RUTHFULLY YOURS

“As-a-Jew” has become a widely used term for Jews who publicly denounce Israel and even call for its dissolution but commonly preface their condemning the Jewish state with assertions that they speak “as Jews.” The intent is typically to convey that their anti-Israel stance is consistent with Jewish morality and sensitivity, which their pro-Israel co-religionists are supposedly betraying.

Among the more well-known examples of as-a-Jew Jews who directly or indirectly promote Israel’s demise are members of groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow, which ally themselves with Hamas-affiliated organizations in their militating for dissolution of the Jewish state. Numerous individuals, including Peter Beinart and Judith Butler, have virtually made careers of plowing the same field.

Since the Hamas massacre of Israelis on October 7, 2023, and the Israeli invasion of Gaza to dismantle Hamas and prevent its promised endless repetition of that slaughter, as-a-Jew Jews have parroted Hamas in its claims of an Israeli “genocide” in Gaza. They have done so even though the ratio of civilian to terrorist casualties in Gaza is the lowest ever recorded in a conflict in which one party has – in violation of international law – imbedded itself in urban populations and used those populations as human shields. As-a-Jew Jews cast this embrace of Hamas propaganda as an expression of their more profound Jewish morality.

But the superior morality as-a-Jew Jews ascribe to themselves predates, of course, October 7. Its foundational thesis is that Jews are uniquely disqualified from any right of national self-determination and are remiss in asserting and clinging to such a right. Proper, moral Jewish behavior dictates, according to these people, that Israeli Jews accept becoming a minority in an Arab-dominated state. It dictates allowing the descendants of those Palestinians who fled the 1947-48 war – a war which they and their Arab allies initiated to quash creation of a Jewish state in a small part of Mandate Palestine – to return to what is now Israel and to transform the territory between the Jordan and the Mediterranean into the twenty-third Arab state “from the river to the sea.” The as-a-Jew proponents of this course characterize their envisioned entity as a “binational state,” but it would inevitably be an Arab majority state. These righteous as-a-Jews are no doubt cognizant of how well religious and ethnic minorities – whether Christians or Yazidi or Druze or Muslim Kurds – are treated in the great majority of the twenty-two current Arab states. Yet they have no qualms in subjecting the seven million Jews of Israel to similar treatment.

(There are what might be called second-tier as-a-Jews, who concede some right of self-determination to the Jews of Israel but see their moral transgression as lying in their failure to facilitate creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. This stance obviously ignores the many occasions, from 1947 to 2008, on which Palestinian leaders refused offers of a state. It ignores Palestinian leaders’ insistence that all the territory between the Jordan and the Mediterranean is properly theirs and that Jews are foreign usurpers who have no legitimate historical or legal claim to sovereignty in any part of it. It ignores the genocidal anti-Semitic agenda of both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. It ignores, that is, the reality that both indoctrinate their constituencies in the necessity of dedicating themselves to the annihilation of Israel’s Jews, and that both have made clear they will inexorably use any territory under their control as a base for pursuing that annihilation.)

In fact, as-a-Jew Jews, for all their self-righteous preening, demonstrate little concern with the well-being of the half of world Jewry now living in Israel and little reservation about advocating geo-political reforms that would put those seven million Jews in mortal danger.

Their priorities, apparent from the positions they espouse and the alliances they form, are to ingratiate themselves with anti-Israel and anti-Semitic elements in the wider society. These elements are particularly far Left, so-called progressive, and Islamist groups that draw their inspiration from Soviet and Muslim Brotherhood anti-Semitism. Such groups dominate campus activism and have become an integral part of the wider circle and broader agenda of the red-green axis. The “as-a-Jew” preface to Jews condemning Israel serves not only to convey their self-congratulatory, imagined higher Jewish ethos. It also serves to advance their ingratiating objective; Jews condemning Israel qua Jews are very much welcomed as being a useful propaganda tool for the various anti-Israel and anti-Semitic components of the red-green axis.

Efforts by Jews eager to propitiate anti-Semites by rejecting Zionism long predated Israel’s creation and even predated modern Zionism.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as the possible extension of civic rights to Jews was first being raised in central European nations, among the objections of those opposed to such rights was that the Jews were a separate nation. Some Jews sought to assuage the anti-Semites behind this objection by arguing that Jews had now become an exclusively religious community, foregoing their earlier national consciousness. They even formed reformist Jewish congregations that stripped the liturgy of references to longing for Zion and for Jerusalem. They argued further that this divesting themselves of the accoutrements of national identity was somehow an ethically superior course.

Jewish immigrants to America from central European states often brought their anti-Zionism with them. The Reform movement’s Pittsburgh Platform of 1885 declared, “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.”

In America, as in central Europe, there were concerns that a Jewish state in the Jews’ ancestral homeland would compromise the status of Jews in their current homes. Rejection of Zionism would, they believed, prevent potential anti-Jewish responses. The key proponents of early Zionism were Jews in eastern Europe confronted with the murderous depredations meted out to Jews there, particularly in czarist Russia, and desperate to find a refuge. But the anti-Zionist Jews elsewhere in Europe and in America demonstrated little concern for the plight of their co-religionists.

World War I was followed by the breakup of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, German and Ottoman empires and the creation of new national homes on what were previously imperial lands. This also entailed the League of Nations lending its imprimatur to mandates for establishment, from Ottoman lands, of Arab nations in Syria and Iraq and a Jewish national home in Mandate Palestine.

Creation of the Mandate had some impact on anti-Zionist opinion among Jews, including in America. So, too, did the severe attacks on Jewish communities in eastern Europe between the world wars, and, in 1933, the rise to power of the Nazis in Germany, with their quickly initiated attacks on German Jews.  Reform Judaism’s Columbus Platform of 1937 reflects some of the consequent changes in opinion as well as what had not changed:

“…In all lands where our people live, they assume and seek to share loyally the full duties and responsibilities of citizenship and to create seats of Jewish knowledge and religion. In the rehabilitation of Palestine, the land hallowed by memories and hopes, we behold the promise of renewed life for many of our brethren. We affirm the obligation of all Jewry to aid in its upbuilding as a Jewish homeland by endeavoring to make it not only a haven of refuge for the oppressed but also a center of Jewish culture and spiritual life.”

The statement begins by seeking to counter the “dual loyalty” canard, feared by so many as the inevitable outcome of the Zionist project. It then acknowledges the potential role of the project as a haven, “the promise of a new life,” for Jews increasingly under siege in eastern and central Europe. It concludes by trying to accommodate both the need and the fear. Jews are enjoined to help in the upbuilding of the homeland/refuge. But the homeland/refuge is conceived of not as an independent Jewish state – an entity that might, again, provide hostile forces with ammunition for claims of divided loyalty and grounds for curbing Jews’ civic gains – but rather as a “center of Jewish cultural and spiritual life.”

This last distinction, with its anti-state bias, had substantive consequences. Its translation into concrete action by, for example, Felix Warburg and Rabbi Judah Magnes, chronicled by Yoram Hazony in The Jewish State (a source for much of what follows), is illustrative. Warburg, a leading figure in the German Jewish elite in America, had earlier agreed to be a major donor to Hebrew University in Jerusalem, founded in 1919. While in favor of building a cultural and religious center in the Mandate such as that alluded to in the Columbus Platform, he was an opponent of Zionist aspirations to a state. He conditioned his support of the university on the appointment of American Reform Rabbi Judah Magnes, who shared Warburg’s views on the proper objective of the Zionist project, to a dominant position in the university, ultimately to the post of university chancellor, and to control of the funds. (At the time of his Hebrew University appointment, Magnes was associate rabbi at Temple Beth El in Manhattan.)

In the ensuing years, both Warburg and Magnes fought aggressively against the pursuit of a Jewish state. Both, for example, perceived the 1929 Arab assault on and massacre of Jews in the Mandate, including the murder of 67 Jews in Hebron, as an opportunity to cast the Jewish quest for a state as the source of Arab enmity and to undermine that quest. In October 1929, Magnes met with a confidant of the Grand Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who had instigated the massacre. He formulated with the Mufti’s representative a proposal for the establishment of an Arab-controlled government in the Mandate and the abandonment of Jewish aspirations to a state.

When the leadership of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in the Mandate, rejected the plan, Warburg threatened that American Jewish support would be cut off if the Magnes initiative was not embraced. Nevertheless, both the elected Assembly of the Yishuv and the Zionist Executive refused to endorse it.

In the spring of 1936, the Grand Mufti again launched attacks against the Jews of the Yishuv, this time in a sustained onslaught that entailed attacks as well against British forces. The following year, the British appointed the Peel Commission to investigate the unrest and formulate recommendations in response to the violence. The commission proposed partition of the Mandate into independent Jewish and Arab states. The Jewish state would consist of about 4% of the original Palestine Mandate. The League of Nations objected to the proposal, insisting that it violated Britain’s obligations to the Jews under the Mandate. However, the Yishuv leadership, led by David Ben-Gurion, agreed to the recommendation, prompted by recognition of the looming catastrophe in Europe and understanding that even this mini-state would offer European Jews a refuge. Ben-Gurion argued, “Through which [option] can we get in the shortest possible time the most Jews in Palestine?… How much greater will be the absorptive capacity without an alien, unconcerned… hostile administration, but with a Zionist government…holding the key to immigration in its hand.”

Warburg, in contrast, vehemently denounced the partition plan, arguing that acceptance of the Peel proposal reflected a Zionist “lust for power” and “a concept of Jewish life which is abhorrent.” This rhetoric of hyperbolic vilification, and its cold indifference to the desperate plight of Europe’s Jews, seem incomprehensible unless recognized as representing, beneath the claims of high-mindedness and moral integrity, a response to anti-Jewish pressures. More particularly, it was a response to fears that creation of a Jewish state would compromise the fragile status of Jews in America and elsewhere in the West.

The Peel Commission recommendations were rejected by the Arabs and withdrawn by Britain. The British subsequently issued the infamous White Paper dramatically limiting Jewish immigration, proposing the ultimate establishment of an Arab-dominated government in the Mandate, and essentially cutting off the one internationally recognized refuge for a doomed European Jewry.

Magnes continued his own attacks on those favoring establishment of a Jewish state even after revelation of the genocide unfolding in Europe. In 1943, he did so in articles in both British and American publications. Perhaps his most consistent outlet was The New York Times, where publisher Arthur Hay Sulzberger had instructed that editorial policy on the Mandate “be predicated on the Magnes point of view.” Indeed, that view was promoted in both editorials and news stories. Magnes pursued his campaign after the war as well, even coming to the States at the urging of the State Department to lobby against the United Nations partition plan.

Warburg and Magnes were apparently comfortable in refusing to endorse, and instead vehemently objecting to, what was the most feasible effort to save at least some European Jews. They seemingly construed their stance as necessary to mitigate what they saw as the potential dire consequences for American Jews should a Jewish state be established in the Mandate.

Today’s “as a Jew” militates for the dissolution of Israel – or the placing of the state in grave danger by establishing next to it a genocidal anti-Semitic regime – seemingly less out of concern over the well-being of American or other Diaspora Jews than out of concern for his or her personal well-being. His or her apparent priority is acceptance by the bigoted anti-Zionist circles with whom he or she identifies. But the common denominator of today’s as-a-Jews and the Magnuses and Warburgs of yesterday is the cold callousness towards Jews at risk. To those Jews, and sympathetic non-Jews, who declare “Never Again,” the retort of the as-a-Jew is an ugly indifference to the prospect of “Again.”

Kenneth Levin is a psychiatrist and historian and author of The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People under Siege.