Adler, The Age and "As a Jew .."

Photo: Lobro78 on iStock

On the weekend, I was planning to write about Israel’s pinpoint pager and walkie talkie attacks on Hezbollah, whose leader, Hassan Nasrallah, describes the Jewish state as a “cancerous gland” in the Middle East. But I was thrown off course by Louise Adler’s op-ed headlined “These are the things I’ve learnt you can’t ask about Israel.” 

The op-ed appeared in The Age — where else? Well, OK, it might have appeared in The Guardian or the ABC as Adler’s columns do from time to time. What I mean is commentary of this sort, declarative pieces from Jewish anti-Zionists, tend to be well-received in liberal-left outlets that nowadays project a distinct worldview — more on this another time.

The headline, therefore, was ironic. Adler frequently asks supposedly unaskable “things” about Israel in The Age and The Guardian and on the ABC and through her directorship of Adelaide Writers’ Week. Her inaugural program last year dedicated a full day to the Palestinian cause as expounded by writers almost universally hardline, including one who had branded Ukraine’s Jewish president Volodymyr Zelensky, forced to defend his homeland from Russian aggression, a “depraved Zionist.” 

Jewish anti-Zionists often assert their moral authority by prefacing their views on Israel with the phrase, “As a Jew” I think such-and-such. Hence, Zionist Jews have started referring to these increasingly organised anti-Zionist Jews as the “AsaJews.” Howard Jacobson satirised them in The Finkler Question as the “ASHamed Jews” because they loudly proclaim themselves “ashamed” of Israel. 

Interestingly, Adler, in her Age piece, claims she has “come to the point” where her criticisms of Zionism and of Israel’s actions in Gaza no longer stem from her Jewishness. “It is not because of my own history that I have declared myself to be an ally of the struggle of Palestinian people,” she writes, “it is because as human beings injustice and inequality demand that we all care.” 

Still, she admits her family history has shaped her political views — and goes on to sketch this history. Her paternal grandfather, she explains, was deported during the first round-up of immigrant Jews in Paris in 1941 and ultimately murdered in Birkenau. Her father, aged 14, joined the Jewish section of the communist partisan resistance. She is proud, naturally, of his legacy, his courage, his enduring belief in the exhortation “not to look away” when confronted with suffering and injustice. 

But she also draws an unsettling contrast between her father’s resistance and the responses of other Jews during the Holocaust. 

“In such moments, we all have choices, which is not to condemn those who focused on survival, sought ways to escape to Palestine, or took comfort in God’s protection. But it is to acknowledge that there was heroism in daily life, despite the great risks.”

What is Adler saying here? That the Jews who chose not to take the fight directly to the Nazis, the Jews who sought the relative safety of the then embattled Zionist enclave in Palestine made a less noble, less heroic choice?

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This much is clear: Adler believes that through her anti-Israel advocacy she is carrying on her father’s mission “not to look away.” She asks: “Who will bear witness if we don’t?” 

She invites us to see her as a modern-day resistance fighter against the new Nazis, namely the Zionists who she views as oppressors and perhaps also as the small-minded cowards they always were. She depicts her journey towards adulthood as a process of merging with her father, becoming him. 

And while she attempts to criticise Israel’s actions — her arguments are so impressionistic, so laden with distortions and omissions that it’s hard to take them seriously — the real thrust of her piece concerns her opposition to Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.

Her parents, she makes clear, weren’t Zionists. When, as a teenager in Melbourne, she spent her Sunday afternoons at a socialist Zionist youth movement, she muses that her parents were probably just grateful for some quiet time away from the kids. 

Her disillusionment with the state of Israel began in Christmas 1972 when she visited for the first time to work on a kibbutz — and it began instantaneously, as “the reality of the Zionist project made itself explicit at the airport.” 

“I imagined that I was landing in a socialist utopia,” she writes. Instead, “European Jews stamped my passport, Middle Eastern Jews manned the luggage carousels while Palestinians swept the floors and cleaned the toilets. So much for the socialist dream.” 

It cuts, I know: I once genuinely believed in the tooth fairy. Although, for a self-described teenage socialist, it’s puzzling that Adler ascribed low status to the manual jobs of manning luggage carousels and cleaning toilets.

I know she won’t be swayed by the argument that Middle Eastern Jews and Palestinians enjoy greater, if still imperfect, social mobility in today’s Israel where they are represented among doctors, prominent journalists, members of parliament and supreme court justices. The supposed racial inequality she witnessed at the airport in 1972 forever defines for her “the Zionist project.” She says she has come to understand that a Jewish state is by definition exclusionary and undemocratic even if, like Israel, it has the outward appearance of a democracy. In this telling, Israel, the collective Jew, is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. 

Countries without racial inequality are usually racially homogenous. The reason “Middle Eastern Jews” manning the luggage carousels found themselves in Israel in the first place is because after its establishment, Arab countries expelled more than 850,000 of them — Jews with millennia-old roots in those societies — in an astonishingly successful project of ethnic cleansing. Adler does not mention this.

She doesn’t mention Muslim and Arab anti-Semitism full stop, or indeed anything that might suggest the Palestinians bear some responsibility for their tragic predicament. 

Instead, she dutifully regurgitates anti-Israel homilies from Masha Gessen, Saree Makdisi and Edward Said. She excuses the latter’s anti-Semitism — Said departed from the leftist party line in criticising “Jews” rather than Israelis or Zionists — as Israel’s fault because .. it’s a Jewish state. She uses a quote from the “much vilified” poet Mohammed el-Kurd that he has “little interest” in “memorising or apologising for centuries-old tropes created by Europeans.” She doesn’t tell us the poetic trope for which he was allegedly vilified alluded to Israelis harvesting and eating the organs of Palestinian “martyrs.” (He later explained this was “a metaphor.”)

All these people she deferentially credits for “educating” her that Zionism is wrong if not evil. Thus, she serves a mash-up of propaganda talking points that add up to the following: the Jews, far from being a people with an exemplary case for statehood are in fact the least deserving of such a thing. How could it be otherwise when the Zionists warrant comparison with Nazis?

Clearly, this narrative would fall apart at the first mention of Hamas or Hezbollah, their genocidal ambitions or the jihadist Iranian-led axis in which they sit, so, again, Adler doesn’t mention them.

She does however invoke Masha Gessen, Putin critic and latterly a fellow “AsaJew,” who in a notable New Yorker piece compared the plight of Palestinians in Gaza to that of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. Adler laments the author had been “vilified” (another one) and initially denied an important prize for drawing a parallel that she herself has drawn and for which she’s been similarly vilified. 

“It seems that the Holocaust is an inviolable, sacred moment in history, forever beyond comparison,” Adler concludes, disavowing a truth self-evident to any moderately intelligent 12 year-old that the comparison between Gaza and the Warsaw ghetto crumbles beneath the mammoth necessary caveats. As in, the comparison would be perfect had the ghettoised Jews been ruled by an armed leadership constitutionally committed to eradicating Aryan peoples, a leadership that had waged a more than 20-year terror campaign against German civilians with the support of key foreign states — and so on. 

(A gross distortion is no less of one just because it appears in The New Yorker; as David Mikics observes in Tablet magazine, “it should be shocking” that a publication renowned for indefatigable fact-checking let Gessen riff in this way.)

Nonetheless, Adler reminds us that Zionism was not a response to the Holocaust but “a nationalist project of the 19th century” that entailed a denial of Palestine’s indigenous population. She leaves out the fact the Jewish nationalist project of the 19th century was a direct response to anti-Semitic Czarist pogroms. She omits also the fact of the Jews’ nearly 3000 year-long continuous presence in the land of Israel, one that predated Islam by a millennium: Jewish sovereignty, some might say, was “never ceded.” 

But again, this piece isn’t really about Israel-Palestine; it’s about Adler and her like-minded Jewish dissenters and what they see as their collective martyrdom. Zionist Jews cannot allow themselves to feel “empathy” for the plight of Palestinians, she says, though I doubt even she believes this. She tells of being called a “kapo” and “token Jew”, being “glared at” while buying fruit and being “berated” in Adelaide’s Pioneer Women’s Memorial Gardens by “disgusted” citizens —  a bewildering vignette that she leaves unexplained. 

She tells us that she listened as a “Ukrainian Jewish immigrant” told her the Palestinians “are not like us.” This is an intriguing level of detail. What’s the significance of this person being a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant? Perhaps Adler is irate this person spoke about “us,” resenting the implication of shared peoplehood — elsewhere she asks, “what is this emotional attachment most Jews declare they feel for Israel?” Does she believe a Ukrainian immigrant ought to know better than succumb to bigotry about Palestinians? Or is she hinting that Ukraine is indeed a place of “depraved” Zionists as the writer she invited to the festival said of Zelensky?

In any event, the unpleasant blowback Adler recounts hardly compares to the hostility “Zionists” have endured through doxxing, abusive graffiti, the targeting of their businesses, the violent protestors descending on their suburbs — and their exclusion from elite and left-wing spaces. As Michael Gawenda points out in My Life as a Jew only Jews like Adler could be appointed as head of Adelaide Writers’ Week. No doubt she would allege Zionists deserve at least some of this discomfort for defending what she regards as racist, fascist Israel. Still, even she would acknowledge that martyrdom is these days a competitive market. (I too have been glared at while going about my business in certain suburbs of Melbourne.)

For here is the contradiction at the heart of her piece: while Adler declares she’s championing the Palestinian cause not as a Jew but as a “humanist” every line undermines this assertion.

Throughout, her unmoving target is her fellow Jews, the Zionist Jews who feel such “passion and heat” despite being physically remote from the Middle East. Yet she’s the one going nuclear. She lashes Zionist Jews for being on guard against anti-Semitism, ventriloquising via El-Kurd that they deflect from Israel’s crimes by setting up a “false equivalence between semantic violence and systemic violence.” Bullying your opponents to shut up, however, is no substitute for forensic argument. In the end we learn nothing, hear nothing, but Adler’s (very Jewish) neuroticism on full blast. 

In her lurid universe, Zionists are colonial oppressors who have forgotten the lessons of the Holocaust — arguably they never learned them in the first place — never mind the enemies at their borders promising another one. And for all her empathy for Palestinians they too appear as caricatures, either romantic “teachers” spreading the gospel of resistance or hapless victims behind a barbed wire fence, devoid of ethics or agency now or ever. 

Her persona is still that of the teenage socialist, clinging to fairytales even as they’re battered by reality. I feel almost protective towards her. She projects the adolescent’s desperate, grasping need for approval — from her Palestinian educators, and from an intelligentsia that will accept her only on the condition she denounce her fellow Jews.