It’s easier to imagine the end of Israel than the end of Zionism
Hannah Arendt, 1955
I recently wrote about my disappointment in my Russian Jewish friends who, while fully opposing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine basically support Israel’s campaign in Gaza. Back then I wrote that the only Jews I know who speak against what Israel is doing are left wing.
It seems that October 7 became a real litmus test for Jews. Some turned from mild critics of Israel’s occupation into the staunch supporters of the regime. To them October 7 was a pogrom that exposed the antisemitism that’s been lurking in Palestine and around the world and that now came to the surface. Others went the other way. They got even more conflicted about their ties to Israel amidst its brutal genocidal campaign and started wondering what it even meant to be Jewish at all.
I belong to the second camp which, while still a minority is a growing one — especially among younger people. In the last month, the anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace grew ten-fold. Not too surprising that ADL CEO Jonathan Greenbalt says it is a “hate group,” while Soviet dissident and zionist activist Natan Sharansky calls Jews who condemn Zionism “un-jews who indulge in messianic self harm” in their pursuit of social justice just like Russian-Jewish revolutionaries did. In short, Zionist Jews believe that Israel must remain a Jewish State and that the hate towards Jews is so deep and eternal everywhere that this Jewish State is the only true refuge for them. They think the only way Jews can be safe is to live in the Middle East behind a giant high-tech wall inside a totally militarized surveilled society, surrounded by people they had kicked out off their land, then oppressed, harassed, and killed. Well, that version of “safe” was proven wrong on October 7.
The House of Representatives passed a resolution that anti-Zionism is indeed antisemitism last month, helping intensify the egregious campaign to smear any criticism of Israel and its war as antisemitism. It is scary to me precisely because I am Jewish and antisemitism does exist and if the state of Israel and Zionists around the world would make antisemitism an empty smear word then if real antisemitism actually reappears no one would care.
The scary thing is that Zionist Israeli Jews do unwittingly provoke antisemitism — as most Jews are Zionist and do support this genocidal military campaign, a campaign in which Israeli soldiers gleefully post TikToks of them desecrating mosques, mocking Islam, and pretty much doing everything to make people know that this is basically a a religious war, a Jewish holy crusade. That this kind of behavior is supported by most Jews around the world is truly frightening. It fuels hatred against Jews at large, makes it justified. How can you blame someone for conflating all Jews — not separating the ones who oppose Israel’s actions from those who support them — when Zionists have actively worked make Israel and Jewishness one and inseparable?
There’s a diabolical dialectical nature to this Zionist fight for “Israel’s survival.” It’s supposed to make Israel stronger but it actually puts Jews into greater danger, makes them objects of hate — not only Israeli Jews but Jews in diaspora. It’s the definition of gaslighting.
In the last month my thesis that only left wing Jews oppose the war was proved wrong — maybe the strict left ideological position is not required to condemn Zionism and this war. And intellectual honesty and openness is enough.
I’ve talked about how Russian liberals have been pretty much monopolistic in supporting Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza. But there have been two notable exceptions that surprised me: Masha Gessen and Ilya Krasilshik. These two very prominent liberal Russian Jews both spoke out not only against Israel’s incessant bombing of Gaza but also against using antisemitism to smear critics of Israel.
Gessen was very unrestrained in her criticism, going as far as comparing Gaza to a Jewish ghetto during the World War II to condemn the imminent ethnic cleansing of Palestine. There was a furious backlash to her essay, and the ceremony for the Hannah Arendt Prize that she was to be awarded in Germany was cancelled.
Ilya Krasilshik — a big Russian social personality who used to be editor-in-chief of a cultural it magazine in Moscow and until recently a manager at Yandex — also went against his Russian liberal peers. He, an actual Russian/Israeli citizen, moved to Germany after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and spoke out continuously against the war. After the October 7 attacks, he publicly admitted that he doesn’t know enough about the conflict between Israel and Palestine to have much an opinion about what’s going on. So he undertook a course on self-education, reading various history books to learn about what’s going on. He emerged out of his readings very conflicted and very critical of Israel and its war. His Russian liberal fanbase turned on him. They all became feral.
Even his very balanced, historically accurate descriptions of Israel’s occupation and its war crimes made his liberal Jewish circle fuming mad. He was harassed on social media, received death threats, and was called a traitor, an idiot, and accused of catering to the “liberal establishment” in Germany where he lives now. That last accusation is delusional considering that the German establishment has made this position borderline illegal.
I think it’s warped that Zionists scream about “antisemitism” while being quiet about the suffering of thousands of children who are being bombed and maimed and blown apart and starved and orphaned by Israel, a state that they want to associate and connect to all Jews. For all their supposed worry about the growth of antisemitism, their callous disregard for any suffering except their own is what can and will lead to a real surge in antisemitism. Yet talking about this only leads to being called an un-jew and a traitor to your own people. Quite a few prominent Jewish intellectuals of the past would be called that today — Susan Sontag, Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi to name a few.
If inquisitiveness and intellectual curiosity used to be a central Jewish quality, I think it is mostly lost now. Commitment to Zionism has became a definitive part of Jewish identity. And virulent nationalism shuts down critical thinking. Everything becomes subservient to this dogmatic and narrow view of the world. Primo Levi, a holocaust survivor who came back to his native Turin after the war, already in the 1970s spoke about how conflicted he felt about Israel and its politics and the support it got from the right-wing powers in Europe. “With friends like that who needs enemies,” Levi said while claiming that the centre of gravity of Judaism is the diaspora not in Israel and that it was the duty of diaspora Jews to remind “our Israeli friends that being jewish means something else…the Jewish tradition of tolerance.”
A former friend, who is a Russian Jew and a conceptual artist in Germany, called me an armchair idealist who ignores antisemitism among Palestinians and supports the “pro-Hamas lobby” (which to her are groups like Jewish Voice for Peace) while her completely normal realist solution is to eliminate Hamas who uses “live shields.”
Her negative reaction to JVP was also caused by the fact there is no “bring them home” slogan there — only cease fire— and so that made them one sided and pro-Palestinian in her mind. As for antisemitism among Palestinians — she rejects the separation of anti-Zonism and bad feeling towards the Israeli settlers who happen to be Jews and the primordial antisemitism that has a deep seated irrational hate at its core. The two are the same to her.
Well, a ceasefire is the only thing that helped bring some hostages back home — while Israel’s ongoing destruction of Gaza only puts them in more danger and already killed quite a number of them.
She would say how repulsive the rhetoric of the left is with its terms — “genocide,” “colonialism,” “judeo-fascism,” ”ethnic cleansing,” etc., as if the rhetoric is to blame for the all the bloodshed. Oh, it’s the rhetoric that is repulsive and not the reality that it describes? Or, if you don’t give a “bad term” to what you are doing — you are not doing it? It seems that many Jews are hostile to the factual description of what’s going on and even openly admitted by Israeli government in the media. They are in total denial.
And that’s what surprises me the most — this posturing about the two bad sides at war with each other and a rejection of “picking a side,” as if it’s some sort of tournament. I find this rhetoric repulsive. The equation of two sides and a refusal to use vocabulary that actually describes what’s going on is a cop out. Calling what’s going on in Israel a tragedy depoliticizes it and takes the attention away from failure of Israel as a Jewish nationalist project and the violence that Zionism brought on both Palestinians and now on Israeli civilians.
No matter how horrific I find the October 7 attack and sympathize with the victims, for me and many other “un-Jews” like me, this sympathy doesn’t cancel the horror at the sight of the unprecedented violence unleashed in return. Its Israeli bombs — usually made in the United States — that are killing, maiming and burying Palestinians along with some Israeli hostages alive under the rubble, not Hamas.
Compartmentalizing this feels inhumane and psychopathic. How could you disregard what’s going on now and incessantly talk about the October 7, all while calling Palestinian “savages.”
The wildest thing about Russian liberals and my former friends in particular is that while they would never trust Russian media’s reporting of the war in Ukraine, they do trust Israeli media’s coverage of the destruction of Gaza and don’t see a contradiction there. They often feel more Jewish than Russian, partially because of the antisemitism of the Soviet society they grew up in — antisemitism that mostly mundane and unthreatening, and yet still very real.
Everyone in the Soviet Union had their nationality written in the passport and Jews were discriminated against at the best universities and certain jobs. Many Jews who emigrated to Israel or America reconnected to their Jewish identity through their commitment to Zionism decades ago. But those who stayed in Russia are doing this now in the wake of October 7.
Their supposed humanism doesn’t actually spread beyond their assumed peer group which is Jews and Israelis. They view the war that Israel is waging as existential and thus no number of Palestinians dead will persuade them otherwise. Because this is for the “survival of Israel.” What they don’t say — they mean survival of Israel as a Zionist project, as a Jewish State. They can’t see Israel as anything else. To paraphrase Mark Fisher — it’s easier for them to imagine the end of Israel than the end of Zionism. And that’s exactly the problem.
So liberal Jews in the diaspora that don’t remain blind to the malaise of modern day Zionism and publicly voice their outrage at the smear campaign that paints any critic of Israel as an antisemite are, ironically, the ones who remain the center of gravity for the future of Jewish culture, while Israel goes off the deep end — massacring thousands and thousands of Palestinian, desecrating their homes and mosques and also endangering us Jews in the diaspora whose unwavering support it demands.
To repeat after Primo Levi — with friends like that, who needs enemies.
—Evgenia Kovda
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Evgenia, I feel exactly as you do and it's a lonely feeling. Great article, a cri de coeur, really.
This view is known as the "Lachrymose Conception" of Jewish History, which tends to amalgamate any (real or imagined) crime against Jewish persons or institutions as being caused by deeply embedded, often irrational hatred of them being Jewish.
There are, of course, a long history of intermittent persecutions by various social actors and states, but it is really unclear whether these were worse or more than the persecutions suffered by many other minority groups (Roma people, Armenians, Kurds, Yazidi, and various diaspora merchant communities seem pretty comparable).
It also often obfuscates particular causes. A good example is Caligula's persecution of Jews in Alexandria. Rather than being just because, there is a key Roman legal and political context. There was a direct challenge (because of inter communal rioting in Alexandria) to the Imperial Cult and the key Egyptian grain used for the Roman subsidy. Jewish farmers in Alexandria actually threatened to burn their fields and cause a famine if Caligula put his statue in the Temple in Jerusalem.
It would be like combining the statue tear down protests and pipeline protests at the same time. An Empire reacting with mass repression to protect its formal jurisdiction and key resources is hardly surprising or unique.