Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

I.

On the second night of Passover, in the year of our Lord 5784, a seder was held in the streets of Brooklyn, in Grand Army Plaza, a block away from the residence of Senator Chuck Schumer. The event was called the Seder in the Streets to Stop Arming Israel. It was addressed by a number of anti-Israeli, anti-Zionist, and/or anti-Semitic speakers — after the wild blurring of those distinctions in the past year, the burden of clarification falls on the demonstrators, many of whose intense hostility to the existence of the Jewish state, and promiscuous political rhetoric, crossed the line into the ancient foulness a long time ago. Hundreds of protesters attended and hundreds were arrested, thereby reversing the order of the holiday and going from freedom to bondage. Their bondage, of course, did not last long; he is a fortunate man whose bondage is purely gestural.  

I have not been able to establish whether anything remotely resembling a seder took place at the Seder in the Streets. (It sounds like the name of an old Richard Widmark movie.)  The political director of Jewish Voice for Peace explained at the gathering that “tonight’s Seder in the Streets will be happening on the second night of Passover, a holiday we observe every year that is all about liberation and how our liberations are intertwined with one another.” Well, not all our liberations: later in her statement she declared that “the Israeli government and the United States government are carrying out a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, over 34,000 people killed in six months in the name of Jewish safety, in the false name of Jewish freedom.”  Here, for a start, was another instance of the popular misuse of the term “genocide,” which has now become a regular feature of progressive discourse. For all of Israel’s cruelties toward the Palestinians, it is a gross historical lie that the Jewish state ever set out to eliminate every last Palestinian and every last vestige of Palestinian culture, so that the people and the culture would disappear from the face of the earth.

Not even the Syrian war, before which the destruction in Gaza pales in grim comparison, was genocidal. Aren’t war crimes, or crimes against humanity, in which the charnel house of Syria abounded, evil enough? “Genocide” has become the term with which to describe the atrocity of which one most disapproves. There certainly are genocides in the world now — the Uyghurs most notably — but the left never marches for them. It never marched for Syria, either. An encampment on campus for the Rohynga? Not a prayer. Scores of thousands dead Sudanese? It appears that you have to be fighting Israelis or Jews for progressives to bestir themselves on your behalf. Anyway, the definition of genocide is not quantitative: the Hamas savagery of October 7, even though it killed “only” twelve hundred people, was in fact genocidal, owing to the anti-Semitic and eliminationist motivations that are amply and explicitly articulated in Hamas’s literature.

None of this exonerates the Israelis from the high number of non-combatant deaths in Gaza. No, “non-combatant” is too cold: innocent men, women, and children. The retaliation for the Hamas attack has been ruthless; and whereas I have no idea how to compute the proportionality that is demanded by the rules of war, I am quite certain that monstrously disproportionate actions have been taken place. We have been witnessing the hell of violations justifying violations justifying violations. The Israeli government – which, to the eternal disgrace of Zionism, includes a few ministers who do think genocidal thoughts —  was dragged kicking and screaming to humanitarian assistance to Gaza; it was American pressure, that is to say, an expedient strategic consideration, that prodded the Israeli war cabinet to overcome its plain contempt for the population it was bombing. This was not the best it could have done. The Israeli notion that all Gazans are terrorists is as ludicrous as the Hamas notion that all Israelis are war criminals. The de-civilianization of others is a significant moment in their de-humanization.

Yet the tendentious application of the concept of genocide was not the most egregious bit of the peacenik’s contribution to the seder in the street. If, as she says, all our liberations are intertwined with one another, why is the name of Jewish freedom false? What was Zionism if not the national liberation movement of the Jewish people? Perhaps someone would like to argue with a straight face that the Jews were not in need of national liberation, but it should not be controversial to suggest that such a person is an imbecile. “Have you ever tried playing the who-suffered-most game with Jews?” Dave Chapelle once remarked. “It’s very hard.” Unfortunately, versions of this malevolent imbecility now proliferate in the ubiquitous disqualification of Jews from the roster of oppressed peoples, as if the success of the Zionist endeavor to create a safe and strong and sovereign parcel for its hounded people should be held against it, and not as a sign of the moral seriousness with which a persecuted people went about rescuing itself. 

The left’s willed obliviousness to the epic history of Jewish victimization is doubly offensive because it is attended by a deep contempt for the equally epic efforts by Jews to put an end to their own victimization. Self-rescue in any group is wholly laudable. A people in pain may be forgiven for impatience, and admired for it if its impatience breeds practicality. Zionism is supremely an ideology of anti-wallowing. It represents an absolute refusal to tolerate the misery of one’s own. In this respect, I have long wished, respectfully and as a steadfast friend of the idea of partition, that the Palestinians would Zionize themselves, that they would be done with historical excuses and come to admire the quickening mentality of state-building. Institutions are nobler than intifadas. The Jewish state existed before it was declared; its sovereignty came last. In a world of Jewish wretchedness, there was no other way. Diplomacy had its place, but agency was everything. Justice for the Jews was justice by the Jews, exactly as justice for the Palestinians will be justice by the Palestinians.

“At the core of the Passover story is that we cannot be free until all people are free,” the JVP woman declaimed. She was right. The problem is that her own slogans vitiate the universalism of her teaching. Insofar as progressive anti-Zionists reject the legitimacy of a Jewish state, they advocate an Orwellian Passover, for which all people are free except one. There is nothing false about the name of Jewish freedom. This must be granted if the conversation is to proceed. In Grand Army Plaza, of course, the objective was not conversation. The gathering’s immediate purpose was to protest an impending Senate vote on billions of dollars of military aid to Israel — hence its proximity to Schumer’s home. Chuck was Pharaoh. “We’re here to tell Senator Schumer that enough is enough,” the JVP woman asserted, a few thousand rhetorical levels below Moses’ original demands of Pharaoh. As in the original exodus, however, the Israelite bill passed.

II

Politically, the Seder in the Streets was a failure. Emotionally, it sounds like it was a success. It consisted in the sanctimonious intoning of an entire anthology of progressive platitudes about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its meanings. In its secular way, the seder was entirely liturgical. Its call-and-response of political chants by the assembly of bitter Herbs was supplemented by a sermon by Naomi Klein, whose presence in this context was surely more exciting for the participants than a visitation by Elijah the Prophet would have been. On April 24, the Guardian in London published the text of her homily. In its way it is a precious document. I reproduce it here, with its lines numbered to assist in a close reading, with a commentary.

III

line 1: It is never a salutary impulse to identify with Moses on his way down the mountain. His rage was terrifying. He smashed God’s own writing. He despised his own people, who had failed yet another test. He kept his compassion from them. As is often the case with holy wrath, corpses ensued. Three thousand people died, brothers killed by brothers. A bad day. Moses fixed things with God, but still a bad day.

line 3: Another unfortunate impulse. There are many ways to read Scripture, many methods of interpretation, but one’s own politics is likely not the most rewarding of them. Why would one want to read this text as an ecofeminist even if one is an ecofeminist? (And what on earth does environmentalism and feminism have to do with the manufacture of an effigy of a calf out of the baubles of high net-worth individuals in the desert?) It is not the purpose of ancient writings to edify modern ideologies. Nor is it a shortcoming of the Torah if it is found to be lacking in ecofeminism. Why would one boast about a bias? The parochialism of the enlightened never fails to amuse. One of the goals of hermeneutics is to encourage the reader to get out more.

line 4: Before the interpreter moves on to arcane methods of interpretation, she should get the literal meaning straight. God’s ferocity is in no plausible way an expression of jealousy. Nothing in the text, or in its larger theology, suggests otherwise. Yahweh has many troubling anthropomorphic quirks, but He is not an idiot. His indignation here is directed at falsehood: he had vouchsafed them a revelation of the truth. Having demonstrated the veracity of His existence to the Israelites with the evidence of their own senses, in miracle after miracle, He is shocked by their reversion to the idolatrous error, to the metaphysical illusions of materialist Egypt. This disappointment is premised on His confidence that the Israelites, who were the first people asked to live with the burdensome intellectual requirements of monotheism, and therefore with its retraction of the emotional gratifications of polytheism, could rise to the spiritual difficulty; and when they fail to meet the challenge, He is volcanically angry. He insists that these people understand the truth. Did he make a bad bet on the spiritual capabilities of the Israelites, of ordinary men and women? To be sure, an intolerance of the frailty of human beings is unbecoming in a Deity, as it is unbecoming in a political movement that speaks in their name; but the crisis at the foot of the mountain was not caused by the injured vanity of an abstract being who was envious of the blingy materiality of a cow.

Nor was it the result of God selfishly hoarding holiness. I do not mean to make God’s apologies, but if this were a hoarder He would not have created the world to compete for His holiness. The medievals discussed this. They believed that creation was therefore the ultimate expression of divine love. Sanctity is not what God keeps but what God dispenses, and in certain schools of thought to the entirety of creation. There is nothing petty about the concept or its history. But Klein’s contrarian questions do not deserve such serious answers. She was just trying to impress her congregation with her skepticism about religion. Her sermon really has nothing to do with theological reflection. She was just intellectually accessorizing.

line 5: False idols? There are no other kind.

line 6: Splendissima! Down with the material, up with the transcendent! But be careful about denouncing the small; trouble starts that way. The small is where we live. And what precisely is the progressive transcendent?

line 8: Rabbi, such an assessment of the event is for others to make.

line 9: Idolatry, in the Jewish tradition, is a very grave charge. The traditional understanding of idolatry is that it consists in the worship of the creation instead of the Creator. It is a misattribution of divinity. It comes in material and immaterial forms. Insofar as it consists in the overestimation of what one admires, it is a common malady.

line 11: Surprise! But the preacher is correct about one thing, which she and her congregation have abundantly illustrated over the years: one can have an idolatrous relationship to ideas, to ideologies.

line 13: The history of the acquisition of land by the founding Jewish settlers of the yishuv and by the relevant Zionist institutions is not remotely one of “colonial land theft.” This is an empirical matter. It has been archivally documented. It is certainly the case that some territories were acquired in battle, but the battle was for survival and it was visited upon Israel by neighbors who refused to consider seriously either the historic right of the Jewish people to the land or the sublime compromise of partition. The armistice lines of 1949 left Jewish forces and Arab forces in places that the United Nations had not assigned to them. The presence of a Jewish state in the ancient land is not an occupation. (But its borders should have more to do with security and morality than with antiquity.) At no point in its history did Israel launch a war of conquest, even when its leaders harbored fantasies of territorial expansion. The preacher in Grand Army Plaza should make herself aware of inconvenient facts and do her best to deal honestly with them. Nothing about this conflict is simple. In this way it differs from many of its analysts.

But what about the occupied territories? The seizure of any or all of the territories that fell under Israeli dominion in the Six Day War was not an Israeli war aim, though a state that has successfully defended itself against many hostile armies cannot be blamed for wishing to end the hostilities in a strategically more advantageous position than when they began. In the aftermath of the Six Day War, the Jewish world was overwhelmed by a great triumphalism, which was only in part an expression of relief at not having been annihilated. There were ideological opportunists, too, who interpreted the unanticipated extension of Israeli rule over the new areas as a providential instrument for their own maximalist ambitions, secular and religious. But there were also some Israelis who, when the inebriation of victory wore off, recognized that sovereignty over the Palestinians in the newly acquired areas was a mortal trap for the Jewish state. I had an Israeli friend who wept with joy and then wept with dread. I remember arguing with my religious Zionist friends, still in high school, that if they really needed to find the hand of God in the new situation, they might consider that the Holy One had benevolently granted them, for the first time in Israel’s embattled history, this: land that Israel could surrender without surrendering itself. Years later I learned that I was groping for the concept of a bargaining chip. The bargain, of course, would be peace.

And so, for fifty-seven years, with increasing intensity and increasing frustration, liberal Zionists in the Israeli Jewish community and the American Jewish community who believe that the survival of Israel depends upon reconciliation with the Palestinians, and that the Palestinians, unlike the Arab states that attacked Israel, have a moral and historical claim that Jews must respect, threw themselves into “peace work,” politically and culturally –—work from which today’s  progressive anti-Zionists would like us to desist. Our work spoils their paradigm, which is that liberalism and Zionism are incompatible. Historically and philosophically, this proposition is outrageously untrue. What is true is that we doves, or pragmatists, or moderates, or two-staters, are the big losers in present-day Israel. But progressives, of all people, should understand that historical reversal is not the same as philosophical refutation. Stubbornness is sometimes an ingredient of integrity. We are not wrong in our hunger for Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation, we are merely unpopular — for now.

So why this rush to the exits? Why should liberal Zionists complacently accept defeat instead of persisting in their exertions? Why this progressive counsel of despair, except that it goes so nicely with other dogmas of the post-colonial faith, and that it makes certain people less likely to be despised by the left, which is their idea of perdition? And what is a more principled and more practicable solution to the conflict than the adjacent states of Israel and Palestine? I have not heard one. Justice that is purchased with injustice is injustice, and this goes for all sides. So I do not have the insolence to recommend to the Israelis that for their own good, or because of a wrinkle in critical theory, they should erase themselves. If Israel commits crimes or abuses that must be criticized, we have plentiful grounds, liberal grounds, Zionist grounds, Jewish grounds, universal grounds, on which to criticize it. We need no lessons in the practice of self-criticism from Naomi Klein or Judith Butler. If Israel cured cancer, they would defend cancer.

Zionism, before it is a historical worldview or a political program, is a conclusion drawn properly from the long history of Jewish weakness, an expression of Jewish self-respect, of Jewish honor. Do I mean to suggest that anti-Zionist Jews, or Jews who advocate for the dissolution of the Jewish state and a return to Jewish weakness, are dishonorable? I think I do.

One additional animadversion. Why do Klein and her camp followers assume that anybody who is a Zionist and who refuses to entertain the erasure of Israel also supports, and is even elated by, all the carnage in Gaza?

Line 14: There was indeed a roadmap that led from Egypt, but it led to Canaan, not to Israel. The command to exterminate the seven nations of Canaan was a ghastly thing — not only was it exceptionally cruel, but it prefigured the same hideous mistake that motivated the anti-Semitic murderers of medieval and modern Europe: that you can kill the belief by killing the believers. In the event, the archeologists tell us, the complete liquidation of the Canaanites never happened. And what about the Egyptians who pursued the Israelites in the desert and drowned in the Red Sea? The ancient rabbis propose that God himself was incensed about the Israelite celebrations of their destruction. “The works of my hands are drowning in the sea and you come before me with song?!” Most importantly, what does modern Zionism have to do with the Bible? Not nothing, certainly; the inspirations for the restoration of the Jewish commonwealth do not all date from Herzl’s outrage at what they did to Dreyfus. But Klein is deploying the Bible exactly as the settlers in the West Bank deploy it: as some sort of blueprint, some sort of excuse, for modern politics. The Zionist exodus was different from the Biblical exodus. Nobody turned a river into blood or split a sea for the Zionists. There were no signs and wonders, except the wonder that people who staggered out of death camps could find the will to live again and cross the waters in the dark of night and participate in the construction of the secular means of their own salvation. There is a roadmap!

line 15: The promised land was not an idea, it was a place — it was, and is, soil. Before it became a metaphor — the Zion of the black churches in America, for example — it was soil. Before it was a metaphor, it was a place. This is a conflict about geography. For the Palestinians, too, the land is soil. They remember, and teach their children to remember, particular olive trees on particular slopes outside particular villages. (One of the conditions of peace is that they finally choose a state over the recovery of those olive trees.) To treat the promised land as a “transcendent idea” is to elide the earthly fury of this conflict. And also its perpetual danger: it is dangerous, after all, to sacralize soil. We have seen in many countries the catastrophic results of geographical mysticism. I confess that I have myself felt the pull of it. I love that land, whatever the political vicissitudes. I would love it even if an imperial power still ruled it. I love it for its beauty and its poetry. I love it because I am a Jew. And so I am here to bear witness that the love of the land, the vulnerability to the aura of its physical setting, does not make one a murderer. Instead it makes me wish more ardently to see peace in it. Note to progressive theorists: sometimes a concept can make you more heartless than a clump of dirt.

The de-materialization of the land has become a central idea of Jewish anti-Zionists. In The Necessity of Exile, a memoir of his spiritual instability disguised as a study of ideas, Shaul Magid lavishes praise upon Rabbi Shimon Gershon Rosenberg, a strange right-wing figure known as Rav Shagar, who died in 2007 at the age of fifty-eight. Until not long before his death, he lived in the West Bank and founded and directed a variety of yeshivot. I have been told that Shagar was an extraordinary teacher of Talmud. His contribution to contemporary Jewish thought was two-fold: a religious post-Zionism and a fusion of traditional Jewish concepts with post-modernism. (A religious zealot who propounded the indeterminacy of truth! Cool!) Shagar’s anti-foundationalist program, which in my view marks the end of belief itself, included his endorsement of a great nineteenth-century Hasidic master’s view that, in Magid’s words, “Eretz Yisrael is not a place but a state of mind.” Never mind that in his messianic thinking that rebbe spoke quite plainly about the land as a physical location. The excitement of a non-material land for the post-Zionist Magid is that it further enables his tedious swooning over exile, as if the romance of exile is not one of the oldest cliches of modern culture. The prolific Shagar once wrote an essay in which he taught, in Magid’s enthusiastic paraphrase, that “we must fold exile into the state itself.” By this he means more than a state of alienation (which Israel, like all states, long ago found ways to nurture). He is referring to a constitutive sense of ontological Jewish difference that not even the restoration of Jewish sovereignty can alter. We are getting into dark chauvinist waters here, in which any self-respecting progressive should be reluctant to swim. But not Magid; he will not be told that he came too late to be an exilic Jew. (Apparently there is not enough glamor in being only a diasporic Jew.) And so he concludes that “the establishment of the state is not a rejection of exile but rather a dialectical move, even a Hegelian one, that redirects exile into the state itself, and thereby elevates it to its next phase, the phase of the political, to a state of justice and compassion.” Who’s afraid of a dialectical move? Zionism has little to fear from such post-Zionism. But it peddles a distortion of Jewish ethics that must be rectified: the Jewish injunction to pursue justice makes no distinction between political dispensations, between physical locations, between exile and statehood, between homelessness and home. The Jew must seek justice wherever he is. The exilic condition is not ethically privileged, except perhaps in the sense that powerlessness makes many transgressions impractical. A state, by contrast, has the power to commit crimes. There has never been a state that has not committed crimes. And so a critical and even adversarial stance is therefore a prerequisite of responsible citizenship. Ethically speaking, territoriality is more exacting than extra-territoriality.

line 17: Having a military does not make you militarist. Militarism is the view that all problems should be solved by force. Sometimes I see evidence of that disastrous view — a despair of diplomacy — in certain Israeli politicians and governments, though not so much in the Israeli army. To defend yourself with a military is also not militarism. Neither is a people’s army, if the security situation warrants it, or universal conscription, all those guns slung jarringly over the shoulders of young men and women who must disrupt their youth to guard their country against its enemies, who are not imaginary. Have Israeli soldiers committed abuses? Of course. But neither is that militarism. Owing to its geopolitical situation, Israel is a Western-style country that cannot suffice with Western-style consumerism as its way of life. (Though the Tel Aviv nights could fool you.) It must also organize itself for its security. Israel has provided an encouraging answer to the question of whether consumerist societies, materialist societies, lifestyle societies, can muster the inner resources that are required for their mobilization in their own defense, though I am not sure how generalizable to other Western societies, to us, its example is. 

Israel is not an ethnostate, though its politics is now afflicted by a new ethnonationalism, like many other states. Israel is a nation-state modeled on the old European model of the nation-state, which I call the theory of the perfect fit. In this view, every nation should be incarnated in a state and every state should embody a nation. Ideally, the political borders and the cultural-religious-ethnic borders should coincide. The problem is that they never do, and so there appears what became known as the Problem of Minorities. As long as the minority on the “wrong” side of the border is small, such nation-states are workable. But when the minority grows larger, the majority would panic, and one of the manifestations of this panic was a xenophobic infatuation with itself; tolerance can metamorphose into intolerance in no time at all. (The Peel Commission of 1937, which proposed the idea of partition because it concluded that Arabs and Jews living together in a single state is a recipe for disaster, also recommended population transfers, voluntary or otherwise, in and out of the Jewish state and the Palestinian state.) Many European countries are now confronting this problem, or choosing not to confront it. So is the United States, where white panic has become a decisive force in our politics. And so is Israel.

There are only two possible solutions to the fiction of the perfect fit: the redefinition of the nation in the nation-state as multi-ethnic, or fascism. Such a redefinition, which has become even more urgent in our era of vast migrations, would render the “problem of minorities” moot. In a self-defined multi-ethnic society, there are no natives and no foreigners. The streets flow with legitimacy. Israel is a multi-ethnic nation. (The Jewish people is a multi-ethnic people.) This is the demographic fact. But its right-wing radicals fear this fact, and their fear has been promoted into hatred, and they themselves have been promoted to the upper echelons of Netanyahu’s disgusting government. They have set out to overthrow the Enlightenment values that are enshrined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence. But there is, again, a struggle. And progressives, when they describe Israel as an ethnostate, are pretending that the struggle is over and that the villains have won. Genossen, this is not helpful! 

Pessimism is not only an analysis, it is also a choice. Why do Jewish anti-Zionists want to pull the plug on the struggle for liberal Zionism and the two-state solution? Because it appears to be losing? But a cause is not a fair-weather activity. When I read Naomi Klein’s book on capitalism and the climate, I did not dismiss it as quixotic, even though the likelihood of her program’s realization seems low. At present there is a strong basis in political and economic reality for pessimism about the renunciation of fossil fuels and the “extractivist” paradigm. Klein’s cause seems doomed. So why doesn’t she give up? For the same reason that I don’t.

It is true that John Rawls would not have written the Israeli law of return. The law enshrines a prior ethnic preference. But who is so ignorant, or so callous, that they cannot comprehend why there must be a secure place on earth to which Jews may flee in the assurance that they will not be turned away? Fleeing, after all, has been a primary activity of Jews over the centuries. For the same reason, the Jews must always form a demographic majority in Israel, so that no blocking minority or other majority makes Jewish asylum impossible. I admit, as a proponent of equality in an open multi-ethnic nation-state, that this is morally embarrassing. In this respect, my liberal Zionism is not completely consistent, but neither was Camus’ invocation of his mother in his discussion of justice in Algeria. If Jewish experience us teaches that we must be stringent and self-reliant about our survival, so be it. Survival, too, is a moral obligation. Anyway, a Palestinian right of return is a similar preference that one day will be extended by the state of Palestine. I would have thought that the extension of such a privilege as a response to their decades of displacement would be a significant Palestinian incentive for hastening the creation of a Palestinian state.

line 18: The Nakba was not the case “from the start.” The expulsions that Klein regards as the essence of the Zionist enterprise did not occur until the war of 1948-1949, out of a mixture of strategy, battlefield improvisation, and chaos. I do not mean to excuse them, but such events are hardly unknown in the history of warfare, even in wars of liberation that have met with the approval of the left. The pre-Nakba years were also preceded by a protracted period of Arab violence against Jews, and by Arab alliances with the Third Reich. (In the 1920s and 1930s Arab attacks on Jewish towns and villages was accompanied by the cry Itbah al-yahud! or “slaughter the Jews!”) Again, I do not mean to excuse the pain that Jews inflicted on Palestinians; not at all. How could an ethically and historically self-aware Jew excuse it? But it is not too much to ask that people who wish to make grandiose interventions in this debate know some history. The sloppiness is insulting.

line 23:  I was not aware that Israel is responsible for the Sisi regime. As I recall, not long after a million Egyptians demonstrated against authoritarianism in Tahrir Square, a million Egyptians demonstrated for authoritarianism in Tahrir Square. To be sure, the election of Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood to the presidency of Egypt rattled the Americans, the Israelis, the other Sunni states, and many Egyptians, but we should all have kept our heads, at least if we are serious about democratization as an objective of foreign policy. (Of course progressives regard democratization as a sinister euphemism for American imperialism, but that is for another day.) Israel’s lack of enthusiasm for democratization in the Arab world has roots in the old exilic preference for vertical alliances with rulers over horizontal alliances with populations, for reasons that are not hard to understand, though Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi showed that the vertical alliance, too, was a myth. The harsh disappointments of recent years notwithstanding, I am not prepared to give up once and for all on the hope for democracy in the Arab world. Sisi’s regime is despicable, and it is an ISIS-making machine. But what does Zionism have to do with it, except insofar as Zionism is the cause of all evil?

line 25: An ugly kind of freedom for whom? I would not treat the achievement of Jewish freedom so lightly, especially at a seder. The plight of the Palestinians is not the entirety of what one needs to know about Israel.

line 27: The Jew as Pharaoh: there is always a cheap thrill in such an inversion. It unburdens the post-Zionist (and the anti-Semite, though I am not accusing Klein of anti-Semitism) of any special sensitivity to Jewish fate and its implications for politics. Yes, to regard human beings in the generalizations of social science — in this instance, as demographic threats — is inhumane, though policy and politics do so all the time. But the notion that Israelis have concluded from their insistence upon a Jewish majority in Israel that they must slaughter Palestinian children is grotesque. Moreover, if it has been a goal of the diabolical Israelis to diminish Palestinian fertility rates, they have failed miserably. Klein should pause to consider the distinction between criticism and slander. And she can take some comfort that Pharaoh spared the daughters. Maybe he was an ecofeminist, too.

line 28: No. What has brought us to our present moment of cataclysm is this: three thousand Hamas terrorists attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, and butchered and raped and incinerated men, women, and children. If they had not done so, all the Israelis and Palestinians who died violently since October 7 would still be alive. The absence of any mention of this depravity in Klein’s paschal sermon is despicable. Another example of the left’s universalism minus one. 

line 35: Every Jewish value? Including holy war, which is also a Jewish value? Or anti-pagan violence? Or family purity? This woman who speaks so categorically about Judaism appears to know little or nothing about it. In American Jewry now, the surest sign of Jewish ignorance is to exalt “the value we place on questioning.” But goyim ask questions, too! And the Zionist tradition is a parade of the questions and challenges and quarrels. Oh yes, and the answers. Questioning is the beginning, not the end, of intellectual responsibility. In the Talmudic tradition, the number of subjects about which we must suffice with questions, because we will not have answers until the prophet Elijah delivers them, is exceedingly small. We sometimes confer too much prestige on questions. (At the seder, as Klein points out, questioning is the child’s task.) In any event, Klein is a creature of answers posing as a creature of questions. It is a neat trick, to traffic in certainties and portray yourself as a champion of doubts.

line 38: How on earth has Zionism betrayed the love we have as a people for text and for education? Pass the maror, please.

line 41: I had not encountered the term “scholasticide” before. I discovered that on April 18 a group of UN human rights experts in Geneva issued a press release in which they “expressed grave concern over the pattern of attacks on schools, universities, teachers, and students in the Gaza Strip, raising serious alarm over the systemic destruction of the Palestinian education system. ‘With more than 80% of schools in Gaza damaged or destroyed, it may be reasonable to ask if there is an intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system, an action known as ‘scholasticide,’ the experts said.” The damage wrought upon education and culture in Gaza by the Israeli campaign must indeed be overwhelming. But there are collateral effects in war, in this war and every other. Not everything that is destroyed in war was targeted for destruction. That is one of the reasons that wars should be avoided: they are wanton. There is no such thing as “surgical” bombing. But there is something demagogic, an agit-prop quality, about the “-icide” construction. Is the destruction of a vineyard vinocide?

line 48: She flatters herself.

line 49: The phrase “our Judaism” contains much less authority than Klein thinks it does. Ben Gvir and Smotrich also have “their” Judaism. Their Judaism can indeed be contained by an ethnostate, so to hell with them. Such a Judaism, every customized Judaism, is nothing like the actually existing Judaism, historical Judaism, Judaism in its classical sources, Judaism in all its text-based variations, which is an irreducible alliance of universalism and particularism. The tangle, the incongruity, the simultaneity of all the imperatives, is the point. Every other version is cherry-picked. Klein’s “internationalist” Judaism is similarly an arbitrary doctrine invented in the image of a political desire. Does she really not see the “nationalist” elements in the Bible and the rabbinical tradition? The gravity of her opinion about Judaism is not enhanced by her assumption that she can blithely wave them all away. Her rejection of particularism has no basis whatever in our religion. Even the prophets, the ones with the prooftexts beloved of lion-and-lamb progressives, were particularists; or more precisely, they taught the coincidence of the local with the global. The internationalist Klein should shop elsewhere for precursors.

line 51: Here is another post-Zionist shibboleth: that Israel is bad for the Jews. But Jewish nationalism never promised a world free of Judeophobia. It promised only a haven from it and a defense against it. And the world without the Jewish state was not exactly good for the Jews.  O, the bliss of subalternity!

line 52: Neither is “my” Judaism. Solidarity with the downtrodden, including Palestinians, is perfectly compatible with it, and even required by it. Klein’s air of moral superiority is insufferable.

line 53: Gender? See paragraph thirteen of the Declaration of Independence of the State of Israel, which includes a guarantee of “complete equality” with regard to sexual difference.  In 1948! Klein might also take an interest in the shelter provided in Tel Aviv for Palestinian LGBTQ people who fear for their lives at home.

These debates discomfit me because they make truthful claims sound like apologetics. The rhetorical situation is rigged against elementary corrections, which come to seem like partisan pleadings. I do not deny my partisanship, obviously; but I insist that objectivity, or the search for it, is the obligatory accompaniment of partisanship. Not perfect objectivity, of course; but the impossibility of perfect objectivity must not provide cover for the whateverist epistemology that now governs our culture. The purpose of objectivity is not to ruin our commitments but to clarify them, to test them, to make them intellectually respectable. A wise philosopher has described our optimal mental situation as “positional objectivity.” There is an easy way to check on positional objectivity: it comes with scars. Those scars are the traces of the positions that one wished to espouse but discovered that one could not, because their usefulness for one’s side could not withstand the honest acknowledgement that that they are false. He who finds no fault in his own side, who lives without intellectual dissonance and moral friction, is a liar. (Honesty compels me to add that for this reason I have admired Klein’s withering critique of the environmentalist elite and the “extractivist left.”)

line 57: As it happens, the Passover seder is a peculiarly bad illustration of the portability of Judaism: it is a service — not a technology! — for a table set with symbolic objects and performed by housed people who are enjoined to imagine empathetically the unhoused existence in the desert and the unhoused generally. It is indeed portable — but so is all of Judaism since the fall of Jerusalem, when a far-seeing rabbi of the first century proclaimed the dissociation of the religion from its capital. The adjustment of Judaism to extra-territoriality was never a choice for extra-territoriality. And there are Passover duties beyond the Passover seder that require a synagogue or meeting place. Even when we wandered, we were not light on our feet.

    (Oh what’s the use?)

line 61: Was the exodus a revolution? Modern revolutionaries have thought so, but they departed from the ancient model. The Egyptian tyranny was not deposed. The slaves did not replace the masters; the slaves left. (The Jews have never sought to overthrow their oppressors. They sought instead to get beyond their sway, to be left alone to be themselves.) The freedom for which the slaves departed Egypt was not what we mean by political liberty. Instead they were given a new metaphysics of obedience. But there is one respect in which the saga of the Israelite liberation brings to mind our own perplexities about authoritarianism: the mentality of servitude survived the experience of servitude. The riddle of democratization is that you must already know what it is like to live democratically in order to live democratically. How, then, does democracy begin? Memory is a terrible saboteur.   

line 65: The list of Zionist and Israeli peace plans is long, which is why it makes for melancholy reading. And the list of Zionists and Israelis who opposed those peace plans is also long, which is why it makes for even more melancholy reading. There has never been a Zionist consensus, except perhaps in the early 1940s, when the prospect of extermination concentrated the Jewish mind in favor of statehood. The old Zionist disputations have never been resolved. They will be on the ballot in the next Israeli election.

line 70: There is no more definitive sign of moral frivolity in the discussion of Israel than to mock Iron Dome.

line 74: You are the exodus? Then go away.

line 77: Oh, I see. You have already gone. Somehow we will have to manage without you.

As for our kids: you remind me of one of the most foolish comments of our time. “Young people are just smarter,” Mark Zuckerberg instructed in 2007. It was a sentiment that updated the most ludicrous generational conceits of the 1960s, as does your little boast about stealing our children. Listen. You do not know our children. You know only the ones who follow you. But we have our little darlings, too, a prodigious number of them, and they live in a world, a world of young and old, that is beyond your grasp – a liberal world, a conservative world, a Jewish world, a Zionist world, a traditional world, a patriotic world, a peace- and decency-seeking world. Their loyalties are not blind and their sentiments are not inauthentic because they are not your loyalties and your sentiments. You are making a mistake. Our kids are not with you now. Those are your kids. I wonder how many future venture capitalists and litigators are among them. Believe it or not, there are larger and deeper places than the quads, places more consequential for the future of the world, and for its betterment, than Grand Army Plaza on the night when you choose to deliver a homily there. No cause will succeed that cannot see beyond itself. For heaven’s sake, woman, look at life from both sides now.