Mike Marqusee, If I Am Not For Myself: Journal of an Anti-Zionist Jew.

Mendes, Philip

Mike Marqusee, If I Am Not For Myself: Journal of an Anti-Zionist

Jew. London: Verso, 2008. 307pp. ISBN 9781844672141

From Marx to Chomsky, there have always been some Jewish radicals willing to exploit their own religious and cultural origins in order to vilify their own people. There were Jews who justified the 1881 pogroms in Russia, there were Jews who spearheaded the purging of the Bund from the Russian Social Democratic Party in 1903, there were Jews who defended the 1929 anti-Jewish massacres in Palestine, there were Jews who defended Stalin's anti-Jewish campaign of 1948-1953, and more recently there have been Jews who advocate the destruction of the State of Israel.

In Australia, the Jews against Zionism and Anti-Semitism (JAZA) group was formed by a small group of marxists in the 1970s for the sole purpose of defending community radio station 3CR against well-documented allegations of anti-Semitism raised by the Victorian Jewish Board of Deputies. JAZA provoked condemnation not only from the Jewish mainstream, but also from the left-wing Paths to Peace group which was highly critical of Israeli policies towards the Palestinians. Paths to Peace aptly labelled JAZA "Jews against Jews."

More recently, the Independent Australian Jewish Voices (IAJV) group has regularly denounced Israel, and even supported a pro-Palestinian advertisement in The Australian which implicitly called for the destruction of Israel. IAJV has also provoked a backlash from other left-wing Jews. For example, the Australian Jewish Democratic Society, which opposes the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, dissociated themselves from the IAJV and the advertisement, citing its extreme and one-sided language.

Some commentators argue that the likes of JAZA and IAJV have internalised the anti-Semitic prejudices of their oppressors, and hence use the term "Jewish self-hatred" to describe this phenomenon. But it is arguably contentious to quantify these views in such psychological terms, particularly when so many Jewish radicals clearly do not hate their people or their culture. It is also debatable to what extent radicals who have no interest in or knowledge of Jewish history, values and culture can be called Jewish. Those whose sole identity is a political one rather than a Jewish one, can hardly be accused of self-hatred when they reject something to which they had no attachment in the first place. Personally, I prefer the term "Uncle Toms" which signifies that these Jews have freely chosen on political grounds to side with groups and viewpoints fanatically opposed to core Jewish concerns and interests.

Given the malevolent tradition of Jewish anti-Zionism, I approached this book by the American-born London-based writer Mike Marqusee with some caution. And his preface is hardly reassuring. He tells us that increasing numbers of Jews are "interrogating and rejecting Zionism," but provides no empirical evidence or data to support this contentious assertion. He then attempts to place his anti-Zionism within a broader Left tradition of opposition to racism and inequality, but only succeeds in convincing the reader that he is well acquainted with Left rather than Jewish perspectives.

He then declares his support for the right of Jews in Israel to progress their religious and cultural beliefs, but conveniently makes no reference to their national identity. Later he continually brackets Zionists and anti-Semites as rigidly limiting the boundaries of Jewish identity which suggests that he does not understand the basic difference between racist ideology and the political responses of oppressed peoples (however imperfect) to racism.

However, the book gets much better from there. Much of the text is actually a memoir of the life and political activism of his grandfather Ed Moran. Moran was born in New York in 1899, and became a prominent left-wing Jewish activist in the 1930s and 1940s. He was active in the American Labor Party (ALP) founded by the famous Jewish trade union leader Sidney Hillman, and also participated in campaigns against the anti-Jewish demagogue Father Charles Coughlin and various antisemitic groups. He defended the

New York Jewish school teacher Morris Schappes who was infamously jailed in 1941 for his Communist beliefs, and was also a strong Zionist and supporter of the establishment of the State of Israel.

Interspersed with this memoir are Marqusee's occasional explanations for his anti-Zionism. But his arguments are weak, and continually reflect a selective reading of historical and political texts. One strategy is to compare the Jews to other persecuted minorities such as the Kurds and the Tamils, and to argue on this basis that there is no universal right of national self-determination. But he misses the obvious point: that Israel already exists, whereas Kurdistan or Tamilstan do not.

He also praises the Arab revolt of 1936 as "the most intense and sustained anti-colonial insurgency of its time," but ignores the numerous terrorist attacks on Jewish civilians that resulted in 400 deaths. He criticises Moran and the American Left for supporting the creation of Israel in 1948, but ignores the political context of the time including the impact of the still very recent Holocaust, and the widespread perception that the Jews deserved the compensation of statehood for their suffering.

He cites the one-sided argument of far left Israeli historian Ilan Pappe to support his view that the 1948 war was a "one-way process of destruction, displacement and plunder" against the Palestinians, but conveniently ignores the more complex and nuanced analysis provided by the seminal Israeli historian Benny Morris. He even defends the Mufti of Jerusalem's dalliance with the Nazis, but conveniently ignores evidence of his active (if insignificant) collaboration with the Holocaust.

He criticises Moran for equating the war in Palestine with other anti-fascist struggles such as Spain, Ireland, India and World War II, and argues that the opposite was the case. But this pro-Zionist perspective was virtually the universal view of the Left at the time. There was even talk of raising an international brigade of Communists to defend Israel. And he attacks the analogy that some have drawn between the Palestinian refugee tragedy, and the associated mass departure of Jews from the Arab world. But instead of providing a nuanced account of the Jewish exodus, he relies on the anti-Zionist conspiracy theories peddled by historians such as Abbas Shiblak and John Rose. No reference is made to Moshe Gat's seminal account of the Jewish exodus from Iraq.

Finally he returns to contemporary events. He acknowledges the prevalence of some anti-Jewish manifestations within the UK antiwar movement, and condemns the overt antisemitism of Labour MP Tam Dalyell and American Marxist academic James Petras. But what he is most angry about is their equation of all Jews including himself with Zionism and Israel. And here his hatred for pro-Israel Jews lets fly. They are accused of "moral, spiritual and intellectual decadence," of undermining free speech, defaming dissidents and denying them academic jobs, destroying political careers, character assassination and intimidation.

He also argues with reference to the UK Parliamentary Inquiry into Anti-Semitism that allegations of antisemitism against critics of Israel are a nonsense designed to protect Israel against legitimate criticism. But he makes no attempt to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate political debate on Israel.

Overall, this book provides a simplistic analysis of contemporary Jewish life. The author has voluntarily excluded himself from the organised Jewish community, and does not understand the many diverse forms of Jewish cultural, ethnic and religious identity. Instead, everything is reduced to the great battle between hardline Zionists and ideological anti-Zionists. But most Jews do not collapse their identity into these simple categories. Marqusee may be more than the self-hating or quisling Jew that some will no doubt label him, but serious readers are left wanting some evidence of a positive affirmation of his Jewish identity.

Dr Philip Mendes

Monash University

Philip.Mendes@med.monash.edu.au