I was once an anti-Zionist. My political views were shaped by leftist academics during my time doing graduate work at Boston University. I had immersed myself in Marxist theory, sure I was on the righteous path of my political forebears. I was studying the work of Noam Chomsky at the time, enamored by his anarcho-syndicalism, ideas on propaganda, and takes on the Middle East. As you may know, Chomsky is a very prominent anti-Zionist.

When I met him, he had CNN reporters waiting for their interview ahead of me. He came out and told them to wait so we could meet. I was a humble student at the time, and I got to sit and talk about philosophy and politics for 30 minutes with my hero. We discussed liberation theology in South America, the assassination of Bishop Oscar Romero, the legendary philosopher Bertrand Russell, and how much we both disliked Sam Harris. It was the zenith of my political development, I thought. I was on a leftist high and felt certain I would stay a leftist forever. Life has changed, and I just have to say sorry, Mr. Chomsky, I no longer agree.

So, I dug further. I read everything by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, the Frankfurt School, and philosophers like Foucault, Sartre, and Althusser—the basic canon of leftism. Many of my professors taught from a Marxist or post-colonial perspective, which meant I became proficient in these ways of interpreting the world. Politically, I moved through communism and socialism—romanticizing liberation movements from the Zapatistas of Chiapas to the IRA in Belfast. I read Rashid Khalidi, Fayez Sayegh, Homi Bhabha, Frantz Fanon, absorbing concepts like colonialism, hybridity, indigeneity, and “othering.” I would use these concepts and theories to interpret the world. It was my mental tool-bag, and the world was in disrepair.

The problem is that many of these tools don’t fit the nuts and bolts of different situations. With post-colonialism, it was oppressor vs. oppressed, colonizer vs. colonized, settler vs. native, and occupation vs. liberation; with Marxism, it was the proletariat vs. bourgeoisie, capitalism vs. communism, and theory vs. practice. And while many post-colonial thinkers had the sophistication and nuance to admit their limitations, these theories can instill in you a way of splitting up the world. Binaries are painfully limiting, and when something doesn’t fit, we don’t want to be Procrustean. We can’t lob off that part, chop off this part, and make it fit our bed. We have to accept it as is, which means we have to sometimes let our tools go and find better ones.

What my old self and the Left fail to see is how often these categories implode when applied to Jews and Israel. Not only can they transmit, and often create antisemitism, they usually render Jewish peoplehood and self-determination illegitimate. When you apply terms like “colonizer,” “oppressor,” and “Imperialist” to a persecuted diaspora of indigenous tribes and cultures, you end up misreading history. The gathering of exiled Jews to their homeland after facing persecution almost everywhere turns into “European Colonization” and “settler colonialism.” Jews are refashioned and theorized into an archetype that is Eurocentric and “white,” which translates their “return” to Israel into a foreign immigration at best, settler colonialism at worst. Of course, within post-colonial discourse, “Zionism”........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)