family despite all the things it has done to mess you up—by the Israel of American imaginings. This is an uncomfortable acknowledgment because I recognize all too well that my sense of “occupation” is a metaphor that’s incommensurable with the deprivations experienced by the Palestinians for whom the meaning of that term is a matter of flesh and blood. But I’ve learned that it’s better to be attentive to my conflicted feelings than to ignore them. I’ve had the privilege of living most of my adult life in the relative freedom of the affluent and liberal city of San Francisco. If I feel bound by American fantasies of Israel, how must those Israelis feel who live elsewhere in places less amenable to a diversity of perspectives?
In a sense, Israel’s punishment for failing to live up to the idealized notions held by American Jews is to be imaginatively conquered by them, suffering a peculiar form of imperialism that overlooks the land’s “natives”— whatever their religion or ethnicity—in much the same way that the original Zionist immigrants to Ottoman Palestine regarded their new home as a wild and empty place. Paradoxically, contemporary political discourse about Israel in the United States—even as it hinges on the opposition between Jews and Muslims, Israelis and Palestinians—ends up collapsing the very distinctions it seeks to sustain in its preference for the figure of Israel over the reality of Israel.
ISRAEL IS EVERYWHERE
In theory, a population as worldly and educated as most Jewish Americans should understand the predicament that Israelis find themselves in, since the U.S. itself suffers under the burden of stereotypes. The years since 9/11 have made painfully clear that people in other parts of the world have a difficult time distinguishing between fantasy and reality where Americans are concerned. Given the United States’ imperial ambitions and unquestioned military superiority in recent decades, this misperception can’t easily be transmuted into a feeling of being “occupied.” But Americans who venture abroad commonly experience the sensation of only being seen for what they’re expected to be, rather than for who they are as individuals. Why then is it so hard for even the most sophisticated participants in American political discourse about Israel to see through the figure of the country to the reality concealed beneath it?
The answer lies in the nature of the Diaspora’s complex political identity. Since the founding of the Israeli state in 1948, all Jews have been considered its citizens, no matter where they live or what they believe. The extension of this right has consistently strengthened Israel economically and socially over the years and prevented Jews from being hopelessly outnumbered by the Arab population still living within the nation’s borders. But it has also given Jews who have no intention of ever living in Israel a political stake in the nation’s affairs. As critics of the U.S. government’s support for Israel have stressed for decades, this psychological investment from the Diaspora Jewish community has translated seamlessly into a financial investment. But those critics often fail to see the degree that this support—which initially came with relatively few strings attached—has recently been accompanied by a growing desire for a specific kind of influence. Whether conscious of this desire or not, members of the Diaspora have increasingly shown that they want more for their time and money than the mere satisfaction of knowing that Israel continues to exist.
The most striking aspect of debates like l’affaire Judt is the way they underscore the collapse of traditional distinctions between Israel and the Diaspora. Already prevalent on the Jewish Right, this confusion of boundaries has spread in the wake of 9/11 to the Left as well. The significance of automatic Israeli citizenship, and the ways in which Jews experience this “birthright” (to invoke the name of the increasingly derided Zionist educational program), have been changed to such an extent that news in Israel at times ceases to be classified as “foreign affairs.” Because non-Israeli Jews are encouraged to feel involved in Israel’s life, some tend to assume they can participate in its politics the way they do in their own home countries, whether that be Germany, the United Kingdom, Australia, or the United States. Instead of this attachment compelling them to immigrate to Israel, many members of the Diaspora are content to participate in the nation’s politics from abroad.
For members of the foreign Jewish Left, this sense of citizenship neatly parallels the strong identification with the Israeli state among conservatives in the Diaspora. In place of veneration for Jerusalem, the holy places, and the Jewish character of the Israeli state, we find on the Left a similar attachment to Israeli media and culture, and the high level of public debate that takes place in Israeli society over issues involving religion, gender, citizenship, and economics. And while both of these Israels are more figurative than literal, the material consequences of this psychic involvement are profound.
Take, for example, what many on the Right have chosen to champion as the paradigmatic instance of progressive positions on Israel: “Left anti-Semitism.” Though its promotion by conservatives is motivated in part by a desire to discredit peace advocacy, the phenomenon itself is entirely real. Attributed to progressives sympathetic to Islamist and nationalist Arab criticisms of Israel and Zionism, this genre of anti-Semitism is the least understood form of prejudice against Jewry. When viewed as opportunist in its support of Islamic and right-wing Arab views of Jews and Zionism, as a means of disguising racism as anticolonialism, left-wing anti-Semites can almost be considered false progressives who don the multicultural mantle of the Left in order to be openly prejudiced.
Jews are incited against not because they practice an inferior culture or religion, but because a key object of their faith is a state that discriminates against non-Jews—specifically, Muslims. Since the concept of the state is so integral to their religious identity, Jews are seen as being inherently biased against non-Jews. The foundational importance of the Zionist state, as an exclusively Jewish state, is often viewed by such progressives as an iconographic instance of the core politics of Jewish identity.
In short, Judaism is a synonym for racism because behind it hides Israel. Progressives aren’t supposed to like Judaism for two principle reasons: first, because Israel stands for the indivisibility of religion and state; and second, due to Israel’s official practice of discrimination against Palestinians on the basis of their ethnicity. Though Judaism is found by many progressives to be deeply problematic, both historically and theologically, the notion of returning to a promised land is less troubling than how this is understood to function as a cover for the theft of Arab lands.
In addition to collapsing the distinction between Judaism and the Israeli state, this perspective can oftentimes appear so totalizing that it denies the possibility that there might be other ways to be politically Jewish—even if Jews acknowledge the imbrication of nationalism and religion in their spirituality. Indeed, it is an unsophisticated and at times vulgar critique of Judaism that harkens back to the most primitive Marxist critiques of religion. Unfortunately, this is not the version of progressive anti-Semitism taken to task by Jewish conservatives like Alvin Rosenthal. Yet it is one of the more impoverished, but real, consequences of the global Left’s anger at Israel.
ADOPTING PALESTINE
When it was primarily the Right that identified with Israel politically, debates like l’affaire Judt were both less frequent and less intense. Although progressives began to grow increasingly skeptical of Israel in the wake of the Six-Day War, they did so under the banner of a self-conscious internationalism, so their criticism seemed abstract. The cause of the Palestinians was packed together with so many other causes in the portmanteau of the Left that it became diffuse, one instance of a worldwide problem.
As those other causes—including the peace movement, the antinuclear movement, and the women’s movement—began to lose focus, attention on Israel in-creased, particularly following its invasion of Lebanon in June 1982. But it wasn’t until the tumultuous period that followed the end of the Cold War that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians became one of the chief preoccupations of the American Left.
Even as the first intifada (1987–1991) began to decrease in intensity, its impact in the United States started to be felt more strongly. No longer having
