“Do not perform the practices of the land of Egypt in which you dwelled, and do not perform the practice of the land of Canaan to which I bring you, and do not follow their traditions.” –Leviticus 18:3

Many people will by now have seen Sarah Hurwitz’s jeremiad at the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America, complaining about Israel’s having lost the narrative war on social media. Hurwitz is a former Obama speechwriter, and the epitome of Democratic centrism. Her comments are notable, not for any great insight they contain or wisdom they impart, but for demonstrating just how illogical and uninformed you can be while conveying the reverse impression for decades, and while making a fabulous career for yourself in American life. They’re also an object lesson in the double standards of Zionist ideology, and what happens when a double standard collapses, as it must, into incoherent hysteria.

There are many ways of responding to Hurwitz’s comments, and many able critics have developed them. There’s no shortage of garbage in this speech waiting to be taken to the curb, and undoubtedly many ways of doing it, but there’s one obvious reductio I haven’t seen anyone make. So here it is.

At one point, Hurwitz feels the need to point out that on a Zionist understanding, Judaism is not merely a religion like any other, but an ethno-nationality involving intimate ties of affinity that span thousands of years and thousands of miles, and transcend ordinary boundaries of politics and culture. This is why Jews need Israel. Only in Israel can this mystical phenomenon be put into practice. If Judaism were just another religion, we could apply the same standards to it as we apply to other religions, but since Zionism relies for its legitimacy on Judaism, while demanding that we treat its claims as sui generis, Judaism can’t just be another religion. It has to be the kind of thing that makes Zionism possible. 

What kind of thing is that? I’m quoting here from the “transcript” of Hurwitz’s speech provided by Caitlin Johnstone: 

“The problem is, we’re not just a religion,” Hurwitz said. “We’re a nation. Civilization. Tribe. Peoplehood. But most of all we’re a family. And so if you are a young person raised in America who thinks Judaism is a Protestant-style religion, then the seven million Jews in Israel are merely your co-religionists. So my co-religionists, if I look at them and they’re not practicing my religion of social justice and certain prophetic values then what do I have to do with them?”

“But that’s a category error,” says Hurwitz. “The seven million people in Israel, they are not my co-religionists, they are my siblings. But I think if you think of them as merely your co-religionists, it’s easy to slide into anti-Zionism. You don’t necessarily have that connection to them.”

Hurwitz seems not to have grasped that if all Jews are siblings, then any Jew who marries (or has sex with) another Jew is committing incest. This implication is particularly problematic considering the semi-maniacal aversion to inter-marriage one sometimes encounters in Zionist ideological circles. Jews must marry other Jews, such Zionists insist. A Jew who marries a non-Jew weakens the claims of the Jewish People. Only by strengthening them can Israel be made fully secure.

Fine. Have it your way. But the more one insists on intra-marriage, and the more credence one gives to Hurwitz’s claim, the more obvious it becomes that Zionism requires incest–indeed, that Zionism just is a highly militarized form of incest. What else could it be? If all Jews are siblings, and every Jew is obliged to marry a Jew, then every Jew is obliged to marry a sibling.

There really is no way out of this bind. You could try to rescue Hurwitz by suggesting that she meant “sibling” in some loose, metaphorical way–kind of like the way in which Zohran Mamdani said that his father’s cousin was his “aunt.” But she didn’t mean that, and claiming she did doesn’t help her. If we weaken “sibling” to mean something other than sibling, we weaken the connection Hurwitz intends. If I’m a Jew, and every tenth Jew is my twelfth cousin four times removed, then the connection I bear to such a person is hopelessly attenuated. If so, then other things equal, I have little reason to care about the person. For Hurwitz’s argument to make sense, every Jew has to bear a close familial connection to every other. So siblinghood in the full-blooded sense (if you’ll excuse the expression) is really essential to the argument.

You could try to rescue the argument by saying that she means siblinghood in a non-genetic sense. The siblings in question aren’t genetic siblings, but step siblings. That doesn’t work, either. For one thing, it’s still incest. But more to the point, it doesn’t capture the ethno-nationalist dimension Hurwitz has in mind. She doesn’t just mean that every Jew is a step-sibling to every other because while not related by lineage, they live in the same house. Her point is that every Jew is a literal sibling to every other because while related by lineage, they don’t live in the same house. When they finally meet up in Israel after having made aliyah, it’s as though one literal genetic sibling is meeting another literal genetic sibling. Again, fine. Have it your way. But then, when literal genetic sibling has sex with literal genetic sibling, they’re committing incest. I mean, sorry, but I’m not the one who came up with this lunatic conceptual scheme.

The only defense of Hurwitz that will work is a defense of incest. If there’s nothing wrong with incest, it’s no objection to her argument to say that Zionist Judaism entails the mass commission of incest. I agree. And narrowly prudential arguments aside, I neither have a knock-down argument against incest nor spend my days trying to produce one. I wouldn’t even be much put out if none was ever forthcoming. I’d simply point out that it’s a strange pass to reach. Sibling incest was practiced by the Egyptian pharaohs, and cousin marriage is notoriously practiced in certain Islamicate cultures. If Zionism requires incest, then it joins this illustrious crew.

King Tut and Half-Sister/Wife Ankhesenamun (scan by Pataki Marta, from Valley of the Kings, Egyptian Museum Cairo)

That by itself isn’t necessarily a problem–except in the sense that this isn’t a crew Zionism ever wanted to join. It’s a problem for Hurwitz’s argument that not only does Zionism require incest, but it requires saddling the Jews (on her conception of them, not mine) with the most perverse practices of their worst ideological enemies.

There’s a polemical Zionist literature that makes a big holy deal about cousin marriage among Muslims, the implication being that the practice shows that Islam is a particularly regressive thing. In fact, some of Israel’s more extreme defenders have tried to argue that the high mortality of Gazans during the genocide is a consequence of cousin marriage, since cousin marriage involves “inbreeding,” which results in autosomal recessive genetic disorders–which presumably depress the immune system or otherwise weaken the constitution, and thus lead to high mortality. Hurwitz’s speech is an own goal for huge swatches of this and related Zionist polemical endeavors. Because if Hurwitz is right, while Muslims marry their cousins, Jews marry their siblings. It’s a weird situation both ways around, but far weirder in the Jewish case than the Muslim.

“This is how the world ends,” T.S. Eliot wrote in The Hollow Men, “not with a bang but with a whimper.” It applies to ideological worlds, as well. This is how Zionism is ending, not with a bang, whether delivered to Israel or by it, but with incoherent, logorrheic whimpers like Hurwitz’s. But it is ending. I certainly prefer incest to genocide, but when those become your choices—and the one facilitates the other—you’ve hit rock bottom. You can stop digging at that point. There’s nowhere left to dig.

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*For instructive (even painful) irony, I can’t top the argument of this essay, or parshat (weekly study portion of the Torah), by one Rabba Sara Hurwitz of Yeshivat Maharat (not the same person as Sarah Hurwitz): “On Boundaries,” dated May 1, 2015 (Sefaria: Jewish Texts Library). The Torah, we are told, instructs us not to transgress boundaries and commit incest, the abominable practices of the Egyptians and the Canaanites. I’d be curious to know how one Hurwitz would respond to the other on this topic.