Suspiciously (((white)))
Whom is it kosher to criticise? Are we holding the accused to account for the right crimes?
As it’s my birthday (no presents please. oh well, if you insist: tell your friends to subscribe, and share my posts) I got reminiscing. Back in an undergrad history module I took in the mid-2000s – the Arab-Israeli Conflict, which I guess was this one – there was this posh, conservative American Zionist Jew who was basically the acme of the type: always wore high collared shirts to class, carried a briefcase, dark slicked back hair, a suaveness and ease about him, but with a noticeable tinge of resentment – maybe because he was kind of short and looked like the kind of person who felt shortness didn’t suit him… like it was beneath him. A guy out of central casting. If the guy doing the casting was anti-semitic.
Anyway, I remember him complaining about Western liberals and leftists always criticising Israel, and noting how unacceptable this would be to those same leftists if someone used the same terms about Pakistan, say. At the time I thought his point was an exercise in apologetics for Israel’s actions – an interpretation motivated by my personal distaste of him and his type. Every Zionist I knew was a total prick, or at least a total prick about their Zionism.
But I ventured an explanation: it’s because for Western liberals and leftists Israel is seen as part of “us”, of European civilisation – i.e. they’re seen as white, and therefore fair game. Sure, you wouldn’t criticise black and brown global South countries because that would be imperialistic (you should criticise your own government, your own state!) but criticising Israel is like criticising a France or a Britain, which is fine if you’re Euro-American, even if you’re not actually French or British. I remember the rest of the class, and the professor, being unmoved by this argument. It was hardly a brilliant insight but I didn’t think my instincts were wrong.
And they weren’t – indeed they’ve been proved right by the passage of time, and in particular over the past four months. Not only that, but even those anti-Zionist leftists and liberals would now openly admit, and insist on the fact, that Israelis are white European settlers and should be held to account for their crimes like other Euro and Euro-descendent countries. (And we’ll say nothing about Pakistan – or to take an example that’s been running round in my head, Sri Lanka, who exterminated the Tamils back in 2008 and no one really gave a shit).
This understanding of Israel as “us”, the bad “us”, ignores that a majority of Israeli society is made up of MENA Jews, often ones expelled from their own countries; that to be Jewish in Europe was precisely to be excluded from “whiteness”; and that it is not a colonial venture, or even a settler-colonial venture, like others it gets lumped with. Or at least, not essentially so (which is to say, not from the 1940s – though the case is stronger if we’re talking about the occupations).
Without getting into all that here – and certainly without defending Israeli policy since Oslo in any way – the reality is that Israel is held to account for Europe’s crimes, for doing what all nation-building projects have done, but doing it too late in history, after that sort of thing was acceptable anymore. It’s one of the smaller tragedies in an Israeli and Palestinian story full of them, and indeed much larger ones especially in the Palestinian case (they’re the kid who loses out in musical chairs, or musical nation-states).
Anyway, it’s clear that Israel is criticised for that is no longer acceptable for white Europeans to do (again, wrong understanding, see above) – but maybe other people elsewhere can get away with it, but mainly because it’s complicated (i.e. I don’t know anything about those places and I don’t have the shortcut of moral certainty in those cases to substitute for actual knowledge, as I do with I&P).
OK, I have more to say, some of it motivated by an instinct to cover my back (not a good instinct), to make sure I’ve properly accounted for everything. But this blog is an exercising in writing more often, in smaller doses, so I will stop here. Thanks for reading. As always, comments and criticisms welcome. Debate is good and meaningful and productive, whatever the anti-liberal and anti-democratic cynics and nihilists maintain today.