Joshua Leifer’s “Conflictedly Connected” Liberal Zionist Center

The well-regarded left Zionist writer Joshua Leifer has a much fawned-over piece in Ha’aretz that’s been adopted in some quarters as the expression of profound wisdom. In it he argues that there’s a “conflictedly connected” Zionist quasi-left “majority” that’s been “drowned out” by the extremist voices of the “ultra-hawkish right” and the “anti-Zionist left.” If only this “conflictedly connected” majority could be liberated from the shackles placed on it by these twin extremists, the Golden Mean would prevail, and virtue would flourish on the topic of Israel and Palestine.

I’ll let the ultra-hawkish right-wingers decide whether they feel the need to defend themselves against Leifer’s charge, but Leifer makes no plausible case for the left-wing half of his argument. Conceding that the anti-Zionist Left lacks any substantive form of political power, he nonetheless gestures vaguely at the idea that they make up in “volume” what they lack in power. The anti-Zionist Left, he claims, enjoys “proximity to the producers of culture and media,” which proximity has enabled them to drown out the poor, helpless, conflicted (hence reflective and thoughtful) liberal Zionists who should be setting the agenda and direction of discourse.

The claim coheres perfectly with Sarah Hurwitz’s less elegant but equally delusional claims about the good old days before social media, when stolid mainstream figures on prime time TV and in mainstream publications gave us real news rather than the “wall” of anti-Israeli propaganda that Israel’s defenders now have to face.  It also coheres perfectly with a preposterous video circulating on Facebook of Rawan Osman wandering in despair through hostile territory in the bookstores of Brooklyn, fulminating over the anti-Israeli books she sees on the shelves, furrowing her worried brow that Palestine is no longer the fringe topic she wishes it was, but something else altogether. Like theirs, Leifer’s claims here are a bluff, a rhetorical gesture bereft of evidence or argument.

No matter what handwaving Leifer engages in, there’s no way to get around any of the following facts:

1. The anti-Zionist Left is maximally vulnerable to reputation-destroying, defamatory accusations of anti-Semitism. Once the charge sticks, you’re out of a job and unable to get a new one.
2. The anti-Zionist Left is maximally vulnerable to political pressure at every level of government–federal, state, and local. Undocumented immigrants aside, no single demographic faces more concerted, systematic persecution than those who are perceived as violating the IHRA definition of “anti-Semitism,” which is de facto employed even in jurisdictions where it has not formally been enacted into law.
3. Leifer’s appeal to “drowning out” is a conveniently ambiguous, equivocal metaphor desperate to be cashed out in straightforwardly literal, causal terms. You can drown someone with water. You can drown them out with sound. But how does a persecuted, defamed minority “drown out” a wealthy, powerful majority? The answer is pretty simple. They don’t. The implication for his thesis is obvious: it’s a hopeless, disingenuous piece of agit-prop intended primarily for the credulous readership of Ha’aretz, but unviable beyond that demographic.

There is something abject and pathetic about a person like Joshua Leifer complaining about being “drowned out.” Joshua Leifer has guaranteed access to virtually every left-leaning English-language publication in Israel, the UK, and the United States. He’s been published in Ha’aretz, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Nation, +972 Magazine, JewishCurrents (where he was until recently on the editorial board), Dissent, and The New Statesman. His first book was published with Dutton, a major publisher, and won the National Jewish Book Award. 

In short: wherever he goes within Ha’aretz-to-New-Statesman circles, Leifer is inevitably greeted as some kind of bien pensant wonder child. That, indeed, is how his Ha’aretz piece has now been greeted, as wisdom of a sort we haven’t seen since Moses on Sinai. It’s common knowledge that a publication profile like Leifer’s gives you networking possibilities unavailable to the average anti-Zionist activist. In other words, he’s the one with the “proximity to the producers of culture and media” he mentions. If this is being “drowned out,” we should all want to be drowned. 

The Wall: Abu Dis, Palestine

Zionists like Leifer have no problems worth taking seriously. They’re not oppressed. They’re a thriving part of the majority in power. Their (confabulated) inability to organize is a homegrown defect requiring a homegrown remedy, not something they can blame on anyone else, and certainly not a case of marginalization by the power of the anti-Zionist Left. If they want to solve their self-made pseudo-problems, they can always take a good hard look in the mirror, and reflect on both the diagnosis and prescription that fits the malady. But they should stop saying or insinuating that we’ve drowned them out. Go to virtually any synagogue, any Jewish community center, any university, or any town council meeting in the United States, and ask yourself, honestly, who has drowned whom out. For all of the “conflict” in the “conflictedly connected,” it’s the connection that has “drowned out” the conflict. They have drowned us out. Drowning us out is the one thing that gives them a sense of unity, the one thing they’re not conflicted about. 

A friend of mine suggested last year that the anti-war movement create a broad-tent popular front that includes liberal Zionists. I get the point behind the comment, but have zero intention of acting on it, and Leifer provides the perfect reason why. If Leifer is representative of “liberal Zionists,” and I think he is, it’s suicidal to make common cause with them.

The problem is not simply a matter of disagreement over this or that issue, or deep disagreement over basic premises, or even irresolvable disagreement over incommensurable worldviews.  The basic problem is a matter of trust. No one can trust people who dish out dishonest, anti-factual shit of the sort Leifer insists that we take for granted. If they’re willing to gaslight the readers of Ha’aretz about things this transparent, God knows what they’d try with us. It’s not clear what’s worse–that Leifer actually believes that we “drowned out” his poor, helpless centrist compatriots, or that he’s self-consciously playing fast and loose with his readers. Either way, he’s too out of touch with moral reality to deal with except in a frankly adversarial spirit.

We already have adversaries who want to destroy us. We don’t need to onboard them. So the notional bridges that people want us to build toward people like this are best blown up before anyone tries to build them.* It’s worth being explicit about the fact that liberal Zionists of Leifer’s variety (i.e., of almost all varieties) are neither friends nor allies of ours, but adversaries, regardless of what editorial boards they infiltrate and regardless of their vitriol for the Right. Unlike liberal Zionists, we don’t have the luxury of magical thought. We have to identify our adversaries for who they are, and deal with them accordingly. 

Just a reminder: we’re unapologetic anti-Zionists. If people conflate that with anti-Semitism, they’re wrong. If they persist in error, fuck them. But their errors don’t change anything, and certainly don’t change our commitments. “Anti-Zionism” doesn’t mean much if it’s to be advanced by Zionist means or through collaboration with committed Zionist partisans.

With certain very narrow exceptions, that’s true of almost all anti-X commitments, be they anti-Zionist or anti-fascist or or anti-communist or anti-theocratic or anti-anything else. There are, to be sure, exceptions, but the exceptions are irrelevant here. It’s one thing to make common cause with, say, the Soviet Union, when your adversary is the Third Reich, or with the Afghan mujahidin when your adversary is the Red Army. In these cases, the alternative to collaboration is annihilation. But no one can plausibly say that our survival, or anyone else’s, turns on our making an alliance with the Joshua Leifers of the world. There is no plausible causal story to be told that gets us from an alliance with liberal Zionists to any real-world outcome worth realizing. I know how badly people want to believe that there is, but I also know how poorly these options have been articulated. 

I was about to say that the idea of anti-Zionists making common cause with liberal Zionists is about as absurd as that of a pro-choice movement advanced through collaboration with anti-abortionists, but of course, that ridiculous idea has been advanced in all seriousness by the “liberal” sages of our time–Mark Lilla, Ezra Klein–and advanced with great enthusiasm by the “let’s pivot to some confabulated center” crowd that Leifer himself represents. These are people whose only principle is not to have any. It’s the Mother of All Mistakes to join them.  

I make no bones about my unapologetic hostility to both Zionism and Israel–my unapologetic desire to “delegitimize” a country that was never legitimate to begin with–and am proud to join in common cause with a diverse array of like-minded people working toward the same goals: Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, atheist, gay, straight, trans, rich, poor, middle class, working class, urban, suburban, rural, American, European, African, Asian, Oceanic, Antarctic, whatever. We neither need nor want Zionists among us, and Joshua Leifer has given us all the permission we would want to ostracize, boycott, and exclude them, no matter how much “shame” they affect to feel about Israel’s recent conduct. Liberal Zionists are as much the source of the problem that Palestinians face as their less conflicted fascist-Revisionist brethren. Generic similarity is, after all, still similarity, and frankly, all the similarity we need to oppose both species of a fundamentally immoral enterprise.

“Who,” Leifer asks, “will wade into the sea to show” liberal Zionists “the way”? Don’t wade, Josh. Jump right in, and keep swimming. As long as you’re swimming away from us, we’re only too happy to see you make your way to the horizon.

*And before anyone blathers at me about singling out Zionists for adversarial treatment, you might want to read what I said back in 2011 about building bridges to the likes of Tariq Ramadan.