The State as Enemy of the People

The “Apartheid Wall” separating Israelis from Palestinians

One early scene in Emily Raboteau’s memoir Searching For Zion helped crystalize my understanding of race in America. Raboteau, who is biracial, recalls a discussion of race issues in her grade school classroom. Her best friend Tamar, who was Jewish, was horrified to hear how thoroughly bigotry is baked into American history. Raboteau recalls her best friend turning to her and exclaiming, “I’m not White.”

As an adult, Tamar performed Aliyah, the ritual immigration of diasporic Jews to the Israelite homeland. Raboteau visits Tamar while researching the elusive concept of “homeland” for Black Americans. She finds her childhood friend living in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, dwelling in a house which had been expropriated from a Palestinian family. She recalls listening in horror as Tamar spews talking points about why Palestinians deserve expelled from the land.

In Israel, Raboteau realized, Tamar had become White.

We’ve watched this week as the longstanding hostilities between the Palestinian Hamas government and the Israeli state have boiled over into war, again. Both sides are committing atrocities, including targeting civilians, and justifying their action by defending their own civilian populations, as states do. Ordinary Palestinians and Israelis, with little influence over their governments’ actions, watch helplessly as powerful states replay the grievances of ages past.

Outsiders struggle with how to respond. American spokespeople weighing in on Levantine affairs hasn’t gone well recently. Representative Ilhan Omar was famously called “antisemitic” for criticizing the Israeli state, an accusation that has subsequently spread to colleagues like Rashida Tlaib and AOC. That accusation was specious, however, spearheaded by Margorie Taylor Greene, the candidate endorsed by the Charlottesville fascists who chanted “Jews will not replace us.”

Well-meaning politicians, journalists, and others fear that, if they criticize Israel or Hamas, their opposition will tar them as smearing Jews or Palestinians. Because that does happen. Yet in neutering their critiques, they appear willing to accept war crimes. Hamas targeted air strikes on civilian populations; Israel responded by giving Palestinians 24 hours to flee northern Gaza, a logistical impossibility, since there are over a million people and no place to go.

American right-wing Christians are historically willing to excuse every Israeli excess, despite a longstanding antisemitic streak through their politics. The Israeli state looms large in their theology, because if Israel rebuilds the Temple in Jerusalem, Jesus will (their script says) come swiftly. The End Times aren’t scary for conservative Evangelicals; they believe Jesus will vindicate them, punish everyone else, and let them live justified in God’s light.

Sort of like Tamar, who needed justification for living in a stolen Palestinian house.

Hey, Israel? Those “terrorist targets” sure look like neighborhoods

Powerful states seldom really represent their citizens’ interests. The English Puritans who settled in Massachusetts were legitimately oppressed by the English ethno-nationalist state; but upon bivouacking in America, they began recreating that oppression on Native Americans, enslaved Africans, and Anabaptists. Similarly, the Israeli state and the Jewish people apparently learned different lessons from the Shoah.

Saying this doesn’t mean Jews, individually or collectively, bear responsibility for the current violence in Gaza. Much like individual Americans, living today, aren’t culpable for African slavery or Indian genocide. Indeed, Israelis or Americans who resist their authoritarian state and its bigoted history often get knocked down first. The state, ultimately, always preserves itself—not its people, and certainly not its people’s morals.

States always oppose free thinkers, dissidents, and reformists. Because the state wants only to preserve itself, and has no other moral goal, it always dispenses rewards to those who support the state, and punishments to those who challenge it. This describes states of all kinds: the history of the Cold War reveals that the Eastern and Western blocs found proprietary ways to punish dissidents, but punish them it did.

The powerful Israeli state provided Tamar the protection from antisemitic hatred which she’d lacked in America. It only demanded that Tamar relinquish her morals to the state, and agree with the state’s rationale. America saw something similar, when it originally rejected Italians and Irish as murky, Latinate foreigners. America eventually accepted these groups as White, if these groups would become wholehearted defenders of American state morals.

So it follows that one can challenge the Israeli or Hamas state without condemning the Jewish or Palestinian peoples. Indeed, we can only protect all peoples equally, without prejudice, by condemning and challenging the state. States, by their nature, reward conformists, and punish those who pursue justice. States always preserve an in-group and try to kill an out-group; the current war is between two privileged in-groups, not between peoples.