Bad for the Jews

Biden's Remarks and the Reality of Antisemitism

At a Hanukkah celebration yesterday at the White House, President Biden made a remark that has already generated a good deal of public comment: “You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist. I am a Zionist. Were there no Israel, there would not be a Jew in the world who is safe.”

This idea that without Israel no Jew can be safe, is at once, a very commonplace, conventional thing to say among Zionists and also an extremely strange idea. Are Jews really so safe in Israel? Apparently not. And how is Israel really guaranteeing the safety of Jews worldwide? Surely, there’s an argument to be made that what the Israel Defense Forces is doing now is quite bad for the Jews: the way they are conducting the war is stirring up an enormous degree of rancor. Can the States President really be serious? Can he, with all the power and might of the United States government at his disposal, really not guarantee the safety of Jews in this country?

It may not be what Biden was intending to say, but there is a sad logic that confirms this line of thinking. Israel may seem to stir up antisemitism through its aggression and bellicosity. But in some cases it actually neutralizes antisemitism: It puts the Jews in an acceptable context. Many on the Christian Right don’t particularly care for the Jews, but in so far as Israel is part of their idea of a divine plan, they have a conditional acceptance of the Jews. They “like” Jews because Jews = Israel. This doesn’t always have a religious underpinning, or rather, something else often lurks beneath the religious veil. Many on the far right may not like Jews in so far as they are liberals, “rootless cosmopolitans,” and so forth, but love Zionism. They say, in effect, “Heck, I don’t love the Jews, but I love all these soldiers, tanks, bombs, checkpoints, and settlements.” In so far as Jews act as intrepid settlers on the far edge of “Western civilization,” and are appropriately aggressive and brutal with the lesser races, they can even celebrate the Jews. They don’t tolerate a certain degree of settler-colonialism because it’s being done by Jews who deserve their own homeland after so many years of persecution and ultimately genocide, as liberal Zionists do, but they tolerate Jews only in so far as they are settler-colonists. They might not state it openly, but the “apartheid” stuff is not so much a pejorative label in their minds as a positive condition for their support. For such people, Zionism “naturalizes” the Jews, it literally and metaphorically gives them a place: rather than being a disturbing alien entity in the midst of a larger society, it makes them a people or even a race like any other. It also transforms Jews, to use a term from apartheid South Africa, into “honorary whites”—even if Israel has a majority Sephardic and Mizrahi population now. Apartheid South Africa, founded on the basis of a deeply antisemitic ideology, came to cooperate with Israel not just out of realism and mutual self-interest, but because Zionism made Jews recognizable to them: these Jews they could deal with. Just look at how the apartheid government understood Israel: "Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples."

Zionism also lets antisemites imagine a world without Jews: “Well, they can eventually just go to Israel, I suppose.” Their “Jewish problem,” as it were, is thereby solved.

Antisemitic Zionism is, of course, not new. While Hitler was always paranoid that a Jewish state would become a kind of “Jewish Vatican” and a center for their nefarious activities, early in the regime encouraging Jewish emigration to Palestine was official Nazi policy. And this was not just a solely pragmatic effort to get rid of the Jews as quickly as possible. It had some real ideological justification. Adolf Eichmann’s predecessor at the “Jewish desk” of the Sicherheitsdienst, Leopold von Mildenstein was a convinced Zionist. To the aristocratic SS officer von Mildenstein, the violent antisemitism of the rabble was gauche, while Zionism provided a civilized solution to the “Jewish question” in line with Nazi racial ideology. As Jacob Boas writes:

Von Mildenstein was no friend of the Jews (he was, after all, a member of the Nazi Party and of the S.S.). His sympathy went out only to that segment of Jewry that called itself Zionist. For the so-called assimilated Jew, the Jew who claimed to be a German first and a Jew second, or denied his Jewish-ness altogether, and for the Jew who eschewed all racial feeling, he held no brief, his view of them being close to the official Party position. The Baron's support of the Zionist cause was not, however, grounded in expediency alone; rather it stemmed from a liberal application of Nazi racial theories. Briefly, according to these theories, a race was the product of a union - a mystical union between a people and the soil in which it was historically rooted. And because Jews were said to lack this vital relationship to the German soil, Nazis considered them an alien force in their midst, branding them as a rootless, decadent, parasitical and inferior species of mankind.

In Palestine, on the other hand, von Mildenstein encountered a Jew that he liked, a Jew who cultivated his own soil, the 'new Jew' typified by the stocky figure of Gurion. There he saw a Jew who was struggling against great odds to re-establish his roots in the land of his forefathers; a Jew who gave the lie to the Nazi stock-in-trade that the Jew hated to get his hands dirty and was incapable of idealism. Of this Palestinian Jew von Mildenstein painted a highly flattering portrait, in a manner, to be sure, which left no doubt as to his own superior Aryan pedigree; still, the image of the 'new Jew' projected by von Mildenstein must have left the regular Angriff reader shaking his head in disbelief. It is doubtful, though, whether the Baron succeeded in changing many minds about Jews, even though Der Angriff had a medal struck to commemorate the voyage of a Nazi and a Jew to Palestine, a medal with the Swastika on one side and the Star of David on the other. Where von Mildenstein did succeed, however, was in securing, early in 1934, the approval of and acceptance by his S.S. superiors for his idea that the solution of the Jewish question lay with the mass emigration of Jews to Palestine. Indeed, the articles earned him promotion, and he was assigned, in the summer of 1935, the Jewish desk in Reinhardt Heydrich's Security Service, the intelligence arm of the S.S. Once installed in his new post, von Mildenstein proceeded to give muscle to the policy he had fathered.

Of course, we all know that Nazi policy changed. And the Nazis famously cultivated ties with anti-Zionist Arabs in Palestine as well. Today, the most fervent, open antisemites are also likely to want to see Israel destroyed. But there is a lesson here: the apparent solicitude of antisemitic Zionists is not be trusted: if the Jews can’t or won’t get with the program, they will deal with them in other ways.

Just as some will only extend solidarity to Jews in so far as they are vocally anti-Zionist, there are also those who will only extend solidarity to the Jews in so far as they are Zionists. These are both forms of antisemitism: they treat Jews as not really being full members of the societies they belong to, but as props in their own ideological or racial struggles.