Abandoning the oppressed to join the oppressors
On the same team now
In my youth, Jews were known as friends of the downtrodden. They supported civil rights and the labor movement. They stood for freedom of speech, education and equal rights for all, and opposed apartheid in South Africa. It was the same in Europe. Jews were over-represented among socialists, labor organizers, and communists.
I was going over this history with Jane, an African-American friend, and she said, “Of course they did. Jews weren’t white then. It’s different now.”
Jane was right. Throughout the history of Europe, Jews were outsiders, second class citizens. Even the rich ones were excluded from elite society. The greater number of poor ones tended to be miserably oppressed, subject to discrimination and organized violence.
In a phrase, they weren’t white. Whiteness is not about skin color as much as about power: social standing, access to resources, treatment by police, employers, and property owners. Light skin is a big help there, of course, but whiteness requires identifying with and serving the white Empire.
Before Israel, Jews didn’t have those qualifications. Until the 1950s, institutions such as universities and country clubs banned Jews completely or had strict quotas on how many they would accept.
European Jew haters were quite clear about their racism. In the 1870s, they coined the term “antisemitism” to frame their hatred as being against the others, the darker-skinned, the foreigners, the “Semites” in their midst. “Semitic” is a category of languages spoken in West Asia and North Africa, including Hebrew and Arabic. To the antisemites, Jews were not white and did not belong in Europe, no matter how many centuries they had lived there.
This second-class status motivated the founders of modern Zionism, people like Theodor Herzl and Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky — to seek their own country, outside of Europe, where they could run the show. They were tired of being kicked around by the Europeans, by the “civilized” West. They wanted to be the ones doing the kicking, strong not weak, dominant not submissive.
Jabotinsky believed that Jews needed to remake themselves in the image of Western European elites. He wrote “The Yid [the widely-used derogatory term for the poor Jew] is ugly, sickly, and lacks decorum. He is trodden upon and easily frightened and… despised by all.” He blamed European antisemitism on Jews’ passivity and weakness. That pacifism had to change if Jews were ever to be free.
Israel was Zionists’ path to whiteness. Jews would show the world that they could be as productive, powerful, and vicious as any European. Only then would they be safe. Since the country’s founding in 1948, they have used every trick in the book to make themselves as fearsome and valuable to the American/British Empire as possible. They built a massive nuclear arsenal with materials and technology donated by or stolen from France and the US. They joined the United Nations and proceeded to violate all its rules when the UN tried to apply them.
Netanyahu told the UN General Assembly last September, while Israel was committing the world’s first live-streamed genocide (per Amnesty International,) “Until Israel, until the Jewish State, is treated like other nations, until this antisemitic swamp is drained, the UN will be viewed by fair-minded people everywhere as nothing more than a contemptuous farce.”
Israel is able to ride roughshod over other international institutions as well. A typical example: Russia has been banned from competing in the last two Olympics and chess Olympiads because of their war in Ukraine, but Israeli athletes, some veterans of the Gaza killing fields, are allowed to compete and win medals. They are following the lead of their big brothers in the US: We make the rules; other nations must follow them, but they do not apply to us. That impunity is whiteness in a nutshell.
How whiteness is changing American Jews
Since Jews became white, their leaders no longer consistently side with the underdog. Although the majority of Jews still consider themselves liberal or progressive, and many are radical or anti-Zionist, their leaders condemn protest movements as being “antisemitic.” They applaud government crackdowns on protest, censorship of universities and deportation of immigrants. They collaborate with far right regimes around the world, because those governments support Israel.
It’s not just the leaders who have moved far right. Large numbers of Israel-identified Jews form themselves into gangs that resemble the Nazi Brown Shirts of the 1930s. They terrorize people in the streets and on campuses. “Death to Arabs” seems their go-to slogan. Their soccer hooligans disrupt European cities and when people fight back, they call themselves victims of antisemitism.
This is what whiteness has always meant: the ability to push others around or take their stuff without consequences. It means behaving like, and being welcomed by the US ruling class. It means becoming “moral monsters,” in the words of Jewish video journalist Aaron Maté.
The battle over Jewish whiteness is why the Zionists react so aggressively against Palestinian activists and anti-Zionist Jews. They’re thinking, ‘We worked hard to become white. We sacrificed, we struggled, we sold our souls. We’re not going back, so get out of our way.’
Zionists resemble US imperialists so closely because they share a history of settler colonialism and a long tradition of racism. To see what whiteness means now, look at Gaza. Whiteness is not an identity; it’s a place of privilege from which one can carry out any crime.
It doesn’t have to be this way. People, including Jews, can appear white and still reject whiteness, and many are doing so. We can reclaim our cultures and connect with non-“white” people internationally. The sooner that happens, the better.
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