Lorenzo from Oz: Jews can’t afford the Jewish lobby

Notice particularly: “Here’s the thing, however. Who did the most to promote the notion of the entitled victim? Who pioneered the notion of the entitled victim as the basis for driving people out of public life, out of their livelihoods? Who? The Jewish lobby; that is, Jewish activists allegedly operating in defense of the Jewish community.”

Excerpt from Jews can’t afford the Jewish lobby.

There were two, interlocking, ideas motivating this feral activism arising out of the academy. One is de-colonisation. Helen Dale provides a pertinent discussion thereof. It is noteworthy that the 2017 Hamas Charter directly plays into Western academic postcolonial rhetoric, unlike its original 1988 Charter. This particular set of toxic nonsense I will not be dealing with here.

Though, to be clear, the problem with decolonisation isn’t only that it is now giving cover to anti-Semitism. As I will discuss in a later post, the problem with post-colonialism as a framing, and a basis for decolonisation arguments, is that they are not true in the same way that phlogiston or geocentrism aren’t true, and so shouldn’t be taught at university — any university.

The other motivating idea is the notion of the sacred victim, of the moral purity of the oppressed. That Israelis are oppressors and Palestinians are the oppressed and the oppressed are entitled to do whatever in their struggle against their oppressors. Who is the oppressed, and who are the oppressors, is all that one needs to know, that is the only morally salient fact.

This is the concept of the entitled victim at its most feral. It has become clear that to many people, including many academics, there is literally nothing Hamas can do to de-legitimise its cause.

Victim entitlement

Here’s the thing, however. Who did the most to promote the notion of the entitled victim? Who pioneered the notion of the entitled victim as the basis for driving people out of public life, out of their livelihoods? Who? The Jewish lobby; that is, Jewish activists allegedly operating in defense of the Jewish community.

This post is not about the Israel-Palestine contentions: that I have discussed here, here and here. My concern here is with the dynamics of debate and activism within Western societies. I will touch on aspects of the arguments for Israel that exemplify problems with arguments mounted by Jewish activists within Western countries.

Nor is this a post about Jews: it is about Jewish activists2 and their activism. It is about the dynamics of discourse and activism. In particular, the pioneering role — and huge unintended consequences — of the feral catastrophising that has been a feature of the Jewish activism for decades. A catastrophising that, as is so common in activism, feeds the flow of donations.

When we examine the evolution of those patterns of debate and activism, we can see that Jews in the West — as we watch the horrid dynamics of the entitled victim turn Jews into objects of hatred and abuse — are suffering the unintended consequences of the entitled-victims arguments mounted by the Jewish lobby and its catastrophising feral activism.

To criticise the Jewish lobby, and its activism, is most definitely not “blaming the victim”. The activists are not the group. One of the problems with activism is precisely the conflation of the activists with the group they claim to be speaking for.

Jewish activists need Jews in general to be as fearful as possible, to keep the donations flowing. They are, in effect, paid to generate as much paranoia as possible.

Feral catastrophising is a status, social-leverage and income play that Jewish activists may have pioneered, but has since become much more widespread. For instance, Michael Shellenberger does an excellent job of demolishing feral climate-change catastrophism.

As an aside, past Christian shaming and shunning of gays and lesbians is a limited analogy for entitled victim catastrophising, as such targeting of gays and lesbians did not rest on Christians claiming entitlement on the basis of victimhood.3

Pioneering illiberal advocacy

Many of the patterns now being wielded against support for Israel and against Jews were pioneered by Jewish activists.

When the central claim of Zionism — that Jews were not safe in Europe — was proved to be catastrophically true, there was a huge surge in support for the Zionist cause. Both in motivating Jews to move to Israel and in garnering Western sympathy.

Unfortunately, two very bad arguments for Zionism gained more salience. One was that Jews were entitled to land occupied by their forebears up to two millennia earlier. This was a nonsense argument that is not accepted for any other group anywhere. A famous animation of this land is my land expresses the folly of this argument.

The other bad argument is that the horror of the Holocaust was such that Jews were entitled victims. That the horror of what was done to Jews entitled surviving Jews, and future generations of Jews, to trumping moral claims. This argument of multi-generational entitled victimhood — applied to a new set of victims — is now being used to excuse or pass over horrors perpetrated against Jews.

The kidnapping and trial of Adolf Eichmann trial — which Hannah Arendt famously characterised as a show trial — was the peak of legitimating Israel on the basis of harm done to Jews. Given that the Holocaust happened on a different continent — as Arab, Palestinian and Muslim commentators have bitterly observed — Israeli PM Ben-Gurion went so far as to claim the trial was about anti-Semitism everywhere. As Arendt observed, the Nuremberg Trial defendants were indicted for crimes against humanity, not some specific subset of Nazi victims.

Victims may be entitled to restitution for harms done to them.4 They may be appropriate objects of sympathy and help. But they do not thereby have claims against people who have done them no harm.5 Not even against people who may share some category with those that did them harm but who themselves did not participate in the harm, nor choose to benefit from it. (To be human is to have benefited from harm done to others: we are all the descendant of groups that wiped out, or otherwise displaced, other groups.)

Ruminating about trauma is generally not psychologically healthy and is far from an automatic response to trauma. As a paper on the subject (pdf) notes:

many Jewish-Israelis report that they are preoccupied with the Holocaust and fear that it will happen again, though most of them were not direct victims. However, this was not always the case, since in the early years after the Holocaust, although the survivors were suffering from severe post-trauma, the Holocaust was not prominent in Israeli discourse and was even considered, to some extent, contradictory to the Israeli identity. Israeli society only adopted a victimhood identity in the 1960s and 1970s, and the Holocaust became prominent in the Israeli narrative … partially as a result of the Eichmann trial, where victims spoke out during the televised proceedings.

Jewish activism simultaneously maintains two contradictory, and false, claims about the Holocaust:

1. The Holocaust was absolutely unique horror (it wasn’t).
2. It could happen anywhere (it couldn’t).

Continues…