Checking My Secular Western Bias

Learning to Live and Let Live in the Levant

Reading Adam Louis-Klein’s excellent essay in The Atlantic (“The Left-Wing Case Against Anti-Zionism”) helps me deal more sanely with my growing antipathy toward Israel.

My problem with the State of Israel, Mr. Louis-Klein says, is not Israel’s but mine: I fail to apply my secular, liberal values consistently. For example, I don’t protest the People’s Republic of China for its ethnic cleansing of Uyghurs and its occupation of Tibet, yet I do protest Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza and its occupation of the West Bank.

After reading his essay, I tried to apply my values fairly. As I did so, I found that my concern for Israel’s values, mores, politics, and policies fell to a level comparable to my concern for those of other Middle Eastern countries. Why? Because, as Mr. Louis-Klein points out, the State of Israel is just another Middle Eastern country.

According to Mr. Louis-Klein, people like me should 1) “recognize the freedom of Israelis [I think he means Jewish Israelis] to choose the nature of the society they want to live under,” 2) admit that Mizrahi and Sephardi Israelis—Jews from Spain, Portugal, the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia—make up at least half of Israel’s Jewish population and largely reflect the illiberal political and social tropes of their Middle Eastern neighbors, 3) extend to Israel “the same allowance” to live as it chooses that I extend to other Middle Eastern theocracies, monarchies, and dictatorships, and 4) “acknowledge that societies can differ from secular Western ideals.”

This is brilliant and calls me out on my secular Western bias. I am a Hasid of Franz Kafka, Ahad Ha’am, Martin Buber, Albert Einstein, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Victor Frankl, and Hannah Arendt, all of whom are Ashkenazi universalists. The State of Israel, run by fundamentalist rabbis, Religious Zionists, and Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews, is, like many of its neighbors, a Middle Eastern religious autocracy rather than the secular, socialist, democratic utopia I would prefer. But there are no secular, socialist, or even liberal democratic countries in the Middle East: only theocracies, monarchies, and dictatorships.

It isn’t that Islam or Judaism is incompatible with liberal secular democracy; rather, an Islamic or Jewish state is incompatible with liberal secular democracy. While individual Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists can accommodate their religions to secular Western ideals, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist states cannot.

But I now see this as my problem rather than Israel’s. I am an unabashed liberal who values secular Western ideals and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights more than Jewish tribalism and religious fundamentalism. If Israelis want to live in an illiberal theocracy, that is their business, not mine. All I ask is that Israel stop speaking in my name, that rabbis stop equating being a Jew with being a Zionist, and that anti-Israel provocateurs stop insisting that, because I’m a Jew, I’m implicated in Israeli policies.

Gut Shabbos.