One of the strongest weapons the enemies of Israel wield is Jewish anti-Zionists. They are celebrated and paraded as examples of a ‘good Jew’ — a Jew who understands the moral deprivation of his co-tribesmen and finds the moral courage to stand against it, a Jew who can be accepted into the Temple of Progressivism and admitted into polite society. Well, probably not all of them. The Neturei Karta types, while gleefully used as props against Israel, would likely be too weird for progressive circles, but the rest will pass muster. So, leaving the religious Jewish anti-Zionists aside (I am not qualified to wade into Jewish theological debates about Israel), one can identify three distinct groups of ‘good’ Jews. I like this term ‘good’ Jews — it carries interesting historical connotations, which form the backbone of this essay.

I remember a chance encounter I had many years ago in a public park in Queens, where I used to walk my dog, Xina. One day I met another dog owner, a woman, walking her dog. We started talking, the way only dog lovers can strike up a conversation with an absolute stranger. About fifteen minutes into it, the woman, who was in her seventies, revealed that she was ethnic German. Then, looking at my characteristically Jewish face, hastily added that she was a ‘good’ German.

So, getting back to the good Jews. As I said, they can be conditionally divided into three categories: Bundists, Internalizing Conformists, and Conscientious Objectors. The boundary between the latter two is rather porous, and one can find examples of people migrating between them, or belonging to both at once, but mostly the categorization holds. The first group is exemplified by Molly Crabapple, who achieved prominence with her recent book Where We Live Is Our Country. The second is mostly filled by student activists of Jewish Voice for Peace and similar youth groups, who want to fit in with the “popular crowd” but do not yet have the maturity to graduate to the Conscientious Objectors. The latter is populated by prominent academics such as Omer Bartov or Avi Shlaim.

I have always been fascinated by the motives of anti-Zionist Jews — how do they live with themselves, rejecting entirely their roots and their people’s historical experience after everything Jews endured in the twentieth century and the centuries before it? How do they justify joining forces with those who continue a long tradition of portraying the Jew as the metaphysical embodiment of evil, while seeking to dismantle the very state created to serve as a safe haven for the Jews?

The Bundists I dealt with in my recent essay, “Can Bundism Serve as Political Cover to Jewish Anti-Zionism?” Their motivation is purely ideological — they are still fighting the long-lost battle of the original Bund against Zionism, without recognizing that history is not a “Back to the Future” blockbuster, and that the ideology of the early twentieth century cannot simply be transplanted into the twenty-first. The Internalizing Conformists are not that interesting, they just want to be accepted by their peer group. So, my focus in this essay is on the Conscientious Objectors, the Jews who just want to be ‘good Jews.’

I want to be clear about what this essay is and isn’t. I am not going to offer a substantial critique of Bartov’s or Shlaim’s writing — Benny Morris has already done that, in “Omer Bartov: What Went Wrong?” and “From Zionist to Hamas Apologist.” I am certainly not qualified to add anything to Morris’s conclusions — his analysis of both Bartov’s and Shlaim’s views was quite thorough. Nor am I trying to psychoanalyze Omer Bartov or anyone like him. I have no access to his interior life and wouldn’t trust my own diagnosis of it if I did. What follows is a different exercise: an attempt to construct, as carefully and charitably as I can, the self-justification I would need if I held his position.

Stepping into Omer Bartov’s shoes, I find the example of the ‘good Germans’, the anti-Nazi German intellectuals, irresistibly attractive. If I needed to justify rejecting Israel’s legitimacy while preserving my moral self-image, Thomas Mann would be my quintessential “good German.” The appeal of the model is obvious: Germany’s most decorated living writer, telling his own people that their nation had made itself a moral abomination. The power of the gesture was that it cost him something real — exile, the loss of standing among his own, the risk of being remembered as a traitor rather than a prophet, a price........

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