The Diaspora Deal

On anti-Zionism at the Venice Biennale.

Belu-Simion Fainaru, Rose of Nothingness, installation, 2019 (source)

Zionism, understood in full, is an elevation of Jewish consciousness. Diaspora Judaism amounted to an agreement between Jews and the rest of the world. Jews would dedicate themselves to morality, learning, and faith, and submit to horrifying injustices and periodic mass murders. In return, their host populations would refrain from destroying them utterly while congratulating themselves on their enlightened tolerance. Jews lived as dhimmis in the Muslim world and ghetto-dwellers in Europe, deprived of rights. But they lived.

That deal became intolerable during the Russian pogroms, and European Jews, motivated by other 19th-century reform movements, went in a new direction. Instead of living in supplication and passivity, Zionism reconceived the Jew as muscular and self-determined. Zionists revived Hebrew as a modern language, disdaining Yiddish as a tongue of weakness. Jews with names like Grün and Perlman dropped them in favor of mighty Hebrew constructions like Ben-Gurion and Ben-Yehuda. Jews bought some of the worst real estate in the Levant from the failing Ottomans and established a state there. The young nation of Israel briefly outlawed Yiddish, so determined it was to stamp out the old way of thinking and establish a national image of the Jew as a scholar-warrior with full personhood.

Israel’s response to the October 7 atrocities forever broke what was left of the diaspora deal. In reaction, certain Western conservatives have taken to revelling in ancient impulses that the deal required them to keep down: public reviling of the Jews and all associated with them, blaming the Jews for societal problems that they inflicted upon themselves through lack of intelligence and character. Certain progressives have taken to framing Jews and all associated with them as manifestations of colonialism, capitalism, and racism, according to the miserable narrative that maintains the progressive lifestyle of constant grievance. Many Jews are progressives who are now trying to crawl back into progressive dhimmitude by denouncing Israel. This is also a diasporist deal—the Jews keep their political home at the expense of self-respect and cultural connection, and their progressive host population points to them as supposed counterevidence regarding its abject bigotry.

The latter became an art story as of this year’s Venice Biennale. I don’t even aspire to attend the Biennale, much less be shown in it, not that anyone is offering. I’m having a wonderful time in my studio, with ideas flowing faster than I can manifest them. The flaps in Venice may as well be flapping on another planet. In all candor, the deeper I get into my own projects, the less I care about the “art world” as such. What follows is not a complaint, but a guide for the perplexed, heavily linked to keep it under 2,000 words.¹

To recap, Israel’s selection for this year’s entry is the Bucharest-born, Haifa-based Belu-Simion Fainaru, who won the Israel Prize last year. Because the Israel Pavilion is under renovation, Fainaru will show at the Arsenale. A group calling itself the Art Not Genocide Alliance demanded that the Biennale exclude Israel. The Biennale refused, but its jury, with which the Biennale disdains to interfere, announced that it would not consider awards for artists of countries “whose leaders are currently charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court.” That effectively excluded Israel and Russia. ANGA also complained about Fainaru’s relocation to the Arsenale, claiming that to do so violates the curatorial vision of the now deceased Koyo Kouoh and that it would “introduce conditions of violence and fear through the military and police presence that will accompany the Israeli pavilion.” On April 30, all five Biennale jurors resigned without further statements.

The accusations are twaddle. Israel has never committed, and is not now committing, a genocide. Total Palestinian casualties for the run of the Gaza war, from its initiation by Hamas on October 7, 2023 until they returned the body of the last Israeli hostage on January 26 of this year, were estimated by the dubiously reliable Gaza Ministry of Health at 72,000, with combatants and civilians undifferentiated. Back in January, the Khamenei regime killed half that number of Iranian protesters in two days.² Despite its declared commitment to human rights, ANGA has expressed no objections to Iran’s participation in the Biennale. Its rhetoric about Israel is empty and tendentious.

Regarding the introduction by the Israeli presenters of “conditions of violence and fear,” no police presence around the Fainaru exhibition would be necessary if not for bad actors who have swallowed wholesale the same lies perpetrated by ANGA, and are willing to resort to violence and fear to make their benighted feelings known. “You’re supposed to let us injure you,” says ANGA implicitly, citing the old deal.

As for the ICC charges, they are the work of a British prosecutor named Karim Asad Ahmad Khan. He issued them on May 20, 2024, simultaneously with charges against October 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar. The ICC could not bring itself to accuse any Palestinian of criminality until it found a way to pin some on the Israelis responsible for defending their country from it. The ICC is not a neutral judicial body; they are a mouthpiece of European progressive autocracy. Citing the ICC, rather than human rights principles, let the Biennale jury punish Israel and Russia, but not Iran, China, or the newly admitted Qatar. The ICC evidently regards Israel’s refusal to let its citizens be abducted and murdered as a crime tantamount to Hamas’s effort to abduct and murder them. “You’re supposed to let us injure you,” says the ICC implicitly.

Movement progressivism has no coherent philosophy. It is best understood as a kind of iconoclasm against an image with some basis in reality of a modal American family of heterosexual, procreative, economically productive, Judeo-Christian-tradition whites who love their country, and an implacable desire to tear down anyone to the extent that they participate, or want to participate, in the associated ethos. We’ll call that picture the White Image.

Whether Israel is conservative depends on whether your baseline is France or Saudi Arabia. It is not particularly white. But Israelis are natalists and patriots, which is what movement progressives hate most about conservatives. Such progressives regard them, like they regard the large numbers of Vietnamese Americans who voted for Trump, as white. Worst of all from a progressive standpoint, Israelis are optimists, and thus resistant to the manufactured woe that prompts people to join progressive movements. Progressives wanted Israel to respond to the October 7 atrocities by pacifistically granting the Gazans nationhood. That would have been suicidal—supplicative, diasporist abnegation. Israel said no, and counterattacked like any other country on earth would have. Now it is a nation of pariahs, but Israel is thriving.

Meanwhile, Jews in the diaspora are enduring an explosion of antisemitism not seen since the 1930s. Progressive groups, as mentioned above, demand that Jews renounce Israel or be destroyed socially and professionally, particularly in the arts. This should look familiar, because it was lifted entire from the “anti-racism” playbook of the decade leading up to October 7. Assimilated Jews, again, have agreed to that denunciation in significant numbers, according to the incentives that accrued to “good whites” under “anti-racism.” They will finally be judged to be as irredeemable as the “good whites.”

Progressives should have dismissed Ibram Kendi and related figures as fascistic cranks. Instead they tried to reorder American life according to their ideas, succeeded more than they should have, and now they’re gleefully likening Jews to Nazis. This only seems contradictory if you think that “anti-racism” was ever about racism. It was not. It is a prolonged excoriation of the White Image. Progressives are unwittingly proving the Zionists correct that diaspora Judaism is untenable and the only viable home for Jews is Israel.

Conservative anti-Zionism mostly transfers antisemitic tropes from Jews to Israel.³ Progressive anti-Zionism does likewise, but embeds that activity in a framework of anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism around which there is a coalition of activists who have little in common except shared hatred of the White Image. ANGA’s Instagram posts are full of comments from progressive whites asking why the Biennale jury didn’t punish the United States along with Israel and Russia. The answer, obviously, is that Trump wasn’t charged by the ICC. But the premise of the question is that they should, or the jury should have acted as if they had.

Implicit in anti-Zionism is an objection to full Jewish personhood. The New School student government did not vote to defund the college’s Chinese Students and Scholars Association and demand that members denounce China’s treatment of the Uyghurs to restore support. But guess what they just did to Hillel. The demand presumes that a Jew has a sub-human, stunted moral consciousness until he demonstrates otherwise. (As if a compelled oath sworn to the New School student government demonstrates it.)

There’s an ongoing debate among Jews these days about how best to combat antisemitism. One side persists at education and dialogue. The other side points out that this has proven useless; we ought instead to devote resources to cultivating Jewish institutions, work with the remaining organizations that haven’t become deranged, pursue creative projects independently, and defend ourselves legally and physically as necessary. While dialogue is still possible at the margins,⁴ I’m in the latter camp, and the situation at the Biennale demonstrates why. In attempting to accommodate the bigots, dupes, and quislings at ANGA, the jury invited legal trouble upon the Biennale organization, because Fainaru threatened to sue. Their mass resignation obviates that problem. That is how they learn, not through workshops, but through credible promises of justice-seeking and defensive force, executed as needed. Even if they don’t learn to accommodate nuance and alternate perspectives, they learn to shut up, which is almost as good.

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1. It’s surprisingly easy, when discussing Israel, to end up talking about all of human history since the Late Bronze Age.

2. Israel estimates Palestinian combatant deaths at 22,000, which puts the civilian Palestinian deaths at 50,000, roughly a quarter more than were killed in the Iran protests not even four months ago. For all the supposed brutality of the IDF, it took them six months of combat in Gaza to reach a death toll that the IRGC achieved in 48 hours.

3. The chief enemy of progressivism is oppression. What some are calling the New Right is also chiefly concerned with oppression, namely their own. Thus the horseshoe bends.

4. I’m willing to discuss these matters in a spirit of shared good faith and curiosity. I’ve written off anyone spewing Gazology.