Old Wine in Old Wineskins

Speaking frankly about Zionism

The Temple in Jesus’ day, model photographed by Dennis Jarvis / Flickr

These are difficult topics and we are in momentous times, so we should make every effort to be sensitive, but also clear and not afraid to say what is true, especially with a conclave beginning in two days.

I think that when the real death count in Gaza is reckoned, a lot of Jews in the diaspora will be so horrified that it will cause a profound shock to them, and I think that many of them, when they think it through, will become Christians. The right thing to do is help them, and that’s why antisemitism is not helpful—it is a barrier to the conversion of Jews.

After the Holocaust, because of the unique nature of those crimes, Jews did play a unique role, both as victims and people who shaped the post-genocide legal frameworks, in building the international order which is now collapsing. It is now collapsing thanks mostly to the Israeli government.

These frameworks aspired to be universal, which is to say they aspired to be applicable to all governments and all human beings. Judaism is not a universal religion. It depends on a specific people, and in its historic form, is also tied to a specific place. It is not difficult to see the position of a person like Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. God has promised Israel to the Jews in perpetuity and regardless of their conduct, therefore anything is justified to protect that, including genocide. In other words, the genocide in Gaza is conducted according to the precepts of the Jewish religion as many Israelis and Zionists in diaspora see them. Jeffrey Peoples goes into this thinking more deeply here.

Fortunately most diaspora Jews do not actually believe this. The process of Jewish integration with Christian societies has left diaspora Jews in the West shaped by Christian culture, and the reverse is to some extent true as well. This integration involved appealing to the universalistic basis of Christianity, though thanks to the changes in law attendant to modern revolutions, they were not required to accept the actual religion. This process of integration took hundreds of years, and involved dissolving the assumption, taken as a given for thousands of years, that a body politic depended upon a common faith.

In other words, the style of moral reasoning of most liberal Jews has much more in common with a liberal protestant than it does with an Orthodox Jew. There is much truth to the Hasidic joke, “what do you call a reform Jew?” “A Christian.” The world order established after the Holocaust was premised on universalistic assumptions that are actually foreign to Judaism, and have more in common with Christianity. Thus, the style of moral reasoning of most liberal Jews is actually Christian, and reflects hundreds of years of assimilation.

The assumption of liberal Jews is that Judaism has something to offer to everyone, and in the sense of ethical lessons or scripture, it does. But if God has made a specific covenant with a specific people in a specific place, then if we are to assume these promises, dignities, and rights now apply to everyone, everywhere, as the international institutions of the postwar order assume, that raises the troubling question of how God might have provided for it. If God has not provided for it, it does not exist. To Christians, he has in the person of Jesus, who opens God’s covenant to all people. In other words, and Orthodox Jews would mostly agree with this, the moral reasoning of liberal Jews since the Second World War is premised on the person of Christ—it is residually Christian.

The idea of a genocide committed by Jews is profoundly destabilizing to this order, since its basis is a genocide committed against Jews rather than Christ, and in observing what is actually going on in the moment, Israel seems to be busily engaged in the task of dissolving the basis for the United Nations and International Criminal Court. There is nothing more likely to inherit their role of supporting the idea of universal jurisdiction than the Roman Church, and there may not be any other which can. This may suggest that a pope who speaks Hebrew, like Patriarch Pizzaballa, might be beneficial.

There is a tempting but unhelpful point that it would be of a piece with the story of the Old Testament for the Jews to once again have an independent state in Syria Palaestina and within a century start misbehaving again, with the attendant divine consequences sure to follow—an argument that makes sense from a Christian perspective just as it was widely believed the destruction of the Temple was divine punishment for the rejection of Christ. But that begs the question from a Jewish one, since there is a strong argument that according to the principles of Judaism, especially in the writing of Orthodox rabbis where the human dignity of non-Jews is routinely denigrated, Israel’s conduct in Gaza is not misbehavior at all.

Thus there is an inherent hostility between Christianity and the type of Judaism taking root in Israel today, which you can see in Israel’s actions in Syria. They are very happy to play the role of protectors of the Druze, but because the type of Judaism to which many Israelis adhere is fundamentally hostile to Christians, it is not the Syrian Christian minority which they choose to protect. It is not a coincidence that in all our post-9/11 wars of Israeli aggrandizement, the people who suffer most are Christians. The reason why is that Israel is, as a nation, hostile to the Christian faith, just as it was in the time of Jesus, as you can see in the legal persecution of Christians in Jerusalem.

It is nevertheless objectively true that the great majority of Jews throughout the world and a large number in Israel are very uncomfortable with the direction things are taking, do not approve of it, and probably would want something done to fix it.

It would be beneficial then to start clarifying what we mean when we talk about Zionism. The way the Israel lobby in the U.S. talks about Zionism is almost like a Jewish shahada, they’ll approach a politician, ask him, do you believe Israel has a right to exist? When that politician, who may not have even thought about it, considers the proposition reasonable—indeed, it’s trivial because it is assumed by our diplomatic relationship—and says yes, they’ll tell him he is therefore a Zionist.

This is not really the level of affective attachment in which nationalism consists. One can believe, for instance, France has all the rights attendant to the ius gentium, without being a French nationalist, and the same is true with Israel. Thinking a foreign country has all the rights proper to one recognized by the country in which one lives, is not the same thing as being a nationalist of that foreign country, which is what the lobby tries to fudge.

The genocide in Gaza is the limit for secular Zionism. It is indefensible as conduct proper to a nation among the world’s community of nations, so it must be defended on the principle that Jews have a special right to commit genocide to extend Israel’s control over a homeland they believe God has given them. There is no warrant for this in the Christian religion. Jewish assimilation in the Christian West has always been premised on the idea that Jews deserve the same rights as any other people, and the only way to defend this conduct is by appealing to special rights. This violates most people’s sense of fairness, including most Jews, and it renders Israel less Western, a fact the composite term “Judeo-Christian” is meant to obscure.

The problem which exists specifically for the United States is that since the end of the Cold War the United States has at least aspired to be the guarantor of the ius gentium, and we have always made an exception for Israel. This exception is discrediting for the United States as well, and makes it harder to play that role. Therefore the Israel lobby is selfishly harming the global leadership of the United States, which suits the foreign policy goals of Russia and China.