Why are young Americans circulating Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” on TikTok?

“We must separate the Jews into two categories, the Zionists and the partisans of assimilation,” wrote Reinhard Heydrich, one of the architects of the Holocaust, in 1935. “The Zionists profess a strictly racial concept and, through emigration to Palestine, they help to build their own Jewish State.…[O]ur good wishes and our official goodwill go with them.”

In Heydrich’s terms, the creation of the State of Israel thus represented the triumph of Zionism over assimilationism. But it also complicated the traditional anti-Semitic perception of Jews as a deracinated, rootless people. This was Martin Heidegger’s view, in 1939, when he called for an examination of “Jewry’s predisposition to planetary criminality”:

“With their marked gift for calculation, the Jews ‘live’ according to the principle of race, and indeed have done so for the longest time, for which reason they themselves most vigorously resist its unrestricted application. The arrangement of racial breeding stems not from ‘life’ itself, but from the hyperempowerment of life by machination (Machenschaft). What this brings about with such planning is a complete deracination of peoples by harnessing them in a uniformly constructed and streamlined arrangement of all entities. Along with deracination goes a self-alienation of peoples – the loss of history – i.e., of the regions of decision for being (Seyn).”

Underpinning these lines is the philosophical opposition between fully living in a concrete world and denying such spiritual-historical roots by viewing all “external reality” as merely something to be manipulated and exploited. But what happens when a supposedly rootless cosmopolitan race begins to put down roots? With Zionism, the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut wrote in 2015, “The Jews, they have today chosen the path of rooting.”

It is easy to discern in this claim an echo of Heidegger’s belief that all essential and great things require a “blood and soil” homeland. The irony is that anti-Semitic clichés about rootlessness are invoked to legitimize Zionism. Whereas anti-Semitism reproaches Jews for being rootless, Zionism tries to correct this supposed failure. No wonder so many conservative anti-Semites ferociously support Israel’s expansion to this day. The problem, of course, is that expansion, under Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s government, now means settling and annexing the West Bank – seeking roots in a place that was for centuries inhabited by other people.

We encounter a similar issue with differing interpretations of the traditional Jewish saying “Next year in Jerusalem,” pronounced at the end of the Seder (the ritual meal marking the start of the Passover holiday). As Dara Lind of Vox explains:

“Many Jews who believe strongly in the importance of a Jewish state see ‘next year in Jerusalem’ as an expression of the need to protect Jerusalem and Israel as they exist today. Others think of the ‘Jerusalem’ mentioned in the Seder more of an ideal of what Jerusalem and Israel could be – for them, ‘next year in Jerusalem’ is a prayer that Israel will move closer to that ideal. Or ‘Jerusalem’ could just be a symbol of utopia more generally, and ‘next year in Jerusalem’ could be a resolution to bring peace to Earth in the coming year.”

These versions reproduce the duality of the transcendental and the empirical. “Jerusalem” is either an abstract spiritual site of deliverance or an actual city with real people, buildings, and religious monuments. Not surprisingly, some Muslim fundamentalists are quite sympathetic to the “transcendentalists” who regard exaltation of the actual city as blasphemy. In the mid-2000s, when then-Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad organized a conference calling for the State of Israel’s obliteration, he hosted a few friendly “transcendentalist” rabbis. It was an inversion of Heydrich’s view: Having Jews in our midst is okay; it is the Jewish state that is unacceptable.

But there is a third, profoundly dangerous version of “Next year in Jerusalem” that offers a synthesis of the two. Those who espouse it say: “Now that we have Jerusalem, we can use next year to demolish the Palestinian buildings and rebuild the biblical Temple on the site where the Al-Aqsa Mosque currently stands.” The struggle for Jerusalem thus becomes a sacred undertaking. Even if a crime is committed, the perpetrators will bear no guilt (in their eyes) because they are founding a new legitimate order. It is like the old joke in which the villagers boast of having no cannibals: “We ate the last one yesterday.”

But let’s be clear about what is really going on. By using Jewish victimhood to justify an expansionist agenda, pro-annexation Israelis are cynically exploiting the memory of the Holocaust. Those offering unconditional support for Israel thus are also supporting the current Israeli government against the liberal opposition that opposes settlements and expansion. Yet that expansionism is a leading source of anti-Semitism in the world today.

Among the countries offering full support for Israel is Germany, where many on the right warn of “imported anti-Semitism” (importierter Antisemitismus). The implication is that any new wave of anti-Semitism in Germany is not a German phenomenon, but rather a result of Muslim immigration. But why, then, have so many young leftists in the West also refused to express solidarity with Israel following Hamas’s attack on October 7? Why are young Americans circulating Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” on TikTok?

It is too easy to say that they simply sympathize with Hamas. Rather, what unites many of those joining pro-Palestinian protests is the broader view that the foreign policies and military apparatuses of the United States and its Western allies are beholden to Big Capital and its exploitation of the rest of the world. Sometimes, there is a very thin line separating genuine discontent with capitalism from the kind of “anti-capitalist” populism found in Bin Laden’s letter.

Many liberals have expressed their support for Israel while simultaneously voicing concerns about the number of civilians – especially children – being killed in Gaza. There is growing sympathy for Palestinians as victims, as well as a recognition of their right to resist expansionist encroachment. But how they can resist without becoming anti-Semites? It is a question that so far has elicited only silence and embarrassment.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2023. www.project-syndicate.org

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