In her now classic If I am not for Myself, Ruth Wisse argues that Jewish identification with liberalism no longer makes historical sense and today it is liberalism which presides over the destruction of Israel and the Jews.

Ruth Wisse. If I Am not for Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of
the Jews. New York:
The Free Press, 1992. $16.95. 225pp.

Why do American Jews continue to identify with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party? In fact, why did American Jews overwhelmingly vote for Barak Obama, after it was George W. Bush who stood firmly behind Israel while it was under continuous assault by suicide bombers, European public opinion and the Arab world? In her now classic If I am not for Myself, Ruth Wisse argues that Jewish identification with liberalism no longer makes historical sense and today it is liberalism which presides over the destruction of Israel and the Jews. American Jewish support of Obama is not a sign of their identification with "progressive” politics. It is a symptom of fear, the fear of rising anti-Semitism which is now sanctioned by the very liberalism which Jews once imagined would save them from it.

Jews have historically identified with liberalism as a way of protecting themselves from the arbitrary authority of Europe’s Christian rulers. The liberal belief that society is composed not of groups or orders but of individuals gave Jews the possibility to leave their sequestered lives in the ghetto and to take on normal roles within society.  Jews naturally admired the French Revolution, which linked liberalism with the secular belief in progress. The triumph of both would free them from the irrational forces of anti-Semitism. The founding of the state of Israel in 1948 reinforced the Jewish association with liberalism.  Jews continued to be perceived internally as underdogs and Israel was an obvious response to anti-Semitism.

The Arab defeats in the Six Day War and Yom Kippur wars of 1967 and 1973 altered the ideological relationship between Israel and the Arab world—but also the Jews relation to liberalism. Arab propaganda, seeking to rationalize their military defeat, now shifted from the “right” (“Kill the Jews”[1]) to the left: the Arabs are the victims. It concealed the fact that the Israeli seizure of the West Bank, Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and Sinai was done in the context of defending their country. As Wisse puts it, it enabled the Israelis to be condemned for the “crime of defending their country.” But more shrewdly, by representing themselves as victims the Arabs inverted the categories which previously had structured the ongoing Arab-Israeli debate.

The first step the Arabs took in establishing themselves as victims was by inventing the “Palestinian Arabs,” which would serve as an Arab equivalent of the Jews.[2]  Since the destruction of the Hasmonean Kingdom in 37 BC, the legend of the “wandering Jew” in search of a homeland had followed the Jews throughout what was called the “Diaspora.” Now a segment of the Arab population, some of whom had inhabited greater Israel prior to 1948, were recast in this light. They were no longer Arab refugees from the 1948 war.  A “new” Palestinian history was generated, sounding suspiciously like the Jews’ own. The “Palestinians” too were fashioned as a “people in a Diaspora”, longing to return to their homeland. The Arab defeats in 1967 and 1973 were now eclipsed by the “holocaust” they had suffered at the hands of the Jews. The PLO was deemed to have authored a “covenant” which promised the land of Israel to them. A ship called the “Exodus” was even launched to bring attention to their plight. And yet, Wisse asks, “If the Palestinian Arabs consider themselves a nation, how and why do they represent themselves consistently as Jews?”

By equating the Jews with the state of Israel and equating the state of Israel with a Holocaust visited upon “Palestinians,” the Arabs now forced the Jews to reconsider their relationship to Iiberalism. It forced the Jews to question the moral worth of Israel and by extension, themselves. In this way, they began to rationalize the Arab aim of destroying it.  “The genius of Arab anti-Semitism. . .lay in the nature of its challenge. By directing its attacks not merely at Jewish people, but at Israel itself, it transferred the dilemma liberalism posed to Jews to Israel itself embarrassing the Jews.”

The Arab propaganda attack on Israel succeeded overwhelmingly, stigmatizing  Jews of all persuasions –whether they were orthodox or secular.  It resurrected the cultural world of the pre-Enlightenment ghetto where Jews were only permitted to enter society if they submitted to conversion—which in modern terms met the disavowal of Israel’s right to exist. The modern secular Jew, who often found himself
unattached to Israel in the first place, found himself in an even more precarious position:  In the days of the ghetto, Jews might look to the Lord of Hosts as their protector. However many modern Jews were no longer certain they even wanted to maintain a Jewish identity—much less in the face of sustained anti-Semitic hatred.

Arab anti-Semitism forced “liberal Jews”, willingly or unwillingly, to address its reality. It forced them to “abandon their pacific generous optimistic view of the world” in order to “take account of a specific aggressive and declared intention again of destroying—yet again—the Jews.” Indifferent to their attitudes towards Israel, collective Arab anti-Semitism increasingly took away the modern Jew’s right of self determination. Whether he chose to be a Jew or not was rendered moot: by virtue of being held a Jew in Arab eyes (and not his own), he was held responsible for Israel’s alleged crimes.

The Arab propaganda attack on Israel demanded a response in kind, namely suspending the belief that  through liberalism that Jews might find refuge from anti-Semitism.

In order to appreciate the political attraction of anti-Semitism, which is the first condition for containing it, Jews would have had to study the mind of their inspired enemies the way they had historically debated the will of God. For Jews to engage in such an inquiry would have meant confronting the humiliation of hatred instead of trusting in eventual acceptance. It would have meant trading in the eschatological optimism of the messianic dream for the political pragmatism of defending against extinction.

However, many Jews refuse to confront Arab racism, continuing to hide behind the all-too-flimsy shield of liberalism. And such a choice, Wisse puts sharply, is no longer innocent.  Many Jews, “. . .having no desire to engage their adversaries. . .tried to prove themselves unworthy of hatred.” It is this which explains the motivation of the endless “human rights campaigns” which, she notes, are often led by Jews. Here “the Jew attempts to subsume his own concerns into those of general humanity—forgetting that the anti-Semite will always come up with an exception upon which he can render the Jew the exception.” Wisse also is critical of the obsession some Jews have in making an ideology of the Holocaust. “Through the close identification [with] the Holocaust, some Jews imagine they will be conceived to be innocent in some general sense.” This, Wisse argues, is myopic. Anti-Semites are just as likely to draw the conclusion that the Jews are ldquo;weak” or “unusual” from the images of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Finally, liberal Jews often attempt to portray anti-Semitism as a sort of mystery—“an irrationalism that is inexplicable.” This too, is dangerous. Since anti-Semitism is “beyond reason,” it “brings about despair.”

Wisse concludes by arguing that the only ethical response to anti-Semitism is to confront it head on.  First, Jews must be “for themselves.” Whether a Jew believes himself to be Jewish or not is an historical reality  imposed on Jews (whether they like it or not) by Arab anti-Semitism.

[S]ince anti-Semitism bears no relation to the achievements of the Jews it cannot be dispelled by proofs of their excellence. . . .Jews could dispel anti-Semitism through their behavior only if it were directed against their behavior. But given that the fear and the hatred derive from the accuser himself, and are often a projection of his own desires, they can only be dispelled by a revision in HIS mind. To put it in contemporary political terms: were Arab opposition to a Jewish nation based on the quality of that nation, on something correctable in Jewish policies, Israel could aspire to satisfy it. But the Arab charge that Israel is racist by definition supersedes
and remains invulnerable to proof.

To be Jewish, to be French, or Persian, is an historical right. Jews have no more need to apologize for being Jews than any other people.

Second, however, the response to anti-Semitism demands a critique of the old liberalism which Jews have long looked to for security since the Enlightenment.

The solution to anti-Semitism is to not avoid it by imagining one can somehow escape into the seductive temptations of the universalist illusion. It is to engage in the defense of that very particularity against which the ideology of anti Semitism has always been at war.

The problem with liberalism in the post 1967 world is twofold. First, as a project directed towards the future it finds itself at a disadvantage when confronted with an enemy who is decidedly illiberal. Liberalism “must either admit the reality of aggression and suspend its belief that the world is liberal for long enough to help make it so, or it maintains its liberal optimism and denies the reality of the aggression.” Today’s liberal is a “fundamentalist” who sees liberalism less as a political choice than an “ontological principle.” The “liberal fundamentalist must therefore “deny the aggression that contradicts his belief.” 

Third, liberalism equates the character of Israel with its legitimacy. The Jews, Wisse insists, like any other people, are entitled to their own nation. While the nation may be in some sense better or worse, liberals, by entertaining Arab anti-Semitism, question Israel’s right to exist. This leads them in part to the existential dilemmas about their own Judaism.  It is also why the moral scrutiny Israel is subject to is never applied to its neighbors. Since Israel is assumed to be an illegitimate nation, it must always “prove” itself to its critics.” The same dilemma is also posed to Jews who fail to distinguish between themselves and the establishment of Israel. Wisse has little good to say about Jews whose willingness to abandon Israel leads them to cover themselves in the cloak of a bogus moralism.  “The scandal of Jews who overlook this outrage or accept it as a test of chosenness is an affront not only to Jewish life, but to any moral life worth living.”

Today’s liberal, Wisse concludes, is not merely an escapist, but a moral coward. “It is only if [the Jews] stand up to Arab enmity [that they] can claim to be maintaining human rights.”[3]  But this requires abandoning the fiction that equates liberalism with a moral vision of the world. “Jews, she concludes,  will never prove themselves moral by seeking refuge from their struggle behind the banner of liberalism. But liberalism assuredly will b e judged by whether it can protect the Jews.”