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Title: Decolonizing Jewishness
Author: Benjamin Steinhardt Case
Date: April 18, 2018
Language: en
Topics: Jewish anarchism, national liberation, decolonization, zionism
Source: Retrieved on 2020-04-11 from https://www.tikkun.org/decolonizing-jewishness-on-jewish-liberation-in-the-21st-century

Benjamin Steinhardt Case

Decolonizing Jewishness

“If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you

have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us

work together.”

–Aboriginal activist saying, attributed to Lilla Watson

Seven decades on, Israel is geopolitically embattled and the Jewish

community is increasingly polarized around the issue of occupation. The

occupation – Israeli military control over the Palestinian West Bank and

the borders of Gaza Strip – is five decades old. Entire generations of

people have grown up without political or civil rights, under the

military jurisdiction of a “democratic” state. Some trace the problem to

the very existence of the State of Israel. How did the Jewish struggle

to free ourselves from antisemitism lead to this point?

Following the trauma of centuries of persecution culminating in the

Shoah (Holocaust), many Jews looked to the Political Zionist goal of

founding a Jewish State of Israel, in what was then British Palestine,

as a guiding star in a time of profound darkness. Defending their new

state against Arab Palestinians and neighboring countries in the 1948

“War of Independence,” what Palestinians refer to as the Nakba

(Catastrophe), gave the new Israelis a powerful founding myth after

millennia of diasporic marginalization. To many Zionists, the State of

Israel represented a historic milestone in the effort to combat

antisemitism, having carved out territory to defend the Jewish people

from a world that had rejected and nearly annihilated them. For many

Palestinians and others, Zionism itself represents a new front in the

historic expansion of European colonialism, with the 1967 occupation, or

the State of Israel itself, representing a crime against humanity.

Israel, the Jewish Question, and the occupation continue to play a

central role in global political discussions to a degree that is vastly

disproportionate to the amount of people directly affected by them,

placing these issues, as Hannah Arendt once put it, at the “storm

center” of national and geopolitical contention.

Meanwhile, amid the impending rise of fascism with the election of

Donald Trump in the US and popular surges of far right parties in Europe

and elsewhere, antisemitism has reemerged as a legitimate, if

uncomfortable, issue for social movements. This subject has led to

renewed discussions and arguments on the Left over the scope, nature,

and reality of antisemitism, as well as the role Jews play in the

dominant identity politics framework of movement communities.

According to anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon, there are two main

characters in the process of global imperialism: colonizer and

colonized. Many around the world have resonated with Fanon’s analysis of

colonial power dynamics and have drawn from his framework to pursue

decolonization, or the process of destroying colonial power structures

and remaking oneself in a liberated image. Considering the occupation as

it stands, it is not difficult to view the current state of the region

through an anti-colonial lens with Israeli Jews playing the part of the

(settler) colonizers and Palestinians playing the part of the colonized

(e.g., Pappé 2015, Said 1979). In this framework, Jewish activists who

oppose the Occupation play the part of “ally,” or conscientiously

subordinate supporter, to Palestinian activists (and others) who are

fighting for their liberation.

However, the Zionist project itself can also be understood as an attempt

at Jewish decolonization. Viewing Zionism and its subjects through this

lens can potentially clarify a great deal about contemporary Jewish

identities, and perhaps open a new path forward in one of the defining

conflicts of our time. Ultimately, this approach helps us to understand,

as I argue, that the Zionist project creates a social condition in which

the liberation of the Jewish people has become fundamentally intertwined

with the liberation of the Palestinian people.

The Complex Jewish Position

To Fanon, there is the colonizer and there is the colonized; there is

white and Black. While he explores some complexity in the psychology and

social positions of the two, to Fanon the colonizer (white) and the

colonized (Black) remain the primary categories of analysis. The forms

of racism that are attached to this colonialism place the target group

at the bottom of a racial hierarchy for the purposes of the social,

political, economic, and interpersonal power of those at the top.

Considering the influence of Fanon on Black Liberation and other

antiracist thinkers in the US, it is no coincidence that the

contemporary framework for understanding race and privilege in this

country follows the same logic. In the “identity politics” paradigm of

today’s social movements, the characters in the dichotomous picture are

white people and “people of color” (POC). This picture can leave out a

great deal of nuance, but nevertheless it captures a wide view of the

politicized racial hierarchy. Importantly, it focuses on the

foundational antagonisms of the racially constructed system by

identifying whiteness as applying to the category of people who broadly

benefit from the existence of the system itself.

Fanon’s work is foundational for anti-colonial thought, so it is a

sensible place to begin an analysis of decolonization for any group. At

the same time, Fanon’s position on antisemitism is not without

controversy. Notably, afro-pessimist theorist Frank Wilderson claims

that Fanon characterizes the Holocaust as merely one of many “little

family quarrels” between groups of white Europeans, using this phrase to

explain the incomparability between white-white antisemitism and the

white-Black legacy of slavery (2010:37–38). However, Wilderson

mischaracterizes Fanon’s view, possibly due to an early English

edition’s translation. In fact, Fanon writes: “Bien entendu, les Juifs

sont brimés, que dis-je, ils sont pourchassés, exterminés, enfournés,

mais ce sont là petites histoires familiales” (1952b:93), which

translates literally as: “Of course, Jews are bullied, nay, they are

hunted, exterminated, put in the oven, but these are small family

stories,” or in another translation, “minor episodes in the family

history” (1952a:95). This difference in wording is subtle but not at all

trivial, and it gets at a crucial point for understanding Jewish

subjectivity from the perspective of decolonization. The “family

stories” Fanon refers to are the Jewish family’s stories of oppression,

not intra-white family quarrels between white non-Jews and white Jews.

In other words, Fanon is saying that the Jews have suffered greatly

under the antisemitic system, but the violences done to them have been

episodic and do not subsume their entire history. The Jewish family has

stories of oppression, of death, but they also have stories of thriving,

of living. Fanon is contrasting this with the African experience of

European colonization and slavery, which he understood as subsuming the

category of Black within a totalizing history of oppression.

For Fanon, Jews are undoubtedly among the ranks of the oppressed, and in

his 1952 work Black Skin, White Masks, he makes great use of the Jewish

experience to develop his understanding of the colonized Black

condition.[1] Black people and Jews pose different existential threats

to whiteness, but their connection is that both are perceived as having

the potential to overwhelm and appropriate white society. At the same

time, the two are not equivalent. Fanon also describes Jews as white, or

at least as white-passing in today’s terms, and articulates important

differences between anti-Jewish and anti-Black racisms. Crucially, to

Fanon, the Black experience of oppression is overdetermined by

corporeality, by skin color. Jews, on the other hand, become oppressed

when they are discovered to be Jews, and since there is no definite way

of identifying Jews in the racial sense, their oppression is contingent

on their detection as Jews.

Prodigious attempts have been made on the part of antisemites to develop

a system for physically identifying Jews at first sight, but apart from

“some debatable features,” Fanon is correct that Jews often pass as

not-Jews. It was this physical ambiguity that led to the infamous yellow

patches the Nazi government mandated for Jews’ clothing. This element of

Jewish racial covertness, which is the case for Jews of all colors, is

critical to understanding antisemitism and how it has shaped Jewish

identity. We might say that Jews are underdetermined by corporeality;

from the perspective of the antisemite, in a sense Jews only become Jews

when they are discovered to be so. That which makes us objectionable

resides within and is not always immediately visible from without. In

other words, if the essence of Black oppression is embedded in

visibility, the essence of Jewish oppression revolves around

invisibility.

Finally, while Fanon explores the real historical and experiential

differences between constructed social categories of Jew and Black (and

Arab), he also notes that the separation and hierarchicalization of

these categories is itself a tool of the oppressor (1952a:83). If each

group of people views the others as the primary or most immediate

threat, then the oppressor class, being insulated from attack and

scrutiny, is able to maintain not only material but also hegemonic

power.

To sum up, from Fanon we learn that: (1) Jews are an oppressed people;

(2) they are oppressed by the same colonial forces that dominate other

oppressed peoples; (3) Jews as a group are in many ways closer to the

colonizer than other oppressed peoples are; (4) that proximity is itself

used by the oppressor to maintain the colonial situation. Fanon gives us

a great deal to work with, but despite his extensive discussion of Jews

as a comparison group, his final analysis leaves us out. Ultimately,

Fanon constructs a dichotomous world – colonizer and colonized – in

which it is unclear where the complexities he discusses around the

Jewish position fit in. If Jews are sometimes in one category and

sometimes in the other, or if Jews simultaneously experience elements of

both, then how can Jews pursue decolonization?

Systemic Antisemitism

Like anti-Black racism, antisemitism can be treated as a systemic

racism. According to race theorist Joe Feagin, systemic racism can be

understood as: “an organized societal whole with many interconnected

elements” involving “long term relationships of racialized groups with

substantially different material and political-economic interests,”

based in “the material reality and social history” of colonial societies

(2006: 6–9). To say that antisemitism is a systemic racism is not to

discount the ethnic and racial differences between Jews, nor is it to

ignore the system’s religious origins. It allows us to analyze

anti-Jewish oppression beyond individual prejudice and understand it in

terms of historical legacies of differential treatment that are imbedded

in institutions and in our experiences of the world.

As a system, antisemitism has developed differently from other racisms.

It should not be surprising therefore that attempts to equate

antisemitism to anti-Black racism feel uncomfortable and forced. The

efforts of liberal Jewish pluralists at analogizing the Black experience

in the US with the Jewish experience in Europe are at best misguided and

ahistorical (Greenberg 1998). Discussing antisemitism in the terms of

other racisms is awkward precisely because it does not fit well within

the dichotomous construction those forms of racism are based upon.

The roots of antisemitism date to antiquity, but its contemporary terms

first emerged with the racialization of Jews in 15^(th) century Spain

and were popularized in reference to the 19^(th) century European “Aryan

myth,” a form of racism in which humans are divided into a biologically

and culturally determined racial hierarchy. Antisemitism, or anti-Jewish

oppression, existed in other regions as well, and although there were at

times similarities to European antisemitism, the Jewish experiences in

these regions cannot be rolled into a single, universal account.

However, the racialization of Jews and the creation of the modern

discourse of antisemitism occurred in the context of the production of

whiteness in Europe. Without ignoring the historical and contemporary

experiences of Jews of varying identities (see Ben Daniel 2016 and

Shohat 2006), the European system of racialized antisemitism is the

dominant model, having been exported to the world via European

colonialism. Though it might seem paradoxical from the perspective of

decolonization, it is therefore necessary to begin by unpacking European

antisemitism and its impact on Jewish identities.

In order to understand the points inherited from Fanon, there are two

significant particularities to antisemitism as a system that we must

confront. First, the target group is not placed at the bottom of the

social hierarchy but in the middle. Second, outbreaks of widespread

violent oppression are episodic and cyclical as opposed to constant.

The first particularity of antisemitism has to do with social position.

Antisemitic depictions of Jews have often projected their image in the

vilest forms, but systemically it has also afforded many Jews

considerable social and economic privilege. While most forms of racism

place the target group at the bottom of the hierarchy, antisemitism

locates its target in the middle. Jews have often played the social role

of merchants, traders, and moneylenders, and at times (such as today’s

US) Jews have been admitted into the higher ranks of professional

classes and social milieus. Interpreted through the lens of other forms

of racism, this privilege appears to be connected to a linear reduction

of anti-Jewish oppression and integration of Jews into whiteness. Put

simply, the popular notion is that Jews were once oppressed, but now

they are not. In the common identity politics of the left today, this

privilege is evidence of Jews’ complicity with whiteness and with

systemic racism, prompting the role of white allyship with other

oppressed racial and ethnic groups. However, historically this privilege

is been a double-edged sword, and in fact has been a fundamental aspect

of the antisemitic system. As Fanon reminds us, the Jewish threat is a

stealthy, intellectual one, so the presence of Jews in prestigious

fields, while economically and socially advantageous for a time, also

plays directly into the narrative that Jews are covertly dangerous.

The middle position alienates Jews as a group from other groups above

and below them in the social hierarchy. From above, they are viewed with

suspicion, while from below they often appear as the most visible

oppressor – for example as landlords, store owners, and bosses in

low-income communities. Georg Simmel famously described the status of

Jews as that of the perpetual Stranger (1950). Kafka articulated the

condition as being told: “You are not from the castle, you are not from

the village, you are nothing.” (1926:46). The presence of this

neither-nor population helped to build and maintain modern state

structures, and in Europe, white supremacy, essentially by acting as a

cushion in between elites and the most acutely oppressed.. As Aurora

Levins-Morales puts it:

The whole point of anti-Semitism has been to create a vulnerable buffer

group that can be bribed with some privileges into managing the

exploitation of others, and then, when social pressure builds, be blamed

and scapegoated, distracting those at the bottom from the crimes of

those at the top. Peasants who go on pogrom against their Jewish

neighbors won’t make it to the nobleman’s palace to burn him out and

seize the fields. (2002, np)

As an identifiable group, Jews accrue limited but real privileges from

above, resentment from below, and mistrust from both, until a moment of

crisis in which an outburst of violence opens a pressure relief valve

for popular discontent over economic or political conditions, directed

at the stranger.

The second particularity of antisemitism has to do with its cyclical,

episodic nature. In between moments of acute violence, such as pogroms,

or most iconically, the Holocaust, there are lengthy periods of calm.

The late 1800s were a time of integratedness and relative prosperity for

Jews in Western and Central Europe, with many feeling as though

antisemitism was a thing of the past. Nineteenth century anarchist

Bernard Lazare’s personal transformation on the matter of antisemitism

is instructive. Lazare was the first Jew to pen a comprehensive

sociological volume on antisemitism, published in 1894. He had been

convinced that the persistence of antisemitism was at least in part the

fault of Jews themselves, and that it would inevitably disappear as both

Jews and non-Jews moved away from the prejudices of the past into a

revolutionary future – a position that is startlingly similar to that of

many Jewish activists on the left today. The Dreyfus Affair of 1894 –

the scandal in France surrounding the arrest and (false) conviction of a

Jewish military officer who had been accused of collaborating with the

Germans – drastically changed Lazare’s mind. After witnessing the

widespread surge of public and state-sanctioned mistrust and hatred of

Jews that followed Dreyfus’ arrest, Lazare committed himself to the

fight against antisemitism. Lazare’s earlier position was partially

attributable to the era in which he wrote. Jews in Western Europe

appeared to be assimilating into white Christian and even bourgeois

society. Anti-Jewish prejudices persisted, but the violence that had

been attached to it in previous eras had all but disappeared, making

these sentiments appear as a vestige of a bygone age that would surely

fade into nonexistence. In Arendt’s words:

After thirty years of a mild, purely social form of anti-Jewish

discrimination, it had become a little difficult to remember that the

cry, ‘Death to the Jews’ had echoed through the length and breadth of a

modern state once before when its domestic policy was crystalized in the

issue of antisemitism. (1951:94)

The crystallization of domestic policy around antisemitism that Arendt

refers to is not random; it has been central to the development and

enactment of systems of oppression by diverting the anger of a portion

of the aggrieved population away from the power source of their economic

and political grievances. Though we have been in a lull of pogromic

antisemitic violence since the Holocaust, this cycle may be becoming

ominously visible again with the prospect of rising fascism, first in

Europe and now in the US. Karen Brodkin’s reversal on Jews having become

“white folks” following Donald Trump’s election is a poignant

contemporary demonstration of what Lazare may have gone through.

Brodkin’s influential work How Jews Became White Folks (1998)

articulated the now popular position that Jews had moved from an

oppressed people to a white people, albeit with some differences,

through a process of assimilation in the US. But the evident widespread

resonance of violent antisemitic tropes in the Trump campaign along with

attacks on Jewish sites and persons prompted the question: can Jews

become nonwhite again? According to Brodkin (2016), this question itself

was the answer – whiteness is by definition non-revocable. Part of its

constructed social power is protection from such insecurity. In other

words, if Jews’ whiteness can be abruptly revoked, then they were never

really white in the first place.[2] Of course, even when speaking of

Ashkenazi Jews, the question should never have been “are Jews actually

white?” because whiteness is an invented and socially constructed

category. The question should have been: in what ways do some Jews

experience and enact whiteness in a context where these Jews have racial

privilege and also where the Jewish appearance as white appears to be

part of the antisemitic system?

In times of relative peace, the community feels the ever-increasing need

to recover from the previous violent episode and protect itself. During

periods of calm, many educated and upwardly mobile Jews have doubled

down on their relative privilege and engaged in a form of

“respectability politics.” Of course, most Jews did not have the ability

to pursue elite social status, but those who did often felt as though

doing so protected the community at large (or at least they could

justify their pursuit of wealth and prestige through that logic). But

the anti-Jewish sentiment never entirely dissipated and Jews as a group

have become distinctively sensitive to society’s antisemitic murmurs,

consciously or subconsciously gauging the political climate for signs of

the next pogrom.

Meanwhile, for generations raised in the times between periods of open

anti-Jewish violence, such as today’s US, the absence of the more

visible type of brutality that is constantly visited upon other groups

sows resentment between Jews and other oppressed peoples. In these eras,

many Jews are clearly more privileged than members of other marginalized

populations. The visibility of Jews’ privilege and the invisibility of

oppression lead to increasing doubt about the persistence or even the

reality of antisemitism, and correspondingly, increased antipathy toward

Jews by other groups that are collectively worse off in the

socio-economic system. The combination of conservative Jews’ claims of

whiteness (and even superiority) and liberal Jews’ insistence on

analogizing their historical position to other groups’ histories of

oppression only serves to exacerbate this bitterness, summed up

powerfully in James Baldwin’s 1967 essay, “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic

Because They’re Anti-White.” The resentment builds until the next moment

of crisis in which a version of the dynamic described by Levins-Morales

repeats itself. The social-political middle position and the cyclical,

episodic nature of antisemitism are what give this racial system its

specific, time-tested character.

In order to talk about decolonization for Jews, therefore, we cannot

directly import the categories of colonizer and colonized from an

analysis that focuses on a different type of racism. If we are to

understand Jewish decolonization we must do so in the context of the

particular historical development of the Jewish subject in relationship

to the antisemitic system.

The Colonized Jewish Subject

The long history of antisemitism has had a significant impact on Jewish

subjectivity. In Fanon’s psychological analysis, being colonized is not

simply a matter of material relationship to power, it is also a

personality. The experience of life under a colonial system generates

specific inferiority complexes among subjects, which, when these become

internalized, in a sense create colonized people. It has been well

argued that Jews have inherited a culture characterized by precarity and

trauma associated with the extreme violence experienced by previous

generations, with Jewish psychological and cultural responses to this

violence dating back well before the Holocaust. Here Fanon’s observation

of “minor episodes in the family history” is both accurate and

insufficient. It is not only the moments of violence but the constant

threat of them, the precarity, the perpetual lack of belonging laced

with fears of betrayal, that have impacted Jewish identity at the

deepest level. That Jews were neither of the castle nor of the village

had the material effect of making them a vulnerable population, acutely

aware that they are exposed to exploitation as scapegoats in moments of

crisis. In short, the culture of antisemitism has created barriers to

the establishing of solidaristic networks between Jews and non-Jews.

Deeper than the objective condition of the stranger is the subjectivity

of the stranger, which develops in the absence of trusted community

bonds with other groups.

Despite their most ardent attempts, and despite the accumulation of vast

wealth by some individuals, upper class Jews were never able to truly

break through the “glass ceiling” of whiteness in the fullest sense,

with whiteness being understood in the dominant European context as the

enduringly superior social-economic caste. Many Jews have sought such

inclusion, and arguably some have achieved it, but only to the extent

that they as individuals function as white. Individual Jews achieving

whiteness in a time and place has not meant that Jews as a group became

fully white, even in that same time and place. The unavoidable fact that

some achieved elite status – most stereotypically the “House of

Rothschild,” for example – has not only not shielded Jews from

antisemitic violence, but the existence of such elite Jews is integral

to the propagation of antisemitism. It was this dynamic that allowed

“white” Jews in Western Europe to seemingly overcome antisemitism in the

19^(th) century only to see it come roaring back as the ideological and

material foundation of one of the more acutely violent episodes in human

history.

Jewish agency has been an integral factor in this process. Arendt

follows Lazare in calling the Jew who is ever striving at all cost to

succeed in the dominant Gentile world, the parvenu. She contrasts the

parvenu with the conscious pariah, the Jew who understands their

positionality and seeks to think outside the bounds of the antisemitic

system. The parvenu is essentially a phony, attempting to assimilate by

“aping” dominant, elite, white behavior and culture. This imitation is

an awkward and exaggerated version of the original, distorted by

distance from the source and the desire to fit in. The parvenu is

contemptible to Arendt not simply because of their spinelessness, but

because their agency is a factor in the continuation of the antisemitic

system. Elite treatment of Jews from “the castle” involves negating

collective Jewish claims to self-determination in favor of dealing with

individual Jews. As French aristocrat Clermont-Tonnerre articulated it,

arguing in favor of civil rights for Jews during the French Revolution:

“The Jews should be denied everything as a nation but granted everything

as individuals” (Judaken 2006:9). Historically, the parvenu accepts and

in fact embraces this dynamic, either discarding connections to their

Jewish community or tailoring them so as to make them least obnoxious to

elite society. Jews’ material proximity to whiteness and upward mobility

in the West, most notably in the US, has enabled the parvenu to

reinforce liberal capitalism and white supremacy by positioning Jews as

success stories of pluralism, with the “right to embrace difference and

yet enjoy access to power” (Greenberg 1998).

The parvenu Arendt wrote of is the Jew imitating and striving for

whiteness, yet unwittingly playing into the antisemitic system, but in

fact there are two parvenu versions. Today, the other version is that of

the left Jewish activist who denies the reality of antisemitism either

striving to be the “good ally” to the oppressed, a group to which this

parvenu denies membership (as a Jew, though not necessarily on other

bases) in a bid to gain acceptance.

Marx (1844) famously contributed to debates over the “Jewish Question,”

in which Jews struggle between their identity as a distinct people and

the identities of the nation-states in which they live as others. In the

19^(th) century, alongside nationalism (from which Zionism grew), and

liberalism (from which assimilationism in the US grew), socialism

offered an alternative solution to the Jewish question: for the working

class of one nation to ally with the working class of other nations on

the basis of their shared economic class. To many Jews, the workaround

required a prerequisite – to negate the legitimacy of membership in

one’s own oppressed community. Indeed, many Jews were active in building

19^(th) century communist and anarchist movements in part as a solution

to the Jewish Question, where Jews might gain acceptance not through

legitimizing their group but by delegitimizing all national groups.

Accordingly, Jews have often sought validation in their participation in

social movements of the oppressed as individuals or on the basis of

membership in some other legitimized group of claimants (e.g., workers,

women, etc.).

This Left-wing Jewish self-denial has survived the transition from

class-based to identity-based politics. In the identity politics

framework, Jews are nowhere to be found on the racial spectrum. Jews as

a group are not exactly white, but Jews as a group are also not

acknowledged as POC. Individual Jews can be viewed as white or as POC on

other bases (e.g., skin color, national background), but they are not

recognized in the white-POC framework as a group. Jewish participants in

Left-wing movements are assumed to identify as white unless they have

another legitimate claim to POC status (i.e., Jews of color), and there

is little room for affiliation in the struggle for liberation outside of

POC status or allyship. Jews are thus disaffirmed as a legitimate

people, which is to say as Jews, in terms of the oppressed as well as in

terms of the oppressor.

The role of allyship, especially when oriented around criticizing the

State of Israel, fits snugly into internalized discomfort and

self-loathing that comes with Jewishness in an era when antisemitism is

at its least overtly violent (see Lerner 1992). The pursuit of

liberation for others alone is a perfect example of this alternative

version of Arendt’s parvenu, essentially aping white guilt. Like the

elite version, this might appear to be the only path for participation

in social-political life alongside other groups, but nevertheless it has

grave consequences. Antisemitism has been and continues to be a linchpin

of far right ideology (Arendt 1951, Ward 2017), a political force that

is a grave resurgent threat to society. By shirking the responsibility

to pursue Jewish liberation alongside and in solidarity with other

groups’ liberation struggles, this parvenu, like the other, not only

facilitates the perpetuation of antisemitism, but hinders the prospects

for collective human liberation as well.

Acknowledging the antisemitic system in which Jewish identities have

evolved is a critical preliminary step to pursuing liberation and

decolonization. This is in part because it exposes a particular vantage

point that the Jewish position creates. Albert Memmi prefaces his 1957

work The Colonizer and the Colonized with an acknowledgement of his

social position as a Tunisian Jew. The middle social position of Jews,

being among the colonized but with unique proximity to the colonizer (a

Jewish status Memmi identifies in both North Africa and in Europe) is,

according to Memmi, what allows him to write a book analyzing the

personalities of both sides of the colonial relationship: “I was a sort

of half-breed of colonization, understanding everyone because I belonged

to no one” (1957: xvi). Memmi is able to see through the eyes of the

colonizer and the colonized, he says, because his experience and

identity simultaneously contain aspects of, and alienate him from, both.

From this standpoint Memmi effectively describes both the colonizer and

the colonized in ways that align closely with the descriptions in

Fanon’s clinical work. Importantly, Memmi’s perspective was colored not

only by his social-ethnic positionality, but also by his anticolonial

ideology.

The reality of antisemitism and its centrality in the ideology of

historical and contemporary fascist movements necessitates a Jewish

liberation movement. But anti-Jewish oppression and Jewish positionality

are unlike that of many other oppressive systems and oppressed

ethnicities and nationalities. It should be no surprise then that any

Jewish national liberation project that fails to account for the

particular dynamics of this positionality will be doomed to failure.

Zionism as (Failed) National Liberation

To Fanon, an oppressed people start with those demands that are most

basic and most promising: “Bread and land: how do we go about getting

bread and land?” (1961:14). In achieving this, the colonized are forced

but also naturally prepared to exact violence upon their oppressors, and

indeed must be “determined from the start to smash every obstacle

encountered” (ibid:3). That the Jews were an oppressed people leading up

to the 20^(th) century just about wherever they lived is clear. In the

Zionist story, the Jews did cry out for bread and land, and ultimately

smashed all obstacles in their path to win and defend it. Nevertheless,

while the legitimacy of other national liberation movements of the

20^(th) century is not questioned today (at least by the Left) Israel is

not considered among them; in fact, it is considered an archetypal

colonizer. In addition to Palestinian uprisings, Israel now faces a

growing boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign, a fracturing

diaspora community, internal dissent, and if it were not for the US veto

in the United Nations Security Council, international criminal charges.

What went wrong?

The simple answer from the Jewish left has been: colonialism. The simple

answer from the Jewish right has been: antisemitism. While neither

answer might be quite as wrong as the other side would like to believe,

the story is much more complex than both.

In line with Fanon’s call for “bread and land,” to many Zionists the

answer to the Jewish Question was autoemancipation, or the Jewish

political movement to create a Jewish State. Seminal Zionist thinker

Leon Pinsker explained:

Today, when our kinsmen in a small part of the earth are allowed to

breathe freely and can feel more deeply for the sufferings of their

brothers; today, when a number of other subject and oppressed

nationalities have been allowed to regain their independence, we, too,

must not sit a moment longer with folded hands; we must not consent to

play forever the hopeless role of the “Wandering Jew.” It is a truly

hopeless one, leading to despair. (1882 np)

For the Political Zionist movement, Jews were perpetual strangers

precisely because they possessed no sovereign homeland. Pinsker’s

reference to his era, when other groups were fighting for national

sovereignty, cannot be ignored. This Zionist vision emerged in the

context of 19^(th) century European nationalism, which, like socialism,

provided a cognitive framework with which to interpret the problems of

the world.

As a social group in this nationalist framework, the Jews’ problems were

seen to arise not from their alienation from other people but from land.

According to Pinsker, Jews could not even dignify themselves to ask for

hospitality as foreigners because they had no place from which to

collectively offer to repay it. A state would provide physical security,

but more importantly it would provide the existential foundation for

recognition of the Jewish people. For Herzl too, recognition in the

modern world was bound to statehood and sovereignty – Jews would only be

able to achieve the recognition required for liberation from

antisemitism if they controlled a state. Whereas Judaism had required

Jews to look to G-d for protection and guidance in the diaspora,

Zionists, who emerged from the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), now

encouraged Jews to look to the State.

Among many dilemmas for this agenda, one stands out. The Jews were a

diasporic community; many felt native to nowhere but Palestine, but

relatively few of them actually lived there. In the 19^(th) century,

Zionists (mainly from Europe) began urging Jews to move to Ottoman

Palestine and establish land rights. Whether or not its adherents knew

it, the Zionist project was at a crossroads: How would their communities

relate to non-Jewish Palestinians?

While their desire and initiative to liberate their people from

oppression is admirable, the Zionist movement emerged from a European

nationalist zeitgeist in which few were considering the rights of

non-European peoples, and the leaders of the dominant model of Zionism

did not break from that mindset. Beyond this context, Herzl and other

Political Zionists misjudged several crucial elements. Herzl’s

nationalism, combined with his belief that all Gentile nations were

inherently antisemitic, led to a realpolitik obsessed with achieving

statehood above all else. Herzl correctly identified the antisemitic

trap Jews had been caught in, where all Jews were conflated with upper

class Jews, who were pushed into professional and financial roles then

blamed for systemic failures. However, the assumption that all

non-Jewish nations were inherently antisemitic foreclosed the

possibility of solidarity with other oppressed groups, namely Arab

Palestinians, who also sought liberation from foreign rule, only leaving

space for cynical bargaining over self-interest.

Despite internal debates (for example, some argued for an Arab-majority

state with minority ethnic rights for Jews and some pushed for alliance

with the Soviet sphere of influence), this avenue ultimately brought

Zionist leaders to the negotiating table of global imperial powers that

were able to produce the results they sought – a sovereign state carved

from the waning British Empire. The British in particular were adept at

defining the terms of their colonies’ identities and territories,

imposing both borders and colonial subjectivities that would survive

local national liberation movements (Mamdani 2012). “The real

anti-Semites… wanted to preserve the availability of the Jews as a

scapegoat in case of domestic difficulties” (Arendt 1978:172) and the

creation of an Israeli state did just that on an international scale.

Arendt was part of a dissenting wing of the Zionist movement that sought

a “national homeland without a national state,” and following their

political defeat, she presciently articulated the implications of

allying with European powers, saying that the autoemancipation project

was ending not only in national but in “chauvinist claims – not against

the foes of the Jewish people, but against its possible friends and

present neighbors” (ibid:140). In short, Herzl’s Zionism led the Jewish

people through a backdoor into the very same position they sought

deliverance from, only on a global scale.

Since the Political Zionists’ success, statehood has provided a measure

of protection for individual Jews who live in Israel, but it has also

created a lightning rod for material attacks by neighbors and political

attacks by anti-imperialist forces. The Israeli government’s

preoccupation with validation of its right to exist and the panic

surrounding the recent “nuclear deal” between the US and Iran are but

two examples demonstrating just how ineffective statehood has been in

alleviating Jewish insecurity on any level.

This pathological insecurity (which Fanon notes in all colonized

peoples) combined with the material benefits of being a colonizer, has

led Israelis to perpetually alienate themselves from and abuse their

neighbors, as Israel maintains a military occupation of the West Bank

and blockade of Gaza, neither granting Palestinians citizenship nor

allowing them to secede. To say nothing of the abhorrent violence of the

occupation, a militarily controlled territory under which people live

with different sets of rights and laws depending on geography,

ethnicity, and religion should be viscerally repugnant to any sense of

justice, and is a status quo that is patently unacceptable in the norms

of the 21^(st) century world.

The Zionist project as Herzl articulated it set the Jewish State on this

trajectory. Before, during, and following its founding, Zionist and

Israeli leaders allied with colonial forces, playing the middle position

in between the imperial “center” of the US and British Empires and the

“periphery” of the Arab and Persian Middle East and North Africa.

Perhaps it is not a coincidence that early Hebrew tribes were often used

by pharaohs as mercenary forces, positioned on borderlands to buffer the

Egyptian Empire with the Assyrians and the Nubians, where they took both

casualties and national blame during warfare (Hull 2009). In a sense,

Herzl’s movement led Jews out of their modern middle position as

stranger-merchants back to their ancient middle position as

stranger-mercenaries.

Though the Zionist movement’s goal was liberation from antisemitism, the

identity of the Jewish people as scapegoats in service of rulers has

survived the founding of the State of Israel unchecked. Worse still, the

material advantages of colonial exploitation (Shafir 1989) combined with

the parvenu impulse to “ape the gentiles” (Arendt 1978:68) resulted in

the Israeli government molding itself in the image of the Western

imperial power, including all of the barbarity that comes with it, and

pitching Jews to the world as racially white. The founding of the State

of Israel in this way – that is, in lock step with systemic antisemitism

– perpetuated a paradox from which Jews as a people have yet been unable

to escape. The State of Israel as it currently exists traps the Jewish

people in liberation limbo, keeping it at odds with its neighbors and

reliant upon ultimate salvation by neo-imperial powers.

Re-Colonizing Jewishness

Decolonization “sets out to change the order of the world” (Fanon

1961:2). This process involves momentous historical events, but the

project begins and ends with human subjects. In the attempt to liberate

Jews via state power in Israel, Zionist philosophy created an image of a

“decolonized subject,” a Jewish New Man. This Zionist version of the

Haskalachic “New Jew” was dubbed the Sabra, after the Hebrew name of the

prickly pear cactus that grew in Palestine: hard and thorny on the

outside but soft and sweet on the inside. The Sabra Jew was born in

Palestine, spoke Hebrew as a first language, and fiercely defended the

“homeland.” The Sabra was the photo negative of the shtetl Jew; whereas

antisemitic propaganda had made the diaspora Jew out to be weak, sickly,

pale, ugly, cowardly, and greedy, the Sabra was strong, healthy,

handsome, hardworking, daring, brave, and self-sacrificing (Zerubavel

2002). This was the idealized anti-diaspora Jew; the sort of “Man”

Jewish people would become in a country of their own.

In seeking to overcome European antisemitic stereotypes, the new

Israelis in fact adopted many of the standards of their (former)

oppressors, including Orientalist views of Arabs (Sela 2005). The Sabra

Jews walked an awkward line, attempting to become natives who, as Ella

Shohat puts it, “live in the ‘East’ without being of it” (2006:331).

Though they struggled against the colonizers in one way, they embodied

them in another. This unintentional but nevertheless close association

between the New Jew and the old antisemite went beyond image – it

actually required marginalizing and silencing the voices and identities

of Holocaust survivors, upon whose experience their movement was being

justified, in favor of an invented narrative of purity and strength

(Almog 2000:82–84).

To Fanon, decolonization involved violence against the colonizer as a

mode of production of the new man, as it helped the colonized to defeat

and transcend their inferiority complex, specifically as opposed to

violence against themselves and their oppressed neighbor, which would

perpetuate it.[3] The Sabra Jews in their most iconic form, the soldiers

of the palmach (Jewish militias in the War of Independence), epitomize

the tragic embodiment of this failure, bitterly fighting their “cousins”

for the sake of a system that ultimately exploits them. Today, agents of

a state that claims to exist for the representation and protection of a

historically oppressed people inflict traumatic violence upon their

Palestinian neighbors, and, ironically, deny them access to a state with

which to represent and protect themselves.

Herzl prided himself on his deep understanding of the antisemite. To

Arendt, Herzl’s understanding of antisemites ran so deep that he not

only trusted them in allyship with the Zionist mission, but maybe began

to think like them too. From this perspective it should not be

surprising that the entire Zionist project has transformed in the image

of the oppressor, not only externally but internally too. Envisioned as

a place of safety for all Jews worldwide, Israel has in fact codified,

racialized, and hierarchicalized previously fluid categories of Jew and

Arab as well as “white” Ashkenazi Jews and Sephardi, Mizrahi, Beta

Israel, and other Jews of color (Domínguez 1989, Motzafi-Haller 2008).

But neither a state, nor cooperation with European powers, nor the

adoption of oppressive systems in the European image were able to

liberate the Jewish people from the antisemitic system. As Arendt

anticipated: “The antisemitism of tomorrow will assert that Jews not

only profited from the presence of the foreign big powers in that region

but actually plotted it and hence are guilty of the consequences”

(1978:133). We can see this phenomenon playing out in the discourse on

the left today, where the US and Israel are held up as the prime agents

of imperialism – and not necessarily in that order.

With the State of Israel claiming to be the true home of all Jews,

Jewish communities worldwide have foundered in the effort to think and

act outside the parvenu paradigm. Until today we have been unable to

build a movement for Jewish liberation in solidarity with the liberation

of all oppressed peoples, and all humanity. With the formal end of the

exile in 1948, this is now the Jewish Question.

Decolonizing Jewishness

To Arendt, the emancipation of the Jews ought to have been an “admission

of Jews as Jews into the ranks of humanity, rather than a permit to ape

the gentiles or an opportunity to play the parvenu” (1978:68). As the

Israeli State, marketed as a liberator, actively oppresses an entire

population under its control, Arendt’s critique stands today. Perhaps

not ironically, the tzabar cactus for which the Sabra Jew was named is

not native to Palestine, but was imported as a desert-friendly crop in

the early 19^(th) century (Griffith 2004). From the beginning, the new

identity was not based on decolonizing, but on recolonizing. The route

Zionism took re-enacted rather than healed Jewish cultural trauma, and

projected it onto another people.

The struggle for Jewish recognition cannot be won from within a parvenu

mentality. So long as Jews as a people consent to the middle role in the

service of the oppressor, we will be perpetual strangers, whether or not

we have a temple, or capital, or a state. The belonging we truly seek

cannot emanate from the castle, but can only come from the village.

Rabbi Steinlauf was therefore on the right track when he wrote his

controversial 2015 essay advocating for Jews to renounce whiteness. He

was heavily criticized, often fairly, for glossing over what it would

actually mean to “renounce privilege,” for ignoring Jews of color, and

of course, for not mentioning the Occupation. All of these problems have

a simple and powerful, though admittedly painful, solution: the decisive

step out of the colonial mindset is removing the white mask in all of

its forms and confronting the colonizer within.

Confronting the colonizer within is an integral part of confronting the

colonizer without. Rabbi Hillel’s famous set of questions – “If I am not

for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? And

if not now, when?” – continues to stand as a beautiful summation of what

is required of the Jewish people. All three questions can be understood

in this context as rhetorical; the first implies the need to fight for

ourselves as Jews, the second implies the need to fight for others in

solidarity, and the third implies a sense of urgency. Pinsker began his

seminal 1882 pamphlet on Zionism with this quote but, incredibly, he

left out the second question! For the thinkers of Political Zionism,

being “for others” was so antithetical to their project they did not

want the revered Talmudic rabbi’s second question to be considered at

all.

Unfortunately, many Jewish activists in Palestinian or other liberation

work today metaphorically omit Hillel’s first question instead; they

focus on being for Palestinian liberation, or for the liberation of

other oppressed groups without considering the implications of not also

being for ourselves as Jews. While important, countering false claims of

antisemitism against pro-Palestinian organizing levied by the Jewish

right and protesting Zionist organizations in allyship with Palestinians

should not, as some suggest, be the sole purpose of Jewish voices in the

struggle. The work of decolonizing Jewishness, which is a personally and

culturally constructive as well as destructive process, is a

prerequisite for any liberated future that involves us as a people, and

is a vital element in the broader political struggle against the forces

of the far right. Jewish liberation requires the Jewish fight against

antisemitism for our liberation and autonomy, and also solidarity with

the struggles of other oppressed groups – in particular the Palestinian

struggle – for their liberation and autonomy.

Herzlian Zionism failed; it created a catastrophe for Palestinians while

failing to liberate the Jewish people from antisemitism. There is every

reason to believe we can yet create a truly decolonized Jewishness in

the continuation of the liberatory movement against antisemitism, but

this can only be done if it is melded with the struggle against the

colonialism entrenched in our previous attempt at decolonization. Our

struggle for our liberation is now inexorably bound up in the liberation

of those we disenfranchised and continue to oppress in the attempt to

gain liberation in Israel. Our position imposes a Jewish version of what

W.E.B. Du Bois called double consciousness (1903), where we are not

forced to see through the eyes of the oppressor as well as the oppressed

for survival, but we actually are simultaneously both the as part of the

same identity.

According to Fanon, an act of violence was required for the colonized to

overcome their inferiority complex and decolonize. For Jews, who have

become both colonizers and colonized, the first act of symbolic violence

must be against ourselves. This violence is both symbolic and internal,

but is no less painful. We must rebel against the internalized colonizer

in ourselves, embedded in our very subjectivities, and we must rebel

against the part of our community that pursues literal colonization of

others, trapping the Jewish people in the global middle position. This

generation of Jews must discover if we will play the 21^(st) century

parvenu or find our place in the grand struggle for people’s liberation

by waking to the contradictions within, standing in solidarity with

other oppressed peoples without, and seeking to take an active role in

our ongoing history.

Emma Lazarus said: “Until we are all free, we are none of us free.” I am

inclined to believe this is true, but it is unavoidably true that Jews

today cannot be free anywhere until Palestinians are free in Palestine.

In and of itself, this is not a political solution. But if we as Jews

take the projects of Jewish liberation and human liberation seriously,

it is a value, indeed an identity, upon which any political solution

must be built. As Jacob had to wrestle with and defeat G-d for our

Biblical people to transcend, so must we wrestle with and defeat our

colonial selves to transcend. Like Jacob, we will be injured in the

process, but the fight itself is required in order to open the door to a

new covenant – one between Jews and our cousins.

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I am indebted to many comrades and colleagues for their discussions and

inspiration. Special thanks to Lisa Brush, Mohammed Bamyeh, Dan

Lainer-Vos, Rachel Kranson, George Weddington, Eric Eingold, and Yotam

Marom for their comments and edits, to Danielle Moeser for her help in

translation, and to Belinda Rodriguez for her support during this

process.

[1] Fanon’s categories are essentialized; he does not deal with the fact

that some Jews are Black and some Black people, Jewish.

[2] Some Jewish scholars disagree fervently with this proposition, and

argue that at least Ashkenazi Jews have indeed become fully white in the

US context (see Biale, Galchinsky, and Heschel 1998 for some of these

debates), while others see the claim to whiteness as itself an aspect of

internalized antisemitism (see Lerner 1992).

[3] Fanon used the term “new men” to refer to decolonized subjects who

have remade themselves (1961:2), following both Freud’s emphasis on the

pathology of men and linguistically androcentric norms. Its patriarchal

implication in this case should not go unnoticed.