Cautionary Universal Lessons from Jewish Identity Politics

I first got introduced to identity politics growing up during and after the Holocaust. For large numbers of Jews at that time the murder of one out of every three Jews on the planet Earth who were alive in 1940 was a trauma that shaped our lives and consciousness. That trauma was also passed on to many in the next several generations of Jews. God had failed to show up and save the Jews. Much of the rest of the world failed to intervene to save Jews. The U.S. turned away refugee ships and most of the countries of the world were unwilling to open their doors to Jewish refugees who were often forced to return to countries dominated by the Nazis, from which they were soon sent to their deaths.

Equally traumatic for many was the gross failure of the communist parties in Europe to overtly challenge the anti-Semitism used in the 1920s and 1930s by rising fascist movements to attract support among Christians who inherited the never quenched hatred of Jews perpetrated by the Catholic Church and intensified by Luther and his Protestant followers right through to the end of the Second World War (and in some places beyond). During the Second World War there were frequent stories of Jews escaping the ghettos of Europe and fleeing to become part of partisan resistance forces, only to find that their partisan allies were themselves filled with hatred of Jews, and in some cases actually turned on their Jewish members. After the war, Eastern European and Soviet communist movements then turned on their Jewish members more systematically, often expelling them from their leadership positions or even from the communist party itself, while the international leader of the communist movement, the Soviet Union, implemented discriminatory practices against their own Jewish population.

No wonder, then, that Zionism became the Jewish identity politics that most attracted new members in the second half of the 20th century.

Yet, as I grew up, I came to understand that the logic of our identity politics was also leading in a very destructive direction. In the course of creating our own state, we caused hundreds of thousands to lose their homes, and these Palestinians were later joined in exile by tens of thousands of others who lost their homes in subsequent Israeli wars.

Sadly, when I joined with fellow progressive Jews, Palestinians, and other allies to criticize Israeli treatment of Palestinians, I found that our criticisms were dismissed as anti-Semitism by many other Jews.

The terms of those criticisms often get repeated today in some Jewish identity politics formations. "You have no right to criticize our Zionist movement or the realities we created in Israel. We crawled out of the crematoria in Europe—you never experienced the pain that we went through. During the Holocaust itself, and then in the years 1945–1948 when hundreds of thousands of European Jews were in "displaced persons" camps, the Palestinians, and their allies in surrounding Arab states, used the power derived from Arab oil to successfully get England to forcibly stop Jews from getting refuge in Palestine. We were the homeless immigrants. You lefties who oppose U.S. immigration policies toward people desperately seeking refuge from oppression should be able to understand why Jewish refugees during and immediately after the Holocaust reacted to this Palestinian close-the-gates attitude by rejecting the voices of Jewish internationalists. These circumstances caused the Zionist movement to move toward its most right wing side and left those of us who continued to believe in reconciliation and harmony viewed as naive idealists. Even to this day a significant section of the Palestinian people identify with Hamas which seeks to destroy our country of refuge and send Jews back to Europe where most Israelis living today never lived, a bit like the reactionaries in the U.S. which sought to do something analogous to DACA youth."

I understand these feelings, but think they are fundamentally mistaken. The tragedy of our Jewish identity politics, when not joined simultaneously to a recognition of our interdependence with the rest...