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| Joseph Trumpeldor |
One of Zionism’s founding fathers was Joseph Trumpeldor. A Russian officer during the Russo-Japanese War, he lost an arm in the Battle of Port Arthur, but went back into active service after insisting to his commanders that “I still have another arm to give the motherland.” After immigrating to Ottoman Palestine, he helped raise a militia to defend Jewish communities there. He was wounded fighting for the British Army at the Battle of Gallipoli, and later fell in Palestine defending a Jewish settlement from Arab marauders.
If Joseph Trumpeldor had irreconcilable dual loyalties, to Russia on the one hand, and the Jews on the other, I should think in that case that Russia still owes him his arm back.
Alt-right figures frequently accuse the Jews of dual loyalty: that we cannot possibly be trusted as Americans when we have such intimate ties and interests in common with the State of Israel. Another charge the alt-right likes to level at American Jews is that our tendency to support pluralism and liberalism is at odds with our Zionism, which is of course a form of ethnic nationalism. Of course, this is an oversimplification, because Israel provides tangible democratic protections to minorities that cannot be expected from the fascists who make this criticism of Jews.
But between these two accusations, there is a contradiction: if American Jews are compromised in our loyalty to America on account of ethnic nationalism, then so must the alt-right be. Except that the alt-right does not agree that America is fundamentally a plural or a liberal country. To them, the branch is an aberration from the root. Thus, ascertaining whether adherence to any given creed renders a man suspect in his loyalties to America necessitates that we inquire exactly what we mean when we say America.
In any case, I would hope that everyone in America is disloyal to America, at least in the sense that he believes something that could conceivably put him at such odds with the government, his fellow citizens, or the body politic, that he’d be compelled to make himself a pariah, break the law, or flee the community.
This doesn’t have to be credal, or ideological. It could familial; or it could just be a sense of fundamental fairness that comes inadvertently into conflict with a government official, or a large enough segment of the public. On the other hand, there is a multiplicity in this country of widely-held belief systems that are liable, on their face, to bring their adherents into conflict with “America,” however defined. Theoretically, almost every form of religious faith has this problem, as do numerous ideologies. As a practical matter, Quakers, Jehovah’s Witnesses, old-school Mormons, Roman Catholics, Russian Orthodoxy, certain ultra-orthodox sects of Judaism, and various denominations of Islam all very acutely have this problem.
Also, ethnic communities in America tend to strongly support their brethren overseas. For example, the American Hellenic Council would love to see America at odds with Turkey, regardless of countervailing interests that may also be termed “American.” And dissident expats are usually strong proponents of American involvement against the regimes they’ve fled from. The Epoch Times, for example, is run by Chinese-Americans who urge the United States to take the strongest possible adversarial stance against Chinese communism—a cause to which America has hundreds of thousands of troops committed. Factions in every major ethnic and political conflict in the world avail themselves of supporters in the U.S. in order to pressure, petition or persuade the American public and the U.S. government. Foreign governments pay American PR firms millions every year to get them favorable press coverage here. And American ideologues of various stripes support foreign political factions without regard for what others may term “American interests.”
None of this is unique to Zionism. And there is no “core” or “heritage” America within which fissures like these have ever failed to open up, violently, from the XYZ Affair to the Know-Nothings to the Civil War. Anyone who is advocating for pluralism and for universal human rights is going to be compromised by some kind of bias, or narrow affinity; and every sectarian, every tribalist, every narrow partisan must necessarily assert his rights in terms that others—outsiders who do not share his interests—may understand. Everyone who wants something for himself that he wants to keep away from others recognizes that that thing is desirable to others for exactly the same reason it is desirable to him.
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| Charles Lindbergh |
….the leaders of both the British and the Jewish races, for reasons which are as understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war.What was his surname, again? Ah, yes… Lindbergh wanted the U.S. to allow Hitler free reign in Europe, so that America would eventually have to be very accommodating with Nazism; for reasons that were eminently understandable from his viewpoint. But were they really “American” reasons?
So, to return to our initial inquiry: just what is this America that we should all be loyal to?
America is founded on the proposition that all men are created equal. This is an echo of Genesis 1:27. It is true that citizenship was limited to whites in 1790. But look what this included: not only was full and equal citizenship extended to Jews at America’s founding, for the first time anywhere in the history of the world; at a time when, in the Old World, only a parishioner of the national church could be a full citizen, America decoupled citizenship from creed and, for the first time in the history of christendom, effectively enfranchised members of every Christian denomination, along with those who (like Thomas Jefferson) confessed membership in no sect at all. Hispanics were made citizens by the treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848; blacks, by constitutional amendment in 1868; Asians, and everyone born on American soil, by the Supreme Court in 1898; Indians, by Congress in 1924. These decisions were all made by white Americans. At no time throughout this history was the Jewish community a major constituency, much less a dominant one. Viewed in the context of this history, the Hart-Cellars Immigration Act is not anomalous; and this explains why it was supported by mainline Protestantism and the Catholic Church, as well as American Jews.
The alt-right insists that American liberty is an Aryan folk heritage, conceived by whites; and that if this heritage is extended to others, it cannot be sustained. But the history of Europe is rife with persecution, and even the most backward non-white peoples have a basic sense of fairness. In any case, the nature of the good is to be promulgated. When the Hebrew scribes redacted the Torah, they said that mankind, not just the Hebrews, are created in the image of God. That is why the Bible is still read today, the world over. When Christ likens himself to the least of these my brethren, he is addressing the righteous of all nations. When Socrates asked, What is justice?, he wasn’t talking just about what was good for himself, or his people. That is why he is still relevant, why his words resonate down the centuries. When the Arabs came thundering out of the desert, wild and warlike, they did not conquer for conquest’s sake; they brought along a universal creed. The political struggles of Anglo-Saxon history which produced the Declaration of Abroath, the Magna Carta, the English Bill of Rights, and the American Bill of Rights, are all successive refinements of justice without respect of persons. Western civilization is expansive, or it is meaningless. And America is the apotheosis of western civilization.
Is Zionism at odds with this heritage, in the sense of not aligning? Well… Zionism is the proposition that an ancient, venerable and long-persecuted people must reconstitute itself in its ancestral homeland. This isn’t a suggestion; it’s an imperative. So to be an American Jew is in some sense to place oneself outside the Jewish community as Zionism envisions it. But do we expect Greek Americans to oppose, or feel indifferent, to the political independence of the Greek nation-state, its survival and well-being? Is a Native American a hypocrite for demanding a fair trial, if his political activism is limited in scope to the concerns of his tribe? Must Mormons choose between concern for the integrity of their faith community, and their commitment to the Bill of Rights? Must Lithuanian-Americans abjure all sympathy with the Lithuanian state, in the name of better U.S. relations with Russia? Must Chinese Americans cease agitating against communist China, lest they get the rest of us in trouble with Xi Jinping? I don’t think so.
When a people, as a people, has been abused badly enough, their national defense becomes a matter of universal principles. Zionists, like the Palestinians, the Kurds, Greek Cypriots, Ukrainians, and dozens of other peoples who have family in America, would like to sell Americans their version of this proposition. So you don’t have to be a Zionist to understand that casting aspersions on the Americanness of American Jews’ Zionism is un-American. In fact, you could be quite anti-Zionist, and still understand it perfectly.
Also published at Utter Contempt
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