to sustain an ethnic majority in a state through the dispossession of others. It is here that Zionists make for Israel an exceptional claim among the nations. Their case cannot be sustained by analogy, so they delegitimize the process of analogy.
However, there is, even here, one analogy they do claim: that between Americanism and Zionism. Like Palestine, North America was a land without people for people without land. Both Americanism and Zionism are settler-colonial ideologies infused with utopianism—and racism. Both the Israeli and the US state are presented as embodying extra-territorial ideas. The “city on the hill” is an outpost, and in latter days an embodiment, of white European civilization. American exceptionalism and Israeli exceptionalism are mirrors and partners. Like the Zionists who founded Israel, the Protestant settlers who founded the USA were fleeing from and supported by an empire. They dispossessed the indigenous people while declaring them the beneficiaries of their good intentions. Among the charges the Declaration of Independence makes against King George III is that he has blocked “new appropriation of lands,” failed to encourage migration from Europe, and sided with the “merciless Indian savages” against the “inhabitants of our frontiers,” namely, the white settlers seeking to expand the colonial domain. The American Revolution, like the Zionist struggle against the British mandate in 1945–47, was partly a response by settler-colonialists to imperial restrictions on their right to dispossess natives.
I’ve heard this analogy used to justify the Nakba, the Palestinian “catastrophe” of 1948: terrible things happened to the Native Americans but these are the casualties of progress, and cannot be undone. Every people acquires its land, at one point or another, by conquest, so why should the Jews be any different?
But that raises the less comfortable case of another settler-colonialism, white South Africa. When it comes to the apartheid analogy, what’s decisive is not Carter’s legitimizing of it but the fact that it arises, spontaneously and irresistibly, to the lips of black South Africans visiting the Occupied Territories. What they see there—the Jews-only roads, the confinement of Palestinians in camps and villages, the checkpoints, the harassment, the second-class citizenship based on ethnicity—reminds them graphically of the system they suffered under and struggled against. The Afrikaaners were immigrants from Europe with a religious-nationalist consciousness whose racist assumptions about their right to the land were underpinned by superior European technology and weaponry. White settlers acquired control of the state thanks ultimately to British imperial power, with which, like the Zionists, they were often nonetheless in conflict.
There is at least one major difference between Israel and white South Africa, though it’s not one that favors the former. Under apartheid, the dominant whites used the black population as a source of cheap labor. In contrast, Zionism has aimed to remove the Palestinian population, to replace Palestinians with Jews. And this has been evident from what Zionists called “the conquest of labor” in the 1920s (when Jewish settlers campaigned for the non-employment of Palestinians), to the Nakba of 1948 and its aftermath, to the current calls within Israel for “transfer,” the final expulsion of the bulk of the Palestinian population.
As for the Nazi analogy, it is indeed indiscriminately used, as is the word “fascist,” applied too readily to anyone who is authoritarian and racist. This is name-calling and it’s no substitute for analysis. The prime culprit here, however, is not the left. In my lifetime, every US military action, from Vietnam to Iraq (and now the threat against Iran), has been justified with analogies drawn from World War II. Every enemy is a new Hitler (Qadaffi, Noriega, Milošević, Saddam Hussein, Mugabe, Ahmadinejad), every call for peace is Munich-style appeasement, and every challenge to Israel is an existential threat akin to that posed by the Nazis—from the days of Nasser down to Hamas and Hezbollah.
Of course, the Nazis and the holocaust represent an acme of inhumanity, an evil so enormous that any comparison seems dubious. Yet if we remove them from history and treat them as sui generis, we debar ourselves from learning and applying the broader lessons. When the world discovered the extent of Nazi barbarism in the wake of World War II, the cry was “Never again!” We cannot turn that cry into a reality, we cannot ensure that nothing even remotely like this happens again, unless we are permitted to draw appropriate analogies from the experience. Where there is Nazi-like behavior, a Nazi-like idea or a Nazi-like threat, then it is right that the comparison is noted. Is it permitted, however, to compare anything to the holocaust? Its industrial and ideological nature and scale seem to make it unlike anything in the annals of genocide. But even these salient features occur only within the broader phenomenon of Nazi imperialism, and Nazi imperialism has to be placed within the still broader phenomena of imperialism, racism and colonialism. That’s where the story of the extermination of European Jewry belongs and it does not in the least belittle or relativize the magnitude of its horror to say so.
League tables of atrocities serve no purpose, or, rather, the only purpose they serve is to allow scope for the apologists for atrocities. The holocaust, the enslavement of Africans, the genocide of Native Americans and Australians, the centuries of “untouchability” in South Asia, the Belgian Congo (where, according to Adam Hochschild’s revelatory book King Leopold’s Ghost, some 10 million Africans may have perished in little more than a decade), Stalin’s Gulag. All these are distinct historical phenomena, but share in common an institutionalized inhumanity on a mass scale. All are unspeakably, irredeemably horrific; they exemplify that which every human being has an absolute obligation to resist and not to aid, in any way, even by omission.
For many anti-Zionist Jews, one of the key analogies is between Jewish and Palestinian experience—exile, persecution, racism. “We travel like everyone else, but we return to nothing,” writes the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. How can anyone study Jewish history and not draw the larger analogies with all those oppressed or displaced by empires, great and small? Palestinians themselves are alert to these analogies. They speak of the Palestinian “diaspora.” The separation wall is daubed with the words “ghetto” and “concentration camp.”
In the late forties, EVM started but never finished a memoir he titled “So You Want to Be a Politician?,” the fruit of his years pursuing the ambition articulated at the end of his letter to Dr Paul. He recalled:
I broke in in ’21. The local Democratic Tammany machine had sold a bill of goods to Nathan Straus Jr to run for state senator. The district was so solidly Democratic that Hiawatha could have won. Straus was the antithesis of what a politician should be—aloof, too rich and too sensitive a stomach. He served one term and obligingly folded his tent.
Straus was the Princeton-educated scion of the German Jewish family that owned Macy’s department store and the jeans manufacturer Levi Strauss. One uncle had been a congressman and another an ambassador. Unusually for wealthy American Jews of the period, they were Democrats and Zionists. To EVM, Straus was a “boob,” one of that breed of charitable reformer who dabbled in politics but failed to engage with the nuts and bolts of political organizing.
Why did the professed idealist choose to join up with Tammany Hall, the New York Democratic Party machine notorious for patronage and municipal plunder? Partly it was a strong attraction to hands-on politics, and a belief that he could succeed at them, and make something of himself through them. Ed’s brother-in-law was a Republican, as were many Jewish businessmen and professionals at the time, whereas most working-class Jews in New York—strongly influenced by the Bund—voted Socialist (the Lower East Side had sent a Socialist to Congress in 1914), and the Jewish-dominated unions were Socialist-orientated. A solidly Democratic Jewish vote in New York was in those days unimaginable. The Democratic Party was the creature of Tammany, and Tammany was still, certainly in the eyes of many Jews, Irish-dominated. It was, in EVM’s phrase, “the ahrganization.” But here he believed his name and his “hybridity” could be turned to advantage. He could stake out a position for himself as a liaison between Tammany and the Jews. It never worked out that way. At one point he resorted to forming—and having himself elected chairman of—a kind of front group called the John E. McCarthy Association, for which John E.,
