If I Am Not For Myself: Journey of an Anti-Zionist Jew by Mike Marqusee
Verso, £15.99
THERE can scarcely be a single Palestine solidarity activist who hasn’t been accused of being anti-Semitic. The charge of anti-Semitism has become so endemic that it has become the currency of what passes for debate among Zionists, too. Who can forget the cartoon caricatures of Yitzhak Rabin, the assassinated Israeli Prime Minister, dressed up in Nazi uniform? And Jewish anti-Zionists face a particular calumny. They are “self-haters”.
As Mike Marqusee notes, quoting the Israeli civil rights leader Professor Israel Shahak, himself a childhood survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and Belsen concentration camp, the origin of this libel lies in the Nazi accusation against German anti-fascists. In opposing fascism and the German state they literally hated themselves, or so the accusation ran; because it is an integral component of fascist ideology that the purpose of the individual is to serve the state.
The subject of this book is a topic long overdue for discussion. It takes its title from the first part of a Rabbi Hillel saying, while omitting the second part: “And if I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when.” Anti-Zionist Jews are like white anti-apartheid activists in South Africa. Attacked by their own community and often distrusted by sections of the wider Palestine solidarity movement and occasionally even the subject of anti-Semitic criticism by those who purport to support the Palestinians, such as the Deir Yassin Remembered Group on whose board of advisers Israel Shamir, an open Holocaust denier, sits.
Mike Marqusee is an accomplished writer and essayist. Yet, despite that, this book is something of a disappointment. It is as if the subject is too traumatic to be dealt with objectively. Most of the book is taken up with a potted biography of Marqusee’s grandfather, Edward V Morand, a politician, lawyer, journalist and populist from New York who started off in the Tammany Hall wing of the Democratic Party and ended up as one of the organisers of the American Labor Party, the most successful left wing party in the United States since Eugene Victor Debs’ Socialist Party of America. The ALP at one time held the balance of power on New York’s city council and even had a Congressman for the East Harlem district of the Bronx.
As Marqusee recalls, he did not initially take EVM’s suggestion to write a biography of him seriously but, clearly, he changed his mind, as this is a book in two parts; one about Jewish anti-Zionism and the other semi-biographical. This is rather a strange marriage given that, to EVM, Jewish anti-Zionists “were the lowest of the low”. Even though EVM remained opposed to McCarthyism and the Cold War, seeing the former as a disguise for anti-Semitism, he ended up as a chauvinist supporter of the Israeli state, blind to the plight of the Arab refugees.
More than once Marqusee wonders what his grandfather would make of this or that aspect of Israel, not least its anti-communism. One suspects that this is little more than post-hoc wishful thinking. Unfortunately, Zionism took many good Jewish socialists and communists and turned them into chauvinists.
What is at times frustrating is that Marqusee doesn’t use his grandfather to illustrate the essential contradiction between being Jewish in a non-Jewish society with social, political and economic interests of one’s own and being a Zionist, ie a supporter of another state.
EVM was a passionate anti-fascist, he railed against immigration controls against Jews and demanded that the survivors of the Holocaust living in displaced persons camps be allowed to enter the US. Yet at one and the same time he was a supporter of the Zionist movement which vigorously opposed lowering the immigration barriers to Europe’s Jews and which was indifferent to the fight against fascism, seeing anti-Semitism as a hereditary condition which afflicted all non-Jewish societies.
The most amusing section of the book is where Marqusee describes the different responses of anti-Zionist Jews to the charge of self-hatred. The humourist Larry David would quip that he might hate himself, but it wasn’t on account of being Jewish! Anti-Zionist historian Lenni Brenner’s response was that his ex-lovers would testify that the last thing he could be accused of was hating himself, whereas an unnamed activist had a simpler response: “I don’t hate myself. I hate you, you fucking bastard!”
Marqusee’s parents were both former members of the Communist Party who buckled under the inquisition of Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy and his House Un-American Activities Committee, naming names. His father was also a Zionist and when, at the age of 14, Marqusee explained his opposition to Zionism as being another form of racism, he was accused of being a self-hater.
It is therefore with a sense of vindication that he describes how, after the butchering of 2,000 Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla in Beirut by the Phalange – the Israeli military facilitated their entrance, providing them with searchlights – that the author describes a phone call from his father admitting that his son had been right after all.
There is much to recommend in this book, such as its emphasis on the fact that Zionism is a passing historical phenomenon and not the culmination of diaspora Jewry’s existence. Particularly poignant is his description of the outrageous attacks on an anti-fascist like Dorothy Parker, who could see no reason why, if she had opposed anti-Semitism, that she should then turn a blind eye to racism simply because it came from Jews. He could also have mentioned the treatment that Hanna Arendt received when she published Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil. Likewise his treatment of the prophets and how they railed against the idolatry of state worship is incisive.
But, overall, the book suffers from a lack of focus and rigour, such as his ludicrous dividing of nationalism into “good” and “bad”, some realisable and some, like a Kurdish state, unrealisable. What Marqusee does not examine is the Zionist claim to be a national movement of the Jews as opposed to a nationalist movement of the colonial stripe. Also, there are howlers like the claim that Herbert Morrison was leader of the Labour Party. It is unfortunate that this is a book whose whole is rather less than the sum of its many parts.
Tony Greenstein
