Leftist Jews — Part I: Jewish Uncle Toms

Credit for inspiration for this two-part piece goes to both Diane Weber Bederman and to Sarah Tuttle-Singer. Diane wrote that J Street Jews (and I suppose others like them) can most accurately be understood as Jewish Uncle Toms. Sarah wrote about privilege. In Part I, I will expand upon Weber Bederman’s application of the term Uncle Tom to leftist Jews; in Part II, I will discuss how Uncle Tomism interacts with a (false) sense of privilege leading to Jewish leftism.

By Jewish leftism I am referring only to the issue concerning attitudes to the Israeli-“Palestinian” conflict, or political leftism. I am not a political leftist. Political leftism stands in contrast to economic leftism with which I do concur to a large extent.

Jewish leftists engage in behaviours that non-leftists see as directly or indirectly harming Israel, whether in the short term or the long term. Harming the Jewish state (either intentionally or unintentionally) can be seen as a form of self-harm. Some critics of the Jewish left call the leftists antisemitic Jews or self-hating Jews.

Defining Self-Hating Jews

Many of us struggle trying to understand the apparent willingness of certain Jews to operate against the Jewish state all the while proclaiming that they are concerned with the well-being of the Jewish state. Many of those, like me, do not feel that calling leftists self-hating Jews is either accurate or really captures the phenomenon.

Surely there are those who hate the fact that they were born into The Tribe. But that is likely not the majority. I am certain that those who act in ways that I see as being against the better interests of Israel believe, in fact, that they are trying to save Israel’s soul. I can say that more confidently about Israeli leftists than I can about North American Jewish leftists.

There is a difference between so-called self-hating Jews and Jews who just do not care about being Jewish. Let’s look first at the latter — Jews who feel no affinity for the Jewish people or Judaism. They perhaps marry out and do not care whether or not their children identify as Jews.

When I entered university in Canada at the age of 18, I did not care about being Jewish. I had grown up in a Jewish area of town and knew only Jews. An antisemitic incident directed against me at age 12 did not really affect me at the time. Being Jewish was but one aspect of my total being. I was neither ashamed of it nor proud of it. It was just a fact, no different to me than having green eyes. But my not-caring was challenged when I left my Jewish neighbourhood and was exposed to how others related to me as a Jewess.

The constant reminders that others saw me as a Jew-first-human-second and, therefore, as being different in an often negative sense had a profound effect on my view of myself. Looking back, I can now see that I could have, as a consequence, gone in one of four possible directions: I could have tried to hide being Jewish; I could have openly hated anything Jewish; I could have allowed the conflict between valuing my Jewish background yet wanting to be accepted by non-Jews to fester; and I could have embraced being Jewish. I chose the latter.

Those we commonly refer to as self-hating Jews likely either hate being Jewish or are conflicted about it. I have the feeling that those who hate being Jewish are most likely actually conflicted to an extreme degree. Probably the hiding Jew is as well, but he or she just keeps quiet about everything connected with Israel or Jewish issues. And there may be some who remain neither-here-nor-there Jews.

How Do Self-Hating/Conflicted Jews Behave With Respect to Israel?

They do one or more of the following:

1. Join pro-BDS demonstrations, write in favour of BDS whether academic boycott or otherwise, vote in support of BDS declarations in their organizations.
2. Promote the one-state solution whereby Judea & Samaria, currently under conjoint Israeli and Palestinian Authority administration, joins with Israel making one indivisible state from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River. It is unclear what name they anticipate would be attached to this new entity. It is abundantly clear, however, that whatever it would be called it would signal the death knell of the Jewish population between the river and the sea. (UPDATE 16.10.19: There are now a number of different options suggested and a one-state solution may not be the demographic danger it was one thought to be. The current equivalent to this item is the leftist opposition to the Nation State Law, suggesting that Israel should not be a Jewish state but a state of all its citizens, meaning that the national anthem, flag and other Jewish symbols are up for challenge in a court of law, as Adalah seeks to do.)
3. Blame Israel (Netanyahu) for forestalling negotiations for a two-state solution in spite of the fact that all previous negotiated terms were rejected by Arafat and then Abbas.
4. Refer to the situation in the Palestinian Authority as Israeli occupation and apartheid without caring that the current situation was agreed upon by both sides in the Oslo Accords.
5. Blame terrorism on Israel, saying that if we played nice the Palestinian Muslims would stop trying to kill us.
6. Scorn Jews who feel attachment to and want to maintain control over Judaism’s sacred sites, such as the Patriarchal Caves and the Temple Mount, saying that rocks should not be more important than people, while accepting that Muslims kill for those very same rocks, seeking to destroy any thread of connection between these sites and the Jewish people.
7. Scorn Jews who want to live in ancient Jewish areas in Judea & Samaria, believing that Jews should accept the apartheid inherent in  agreeing to stay out of there.

Leftist Jews sincerely believe that they are acting in Israel’s best interests. They are, in their opinion, trying to raise the ethical and moral standards demonstrated by leaders of the country so that Israel corresponds to their image of a just and tolerant society. In some cases, leftist Jews may believe that they are successors of those who fought for civil rights in the USA and against apartheid in South Africa. They draw some kind of equivalency between the Palestinian Arabs in Judea & Samaria and the Blacks of the States/South Africa.

However, they are aligning themselves with those who seek Israel’s destruction and not simply redress for crimes they accuse Israel of committing against Palestinian Arabs. It has been suggested by some analysts that cooperating with those who want to kill you, virtually an act of suicide, is a form of Stockholm Syndrome but the situation does not mirror that in which Stockholm Syndrome arises. Others have referred to leftist Jews as kapos. Weber Bederman says this is wrong.

Leftist Jews as Uncle Toms

In contrast with the kapos who were definitely in mortal danger from the Nazis with whom they cooperated, the leftist Jews are not in immediate mortal danger from the anti-Zionists with whom they cooperate.

I think the J Street Jews are the Jewish equivalent to Uncle Tom.  Their lives are not in any danger.  They, like all Uncle Toms, have chosen to curry favour with the “elite” and turn on their own people. [she is referring to diaspora Jews, not Israelis]

Weber Bederman was mainly talking about the Iran Deal. I would like to expand her application of the term to include all those Jews who support BDS against the Jewish state, who want to browbeat Israel into giving up land to the Palestinian Authority with nothing back in return, who agree that Jews should not go up to the Temple Mount and who think all our problems are because of some make-believe “occupation”. The mayor of Tel Aviv is one major player whose name comes to mind here.

What Is An Uncle Tom?

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines an Uncle Tom as “a black who is overeager to win the approval of whites (as by obsequious behavior or uncritical acceptance of white values and goals).” If we switch out “black” for “Jew” and “white” for “non-Jew”, we have the definition of a Jewish Uncle Tom.

Being an Uncle Tom means relinquishing your right for self-definition.

It means that if the non-Jewish majority of humanity sees the Jewish state as an occupier, then you agree that Israel is an occupier even though legally that is not so. It means that if the non-Jewish majority of humanity sees the situation in Judea & Samaria as apartheid, then even though the division of authority was agreed upon in the Oslo Accords, you agree that the situation is one of apartheid. If the non-Jewish majority of humanity calls Judea & Samaria the West Bank, then so do you. If they say Jews cannot pray on the Temple Mount, you agree. If they say Jewish communities are illegal settlements you agree; if they say building homes in these communities constitutes an impediment to peace while terrorist murder does not, you agree.

At what point do you stand up and ask about Jewish rights? Or do you not believe we have any?

What do you think would be the consequences of standing up proudly and assertively to declare Jewish rights to self-definition, self-determination, self-defense, and all the rest? Why do you instead bow your heads as if you are ashamed that a Jewish state even exists?

That brings us to the issue of privilege. In Part II, I talk about how a sense of white privilege intersects with Uncle Tomism and how that creates the Jewish leftist.