Exchange with Michael Neumann

This is Michael Neuman’s reply to the 1 March entry entitled ‘Michael Neumann, the Canadian Jewish Congress, and antisemitism’, originally posted as a comment on that entry.

Thanks for sending me your post. I think (and hope) I've answered most of your concerns about my position on the Israel/Palestine conflict elsewhere, so I'll confine my attention to antisemitism.

For a start, I'd like to head off any misunderstanding about this quotation:

‘... since we are obliged to oppose the settlements, we are obliged to be anti-Semitic. Through definitional inflation, some form of anti-Semitism becomes morally obligatory.’

This could use more context. The sentence quoted describes the consequences of a ridiculous definition of antisemitism: "Suppose, for example, an Israeli rightist says that the settlements represent the pursuit of aspirations fundamental to the Jewish people, and to oppose the settlements is antisemitism." In the article it is crystal clear that I reject this definition and its consequences. The article makes clear that I do not consider any form of antisemitism, properly defined, acceptable or obligatory.

Next, a brief comment on your remarks that

"When people accuse ‘most Germans’ of complicity with Nazi atrocities, they are not levelling that accusation against US citizens born in Germany, much less their grandchildren. If they did, they would rightly suffer accusations of racism. The significance of German complicity, as far as I’m concerned, is that they were there, in Germany watching their Jewish neighbours carted off during the Holocaust. If they were ignorant of what ‘their’ government was doing, it was a thoroughly wilful ignorance. And presumably they, more than anyone, could do something about it.

"This is quite different from Neumann’s accusation of complicity by ‘most Jews’ in Israel’s crimes. He’s implicating people whose ancestors haven’t stepped on Palestinian soil for 2000 years! Diaspora Jews individually per se have no influence over Israeli government policy. There are organisations in the US and perhaps elsewhere that may be able to exercise some influence, but they are not at all representative."

First, when I discussed these matters, I meant just what I said. I said that we might not want to accuse someone making these accusations of antisemitism, because there is a quite reasonable case for them. This does not mean I endorsed the accusations. There is a quite reasonable case for the accusation that Bush was lying about weapons of mass destruction, but I do not endorse it: I happen to think he's just a self-deceiving idiot. There is a quite reasonable case that the Palestinian tactics are self-destructive, but I do not endorse it. There is a quite reasonable case that free trade is the best route to prosperity in developing countries, but I do not endorse it. My point was that assertions for which there is a reasonable case may not be racist, not that those assertions are true, and certainly not that I endorse them.

Now many diaspora Jews are very proud of their support for Israel. In many cases this support is material, and I'm sure these Jews would loudly affirm their complicity in what Israel does. But I do not support the accusation of complicity against Jews in general, or 'the Jews', and I gave my reasons in the piece cited: "...perhaps the whole notion of collective responsibility should be discarded; perhaps some clever person will convince us that we have to do this." I am uncomfortable with the whole idea of collective responsibility; in general I consider it a dangerous notion. However I don't have a strong case against the use of that notion. That's why I don't actually say it should be discarded. Though I can't reject the notion out of hand, my doubt is quite sufficient keep me from endorsing notions of collective responsibility applied to Jews or to any other large group.

As for your criticism of my analogy, diaspora Germans who actively supported the German government certainly were accused of complicity. Very large numbers of Americans were of German origin (including the US commander in chief, Dwight Eisenhower), and very few of them actively or even passively supported the German government. Many fought against that government. So there was little inclination to include German-Americans when speaking of alleged German collective responsibility. However, the situation with Jews and Israel is very different. Israel was conceived by and dedicated to diaspora Jewry. In the 1940s, diaspora and particularly American Jewish support for Zionism (and then Israel) was crucial. Ever since (or at least until very recently) it has been massive, public, and insistent. No doubt you could count the number of Jews who fought against Israel - if there are any to count - on the fingers of one hand. Israelis themselves acknowledge that American Jews have had a profound and uncompromisingly Zionist influence on Israeli policy: whether individually or collectively has little relevance to the matter at hand. So I do think that, were the standard of complicity applied to 'the Germans' also applied to diaspora Jews, diaspora Jews would indeed be counted as complicit and collectively responsible.

On the other hand - in keeping with what I said earlier - I personally reject the notion of (non-diaspora) German collective responsibility. One reason is that many Germans fought against the rise of Nazism. I also think the idea that Germans should have resisted Hitler's rule demands of Germans what no other people would have managed in their shoes. So the 'quite reasonable case' for German collective responsibility does not in the least incline me to accept the case for Jewish collective responsibility. Once again, though that case may be quite reasonable, I do not think it at all conclusive and I do not accept it.

Finally, a small point about the seriousness of antisemitism. Though I do think concern about antisemitism is vastly exaggerated, I believe one bad consequence of this exaggeration is its tendency to blind us to genuine dangers. That's why I said: "This is not to belittle all antisemitism, everywhere. One often hears of vicious antisemites in Poland and Russia, both on the streets and in government." Since that sentence was written, violence against Jews, at least in Russia, has been at least as serious as in Western Europe, probably much more so. But because this violence is less suited to anti-Muslim propaganda, it is largely ignored, e.g. in this case: http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=2862307. It's not just that the Zionist agenda makes too much of antisemitism. When an instance of antisemitism doesn't suit their purposes, Zionists make too little of it.

Michael

When I received that I replied

Dear Michael,

Thanks for your response and for the useful link to that gross story about the Yekaterinburg murder. I have posted it as a comment under the blog post it responds to. I will post my own rejoinder once I’ve finished drafting it, which unfortunately may not be until some time tomorrow. You might like to have a look at the blog site, as there have been a couple of other comments.

One issue that remains obscure to me from what I’ve read is where you stand on the question of the Jewish state. The Counterpunch article seemed to suggest you rejected it, while the response to the CJC explicitly accepted it. If memory serves, so did The case against Israel. Would you care to clarify that?

In solidarity,

Harry

This is my full response to his reply. He subsequently replied to my question about the Jewish state, which I post below, along with my response.

In reply to Michael’s response to the entry I posted on Thursday, first, I think he concludes with two very useful and important points. One is that exaggeration of the seriousness of the current threat of antisemtiism has ‘tendency to blind us to genuine dangers’. The second is that

It's not just that the Zionist agenda makes too much of antisemitism. When an instance of antisemitism doesn't suit their purposes, Zionists make too little of it.

He exemplifies this with the ABC News report of the sentencing of five Russian teenagers for the gruesome hate murder of a young Jewish man in October 2005 by stabbing him with a cross.

In case there is any doubt, I did not intend to accuse Michael of suggesting anti-Semitism in the definition I identified as the one I thought he preferred was ‘acceptable or obligatory’. The point I was trying to make was that I thought his caricature of the definition of anti-Semitism as opposition to the settlements and associated tongue in cheek assertion that it made anti-Semitism thus defined ‘morally obligatory’ was a clever rhetorical trick.

The balance of his reply deals with the issue of collective responsibility. He starts out his discussion by asserting

I meant just what I said. I said that we might not want to accuse someone making these accusations of antisemitism, because there is a quite reasonable case for them. This does not mean I endorsed the accusations.

Clearly, I don’t possess the subtlety of a professional philosopher, because it seems to me that when you assert that ‘there is a quite reasonable case for’ something, it suggests an obligation to refute that case if you ‘do not endorse it’. Actually my understanding is so crude that to me, ‘I happen to think’ doesn’t constitute a refutation.

He proceeds to offer three examples of reasonable cases, without actually making those cases explicit.

There is a quite reasonable case for the accusation that Bush was lying about weapons of mass destruction, but I do not endorse it: I happen to think he's just a self-deceiving idiot. There is a quite reasonable case that the Palestinian tactics are self-destructive, but I do not endorse it. There is a quite reasonable case that free trade is the best route to prosperity in developing countries, but I do not endorse it. My point was that assertions for which there is a reasonable case may not be racist, not that those assertions are true, and certainly not that I endorse them.

It may not be a coincidence that I disagree with his position on two of those reasonable cases and don’t agree that there really is a reasonable case for the third at all. But that’s not part of my argument. The point he concludes with is baffling. I’d have thought that there were certain kinds of cases where the question of racism can’t possibly arise and is thoroughly irrelevant and all three of his examples are among them. For racism to be an issue, the subject of the ‘case’ must be a group of people that can somehow be constructed as a race in the mind of a racist. It’s not absolutely crucial that some racist have already constructed the race – you can construct a new one in your own mind.

Michael writes

I am uncomfortable with the whole idea of collective responsibility; in general I consider it a dangerous notion. However I don't have a strong case against the use of that notion. That's why I don't actually say it should be discarded. Though I can't reject the notion out of hand, my doubt is quite sufficient keep me from endorsing notions of collective responsibility applied to Jews or to any other large group.

The paragraph at issue from the CounterPunch article, reads in full

Well, virtually no Jew is in any kind of danger from speaking out. And speaking out is the only sort of resistance required. If many Jews spoke out, it would have an enormous effect. But the overwhelming majority of Jews do not, and in the vast majority of cases, this is because they support Israel. Now perhaps the whole notion of collective responsibility should be discarded; perhaps some clever person will convince us that we have to do this. But at present, the case for Jewish complicity seems much stronger than the case for German complicity. So if it is not racist, and reasonable, to say that the Germans were complicit in crimes against humanity, then it is not racist, and reasonable, to say the same of the Jews. And should the notion of collective responsibility be discarded, it would still be reasonable to say that many, perhaps most adult Jewish individuals support a state that commits war crimes, because that's just true. So if saying these things is antisemitic, than it can be reasonable to be antisemitic.

First of all, I think Michael is right if what he’s saying that all that is ‘morally’ required of any Jew is to speak out. But it will require a great deal more than ‘many Jews’ speaking out to, say, force Israel to evacuate all the settlements, if that’s what he means by ‘an enormous effect’, much less to transform Israel into a democratic ‘state of all its citizens’ or the like. It would require withholding donations from organisations like the JNF, and the American Jewish Congress, not to mention AIPAC and the like. It would also require a real concerted campaign to get the US government to desist from financing the settlements, the D9 bulldozers, the helicopter gunships, and the cluster bombs. Israel is a US strategic asset and the US will not part with it just because it offends Jewish sensibilities.

Second, I think the argument in the paragraph supports his assertion that he is uncomfortable with the notion of collective responsibility. When he couches his discussion of what is ‘not racist, and reasonable’ as a condition, he can sustain a claim that he is not advocating the positions he outlines, which I suppose must be his point. But I think he could have strengthened the case that he rejects collective responsibility if he had acknowledged that it is racist, and unreasonable, to implicate Germans as a ‘race’ or ethnicity in the Nazis’ crimes, as it is to implicate all Jews in the Israelis’ crimes.

In the next paragraph, he mentions that ‘diaspora Germans who actively supported the German government certainly were accused of complicity’, and in my view, this was in fact racist. Later, he says, ‘I personally reject the notion of (non-diaspora) German collective responsibility’. I surmise this is a response to what I wrote about ‘wilful ignorance’. And I think it’s true that I may not have been sufficiently explicit that the point I was trying to make there was that I thought a more reasonable case could be made for non diaspora German complicity in Nazi crimes than for diaspora Jewish complicity in Israeli crimes – exactly the opposite of what he asserts on the grounds that it required greater courage for a German in Germany to fight the Nazis, as some did, than for a diaspora Jew to condemn Israel.

Ultimately, however, both arguments are sterile, because we both claim to reject collective responsibility. I disagree with him, however, that it requires a clever person to make a case to discard collective responsibility because I’m obviously not very clever by his standards and I’m going to do just that.

Wikipedia defines collective responsibility as

a concept, or doctrine, according to which people are to be held responsible for other people's actions by tolerating, ignoring, or harboring them, without actively collaborating in these actions.

I think there is actually an inconsistency in the definition itself, because harbouring sounds like active collaboration of a kind, as well. Significantly, the definition is silent on what I think is a crucial issue – whether it applies in the case of an otherwise uninvolved beneficiary of another’s actions. In any case, neither of those issues matters to my argument, because in the kinds of populations at issue it is altogether possible for all members to tolerate or ignore the crimes they are held responsible for, but not to harbour the perpetrators or materially benefit.

In this discussion, I’ll assume that that’s the sense in which Michael uses the term. So when he writes

Now many diaspora Jews are very proud of their support for Israel. In many cases this support is material, and I'm sure these Jews would loudly affirm their complicity in what Israel does. [my emphasis]

he’s actually describing three overlapping, but probably not entirely congruent, populations – those proud of their support, those who provide material support, and those who affirm their complicity.

As I read the definition, material support would constitute active collaboration, so the complicity of those who provide it is not in doubt and does not rely on the concept of collective responsibility. I hasten to add that I would exclude kids collecting pennies for the Jewish National Fund that they believe are just going to plant trees and not knowing that the trees are being planted to obliterate any trace of razed Palestinian villages.

Taking pride in offering moral support for crimes against humanity, and even claiming responsibility, does not, in my view, constitute active collaboration. It’s deplorable, it’s disgusting, but it’s not complicity. So if we assign collective blame to these groups – ‘diaspora Jews [who] are very proud of their support for Israel’, or who ‘loudly affirm their complicity’, or both – that would constitute a case of collective responsibility. And it would definitely be anti-Semitic to blame them for Israel’s atrocities for the simple reason that to do so singles out Jews who proudly support and affirm their complicity in Israeli crimes while excluding the Gentiles who do the same thing.

There are actually two related arguments against collective responsibility. One of them is that it holds people responsible for crimes that they had no hand in setting in motion, committing, encouraging, aiding, or abetting. It was entirely out of their control that the crime was committed. They could not have averted it. In this way, it is unjust to hold them accountable, even if they are pleased at the outcome. It undermines the fundamental rights that ordinary people have fought for for centuries to due process and so forth.

Two factors make it even worse. One is that collective punishment can impact on people even beyond the population held collectively responsible. The other is that a population can be collectively punished for a crime that none of them had any hand in, or even when there was no crime at all. For example, when in 2002, the Afghan government demanded evidence from the US government before they would undertake to hand over Osama bin Laden, all Afghans were held collectively responsible, and punished accordingly. Imagine a Pakhtun family from Peshawar visiting relatives over the border in Afghanistan. They could have been bombed to smithereens even though they were not Afghans, and therefore not among the population held responsible at all. And of course they were being punished not for a crime anyone had committed, but for a thoroughly unrepresentative government refusing to commit one.

The second argument is that there is a strong tendency to assign collective responsibility on an explicitly racist basis, as with the diaspora Jews applauding Israeli crimes, or nationalist basis, as with the Afghans. The problem with racism and nationalism is that they are divisive ideologies. They erect artificial barriers between people with genuinely, inherently common material interests, setting them against each other, while creating the illusion of common interests with our own oppressors, just because they may happen to be Jewish or Canadian. Indeed, it is precisely these bogus groupings, and the assignment of collective responsibility in particular, that makes wholesale and retail terrorism possible. Sometimes the motivation is to punish those held responsible collectively. For example, presumably the Serbs had to be bombed to punish them for ‘their’ treatment of the Kosovars. Sometimes it is to provide an incentive to stop what they are collectively responsible for. For example, the bombing and shelling of Gaza last summer was explicitly to get the Gazans collectively to release Cpl Shalit, or to stop launching Qassam rockets. The attack on the World Trade Centre presumably was to get ‘the Americans’ to stop…well all the stuff Americans are held collectively responsible for, supporting Israel, stationing troops in Saudi Arabia…

I might just add parenthetically, that the myth of democracy feeds right into this. If it were really true, as the propagandists assert, that Americans control ‘their’ government, because it’s so democratic and all, the terrorists would be right to hold them collectively responsible. No, not really, after all, it would only be the majority who really deserved the dirty bomb, not everybody.

So the reasons we have to reject collective responsibility are basically that it undermines some of the rights we’ve won through generations of struggle and at the same time the kind of solidarity that will allow us to win further struggles, including, ultimately, the struggle to build a truly democratic society based on cooperation rather than competition, where we can work together to meet human need and nurture our only planet.

Not as complicated as all that, really.

This is Michael’s reply to my query about the Jewish state.

Hi Harry,

My position on the question of a Jewish state is pretty much stated in The Case, but maybe not all in one place.

'Jewish state' is ambiguous and Zionists make use of this ambiguity. Some pretend that Israel is simply for Jews as some states are for Muslims; that it is religiously Jewish. This might be objectionable but it's not nearly as bad as the reality: that Israel is a state committed to preserving ethnic Jewish sovereignty over the entire population, whatever its members' ethnicity. This commitment should be abhorrent to any civilized person and especially to Jews, who have suffered to much because of ethnic nationalism.

Does Israel have a right to exist? The idea that states have such a right is bizarre. States are abstract entities. For a state to cease existing is for institutions to disappear and be replaced by other institutions. The death of a state, as opposed to the death of human beings, need raise no concern. It's a matter of concern if people are harmed in the process, but that's because of the rights of the people, not the alleged rights of the state.

On the other hand, there are circumstances in which states, however illegitimate or abhorrent, have a right to defend themselves, and therefore, derivatively, to preserve their existence. This right is not intrinsic; it does not follow from the mere fact that something is a state. Instead it is parasitic on the rights of the population controlled by the state. States have a right to defend their existence is that's required for the legitimate defense of some or all of its population.

Clearly there are possible cases in which Israel would have, in exactly this sense, a right to defend itself. Suppose, for example, a fanatical Christian state attacked Israel in an effort to destroy all non-Christians there, in order to fulfill some prophecy or other. Israel would have an obligation not to let this happen and therefore, derivatively, to defend its existence. As for the cases I've had in mind in other contexts, they're something like the following.

Suppose there is a comprehensive peace agreement which includes the complete evacuation of the occupied territories and the creation of a Palestinian state. There might be other elements to the agreement, for instance that Israel pays compensation to the Palestinians, makes various territorial concessions, and undertakes negotiations to explore the possibility of a single secular state over the whole of Palestine.

This might not be a just or adequate solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict, which would be supremely unsurprising. History isn't big on doling out justice. But it might be a sufficient reason for the Palestinians not to pursue further gains through attacks on civilians. Suppose, therefore, that some Palestinians, or the Palestinian state, fired rockets at civilian population centers in Israel. Because the inhabitants of those population centers would in these circumstances have a right of self-defense, Israel would have a right to use reasonable force to stop the attacks. This might include not only returning fire but cross-border incursions. To say this is to say no more than what has always been considered the right of any state, however criminal its nature or origins.

None of this means that Israel's derivative right to self-defense applies to the current situation. Rights of self-defense do not apply to aggressors. I've discussed the implications of this elsewhere.

Michael Neumann

And my reply

Dear Michael,

Thanks for getting back to me on that. As a matter of fact, I was just glancing through some of the passages I had highlighted in The case against Israel and trying to work out your position. I appreciate that the concept that a ‘right to exist’ is plain silly when it comes to states. If there were such a thing, the demise of the USSR or Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia would seem to have definitively nullified it.

I kind of agree with you about the ambiguity of Jewish state. Certainly, Jew, Jewish, even Jewry, are ambiguous in a way that Judaism, the religion, is not. People even more pedantic than me sometimes insist that Judenstadt must be translated ‘state of the Jews’. Since both religion and ethnicity are categories that apply to persons and populations rather than to states, I think they are right. In that context, of course, at some abstract level, it could in principle be the state of the Jews who practice Judaism or of the Jews who are of Jewish ethnicity. But in practice, Zionism was always a response to anti-Semitism, a form of racism. Race, as I always argue, is a social category constructed on a fictive biological basis by racists. Antisemites may use religious observance as a marker of Jewishness, as indeed the Nuremburg Laws did, actually descent from a member of the religious community, but I don’t believe that those carrying out pogroms interrogated their victims closely on their observance of the laws of kashruth. For Herzl and all the other Zionist thinkers, therefore, the ‘state of the Jews’ was always the state of the Jewish ethnicity. And moreso, if possible, in the wake of the Shoah. I am not aware of Zionists exploiting the ambiguity as you assert. While the pretense that a claim to Palestine is thoroughly secular is transparent, there has always been a pretense of secularism. Even though the Orthodox rabbinate has control of some administrative functions and Jewish religious holidays are state holidays, there is no sense that Israel could present itself as the state of the Jewish religion.

You are probably also right to assert that states have an in principle obligation to protect the wellbeing of their citizens, although I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t couch this in terms of a right to self defence. Certainly Israel does a positively ratshit job of protecting the wellbeing of Israeli nationals, even of Jewish ones, with the high levels of child poverty and domestic violence it presides over, quite apart from the question of the Israeli Arabs, who didn’t even have the benefit of bomb shelters in last summers’ war. But since you assert that aggressors do not have a right to self defence, it’s hard for me to see how it could ever apply in the case of Israel, since it was founded on aggression which will remain unresolved at least until the refugees exercise their right of return, or accept compensation at their sole discretion.

But that’s not really what I thought I was asking about. My question, which I think is quite a different one, is whether you reckon it’s ok for a state to constitute itself specifically for the benefit of a particular ethnic group? And if so, whether it’s ok to carry out ethnic cleansing in pursuit of that objective? And if so, whether it’s ok in the particular circumstances of Israel, specifically established as, in Herzl’s words, ‘a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism’? And continuing in its role as watchdog for US imperialism in the Middle East? I generally take advocacy of a two state ‘solution’, which can only mean a commitment to preservation of Israel’s ‘Jewish character’, as implying affirmative answers to those questions. Formulae like ‘I do not advocate the destruction of Israel or even insist on implementing a Palestinian right of return’, or your declaration in the very second sentence of The case against Israel that your biases are ‘pro-Israel’, also typically imply affirmative answers. From my perspective, however, you articulate views elsewhere that appear to reject the Zionist project. In particular, your write here, ‘This [a state for the Jewish religion] might be objectionable but it's not nearly as bad as the reality: that Israel is a state committed to preserving ethnic Jewish sovereignty over the entire population, whatever its members' ethnicity. This commitment should be abhorrent to any civilized person and especially to Jews, who have suffered to much because of ethnic nationalism.’ I think that answers my question.

…

In solidarity,

Harry