ANTI-SEMITISM AND ITS VAGARIES

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In 1935 Reinhard Heydrich (who a couple of years later organised the holocaust) wrote: "We must separate the Jews into two categories, the Zionists and the partisans of assimilation. The Zionists profess a strictly racial concept and, through emigration to Palestine, they help to build their own Jewish State. /…/ our good wishes and our official goodwill go with them."[1] Something radically new happened with the establishment of the State of Israel: in Heydrich’s terms, Zionism won over assimilationism. How did this shift affect anti-Semitism? The traditional anti-Semitism which perceived Jews as deracinated/rootless people was rendered problematic. Let’s take the case of Martin Heidegger who in 1939 urged an examination of “Jewry’s predisposition to planetary criminality (planetarischen Verbrechertum)”:

“With their marked gift for calculation, the Jews ‘live’ according to the principle of race, and indeed have done so for the longest time, for which reason they themselves most vigorously resist its unrestricted application. The arrangement of racial breeding stems not from ‘life’ itself, but from the hyperempowerment of life by machination (Machenschaft). What this brings about with such planning is a complete deracination of peoples by harnessing them in a uniformly constructed and streamlined arrangement of all entities. Along with deracination goes a self-alienation of peoples -- the loss of history -- i.e. of the regions of decision for beyng (Seyn).”[2]

The philosophical background of these lines is the opposition between fully living in a concrete world, assuming the way being discloses itself to us in an always unique Event, and the denial of such concrete spiritual-historical roots in the abstract stance of objectivizing the world into “external reality” as something to be manipulated and exploited. Defenders of Heidegger claim that he simply confuses here the metaphysical stance of rootless Machenschaft that predominates today with an empirical people (Jews) which embodies this stance at its most radical, so that one can get rid of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism by being more faithful to Heidegger than Heidegger himself, i.e., by sticking all the way to the ontologico-ontic difference. However, in Heidegger’s theory, Jews are not the only place of such a short-circuit between the ontological and the ontic: the counter-point to Jews are Germans as the only proper meta-physical people, the only people which can enact a new epochal beginning. If Germans and Jews are two absolute opposites the tension of which can only be resolved through the annihilation of one pole, does this mean that holocaust was in some sense justified? Here Heidegger takes into account the difference between the metaphysical stance of Jewishness and the ontic Jews, but in an extremely perverted way: he interprets holocaust (the annihilation of ontic Jews) as the self-annihilation of the Jews themselves:

“Only when what is essentially ‘Jewish’ in the metaphysical sense battles against the Jewish is the pinnacle of self-annihilation in history attained; assuming that what is ‘Jewish’ has everywhere seized dominion entirely for itself, such that even the battle ‘of the Jewish,’ and this above all, becomes subjection to it.”[3]

By accounting for the holocaust in the terms of the havocs of modern technics, Heidegger ignores the pathologies of the German historical development which culminated in the annihilation of the Jews; in this false move from the particular to the universal, Germans, the actual perpetrators of the holocaust, disappear from the picture, they become just an anonymous perpetrator of the self-annihilation of the Jews themselves. The irony goes here even a step deeper: Germans (or, more closely, the Nazis) become the stand-in of “what is essentially ‘Jewish’ in the metaphysical sense” in its battle against the empirical Jews. In short, they stand for the much more radical practice of technological machination than the actual Jews themselves, so that, to go to the end, Germans themselves were the true agents of self-annihilation, so that the destruction of Germany in 1945 was its self-destruction, something Germany brought upon itself. What Heidegger misses here is that, in our global capitalism, every reference to roots, to “blood and soil,” loses its innocence since it already serves the aim of global machination.[4]

So what happens when Zionists themselves begin to evoke the traditional anti-Semiotic cliché of roots, or, as Alain Finkielkraut wrote in 2015 in a letter to le Monde: “The Jews, they have today chosen the path of rooting.”[5] It is easy to discern in this claim an echo of Heidegger who, in his Spiegel interview, that all essential and great things can only emerge from our having a homeland, from being rooted in a tradition. The irony is that we are dealing here with a weird attempt to mobilize anti-Semitic clichés in order to legitimize Zionism: anti-Semitism reproaches the Jews for being rootless, and it is as if Zionism tries to correct this failure by belatedly providing Jews with roots… No wonder many conservative anti-Semites ferociously support the expansion of the State of Israel. The trouble with annex-West-Bank Jews today is, of course, that they are now trying to get roots in a place which was for centuries of years inhabited by other people. To put it in another way, we encounter here the ambiguity of the traditional Jewish saying “next year in Jerusalem” pronounced at the end of Seder (Hebrew: “order,” the religious meal served in Jewish homes on the 15th and 16th of the month of Nisan to commence the festival of Passover):

“Many Jews who believe strongly in the importance of a Jewish state see ‘next year in Jerusalem’ as an expression of the need to protect Jerusalem and Israel as they exist today. Others think of the ‘Jerusalem’ mentioned in the Seder more of an ideal of what Jerusalem and Israel could be — for them, ‘next year in Jerusalem’ is a prayer that Israel will move closer to that ideal. Or ‘Jerusalem’ could just be a symbol of utopia more generally, and ‘next year in Jerusalem’ could be a resolution to bring peace to Earth in the coming year.”[6]

(There is also a third version which is the worst, a kind of “synthesis” of the first two: now that we have Jerusalem, next year it will be rebuilt with Palestinian buildings destroyed and a new big temple constructed again on the site of Al Aksa mosque.) The two main versions reproduce the duality of the transcendental and the empirical: “Jerusalem” as a non-empirical spiritual site of deliverance against the city in our material reality. The “transcendentalists” who reject the beatification of the actual city as a blasphemy and oppose the State of Israel, are kindly viewed even by some Muslim fundamentalists: when a decade or so ago the Iranian then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad organized a big conference for the obliteration of the State of Israel in Tehran, and he received very friendly there some “transcendentalist” rabbies, personally greeting them. Ahmadinejad was thus the opposite of Heydrich: Jews in our midst are OK, but the Jewish state is unacceptable…

I see a great danger in the short-circuit between the transcendental and the empirical notion of Jerusalem: it conceives the struggle for Jerusalem as a sacred task, elevating it to a sacred crime, a crime which doesn’t make us guilty because it founds the new legitimate order – in short, it works like a new version of the old joke “In our village there are no cannibals, we ate the last one yesterday.” Or, to put it even more brutally, Israel uses the status of Jews as victims to justify its expansionist local-superpower politics and is thus itself manipulating and exploiting the memory of holocaust.

The circle is thus fully closed: the German unconditional support of Israel amounts to the support of the present Israeli government against the liberal opposition to it which advocates an understanding for the plea of Palestinians – the German full support for Israel thus de facto contributes to the growth of anti-Semitism. Furthermore, the notion of importierter Antisemitismus advocated now in some circles in Germany in some sense present the hidden truth of the official anti-anti-Semitism: their claim is that the new wave of anti-Semitism in Germany is not a German phenomenon, it was imported there with the Muslim immigrants – so Germans are clean, the way to fight anti-Semitism it is to limit and control immigrants… No wonder my speech at the opening ceremony of the Frankfurt book fair in 2023 caused a scandal: I was accused of introducing politics into a cultural literary event - really? Five speakers before me all focused on the unconditional support for Israel, and presented their support as an apolitical act of solidarity – in that constellation, such an act amounted to the worst extreme politicization because it amounted to unconditional support of the present Israeli government against the strong Israeli opposition to its politics. After unconditionally condemning the Hamas attack, all I did was mention Palestinian suffering.

But why, then, are (some) anti-Semitic immigrants who refuse any solidarity with Israel affecting many young Leftists in the West? Why did Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America”[7] go so viral, especially among the young, in October and November 2023, at the time of the Gaza war? What nerve did it hit? One can safely presume that many of its avid readers also participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations against the Israeli bombing of Gaza. However, it is too fast to conclude that they sympathized with Hamas, considering it a genuine anti-colonial movement. What attracted the readers was more the portrait of the US (and of the developed West): dominance of the big capital in conjunction with the state apparatus, neglect of ecological concerns, growing poverty of the exploited majority… Sometimes the line which separates the discontent in capitalism with pseudo-“anticapitalist” populism is very thin - Bin Laden also advocated open anti-Semitism and Muslim fundamentalism.

There is a further crucial point to be made here. Lately, many liberals in principle support Israel and simultaneously advice caution or even express concern at the numbers of the killed, especially children, in Gaza… in short, there is a growing sympathy, love even, for Palestinians as victims, but why should Palestinians be just victims, why should they not RESIST Israel in justified rage? Remember Thomas Jefferson’s words: "When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty." So how should Palestinians resist, REALLY resist, without becoming anti-Semites? The moment this topic is approached, silence and embarrassment appear.

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[1] Quoted from op.cit.

[2] Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen XII, GW 96, Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann 2014, p. 56.

[3] Martin Heidegger, Anmerkungen I-V. GW 97, Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann 2015, p. 82.

[4] Not to mention the obvious fact that there is a rich tradition of Jewish spirituality which absolutely cannot be reduced to Heidegger’s rather caricatural notion of Judentum.

[5] C’est reparti comme en 50 (lemonde.fr).

[6] Why are you supposed to say “next year in Jerusalem”? - Vox.

[7] Microsoft Word - To the American people (dni.gov).