“AA: There is also a way to argue, on the flipside, that the project of Israel is essentially a project of assimilation into the Western world order—that there’s nothing inherently Jewish about what Israel is doing, and that it actually represents assimilation into a colonial framework. But then, of course, there’s a way to read this that’s very direct: This is what Jews are doing in the world. Secular Jews, religious Jews, cultural Jews, all kinds of Jews.

EL: You’re absolutely right. That was the strategy we on the Jewish left used for a long time, to say Judaism was colonized and the Zionists are Jewish antisemites, in that they reject what the antisemites reject—the diasporic, exilic, “parasite” Jew—and want instead to become real Europeans. But when so many people who call themselves Jewish are doing things that we have a problem with and calling it “Jewish,” we cannot just dismiss it, or claim that it’s not real Judaism. If you look at statistics, at least in Israel, the support for Netanyahu and the Gaza war, including the most racist genocidal statements, is correlated to how religious people are—the more religious, the more supportive. There were times when you could expect the Haredi communities not to go to the army, not to celebrate Yom Ha’atzmaut, Independence Day, not even to speak Hebrew. And that’s changed.”

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