Israel's Dead Soul, by Steven Salaita, Temple University Press, 2011, 176 pp.

Open a liberal publication after a major Israeli military operation, and you are as likely as not to find some scribbler fretting introspectively over the state of Israel’s soul. Dying, decaying, dirtied, corrupted, the metaphysical expression of Israeli ideals, separate yet tethered to the body of the nation, the soul of the state is in deep trouble.

Steven Salaita’s book, Israel’s Dead Soul, discusses this decay. His verdict? The soul was never alive in the first place, fixed in a filthy history: terrorist attacks, ethnic cleansing, cross-border incursions, massacres, military occupation, checkpoints, land-theft, and incessant humiliation, all of it tightly interwoven into global processes of accumulation and neo-colonial expansion. Israel’s soul is not just dead. Like contagious ether, it wafts through Western intellectual and popular culture, along the way infecting a number of liberal-left intellectuals with Blut und Boden nationalism. For Zionism, this has meant marrying up: association with multiculturalism momentarily cleanses it of the bloody detritus of Zionist history. But when Zionism is included among the cultural forms that compose “multiculturalism,” multiculturalism, slumming, loses out from the association.

Salaita shows that through Zionism racism and imperialism can covertly enter American political culture. For example, organized American Jewry, through its not-quite-homogenous campus Astroturf organization, Hillel, pushes the line that civic responsibility means supporting Israel, thereby making “ethnonationalism a central element of civic responsibility” and a core component of campus diversity efforts. With Zionism turned into an inoffensive expression of Jewish culture, who could oppose it? Who could oppose supporting Israel? But supporting Israel does not merely mean supporting an abstract expression of Jewish self-determination. It means supporting Israeli practice. So even while soft Zionists marched against the apartheid practices of South Africa, they remained in favour of links with apartheid Israel, which was publicly and later covertly funnelling arms to Pretoria, while the latter was carrying out counter-revolutionary warfare across southern Africa, one example among many of how Zionism infected fragments of the American left.

Salaita also discusses the Anti-Defamation League, an organization that actually used to be devoted to defending civil rights. Nowadays, the ADL allocates resources not just to fighting the neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups that do deserve to be targeted, but also to targeting what it calls Arab and Muslim extremists – typically a code for Arab and Muslim resistance. The organization is also mostly mute on the Armenian Genocide, mostly because it fetishists Jewish suffering, casting the Holocaust as the one true genocide of modernity (Turkey’s role as a NATO ally also helps). As Salaita rightly points out, this is immensely problematic. Even from a parochial perspective, it walls off Jewish suffering from history, conveniently hiccupping when what should be said is that the German Judeocide was the culmination of a racial century in which the practices pioneered during European colonial expansion finally came home to the continent. Accepting this exceptionalism was part of how Jews came to be fully white and fully privileged in American and European society. The corollary is that it justifies the last ongoing European colonial project.

Of course, such links are relentless. In a world in which talk of Israel’s servicing of global capital is increasingly replaced by cant about a lobby mis-directing the machinery of imperialism from optimal operations – inputs, capital and brown people, outputs, more capital and brown bodies – Salaita’s observations on the cultural and economic imbrications of the American and Israeli settler-colonies are refreshing. Commenting on Steven Spielberg’s Munich, he discusses the cut to a view of the New York City skyline before September 11, after the “terrorists” who killed – or did not kill – the Israeli athletes had been eliminated. “The conflation is unmistakable,” he writes: “the Israeli battle against Palestinian terrorists is indivisible from the United States’ post-9/11 engagements in a Muslim world.”

Thus the US took advantage of September 11 to aggressively re-deploy the most brutal forms of extraction and accumulation, cashing in on Middle East energy wars that sent the stock prices of the oil majors and arm corporations to the sky, while the brief Oslo interlude of economic peace lapsed, replaced by renewed direct occupation.

Salaita’s chapter on sexuality, violence, and modernity in Israel offers a good overview of how hypocritical Israel is when it comes to the rights of the non-heteronormative. He rips into Israeli pink-washing, its self-painting as a homosexual-friendly environment, a country that protects human rights, in juxtaposition to its illiberal Muslim neighbours, to colour over its reality as a country that systemically violates them. But he misses the chance to note that Israel was one of the promoters of that illiberalism – for example when it quietly encouraged the rise of Hamas, as in the 1980s, when Israeli occupation forces allowed the Muslim Brothers to assault the Red Crescent Society as well as the Communists in Gaza without interference.

Such strategies were in line with a long-standing imperial commitment to foster the rise of more-or-less virulent forms of political Islam to parry the growing threat of secular nationalism and rising communist parties. Foreign intervention in the region, including the creation and subsequent actions of the state of Israel, has entailed encouragement of the most backwards tendencies in the societies and regions in which it has sought to intervene, tendencies Israel and America can then opportunistically juxtapose against its own plastic multiculturalism – We are modern, they are backward.

Salaita is at his most cutting when dissecting Michael Eric Dyson and Cornel West’s contributions to discussions of the Palestine-Israel conflict. Describing them, with some tactical hyperbole, as “two of this generation’s most important intellectuals,” he notes that on the Israel-Palestine conflict they become mealy-mouthed, reduced to blubbery blabber about dialogue, tolerance, and open-mindedness, in a conflict over hard issues of power with respect to access to and control over land, water, capital, political power, and the guns and tanks with which to assert that power. Thus the conflict is reduced to an “inexplicable misunderstanding nourished” by nuts, extremists, and “nihilists.”

Noting that when airlifted to the Middle East, West’s “multicultural humanism unwittingly reveals its own illiberal anatomy,” Salaita’s attack reaches crescendo: “I suppose it is possible that West actually wants to sound as if he’s a fortune cookie writer with a PhD.” Similarly, when dealing with Dyson, Salaita untangles a knot of philosophical confusion in which Dyson serially invokes Foucault and Weber while purportedly addressing the conflict. Finding nothing there, Salaita refers to Dyson’s “annoying habit of concealing his moral cowardice with philosophical gibberish,” in the process avoiding the entire “question of Zionism and racism altogether.” It is when Salaita unlooses his anger from the slight strictures of academic writing that his prose really crackles.

Indeed, Dyson and West are exemplary of a strain of leftism that starts to fumble when the question of Israel/Palestine arises. And the upshot is that more and more of the imperial agenda is stuffed into the rucksack of support for Israel, while its defenders can draw on the legacy of European antisemitism and its horrific apogee to legitimize policies that rehearse the murder and destruction of World War II, if only this time against – generally – more melanin-rich targets. The legacy of that manoeuvre, through which right-wing settler-colonialism has infiltrated the liberal and even radical left for over half a century, has been the weakening of socialist and leftist movements across Europe, the Arab world, and the United States, as proponents of anti-colonial leftism suddenly peddle colonial rightism when carried out under the cover of a Jewish star.

So it is correct and important to note that “Israel is a crucial element of the structures of elite industry whose interests politicians in capitalist societies are obliged to serve.” And thus part of the work of the lobby, as represented in institutions such as the ADL, is to both legitimize imperial policies with the patina of anti-antisemitism, now used simply to cover up unalloyed racism, and fire endless flak at those who criticize Israel. But nowadays that flak misses its targets more and more. The myths of Israeli ‘socialism,’ democracy, and multiculturalism are, in turn, increasingly exposed as myths.

The upshot is that it becomes harder and harder to allude to the myths to defend Israel, and thus left-liberals who hover within the decent spectrum are reduced to the waffling non-sense which Salaita devastatingly pillories – the price they pay for a measure of acceptability is cowardice when it comes to Palestine. So if Israel as an idea and as a discourse has provided a place of refuge for reactionary ideas and imperialist intrigues within liberal and leftist thought for decades, then that place of refuge is shrinking fast; force-shrunk, as it is under attack from all sides. And it is to that well deserved ideological assault that Salaita’s book makes an important contribution.

Max Ajl is an essayist, rabble-rouser, and PhD student in development sociology at Cornell. He is the proprietor of Jewbonics, a blog founded during the Gaza massacre.