Nationalism Near and Far: Replies
Cohen, Mitchell
Jim Rule, a valued Dissent colleague, and I have a very sharp disagreement. In the aftermath of Yitzhak Rabin's assassination, I wrote in praise of this man's revolutionary transformation...
...This is simplistic universalism at its most simplistic...
...Working people, laboring under miserable conditions had (and have) the right to insist on a different, fair social order—and they have the right to look askance at anyone suggesting "rugged individualism" as the proper response to their suffering...
...After all, Rabin, who denounced Goldstein's "loathsome, criminal act of murder" (Rabin's words), was slain by someone with Goldstein's worldview...
...better to take a circumspect look at how and why persecuted people opt for this or that response to their predicaments...
...One lesson I draw is that it is best to keep away from slippery slopes, especially in the form of political argument...
...But that is all it is—it isn't history...
...In fact, my position toward Jewish and Israeli politics is the counterpart of that taken by African-American critics of the "Million Man March," who refused to embrace Louis Farrakhan, that Meir Kahane of Black America...
...No wonder it attracted few adherents and failed...
...I'll leave aside all the ensuing history up through the Hamas suicide attacks, and just point out that one need hardly approve of all Rabin did throughout his career to understand why he was "security-minded" or why Israelis might appreciate this...
...Beyond what's obvious— that prejudice everywhere should be fought— why is one political prescription applicable in all circumstances...
...Surely Rule recalls that the Zionist mainstream, led by Labor, accepted compromise with the Arabs over and again during the British Mandate...
...If Rule wants to believe Israel never had security problems, that in decades of bloody conflict every act by an Arab was the fault of an Israeli, that Rabin "never shrank" from seeking "supremacy over others occupying the same territory," that is his privilege...
...Hence the moral legitimacy of affirmative action in my view...
...and that Azzam Pasha, head of the Arab League, warned of "a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades...
...Jews, having suffered centuries of relentless persecution, culminating in the greatest racist mass murder in history, were right to insist on affirmative action, that is, on a state of Israel as part of any fair world order—and they rightly look askance when someone rushes to advise: forget it, be "universalist...
...Surely Rule recalls the Russian pogroms of 1881, when Jews were ravaged in some two hundred towns, leading to the birth of Zionism...
...Whether or not an AfricanAmerican state is a useful or intelligent response to racism in this country depends on the circumstances of this country, not on those that led to Israel's birth...
...But this doesn't mean that one thing always collapses into another—only that Stalinists and racists should be fought and that all states should have secure civil liberties, whether or not they have an ethnic majority...
...Rule's ire, I suspect, comes from something other than Rabin: he objects to all forms of nationalism, including that of an oppressed population, as racist...
...One way sees it as tragedy in the most profound sense, a complex clash between two rights and two historical imperatives, with wrongs committed by both sides...
...it imagines that all right and all wrong slide to one side or the other...
...In the aftermath of Yitzhak Rabin's assassination, I wrote in praise of this man's revolutionary transformation while prime minister...
...It is also a difficult politics, not least when calls for chauvinist solidarity come from one corner and thinly disguised calls for abstract universalism come from another...
...and that is what they were thinking about in between pogroms, not "ethnic supremacy" over others...
...Actually the idea of carving out such an African-American state (in the southern "Black Belt") was advocated in the late 1920s and early 1930s—not by nationalists, as one would expect in light of Rule's assertions, but by the American Communist party, which was also vehemently anti-Zionist...
...Rule apparently thinks I ought instead to favor carving an African-American state out of the United States, by analogy, evidently, to Israel...
...Yet a brief glance at history reveals that there are different types of nationalism and nationstate...
...Unless I have misunderstood people like John Lewis, Major Owens, and Julian Bond, they are trying at one and the same time to be cosmopolitan— upholding a humane, egalitarian vision for the country as a whole—and particular, that is, rooted in the specific problems, historical pain, and, therefore, the needs of their community...
...and those in the Ukraine in 1919-1920 (as many as a hundred thousand dead...
...The same is true for ethnic solidarity—it is justifiable or not depending on circumstances...
...To the contrary—I'm just against the simplistic kinds, and especially when they are indignantly propounded abstractions that ignore the historical experience of real human beings...
...History began before the Intifada...
...Adolph Hitler was not Thomas Masaryk...
...and that this was three years after the Holocaust, during which the preeminent leader of Palestinian nationalism, Haj Amin el-Husseini, was in Berlin championing the Nazis...
...At the same time, I don't find it inappropriate when deprived and injured populations demand special considerations...
...Such nationalist claptrap usually has an ulterior agenda, in this case to subvert the peace process...
...Theirs must be a complex politics—something also familiar to Jews who at once hope for social justice in America and a fair deal for Palestinians and Israelis in the Mideast...
...It's that there are, in the end, two ways to look at the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis...
...And he objects especially to the existence of Israel...
...Indeed, one can hardly find a more striking case for Zionism than Rule's dismissive attitude to Israeli security concerns—as if they are reducible to Rabin's repression (which, I agree, was brutal) of the Intifada...
...So it's not that Zionists were always angels— they weren't...
...So they repudiate Farrakhan for his detestable vision of America but no less because they won't countenance defining African-American solidarity by Farrakhanism...
...Rule employs what I'd call "slippery slope" reasoning, much like Friedrich Hayek, the rightwing political philosopher beloved by Reaganites and Thatcherites...
...This is also why the logic of my arguments applies no less to the situation ofAfrican-Americans...
...The plan originated, it seems, with a Finnish Comintern official, one of Stalin's flunkies, who was equipped with his idea though with little sense of American reSPRING • 1996 • 97 Arguments alities—black or white...
...Rule responds, in effect, that little differentiated Rabin, Baruch 96 • DISSENT Arguments Goldstein (the religious right-winger who slaughtered scores of Palestinians at prayer in Hebron two years ago), Louis Farrakhan, and, by implication, me...
...and the pogroms of 1905...
...and surely he recalls the Dreyfus Affair...
...Surely he recalls that Israel was assaulted by half a dozen armies on the day of its birth in May 1948...
...Yet here, again, Rule's slippery-slope perspective misses the point because it finally must reduce all forms of Jewish solidarity to Jewish chauvinism...
...it brought mutual recognition between the PLO and Israel, and the beginning of the end of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, despite furious opposition in Israel by right-wing and religious Zionists...
...and then Auschwitz...
...Jews were not persecuted as individuals, much less as universals, but as Jews...
...The other is easy and absolutist...
...If a Grand Wizard of the KKK proclaims the need for white solidarity, it is obviously pernicious, if not ludicrous...
...And this sense of solidarity is not reducible to Louis Farrakhan...
...q 98 • DISSENT...
...Yes, given all this, Zionists did want to reconstruct a very battered people...
...Not that there haven't been leftists who were Stalinists and Zionists who were racists, with some rotten consequences...
...Ironically, when I called Rabin "security-minded," it was not to argue with antiZionists, but with right-wing Zionists, for whom any Israeli offense can be blamed on an Arab, and who conflate security with integral nationalism to camouflage the fact, well understood by Rabin, that an intelligent assessment of military strength may allow you to rethink things, to change policies, to hold a hand out to the Palestinians...
...If AfricanAmericans feel a sense of solidarity among themselves— if blacks in New York feel that a racist assault on a black in Mississippi is also an assault on them—I find this to be the most natural response in the world...
...They have been victims not as individuals but as African-Americans and rightly look askance at those who contend that race is a nonissue in this country...
...Sure there may be social pain, Hayek admitted, but create a welfare state, meddle with the market, and you are on a slippery slope to totalitarianism...
...Quite a leap—or skid—of imagination, in both cases...
...Hence, in the aftermath of Rabin's murder, I called for repudiation, in no uncertain terms, of calls by Zionist right-wingers for"unity" of Jews, Israelis, and their friends...
...But it is the right politics...
...They have played different roles, depending on time and place—sometimes exclusivist and murderous, and sometimes democratic and the means by which a population responds to a history of subjugation...
...Workers are not exploited simply as individuals, but as workers...
...This is more curious than "bracing...
...Not that I'm against individualism or universalism...
...Sure, anti-Semitism was vicious in the last century, Rule would acknowledge (actually I so credit him since there is no obvious recognition of its seriousness in his comments), but respond with a Jewish state and you slide into a "project of ethnic supremacy...
Vol. 43 • April 1996 • No. 2
