Why I am a Zionist

Deeply aware of the harmful consequences wrought throughout history by unflinching adherence to this or that particular ideological creed (political, economic, theological, artistic, whatever), I have little sympathy -- intellectual or otherwise -- with "isms" of any sort. Far better, I think, to consider situations and problems on a case-by-case basis rather than try to subordinate everyithing to the kind of ideological strait-jacket that most isms represent. To this longstanding distrust of ideational systematization, however, I make two exceptions. One is individualism. The other is Zionism. And my belief in individualism is subject to all sorts of constraints.

Behind Theodor Herzl's push for a Jewish state lay two (distinct but overlapping) motives. One was his belief that the Jewish people, if joined together in their own community and allowed to give full vent to to all their abilities and aspirations, could make even more indelible contributions than they already had to human civilization. Antisemitism comprised the other, more immediately visible spur to Herzl's vision. It was the Dreyfus Affair in France which convinced Herzl that Jews could never be truly secure lving among the Gentiles, that only a state of their own could guarantee the Jews' survival, literal and otherwise. Regarding the notion of a Jewish "collectivity" whose existence would somehow benefit the whole human race I am agnostic at best; when it comes to creativity and genius, lving among one's own "kind" is often far more stultifying to individual creativity and genius than dwelling amidst strangers and enemies (as the Jewish experience itself amply attests). But Herzl's prognosis of the antisemitism which makes a Jewish state a vital necessity rather than just a desirable luxury remains all too accurate.

While I have never encountered any antisemitic remarks directed against me personally, evidence of antisemitism -- or, at the very least, of an inclination to view Jews as somehow different from, and by implication inferior to, everyone else -- has not been lacking in my experience. More memorable indications include the following:

(1) One of my students in Hungary, in an essay dealing with the subject of money, repeated the old canard about Jews controlling most of the world's finances. And a leading historian in the university department where I taught insisted that the Jews themselves -- by virtue of their wealth as well as their predominance in certain fields such as law and journalism -- bore the lion's share of responsibility for the Nazi onslaught against them. (That most Magyars continue to attribute the actual slaughter of 400,000+ Hungarian Jews in 1944-45 to the fewer than 300 Germans who entered the country in mid-1944, rather than to the thousands upon thousands of the Germans' willing Hungarian helpers, is, I believe, a reflection less of antisemitism than of nationalism. After all, today's Hungarians show a similar reluctance to criticize their forebears' discriminatory "magyarization" policy of the nineteenth century.)

(2) At a two-hour seminar I conducted on antisemitism, students of Latvia's leading university revealed a veritable array of standard antisemitic stereotypes: Jews were unduly clannish and didn't want to be friends with anyone else, Jews cared only about making money, Jews were averse to working the land (i.e., as farmers), Jews felt no attachmment to the countries where they lived, etc., etc., etc. (It was while living in Latvia, too, that I witnessed vestigial antisemitism from another, far more respected source, the BBC, whose coverage of the then-latest Israeli-Palestinian clash was hopelessly one-sided. An interview with a Palestinian spokesperson began with a civil question about why they were fighting Israel, while an immediately subsequent interview with the Israli Defense Minister began thus: "So, Mr. Minister, how many Palestinians did you kill today?" To be fair, though, it was another BBC broadcaster who reported starker proof yet of Europe's still vibrant antisemitic tradition: an editorial cartoon in Madrid's leading newspaper which depicted an image of Jesus above a Bethlehem church that Israli soldiers had fire upon in an effort to dislodge several Palestinian gunmen who had taken refuge there. The caption below the Jesus drawing read: "My God, my God, have they come to crucify me again?" Old ways of non-thinking do die hard, don't they?)

(3) In an (outwardly civil) argument on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the head of the Thai branch of an internationally renowned NGO told me that the Jews did not need a homeland of their own, that Jews who were persecuted in places like Russia or Syria could be helped by those Jewish moguls who dominated finance, government, and the media in the West.

(4) More than one Russian I met during my brief stay in Kazan referred -- casually, not maliciously -- to "Jews" and "Russians," as though a person could never be both. (This, however, was far less annoying to me than certain remarks made by a guest American lecturer -- an expert on early modern Polish Jewry -- during one of her scheduled public talks at the university. To a student who asked her assessment of Russian antisemitism past and present, the professor replied that reports of such were grossly exaggerated, that [for example] not all the czars were against the Jews [though precisely who she had in mind was never clarified], that she herself -- with a discernibly Jewish last name -- had been treated with the utmost courtesy and respect by all the Russians she had met during her trip. One harlly needs a PhD to spout -- or spot -- such nonsense.)

(5) In our first -- and last -- sustained conversation on politics, the woman whose house I lived in during my recent stay in San Francisco said that "the Zionists" were to blame for blocking the arms embargo which would've prevented Hitler from launching war in 1939. That such a claim rested on more (or should I say less?) than a singularly perverse non-reading of history was later demonstrated by (among other remarks) the woman's scathing denunciation of "the Zionist/Jewish scum" who had made her life so miserable. (Or so she loudly proclaimed in the course of a telephone conversation the bulk of which, mercifully, I could not overhear.)

(6) In talking about Israel's recent attack on Gaza, one of my newfound acquaintances here in Korea has admitted he hates Jews -- less on account of Israeli actions than because of some bad dealings he (or his company) had with an overseas Jewish financier. Further conversation seems to have changed his mind, at least as far as Israel is concerned (he freely admitting his ignorance on that subject). But to what extent he still harbors a vestigial antipathy toward "the Jewish race" I cannot say with any certainty.

Individually, each of these episodes betokens little but stupidity and/or bigotry on the part of its protagonist. And even collectively, they cannot be said to signify anything so ominous as a "trend" or a "forecast." But they do serve as sharp reminders that the antisemitism of which Herzl spoke over a century ago remains alive and well, even in places where the "Jewish question" has never really existed.

Which is not to suggest that we are on the verge of a second Shoah. For reasons having more to do with geopolitics than with humanitarianism, no sane person or government today seriously contemplates attempting to finish the job Hitler began; had the people of Darfur or the victims of the Khmer Rouge or the Muslims of Bosnia possessed nuclear weapons, the rest of the world would no doubt have looked upon their respective plights with somewhat less "blinded" vision. But personal experience as well as extensive reading has convinced me that nary a gentile eye would blink if the Jews just "disappeared," either figuratively (i.e., through assimilation) or literally. Thus I regard the continued existence of Israel as a moral no less than a strategic imperative. That Israel is also a haven of individualism represents merely another point in its favor.

Pseudo-update

Today I discovered what is likely to be the nearest equivalent to paradise that I will ever find here in Seoul: the eighth floor of one of the city's largest electronics complexes, replete with enough DVDs (at fairly cheap prices) to keep me occupied -- audiovisually -- either (1) for as long as I remain here or (2) until I run out of money. My failure to write any fresh blog entries over the past several day, however, cannot fairly be attributed to cinephilia; it's just that I've been lazier than usual. But I shall try to write something at least semi-intelligible within the next few days -- in between the movies that constitute my chief means of diversion nowadays.

A Study in Contrasts

During my six months' stay in San Francisco last year, I rented a room in a house owned by someone with strong opinions on just about everything. A self-avowed leftist who favored Dennis Kucinich for the presidency, this woman insisted that none of the mainstream media could be trusted at all, that American policymakers had no legitimate reason to criticize Russia's attack on Georgia, and that the only possible beneficiaries of genetically-engineered food were its manufacturers.

More recently, Facebook has allowed a former high-school acquaintance of mine to re-establish contact with me after a stretch of nearly thirty years. A self-professed conservative who has named his son after Ronald Reagan, this guy asserts that Barack Obama's economic plan is doomed to fail, that blame for the current crisis rests almost exclusively with the Democrats, and that American-style capitalism represents the zenith of human social development.

Any face-to-face confrontation between these two individuals would clearly lead to verbal fireworks, if not to actual physical assault. Yet in fact both share one overwhelming trait -- a trait common to virtually all ideologues: they are singularly close-minded. Convinced that they and they alone know "the truth," that they and they alone have the proper solutions to the world's problems, that anyone who disagrees with them is misguided at best and downright evil at worst. Such rigidity of thought -- or, rather, of sentiment, since ideology at bottom serves as a convenient substitute for the hard work of thinking -- makes the pursuit of human betterment -- whether on an economic, a political, a social, a physical, or an aesthetic plane -- that much more difficult.

This is not to suggest that every idea merits equal respect, or that every person deserves an equal hearing. But when it comes to rendering "human civilization" a contradiction in terms, ideologues of both the left and the right can certainly claim equal credit. As a non-ideological reading of history will demonstrate time and time again . . .

Hypocrisy

In lifting the ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, Barack Obama has not only demonstrated a respect for scientific pursuits unfettered by particularistic ideological or religious constraints (the same sort of constraints that lay behind the trial of Galileo in the 17th century, the Scopes "Monkey Trial" of 1925, and innumerable other efforts to suppress all speculations in potential conflict with The Truth as promulgated by this or that "higher authority"). He has also given his partisan (as opposed to principled) critics a fresh opportunity to demonstrate anew their underlying hypocrisy. While on the one hand they bemoan his "unprecedented" expansion of the federal government (unprecedented, at any rate, since the reign of his predecessor), on the other they insist that government has a "God-given" responsibility to oversee what goes on in the country's universities, laboratories, libraries, and museums. This in turn points to the fundamental (or should I say fundamentalist?) dichotomy that has plagued the American right (nowadays a.k.a. the Republican Party) at least since the days of Ronald Reagan. For the right's mantra against "big government," against "obtrusive government regulation," is limited exclusively to matters economic, to measures that would somehow interfere with every American's "God-given" right to make as much money as possible. When it comes to issues of privacy, of civil liberties, of freedom to pursue activities (such as scientific research) that do not yield immediate and monetarily measurable profit to someone to one or more individuals, today's Republicans (along with many conservative Democrats) are second to none in calling for a degree of government control that, at least in intent, would have done Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin proud (though these latter figures were admittedly far more ruthless -- or, if you prefer, far more forthright -- than their American kindred of either left or right). Reversing the ban on federally-funded stem cell research is one small but important step in countering such an "un-American" (or should I say "all-too-American"?) tendency toward government-imposed conformity. Expect a far bigger -- and more strident -- battle when the legislative/legal fight over abortion is rejoined.

A word of advice to Obama's critics

Read a biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (preferably one written by a professional historian rather than by a partisan hack). Granted, the circumstances (political, economic, international) were very different in many respects. Granted, too, the New Deal was of questionable efficacy in getting America out of the Great Depression an eventuality for which the country had to await the onset of the Second World War. But at least FDR was trying to do SOMETHING, something different from just relying on the same old nostrums (and the same old personnel) that had done so much to bring about the depression in the first place. Perhaps more importantly, Roosevelt saw the crisis confronting him as an opportunity to bring about (or at least try to bring about) certain fundamental changes in the relationship between government and society, as well as in some concrete governmental policies.
Does Obama have a comparable longer-term vision? It would seem so; indeed, one might claim that the current president, more open to contemporary realities, less hidebound by traditional constraints of class and gender and race, sees even farther than his predecessor of seven decades before. To what extent he will succeed in realizing his vision remains to be seen. But if nothing else, he offers a worthy alternative to those who prefer to seek solace in the latest biography of Herbert Hoover.