Maximum self-hatred

A new “Jewish” anti-Zionist student group shows that the endgame of self-hatred is always absolute nihilism.

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It is one of the strangest aspects of radicalism that it always compounds itself. It is never quite satisfied with its own derangements. Much as pornography must always become more explicit and perverse, radicalism must always push further.

This is not entirely inexplicable, however. Radicalism’s primary method, after all, is a kind of activist pornography, and it suffers from the same problem: You can only shock people once. After that, escalation is required to shock them again.

That the neo-antisemitic movement on American campuses is no exception should not be surprising.

One of its “problems,” if one can call it that, is that it is already at maximum antisemitism. It has nowhere left to go. Slogans like “by any means necessary,” “death to Israel,” and “globalize the intifada” are explicit calls for genocide, and the movement’s recent turn to outright terrorism indicates that it is collapsing into nihilistic violence.

This movement has now been joined by its tiny Jewish minority, with activists from the already collaborationist Jewish Voice for Peace forming an ostensibly more radical group called the Anti-Zionist Jewish Student Front.

The “Front” is clearly as maximalist as it dares to be. According to the Algemeiner, the group stated, “We work to dismantle Zionism in its entirety by confronting Zionist institutions on campus, to struggle for divestment, and to pursue the criminalization of Zionism as a white supremacist weapon of war.”

This just barely stops short of a call for genocide—“dismantle” being a comfortable euphemism—and clearly compounds JVP’s already deplorable stance by effectively endorsing antisemitic campus harassment and violence.

Moreover, it states in clear terms that its goal is to completely suppress the majority of Jewish students. It wants to ghettoize them and place them under a de facto totalitarian regime that will actively prevent them from advocating for their most deeply held beliefs.

This egregious war on Jewish students is combined with an even more violent attitude toward Israel, which the “Front” clearly wants to destroy as a Jewish state. That this would almost inevitably involve the ethnic cleansing or outright genocide of Israeli Jews goes unmentioned, but the “Front” can hardly be unaware of it.

I will put aside the “white supremacist” libel, except to note that the majority of Israeli Jews are not white, and instead ask the question that has no doubt already popped into readers’ heads: How can Jews engage in such egregious behavior?

I have already written at length on the subject of Jewish self-hatred, but this is a bit beyond self-hatred. These Jewish students—to the extent that the “Front” is actually “Jewish” in any meaningful way—have taken on this astroturfed cause in the name not of self-hatred but of self-immolation. Their hatred is so violent that, in effect, they have negated themselves.

The reason is that the “Front” students appear not to know that they are only so celebrated by their allies—and so lavishly aided and funded—because they are useful.

The self-hating Jew is always the antisemite’s best sword and shield, for obvious reasons. The antisemite uses them to both strike at the Jews where they are most vulnerable and to exonerate himself before the fact.

But the useful Jew does not know that, once they have outlasted their usefulness, they will be subject to the same fate as everybody else. As a prominent 19th-century antisemite once said: “I decide who is a Jew.” At the moment, the neo-antisemites have decided that the “Front” are not Jews, but when they decide otherwise, they will eat the “Front” alive.

As for the Jews involved, what we are seeing is collaborationism as suicide. The total evisceration of the self.

To an extent, this is an expression of privilege. It is the cry of Jews who feel they must, due to some unknown “virtue,” be immune from the fate of all other Jews. But they are not. Theirs is a contingent and fleeting privilege. And, as they must know, they are always on trial. As a result, they work assiduously to be more antisemitic than the antisemites. By doing so, they feel they are protected from antisemitic violence. And they are. But only for a time.

This is an ancient phenomenon. The story is told, for example, of Elisha ben Abuya, the heretic who came to be known as “Acher,” or “the other.” According to the tale, Elisha and three others entered “the garden”—a metaphor for a divine vision. But unlike the others, Elisha “chopped down the saplings.”

In other words, Acher could not simply become a heretic. He could not simply leave Judaism. He had to destroy it as well. Maximum self-hatred, the story tells us, is absolute nihilism.

This is where the Jews of the “Front” have arrived, and it is why they do what they do.

There is, as always, a great deal of irony in this, because if the “Front” gets its way, they will no longer be useful, and Aliyah will be their only recourse. Whether they will then be grateful for the Zionism they have defamed is an open question, but one imagines that the answer is no. Ingrates, after all, rarely change.

The real question, however, is what the vast majority of Jewish students are going to do about this.

To an extent, they must do the same as they should do about the entire neo-antisemitic movement. But on another level, this threat is more insidious and must be dealt with differently.

Put simply, Jewish students must do everything possible to protect the “saplings.” They should allow neither themselves nor their fellow Jews to be “criminalized,” to have their most basic principles forcibly violated, or to submit to Acher’s monstrous demands.

Instead, they should hold fast to those principles. They should become even louder and more militant Zionists. They should confront, provoke, impede, interdict, resist, and, if necessary, physically defend themselves against their enemies within and without.

They should declare that being a “good” Jew does not mean becoming a “good” antisemite. They should know in themselves and let others know in no uncertain terms that the destruction of dignity and the self in the name of fleeting acceptance by the worst of all “friends” is not worth the terrible price to be paid in the end.