It's Okay, There's a Jew Involved!

This is a really great post at Ignoblus about a divestment plan being put on the ballot in Seattle. Start with the fact that the organizers are being more than a little underhanded, roping together an anti-Iraq war measure with a divest from Israel measure under the moniker of "Divest from War and Occupation." To my knowledge, it only targets the Iraq war and Israel (with an option for expansion to "any similar unjustified attack" -- presumably by the United States, as a hedge in case we attack Iran).

But the post focuses on something else -- namely, the use of a few Jewish organizers to deflect attention from the fact that the vast majority of Jews find these sorts of proposals to be severely problematic. One sees this all the time with regards to minority politics: Ward Connerly and Shelby Steele get trotted out to take the contrarian point of view on issues of importance to the Black community, and, having done so, it is no longer necessary to account for the fact that one side has the overwhelming support of their community. I'm not saying that Connerly and Steele don't have the right to express their opinions (nor do I deny the right of their Jewish comrades to do likewise), but it has to come with the context that most of their peers find their position to be outright hostile to their own community.

But what happens instead is that

if one can find a single, contrarian Jew, then there is no need to wrestle with the fact that an overwhelming majority of Jews hold any particular opinion.... the collective voice of Jews need never be taken seriously, even when the audience is insignificantly gentile.

I also like how Ignoblus discusses the classic "it's basically a crime to criticize Israel" tripe. That critique is deployed to make any defense of Israel that asks "progressives" to take critical account of their position and the continuing significance of anti-Semitism as (in the immortal words of Jerome McCristal Culp) "a type of shrill craziness". It derails the discussion from the start by making the baseline regarding discussion of Israel the "fact" that Jews are neurotic.

There's a lot of talk about how any critique of Israel is anti-Semitic. What isn't discussed is that our complaints keep coming because there has been virtually no critical engagement by the progressive community about how anti-Semitism does interact with the Israel/Palestine conflict. They'd much rather deploy their Clarence Thomases and Ward Connerlys as a shield to wave away the vast majority of Jews (and our account of our experience and reality) as insignificant insanity.