(in: Judith Butler, Precarious Life, 2004, p. 101-127)
"The Charge of Anti-Semitism" was published in reduced form by the London Review of Books, August 21, 2003.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v25/n16/judith-butler/no-it-s-not-anti-semitic
"Profoundly anti-Israeli views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities. Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their Intent." - Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard University, September 17, 2002.
"There were debates throughout the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, and indeed at the inception of Israel, among Jews whether Zionism was a legitimate political ideology, whether it ought to become the basis of a state, whether the Jews had any right, understood in a modern sense, to lay claim to that land - land inhabited by Palestinians for centuries - and what future lay ahead for a Jewish political project based upon the violent expropriation of the land of Palestinians, dispossession on a massive scale, slaughter, and the sustained suspension of fundamental rights for Palestinians. There were those who sought to make Zionism compatible with peaceful coexistence, and others who made use of it for military aggression, and still do. There were those who thought, and who still think, that Zionism is not a legitimate basis for a democratic state in a situation where it must be assumed that a diverse population practices different religions, and that no group, on the basis of their ethnic or religious views, ought to be excluded from any right accorded to citizens in general. And there are those who maintain that the violent appropriation of Palestinian lands, and the dislocation of 700,000 Palestinians at the time that Israel was founded has produced a violent and dehumanizing basis for this particular state formation, one which repeats its founding gesture in the containment and dehumanization of Palestinians in the occupied territories." - Judith Butler
My view on when criticism of Israel becomes anti-Semitic.
First of all, the criticism must be invalid, unfounded, unjustified - valid criticism of Israel can never be anti-Semitic. This implies that the objection to it as 'anti-Semitic' can never stand on its own, it must always be accompanied by a demonstration invalidating the criticism. If left standing on its own, the accusation of anti-Semitism looks just as prejudiced as the anti-Semitic criticism of Israel itself, and offers the anti-Semite the well-known escape route of 'you just want to silence every criticism of Israel', an escape route that is cut off whenever the anti-Semite has to respond to a demonstration invalidating his criticism.
Secondly, that what makes the criticism invalid, unfounded, unjustified cannot be an innocent thing, such as an honest mistake or a simple case of misinformation, as is shown by the immediate withdrawal of the criticism whenever the mistake is pointed out and recognized. No, the invalid criticism becomes anti-Semitic only when it is made wittingly as an invalid criticism because it is inspired by some negative prejudice against Israel. It is therefore never just in effect, but always also intentionally anti-Semitic, while the anti-Semite will necessarily deny that it is so. It is after all in the nature of prejudice that it is not recognized as such by the one who holds it: there exists no anti-Semite who is not fully convinced that his negative prejudice is entirely justified!
When Jean-Paul Sartre said that 'anti-Semitism is a passion, not an opinion' he did not mean to deny that the anti-Semite typically rationalizes his hateful prejudice in the form of extensively formulated opinions he considers fully justified by imagined or invented facts. And as imagined or invented facts are notoriously difficult to disprove, the anti-Semite's position always appears at least to him impregnable.
In the case of anti-Semitic criticism of Israel, the negative prejudice typically appears as the omission or suppression from the argument of important facts or judgements. And Judith Butler is no less guilty of it than any other anti-Semite.
She questions the right of Jews to lay claim to a land inhabited by Palestinians for centuries, ignoring that a claim is a claim and not a right, and that everybody has the right to make claims as long as he does not expect that all the reasons he may put forward to justify his claim can unilaterally elevate that claim to the status of a proven right to the land in question. She thereby suggests without any proof that the Zionists proceeded in their enterprise in a way that completely ignored or denied any rights or claims that the Palestinians could make to their own land! How can anyone avoid the impression that she thereby exhibits a decidedly malevolent prejudice against the Zionists?
And then there is of course the staple of Palestinian anti-Semitic prejudice, the Nakba or catastrophic injustice of which the Palestinians pretend to be the victims at the hands of the Zionists and their Western backers: dislocation of 700,000 Palestinians, violent expropriation of the land, dispossession on a massive scale, slaughter, and the sustained suspension of fundamental rights for Palestinians are all cited as facts, suggesting that the fact of victimhood is in itself a proof of innocence, and therefore renders superfluous any examination of the events that led to that catastrophic outcome, and any assessment of the responsibilities of all the actors involved, without excluding the Palestinian people, their leaders and their allies. Is it simply the result of thinking in slogans, whereby victims are never to be blamed, because the slogan originated with victims of proven innocence, such as the victims of rape or the victims of the Holocaust? Whatever it is, it is again not devoid of malevolent anti-Zionist prejudice extended to Israel as the result of that tainted Zionist enterprise.
There are so many other specious arguments in Judith Butler's long and wordy essay that one despairs of having to answer them all. Reminding myself of the statement I began with, namely that the negative prejudice typically appears as the omission or suppression from the argument of important facts or judgements, I would argue that it isn't even necessary to answer them all, because it suffices to point out that nowhere in her essay does Judith Butler discuss the two major issues one must have with the Palestinian side of this conflict. (1) The complete disregard for the constituency of diaspora Jews in the name of which the Zionists advanced their national aspirations to sovereign statehood in Palestine. (2) The complete refusal to partake in negotiations in search of a possible compromise that would accommodate the national aspirations of both peoples, and the consequent resort to violence and outright war to thwart the Zionist enterprise.
(ad 1) The Palestinian side much more than the Zionists proceeded as if their natural majority in Palestine in the beginning of the British Mandate elevated their claim to the land to the status of an indisputable and exclusive right to self-determination and sovereign statehood in Palestine by simply ignoring the Jewish diaspora, which not only formed the larger part of the Zionist constituency, but was also much larger than the native Palestinian population, and this at a time when the whole region formerly governed by the Ottoman Empire needed to be politically reconstituted and offered a wealth of possibilities for a negotiated compromise.
(ad 2) One such possibility, after Transjordan was separated from Palestine to become an Arab state under a Muslim ruler, would have been to also make the Palestinians living in the remaining part of Palestine Jordanian citizens, while keeping them as 'foreign residents' with local citizenship rights in the future Israel occupying that whole territory; no transfer of population and compensation for expropriated property would have been necessary, but the Jews of Israel, even before having become a majority in the country through immigration, would have had the political control of their new democratic state. Granted, it would have been an even bigger ask of the Palestinians to live under exclusively Jewish rule than the Zionist plan to turn them into a minority with full citizenship rights in their own binational state. Maybe some confederation treaty with Transjordan could have alleviated the pain by giving Emir Abdullah some symbolic role as the head of the confederation and ruler of all the Muslims. I'm not sufficiently informed of all the dealings that took place between Zionists and Palestinian political figures under the British Mandate, so it is entirely possible that such a compromise was for some reason rejected by one or both of the parties, although the compromise would eventually have permitted to shake off the British Mandate and acquire independence much earlier, allowing for unrestricted immigration by diaspora Jews without British interference.
But I am sufficiently informed to affirm, that in confirmation of the adage that proximity kills prejudice the Palestinian population, who were never given a vote in the matter, were in fact much more conciliatory toward the Jews and Jewish immigration than their extremist leader Amin al Husseini, who with the backing of the Muslim Brotherhood defended the principle of Muslim supremacy derived from political Islam and rejected any concession of Palestinian territory to a sovereign Jewish state. So that when the rejectionist stance of the Palestinian and Arab leadership had finally led them to war with the newly created state of Israel in 1947/48, the term 'Nakba' was meant by the Palestinian refugees as an accusation hurled at their leaders for having led them to catastrophic defeat in a needless and unjust war against their Jewish neighbors.
By simply adopting as her own the Palestinian victimhood narrative, in which these grave responsibilities of the Palestinian and Arab leadership, for repudiating the essence of the Zionist enterprise and for resorting to violence and regular war in order to defeat it, are altogether suppressed, Judith Butler has already implicitly and unjustly blamed Israel for both the war and its regrettable consequences before she even has begun formulating her own criticism of Israel and its policies!
Her own criticism of Israel can easily be summarized: Israel is simply not doing enough or is not well intentioned enough to remedy a situation in which the Palestinians continue to suffer the consequences of their own actions. The last part is of course not admitted so openly as I have written it here, because it would render it rather difficult for Judith Butler to continue discussing Israel's faults as if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were an entirely one-sided affair. She has in other words fallen prey again to the Palestinian victimhood narrative of the Nakba, which by omitting all Palestinian responsibility for the current deplorable state of affairs also absolves the Palestinians from making any contribution to the solution that would put an end to the so-called 'occupation'.
It is truly amazing: in a long essay meant to counter the charge of anti-Semitism leveled at her and her left leaning colleagues in the academy, Judith Butler performs the astonishing feat of demonstrating her negative prejudice against the Jewish state of Israel for everybody to see without in the least becoming aware of it! And that is indeed the hallmark of prejudice: the total lack of self-awareness, the complete abdication of common sense in the service of a passion to see evil where one wants it to see.
Now, Judith Butler clearly does not hate Jews in the way modern anti-Semites such as the Nazi-ideologues did, or the Muslim Brotherhood following in their footsteps, and that is probably equally true for most of the Western anti-Israel crowd, who therefore cannot recognize their prejudiced criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic. They may even be so devoid of Jew hatred that they cannot even recognize it in their Muslim Palestinian proteges and allies. It is also apparent that their negative anti-Israeli prejudice together with their positive pro-Palestinian prejudice originates from their firmly held anti-capitalist convictions and their anti-colonialist ideology, both of which they have smuggled into academic 'critical theory'.
So one must indeed conclude that the charge of anti-Semitism has become misguided and ineffectual when the purpose is to counteract the polarizing effects of anti-Israeli and anti-Western prejudice in the public sphere.
"No political ethics can start with the assumption that Jews monopolize the position of victim."
Very well, now extend that same reasoning to the Palestinians and you may have understood something important about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
"The Jewish effort to criticize Israel during these times emerges, I would argue, precisely from this ethos. And though the critique is often portrayed as insensitive to Jewish suffering, in the past and in the present, its ethic is wrought precisely from that experience of suffering, so that suffering itself might stop, so that something we might reasonably call the sanctity of life might be honored equitably and truly."
Fair enough, although it cannot have escaped you that compassion is no substitute for reason when it comes to making an objective and impartial assessment of the responsibilities of all the actors involved in this conflict. You should also remind yourself of the need to keep your feet on the ground whenever you want to strive with some chance of success for an elevated goal such as honoring equitably and truly what you not unreasonably call the sanctity of life!
"But with what difficulty does one vigorously defend the idea that the Israeli occupation is brutal and wrong, and that Palestinian self-determination is a necessary good, if the voicing of those views calls down upon itself the horrible charge of anti-Semitism?"
Well, it is a bit obtuse to believe that these views as such are deemed anti-Semitic and not rather the implicit assumption made by their vigorous defenders that it is all Israel's fault.
"Now, it may be that what Summers was effectively saying is that, as a community, largely understood as the public sphere of the US, or, indeed, of a broader international community which might include parts of Europe and parts of Israel, the only way that a criticism of Israel can be heard is through a certain kind of acoustic frame, such that the criticism, whether it is of West Bank settlements, the closing of Birzeit University, the demolition of homes in Ramallah or Jenin, or the killing of numerous children and civilians, can only be taken up and interpreted as an act of hatred for Jews."
Now, I'm sorry to say that your bad faith is showing through rather remarkably here and it surely is no minor part of your anti-Israeli prejudice! What have the acoustics got to do with anything? When the words themselves and especially the words that are missing for an accurate explanation of these things are clear enough to allow for such an interpretation? And that not only in what you so elaborately describe as the Western public sphere, but also in the Muslim public sphere, albeit with much less disapproval.
"So whereas Summers himself introduces a distinction between intentional and effective anti-Semitism, it would seem that effective anti-Semitism can be understood only by conjuring a seamless world of listeners and readers who take certain statements critical of Israel to be tacitly or overtly intended as anti-Semitic expression. The only way to understand effective anti-Semitism would be to presuppose intentional anti-Semitism. The effective anti-Semitism of any criticism of Israel will turn out to reside in the intention of the speaker as it is retrospectively attributed by the one who receives, listens to or reads that criticism. The intention of a speech, then, does not belong to the one who speaks, but is attributed to that speaker later by the one who listens. The intention of the speech act is thus determined belatedly by the listener."
Wow, you're not making this easy for any of us, this game of smoke and mirrors! I suspect that you are misunderstanding Larry Summers quite intentionally so that you can insurge yourself against those arrogant listeners who dare doubt your good intentions when you unfairly criticize Israel. Whereas Larry Summers meant to say, with some approval from us arrogant listeners, that so much of the effectively unfair and anti-Semitic criticism of Israel is proffered by left leaning intellectuals who have become so prejudiced against Israel that they see the mote in Israel's eye but not the beam in their own. In other words, their unfair criticism of Israel is effectively as well as intentionally anti-Semitic, although their anti-Israeli prejudice prevents them from understanding how their good intentions can become effectively anti-Semitic!
"One reason, then, to oppose the use of the charge of anti-Semitism as a threat and as a means to quell political critique is that the charge must be kept alive as a crucial and effective instrument to combat existing and future anti-Semitism."
Knocking down straw men now? Without even noticing they're made out of straw after you have convinced yourself in so many words that Larry Summers effectively if not intentionally (or was it the other way around?) has come out to quell political critique. I know, it's hard to keep thinking straight when your prejudice has made you abandon all common sense.
"Of course, one could argue that criticism is essential to any democratic polity, and that those polities that safeguard criticism stand a better chance of surviving than those that do not. Let us imagine, for the sake of argument, that one set of criticisms do challenge the basic presuppositions of the Israeli state, ones that produce differential forms of citizenship, ones that secure the Right to Return for Jews, but not Palestinians, ones that maintain a religious basis for the state itself. For a criticism of Israel to be taken as a challenge to the survival of the Jews or Jewishness itself, we would have to assume not only that 'Israel' cannot change in response to legitimate criticisms, but that a more radically democratic Israel would be bad for Jews or for Jewishness. According to this latter belief, criticism itself is not a Jewish value, and this clearly flies in the face not only of long traditions of Talmudic disputation, but of all the religious and cultural sources for openly objecting to injustice and illegitimate violence that have been part of Jewish life for centuries, prior to the formation of the contemporary state of Israel, and alongside it."
Elliptical formulations such as 'Israel's right to exist' lend themselves perfectly to sophistry of the kind with which you're entertaining us here, namely that criticism challenging Israel's right to exist as the Jewish state it is now is what is needed to help Israel survive as a state at all. For someone who has obliterated from historical memory the role played by Palestinian and Arab leaders as instigators of the various violent phases of the conflict and replaced that history with the Palestinian victimhood narrative, it may well be possible to imagine that simply 'ending the occupation' and granting citizenship to all Palestinians including all returnees will end all violence and result in a radically democratic binational polity that continues to work as well for the Jewish minority and the Muslim Palestinian majority as Israel has worked hitherto for its Jewish majority. For someone less prejudiced however it would seem more natural to expect from the Palestinians some solid and tangible proof of their peaceful intentions before even thinking about making such a fateful leap of faith. Maybe we should at least agree that sophistry is no basis for statecraft.
My conclusion.
Judith Butler has written a 27-page essay to counter the charge of anti-Semitism leveled at her and her left leaning academic colleagues with all sorts of arguments: some of them are childish, others confusing, and all are formulated in a far too complicated manner to be correctly understood. But she seems never to have grasped where the charge was actually coming from and why her position was so exposed to it, which is the only explanation I can think of for her rather directionless counter-argument, and which is also direct proof of her anti-Semitic, or more exactly, anti-Israeli prejudice, of which she cannot become aware because it precedes and secretly motivates all her thinking about Israel and Palestine.
The somewhat esoteric, sometimes bombastic, but always imprecise and suggestive language she uses (e.g. 'radically democratic') reminds one of Jürgen Habermas, whose books also never become clearer after a second reading, in the way good books containing complex thoughts always should, according to Schopenhauer, whose opinion in the matter seems entirely reasonable, as one can only start to grasp all the internal relationships between complex thoughts contained in a good book after one has reached the end of it and starts reading it again from the beginning (and even then it takes a very good memory that retains all the bits one hasn't well understood on the first reading, so that even a third and a fourth reading will be rewarding).
It is also disappointing to see how far 'critical theory' has moved away from its original purpose of what the Frankfurters called 'Ideologiekritik' as a means to overcome the alienated human condition in modern Western society, to become something of a cottage industry for the manufacture of leftist ideologies tailored to the most improbable causes and contributing in no small measure to another layer of false consciousness of that same alienated condition. In other words, 'critical theory' has become indistinguishable from a nonsensical and inimical ideology that clearly undermines our capacity to rationally think and argue about the human condition and the state of society.
However, if one reminds oneself that Larry Summers's warning dates back to 2002, one is forced to concede that today Judith Butler and her colleagues have largely won the contest. Or so at least it seems.
I'll end with a quote from Vasily Grossman, whose reverence for the sanctity of life comes much closer in spirit to Teddy Adorno than Judith Butler's bombast ever will.
"Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness." - Vasily Grossman
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