Israel’s genocidal destruction of Gaza and its people, as well as the Israeli government’s open expressions of genocidal intent, have pricked the consciences of millions and launched a case at The Hague. While there have been many comparisons between today’s ceasefire protests and those against the war in Viet Nam, the explosion of disgust at the Gaza genocide and Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians bears greater resemblance to antebellum Abolitionist outrage at the “peculiar” American institution of slavery.
The Abolitionist movement rode a long wave of 17th and 18th century Enlightenment values, and by the 18th and 19th centuries slavery was on the way out over much of the world. Successful slave revolts, the British campaign to end the slave trade throughout its empire, a similar ban by the Ottoman empire, abolition of slavery in the Northern US, Britain, Latin America, the emancipation of serfdom in the Russian empire, and France’s abolition of slavery throughout its colonies – the moral arc of the universe was straining but the South was almost alone in resisting the bend toward justice. Just as Israel is today.
What survived slavery was scarcely better. While it was no longer acceptable for individuals to exploit a hundred or a thousand lives as personal property, rules were different for empires. Virtually every empire that had abolished slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries colonized and exploited entire populations, typically of a different race. And in order to extract wealth and exert control over these subjugated people, settlers were needed to colonize, administer, and defend the ill-gotten gains.
One of Hannah Arendt’s critiques of Zionism is that it turned its back on Enlightenment values. But writing as a Jew who had just barely escaped Nazi terror no thanks to Western democracies, she was also rightly skeptical of Western liberal traditions. In the Arendt Center’s newsletter Roger Berkowitz writes,
“The weakness of the enlightenment is baked deeply into the liberal tradition. Montesquieu follows Aristotle in insisting that limited and liberal government depend upon the virtue of citizens. Liberals such as John Stuart Mill and John Locke insisted that only some countries had citizens who were evolved enough and civilized enough to enjoy the freedoms of liberal democracy. There is, as Uday Mehta has so powerfully argued, an Imperial project at the foundation of liberalism, one that insists that all peoples be assimilated into the values and virtues of liberal civilization before they can be allowed to enjoy the benefits of liberal government. Until that time, backwards peoples need to be governed by liberal colonialists. Much of the critique of enlightenment and liberal government is a result of this imperial drive in liberalism to insist that only those who think like liberals are capable of freedom.”
This is clearly reflected in the Charter of the League of Nations and also in the Charter of the British Mandate in Palestine, whose laws of military occupation Israel still uses in the West Bank.
Israel’s colonization and ethnic cleansing of Palestine is scarcely different from the American settler-colonial project, Australia’s, or that of the British in India. China and Russia both have ongoing settler-colonial projects – and American politicians just spent tens of billions to slow down the competition. The United States too has its colonies. An estimated 15% of Israel’s illegal West Bank settlers are American citizens. Most of us live on land stolen by earlier generations of settler-colonists, some of whom were our ancestors.
We may not have colonized Africa but we literally kidnapped and enslaved the ancestors of 13% of our own population and yet have made no attempt to redress wrongs to them. We fork over up to $40 billion each year to maintain the supremacy of Israel’s 6.8 million Jewish citizens but for our own 10 million Native Americans the budget for the Bureau of Indian Affairs is $3 billion.
Israel’s bad luck is that their settler-colonial project began in the 20th Century, when – just as in the case of slavery – the evils of the “peculiar institution” of settler-colonialism were well-understood and beginning to be regarded as morally reprehensible.
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I recently reread Charles Reagan Wilson’s Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 and was struck by the many similarities between Zionism and the Lost Cause of the Confederacy.
Baptized in Blood distinguishes between the CSA’s government and the culture it represented. Wilson recognized two “civic religions” of the United States, one dedicated more or less to Enlightenment values, another to darker aspects of European nationalism, myth, and racial supremacy.
Zionism’s self-defense and propaganda efforts have much in common with the South’s vehement defenses of its “morality,” customs, and values from Northern criticism. The South rejected Enlightenment values that the North had embraced more or less at the same time early Zionists were rejecting them.
Both Zionism and the Confederacy promote a narrative of persecution and threat to a “way of life.” Their way of life, of course, means sovereignty for a chosen people who, whether at the Biltmore Hotel or at Fort Sumpter, secede from one nation to create a separate nation that privileges their ethnicity. Both the South and Israel cultivated the good will of foreign empires. Judah Benjamin, who held positions with the Confederacy as Attorney General, War Secretary, and then Secretary of State, unsuccessfully negotiated support for the CSA from both France and Britain. Similarly, the newly-established World Zionist Organization negotiated with both the British and Ottoman empires for support for its own nationalist project.
Just as both Southern religion and what Wilson calls its “civic religion” parted ways from Northern Christianity, Zionism makes a mockery of Jewish values. Early Zionists were regarded as heretics by almost every branch of Judaism, particularly Orthodoxy. Today the largest ultra-orthodox sect, the Satmars, continues to oppose Zionism. Abolitionists and a fleet of Northern clergy similarly regarded Southern Christianity as an aberration.
Civic and cultural values have also diverged because of Zionism, especially now that Israel’s 37th government includes outright fascists. It is no secret that for many years American Jews have held democratic values not shared by a majority of their Israeli cousins. A significant number of younger Jews in North America and Europe who grew up in “democracies” that claim liberal values have embraced those liberal values and reject what is, in the end, nothing but ethnic nationalism. And such was the case with a divided antebellum United States where Abolitionists were every bit as zealous as kaffiya-wearing ceasefire demonstrators.
The conscription of religious leaders into propaganda efforts was central to Southern religion and culture just as it is to Zionism today. Theodor Herzl wrote that the Zionist project depended upon the conscription of rabbis into its service (“The Rabbis will receive communications regularly from both Society and Company, and will announce and explain these to their congregations”). Ultimately the centrality of ethnic cleansing to create a Jewish majority in Israel and the centrality of the institution of slavery for the Confederacy corrupted both religions enlisted to defend them.
The South may have lost the War, but its true believers embarked upon a campaign to justify and legitimate their vision of their dying culture. In contrast, Israel won its many wars and successfully established a state (both with significant American support), yet nevertheless must justify its ongoing crimes against a subjugated and repressed Palestinian people – as well as its continuing embrace of 19th century settler-colonialism.
As is the case with Judaism, the tragedy of the Shoah (Holocaust) has been ruthlessly exploited by Zionism. Both Ian Lustick and Avraham Burg have written about how Israel’s first Prime Ministers retroactively and tautologically seized upon the Holocaust as the ultimate raison d’être for Zionism, as an excuse for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians (and worse), and as a shield from criticism for crimes of the state they created. In the United States Israel employs a constellation of propaganda and lobbying groups in its service, many operating in contravention to the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
The South similarly spawned an entire cottage industry devoted to Confederate propaganda, much of it written by Christian ministers. In 1860 an anthology of pro-slavery propaganda, most essays by clergymen, was published under the title Cotton is King.
Zionism as “civic Judaism” and the Lost Cause as “civic religion” were both built on victimization, martyrology, and myth. Dixie and Zion are both mythic lands of the imagination. Where the South dreamed of an eventual resurrection of Dixie, the Zionists had been dreaming of Zion’s resurrection for a hundred years. Both Confederates and Zionists believed in a special destiny for their people, born of and sanctified in bloodshed and sacrifice. Both were obsessed with monuments, memory, and military heroics. The CSA had their “knights”; Israel has its elite fighting units. Both embrace ethnic supremacy.
The birth of Zionism and Southern Christianity and their corresponding civic religions owe profound debts to Romanticism and German nationalism. Fritz Stern and Wolfgang Schivelbusch have studied the Southern debt to German nationalism, while Zionism’s founder Theodor Herzl belonged to a German nationalist fraternity and even advocated conversion to Christianity for a time. Herzl’s 1902 novel AltNeuLand (Old-New Land) is the story of a German-Jewish lawyer who retires to a tropical island for 20 years then visits Palestine only to discover a German-speaking, pan-European New Society that Zionists have created.
Again, the South may have lost the War but the North all too willingly embraced Southern myth, heroics, and military veneration. Since Reconstruction it’s been a struggle to rid American military bases of the many Confederate generals’ names, even as white supremacy remains as malign as ever. I would argue that our contemporary American civic religion – militarism – shares this with Israel’s, both reinforcing one another.
Whether it is turning our backs on Reconstruction, continuing to propagate neo-Confederate myth and culture through a hijacked Evangelical MAGA Christianity, or providing 75 years of bipartisan support to a racist Jewish ethnocracy, America has firmly turned its back on its supposed Enlightenment values, as a skeptical Arendt was well aware. Today – and especially since Gaza 2023 – Democrats have torn up or ignored international agreements, laws, and institutions as readily as their MAGA brethren. So much for the supposed “rule based order.” So much for the Enlightenment.
Today’s young “genocide abolitionists” represent the best in our civilizational aspirations despite being smeared as “antisemites.” There have been hundreds, if not thousands, of cases of firings, cancelled talks, banned meetings, arrests, assaults, doxxing, and language policing of ceasefire supporters. Laws are being enacted to shut down protests, ban a social media outlet that does not censor criticisms of Israel, redefine “antisemitism,” and criminalize criticism of Zionism.
How much democracy are we willing to give up for American and Israeli imperium?
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