerusalem that would bring about Armageddon.

It’s no wonder Bundists decried Zionism as “escapism,” and Jewish liberals saw it as bolstering, not opposing, antisemitism.

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[1] Url: https://jacobin.com/2024/05/antisemitism-bill-bund-jewish-history

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