BEYOND the Loony Toon Hate Parade, will a movement to defend the world against militant theocrats and odious Jew-haters emerge? Those who are quick to label any defense of secularism in the Middle East (or at home) as an ‘illiberal plot’ against the very progressive values they claim to hold so dear?
After two decades attempting to persuade my country that attendance at a ‘Mixed-race’ Music venue as a Jew has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not I support religious Orthodoxy and everything to do with secular humanism, (whether acting as a Progressive, an Atheist, or Pagan for that matter), I find Professor Stephen Robbins, mendacity in claiming to speak on our behalf, more than a little annoying.
That he has zero understanding of the secular issues at hand can be seen by the fact he treats his subject matter as though it were in some vacuum in outer space.
Israel for these self-proclaimed multiculturalists, hellbent on imposing a unipolar vision of a world in which theocrats and Jihadists are somehow absolved of their crimes committed on 7/10, must either be destroyed or exist apart from us — an apartheid pariah under a petri dish — a nation so distantly related to Judaism, that segregation is to be dished up amongst the nations — thus where previously our country had segregated itself, we now segregate Zionists, determining who is Good or Bad according to a new theological pencil test?
Robbins faux academic gaze is amplified by the manner in which he disabuses his authority, at first relying on a secondary source rather than primary text, for example a reference to an interview with the Israeli author Noah Harari in Middle East Eye, is actually a link to an article which quotes an Harari youtube video. ‘If Israel stays on its current path,’ Harari predicts, ‘the country may dismantle its own democracy, and create a state built on Jewish supremacy, power, and violence’. Hardly a unique indictment of the current situation?
There are indeed reasons for those affected to be alarmed, but not because Zionism has failed to deliver Jews from oppression. But rather because western democracies, our own secular state, are failing miserably to defend religious minorities from discrimination. That I appear to be a minority-of-one when it comes to issues surrounding the Jewish Shabbat (a private matter between oneself and one’s maker) is par for the course. A 2010 decision by South Africa’s Labour Court, still in force, bizarrely asserts that since I am somehow in breach of rabbinical law, I cannot claim discrimination on the basis of a racist, religious inquisition of my identity.
Academics and intellectuals have remained silent, only speaking out when I was muzzled in 2006 by the corporation.
Old Fashioned
When Robbins does manage to raise a primary document, it is from a period of history that has little contemporary relevance. The anachronistic ‘Zionist manifesto’ was written decades prior to the Farhud and Tripolitania massacres which lead up to and extend beyond the Holocaust. Quoting the Russian Zionist, Jabotinksy in order to understand Netanyahu and Likud, may be helpful in an oblique sense, but it fails to speak to the political realities of our age, a time in which our conceptions of the nation-state have outgrown nationalism, in which a global village is predicated on trade and digital information.
Historian László Veszprémy for example, views Jabotinsky as nothing more than” an old-fashioned nineteenth-century national liberal and a committed democrat”.
He says,”the Zionist writer described his early worldview as ‘liberal anarchy’ in which ‘every individual is [worth as much as] a king’. The free market, freedom of the press, equality for women and respect for minority rights were fundamental tenets of his thinking.”
“The word colonialism was used by the early Zionists” he claims “but of course not to refer to an activity such as that of the Dutch East India Company, since they were not seeking to exploit a land for the economic interests of a distant country, but to establish a Jewish state on the former land of their ancestors.”
Unlike donor countries like the Dutch, the Zionists arrived in the Levant to complement an already existing Yishuv surrounding Jerusalem, a fact that Robbins painfully ignores, and all due to a rising tide of Anti-Semitism, beginning with Pogroms under the Tsar, the Dreyfus Trial in France and the 1941 Farhud in which the Jews of Baghdad were dispossessed of their property rights, all a prelude to the tragic Holocaust of the Nazis.”
Don’t forget Tripoli
The 1945 Tripolitania Anti-Jewish riots which occurred in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, were ‘the most violent riots against Jews in North Africa in the 20th century’, resulting in the country losing its entire Jewish population by 1948, in a process that resulted in over 850 000 Mizrahi Jews being ejected from countries across MENA.
Yet Robbins appears to make out a case that Jabotinksy is somehow a precursor in support of the modern libel of genocide, a charge so readily leveled at the Jewish Refugee State in the aftermath of a bloody conflict that has its origin in a centuries old religious dispute over Jerusalem. A disaster that precocious academics such as Robbins, immediately de-link from the Holocaust, at the same time that they airbrush away its role players, for example Amin Husseini, leader of the Arab Higher Committee, later President of Gaza, whose plan to destroy the proposed Jewish National Homeland, is recorded for posterity.
One cannot help but observe that in tackling the past, Robbins fails to address Husseini and the 1948 Arab Israel War much in the same manner that he fails to compare Kemal Atatturk, whose ‘Six Arrows of Kemalism’ envisaged a very similar national struggle over land that had once been the Ottoman Empire.
It’s not about Emancipation (per se)
If Palestinians were genuinely waging a struggle of emancipation, in order to vote alongside other Israeli’s in the Knesset, instead of dressing up a perverse politics of negation and elimination within the rhetoric of the left, one might agree with Robbins on his tendentious assertions about Kahane, Gvir and the like. Trouble with this outlook, is that Israel already has a sizeable Muslim and Arab population that votes as Israeli citizens (some 1.782 million counted in 2023) — even the Israeli left would disagree with his framing and its obsession with the far-right.
Einat Wilf of the Labour Party, for example, argues that the core obstacle to Palestinian statehood is not a lack of land, but the ideology of “Palestinianism,” which she defines as a century-long war against the existence of a Jewish state. Attempting to broaden this battle into a general fight against ideas central to Judaism or Christianity is not the ready-to-wear solution it may at first appear.
Rather returning the world to a defense of secular values underpinning our democracy, and extending our country’s hard won freedoms towards our foreign policy objectives, would do far more to assuage fears about the ‘spiritual crisis’ the world faces.