Rahm Emanuel's speech in Tel Aviv was shocking. Beneath the rather incoherent geopolitical analysis – one which somehow blames a beleaguered refugee state facing genocidal violence on seven fronts for the wars it is forced to fight – all I could hear was tone. The voice of someone who believes himself to be above the people he is addressing. It would be too easy to say he speaks as a gentile to Jews, while claiming to speak as a Jew to Israelis, but there is a truth to it.
Emanuel signals his authority as one who supposedly shares a fate with Israel, referring to his father who fought in 1948 and to his uncle who is buried on the Mount of Olives. Yet he depends on an assumption of belonging – a bond between diaspora Jews and Israel – that he clearly seeks to break, fracture, and dissolve.
Much has been said about an ongoing split between American and Israeli Jews, and often one gets the sense that reporting on the issue is less documentation than celebration. A divide and conquer tactic, where causing tensions and strife within the community serve the ends of those who seek its harm.
In the face of a relentless propaganda campaign, and the false consensus of the genocide libel that the mainstream media distributed to millions – while concealing its source in a highly ideological cohort of antizionist academics – it's understandable that many Jews do not know what else to think. They find themselves confused, traumatised, and lacking a language to explain what is happening to them. Many, though not all, Jewish legacy organisations have done strikingly little to name, condemn, or intervene in the spread of antizionist narratives and libels. They have often, it would seem, preferred to throw their Israeli cousins under the bus than lose a seat at the table in an antizionist society. Meanwhile, the ongoing purges of Jews – marked as “Zionists" – from civil society proceeds apace.
Emanuel does not share a fate with Israelis, and certainly not with the "Zionists" whose forced exodus from social networks, whose professional discrimination in the academy and elsewhere, he frames as a the natural consequence of Israel itself. He speaks from a thousand miles above, insulated from the antizionist abuse that is raging across the West.
His open attribution of collective guilt toward Jews – discriminatory in its very essence – is hardly surprising. It's increasingly treated as the common sense of liberal politics. “Netanyahu is harming Jews” is a common refrain, even though it lacks all logical sense. Netanyahu could be Hitler – as antizionists daily imagine him to be, as they mouth old Soviet slogans – yet targeting ordinary Jews as “genocidal” would still be unacceptable, and blame would lie with those who did so.
The casual rhetoric of blame reflect a deeper problem: the systematic concealment of antizionism, of Israel-hate, as something that could actually be the structural cause not only for changes in Israel's “reputation,” and not only for the violence against diaspora Jews, but for the crises in the Middle East themselves. Why, exactly, is Israel in a permanent state of war, which includes occupation and ongoing reciprocal violence? Why, exactly, does the question of whether the United States should be entangled in these wars come up in the first place? Violence against Israelis here is taken as natural and given.
While Emanuel claims to want Arab states to recognise Israel's right to exist, to integrate Israel into the region, he seems uninterested in the moral stakes of anyone seeking to annihilate a state in the first place. He seems oblivious to the social media accounts with millions of followers screaming with joy at the sight of Iranian missiles falling on Israeli civilians. Somehow none of that causes any moral outrage, since he has saved it all up for “Netanyahu” – the villain of his decadent fantasies.
The absence of any actual engagement with global antizionism is not merely a lacuna in the discourse: it is one that serves to reproduce that violence itself. By refusing to name the cause, and refusing to hold its principal actors accountable, ongoing wars are continually given justification, while blame is displaced onto Israel. This ongoing habit of evasion and non-accountability around antizionism – including refusing to say its name – causes harm to Israelis, Jews, and Palestinians alike.
Emanuel's politics does not seek peace; it seeks moral legitimacy and it exploits Israel as a tool to achieve it. His tone of superiority is not incidental. Like the old German Jews who looked down upon the traditional Eastern “Ostjuden” with contempt in the early 20th century, the liberal American Jew, insulated from antizionist abuse on the ground, now proclaims their civilisational superiority to the primitive Israeli.
I doubt that such a relationship is meant to lead to a memorandum of understanding.
Adam Louis-Klein is the Founder of the Movement Against Antizionism (MAAZ)
To get more from opinion, click here to sign up for our free Editor's Picks newsletter.