TLDR:
Chris Rabb has been criticized for campaign with Hasan Piker. I understand why people, and especially Jewish people are uncomfortable with the stridency in the debate over Israel and Palestine. I argue however that living with discomfort and working with people who we agree with on some issues and disagree with on others is part of life in a functioning liberal democracy. So is engaging in debates with them.
I draw the line at work with racists, sexists, bigots, and antisemites. While some of the things Piker has said come up to that line they don’t cross it. Most importantly, he is not an anti-semite.
The Whole Story
it is a lot harder to be a liberal progressive Jew than it used to be. Disputes over the Israel-Palestine conflict can be very uncomfortable for us. But we need to deal with our discomfort about Israel / Palestine in other ways than turning right, away from our heritage.
I know some Jews in the 3rd Congressional District who are disappointed that Chris Rabb did a campaign event with Hasan Piker. I want to defend that event. But to do so, I need to explore how I, and I suspect many other Jews, think about and react to discussion of Zionism.
The Burdens of the Controversy Over Israel-Palestine.
I’ve been a critical Zionist for all of my adult life. I wrote my first published piece right after my Bar Mitzvah calling for Israel to negotiate a settlement that created a Palestinian state. Since then, I’ve been harshly critical of Israeli policy in the occupied territories, in its wars, and often in its domestic policy, which is far less respectful of the right Palestinian Israelis than most of us like to think. I have condemned the Gaza War which clearly has been fought unjustly, with multiple violations of the laws of war.
For reasons I’m going to explain another time, I’m still at least a kind of Zionist. (One thing few people know is that Zionists come in many varieties.) I support a Jewish political homeland that also respects the rights of Palestinians to equality in the homeland and to a state of their own. I think a settlement has to come about through negotiations between Israel and an elected Palestinian leadership. if I had my way, Israel and a Palestinian state would from a confederation that would allow both peoples a right of return and the ability to live anywhere in mandatory Palestine. But whatever settlement the two people make is fine with me.
Despite my critical views of Israel, being on the left and a member of the Democratic Party is more uncomfortable than it once was. I get a little uncomfortable when I see people on our side attack Zionism or use it’s a slur.
My discomfort a product of a few things.
First some–but certainly not all–anti-Zionism is in fact antisemitic. When people criticize Israel for being a settler-colonial country even though that is only one part of the story of Israel, almost every other country in the world is a settler-colonial regime, and the US certainly is one, it seems to they are holding Israel to a double standard. When they talk about Israel as if it is the only country that has committed war crimes–and ignore the far greater ones of other counties including the US—again I see a double standard. Holding Jews to a different standards is a standard antisemitic practice.
And when they blame the entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict on Israel, ignoring the goals and actions of Palestinians that have rejected possible settlements or paths to a settlement or that clearly aim to eliminate most Jews from the country where half the Jewish population in the world lives, again I see not just a defense of Palestinian rights but antisemitism.
Of course, antisemitism makes me uncomfortable. But if I’m honest with myself, I recognize that is not just antisemitism that disturbs me and many other progressive Jews. Even though I have been a critic of Israel for most of my life, reading criticism of Israel still unnerves me a little. And that’s true even when I agree with that criticism and when the criticism I read is actually softer than my own criticism of the country.
The explanation for this discomfort is not hard to understand.
I know that Jewish life is fragile and that it is important to keep watch on antisemitism. I know that for all its power and strength, Israel is still in danger from extremists who would kill all the Jews in the country if they could. (October 7 certainly proved that.) I know that while some critics of Israel share our views and seek a just settlement between Israel and the Palestinians others, including those who hold views I discussed above, have a deeper antisemitic animus towards the country and its people.
I also know that Jewish solidarity is important to the survival of our people.
So, I worry that legitimate criticism of Israel and Zionism and divisions among the Jewish people can give comfort to or even empower antisemitic criticism of the country. Or, even worse, hey could utterly delegitimate Israel country in the eyes of other Americans.
That’s only part of the story. Another part of my discomfort with even legitimate criticism of Israel is that I agree with it. I, and I suspect many other liberal Jews are both utterly furious and in complete despair at the direction of the country in the last 20 years. I abhor Netanyahu. I once hoped that a peace settlement could repair the damage done to Palestinians in the past. Now that prospect, which was raised by the Oslo Accords, seems to have disappeared. And I fear that Israel’s current direction is not just awful for the Palestinians but will ultimately lead to the physical of Isarel itself. (Netanyahu is well on his way to destroying the moral core of Israel.)
And, finally, part of my discomfort with legitimate criticism of Israel is I know that Israel’s actions are leading to a heightening of antisemitism in the US. Let me be clear: Israel’s actions do not justify antisemitism. There is no justification of antisemitism. But there is a causal if not rational relationship between what Israel has done and the growing threat of antisemitism.
So how should I and other Jews deal with this multi-faceted discomfort and the fear it engenders? How should it play into our political alliances on the left and left center and our relationship to the Democratic Party?
One response is to set down markers and insist that politicians toe our line. One example of such line drawing is occurring now as some Jews who are critical of Israel policy have said recently that they won’t support Chris Rabb because he campaigned with Hasan Piker a few weeks ago.
I understand where they are coming from. There are some quotes from Piker that are disturbing. He has said and done some misogynistic things. He said a couple of things that are antisemitic and his anti-Zionists arguments at times echo some of the ones I criticized earlier as echoing antisemitic claims. (I admit don’t know if his opposition to ethno-states is consistent or whether he mainly focuses on Israel and I’m not prepared to spend the rest of my year listening to him to find out!)
Many of Piker’s comments strike me as either infantile leftist or the kind of things a shock jock would say just to draw an audience or both. It is, for example, appalling to say the US one deserved 9/11 because no innocents ever deserve to suffer from terrorism. And his dismissal of the importance of Hamas rapes of Israeli women is disturbing, even if he just meant to say that they did not justify Israel’s war in Gaza. As for his saying that Hamas is a 1000 times better than Israel, he was simply making the point that Israel is responsible for far more deaths of innocents than Hamas. That is true. But it is a terrible over-simplification of the situation in many ways. It ignores Hamas’ responsibility for the initiation of the war. And it ignores the basic fact that Hamas not only did not use any of its resources to protect the civilian population of Gaza but that its whole political strategy has been to push Israel into committing war crimes. (Which does not mean Israel should have been so stupid and immoral as to commit them).
I really don’t like this Piker’s vulgar and over the top politics which oversimplifies complicated matters and prefers vapid slogans to historically informed and morally complicated discussion. It demeans and diminishes our politics in just the way right wingers from Rush Limbaugh to Newt Gingrich to Donald Trump have done.
But I also recognize that this is, sadly, the politics of the time. And not just of our time. If we go back to the often vulgar and over-simplified cartoons of the 1800s, a rough and ill-mannered politics has always lived side by side with the serious intellectual discourse. Moreover, Democratic politicians staying away from Piker or deplatforming him and other purveyor of this kind of politics on the left won’t restore high-minded decency to our political life. It will just hand over this important playing field. to the right.
Why We Be Careful Before We Censor or De-Platform Anyone
Should the kinds of problematic things he has said, or his anti-Zionism lead Democrats to shun him?
I think the answer in general is no, for five reasons.
First, while he echoes antisemitic critiques of Israel, Piker does explicitly condemn antisemitism in terms that I welcome and applaud. I would not associate with anyone or vote for anyone who associates with a person who explicitly embraces or refuses to clearly condemn antisemitism or racism or sexism or other bigotries. I don’t want to give them a platform That’s my red line and one I think we should all observe.
I really don’t think Piker crosses that line. And the effort to deplatform him on the basis of a couple of things he has said in so many hours of streaming strike me as being made utterly in bad faith. That is to say, it is being used by Jewish defender of Netanyahu to discredit any and all criticism of Israel.
Second, while there are faint echoes of antisemitism in his criticism of Zionism, his anti-Zionism should be a subject of debate. Anti-Zionism, like Zionism itself, is a very broad term. Some people might view my position anti-Zionist. Piker is certainly far more extreme in his condemnation of Zionism. But he also almost entirely focused on the things Israel has done that I and many other American jews condemn. He sees no differences of opinions between Ben-Givir and Shimon Peres let alone Martin Buber and doesn’t seem terribly interested in looking for them.
This is one of the dangers of shock jock politics. And it explains why he is very wrong in his understanding of what Zionism is. But I think this should be a subject of discussion and debate so that people who listen to him can hear alternatives. And I think it is worth investigating the varieties of anti-Zionism to clarify our vision of what just outcome in the Middle East is. I don’t know if Piker wants to see the destruction of Israel let alone the people of Israel. I doubt it. But even if it does, we do have a debate about what US policy towards Israel and we can’t and shouldn’t stifle debates before they start by assuming the worst of our interlocutors or walling ourselves off from them. Even if we find out that his views are awful, interacting with Piker and folks like him is a way a way to call them account for the wrongheaded, problematic and awful things they say in front of a large audience.
Third, most of us recognize that peace in the Middle East will not be possible without US engagement that pressures both sides to reach an accommodation. If we are serious in thinking that Israel’s policies are, to one degree or another, wrong, we have to have the debate about US policy towards Israel.
Fourth, and most importantly, Piker and folks like him have a following and we Democrats need to reach out to the people who pay attention to him.
That’s why Chris Rabb agreed to campaign with him, and I think it was the right thing to do.
Politics in a representative democracy like our own is always coalition politics. We can’t elect people on our side without working with those with whom we sometimes disagree.
Support for Israel has been so strong in the United States that we liberal Jews have been spared having to work with people whose views on Israel are not our own.
But many of us have worked with people and voted for politicians in the past for politicians whose views we disagree on some issue even though we support them on other. We have voted for Democratic candidates who are opposed to abortion. We have voted for moderate Democrats whose support for quality affordable health care has been weaker than we hoped. Some of us are old enough (or have had parents old enough) to have voted for Democrats whose commitment to civil rights for Black people was weaker than we wanted it to be.
Now we are going to have to suck it up and associate with people on our side and vote for Democrats who are not entirely where we want them to be on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We are going to have to fight for our vision of justice for Israel and Palestine while at times working with people and voting for people who do not share it.
Or to look at this from another angle, we are going to have to emulate other groups who voted for Democrats that did not fully recognize or embrace their interests. We might model our actions after Black people who have been the backbone of the Democratic Party for generations even though the party temporized and delayed on civil rights for a long time and never fully embraced affirmative action let alone economic policies that addressed entrenched Black poverty.
Why do we have to practice this kind of coalition politics? Because of a fifth point: the alternative is handing power to the Republicans. And as I have pointed out elsewhere, on every single issue, the Republicans are worse for our world, our country, and given the strong strain of antisemitism in the Republican Party, for Jews than the Democrats.
How We Should Move Forward
Lots of people are discomforted by people they ally with, work with, and vote for in politics. We often tell the extreme left to suck it up and vote for the lesser evil. We Jews have been spared the discomfort of having to work with critics of Israel. Now we have to suck it up and recognize Israel is a contested issue and we will have to both work with and sometimes challenge people work with and vote for.
We can’t let our discomfort with criticism of Israel, for whatever, reason, lead us to leave the Democratic Party let alone join the fascist cabal that now passes for the Republican Party.
Nor, if we are progressives, should we embrace centrists in the Democratic Party because we agree with their position on Israel. Given the threats we face, as Americans and Jews we need a strong progressive Democratic Party that can take our country back from the MAGA right. So we need to stand fast to the progressive ideals that have animated our politics for decades
We care about Israel even, or perhaps even most, when we criticize it. We have to remember that a US government that pushes the Israeli government where it does not want to go may be acting in Israel’s interests. And even more we have to remember that we American Jews have other interests besides Israel, interest that we can’t sacrifice in order to remove the discomfort that we feel in when we hear even valid criticism of it.
Why You Should Support Chris Rabb
I’ve known Chris for a long time and know not have an antisemitic bone in his body. He supports the continued existence of Israel but seeks, as I do, a just settlement between it and the Palestinians. And for reasons I’ve explained elsewhere, given the crisis of our time, I think we need Chris’ kind of leadership in Washington.
So this is not a hard vote for me at all. I hope those of you who support political leadership of the kind Chris offers and shared my discomfort with his event with Piker will come to the same conclusion.