In his oped for The New York Times on December 9, 2017, entitled “Jerusalem Denial Complex”, Bret Stephens, the new super-Zionist Times oped columnist, supported Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital by arguing that Trump was simply acknowledging reality. This echoes Trump’s own justification for the move from his speech announcing the new policy last week. After listing the many “pieties”, as Stephens puts it, that Trump’s announcement finally lays to rest, he gives us the following description of Jerusalem:
“What Jerusalem is is the capital of Israel, both as the ancestral Jewish homeland and the modern nation-state. When Richard Nixon became the first American president to visit the country in 1974, he attended his state dinner in Jerusalem. It’s where President Anwar Sadat of Egypt spoke when he decided to make peace in 1977. It’s what Congress decided as a matter of law in 1995. When Barack Obama paid his own presidential visit to Israel in 2013, he too spent most of his time in Jerusalem. So why maintain the fiction that Jerusalem isn’t the capital?”
What’s interesting about this passage is that it embodies both a fundamental fallacy and a fundamental falsehood. Pretty good for one paragraph.
The fallacy is one of equivocation, in this case on the word “recognition”. One commits this fallacy when one takes an ambiguous term – in this case, “recognition” – and constructs an argument in which one uses the terms in one sense in a crucial premise and then in a different sense in the conclusion. “Recognition” has two, admittedly related, meanings. In one sense, the one expressed when it is said it’s time to recognize reality and stop believing in fictions, the premises of Stephens’s argument, “recognize” just means acknowledge what is the case. And in this sense all of us know, indeed “recognize,” that Jerusalem has functioned as Israel’s capital for many years, so if you want to talk to government leaders, of course that’s where you have to go. So from this premise, together with the premise that you ought to acknowledge facts that are staring you in the face, Stephens (and Trump) conclude that you ought to recognize that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital. Sounds almost reasonable when you put it that way.
However, “recognition” has a different sense when describing political acts carried out by representatives of nation-states. In this sense it means formally agreeing not to challenge the situation in question, to sanction it and treat it as legitimate. So Trump’s act wasn’t a mere cognitive achievement, it was a political act of officially acquiescing and condoning Israel’s annexation of the city against international law. The point is that when governments “recognize” they are not merely acknowledging facts, they are in an important sense creating them. What Trump did was to put the US seal of approval on the Israeli annexation, and that goes far beyond merely recognizing what happen to be the undisputed facts of the matter. While Trump may not himself understand the difference, I find it hard to believe Stephens doesn’t, which makes his argument extremely disingenuous.
The falsehood comes in that phrase, “…as the ancestral Jewish homeland”. What this means is that the group of people who now identify as Jews, whether currently living in Israel or outside it, constitute a nation, and the very same nation as the people who lived in the ancient kingdom of Judea; therefore, in establishing the Jewish state of Israel, they are merely returning to take possession of what has always been rightfully theirs.
But can anyone really take this claim seriously? Judaism is a religion, and what Jews today share with the ancient Judeans is this religion. My roots can be traced back to Eastern Europe, and earlier than that is all speculation and conjecture, nothing that can compete with the Palestinians’ actual residence on the land for the past hundreds of years.
Shlomo Sand, in The Invention of the Jewish People, has forcefully argued that the very idea that Jews, as a collective, constitute a nation, is a very recent idea, largely coinciding with the rise of Zionism. As someone who was raised Orthodox, I’m not sure I totally agree with him, but this only reinforces my point. It has for a long time been part of Jewish religious doctrine that we are God’s people, so if that’s so, we have to be identifiable as a separate nation. We also have religious laws about who can count as a Jew that are mostly biologically based. But this is religious dogma, not history and not political reality.
In fact, not too long ago, during the period of Jewish emancipation in Europe, it was the anti-semites who emphasized that Jews were a nation apart, and it was advocates for emancipation who argued that Jews were integral to the nations in which they lived but just happened to have a minority religion. So no, Bret Stephens, Jerusalem is not my homeland, nor my “birthright”. I have no more of a right to claim Jerusalem than any Catholic in the US has to claim Rome.
Wonderful little essay
Very accurate, logical, and much appreciated.
Israel is a modern nation-state, but it is not and has never been an “ancestral Jewish homeland” – the homeland of every person in the world who embraces the religion-based identity of Jewish.
Israel sinfully covets Jerusalem and illegally occupies and colonizes it. It is the capital of Israel in much the same way the victim chained in his basement is the rapist’s wife.
I think that the following statements are all true
a) many of the ancestors of today’s Jews lived in what is now called Israel
b) many of the ancestors of today’s Jews lived elsewhere
c) many of the ancestors of today’s Palestinians lived in what is now called Israel
d) Judaism in most of its forms both ancient and modern ascribes particular theological importance to Jerusalem and the territory around it. (Mind you, it is at least an oversimplification to say that all forms of Judaism or many forms of Christianity have implied something like Zionism.)
Everything really depends on d). The other propositions by themselves would never have been thought to imply anything important. However, it is wrong to impose on others a political claim founded on a religion they do not accept.
Levine’s remarks on the equivocation between ‘recognise as fact’ and ‘recognise as legitimate’ are impeccable.
Folks, over at CounterPunch, Jim Kavanagh has an interesting perspective on Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, including numerous historical references we should be aware of. The gist is that the empirial elites are fundamentally Zionists and that this recognition will shine a spotlight on that reality. A long quote and a link:
“After all, Israel’s relentless Judaization of East Jerusalem, consistent with its long-held declaration of sovereignty over the entire city, was proceeding swimmingly, with only the feeblest occasional murmurs of protest, accompanied by massive countervailing deliveries of arms and money, from the peace-process-loving governments of Europe and America. Trump’s gratuitous, self-aggrandizing gesture, by unmasking that as the de facto acceptance of annexation that it is, only brings unwanted attention to the whole rotten game, and to the hypocrisy of those governments especially.”
….
“As excessive and gratuitous as Trump’s Jerusalem announcement was, there is no question that it is the culmination of American politics. It is the perfect example of how Trump is the symptom not the cause of long-festering political rot, the product not the antithesis of American political culture. His recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel is the fulfillment, exactly as Trump says, of a promise that’s been de rigueur for presidential candidates, and of the demand of a law (Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995) passed twenty-two years ago by overwhelming majorities in both Houses of Congress. Just six months ago, the Senate—including Chuck Schumer, Dianne Feinstein, Kamala Harris, and Bernie Sanders—voted 90-0 to demand that Trump “abide by its provisions.” Schumer, who believes he’s on a mission from God to be the guardian of Israel, had last week criticized Trump for his “indecisiveness” about declaring Jerusalem the “undivided capital of Israel” and moving the embassy.
….
“To wax ironic, Zionism’s fatal weakness may be the effect of its greatest strength—its tenacious entwinement in our political culture, which is hard to overstate. We live in a country where powerful politicians and the wealthy donors who control them proclaim their fealty to Israel; where Israeli officials enjoy veto power over candidates for office down to the level of State Assembly. where the Secretary of State gives a “devoutly Zionist” speech and is still criticized for not being obsequious enough to Israel, where the Vice-President declares “I am a Zionist,” and where a President who was excoriated for avoiding service in the American army can say “I would personally grab a rifle, get in a ditch, and fight and die” for Israel, and nobody bats an eyelash.” (Jim Kavanagh) https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/12/13/zionism-in-the-light-of-jerusalem/