Lies and Half Truths, Machine Guns and Sub Machine Guns
The Zionist Claim to Reasonableness in Three Recent Articles
On October sixth, I had finally written a new substack letter—about seeing Hadestown in Toronto—and was all ready to post it. Then, well, then the world turned inside out. Since waking on October seventh, anything not related to Hamas, to Gaza, to Netanyahu, to wanton death from above, to Israel and to Palestine instantly became utterly inconsequential.
For weeks, in-between the rage and the despondency and the disbelief and the protesting and the reading, I’ve been trying to write something about the genocidal ethnic cleansing currently taking place in Gaza (the just-expired multiday “pause” notwithstanding). It was going to be a big, sprawling piece, about the horrors of October seventh, the deadly Israeli response, what it means to be an anti-Zionist Jew in a Jewish world that has lost its collective mind. I was having a lot of trouble writing this piece; it was too big, too sprawling. So, what follows is a truncated version of that missive: a close reading of three articles by Jewish Zionists that were written in the past six weeks. Simon Sebag Montefiore’s screed against decolonial theory in The Atlantic, David Bezmozgis’s opinion piece in The Globe and Mail, and Lena Bykhovsky’s open letter to her Carleton University students.
What all three of these pieces display is what I call the Zionist claim to false reasonableness. Everybody hates Netanyahu, the reasonable Zionist friend posts. We want peace too, the reasonable Zionist friend says. Don’t believe everything you hear in the fog of war, the reasonable Zionist friend texts you. And then—they inevitably continue—the war in Gaza is necessary (and/or entirely Hamas’s fault), the IDF’s obviously fake recordings of Hamas operatives talking is real, hospitals need to be bombed because that’s where the terrorists’ HQ is, and besides, all those doctors and babies and sick people and journalists are human shields. Have you not heard of collateral damage? Do you not know that they are taught to hate us? Do you not care about Jewish life? Behind these statements from your reasonable Zionist friend is always the same thing: the belief that Palestinian life is not as precious as Jewish life; that thousands of dead children (and women and men) are worth killing to take out one Hamas operative; that Israel’s history of obfuscation, ethnic cleansing, and genocidal policies are fine, as long as the oppressed don’t rattle the bars of their cage too loud.
Sidenote: an important subgenre of the plea for reasonableness is the claim that this is not the time for context. I was told, and saw other people being told, dozens of times from October seventh on, that this was not the time for context. However, what the Zionists who say this mean, is that this is no time for any context but our context. Objective, historical context that is cognizant of the vast power differentials between the Israeli military and the Hamas fighters, that rages and mourns at the murdered life on the kibbutz and at the rave but that nonetheless understands that a captive, oppressed people will not always behave humanely and that that is on those doing the oppressing, is anathema to the idea that Jewish people, in Israel, are always innocent victims, so must be boldly pushed aside.
We see this claim to reasonableness throughout the much-shared Atlantic article, “The Decolonization Narrative is Dangerous and False,” where Simon Sebag Montefiore argues for what can be termed historical reasonableness. Montefiore’s article is a multipronged attack against anyone and any position to the left of his warped liberal Zionism (which, a supposed belief in a two state solution notwithstanding, reads, as does most liberal Zionism, as far right ethnic nationalism dressed up in humanist language). Where to even begin with this thing?
For starters, Montefiore seems to believe that decolonization is a concept that only pertains to Israel and Palestine; nowhere in an article that purports to be a takedown of decolonial thought does he mention how decolonization operates in other settler colonial states (Canada, America, Australia, South Africa, Rhodesia, Algeria, various Latin American countries where the concept itself originated), nor does he mention a single decolonial thinker (a short curated list would include Fanon, Edward Said, Rashid Khalidi, Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin). My guess is that Montefiore can’t admit decolonial thought also includes settler colonies other than Israel, because than his argument that decolonial thought is just dressed-up Jew hatred, simply falls apart. Decolonial thought, Montefiore claims, is “presented as history, but it is actually a caricature, zombie history with its arsenal of jargon—the sign of a coercive ideology, as Foucault argued—and its authoritarian narrative of villains and victims.” By jargon, like historical context, Montefiore simply means words and concepts he doesn’t like, that don’t conform to his ideology.
Here is a small snapshot of what Montefiore argues in his article: that the “decolonization narrative has dehumanized Israelis to the extent that otherwise rational people excuse, deny, or support barbarity”; that the ideology of decolonization is a “toxic, historically nonsensical mix of Marxist theory, Soviet propaganda [uh…what?], and traditional anti-Semitism from the Middle Ages and the 19th century”; that, because Britain and France carved up the Ottoman empire into a bunch of states, it’s okay that Israel dispossessed 750,000 Palestinians; that, besides, “the creation of nation-states was frequently marked by population swaps, huge refugee migrations, ethnic violence, and full-scale wars”; that Israel’s current destruction of Gaza is “a tragedy” but “not a genocide” (italics in original); that the only possible solution to “this century of conflict” is two states, which hasn’t happened yet for various—read: Palestinian—reasons; and that the West is “polarized by paralyzed politics, petty but vicious cultural feuds about identity and gender, and guilt about historical successes and sins.”
These claims are cushioned with a who’s who of Zionist talking points—that Jews are indigenous to Palestine, that 900,000 Jews lost their homes in Islamic countries so the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is okay, that it’s not a genocide because the Palestinian population is growing and, besides, far more people died in the Syrian civil war (two separate arguments disguised as one), that open letters that do not talk about Hamas are ipso facto terrorist sympathetic, on and on—that don’t even deserve the attention it would take to debunk. Talk about no-context-but-our-context! Finally, Montefiore tampers his argument with a little sprinkle of Netanyahu disdain, a move to reasonableness we’ve seen regularly in the past weeks. Montefiore says that Israeli policy in the West Bank is horrifying and that Israel “has done many harsh and bad things,” going so far as to call Netanyahu’s government “the worst in Israeli history, as inept as it is immoral, promot[ing] a maximalist ultranationalism that is both unacceptable and unwise.” Of course, this makes no sense (please, make any of it make sense!). If Netanyahu is so bad, then why is it okay that this same government is flattening Gaza? Montefiore, and everybody else who uses this claim to reasonableness, are basically saying: Netanyahu is awful and so is his government, but I support their war of genocidal terror. At root, Montefiore is in lockstep with the ideology that fuels Netanyahu: Jewish ethnic superiority.
To deal with Montefiore’s topic sentences, then. One. The idea that Israelis have been dehumanized is ludicrous. It is the Palestinians who have been dehumanized to the point that thousands of them could be murdered from the sky and if you call this bad you can get fired or arrested. Not to mention the fact that millions of Palestinians live in an open air prison, while the vast majority of Israelis go about their lives without giving them a second thought. Two. Decolonization is far from “toxic and “historically nonsensical,” but it is a rigorous, grounded, and debated field, with its own first principles and genealogies (none of which Montefiore discusses). For an actual, in-depth, academic history of decolonial thought, how it differs from postcolonialism, and how it operates both in the academy and out, one place to start would be Alana Lentin’s lecture on decolonial thought. Decolonization, the struggle to dismantle the colonial infrastructure that keeps settler colonial states functioning as oppressive hoarders of land and resource, is more than just an academic exercise, but, as Lentin explains, calls for “a delinking from the rules of the game, a decolonising of the mind.” Three. Montefiore’s belief that the European empires carving up the Middle East means what happened in Palestine is copacetic, is, once again, totally backwards: nothing Britain and France did in the Middle East was fine. They divided and conquered, created dictatorships, set the stage for resource extraction and internal turmoil. Decolonization wishes to undo all the structural harms created by the colonizing European empires.
This leads to his next major point (four), that nation-states often have bloody histories. But, again, who thinks this is okay? (Montefiore also steps into a trap of his own making, if “the creation of nation-states” are marked with ethnic violence and full-scale war, and he thinks that this is normal and just how nation-states are made, then wouldn’t Hamas’ actions fall directly into this rubric he made up?). As a progressive anti-Zionist, I don’t like any nation-states. To quote George Steiner, writing in 1985 (the year I was born, showing how old this kind of critique is): “The nation-state is founded on myths of instauration and of militant glory. It perpetuates itself by lies and half-truths (machine guns and sub-machine guns.)” A succinct, thorough take down of the nation state system.
Steiner then turns his ire to Israel: “Israel is a nation-state to the utmost degree,” he writes. “It lives armed to the teeth. It has been compelled to make other men homeless, servile, disinherited, in order to survive from day to day (it was, during two millennia, the dignity of the Jew that he was too weak to make any other human being as unhoused, as wretched as himself.) The virtues of Israel are those of beleaguered Sparta. Its propaganda, its rhetoric of self-deception, are as desperate as any contrived in the history of nationalism. Under external and internal stress, loyalty has been atrophied to patriotism, and patriotism made chauvinism.” If anything, in the thirty-eight years since he wrote these words, Israel has only further atrophied towards full-blown fascism, propped up by America.
Five. Montefiore can say as much as he wants that what is happening in Gaza is not a genocide, but plenty of genocide scholars, including Israeli genocide scholars, would disagree. This is also a problem of temporality: if you can’t say something is a genocide until the genocide is complete, there are no ways to stop it from occurring! Six. The two state solution was never a viable option, but always just a way for Israel to maximize its landbase while downloading the surveillance of the Palestinians onto the PLO. In what world would a militarily armed Israel next to a Bantustan of defenseless Palestinians make sense? Do we really believe Netanyahu and other Zionist maximalists would have allowed these two states to remain next to each other peacefully? Seven (and finally). Saying that the west is polarized and floundering because of gender and identity issues reveals where Montefiore really stands. If the west is in trouble, it’s because of the ravages of capitalism, the growing divide between rich and poor, the police state, out-of-control surveillance, unbridled resource extraction, the already-arrived climate catastrophes that will rock our species for the foreseeable future. But for Montefiore, these are all fine; it’s those damn kids on college campuses bringing the “reasonable” capitalist world to its knees.
Jewish Canadian novelist and short story writer David Bezmozgis’ opinion piece in The Globe and Mail, “The Jews of My Generation Thought They Would Be Exempt From History. They Were Wrong,” is somewhat more successful in its plea for reasonableness, though under even the scantest amount of critical pressure it, too, buckles. After detailing being a young Jewish child growing up in a Riga rife with antisemitism, where your grandparents’s murderers are now your next door neighbours, Bezmozgis goes on to the October seventh attacks. In the attack’s aftermath, Bezmozgis writes, “Jews around the world, including in Canada and the United States, have come to the shocking realization that a significant number of their fellow citizens are indifferent to their pain, openly celebrate it or, under the right conditions, would inflict more.” Is this even remotely true? What I watched was the entirety of the world’s leaders and elites—those who control shipping lanes and media and navies and armies—line up behind Israel, give it a greenlight to commit its own massacre at a much larger, technologically advanced, and horrifying magnitude.
Bezmozgis says this realization was “particularly painful for Jews who align themselves with the political left, since much of this animosity has come from people whom they considered friends and allies.” Bezmozgis, who as far as I’m aware is nowhere near the Jewish left—at least not in Toronto, where he and I both reside—couldn’t be more wrong. Immediately after October seventh, progressive Jewish groups were organizing, getting together, planning, grieving. That first week, I sat around a fire with other progressive Jews, railing against the world. I’ve marched with hundreds of other Jewish people who want a ceasefire. In fact, Palestinians and Jewish people are the two most visible groups protesting Israel’s bombing campaign, calling for a ceasefire and a free Palestine. Bezmozgis is partly right, though: Zionists are not welcome in progressive spaces. This is for the simple reason that Zionism is not progressive; statist Zionism, the dominant strain for the past hundred years, is an ethnic nationalist movement that believes in maintaining a Jewish majority in Israel through all available force. Why else keep two million stateless Palestinians locked in Gaza?
Bezmozgis goes on to tell us about “the nature of antisemitism.” “It is like a vapour that circulates everywhere,” he tells us, “here diffusely, there in higher concentration. It moves like weather, unpredictably if not entirely inexplicably—or vice versa.” This is a very dangerous way to think of antisemitism, entirely detached from politics, fascism, culture, power; if antisemitism is a vapour, there is no way to combat it. After claiming that “Israel was created so that Jews would always have a place to go when they needed one,” Bezmozgis now makes some room (really a cramped closet, but still) for the Palestinian side of things. “Where is the march or campaign that recognizes the pain of the other? Where is the march that calls not for ground invasions or a free Palestine from the river to the sea, but for peaceful co-existence?”
This is what Bezmozgis is actually talking about. He doesn’t think a free Palestine would be free for Jews. We saw it in Montefiore, and we’ll see it again below. However, Zionists do not get to decide what “from the river to the sea Palestine will be free” means, especially when Palestinians are loudly telling us otherwise. As Yousef Munayyer explains: “’From the river to the sea’ is a rejoinder to the fragmentation of Palestinian land and people by Israeli occupation and discrimination.” After detailing the myriad ways Palestinians are oppressed, Munayyer rightly states that “All of them have a right to live freely in the land from the river to the sea.” (Munayyer goes on to quote historian Maha Nassar that “there has never been an ‘official Palestinian position calling for the forced removal of Jews from Palestine.’”) When Jewish people say this is a slogan for genocide, it means one thing to me: they have never spoken to an actual Palestinian person, or read a Palestinian book. (The truth is that Israel currently is the only state that is attempting to create a Jewish-only state). To fight for an Israel/Palestine that is not based on ethnic superiority, that does not maintain its Jewish majority through violent force, where Palestinian and Jewish Israelis could live as equals—in other words, what we have been marching for for weeks—is a call for justice and equality for all the people who live between the river and the sea. (If you are interested in more of my thoughts on Bezmozgis, his fiction, diaspora and Palestine, there’s a whole chapter in my latest book on his novel The Betrayers.)
Finally, an open letter that is super popular in Jewish email threads and whatsapp groups, shared far and wide in the liberal Zionist diaspora. The letter is by Lena Bykhovsky, a professor of bible studies at Carleton University, in Ottawa, and is addressed to the students she’s had over her twenty-five years of teaching. Bykhovsky, she writes, spent that time “showing you the beauty of all of the literary, cultural, philosophical, and artistic heights of the human spirit over the course of human history.” She’s taught her students “how to analyze, how to think critically, to weigh evidence, and to understand people and ideas, contexts and complexity, deeply and thoroughly,” all in order to “make the world a better, more humane, more thoughtful place.” That’s the first paragraph. In the second paragraph we find out that her students have “broken” her heart, “shattered it, irreparably.” From here, Bykhovsky launches into five hundred or so words of pure, unfiltered Zionist propaganda, rehashed early-two-thousands-style Dershowitz. The pro-Palestine rallies taking place around the world are a “movement that seeks only to wipe me out … To exterminate me, my children, my parents, my entire family and community.” Jewish people are indigenous to Israel. “There is no apartheid.” Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005; the reason there are settlements in the West Bank is because “of the high number of suicide bombers and other threats to Israel’s existence fomenting there.” From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free is “a call to ethnic cleansing of Jews from their homeland.” Sprinkle in thoroughly debunked claims of Palestinians fleeing in ’47 and ’48 because their leaders told them to, that Hamas are Nazis.
The irony of this letter is staggering: claiming to have taught critical thinking and complexity for a quarter of a century, only to turn it off herself and hose the basest of Zionist ideology. A more perfect letter to assuage Jewish folks who don’t want to acknowledge what is actually going on could not have been created in a lab. Which is fitting, because, as it turns out, it very may well have been. This woman, this professor of Bible studies, does not exist. There is no Lena Bykhovsky at Carleton. (I wrote to the chair of religious studies, who confirmed that there is no such person at Carleton.) In the propagandistic rush to Zionist reasonableness, not only do facts not matter anymore; apparently, neither does being a real human being. It’s not hard to imagine this letter being written by an AI. A possible prompt: distill the position of a stereotypical Progressive Except Palestine. Or, possibly: write an open letter from a Zionist academic designed to infuriate me, Aaron Kreuter, PhD.
One thing with Zionist pleas for reasonableness, as we see in these three examples, is that they avoid entirely the discussion of power. You’d have no sense from reading Montefiore’s piece that, as he was writing it, Israel was raining down destruction and death on the captive Gazan population. Bezmozgis writes beautifully about living in Riga and being aware of the horrors that befell Jews in his very backyard: but this is the exact inverse of the Palestinian experience, where Jewish settlers live in stolen Palestinian houses, towns, and cities. As Bezmozgis does rightly point out, violence against Jews typically do not come from their fellow citizens, but “by the regimes under which they lived.” Which is exactly the point: Israel is now the regime—to think of the mental gymnastics it takes to deny this!—and the violence they mete out to Palestinians is meted out by Jewish soldiers, Jewish drones, Jewish bombs. It is this regime that the Palestinians and us progressive Jews desperately want to dismantle, discard, replace with something justice-oriented, equality-oriented, human-oriented. A lot of Israeli propaganda is terrible, but writing like this, designed to seem middle-of-the-road, humanist, reasonable, calibrated to the casual Jewish Zionist living in diaspora, can easily fly under the radar. Which is exactly why it is worth spending time shining light on.