Safe for Zionism Is Not The Same As Safe for Jews

But Zionists would like to conflate the two.

Vice President Joe Biden is greeted by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife, Mrs. Sara Netanyahu, upon arrival for his bilateral meeting at the Prime Minister's residence in Jerusalem on January 13, 2013. [State Department photo by Matty Stern/ Public Domain]

—

If you find this post valuable, consider becoming a member. There is a limited time only 50% sale off right now. So $25/year.

—

Israel’s horrific, genocidal assault on Gaza has now spread to Lebanon, where its military continues to incinerate children. The US under President Joe Biden has enabled these atrocities by sending Israel’s rabid far right government some $17.9 billion in military aid over the last year.

When called on to explain his (despicable) policy in Israel, Biden often argues that Israel deserves US aid because Israel protects Jewish people. “Were there no Israel, no Jew in the world would be ultimately safe,” he said at one White House meeting on antisemitism. “It’s the only ultimate guarantee.”  Even more succinctly at an appearance on Late Night With Seth Meyers, Biden said, “Were there no Israel, there’s not a Jew in the world who will be safe.”

This is a disturbing sentiment from the President for a number of reasons.

First, as president, Biden is supposed to ensure the safety of Americans, including American Jews. He is not supposed to outsource that safety to some other country. I don’t live in Israel, and do not want to move to Israel. I live here. I want Biden to be committed to protecting Jewish people in the US, not using our safety as an excuse for arming war criminals.

In addition, Biden’s sentiments, as a reaction to 10/7, seems bizarrely ill-timed. On that date in 2023, Hamas murdered around 1139 people in Israel. Hamas was able to do so because Netanyahu ignored obvious warnings, and the vaunted Israeli security services completely failed in their duty to protect their citizens.

Israel did not keep Jewish people safe on 10/7.  Nor has Israel in general been a safe place for Jewish people. Israel has sometimes been a safer option for some Jewish people, as when Jewish people from Middle Eastern nations were forced to flee those countries because of growing nationalist movements. But Israel is attempting to establish a state on land where other people live and have lived; that has always required violence and always provoked violence. Unsurprisingly, then, in its 76 years of existence, Israel has been more or less constantly at war with its neighbors and with Palestinian resistance movements.

American antisemitism is a problem, especially as Trump’s fascist movement gains ascendancy and power. But America’s colonial wars in the North American continent are some distance in the past, and the US is currently a fairly safe place to live, even with the gun violence. Certainly, post 10/7, I feel a lot safer in the US than I would in Israel.

This is pretty obvious. So why isn’t it obvious to Joe Biden, and to Zionists like him?

For Zionists, Jews only exist when they’re in Israel

I think the reason it is not obvious to Biden is that Biden, like many Zionists (non-Jewish and Jewish), sees Zionism as core to Jewish identity. Jewish people are “safe” only in Israel because Jewish people outside Israel do not really exist, at least not as (real) Jews.

Zionism doesn’t guarantee the safety of Jewish people by protecting Jewish people from violence. Rather, for people like Biden, Zionism is Jewish people, and therefore Jewish safety is Zionism.

That’s why 10/7 doesn’t factor in for Biden when he says that Israel protects the safety of Jews. It doesn’t matter how many Jewish people die in Israel or outside of Israel, because individual Jewish lives aren’t really important. The only important thing is the ethnonationalist state, which is the truth of Jewishness, and whose existence, therefore, is the entirety of Jewish safety, even if Israel’s policies in practice lead to lots of dead Jewish people (and to even more dead people who aren’t Jewish, and whose lives, I’d argue, are equally valuable.)

There’s plenty of evidence that Zionism sees Zionist Jews, and Zionism itself, as distinct from, and more important than, non-Zionist Jews and/or Jews in the diaspora. I wrote here about Hayim Nahman Bialik’s poem “The City of Slaughter,” a lengthy Zionist attack on diaspora Jews which frames them as subhuman and deserving of extermination.

In line with this logic, and extending it, the Anglo-American Committee tasked with recommending policy in Mandatory Palestine in 1946, shortly before the establishment of Israel, claimed that Jews in Israel had been transformed into something like Aryans. Bartley Crum, a member of the committee, reported:

Many of the Jewish children I saw were blond and blue-eyed, a mass mutation that, I was told, is yet to be adequately explained.  It is the more remarkable because the majority of the Jews of Palestine are of east European stock, traditionally dark-haired and dark-eyed. One might almost assert that a new Jewish folk is being created in Palestine: the vast majority almost a head taller than their parents, a sturdy people more a throwback to the farmers and fishermen of Jesus’ day than products of the sons and daughters of the cities of eastern and central Europe.  

Zionism here makes Jewish people safer not by physically protecting more Jewish people from death, but rather by actually transforming Jewish people into [Christian] white people. Jewish people with their own state become more biologically pure and hearty; the state creates the biology. That’s ethnonationalism. And, also, inextricably, antisemitism.

Safety Is Zionism

 Of course, Zionists insist that it is the critics of Israel who are the real antisemites—and more, that criticism of Israel is itself antisemitic. The US House has tried to legislate the definition of anti-Zionism as antisemitism, as just one example. The Anti-Defamation League insists that even nonviolent boycotts of Israel are antisemitic because they “demonize the Jewish state and those who support its existence.” 

It's easy to label this kind of conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism as bad faith. And I would say that in many respects it is bad faith. But it also expresses a genuine belief that Zionism is the true expression of Judaism, and that when people, even Jewish people, question Zionism, they are therefore attacking, and threatening, the essence of the Jewish people.

What, then, is that essence? Zionism is an ethnonationalist vision. Like Christian nationalism, it points to religious doctrine as justification to some degree. But the religious doctrine is less important than the assertion of superiority and of power.  Zionism’s essence is the ideology that Jewish people must control the state of Israel.

That is the rationale for offering full citizenship rights to Jewish people who do not live in Israel, and denying citizenship to Palestinians who do live in Israel. It’s why Israel is so adamantly against the Palestinian right of return. As Ta-Nehisi Coates writes of the nakba, in which Zionists displaced around 750,000 Palestinians in the process of establishing Israel in 1948:

Many of these people believed that they would be able to return to their homes after the war. But such a return would destroy the Israeli state project by turning Jews into a minority—the very thing Zionists sought to prevent.

Coates also quotes Leon Uris, an ardent Zionist, who despised “weak Jews” and who in 1956 praised Zionism in a letter to his father by declaring:

“This is Israel…[the] fighter who spits in the eye of the Arab hordes and dares him.

Zionism is defined by strength, and specifically by strength in defeating and suppressing Arabs. If Judaism is Zionism, at its core, then Judaism, at its core, for Zionists, is the demand that Jewish people rule. Jewish people who rule are real Jews, and their existence is guaranteed by the fact that they rule. Jewish people who do not rule can be real Jews by proxy if they are ardent enough Zionists. Otherwise, they are detritus, and don’t really even exist as Jews—which is why their safety, or lack thereof, is irrelevant.

Safety Is Power Is Whiteness

There’s precedent for an identity built first and foremost on dispossession and supremacy. That identity is called “whiteness.”

“Whiteness” isn’t really a history or an ethnicity the way Irish or Italian or British is. “Whiteness” is just a catch-all for people who are designated as having certain kinds of privileges and power. In the US, in particular, during its early years, the privilege and power to not be enslaved.

When the Confederate states issued their Declarations of Independence from the Union, they made it clear that they saw whiteness as inextricable from superiority, which meant that their identities, as white men, were under threat when Black people were equal, or even autonomous. Here, for example, is Texas’ declaration:

We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable

… the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding states.

Whiteness requires Black subordination; without that, there is “desolation.” Just as, if Zionists do not control Israel, Jews are unsafe. The identity rests on and is an assertion of power. Without the power, the identity is not so much an identity as a crisis.

Jewishness isn’t, obviously, just a claim to power. It’s a religion. It’s a long history of marginalization and of persecution. It’s a tradition of resistance and critique. It’s a story of people negotiating difference in part by working with their neighbors.

Zionism, in making a singular claim on Jewish identity, and in tying Jewish identity to power, threatens to erase other ways of being Jewish, painting them as weak, worthless, secondary at best and irrelevant at worst. In that sense, Zionism is not a guarantor of Jewish safety. It’s a threat to the fulness of Jewish experience and identity.

Zionism has not protected Jewish people’s lives; it has not protected Jewish identity. When Biden says Israel keeps American Jewish people “safe,” he is showing exactly how Zionism displaces Jewish people from their own identities and their own lives.

Palestinians are the main victims of Zionism. But Zionism doesn’t keep Jewish people “safe,” and is not intended to. It is intended to conscript their identities to an agenda of supremacy and violence. Biden’s Zionist comments about Jewish “safety” should be read with that in mind.

Before you go

I’m only able to write lengthy posts like this because of your support. If you haven’t become a subscriber, I will reiterate that now is a good time, since there’s a 50% off sale for the next couple days. That’s $25/year. Please join and help me keep scribbling!