Germany and the Critique of Israel

For a variety of reasons - not all of them actually obvious or honourable - the space for speaking out in Germany about Israel's crimes against the Palestinians is particularly narrow and contested.  My friend and admired comrade Raymond Deane has written on this topic - pertinent most immediately to the situation regarding Judith Butler and the Adorno Prize - with great lucidity and intelligence.  Here's a piece of his on Irish Left Review:

 

Dissident Jews: Unwanted in Germany?

Raymond Deane is one of Ireland's most important contemporary classical composers.  More than any other living Irish artist, he exemplifies the engaged intellectual, through his brave radical political activism.  Would that we had more like him.  Here is Raymond's blog:

 

The Deanery

Conor

Judith Butler and the Adorno Prize

Starting this blog last April, I took my example from two great writers - whom I will never match.  Alexander Cockburn, who died recently, and Theodor Adorno both produced significant writing in a style akin to that of a diary: Adorno's work that I referred to was his wonderful Minima Moralia.  Of course, this book is not a diary as such, but it is composed in jottings - not 'loose jottings', but frequently aphoristic musings so tight and dense that reading them you can almost hear the whiplash crack of Adorno's relentlessly dialectical mind as you parse and re-parse his sentences.

Adorno was one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century.  He is best known now as a leading figure and latter-day director of the Frankfurt School, or the Institut fur Sozialforschung, whose early members included luminaries such as Max Horkheimer (with whom Adorno wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment and to whom he dedicated Minima Moralia), Leo Leowenthal, Herbert Marcuse, Friedrich Pollock and Franz Neumann, and whose more recent alumni include major living German philosophers such as Axel Honneth and Jurgen Habermas.  The Institut carried out a wide array of social and political research, most of it informed by the brand of Hegelian humanistic Marxism initiated by an earlier generation of writers such as Georg Lukacs, Karl Korsch and Antonio Gramsci, and boosted by the discovery of Marx's Paris Manuscripts in the 1930s.  Adorno himself wrote extensively and brilliantly about society, literature and culture, politics, philosophy, and music most of all.  The Institut, and Adorno, also wrote importantly about anti-Semitism.   Many of the Institut's staff were Jewish, and in fact during the Second World War, it decamped first to New York, and then to Los Angeles: an academic institution in exile.  Tragically and famously, Walter Benjamin, an older associate of the Institut, and a good friend of Adorno's, did not escape, taking his own life whilst fleeing the Nazis in France in 1940.

In 1977, the city of Frankfurt established the Adorno Prize, an award given every three years to a major philosopher.  Previous winners include Habermas, Jacques Derrida, and Zygmunt Bauman.  This year, the winner is to be the American philosopher Judith Butler - the first woman to win the prize.  She is due to receive the award on September 11 next.

I have already referred to Butler's work on this blog - her essay 'No it's not anti-Semitic', published in the London Review of Books in 2007.  The thinking behind this piece has now issued in a new book, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press) where she turns back to her own Jewish education, and, while also in critical dialogue with Palestinian writers - Mahmoud Darwish and Edward Said principally - seeks to scour the work of great modern Jewish philosophers and writers - Martin Buber, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin and Primo Levi - for the resources of a Jewish critique of Zionism.  Butler even goes so far as to suggest that in our times Jewish thought might be most itself when criticizing Zionism for its crimes of ethnocratic domination and state violence.  She seeks to derive an ethic of 'cohabitation' that would be pertinent to the situation of Jews and Palestinians and which would not be predicated on a simple universalism, but would eventually issue in a binational state.  Ultimately, her philosophical message is that a properly effective Jewish ethics must be prepared to transcend itself, and leave its Jewishness behind.

And now she is paying a price: multiple campaigns, letter-writings, Facebook maunderings, and other hypocrisies are underway, in Israel and Germany, to deny one of our most important contemporary thinkers an honour that is her due.  Copious character-assassinations and accusations of Jewish self-hatred have already been flung: the quickest google search will reveal this.  Here's an example, from Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (one notes immediately that fairly unpeaceful 'scholars' such as Efraim Karsh and Daniel Pipes are members or former members of this grouping):

German Jewish leader: Rescind Israel hater's prize

And here is Butler responding to her critics generally, and at the Jerusalem Post specifically - this is taken from the excellent liberal Jewish website, Mondoweiss:

Judith Butler responds to attack: ‘I affirm a Judaism that …

Butler, I reckon, is an exemplar of an all-too rare quality in thinkers and writers: she does not become conservative, or lax, or repetitive as her career develops and her work expands and gets older.   She gets tougher, harder, more radical, more rigorous, and she steels herself to the most formidable and difficult tasks.  She is a courageous and brilliant woman, and deserves support and recognition.

Conor

Adieu to Alexander Cockburn

Little did I think, when setting up this blog only 3 months ago, and taking as one of my guides the great Alexander Cockburn, that I would soon be mourning his passing.  Cockburn died on July 20 of cancer, having kept his illness secret for the last two years, all the while continuing his wonderful coruscating writing.

Disgracefully and sadly, Alex's death was barely covered at all in the Irish media.  I published this tribute on Irish Left Review, an excellent leftwing website edited by Donagh Brennan.  Warm thanks to Donagh for his help with this piece.

Adieu to Alexander Cockburn

Conor

The Nazi Past of Yitzhak Shamir

This week witnessed the death of Yitzhak Yezernitsky, better known as Yitzhak Shamir, at the age of 96.  Though other Israeli prime ministers are remembered more immediately - Begin, Rabin, Meir - the fact is that after David Ben-Gurion, Shamir was Israel's second-longest-serving leader.  He served as Prime Minister of Likud governments, after the resignation of Menachem Begin in the wake of the 1982 Lebanon War, and also at the time of the Madrid Conference, organised by the United States after Iraq was beaten out of Kuwait in 1991.   He had a reputation as a hardliner, though he did not always show political nous: determined that the PLO would not be represented at the Madrid Conference, he and his government demanded that any Palestinian representation should come only from within the Territories, and as part of the Jordanian delegation.  But this proved to be a diplomatic blunder, as the Palestinian leaders who attended the Conference - people like Hanan Ashrawi, Haidar abd-al Shafi, and Faisal Husseini - proved to be vastly more able than the Fatah hacks that Israel might otherwise have found itself debating.  Of course, the downside of this was that Israel then stonewalled so determinedly at Madrid that eventually the Oslo process began, behind the backs of the Palestinian delegation, between Arafat and Israel, and we all know what emerged from that.

What many people are less likely to know of are the (pretty minor) Irish connection Shamir had, and his extremely dubious ideological background.  Born in Poland, he became involved in Betar, a rightwing Zionist youth movement, some of whose activities were recently mythologised in a ghastly Edward Zwick historical epic film, Defiance (which can be read as a clunky allegory of the creation of the State of Israel).  In 1935, he made aliyah to Palestine, and there became involved in the Irgun Zvai Leumi, the main 'Revisionist' or rightwing Zionist militia in the Yishuv.  When it split in 1940, he joined the even more aggressive splinter, the LEHI, or 'Stern Gang', named for  its first leader, Avraham Stern.  The Irish connection is that Shamir took a nom de guerre - 'Michael', after Michael Collins.  The fact is that the Jewish guerillas in Palestine greatly admired the IRA and its struggle against Britain during the Irish War of Independence.  Funnily enough, this admiration did not extend to the IZL or LEHI being particularly in touch with the Irish situation - some years ago, Ben Briscoe, Fianna Fail TD and ex-Lord Mayor of Dublin, revealed that a delegation from the IZL arrived in Dublin in 1948, hoping to make contact with the IRA and learn from it, but clearly not knowing that by this time, the IRA was a proscribed organisation, many of whose current members had been interned during WW2 by their erstwhile colleagues now at the head of the Free State. 

But the real clue to the make-up of rightwing Zionism of Shamir's kind is illustrated by the fact that whereas the Haganah, the main Zionist militia in Palestine, observed a ceasefire during Britain's struggle with Germany during the Second World War, the IZL and the LEHI regarded the war as their opportunity.  Most strikingly of all, the LEHI made two overtures to the Nazi regime to enter the war on its side, suggesting that the creation of a 'folkish-national' Jewish polity in the Middle East would be mutually beneficial. Stern, with Shamir among his chief colleagues, put forward a document entitled 'Fundamental Features of the Proposal of the National Military Organization (NMO) in Palestine Concerning the Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe and the Participation of the NMO in the War on the Side of Germany', which noted inter alia that 'Common interests could exist between the establishment of a new order in Europe in conformity with the German concept, and the true national aspirations of the Jewish people as they are embodied by the NMO', and, furthermore, that 'The establishment of the historic Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis, bound by a treaty with the German Reich, would be in the interest of a maintained and strengthened future German position of power in the Near East'.
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That this idea was advanced well after the murderous and anti-Semitic character of the German regime had been revealed, and after it had conquered most of Europe, shows the alarming symbiosis between Zionist ethnic exclusivism, and the most brutal strains of European Fascism, and their mutual moral degeneracy.

Yitzhak Shamir was a representative of an older world of Zionism, but his cynical and racist attitudes are reproduced today, in the Liebermans and Netanyahus at the head of Israel, with only a little more polish.  He will not be missed by anyone who wishes to see justice in the Middle East.

Conor

The last two months have revealed to me some of the difficulties of blogging!   I mean by this that it seems to  me that for a blog to be of interest, it must be updated reasonably frequently.   That 'reasonably' is open to interpretation, but every few days, or once a week, might be 'reasonable'.

However, I have failed to write on my blog for nearly two months.  Ordinary work intruded, but also the fact is that the accumulating controversy involving the cultural boycott of Israel, Dervish, Gerard Donovan, the slanders on the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign and on my comrade Raymond Deane, the yet-again-revealed bias of the Irish Times in the course of the whole business (not to mention the rubbish published on this matter by Independent Newspapers) produced a concatenation of issues which I simply could not keep up with.

I hope to add to this blog more frequently in the coming months.  Friends and foes alike will note that we are now in what is called in Irish and British media circles 'the silly season'.   I'll try not to be too silly.

Conor

Anti-Semitism and Criticism of Israel

Along with my letter and those of Laurence Davis and Raymond Deane in yesterday's Irish Times, there was a 'pro-Israel' letter from David Fine.

Mr Fine asserts that there is 'something wrong' with Irish democracy 'if cultural groups are prepared to boycott the only functioning democracy in the Middle East', and if these groups support instead 'a quasi-state whose party in power has enshrined the demand in its own constitution to "drive the Jews into the sea"'.  He endorses Minister Alan Shatter's description of efforts by Palestine activists to persuade Dervish to give up its planned Israel tour as 'cultural fascism'.  Fine goes on to assert that 'Any form of opposition to the Jewish state ...  can only be interpreted as a veiled form of anti-Semitism'.  He then notes that Israel, 'unlike the Palestinian state', guarantees the vote to all its citizens, regardless of their ethnic background, gender identity, and so on.

This statement is problematic in various ways.  Firstly, it denounces 'cultural fascism' and then, without missing a beat, suggests that any form of opposition to the Jewish state is anti-Semitic - a formulation that is awe-inspiring in its totalizing reach. Secondly, the statement is factually incorrect.  Let's deal with the facts first.

Israel is not 'the only functioning democracy in the Middle East'.  Turkey is another democracy in the region, albeit also with serious flaws.  Israel is better characterised as an ethnocracy, because of the priority given in its Basic Laws to the Jewish people.  In that Basic Law, Israel is defined not as the state of its citizens, but as the state of the Jewish people.  This has the immediate and practical result of rendering all non-Jews in Israel as second-class, in juridical terms.  Furthermore, under the terms of the Law of Return, it means that a Jewish person living in Paris or Miami has the automatic right to citizenship of Israel, whereas a Palestinian person living in Cairo, whose parents left in 1948, has no such right.  Uri Davis has pointed out how at its inception the state of Israel transferred certain functions pertaining to the state over to organisations which are constituted only to assist or work for Jewish people.  A good example of this would be the administration of state lands by the Jewish National Fund.  Because the JNF continues to see its function as, indeed, the Judaization and 'redemption' of the land of Palestine, the ability of Palestinian citizens of Israel to buy or trade in land is fundamentally restricted.  A more recent example of this kind of structural racism would be the 2003 Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law.  This law prevents Palestinians from the Territories who marry Palestinian citizens of Israel themselves becoming citizens of Israel. It was renewed by the Supreme Court in 2006 and extended to persons from Syria, Iran, Iraq and Lebanon.  The publisher of Ha'aretz, Amos Schocken, said in 2008 that the existence of this law on the statute  books turned Israel into an apartheid state.

Fine's statement is completely unclear as to what Palestinian 'state' he refers to.  Neither the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, nor the Hamas government in Gaza could be said to exercise anything like true sovereignty, so there is no Palestinian 'state'.  Neither the PLO Charter, nor the Covenant of Hamas (which is deeply problematic, and shot through with elements of anti-Semitism) make any mention of an ambition to 'drive the Jews into the sea'.

As to the idea that any opposition to the  Jewish state is a veiled form of anti-Semitism, well, the intention of such a statement is to delegitimize and block any criticism of Israel by the use of one of the worst slurs or aspersions that can be cast in the post-Holocaust world.  But there is a number of problems with this strategy:

1) it seeks to block all opposition, of any kind - be that militant or written or verbal or political or cultural or religious, violent or non-violent. We should note that it even blocks criticism of Israel by Jewish people, and by Israeli citizens.  This kind of blanket suppression of opinion is, surely, one of the essences of fascism; 

2) it elides the differences between the Jewish state and Jewish people everywhere.  Far more Jews live elsewhere in the world than in Israel.  Not all Jews identify with the 'Jewish state' - many of the most courageous and powerful critics of Israel are Jewish.  Not all Jews inside Israel identify with or fully endorse government policy.  Not all Jews fully identify with Zionism.  This statement in fact arrogates to Israel the right to represent all Jews everywhere, whether they like it or not.  This too is hardly democratic;

3) the fact is that the charge of anti-Semitism is thrown so often, and so easily, these days means that it has become profoundly and dangerously cheapened.   Its use by someone like Fine elides the gulf of difference between Nazi advocates of genocide and non-violent protestors who demonstrate outside Israeli embassies.  This elision, too, is characteristic of the fascism Fine purports to oppose.

One excellent point of reference in discussion of this kind is the work of the brilliant Jewish-American philosopher and cultural theorist Judith Butler.  Butler teaches at UC Berkeley, and is best known as a theorist of gender and sexual identity working at once in the Hegelian and poststructuralist traditions.  But she has also written influentially on hate speech, and she has long been an anti-Zionist activist.   In August 2003, she published an essay in the London Review of Books, 'No it's not anti-semitic', which she then re-published in extended form in her collection of political essays, Precarious Life (2006).  It starts off from statements made by Larry Summer, president of Harvard University, about campus 'anti-Semitism', and proceeds, carefully and politely, to demolish positions such as that of David Fine.  Anyone interested in the debate about Israel and Palestine should read it.

Conor

Letters in the Irish Times

In today's Irish Times, my letter replying to Ivor Shorts, along with letters by Raymond Deane and Laurence Davis, is published.  I am pleased, of course, though it must be noted that up until now the IPSC-bashers and proponents of 'balance' have had the field.  I am leaving my letter up here.

The link to today's letters is  http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/letters/2012/0516/1224316194435.html

Conor