Anti-White Jews are also Anti-Jewish

I am not sure if I was the inspiration for this article by Dr. Jobling, but I think I may have been. In my article on the Jewish question, I touched on the topic that Leftist Jews aren’t attacking the West out of self-interest, but out of self-hatred, pointing to the fact that they also attack Israel and fellow Jews. Dr. Joblings wrote that this was news to him at the time. Now he has taken that theme and hugely expanded it. After this article, I can’t imagine that anyone would believe Kevin McDonald’s theory any longer.

I also just saw a poll that had Barack Obama winning 60%+ of the Jewish vote even though Jewish organizations and Israel are terrified of him. This shows that liberal Jews prefer the Left to fellow Jews. Another David Dinkins can’t be good for them. Any kind of ethnocentricism would lead them to vote for McCain or almost anyone other than Obama.

The central ingredient of Kevin MacDonald’s theory of Jewish culture is the postulate that Jews are intensely ethnocentric, indeed “hyperethnocentric.” Even by the standards of the highly tribalistic Middle Eastern peoples, Jews stand out for their clannishness, in MacDonald’s view. This trait has caused them historically to obey Jewish authorities unquestioningly and to be willing to fight and die for their group.1 To substantiate his claim, MacDonald quotes Jewish writers who “consider Jews and non-Jews as completely different species, with Jews absolutely superior to non-Jews” and who believe non-Jews have “Satanic souls.” Such hyperethnocentrism is rooted in the biological makeup of Jews rather than being a consequence of contingent historical conditions and thus “continues to pervade all segments of the Jewish community” today.2 MacDonald believes this hyperethnocentrism manifested itself in the Leftist, anti-racist “culture of critique” that Jews developed in the 20th century, which demonizes ethnocentrism among Gentiles while serving Jews’ ethnic self-interest. (For discussions of MacDonald’s work on the Jewish Left, see here and here.)

This theory, however, flies in the face of the fact that today’s Jewish Left is radically critical of Israel. Jewish academics like Noam Chomsky, Joel Kovel, and Jacqueline Rose vociferously accuse Israel of being a racist state that has brought only suffering to the world. Some of these intellectuals even call for the dissolution of the Jewish state and advocate a South Africa style boycott of Israel in order to force it to make concessions towards Palestinians. In sum, today’s Jewish Left subjects Israelis to the same treatment as it has historically given American whites.

The most famous and influential of these new self-hating Jews is Noam Chomsky. Like all of the intellectuals discussed here, he is plainly the descendant of the anti-racist Jewish Left. Like Frankfurt School and New Left intellectuals, Chomsky’s project is to link America, capitalism, and Nazism together as though there were no moral difference between them.

Yet Chomsky is no kinder to Israel. As Paul Bogdanor concludes in his review of Chomsky’s writings on the Jewish state:

In Noam Chomsky’s books, essays and public campaigns stretching back for decades, one theme is constant: his portrayal of the state of Israel as the focus of evil in the Middle East, a malevolent outlaw whose only redeeming feature is the readiness of its own left-wing intelligentsia to expose its uniquely horrifying depravity.

Chomsky is willing to falsify the historical evidence in his campaign to demonize Israel. Thus, he exaggerates the number of Arab civilians killed during wars in the region and misquotes Israeli leaders in order to make it look as though they ordered war crimes. Chomsky also ignores atrocities committed by the PLO, who are blameless freedom fighters in his works, against both Jews and Palestinians. And of course Chomsky says Israel has “points of similarity” with the Nazi regime—no one can stop this man when he’s on a roll.

Beyond this, Chomsky desires the dissolution of the Jewish state. Chomsky supports the formation of a bi-national Israel in which Palestinians and Jews would live side by side, despite the fact that such an amalgamation would end the Jewish character of the country and lead to ethnic violence on a massive scale.

Jewish leftist? Certainly. Hyperethnocentric? I don’t think so!

As is clear from Alvin H. Rosenfeld’s review article on Jewish anti-Zionists, there is a large community of Jewish academics and other intellectuals whose views of Israel are similar to Chomsky’s. The anguished laments of these self-hating Jews fills two recent collections of articles, Wrestling with Zion: Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and Radicals, Rabbis, and Peacemakers: Conversations with Jewish Critics of Israel. For example, Joel Kovel, a professor at Bard College, calls Zionism “equivalent to a form of racism” and believes to be a true Jew, one must work to “annihilate the Jewish state.” Steve Quester asks if Israelis are “going to build gas chambers and kill [all Palestinians].” Rabbi David Weiss says that Zionists have been “worse than Hitler.”

Like Chomsky, these Jewish anti-Zionists exaggerate and even fabricate Israeli war crimes. Thus, Jacqueline Rose, a British academic who has called for a boycott of Israel, refers in her anti-Zionist tract The Question of Zion to “the razing [of] the [West Bank] town of Jenin” by the Israeli military. Jenin was, in fact, not razed. The source of Rose’s error was reports by the Palestinian Authority in 2002 that Israel had committed a “massacre” that killed more than 500 people in the town. Subsequent investigation revealed that 56 Palestinians in Jenin died, most of them combatants, along with 23 Israeli soldiers. Israel ordered the strike on the town because terrorist networks there had been responsible for dozens of suicide bomb attacks on Israel.

Other self-hating Jews are the so-called “New Historians,” a group of Israeli academics, including Benny Morris, Avi Schlaim, and Ilan Pappe, who have argued that Arabs were the victims of Jewish aggression in the 1948 Israeli War of Independence and that Israelis expelled Arabs according to a pre-meditated plan. Efraim Karsh of King’s College in London has demonstrated conclusively that many of the New Historians’ claims were based on distortions of historical records. The 1948 war was precipitated by Arab aggression against Israel, and there was no Israeli plan to expel Palestinians, who departed the territory of their own will due to fear-mongering by Arab leaders.

I don’t believe anyone has ever tabulated the percentage of Jewish intellectuals who are anti-Zionist, but it cannot be considered a trivial or peripheral movement in the Jewish community. After all, many Jewish anti-Zionists enjoy great prestige—Noam Chomsky is perhaps the world’s most famous political commentator, and many of the intellectuals discussed in Rosenfeld’s review write regularly for influential periodicals like Britain’s The Guardian and the The New York Review of Books.

Jewish anti-Zionism is influential enough to affect coverage of Israel by Jews in the mainstream media. As I pointed out last week, pro-Israeli groups have convincingly argued that the New York Times, which is owned and substantially administered by Jews, takes an anti-Israeli, pro-Palestinian slant.

The viewpoint of anti-Zionist Jewish intellectuals indicates that Jews are actually much less ethnocentric than other peoples are. After all, how many blacks, Mexicans, or Japanese fabricate reasons to hate their people, as Chomsky and Rose do by inventing or exaggerating Israeli acts of aggression? The intellectual classes of most races generally do as much as they can to portray their own in a positive light, rather than vilifying them. Only Gentile whites share with Jews the yen to slander their own people.

MacDonald certainly puts together a powerful case that the Jewish Left has historically been extremely hostile to white Gentile ethnocentrism. However, the existence of an anti-Zionist Jewish Left today suggests that Jewish ethnic self-interest was not the major source of the “culture of critique.” Rather, it seems more likely that Jewish Leftists are motivated by extreme anti-authoritarianism and anti-nationalism, which they apply consistently both to Jewish and Gentile nations. Moreover, the willingness of today’s Jewish Left to slander and call for the abolition of Israel renders MacDonald’s theory of a biological Jewish hyperethnocentrism highly doubtful.

It seems MacDonald’s portrait of the hypocritical Jew animated by a covert lust for ethnic power is an ugly and unjustified stereotype that ought to be repudiated.