TL;DR
Chris Rabb has been criticized for campaigning with Hasan Piker.
Many Jews, including myself, are discomforted not just by antisemitism, but by anti-Zionism. And that’s true even when we are strong or even strident critics of Israeli politics. For most of our lives, we Jews have been spared the discomfort of having to work in political coalition with critics of Israel. But, mostly because of the extremist policies of the Israeli government under Netanyahu, those days are over.
How respond to this situation is perhaps the greatest test of our political acumen and morality many of us have ever faced. For given the stakes for our country and the world, we are going have to suck it up and recognize that Israel is now a contested issue and that we will have to both work with and vote for people who we also disagree with and want to challenge. We can’t let our discomfort with criticism of Israel, for whatever, reason, lead us to abandon our progressive principles let alone leave the Democratic Party to join the fascist cabal that now passes for the Republican Party.
I draw the line at working 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 clearly not an antisemite. So despite my qualms about Piker, I remain committed to electing Chris Rabb to Congress.
The Whole Story
It is a lot harder to be a liberal progressive Jew than it used to be. But we need to deal with our discomfort about criticisms of Israel / Palestine and fear of antisemitism in other ways than turning right, away from our moral heritage
Where I Stand
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 still myself somewhere between an anti-anti-Zionist and a kind of Zionist. Or perhaps as one of my friends told me, I’m a post-Zionist. (One thing few people know is that Zionists come in many varieties as do anti-Zionists and post-Zionists, whatever that latter category means.) 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 even for me than it once was.
Antisemitism on Left and Right
I’m going to focus primarily on my issues with anti-Zionism, not with antisemitism. But let me say a word about the latter issue.
There is no doubt that strong disagreements with Israel’s war in Gaza on the left has led some Democratic-leaning voters to dabble in or embrace antisemitism. The campus movement against the Gaza War, which I mostly welcomed, too often embraced Hamas talking points, which had a strong streak of antisemitism. (And Israel’s war is genocidal than Hamas’s attack on October 7 certainly is as well.) And while it’s hard to evaluate how often Jewish students were harassed or discriminated against because they were Jews, there is clear evidence that it happened. Some Democratic aligned pundits and perhaps one or two political officials have dabbled in antisemitism.
This is awful. There is NEVER any justification for antisemitism. Opposition to Israel’s actions in Gaza have given people who were already antisemites permission to express their horrid views. But Israel’s actions, however wrong, do not justify antisemitism. Again, there is never justification of antisemitism.
Yet while I worry about antisemitism on the left, I’m far more concerned by antisemitism on the right and in the Republican Party. It’s one thing for supporters of a party or even some grassroots party activists to be antisemitic. It’s a far different thing for the President of the United States, people in his administration, some Republican members of Congress, and leading influencers like Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson to antisemitic. And that includes the Christian Zionists who have far more influence over the Republican policy than Jews.
As I’ll talk about more later in this piece, I understand why some Democrats have angst about antisemitism in the party. It’s a very new and disturbing phenomenon. But to leave the Democratic Party when the Republicans are drenched in antisemitism is an utterly absurd overreaction.
Hearing Criticism of Israel Is Hard for Many of Us, Even When We Agree With It.
But most of this angst is not about antisemitism but about growing Democratic criticism of Israel.
Though I’m a strong critic of Israel, I understand this. I still get a little uncomfortable when I see people attack Israel and Zionism or use Zionism as slur.
My discomfort a product of a few things.
First some–but certainly not all–anti-Zionism is in fact antisemitism. 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 war crimes of the Palestinians, the far greater ones of other counties including the US, or when those criticism are put forward with rhetoric that aims to delegitimate Israel—again I see a double standard. Holding Jews to a different standards is a standard antisemitic practice.
When people criticize Israel for being an ethno-state, but have no issue with Germany or France, again I see a double standard at work.
When people blame the Israeli-Palestinian conflict entirely on Israel, ignoring the goals and actions of Palestinians who have rejected possible settlements or paths to a settlement or who 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. If you don’t understand that extremists on both sides–Netanyahu and Hamas—are in effect working together to radicalize the other side and make a peaceful settlement impossible.
But it is not just these claims that make me, and I suspect many other Jews, uncomfortable. Even though I have been a critic of Israel for most of my life, totally oppose Netanyahu, think the Gaza War and the Iran Ware are both moral and strategic disaster, reading criticism of Israel still unnerves me a little. And that’s true even when I agree with that criticism and when the criticisms are actually softer than my own.
The explanation for this discomfort is not hard to understand. It has a few sources.
First, I know that Jewish life is fragile and that it is important to keep watch on antisemitism. More than half of my family was killed in the Holocaust. So I very much fear antisemitism. And 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. Some of them would like both the country and its people to disappear.
I also know that Jewish solidarity is important to the survival of our people. So I worry that legitimate criticism of Israel and Zionism can give comfort or even empower antisemitic criticism of the country and, even worse, utterly delegitimate Israel country in the eyes of other Americans.
Second, my discomfort with even legitimate criticism of Israel is that I agree with it. That’s not as odd as you may think. 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 destruction of Israel itself. (Netanyahu is well on his way to destroying the moral core of Israel.) Hearing legitimate criticisms of Israel are thus disturbing precisely because they remind us how badly things have gone.
And, finally, part of my discomfort with legitimate criticism of Israel is that, as I said above, that Israel’s actions encourage or give permission for antisemitism in the US.
How Should We Deal with Our Discomfort
So how should I and other Jews deal with this discomfort? How does 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. So 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-Zionist arguments at times draw on ideas the ones I criticized earlier. (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 all 20,000 hours of his video posts 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 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 which is true. 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 sadly 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 certainly does nor excuse Israel for committing them).
I really don’t like 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 early 1800s you will find a politics in which often vulgar and always over-simplified cartoons in which the Jefferson and Hamilton attacked one another. A rough and ill-mannered politics has always lived side by side with the serious intellectual discourse in our representative democracy.
Why We Must 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 has explicitly condemned 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.
Though I’m not fond of his politics and how he presents it, I 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 the spur of the moment 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 as anti-Zionist. (I’ve been called far worse by fellow Jews.) 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 also condemn.
Piker wrongly sees no differences of opinions between Ben-Givir and Shimon Peres let alone the Zionist I seek to emulate, 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 Zionism is oversimplified. 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 Jewish people of Israel. I doubt it. But even if it does, we must have a debate about US policy towards Israel and we can’t and shouldn’t stifle those debates by assuming the worst of our interlocutors or walling ourselves off from them. Even if we find out that his views are wrong or awful, interacting with Piker and folks like him is the right way a way to call them account.
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. And that includes being open to using a denial of military aid to the country as leverage.
Fourth, Piker and folks like him have a following and we Democrats need to reach out to the people who pay attention to him. Winning elections is critical at this moment.
That’s why Chris Rabb agreed to campaign with him. I think it was the right thing to do.
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.
The Discomfort of Coalition Politics
And fifth, we have to recognize that politics is now going to be harder for us Jews and learn to live with it.
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 (and opposition to antisemitism) 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 whose views we disagree with on some issues. We have voted for Democratic candidates who are opposed to abortion. We have voted for Democrats whose support for quality affordable health care has been pretty weak. We have voted for Democrats who oppose gay rights. 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.
We haven’t just voted for these folks. Many of us have insisted that people hold their noses, suck it up, and vote for Democratic candidates with whom they have profound disagreements.
Now it’s time for American Jews to do the same. We are going to have to suck it up and associate with people on our side we disagree with about Israel and Palestine. 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 to address 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 than Democrats for our world, our country, and given the strong strain of antisemitism in the Republican Party, for Jews.
How We Should Move Forward
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 their position on Israel does not trouble us. 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 not just when we support it but when we make strident criticisms of its policies. 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, interests 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 that he does 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 yet share my discomfort with his event with Piker will come to the same conclusion.