NYC "War rabbi" Ammiel Hirsch's latest attack on the anti-Zionist left

NYC "War rabbi" Ammiel Hirsch's latest attack on the anti-Zionist left

If anyone is interested in looking more closely at the October 16 attack on Zohran Mamdani by Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch of Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, I suggest looking at his sermon on October 11, 2023, especially the last few minutes. It is available at swfs.org, where all his sermons are posted and archived.

The more banal points of rebuttal are easily enough derived from Hirsch's 10/16 remarks, and I encourage others to look closely at them.

Hirsch articulates the kind of wishful thinking that is receptive to the political instrumentalization of myth when he claims to “represent the views of the large majority of the New York Jewish community.”  Except as a desideratum, this statement is false.  Polls indicate that 58% of American Jews oppose the Gaza war, and 44% of Jews in New York sympathize more the Palestinians than with Israel.

The rabbinate, certainly in Reform Judaism, is well to the right of its congregations. They don't want you to know this. They are worried about keeping younger Jews in line. They are more representative of their donor basis than their membership, as is true of every non-profit organization.

Indeed, Rabbi Hirsch has spoken of his efforts to try to squelch anti-Zionism in rabbinical seminaries as well as on college campuses. Where such a crackdown did indeed take place.

And on 10/11/23 Hirsch shook his fist and all but called for war. When he says "the Jewish people will live," viewers could understand this meant "the Jewish state will wage a ruthless war of conquest." And so they did.

Hirsch misleadingly represents the position of the anti-Zionist left.  It is true that it may sound provocative to say that we oppose "the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish state," but what does that mean?   We on the left, including the Jewish left, are not in favor of exiling Israel’s Jewish inhabitants, are in favor its citizens and residents dismantling Apartheid.  What will that mean?  But isn’t this obvious?  It will mean that, as now, there are several million Jews in this land and it has plenty of Jewish life in it in every sense, and it will also mean that they continue to cohabit with several million Palestinian people who will, finally, live in a state that is also theirs because while it will be certainly still be a state “of Jews,” which is not exactly the same as “the Jews,” it will be a place that is “not for Jews alone,” a former colony whose colonists have at last recognized that the price of trying to live with the natives is a better alternative to that of eliminating them; a state home to many Jews that will no longer be, constitutionally and legally, or otherwise, a “Jewish state.”  To affirm a Zionism that refuses say this as impossible is to insist on a project that is impossible, which is surely also true, ultimately, of so many international projects engaged in militarily by the United States. 
 
In New York we have much Jewish life, but without a governmental apparatus claiming to embody some associated entity, let alone enforce its prerogatives.  If it did, I would be worrying less about all those happily included than whoever might be excluded.  That — identitarian collective narcisssism and its nasty political effects — is a major problem today in America and elsewhere.  It’s often deadly for those whose fate is to be imprisoned, tortured, or “disappeared,” as is always the case in fascist regimes.  I think too of German history, from which I draw different lessons than those promoted by the mythologized historical legends sustaining the Zionist project. 
  
There is a common idea now of Judaism itself as largely amounting to an identity cult of Jewish people.  Indeed, I think that may be the ultimate problem with the American Jewish world and the way it both has been organized and thinks of itself.  This is always implicitly Zionist even when not explicitly so. 
 
The political trajectory of Jewish life in America in recent decades is interestingly relevant.   There was a broad turn to identity politics in America after 1968, and the rise of contemporary Israelism among American Jewry, which only occurred after the 1967 war, was part of this, and there is a still inadequately understood history to be told about this, in part because it is also the story of what happened to the American left.  Black, feminist, gay, and other identity politics certainly had their just reasons for being and real achievements, but it was a turn away from a politics that fundamentally questioned both American militarism and ‘imperialism’ and capitalism, which of course underlies it.  A Jewish identity politics arose at the same time in response to the 1967 war, which was used to support a rising right-wing agenda, centered, for Jews, around Israel (and the funding of its military).  There had more than once been a robust Jewish left.  It was repeatedly attacked and destroyed, including in two Red Scares, and Stalinism was enough of a debacle on its own grounds to give American conservatives and liberals plenty of opportunity to do so.  The new left that formed in the 1960s was also attacked and defeated, its violent repression easily forgotten, and its themes coopted, giving rise to forms of black, feminist, and gay politics that were all too often skewed to the interests of the professional classes, and thus also not challenging the corporate power that reasserted itself in “neoliberal” terms (setting up a “culture war” since a faction of the ruling elites manifestly favored various forms of cultural and lifestyle liberalization), and cults of “therapy” and a drug industry that was both highly profitable, in both its licit and illicit forms, and could be used to feed both the, also enormously profitable, medical and attendant therapeutic/spirituality industries and that of prisons and the attendant punitive moralities, helped depoliticize disaffection and deviance.  The same year the American government engineered the fascist coup in Chile, the Watergate scandal was used to transform widespread opposition to a genocidal war into the scandalous behavior of a corrupt individual tyrant doubtless caused by what was in effect a mental illness.  Lost on the many Jewish promoters of the medical and psychological state and the attacks on narcissism and other broad cultural malaises, a campaign that begun during WW2 with American psychoanalysts claiming, doubtless quite plausibly, that Hitler was psychotic, is the fact that central to Nazism was a cult of physical and mental health.  So if fascism and other political disorders are sicknesses, and maybe German culture by way of targetable personalities along with it, then one can wonder if the victorious Americans were not actually taking over a fascist narrative on liberal pretenses.  Fascism in Europe was defeated broadly by a coalition of liberal and socialist forces, which was affirmed in American policy until the end of the war, and has been rejected since.      

I consider that those who (and all of us when we) do not view such developments critically are most likely to be contributing to them unwittingly while they focus on the concerns that do matter to them.  So where were most American Jews in this?  According to what is generally understood, now mostly middle class, on the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, but reliably supportive of one of American foreign policy’s key objects, the Jewish military state.  There was even little effective opposition to the war on terror, which the right wing of the Jewish world lent its support to in so many ways.  But the Gaza war changed this.  If only as far as Israel is concerned.  Rabbi Hirsch apparently does not know, or does not want to recognize, this.  I believe many Jews of my generation understood that if you want to be on the left, “Jewish” institutions will not help you.  Those who liked some things in the religion would go if they had no place else.  Politically, it offered nothing.  

Related to this Jewish avoidance is an American one, for a similar denial was orchestrated by the American establishment after the defeat in Vietnam in 1968 that was completed in 1975.  While France largely recognized as correct the  defeat of its colonial project in Algeria (and earlier in Vietnam), the US did not.  The dominant media narrative was that the war was a mistake because unwinnable and involved too many American military casualties.  Two million dead Vietnamese, mostly civilians, many killed with chemical and biological weapons, were not a problem.  The very successful cultural revolt that defined much of the 1960s in “the West,” against the disciplinary society and its highly familial, explicitly patriarchal, authoritarianism, was, when not violently counterattacked, appropriated in forms of subjectivity more befitting to office than factory life (and so also friendlier to more “feminine” persons and styles).  The obvious class character of the liberalisms that resulted fed the conservatism of the traditional working class, leading to where we are now.  The politics of the neoliberal period (roughly 1973-2008) was largely defined by the old liberal/conservative quarrel (on this, see, e.g., the work of Eugene Borowitz, Reform’s former unofficial head rabbi, for whom “liberal Judaism” is about personal liberty, posing a challenge around the idea of “community”) and the cultural wars.  Jewish liberal and progressive politics of the time largely fit into this schema, with cultural identity politics taken for granted and support for Zionism along with it. 

I think what happened with the Gaza war is that many Jews can now see much more plainly that  in some ways this conflict repeats that of Vietnam, as it is a colonial genocide, with the difference that Jews are now positioned quite uncomfortably in relation to it.  The citizens are told by the leaders, evidence readily presented to back the claim, that the war is for them.
This fact has sparked a level of opposition far greater than the horrible “war on terror” with its thousands of domestic casualties and hundreds of thousands abroad, also heavily marketed to Jewish as well as American audiences, of which it is also a continuation.  America’s own problem finds in Israel a grotesque but very real mirror image, as our shared problem is how to transition in a world of declining relative US power, to a properly postcolonial world.  To which of course one, horrifying, answer, has been that of Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, and right-wing governments everywhere: Actually (and with our back against the wall), we do not represent equal liberty (fraternity would be quite a laugh) or any other “democratic” or “liberal” principles at all, but only self-assertion through the defeat of all resistance by overwhelming force.  Liberals say, no, we can affirm our constitutional liberal state, and maybe that’s all we believe in.  Right-wing liberals would have it both ways, which is the stance of the Democratic Party and liberal Zionism.  Fascism tends to arise when liberalism effectively capitulates to it, having no credible alternative.  And then one might begin to notice how “conservative” many of these liberals were all along.     
 
One question now for the left is what to do with identity politics.  Under ferocious attack from the right, was it a mistaken direction now to be abandoned?  Perhaps, as the historian Perry Anderson has recently suggested, it will affirm it in weak terms in conjunction with claims made on the state by particular demographic groups, as in America, whose most important city, New York, is more diverse by ethnicity and language than any place in the world.  It is a bit more difficult for politicians here to rely on notions of whiteness (or Jewish identity), though not impossible.  Hirsch’s intervention in the current mayoral election campaign appears reliant on a weak formulation of identity, but elsewhere he has promoted a strong form of it indeed, as of course has the American Jewish leadership now for almost sixty years.  

Can the American Jewish world survive as an identity cult?  I have been witness to numerous conversations of Jews wanting to be on the left in some way (a continuing trend since 1967-68) and wondering how they can do as Jews, and most of what I have seen leaves me doubting that, for reasons that are linked what is limited in terms of any effective critique of capitalist militarism and neo-colonialism on any identity group terms.  I think what this will produce is an overlap between Jewish groups who say we should work with the left, and actual left organizations.  On the left we have legends from ancient literature of which the Exodus narrative is one, and historical experiences, which include the struggles against feudalism, against fascism, against holocausts, which for us on the left are not singular but plural, not in the past but ongoing, and not something a nation such as ours can claim to be outside of, and against capitalism.  (Thatcher was right in one sense: “there is no alternative” spatially; alternatives to what we do not like because it oppresses us (though not, I trust, Rabbi Hirsch, for I speak of American capitalism, no less, and its militarist and fascism forms and tendencies) are possibilities to be constructed in a future time).  There is in Jewish history much the international left can learn from, as is also true of other oppressed peoples.  Can the study of ancient literature also give us useful tools for a real project of liberation (of which Zionism is certainly not one today, whatever, in its ambiguous and contradictory ways, with their horrifying denouement today, it was at one time)?  I suspect so.  Hirsch, being on the right, at least by my lights, could not be interested in any such project, though I am.  There is now no longer a national liberation project for the Jewish people, who need to find not their constituent potential, to us Giorgio Agamben’s terms, but a  destituent potential.  That will be the peaceful dismantling of the Apartheid state.  
 
But what, you say, about those among the Palestinian people and other forces in the region who want to rid historic Palestine of its Jewish presence?  It is certainly quite possible and understandable to want that, though I do not believe many sane persons believe this is likely to occur.  The Jewish left to my knowledge does not want this, and while some Palestinians do, there is no way they can achieve this, and Hamas knows this as Israel certainly does. 
 
That fact gives the lie to all the claims that Israel is endangered.  This is an absurdity, as Israel is a massively armed regional superpower.  Could not Israel have defended its own people more satisfactorily using defensive measures alone?  Was this genocide its only option?  This has never been proven, and there was never much will to discuss the matter.  Rabbi Hirsch showed no interest in it.  Neither in his October 11 sermon nor anywhere else. That speech was a call for the war the right-wing leadership that dominates American Jewry wanted, along the sames lines whereby it has spent enormous effort and money since 1967 doing the best they can to make sure American Jews are kept in line supporting.  This is a problem for them as so many do not.  The response is to obscure or silence the dissenting voices as best they can, and they have done this also.  The closure of American university campuses, including here in New York City, is one result.  
 
Apartheid must be dismantled, and it will not happen through war.  As for Hamas, what should we say about highly compromised governments and insurgent organizations fighting to defend their people from foreign occupation and, in this case, genocide?  All the more if they commit atrocities, as has happened before (Stalin’s Red Army, which did play a crucial role in ending the Holocaust, is a good enough example)?  It actually is a simple matter: We are for the liberation struggle, and against the atrocities.  And we refuse to buy the canard that an atrocious war crime justifies a war of conquest and extermination.  
 
Since Hamas as an organization has what I consider some nasty fascist elements, and I think liberation movements of oppressed peoples should always regard the identitarian nationalist and religious tendencies as a liability, my solidarity is with the likes of Edward Said.  This is the Palestinian position that wants a secular democratic Palestine that will belong to everyone who lives there.  This will happen peacefully and it will happen when enough Jews, including in the United States, say no to Apartheid and ethnic cleansing, because they know that if I must keep you as my prisoner than I am a prisoner of the apparatus of imprisonment also.  Colonialism is that.  That the colonists and their descendants have some legitimate claims, we know, as we also know that whatever your opinion of the excesses of various anti-colonial movements and people with in them, the American, British, and Israeli project of rooting out all resistance, actual and possible, is doomed.  No one on the left I know of does not cry for colonists who are massacred by colonial subjects whether acting from strategy, desperation, or both.  We all prefer the least violent path to the postcolonial world.  Israel and its supporters, in a position strong enough to afford them much liberty of choice, have of course had no such interest at all.  But they and we must.  I doubt the Jewish world has a future otherwise, and its mainstream remains committed to one fewer among us can credit as worth saving, a very sad fact only if you believe nothing else is possible.  Maybe it is indeed easier to imagine the end of the world than that of capitalism and its nationalist militarism, in which case the specter of apocalypse can continue to in use as marketing scheme. 
 
The “paradox” is that Zionism was a kind of national liberation project and, being effectuated through displacement, in tragic inevitability, also a colonialist project. It is surely destined (at least this is its best hope) to be transformed, as South Africa was, into a post-colonial state.  Such eventualities have sometimes been forestalled with enormous violence.  Israel is, like the United States, both one of the world’s most prosperous states with many achievements, and one of its most repressive.  Emergent postcolonial societies have tended not to reject but build upon the achievements of capital and labor in the colonial period; it is one of the great myths sustaining fascist in declining colonial empires that the colonized just want to murder them all.  Such fears are readily evoked along with various specters in Jewish history as we know all too well.  Israel’s project has been marked throughout by concerted colonial violence and often desperate counter-violence, which is why the anxieties of Israelis that are easily justified when looking only at the situations with which they are immediately presented bear uncomfortable similarities to those of Americans still living with the consequences of slavery.   Only purists of theological dualisms will deny that good things happened under colonial rule; it is the incipiently fascist left that hates people they associate, rightly or wrongly, with it, and that remains a problem and doubtless will, though it would be lessened by improved conditions and an end to de facto segregation. I wonder how many American Jews realize how much the figuration in their own mediated political and social imaginary of Palestinians in revolt, expressed in all kinds of ways, draws upon their own relationship to black American life.  Today the left is mostly moving away from identity politics and back towards one rooted in class, and its politicians are talking mostly about local governance.  But you won’t get far asking us to go back on our commitment to ending Apartheid.   Any democratic socialist vision of America we want to build must be based on a principled opposition to the role of capital, any form of nationalism that goes beyond the minimal kind implicit in acknowledging that we are a society that needs a government, and wars such as that in Gaza.  It is the Jewish world’s Vietnam, and that means the left is back, you can again recognize that capitalism is the problem, and if solutions are difficult to work out, we are willing to try. 

When ‘anti-semitism’ means crimes of violence committed against people on the grounds that they are Jewish and therefore "oppressors” (I have been a victim of this myself), then all of us on the left are very much against it as always.  National states always claim a representational equivalence to the people the state governs (and constitutes as object, in theory and political imagination), yet it is possible to separate these by questioning radically what that state is. This is similar to claiming, as in an empiricist logic, that a concept has an object as its referent whose existence verifies the concept’s truth.  This logic is used in much political rhetoric, to support many claims where supposedly it is only facts and not how they are conceptualized that are in question.  (Medicine tends to operates in this way: it invents concepts and then claims that ‘evidence’ shows that they are instantiated with objects (persons behaving in certain identifiable ways) that can be verified as possessing the attributes identified as indicating the presence of the syndrome thus conceptualized.)  And that actually is similar to the colonial strategy of creating conditions where a colonized people appear to be living in miserable conditions and then blame them for this.  We on the left deny the connection of the refusal of anti-semitism to the supposed need to defend Israel’s continued existence as an Apartheid state based on Jewish identity and thus necessarily on massive police repression and war.  Interestingly, Hirsch’s claim in his recent speech criticizing Mamdani is only that most Jews support Israel, and as a Jewish state.  This is not true, and the claim confuses the idea of a state for Jews to live in with a state defined as Jewish, but that is precisely what we contest.  The argument will best proceed when this distinction is recognized.            
 
Sane people on the Palestinian side know they cannot abolish Israel militarily, and the fantasies that some entertain of establishing a national state that is a kind of pre-colonial restoration, rather than the post-colonial state that in its modernity and multiplicity will have real advantages, restored a state, these fantasies are most usefully invoked by Israel itself ideologically to justify war on the grounds that Israel’s existence is endangered, in a way that is assumed to entail the removal by force of its 8 million Jewish citizen residents.  But just think: Might not the Jews, who have been susceptible to intolerance everywhere, could face another holocaust?  That gets the money rolling! 
 
My Jewish friends wish to be friends of the Palestinian people, whom other Jews are murdering.  I cast my lot with the oppressed and wretched of the earth.  If you are on their side, you are on the left.  If not, you are not on the left, though you may be a liberal, which is something else entirely. 
 
Jews in New York mostly have more manageable problems, as is still quite true of most people in Israel.  God knows we all have our, normally not moral so much as quite materially real, problems of living.  Israel is a dangerous country, and the United States is more so than it had been.  Casual urban violence is a risk everywhere.  Israeli residents and citizens must fear it, also, though their state is not in danger militarily.  Apartheid will not be destroyed with missiles, but when enough people living under it say, we’ve had it with this shit. 
 
Hirsch blames Hamas for the war.  As if Israel, and its American supporters, bore no responsibility for it, when it is mostly theirs.  Israel could have taken steps to strengthen its own defenses without the ground war in Gaza.  It has the ability to do so.  The Hamas attack was used by it as an excuse.  The ethnic cleansing of Gaza is part of that of Palestine that had been ongoing since 1948.  
 
This leads me to the question of the idea that Israel embodies “the Jewish movement of national liberation.”  Liberation from Nazism?  That war was fought in Europe.  Many partisans participated, some were Jewish.  Zionist projects did little, and Judaism itself almost nothing, to further this cause, that of fighting Nazism and ending the Holocaust that, while directed largely at them is quite indeed from being fully accounted for by that fact, the more so as some of its other rationales are less easily criticized and contested.  The settlers of this land were positioned quite ambigously in relation to the global powers they might oppose or rely upon, as they continue to do, providing the fighting men and women, often drunk on their conquering army’s nationalist ideology with its passions of love and hate, while Americans provide the money, and the Jewish nonprofits and other elites pursue their own quite fitting agenda, which a congregational rabbi would challenge at his peril, much as university professors might.  Israel today represents no project of liberation, and a keystone of the global rise of fascism.  The constant tendency of American liberals to oppose any criticism of whatever they support by claiming the attack is personal and affecting is a tactic that becomes as tiresome as its function is obstructive.  It is destructive to freedom of speech, since criticism is defined as violence, and it is destructive to the urgent need to begin to rebuild the Jewish state in the only way that has any viability, which is dismantling its Apartheid character.  Sometimes I think the answer is to have objects defined by concepts we accept but that do not become idols, like nations without nationalism: their existence would be acknowledged but not the object of an ideological project.  I find most such projects at best obnoxious.  I don’t want to abolish soccer, but I would be happy with less soccer fanaticism, so I could say I don’t believe in soccer. This is an idea that is well-recognized in Judaism, and not only St. Paul, who in promoting universalism argued that social identities must be acknowledged but denied value, and useless as distinctions.  It horrified me to see the specter of the abolition of a people consecrated in official legend weaponized for the destruction of a neighboring people.  I recognize it as funny that in arguing against an opponent one winds up overcrediting their fears by way of rebutting them, but I do think they are groundless.  I am sure the Jews of Israel are as likely to be around decades from now as any people anywhere, which we know is far from certain.  The New Yorkers I know, many of whom are Jews, do not have the concerns Rabbi Hirsch expects of them.   

And I can wish men like this esteemed “community” leader cared less about winning a war that they are willing to fight at the price of mass slaughter, and more about the real threats that are forefront in the minds of the more liberal of their congregants, who may worry, as I do, about being targeted by the blatantly fascist government we now have, and about their neighbors being targeted and “disappeared”?  I believe Rabbi Hirsch and Jews like him have very different notions of the meaning of the kind of events that took place in Europe during the most infamous recent genocide. They see this as part and consequence of “anti-semitism” and believe that the militarism of their “Jewish” state somehow is a bulwark against this, along with the United States, whose flag is equally flown behind his pulpit.  I see the Holocaust, not as a Jewish event exactly, but as part of something ongoing, of which the United States and its middle eastern puppet state are not innocent of. Some people are proud to believe in that innocence, which they will defend with massive violence. The official leadership of the American Jewish world has supported the obvious if daily minimized fascism of the United States government abroad and at home for decades. I want a city government that will at least be more likely to be a useful ally in resisting the fascism we are living with.

Many Jews care greatly about their identity. Identity is nice, it is fun, though admittedly it tends to make you defensive, conservative, even welcoming of, if not eager to embrace, the militancy that supports a culture of war.

Hirsch also has spoken in mythological and bellicose terms of anti-semitism. He says it has no explanation; it is a mythical force that is as eternal as the equally mythical character he likes to give to “the Jewish people.” This is ideology at work. I find it curious to defend an evil that one cannot be interested in understanding, but such is the character of some forms of militarism. This rhetoric supports war on the kind of mythical-"theological" grounds that we remember from G. W. Bush's (continued by Obama) “war on terror,” which had a great many victims both abroad and domestically (I count myself as one), which of course continued a playbook from the Cold War. With its seemingly irrefutable provocation, these were wars on international and domestic opposition. They had many Jewish casualties, and, like the Cold War, also many Jewish prosecutors. Wishing, with the naive absurdity that presumes politics and the divisions of ideology and class that drive them need not really matter (as if to say, like so many in the protestant world, “we are all a happy family, patricians and plebes, monarchists and republicans alike, so we don’t argue, as that would not be nice”), the Jewish world were united (around the Zionist agenda), he cites Josephus in The Jewish Wars in lamenting that the Second Commonwealth, which Zionists often fantasize Isreal as reincarnating since this fits their claim that the territory belongs to them, was destroyed by factional opposition Hirsch calls “baseless hatred.” But like it or not the Jewish world is irremediably divided between left and right because they issues that drive this division, far from being baseless, are that important. Not only that: Reform Judaism in the hands of rabbis like Hirsch is largely a political lobby that in many ways belongs to the American right more than it does to Judaism. His appeal to unity is disingenuous, as the right consistently attacks politics as hatred while prosecuting wars based on open hatred for their own very partisan political ends. The consistent strategy is to delegitimize and vilify all opposition. Zionists need not desire to understand what they oppose, since they intend to eliminate it outright. All the while Reform leaders protest that Israel gives too little weight to their presumptively more liberal faction (more liberal in all the ways that are irrelevant to the most decisive issues and conflicts), even before this war it was being noted that Jewish leftists in Israel are routinely harassed, and many have left for Berlin, finding it to be the liberal and open city even Tel Aviv no longer is, to say nothing of Jerusalem, a better place to live as or raise a modern liberal Jew. In this context does the party of absolute war parade its sincere enforcement of what it considers peace. The party of masters can always afford to claim the high ground of civility while outsourcing the military affect, hatred, and misrecognizing, or claiming ownership of, both the idea of opposing oppression with liberation and the anger at injustice that are so fundamental to this faith and those who share something of the heritage it legated to the world and its increasingly global literary archive. Not even the Holocaust was only about them; its meaning is larger than the ability of either Jewish identity or its uses of the late modern war-driven capitalist nation-state can contain. One reason I do not believe there is a basis for a separate Jewish radical left politics is that not only are all the historical bases of the latter in modern traditions that are not specifically Jewish (until fairly recently they were mostly European, deriving from its mainstream culture and social struggles within it, to which most of the Jewish world remained outside until the twentieth century, when imported socialist ideas passionately stirred much of it, including in Palestine; the central historical event in modern history that the modern left continues was the French, not the English or American, revolution, which asserted claims for social equality that the structure of American society has never recognized (in Europe they were never quite realized but retained much force and recognition), a fact that is obvious to many people not in the professional class but subject to its power), but also because the Jews of Israel and elsewhere today face no important problem that isn’t faced by the rest of the world’s people, and the state of Israel today is more actual obstacle than potential aid in solving them. While capitalism is busily destroying the planet, Israel and its American backer have been busy annihilating a population, evidently because its leaders believe, contrary to Jewish religious teaching, that their people’s blood is redder than anyone else’s. This exceptionalism is endorsed by the imperial power of settler colonial origins that supports it, the United States, lending its largely evangelical Christian extreme right a prominent role in shaping American pro-Zionism (and other aspects of US foreign policy). This exceptionalism is never contested, but enthusiastically endorsed, by American Jewish ethnic nationalists who claim to find that project wholly rooted in, and central if not quite identical to, the religion.
 
The liberal right typically says disagreement is violence, anger is hatred, resistance is evil when it is not futile, and they call it “attack” when we speak against what they are doing, but seem to consider their own actions the self-assertion of a way of being that, as an identity, has an ‘existential’-ethical necessity to be affirmed that neatly dovetails with the fantastically overwrought marketable image of an eternally victim people of an equally eternal demonic, mythical or imaginary, enemy, who logically then must be combatted, with the Spartan ethos of the ethno-state, by any means necessary.  The logic of the identity cult is part of the logic of war. 
 
In this schema, “the Jewish people” become a band of brothers destined to fight as ‘friends’ in the bellicose sense of Carl Schmitt that is constituted and verified practically by the assault on an enemy.  The Jewish identity cult is the Palestinian people what the pan-European American or ‘white’ identity is to the Africans who were once enslaved: it would be meaningless in its present form without that.  Thus, it is founded on war.  Every idea of a society or nation is the constituted, rendered material fact from imaginary (or legendary, even when the legends are true or imputed to divine agency) origins: society is that which is represented by the state. An idea of a people as a national state constituted by a permanent colonial war of displacement, by removal or killing or both, this is an idea of a people as the referent of a state at war.  I do not find this idea in the Amidah, the Jewish daily prayer, though I realize that Rabbi Hirsch does.  It can be read into the book of Deuteronomy to be sure, which can also be read without it.  To say, as Hirsch sometimes does of Judaism and the state of Israel, that modern developments are latent and implicit in ancient roots is to imply only that they are possible consequences, not necessary ones.  Then again, various justifications are always available when it is facts on the ground established by might that constitute the situation calling for the sometimes desperate efforts to discover the applicable idea of right.  Is the essence of Judaism Zionism?  Plainly we see the consequences.  If some curious ethical motive drives us to affirm our identity above all, then we may as well do what we must to assert and defend it.  Identity “by any means necessary” includes every form of torture, mass imprisonment, disappearances, war, and fascist police state repression.  Aimé Césaire famously said that the violence colonial powers wield against the colonized is eventually brought home to be used against the people of the colonial metropole or “homeland.”  We are seeing that in today’s America.  I fear it happening to me and my neighbors (I live in the Bronx).  Rabbi Hirsch and Stephen Wise Free Synagogue has a different, and conflicting, agenda.  I am pleased to know they do not speak for most American Jews, and that is particularly true in New York City and increasingly so.  Maybe he is the one who election should be opposed the next time it is up for renewal.     
 
Much ado now is being made about how "Jewish Jews" (those who have a religious or nationalist identity, distinguishable from other concerns and interests, including, usually, Jews on the left, who in recent decades have usually not figured as instances of the concept "Jewish" in many accounts at all, and of course it is when some cause, national, or otherwise, is claimed, that people are most likely to claim some strong collective identity) are endangered, usually in connection with the militarist Israel narrative, but Jews have suffered in vast disproportion when the left is attacked. But Hirsch and rabbis like him do not speak for Jews on the left, they do not like them, and I submit are not their, and our, friends at all.

I think most of what I have seen in the last few decades of American and Jewish liberalism was more than anything else a distraction. American Jews have been corralled for decades into supporting a right-wing foreign policy agenda in this country on the grounds that their interests are Israel's supposedly threatened (of course, this is a myth) existence.  Given the role we know this narrative to have played in the legitimate of the (to much of the world) relentlessly miserable adventures of the foreign policy pursuse by this country at the best of its corporate elites, I would say that what we are dealing with here is the use to which a certain population group in this country has been put to supporting what I think is best called: fascism, indeed…

Why do people with “liberal values” wind up supporting fascism, or, as in Germany in the half century before the rise of the Third Reich, to developments (like the liberal German nationalism of Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen, not to mention the many similarities of Zionist discourse to “conservative” thinking in Europe in this period) that led to it?  The rise of Zionism could not stop that of fascism, and now is central to it.  What I have been aiming to indicate is how on close examination what look like centrist “liberal” positions are, always latently and often enough explicit, in fact nothing of the kind.  This is obvious to many people elsewhere in the world than on Rabbi Hirsch’s Upper West Side.  To his own audience, it seems, often less so.  I think he is counting on that, as those he at least tacitly supports certainly are.