Do many if not most people calling themselves “progressive” political thinkers and activists have a special dislike, even hatred, for the state of Israel and make common cause with those who want to destroy it?
Many in the Jewish community have concluded that they do. They base their perception on phenomena like the following:
• The U.S. Green Party at its 2004 convention in Milwaukee put in its platform the statement, “We would consider support for a U.S. foreign policy that promotes serious reconsideration of the creation of one secular, democratic state for Palestinians and Israelis” to replace Israel.
• The Jewish community has heard many reports from Jewish college students and others of anti-Zionism and pro-Palestinian teaching and activism by many “progressive” professors on college campuses.
• At some universities, including the University of Wisconsin System, and in some religious movements, “progressives” have sought divestment from companies doing business with Israel.
• “Anti-war” organizations like Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER) march with signs saying, “Zionism is racism.”
• “Progressives” — including people proclaiming themselves to be Jews — have written a library of anti-Israel and anti-Zionism books and articles.
But is this perception accurate? No, says a leading figure in the “progressive” world, who is a Jewish Wisconsinite.
Matthew Rothschild of Madison has been the editor of The Progressive magazine since 1994. As he explained to The Chronicle, he grew up in Highland Park, Ill., where he and his family attended a Reform synagogue. While in Madison, he and his wife belonged for a long time to Temple Beth El, where their three children celebrated becoming b’nai mitzvah.
But he also said, “I am an out-and-out atheist.… I am firmly of the belief that you can be a Jew and an atheist at the same time.”
The magazine began as La Follette’s Weekly, founded in 1909 by the famous Progressive Movement Wisconsin Sen. Robert M. La Follette. Today, The Progressive is a monthly that covers news of the “progressive” world, provides a forum for opinions, does investigative reporting, prints interviews, and features poetry and comedy.
Chronicle op-ed editor Leon Cohen interviewed Rothschild by telephone on Sept. 12. Arranged and edited excerpts of that conversation follow:
How would you define “progressive” as opposed to liberal or libertarian or some of these other political phrases that are tossed around?
A progressive is someone who believes deeply in civil rights and civil liberties, and the preservation of the environment. Someone who believes strongly that corporations have way too much power in this country. Someone who believes that U.S. interventions abroad have almost always been wrong-headed and often designed to further the interests of large corporations and not the interests of the American people, with the exception of World War II.
We believe in a free and independent media, and believe that corporations have too much power over the media. We do have bedrock principles of free speech and non-violence. We also are strong believers in human rights, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and economic rights as well.
What distinguishes you from others on the left, like communists and socialists?
We believe in democracy. We believe in representative government, in democratic rule. We don’t believe in rule by vanguards or juntas or dictatorships. And we certainly believe in civil liberties so that people can protest and speak freely.
We come out of an indigenous American tradition of progressivism that is close to some of the “democratic socialism” that has been practiced in the European countries.
We are libertarian as regard to social rights; we don’t want the government telling us what to do in our bedrooms or in our studies or in our TV rooms or anything like that.
But we think libertarians are 180 degrees off course … because they don’t believe in regulating the economy. We believe that private companies that dominate not only the economy but also the political system are a huge problem in our society.
Do you go so far as some of the Marxists who want to abolish capitalism altogether?
I like the tadpole; I don’t like the bullfrog. I like small companies. I like the little bagel stand and the doughnut shop and the ma-and-pa restaurant. The Progressive is a small business that I’ve been running for years and years. I sympathize with the small business people…. It’s just when you have a huge corporation that can dominate someone’s life, and distort the economy and essentially bribe elected officials and pollute the environment and cause global warming, then you get real serious problems of power and accountability.
There is a perception in the Jewish community that the progressive community in the U.S. is increasingly outright hostile to the existence of the state of Israel, that in some ways it contradicts itself by being on the side of Palestinian terrorists and Muslim religious fascists, people that want to murder Jews, people who have come from cultures that want to be supremacist over Jews. The fact is that if you were to compress the whole population of the world into 1,000 people, 300 would be Christians, 200 Muslims and only two would be Jews; and therefore no matter how successful American Jews are, how prosperous Israel is, how good its army is, how many atom bombs it may have, Jews still feel they are a threatened community, threatened by active hatred and a world that is indifferent or regards Jews as expendable. And a lot of Jews think the progressive community doesn’t know this, doesn’t understand this, and doesn’t care. Do you think this perception is accurate? Why or why not?
Well, I don’t think it is accurate. Let me start with the premise. You speak of the Jewish community as though there is a monolithic Jewish community. And there is no monolithic Jewish community.
Let me take that back then and say there’s a lot of the Jewish community that feels this way.
Well that’s better. It is certainly true that a lot of the Jewish community feels that way. There is also a significant percentage — a minority but a significant percentage — of Jewish Americans who are critical of the policies of the state of Israel or critical of the policies of the government of the state of Israel. I prefer to use that kind of careful phrase, as opposed to just critical of Israel. Because when you say “critical of Israel,” you are conflating the idea or existence of Israel with every policy of the Israeli government. Then some people even conflate it further and conflate Israelis with Jews.
I think it’s a canard for people to say that some left-wing Jewish intellectuals, or that a lot of left-wing Jewish intellectuals in the United States are outright hostile to the state of Israel. And it’s a double canard to say that they side with people who want to murder Jews.
Noam Chomsky, for instance, is the leading Jewish intellectual in the country and he is not outright hostile to the state of Israel. He believes the state of Israel should exist. He is critical of many of the policies of the state of Israel, many of the policies of the government of the state of Israel, as I am. That doesn’t mean also that we don’t believe that Israel has a right to exist.
I didn’t want to discuss just Jewish progressives. It is the progressive world in general that I am thinking of. I was at the Green Party convention in Milwaukee in 2004, when they put into their platform that they want to promote consideration of a one-state solution. And I saw a guy from the Israeli Green Leaf Party get shouted down and discriminated against, and treated like dirt at this event.
Stipulating that what you say is accurate — I wasn’t there — was the person shouted down because he didn’t agree with the one-state solution that the Green Party was advocating? Did that mean the Green Party people were hostile to the state of Israel and side with people who want to murder them? I don’t think that necessarily follows.
I should say, to give a full description, he was shouted down primarily by what looked like an Arab person, and there were members of the Green Party who said, “Wait a minute. Let’s be Green here. This does not comport with our values.” But the fact is, I felt there was a current within the Green Party of hostility to the very idea that a Jewish state should exist.
Well, I wasn’t there. I can’t talk with any degree of accuracy about what happened there. But I think on the progressive side, while there are some people at some progressive events that may go overboard, I don’t believe that it’s accurate to say that the left wing in this country is outright hostile to the state of Israel. And certainly, I don’t believe that there are many progressives who want to see Jews get murdered. I think that’s outrageous.
But look, I can be critical of the policies of the state of Israel, I can even advocate a one-state solution, which I don’t; I can even be a non-Zionist and believe that the enterprise of forming a state of Israel was ill-conceived, and that the best part of Judaism is not to run a state and oppress other people, ultimately as every other state in the world has done, and to become a colonial power; that that isn’t in the best traditions of Judaism; and still not be someone who is wanting to see Jews get killed.
I think we need to be careful when we take leaps from people who are criticizing policies of the state of Israel to people who want to see Jews get killed. That is a huge chasm.
It does seem that people who do want to see Jews get killed and people who have the positions you state say a lot of the same things.
Well, that at best is guilt by association. Look, who wants to see Jews killed? I think you need to define your terms there. If Palestinians want to see Jews killed, if every Palestinian wants to see Jews killed, or if the Palestinian Authority wants to see Jews killed, or Hamas wants to see Jews killed, or if [Palestinian Authority President] Mahmoud Abbas wants to see Jews killed… I mean, whom are we talking about here?
Hamas and Hezbollah and their charters. The Iranian government. The Palestinian national charter.
You would be hard pressed to find a progressive who backs the Iranian government. There are a lot of progressives who don’t want to see the United States attack Iran or obliterate Iran and all 75 million people who live there. But … I’ve signed lots of petitions against [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad and his treatment of political prisoners and women and trade unionists.
But what I was getting at in my argumentative way, I suppose, was that there have been … some Palestinians have resisted Israeli occupation with tactics that we find abhorrent here at The Progressive because we believe in non-violence. On the other hand, there were Israelis, including [the late Prime Minister] Menachem Begin, who used some of the very same tactics some of the Palestinians have used, and he is revered by many Israelis. So there is a double standard there.
I hope we haven’t gotten to that point right now where you can’t criticize a policy of the government of Israel without being tarred with the brush of anti-Semitism.
Thomas L. Friedman once wrote an opinion column [New York Times, Oct. 2, 2002] that I keep near my desk here, in which he said there are two kinds of critics in the world, those who criticize you because they want you to succeed and those who criticize you because they want you to fail. The problem seems to be that with Israel, the critics who want Israel to succeed and the critics who want Israel to fail say a lot of the same things. And a lot of American Jews think that the consequences that could flow from those criticisms are dangerous and threatening and the critics don’t take the community’s danger seriously.
So you’re not supposed to criticize Israel.
But criticize Israel because you want it to succeed or criticize it because you want it to fail? How would you make that distinction? Or is there a distinction?
I think the criticism of Israel and the criticism of the government of Israel … would diminish, as would anti-Semitism globally, if the Israeli government would reach a decent and just settlement with the Palestinian people. If the Israeli government would not only stop building new settlements, but would tear down the settlements and give up the occupied territories and return to the 1967 borders, then the chance for an enduring peace would rise exponentially and the largest cesspool that is breeding anti-Semitism worldwide would evaporate. There are other cesspools of anti-Semitism around the world that have been there forever, there are some that have more modern sources; but the big one would dry up.
I would have no problem with people who say I-want-Israel-to-leave-those-territories-because-I-want-Israel-to-succeed, like Rabbi Michael Lerner [of Tikkun magazine] who in his book “Healing Israel-Palestine” argues that case. But there are others who say Israel should leave those territories, and that will make Israel less defensible and we can then proceed with the project of destroying Israel.
I’ve never met a progressive person who made that argument.
Certainly there are Palestinians who make that argument.
Well, if they do they are naive anyway because they are not going to be able to destroy Israel militarily. I know that [what you describe] is a fear. I’ve heard that fear from other Jewish Americans. But I don’t think that is a fear based in reality.
I believe I have read that you yourself favor a two-state solution?
I do favor a two-state solution. I believe that Israel has a right to exist. I also believe the Palestinians have a right to their own state.
Now, is it a requirement that Israel must be now and always forever a Jewish state with a majority of Jewish people in the state? That is a tricky question and I would hope the answer to that question actually is no; that is, that Israel could exist in a pluralistic way even if a majority of its citizens turned out to be not Jewish.
Israel is on a collision course between being a Jewish state and being a democratic state ultimately. I would hope that in that collision that it would swerve away from a catastrophe and take the route of democracy. I mean, that’s a big, big issue, the question as to whether Israel has to be a majority Jewish state.
I know some people are for a one-state solution; at this point I think that’s unrealistic. I think it would be far preferable and faster and easier and cleaner and neater to have a two-state solution. I don’t think the right of return would be the final, unclearable hurdle. Because I think ultimately if people are allowed to go to a decent state of their own, they would prefer that than retrieving their right to their plot of land or their home.
So you do not think that there is hostility in the progressive world to the very idea of a Jewish state.
There may be a small percentage of people in the progressive community that have what I would say are facile and unfortunate and erroneous assumptions about the state of Israel, leaving aside what its policies are. By that I mean, when I’m at a protest, and I see a sign that says “Zionism equals Nazism,” I find that offensive. But I find almost any analogy with Nazism offensive. I don’t think that represents the preponderance of progressive thought on the state of Israel.
But I do think you can be a critic of the policies of the state of Israel, you can even be a Jewish person who is not a Zionist and be someone who firmly believes that there’s anti-Semitism in the world and doesn’t want to see Jews harmed in the world. By being a Jewish person who is not a Zionist, you are not someone who is ipso facto fueling anti-Semitism.
I appreciate the opportunity to articulate my views on the subject. I’m someone who believes in discussion and argument and free speech and hashing things out verbally as opposed to with guns.
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