Exodus from Liberal Zionism
I grew up stunningly ignorant about Jews and Israel.1
I had Jewish friends in high school, but they never drew attention to their identities except around Christmas. Central Florida in the ‘90s wasn’t all harmony and rainbows; racism was very present. But it was a melting pot of every ethnicity, especially Jews, Puerto Ricans, and Southern Whites. And Jews presented—at least in that place and time—as white. Much better senses of humor than other white folks, but still white. They thought of me as a minority.
Fast forward to me working in the Pentagon during the Obama administration. I got a bit of a crash course in the Israeli state, which had very little to do with American Jews as I knew them and everything to do with a political project.
By then, the government of Israel had corrupted US foreign policy, but it was taboo to say so. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt got smeared as anti-Semitic—an accusation that used to have bite—only a year or two prior for their book documenting how the Israel Lobby distorts American power in the Middle East. I saw firsthand that the policy of “Qualitative Military Edge”—a poisonous commitment to ensure Israel out-arms its neighbors even as we also sell its neighbors new weapons every year—is an ambient reality of Pentagon staffer life.
I would also eventually be pulled into an after-hours group that spent time drinking whiskey and socializing about “strategic assessments,” which turned out to actually be about deconstructing IDF operations against Hezbollah and Hamas in various conflicts.2 The camaraderie felt nice, but my god, when did strategy become about underground tunnels and the combat range of drones? I dropped out of that particular club after only a couple meetings.
Years later, after spending some time with Edward Said’s writings, I realized that salon I walked away from had been comprised of Zionists, not all of whom were even Jewish. I had been unfamiliar with Zionism back in the Obama years, and nobody ever used that word around me. But like so many others, October 7 has forced me to learn as much as I can about the history of the Middle East and the impossible depravities that Palestinians are still enduring.
I’m not writing all this because I have a particular hot take about Zionism. This is not my area.
But I was recently an alien presence in an extremely sharp, hilarious, and insightful conversation about Zionist myths and Israeli realities with two Jewish friends, my co-host Lyle Jeremy Rubin and our guest, David Meir Grossman. I learned so much from this episode of The Bang-Bang Podcast, which we convened to talk about Exodus—the 1960 Otto Preminger film about the founding of Israel, starring Paul Newman (the salad dressing guy).
In this short clip, Lyle and David explain that my ‘90s non-exposure to Judaism in Central Florida was a moment when liberal Zionism—a more inclusive, tolerant, cosmopolitan but still religious nationalism at the end of history—dominated. Below, Lyle declares that dream dead:
What’s left is ethnonationalism. Tacit acceptance or outright support for a kind of fascism. Alternatively, if you’re like Lyle and David, a repudiation of all of that—anti-Zionism.
As a source of history, Exodus kind of sucks; it’s literal propaganda, and a distortion of, well, a lot. Its depiction of the British is cartoonish, and depiction of Arabs is dehumanizing. But it’s a real (funny!) education talking about why the film doesn’t work.
Check out the episode below, or wherever you get podcasts:
Eventually it also became about China.
I saw Preminger’s Exodus when I was 14. For me it was THE STORY of the heroic founding of Israel. As propaganda it worked very well on a 14-year old. Whether propaganda works or not depends on the targeted audience and context.
Preminger’s Exodus