How Zionism and the left came to be so at odds is the subject of Susie Linfield’s most recent book, The Lions’ Den—a work, she explains, aimed at reckoning with her “double grief.” “First,” she writes, “I am grieved by the contemporary Left’s blanket hatred of Israel…. Second, I am grieved by the trajectory of contemporary Israel.” For her, however, the first grief is far more the subject of the book than the second. A collection of profiles of intellectuals who debated “the Zionist Question” in the second half of the 20th century—Hannah Arendt, Arthur Koestler, Maxime Rodinson, Isaac Deutscher, Albert Memmi, Fred Halliday, I.F. Stone, and Noam Chomsky—The Lions’ Den devotes only cursory attention to Israeli history and politics. Instead, it’s an extended critique of what Linfield considers the shortcomings in many of these intellectuals’ views on Israel, in particular, their reluctance to criticize Palestinians as stridently as they do Israelis. She is also critical of how their ambivalence (and occasional hostility) toward Zionism and Israel have become central to the politics of the contemporary left.
If the book has a grand claim or central argument, it is that the left “moved from defining itself as anti-fascist to defining itself as anti-imperialist.” As a result, Western leftists, including many of the intellectuals Linfield profiles, abandoned Israel and aligned themselves as “a subsidiary ally” of what she calls “the anti-colonialist struggle.” She recognizes that anti-imperialist politics on the left are not particularly new; everyone from Marx and Engels to Luxemburg and Lenin criticized Western empire, and anti-imperialism and anti-fascism have often gone hand in hand. But her main concern is how these intellectuals’ embrace of anti-colonialism and their growing criticisms of Israel reflect a significant divergence, in her view, from the left’s long-standing commitments and ideals.
Linfield offers detailed, often probing readings of how her subjects adjusted their analyses and ideologies to the complex and ever-shifting political terrain of Israel-Palestine. Yet the cumulative effect is to call into question her overarching claim. Rather than elucidate the reasons the left and Zionism suddenly parted ways, her profiles reveal the tensions that have long existed between Zionism’s exclusionary nationalism and the left’s egalitarianism and internationalism. It is not that the left suddenly abandoned Israel and Zionism but rather that left-leaning intellectuals (though not all of Linfield’s subjects are “of the left”) have struggled to reconcile themselves to the injustices that the founding of Israel entailed.
Linfield charges that these intellectuals, unlike the liberal Zionists with whom she identifies, have refused or failed to understand Israel-Palestine without ideological distortions—which for her means that they did not find the Palestinians just as deserving of their opprobrium. For Linfield, this is not because of a sensitivity to relations of power, a commitment to principles of anti-oppression, or even her mostly Jewish subjects’ anger about the nature of a state that claimed to speak on their behalf. Instead, she argues, it is because of their blind adherence to “dogmatism, fantasy, and manipulation” and their failure to abide by what she calls, somewhat condescendingly, “the reality principle.”
Cloaking false equivalences and ideology in the language of realism has long been a hallmark of liberal Zionist argument. Liberal Zionists often insist that one cannot condemn Israeli militarism and occupation without an equivalent condemnation of Palestinian rejectionism and irredentism, and they generally maintain that the two-state solution is the only realistic and desirable outcome for Israel-Palestine. They have held to this line even as the two-state solution has become ever more unlikely, and they have done so by eliding the differences in power between occupier and occupied.