Defending Jewish Democracy

“Do you really think a Holocaust could happen here?” I asked. “I have all my papers in ready just in case,” my septuagenarian neighbor replied.

That woman is now in her 80s, but the exchange has stuck with me, and it always surfaces in my mind around this time of year, as we commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day and celebrate Israeli independence. If I found her sense of vulnerability unsupported, I shared her implicit sensibility, a hard truth of the 1940s: Only a Jewish state and a Jewish military can be depended upon to protect the Jews.

Frightfully, anti-Semitic incidents are spiraling upward in Europe, and the Jew is menaced from both ends of the political spectrum. Fixated on Muslim immigration, chauvinists and neo-Nazi retreads are momentarily occupied, but they have no great love of him, a threat, if less than in times past, to national purity. Some communists and socialists, despite their pretensions to universalism, are also purveyors of anti-Semitism. The wealthy Jew is the class enemy of a new European proletariat of Third World émigrés, the booster of the racist, settler-colonial Zionist enterprise. Thus, the far-right and the hard-left are united in seeing the Jew as an alien, the agent of a foreign power, i.e., Israel.

In fact, the Jew and Zionism are increasingly linked in the European mind. According to the Anti-Defamation League’s 2012 study of European anti-Semitism, 45 percent of French and 55 percent of Hungarians think Jews are more loyal to Israel than to their respective home countries;

12 percent of French and 27 percent of Hungarians say their opinions of Jews are influenced by Israel’s actions. Former Yale professor Charles A. Small has even demonstrated that in Europe anti-Zionist sentiment predicts Jew-hatred. So when the liberal-left, in its poor imitation of Murrowesque outrage, intones that “criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitic,” one must understand this as a statement of ideology, not absolute fact.

Though anti-Semitism is real and the Jew is persecuted, he is not a helpless victim. In my last column, I deplored this narrative, rendered a tall tale by the establishment of the state of Israel. The individual Jew has agency. He can escape his suffering by making aliyah. (Many French Jews have already bought homes in Israel, inflating the real estate market.) In the form of the Israel Defense Forces, which have intervened in Ethiopia, Uganda, and the Arab world, the Jewish people have a means of collective defense, something they lacked during the Holocaust.

But anti-Zionists harboring anti-Semitic views are much more dangerous than the old Jew-haters. Objecting to Jewish nationalism in particular, they seek to reprise the Achille Lauro, standing aside as others try to push the Jew off-deck, denying him a life-boat. Often, this stance is justified by nothing more than the academic equivalent of je ne sais quoi. Others are subtler, claiming Israel should not exist because it is impossible for a Jewish state to be a democracy.

A few weeks ago in The New York Times, Joseph Levine, a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (and a modern-day Josephus of sorts), advanced this specious line of argument. According to him, only civic nationalism, predicated on common values, is acceptable in the 21st century, especially in states home to multiple ethnic groups. Zionism, he avers, is exclusively ethnic, and in a country where 25 percent of the citizenry is non-Jewish, this means the state favors a particular group and is therefore undemocratic.

For one, this analysis ignores Zionism’s civic component; Jewishness is not a mere sanguinary identity. Just as Frenchmen, whatever their ethnic origin, can cleave to the ideals of liberty, fraternity, and equality, any person can convert to the universal religion of Judaism and be eligible for Israeli citizenship. Secondly, the notion that Israel is the only “democratic” state where the system structurally favors an ethnic sub-group is fallacious. Ireland and Germany both have provisions that privilege citizenship applications from people of Irish and German descent over those of others. Most European countries give Christian festival days off. Italy marks the anniversary of its unification, when most ethnic Italians were brought under one flag. These countries have sizable immigrant Muslim minorities, so are they undemocratic? Ultimately, Levine misapprehends the nature of democracy. It is possible for a democratic state to enshrine the national rights of a majority, providing it ensures the full civil rights of all. In its Declaration of Independence, Israel endeavors to do so. Unfortunately, Arabs, while given the vote, face rampant discrimination within Israeli society.

That makes the Jewish state a flawed democracy, but certainly not an ethnic oligarchy. We must be clear about that, lest haters and liars distract from one of the great lessons of the last century.

Daniel J. Solomon ’16 is a Crimson editorial writer in Matthews Hall. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays. Follow him on Twitter @danieljsolomon.