Re: Jeff Weintraub: Ellen Willis, democratic socialist and anti-anti-Zionist, 1941-2006
On Nov 11, 2006, at 1:28 PM, Michael Pugliese wrote:
http://jeffweintraub.blogspot.com/2006/11/ellen-willis-democratic- socialist-and.html
Which approvingly cites her essay on anti-anti-Zionism
in politics, but she writes out of the story all of Israel’s
repressive policies. Coming after the recent rampages in Lebanon and
Gaza, this sort of thing is pretty disturbing:
Many on the left view this wave of anti-Semitism as just another
expression, however unfortunately couched, of justified rage at
Israel—whether at the occupation and the escalating destruction of
the West Bank or at the state’s exis- tence per se. In either case,
the conflation of “Zionists” and “Jews” is regarded as a
misunderstanding of the politically uneducated. Which is to say,
again, that Israel is The Problem—not only for Palestinians but for
Jews as well. This is a serious failure of imagination, for in fact
Israel’s conflict with the Arab world owes more to the peculiar
role played by the Jews in history, culture, and the Judeo- Christian-Islamic psyche than vice versa.[…]
In the patriarchal unconscious Jews represent the vindictive
castrating fa ther and the wicked, subversive tempter, the moral
ideal we cannot attain and the revolution we dare not join. As
such, Jews are an object of our unconscious rage at repressive
authority as well as at those who tease us with visions of (evil)
freedom; a subterranean rage that is readily tapped by demagogues
in times of crisis.
This is true to some degree, but there’s almost no acknowledgment in
the piece that Israel kills and represses using our money and
weapons. Sure there’s a way in which people use criticisms of Israel
to vent their anti-Semitism in “acceptable” ways, but she was also
using that old trick of tarring critics of Israel as anti-Semites. On
this topic, give me Judith Butler anyday.
Doug