On Identity, Ethnicity and Race

I had an angry reaction when I recently found that my profile with my employer showed my race/ethnicity as white; nobody ever consulted me about that. I have pondered the significance of these classifications for many years and would like to sum up my conclusions here. All of us have multiple identities. We have personal identities, the sense of who we are. We may have many social identities based on what other people see and think of us, how they treat us, etc. Some of our identities are objective, such as ethnicity. Others are partially or totally subjective, such as the notion of race.

Let's work our way through these. There is no iota of my personal identity which has any relevance to "White." I do not come from Whiteland nor did I have any ancestors who would have identified themselves as Whites. That was the reason for my anger at being classified as White. I would variously describe myself as a European-American, a descendant of Eastern European Jews (which is my ethnicity, and likely a descendant of inhabitants of the Khazar nation long ago. I do not belong to any race because, as sociologists long ago included, there is no such entity from a scientific point of view. As a species, we are perhaps only 80,000 years old and our DNA has not differentiated into any groups which could be characterized uniquely. Races are arbitrarily defined in societies by those who use them to maintain themselves in power, regardless of whether it was Whites versus Blacks and others in the USA, Whites versus Africans and Asians in South Africa, or Jew versus Palestinians in Palestine. An African-American scholar and friend of mine once observed that it was the English who conceived the idea of a White Race to prevent themselves from becoming a minority in the United States. At first, the Irish and southern Europeans, such as Italians, were not part of the White race, but when their numbers were needed, the notion of race was extended. For Blacks, even one-eighth descent from an African made one Black. Many contemporary African-Americans are descended from marriages with Native Americans, which was largely ignored in the USA race lexicon. South Africa had very complex racial classifications, including White, Coloured, Black, Asian (but not Japanese who were considered White for economic reasons), and fifteen or twenty other categories. There was a board which classified people. Each year they would report on reclassifications in which children of the same parents were often put into different races. However, nobody was ever classified from Black to White or from White to Black. Israel's racial classification system is simpler, though it has problems with non-Jewish Russians and with African dark-skinned Jews who emigrated there. In fact, I argue that there isn't even an Israeli nation since Israeli citizens belong to many nations, including the Palestinian nation. The only way such a nation could begin to come into existence would be for the state of Israel to abandon Zionism and Jewish supremacy and become the state of all its citizens. Personally, I am a USA citizen and thus belong to the USA nation and to no other nation. Dual nationality is certainly possible, for example, for children with parents of different nationalities, but it does not apply to me.

Let us digress for a moment on that topic. When I defined my personal identity, I referred to Eastern European Jews. There were also Jews in Palestine and other Arab countries, including Morocco and Yemen, the Sephardic Jews in Spain, and so forth. Three of my four grandparents spoke Yiddish, which was a Jewish language only spoken in Eastern Europe. The fourth grew up on a farm in what is now Slovakia. She told me that they spoke German at home, but she was also fluent in Hungarian. I had a Morrocan Jewish friend. We realized that we had nothing in common aside from our support for the Palestinians. The only common language we had was English. His ancestors were likely descended from Berbers who converted to Judaism. I won't pursue this in more depth here because I have done so in other blogs. The only point to emphasize is that there is no single identifiable group which could be called the Jewish people. Since that group does not and cannot exist, I do not belong to it. My ancestors most likely were Khazars, whose kingdom converted to Judaism en masse, and then dispersed westward when that kingdom fell. Millions of them ended up in Poland, Ukraine, Russia, and other countries.

Since the USA was and is a racial society, it does divide people into races, but it does not consult us about our identity. Even for the laudable purpose of ameliorating historic discrimination, it classifies us without our participation, as my employer did. While I support that purpose, affirmative action, I do not support the assault on my personal identity which causes me to be classified as White, which is a meaningless category. This becomes embodied in full absurdity by those who declare they are part of a White Nation, which is defined only in hostility to those they despise. There is no such quality as Whiteness, there is no Whiteland, no White language, no White culture, no common trait at all. Those who use the term White are thus propagating, usually unwittingly, the racist structure of white supremacy that the term was invented to promote and preserve. I doubt that the Ku Klux Klan, which hated Jews along with African-Americans, would have classified me as White. I'm not sure why I used the past tense in that sentence since the Klan and their cohorts still exist.

So far, I have been discussing strong and sometimes pernicious characteristics of identity. There are, of course, others. To give one example, I am a musician who primarily plays the banjo. To many of my musical friends and to me, too, being a banjo player is a very visible part of my identity. Yet I know many other people who are not aware of this at all. On my job, I have a particular identity associated with my history there, my known capabilities and expertise, and so forth. The point is that few of us present our entire identities to everyone or even focus on all of our identity all the time.  When I am playing the banjo, I am a banjo player. When I am working at my job, that is usually far from my consciousness.

I'm sure I haven't mined every aspect of identity here, but I have addressed some aspects which I think are confused by many people and which muddy our thinking and obstruct us from dealing with the real world.

I want to add a footnote about the Khazars. I just read the Wiki page on Khazars, which disparages the likelihood that most Eastern European Jews were descendants of Khazars. They offer essentially two arguments: the Khazar origin of Eastern European Jews was taken up by anti-Semites and anti-Zionists and DNA studies. The former, obviously, is irrelevant. If we are the descendants of the Khazars, then the use or misuse of that fact by others is not related to the fact of origin. The second, interestingly, is not supported by the studies included on the Wiki page, which only show that  European Jews are more genetically similar to other ethnic groups in the Middle East (which you would expect if they fled from the Khazar area adjacent to the Middle East) than they are to their neighbors in Europe. But the real question is this: What happened to millions of Khazari Jews when their kingdom was destroyed and where did the millions of Jews who arrived in Eastern Europe at the same time come from?

As an anti-Zionist, I will also point out that there is no need to refute claims to Palestine based on rule there for a few centuries at most more than two millennia ago. The claim of Palestinians to Palestine is based on their presence there when the Zionist colonization began. That the Palestinians likely include the descendants of the ancient Hebrews among other indigenous peoples there is not a basis for a claim to Palestine, but merely an interesting historical fact which exposes the lie of Zionist "claims." For Zionists, however, to try to try to deny my origin--the origin of Eastern European Jews--as Khazari, is an assault on our identity and a travesty to objective history.

Bigotry and the Islamic Center in New York

As others have pointed out, the question is not "why build an Islamic center (it is not a mosque) a few blocks from Ground Zero?" The question is "why so much opposition to this project?" The only and simple answer is pure bigotry. There is no rational reason for opposition, though opponents raise the spectre of offending the survivoring relatives and friends of those kill on September 11, 2001 when the World Trace Center was destroyed in New York. The United States of 2010 is a hotbed of bigotry, whether racial or religious. This brouhaha is a prime example. It seems that bigotry sells well to some voters, so politicians are playing it to the hilt. They know no shame no matter how disgusting their positions are. They characterize the Imam leading this project as extremist, even though he is a leading proponent of interfaith unity and a staunch opponent of terrorism. Personally, I don't like any religions and any religious institutions. But I distinguish between my own personal views and the right of others to have their own. Too bad that the bigoted bombasts are unable to do that, whether on Islamic centers, abortion rights, or gay marriage.

Spinning Obama or Obama is Spinning

Obama's deputy press flack says that leftists won't be satisfied unless we have Canadian style health care and abolish the defense department. Let's deconstruct that.

Of course, Canadian style single payer health care would be wonderful, but is that what we are criticizing Obama about? No, we are criticizing him for abandoning leadership entirely on that and many issues. Did Obama acknowledge that single payer is the only solution which addresses our many health care problems and then make concessions to get a bill which would pass? That is leadership. No, he eliminated single payer and single payer advocates from the discourse at the outset. The result, a health care bill that Rep. John Conyers called "a piece of crap." The health care industry loves it.

Let's ignore the straw man of abolishing the defense department and look at the real issues. Leftists want Obama to get us out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead, he has mired us more deeply in Iraq and is pursuing an insane, psychotic (in the sense that it is totally out of touch with reality) program in Afghanistan.

In fact, on both wars, Obama is continuing Bush's manic policies without significant modifications. Ironically, if the Republicans attack Obama for endangering national security, they will be right since Bush and Reagan were the biggest producers of national insecurity we have yet seen.

Of course, it goes way beyond the two distorted issues Obama's flack raised. Policy toward Israel has not changed one iota. The focus on Iran, which is hardly a credible threat to anyone, is a cruel joke. Obama put finance capital in charge of his economic policies, and the rest of us are paying the price. It really is a case of the same sour wine in new bottles with different labels.

But let's be clear on one point. I am not disappointed. Obama is exactly as awful a president as I predicted he would be, which is why I didn't vote for him. That is my no-spin opinion.

The Afghan Leaks

The Obama administration is reacting in a typically and predictably paranoid manner to the leak of tens of thousands of incident reports, which appear to reveal potential war crimes among other things. The point to keep in mind, however, is that the US Afghan war and policy is insane. It is psychotic in the sense that it is totally out of touch with reality. Its stated goals are entirely impossible to achieve. Therefore, a paranoid reaction is to be expected. The real question is how to cure the mentally ill patient, the US government and its allies. If the leak of these documents helps to do that, then it will be an important contribution to peace.

Political Zionism: The Ideology of Jewish Self-Hatred--Part 5

So, what do these early Zionists have in common? They all blame the victim. They agree that the cause of anti-Semitism is the lack of a Jewish state. Herzl also mentions other material causes, but he comes around to that one. He and Pinsker clearly assert that Jews bring anti-Semitism with them wherever they go. Let's point out that anti-Semitism of the sort they were dealing with was a purely European phenomenon. Algeria was mentioned, but it was a French colony. Europeans exported it to some of their colonies. But this skewed European focus obscures the fact that there was nothing like that phenomenon anywhere else, including in the Turkish, Arab, and Persian countries of the Middle East even though there were very sizable Jewish populations in those countries. Second, they all agree that there is something called a Jewish people with origins in Palestine even though Pinsker states quite well the reasons that no such entity existed. On this point, I refer you to the excellent book, The Invention of the Jewish People (2009) by Shlomo Sand, who is a professor of history at the University of Tel Aviv. Sand's entirely scholarly and well-sourced book shows that the vast majority of modern Jews descend from converts and that the mostly likely concentration of descendants of the ancient Hebrews who lived in ancient Israel is precisely among the modern Palestinians who first became Christians and then Muslims under foreign conquest. Thus political Zionism (we use that term to distinguish this largely secular movement from religious Zionism which prophesies the return of Jews to Palestine along with a messiah) is founded on at least two  premises easily shown to be false. Further, political Zionism, which these writings clearly demonstrate grew in the same soil as non-Jewish anti-Semitism, xenophobic nationalism, and fascism which culminated in the slaughters of Jews, Gypsies, leftists, homosexuals, and many others during World War II, incorporated some of the same ideas into their ideology. The anti-Semites said that Jews did not belong in their home countries. The Zionists agreed with them. The anti-Semites promoted stereotypes about Jewish behavior; the Zionists said that there is truth to the stereotypes because Jews don't have their own nation. The testimony of these early Zionists confirms that the vast majority of Jews rejected their ideas and their project to colonize Palestine. They were considered crazy kooks. Why would a self-respecting Jew embrace an ideology which teaches her or him to hate him or herself and blames her or him for the acts of anti-Semites? Why would a self-loving Jew agree to leave instead of to fight? That is why I indict political Zionism as a form of racial discrimination as the United Nations once held; it is racism first and foremost against Jews. The project of the Zionist movement, which was to create an apartheid state in Palestine, leads to the second expression of racial discrimination, which aimed to remove the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine using a variety of actions which are clearly war crimes. The best book on that is Ilan Pappe's The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Pappe is another Israeli historian. There are many, many books on these subjects, but I will recommend one more if you can find it. Abram Leon, a Polish Jew who died in Auschwitz in 1944, wrote an excellent study The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation. Leon presented some of the same material that Sand presents on Jewish history, but he also shows that anti-Semitism was a specifically European phenomenon derived from the role that Jewish moneylenders played under feudalism and then magnified by the collapse of feudalism in Eastern Europe.

So, the next time that a Zionist defender of Israel makes the anti-Semite or self-hating Jew attack, tell him or her to look inward. To be sure, there are still lots of non-Jewish anti-Semites in the world, but some of them are allies of Israel. (Consider the Argentinian regime which tortured Jacobo Timerman and was armed by Israel.)

Zionism is now a much more immediate threat to Jews and to the world than non-Jewish anti-Semitism. Just as African-Americans had to confront those who internalized racism, Jews have to confront Zionists and challenge all of the historically and morally decrepit elements of their ideology. And this is not only the responsibility of Jews but of all interested in justice, peace, and world survival.

Political Zionism: The Ideology of Jewish Self-Hatred--Part 4

Chaim Weizmann led the establishment Zionist movement in the first half of the 20th century and was the first president of Israel.

Zionism Needs a Living Content (1914) in Hertzberg

In its initial stage, Zionism was conceived by its pioneers as a movement wholly depending on mechanical factors: there is a country which happens to be called Palestine, a country without a people, and, on the other hand, there exists the Jewish people, and it has no country. What else is necessary, then, than to fit the gem into the ring, to unite this people with this country. The owners of the country must, therefore, be persuaded and convinced that this marriage is advantageous, not only for the people and for the country, bu.t also for themselves. On this basis grew Zionism. First, we must sell many shekalim to show the Turks how strong we are, in the meantime, the leaders will discuss the question of the marriage....

It is the Zionists' good fortune that they are considered mad; if we were normal, we would not think of going to Palestine, but stay put, like all normal people. Who does not believe in taking a hard road and thinks that a dangerous road should not be taken had better stay abt home. With fear and timidity the permanent home of the nation cannot be established. Never has a people freed itself by profitable investments, but by energy and sacrifice. And we Jews have not made many sacrifices yet, and that is why we own only 2 per cent of the Palestinian soil.

What value there is in real sacrifice, the example of a Jew from Kiev will show you; his name is Barski. One of his sons, a worker, was killed on Palestinian soil, at Degania; the bereaved father writes a letter of comfort to the workers in Palestine and send his second son into this most dangerous life to take the place of the fallen one. This is the continuation, writes the bereaved father. And it is this Jew who is the greatest political Zionist after Herzl.

Reminiscences in Hertzberg (1937)

We Jews got the Balfour Declaration quite unexpectedly, or in other words, we are the greatest war profiteers. We never dreamed of the Balfour Declaration; to be quite frank, it came to us overnight. But--"What you have inherited from your father you must earn it anew to really possess it!" (Goethe) The Balfour Declaration of 1917 was built on air, and a foundation had to be laid for it through years of exacting work; every day and every hour of these last ten years, when opening the newspapers, I thought: Whence will the next blow come? I trembled lest the British Government would call me and ask: "Tell us, what is this Zionist Organization? Where are they, your Zionists?" For these people think in terms different from ours. The Jews, they knew, were against us; we stood alone on a little island, a tiny group of Jews with a foreign past.

David Ben-Gurion was a founder of the Histadrut and the first prime minister of Israel.

The Imperatives of the Jewish Revolution (1944) in Hertzberg

.... The separatist tendency that has manifested itself in our land uses the empty phrase "of proletarian origin" as its slogan. This doctrine is totally foreign to the spirit and essence of the Jewish revolution. Not the origin but the mission, not "whence" but "whither," is what will decide the fate of our revolution. The Jewish people is not a proletarian people and there are no sons of the proletariat to assure the success of its revolution. The mission of the Jewish revolution is to transform the Jewish people into a laboring people....

Next analysis and alternative views.

Political Zionism: The Ideology of Jewish Self-Hatred--Part 3

Ber Borochov would be only a footnote in history if his ideas had not inspired the founders of the Israeli Labor Party.

Our Platform (1906) in Hertzberg.

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Since the Jewish nation has no peasantry, our analysis of its national problem deals with urban classes: the upper, middle, and petty bourgeoisie; the masses who are being proletarized; and the proletariat.

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The Jewish problem migrates with the Jews. Thus a universal Jewish problem is created which involves not only Jewish philanthropists but also the political powers of the civilized nations . . .

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Proletarian Zionism is possible only if its aims can be achieved through the class struggle; Zionism can be realized only if proletarian Zionism is realized.

. . . The Jewish proletariat is in need of revolution more than any other. ....

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Political territorial autonomy in Palestine is the ultimate aim of Zionism. For proletarian Zionists, this is also a step toward socialism.

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Vladimir Jabotinsky is the intellectual father of the Likud Party in Israel.

Evidence Submitted to the Palestine Royal Commission (1937) in Hertzberg

Three generations of Jewish thinkers and Zionists, among whom there were many great minds--I am not going to fatigue you by quoting them--three generations have given much thought to analyzing the Jewish position and have come to the conclusion that the cause of our suffering is the very fact of the Diaspora, the bedrock fact that we are everywhere a minority. It is not the anti-Semitism of men; it is above all, the anti-Semitism of things, the inherent xenophobia of the body social or the body economic under which we suffer....

We are not free agents. We cannot "concede" anything. Whenever I hear the Zionist, most often my own Party, accused of asking for too much--Gentlemen, I really cannot understand it. Yes, we do want a State; every nation on earth, every normal nation, beginning with the smallest and the humblest who do not claim  merit, anyany role in humanity's development, they all have States of their own. That is the normal condition for a people. Yet, when we, the most abnormal of peoples and therefore the most unfortunate, ask only for the same condition as the Albanians enjoy, to say nothing of the French and the English, then it is called too much. I should understand it if the answer were, "It is impossible," but when the answer is, "It is too much," I cannot understand it.....

I am going to make a "terrible" confession. Our demand for a Jewish majority is not our maximum--it is our minimum: it is just an inevitable stage if only we are allowed to go on salvaging our people....

There is only one way of compromise. Tell the Arabs the truth, and then you will see the Arab is reasonable, the Arab is clever, the Arab is just; the Arab can realize that since there are three or four or five wholly Arab states, then it is a thing of justice which Great Britain is doing if Palestine is transformed into a Jewish state. Then there will be a change of mind among the Arabs, then there will be room for compromise and there will be peace.