Never Met a Poor Communist
Posted on November 7th, 2009
by Jack Ross |
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I’ve grown apart of late from my one-time ostensible sponsor in the blogosphere Philip Weiss. I’ve been conflicted over whether or not to air the dirty laundry, which had basically been limited to his sponsorship of such utterly assinine leftism as this, but an exchange he’s just had with Bernard Avishai has exposed to me what is fundamentally wrong with where Phil is coming from.
After Avishai took the time to explain to Phil following one of his more off-the-cuff posts that he was not a believer in the need to save as Israel as a “Jewish state” but merely in preserving the integrity of modern Hebrew culture, Phil tears into him in a harangue about “prvilege”:
Let’s not talk about your heart, but your passport. According to your website and wikipedia, you grew up in Canada and now divide your time between in Israel and the U.S. As a worldly person myself, I identify with you. But I would say that yours is a very privileged position, as mine is. And when you say that you would like to live in a democratic state with a Hebrew character, isn’t this a partial truth? You seem to like living in the United States, too. I bet you have a great life in New England, as I have a great life in New York. And I am sure you experience Torah and Amichai’s poetry here too, as a minority. Your ability to move between societies is a reflection of the Law of Return, which of course many Palestinians who were born in Israel or the yishuv cannot exercise. So your privilege is bound up in inequality, and an inhumane one.
Now, for myself, as a Yiddishist I consider the modern Hebrew language to be an abomination. But I would be the first in favor if, once there is an enfranchised Arab majority in Palestine, the Israelis chose to secede in the small strip of territory - about the size of Cape Cod - along the coast from Tel Aviv to Haifa where 75% of them live.
What strikes me first is that Phil is engaging in such Jewish identity handwringing when he has spent a good deal of time denouncing it in others, and incidentally given me space for a good bit of my own. In this connection Phil, who constantly insists to me he is not an intellectual, has the galling chutzpah to call out Avishai for not being “introspective”.
Thus, Phil’s obsession with privelege is especially revealing, as it is of a piece with what I’ve found fundamentally wrong with him and his approach for a long time now, that he has fallen in for a leftist program he really doesn’t understand. He constantly goes on about those he deems “progressive except on Palestine” because he is precisely a “progressive” in the mold of such uber-Zionists as Bill Maher and Arianna Huffington who foolishly supported both John McCain and Ralph Nader in 2000. And his admirable passions on Palestine have led him to embrace the worst knee-jerk down-with-whiteyism, as reflected in his boosting of the above linked “poet”.
Both of these strains reflect that the left has no shortage of what Lionel Trilling called irritable mental gestures posing as thought. And this was clear to me for some time now in the fanaticism with which they have embraced boycott and divestement from Israel as a populist silver bullet - I personally have always been ambivalent on the question, my position can be found here and here.
Wow - 600 words of self-indulgent polemic is enough for me. So why should this be of interest beyond me getting it off my chest? Because it illustrates the eternal struggle of the true conservative, and yes, also of the right-wing socialist, but was there ever a difference?
My insistence that I will never go to Gaza because I would be too radicalized, and for the same reasons I would have had nothing but contempt for anyone who went to Spain, may well reflect what both Theodore Roosevelt and Ward Churchill called pacifism as pathology. But I’ll take that over constant hand-wringing over the reality of bourgeois existence any day.
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You wrote, “Now, for myself, as a Yiddishist I consider the modern Hebrew language to be an abomination.” I’m curious as to why you feel this way.
Paleoconservatives, or traditional conservatives, or whatever name they (you) want to call themselves (yourselves), ought to support the principle of “ethnonationalism whenever desired and feasible.” It is bizarre when anti-zionists on the right, whether respectable or disrespectable, start aping anti-racist rhetoric. I actually saw David Duke somewhere accusing Israel of being a “brutal, Apartheid state.”
In principle, it is bizarre when David Duke does this because he was a major South African supporter. However, the South African Apartheid of the 70s-80s was much less bloody than today’s Israel.
Supporting ethnonationalism or anything “whenever desired” does not sound like much of a principle to me.
I think it is a damn good prinicple, Thomas: the right to national self-determination, whenever the borders to the emerging nation can be drawn without necessitating large population transfers, and without oppressing unwilling minorities within the proposed new nation. Based on the principle that ethnic consciousness is a positive good in an otherwise soulless materialistic world, that people prefer to be ruled by their own kinsmen rather than others, and that an ethnically homogeneous political unit is likely to be more stable and less prone to conflict than a heterogeneous one.
Markus,
I was not meaning to mock the idea of national self-determination, I was only referring to the modifier “whenever desired”, since our govt supports democratic elections, but only “whenever desired”.
All the same, there is a problem with ethnonationalism as the number one guiding principle, namely, that it leads to the creation of multiple microstates. These have the problem that they are essentially impossible to defend or develop economically without falling under the protective wing of a larger state. Notice that the US govt has occasionally promoted ethnonationalism (again, “whenever desired” by the US itself) while the US promotes itself as the 180-degree opposite thereof. A hodgepodge of microstates is easy for an empire to dominate. Read Foreign Affairs and see how many articles are about promoting the break-up of Iraq or Pakistan or Russia or China (but rarely Turkey or the Ukraine or Georgia or Croatia, whose borders are sacrosanct, since their breakup is not “desired”). This is no accident.
Peace and anti-materialist principles also demand that we construct identities and allegiances higher and broader than those of blood. For large religions like Christianity and Islam, placing preference on one’s religious identity is a good start, and certainly nothing new.
Jack,
Apologies for not addressing the heart of the article, but what was foolish about backing McCain and Nader? Particularly coming from a right-wing socialist background?
Those were the first two votes I cast. Of course I never wanted McCain to be president, but the point was to defeat the Bush clan and oligarchic forces behind him. Would it have been more true conservative to back Gore (though Nader and a few of the latter’s supporters have been interviewed in AmCon, unlike Gore, Lieberman, or Donna Brazile)? Or the Crown Prince himself?
It’s next to impossible for me to say who I would have voted for in 2000, when I was 15 and started paying attention to politics for the first time and look back on my attitudes at that age with great embarassment. I will go out on a limb and say, that while there were legion problems with the Buchanan campaign and how it was run, myself today would have probably voted for him.
Regarding nationalism in general, whereas Abe Foxman has stated that the one way one can be an anti-Zionist without being an anti-Semite is if one rejects all nationalisms, to which I can say that yes, I do, but that doesn’t mean some nationalisms aren’t more invented and pernicious than others.
Which leads to the answer of the first question among the comments, about why I defend the legacy of Yiddish against modern Hebrew.
Jack, thanks, I think I understand your antipathy to modern Hebrew now. But is it not possible to resurrect a language outside a political/ ideological context? I have no dog in this fight as a Christian, but it seems to me that Hebrew could be reborn without Israel even existing.
In principle, sure, but historically speaking the Yiddish Renaissance was a reaction against the revival of Hebrew in the mid-19th century.
It would be quite difficult for mostly East European Jews, speakers of Indo-European languages (like Yiddish), to revive a Semitic language without the impetus of building a totally new nation in a foreign land alongside a new mix of peoples. The grammar is entirely different. At best you would end up with some lazy creole, though Modern Hebrew is somewhat European and un-Semitic in many ways.