JEWS BETWEEN ASSIMILATIONISM AND ZIONISM

For decades I have highly appreciated the Lacanian linguist, philosopher and social analyst Jean-Claude Milner – even when (as is often the case) I don’t agree with him, I find his line of argumentation highly instructing and perspicuous. So let me bite the sour apple and take a look at how Milner, from his radical pro-Zionist stance, describes the ongoing shift in the relationship between Israel and the US:

“After October 7, the White House proclaimed its unconditional support for Israel. Gradually, however, it became clear that this support was not, in fact, unconditional. It depended on conditions that were all the more insistent in that they were not clearly expressed in the form of injunctions; they were confined to suggestions, reservations and warnings. For some time now, a step has been taken; President Biden is less and less secretive about his opposition to Israeli plans and his personal distrust of Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu. From this set of data, a program can be derived, which we can assume the American Jewish community agreed to, if not conceived: the need to negotiate a halt to the fighting as soon as possible, promotion of the two-state solution, refusal to allow the Gaza Strip, in the event of a temporary truce or lasting peace, to be controlled, even partially, by Israel, abandonment of all forms of settlement in the West Bank, removal of the Prime Minister as quickly as possible and, ultimately, limitation of Israel’s autonomy vis-à-vis the United States. The list may be long or short, depending on the circumstances, but in all its versions, it implies radical concessions on Israel’s part, with regard to its borders and its status as an independent nation.”[i]

Along the same lines, Bernard-Henri Levy speaks about the “solitude of Israel” which, from 1945 (even before it was established as a state), has to confront the threat of being abandoned by the West[ii]… really? How can one make such a claim when even the demonstrators for ceasefire and peace are now regularly arrested in Western countries? Plus one cannot help to note what is missing in Milner’s text which focuses exclusively on the topic of Israel versus US and West Europe – there is no mention of Palestinians… According to Milner, the message the American Jewish community is sending to Israel is thus:

“forget the Holocaust, Jewish studies and anything else that might persuade you of the inadequacy of the WASP; abandon the Middle East, which is devouring you; Jerusalem is no longer in Jerusalem, it’s all where I am. The European bourgeoisie is sending out similar messages, vainly, stupidly, following in their footsteps, and part of the French Jewish bourgeoisie is getting ready to join in. But who will believe France, Germany and the others, when these countries claim to be gardens of peace for the Jews? The American message will be the only one to be heard. Will it be listened to? Spielberg hoped so, as a precursor, in his film The Fabelmans. I hope it won’t.”[iii]

I disagree with this standpoint for two main reasons. First, I think that the true stance of the US and (most of) Western Europe is exactly the opposite one: while rhetorically expressing reservations about how Israel acts in Gaza and on the West Bank, at the level which really matters (financial and military support of Israel) nothing is really changing. Second, the idea of providing a home for the Jews outside Europe and the US, preferably in the Middle East, has for over a hundred years been promoted by the European and American Right, including Reinhard Heydrich himself, the organizer of the Holocaust, who in 1935 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."[iv]

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. 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.”[v] It is easy to discern in this claim an echo of Heidegger who, in his Spiegel interview, said 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.

The point is thus to get rid of the Jews in Europe: Jews can represent Europe out there, in Palestine, among the Arabs, just not here, in Europe itself. In clear contrast to this stance (against assimilationism and for Zionism), a group of French Jews organized a pro-peace movement which drew attention to the fact that “a wide scope of Jewish anti-Zionist writings denounced what the creation of a ‘Jewish’ state will mean, its dramatic, murderous consequences. Marek Edelman, a member of Bund, remained in Poland after the WWII. After 1945, he spoke of the ‘Palestinian partisans’ and became, for this reason, not wanted in Israel.” When Israeli Zionists use the term “anti-Semitism” to criminalize the pro-Palestinian movement, the kill - for the second time - the revolutionary Jewishness (from Trotsky to Edelman). If one has any doubts about the “murderous consequences” of establishing the State of Israel as exclusively Jewish, suffice it to take a look at Owen Jones’s podcast in which he shows a fragment from a talk show on the most popular Israeli TV channel where a participant says with a passionate intensity:

“The most disturbing pictures I have seen in a long time are the pictures of the Gazans enjoying on the beach. /…/ These people deserve death, a hard death, an agonizing death, and instead we see them enjoying on the beach and having fun. /…/ There are no innocent people there in the Gaza Strip. None. They voted for Hamas, they want Hamas, /…/ they are now enjoying on the beach instead of starving, instead of being jerked around, instead of being severely tormented, instead of hiding from shelling /…/ we should have seen there a lot more revenge, a lot more rivers of Gazan’s blood.”[vi]

If this is not “a case study in genocidal mania”(Jones), then this term has no meaning… So what really happened? An obvious thing: Gaza was hit by an unexpected heat wave, and since the place is in ruins with lack of electricity and water, what should people do but go to the beach which stretches along the entire territory? That’s why all one should do apropos the shots of the Gazans on the beach is to move the camera backwards a little bit, and one would immediately see the ruins behind them… Plus can one imagine the reaction if a Palestinian were to say something in similar words – and words matter here: it is not just a genocide but a genocide which should be as painful as possible - shown across big public media? Which is why the oft-repeated argument “Israel cannot really annihilate Hamas” is simply stupid, it totally missed the point: the true goal of the war is for Israel to fully integrate Gaza and the West Bank, to create the great Israel from the river to the sea, so the more Hamas remains as a threat, the more the Israeli military intervention is justified. This is why, as Newsweek reported,

“the true epicenter of the war in the Holy Land is not the devastated Gaza Strip, it is a few dozen miles away in Jerusalem, at the holiest and most fiercely contested hilltop on Earth. The war has given new impetus to a group of Jews and their evangelical Christian allies who are set on rebuilding an ancient temple where millennium-old Islamic shrines now stand, a suggestion that arouses the horror not only of Palestinians and Muslims worldwide, but of many Jews in Israel and around the globe as well as that of would-be Middle East peacemakers.”

And we are not talking here about vague plans, detailed preparations are in full progress: “Third Temple advocates have been preparing for the day when the temple can be rebuilt, complete with rabbinically-certified red cows shipped from Texas for use in sacrificial purification rituals. The architectural designs are all ready, along the lines of the detailed Biblical descriptions. Robes have been woven and utensils assembled to Biblical specifications for ceremonies at the planned temple.” The peak of madness is the obvious inconsistency in this demand for the Third Temple: Zionists and anti-Semitic Christian fundamentalists are together in its:

“Messianic Jewish supporters believe the rebuilding of the temple, rather than being divisive, would fulfil Biblical prophecy to bring an era of peace with the temple as ‘a house of prayer for all nations’ (my insert: Arab Muslims inclusive?), while Christian backers, meanwhile, believe it would be an important step towards the Second Coming of Jesus and an apocalyptic last battle with the Antichrist.”[vii]

In short, the Christian backers see it as a step towards Armageddon in which Jews who will not convert to Christianity will also be slaughtered… who is more fundamentalist here, Palestinians or Jews? Compared to the Third Temple project, many Palestinians effectively appear as secular multiculturalists, just demanding the equality of all religions… Not only is the long tradition of Leftist Jewish revolutionaries being erased from historical memory in this way (recall how many Jews were part of the early Bolshevik elite!); what disappears is also the tradition of Muslim solidarity with the oppressed Jews. For example, when in Algeria during the WWII the Vichy government cancelled the Crémieux Decree (a law that granted French citizenship to the majority of the Jewish population in French Algeria, signed by the Government of National Defense on 24 October 1870), “local Muslim authorities prohibited anyone in their community to appropriate Jewish properties. Not one of the Algerian indigenous Muslims violated this decision.” Only the French supported the Vichy cancellation and profited from it.[viii] Who cares to remember things like this today?

There is no question here of blaming the Jews for their predicament: this predicament is objectively tragic – just recall the two versions between which oscillate the anti-Zionist Jews: some of then advocate the peaceful integration of Jews in Palestine into the Arab environment instead of a sovereign Jewish state, while others prefer withdrawal from Palestine and another attempt at the assimilation into Western democracies. Both versions are fraught with difficulties and the first one borders on the impossible.

The sad conclusion is nonetheless the following one. After the October 7 attack, prior to any debate the question automatically posed to anyone who criticized Israel was: “Do you condemn the Hamas attack?” Now the time has come to turn this question around: “Do you condemn what IDF is doing in Gaza?” The asymmetry is clear: while Palestinians are presumed to think about the destruction of Israel, Israel is actually destroying Gaza…

---

[i] Israel and the USA: from reservations to dispute, by Jean-Claude Milner - Jews, Europe, the XXIst century (k-larevue.com).

[ii] Bernard-Henri Levy, La solitude d’Israel, Paris: Grasset 2024.

[iii] Milner, op.cit.

[iv] I’ve dealt with this topic more in detail in another contribution to Substack: ANTI-SEMITISM AND ITS VAGARIES - by Slavoj Žižek (substack.com).

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

[vi] Palestinians Must Suffer "Agonizing" Deaths - Because They Went To The Beach - Israeli TV (youtube.com).

[vii] Holy War: Red Cows, Gaza and the End of the World (newsweek.com).

[viii] La captation du mot « juif » par l’Occident ou la deuxième mort d’un monde - UJFP Analyses, opinions & débats.