No True Scotsmen and Self-Hating Jews

Israel and the diagnostic demonology of identity politics

Not long after Israel’s invasion of Gaza started, I traveled to London to give a talk on my recently-published book, Here Be Monsters: How to Fight Capitalism Instead of Each Other. That presentation was heavily attended, but what sticks out in my memory are the crowds at the book fair before and after my presentation, and especially the ever-present theme of Palestinian solidarity. Many people had sewn patches onto their jackets and jeans, wore keffiyehs, and otherwise displayed their protest against Israel’s bombing of the Gaza strip.

After my event in London, I flew to the German city of Köln (also called Cologne) to stay overnight there. The next day, about to set off on the final leg of my return journey, I happened upon a large Pro-Israel protest gathering in front of the cathedral next to the train station, billed officially as “gegen Antisemitismus” (against antisemitism) but quite full of anti-Palestinian rhetoric.

I stood at a distance and watched for a little while, thinking about the strangeness of seeing two completely opposing groups in such a short period of time. Suddenly, two people passed by me on their way to the protest, holding hands, and I’m sure I stared at them slack-jawed. They both wore flags as capes: one with an Israeli state flag, and their companion wore a trans pride flag with a Star of David in the middle.

I tried not to stare at those two, but I was baffled. Less than 24 hours before, on another continent, I’d seen their mirror image: two people walking together, also holding hands, sporting pins proclaiming their queer identities, and each of them wearing flags as capes. One had suspended the Palestinian flag from their shoulders; the other wore the “new” pride flag bearing extra stripes to represent trans and non-binary people.

This was all months ago, yet I've still not shaken off the strange juxtaposition of political images in my head. Of course, what I saw in person happens even more so on the internet. Videos and posts appealing to identity (black, trans, gay, disabled, etc.) as a reason to support one side or another immediately flooded social media feeds after 7 October, 2023 and have not yet abated. You can easily find many trans-identified, gay or lesbian people explaining how Hamas wants to genocide them as you can people of those same identities arguing that Israel is the actual genocidal actor.

This strange divergence is not just the case with sexual minorities, however, but also with much larger groups. In particular, it’s easily seen with arguments from feminists on either side. Each claims in equal part that either Israel or Hamas is the more misogynist and patriarchal power. Likewise, each accuses the other side of either not caring about the rape and patriarchal oppression of women, or not caring about their slow starvation and outright slaughter.

Also, the racial framework of social justice seems to work equally in favor of support for Israel as it does for support of Palestine. The experience of Jews as an oppressed racial minority in Europe and the United States is just as easily employed as the experience of racism against Arabs and Palestinians. Those arguments then devolve to minute points reminiscent of medieval theologians trying to count the number of angels who can dance on the head of a pin. Are Ashkenazim actually a racial minority, or are they white? Are brown-skinned Sephardi and black converts to Judaism who kill Palestinians enacting intra-racial violence, or are they enforcing “white supremacy?” And, is the explicit antisemitism of Hamas and many Palestinians a response to the anti-Arab racism of Israel, or is it its cause?

The arguments involving sexual minorities follow the same pattern. At least on paper, Israel is objectively a better place to live if you are gay or lesbian, or if you identify as trans or non-binary, than any of its Arab neighbors. Many leaders of Hamas and other Palestinian political groups have been explicit in their abject hatred of any behavior deviating from heterosexual monogamy. Yet, it’s equally obvious that Israel consistently propagandizes its relative (and often tentative) tolerance, while using one of the oldest tactics against gay men — blackmail — to turn homosexual Palestinians into spies. Thus, being gay, lesbian, non-binary, or trans is used equally as a reason to be for Israel as it is to be against it.

The further one delves into these arguments, the more they begin to appear as mirror images of each other. Supporters of each side offer a coherent and rationally pristine argument on the basis of identity for their position. Being black, or being gay, or being trans, or being a woman must therefore lead a person to take the side whose concerns most match ones’ own identity concerns.

The problem, though, is that identities are not monolithic, and there is never any real coherence within an identity group. This is seen particularly in the matter of Jewish identity. There are many Jews who side with Israel in this conflict, and there are many Jews who side instead with the Palestinians. Which, then, is the “true” Jewish position? And what does one make of those who don’t take that position? Complicating this matter for Jews, especially, is that Israel claims that it acts and even exists on behalf of all Jews in the world. In their narration, to criticize or oppose its actions is to therefore criticize and oppose Jews and Jewish identity throughout the world. A Jew who does not support Israel then becomes a “self-hating Jew,” and a traitor to all other Jews.

The idea of the “self-hating Jew” is actually quite old, and it long predates Zionism. Arising out of arguments between Orthodox and Reform Judaism, Jews in each group accused their counterparts of betraying their Jewishness. Orthodox Jews believed that Reformed Jews were abandoning the things that made them truly Jewish, trading away the core aspects of their identity in order to better fit in (assimilate) with the rest of society. On the other hand, Reformed Jews believed that the Orthodox Jews were becoming caricatures of Jewishness, adopting more extreme expressions of Judaism in order to conform with societal stereotypes of what a Jew was supposed to be.

Each side believed that the other was responding to societal pressure, “internalizing” the antisemitism of European Christian society.

The idea that a Jew might internalize societal antisemitism points to a larger problem within all identity politics frameworks, and there are versions of the “self-hating Jew” in every other modern identity category. It follows along the same logic of what is called the “No True Scotsman” fallacy. In that fallacy, a universal claim is made about a group, and then any counter-examples to that claim are dismissed by excluding those counter-examples from the group.¹

For example, gay men who do not display effeminate traits or who choose to marry their partners are often accused by others of having internalized homophobia. On the other hand, gays who adopt “camp” modes of behavior, engage in relentless risky sexual behavior, and embrace overt consumerism are just as easily accused of having adopted societal stereotypes of how gay people should act.

This goes the same for trans-identified people. Older transsexuals, especially those who criticize early-age transition policies or who claim it is actually impossible to change physical sex², are accused of having internalized transphobic beliefs. On the other hand, those same transsexuals argue that newer transgender activists are actually harming trans people, and are likewise suffering from internalized transphobia by trying to conform to stereotypes of what a woman or a man should “really” look like.

This same problem is seen especially clearly in racial identity groups. Black people who criticized looting and vandalism during Black Lives Matter protests were accused of betraying their blackness, while they in turn accused the looters and vandals of internalizing white beliefs about black criminality. In the United States, particularly during the election of Donald Trump, Black, Latino, and indigenous people who voted for him or who argued against unrestrained immigration were accused as having internalized white supremacist thinking (“multi-racial whiteness,”) while those same people accused their counterparts of ignoring the real material conditions of minorities and thus siding with whiteness.

A more generalized version of this also occurs in national identity. Again looking at the United States, support for Trump was seen by those who voted against him as a betrayal of true American values, and Trump himself was smeared as a Russia asset by Democratic Party operatives. On the other side, those who supported Trump saw his opponents as the true traitors of American values. Earlier, opposition to the American invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq was seen as un-American, even by most Democratic politicians, while right wing and far left opponents of those invasions claimed it was those supporting the wars who had betrayed what America really stood for.

No matter the identity group in question, a form of the “self-hating Jew” argument recurs, with factions within each group arguing other factions have fundamentally betrayed their identity. What is really at stake in these arguments is identity itself, competing claims on what identity should mean and what those within the identity group owe to each other.

The ultimate problem here is that there is nothing that can ever fully define every person within an identity group except the label itself. The only thing all homosexual men have in common is that they are homosexual, just like the only thing that a Jewish person has in common with all other Jews is that he or she is a Jew.

That’s it. There is nothing else that necessarily or naturally follows from the initial abstraction. Anything then added to the category, any attempt to define the group further, will always produce counterexamples who must then be excluded somehow, through the No True Scotsman fallacy or the Self-Hating Jew diagnosis.

Returning to the matter of Israel and Palestine, there is absolutely nothing about Jewish identity, or queer identity, or any other identity category that can rationally lead one to take one side or the other in that conflict. Nor is there, for that matter, any other situation where identity can rationally determine a position. Those who insist otherwise, who claim to support one side or another because of their identity, are merely mistaking identity and identification.

That is, it’s not that their identity leads them to take their particular position. Instead, it’s that they identify more with one group than the other.

The difference here is crucial. While identity is a description of how you differ from others, identification is an emotional attachment, an allegiance, a psychological mechanism by which you define yourself in relation to who you prefer and who you detest. It’s the core “friend-enemy distinction” upon which Carl Schmitt asserts all modern politics are founded, an unconscious and completely arbitrary division of the world into two groups — those you like, and those you don’t.

This is why accusations of antisemitism, transphobia, racism, homophobia, ableism, and similar concepts are so frequently employed whenever reason and logic fail in arguments. Each of these makes a claim about the true nature of a person’s inner beliefs, and it will always be impossible to defend oneself once these accusations are made. While one might have all manner of well-reasoned arguments that have nothing to do with identity concerns, the accuser can dismiss these by claiming an occult knowledge of the real reasons behind the position.

Consider, again, the accusation that a Jewish critic of Israel is a “self-hating Jew.” Those who make such accusations are making an occult claim about the internal world and the psychological state of the critic. The same is true when a trans person is accused of being transphobic when they express criticisms about early-age transition, or when a black person is claimed to have internalized white supremacy because he or she criticized BLM protests or votes for stronger neighborhood police presence. A gay man who doesn’t “act gay” is likewise considered to have internalized homophobia, just as an overweight person who decides to go to a gym to lose weight is accused of internalized fat-phobia.

In all cases, the accusation is really a claim about a psychological mechanism that the target isn’t even aware of. Some unseen and intangible force is shaping the beliefs and behaviors of the accused, something they cannot even sense themselves, and thus they need external help to eradicate it.

In other words, these accusations are actually attempts at diagnoses (from Greek diagignōskein: to distinguish, to know thoroughly). The target (or better said, victim) is believed to suffer from some internal malady or a disease. Something has gotten into them from outside themselves, some external presence has become internal(ized). This unseen presence now controls their beliefs, shapes their way of seeing the world, and also leads them to mistake friends for enemies, and enemies for friends.

It should be obvious, then, that such diagnoses are continuations of earlier Christian beliefs about demon possession. Quite frequently in witch accusations — and in the majority of accusations of lycanthropy³ — accusers started from the presumption that the victim did not actually know they had been possessed. Though it was believed that the target had done something at some point to open themselves up to the demonic force, it was assumed that he or she had either forgotten this moment or was no longer capable of understanding that their actions were being caused by an internalized presence. Thus, the role of the priests and other examiners was to first convince the person of the diagnosis, and then to extract a confession and render judgment.

This is not merely metaphor or comparison. I do not just mean that this is similar to how demon possession was seen, but rather that it’s the very same mechanism dressed up in secularized language.

The belief that we can diagnose the true condition of another person’s soul and the external presences controlling their behaviors and beliefs never went away, we just use different words for those diagnoses. We once called it demon possession, and we now call it antisemitism, transphobia, racism, and any other manner of terms. And though we believe ourselves now more capable than our medieval ancestors of truly knowing another’s soul, we’re no better at it than they were.

This is ultimately why identity politics will always lead to these dead ends, because there is nothing that identity can tell us about what is really going on inside a person’s head or their soul. Identity is always an abstraction, a reduction of everything unique about a person to a mere label. Attempts to build political frameworks (or, better said, theologies) on the basis of a single characteristic (or set of characteristics) of a person will always devolve back to identification and the friend-enemy distinction. It will always lead only to who we prefer, and who we think should be eradicated from the earth.

Fortunately, identity politics has never been our only option.

1. To take an example from religion, imagine someone claiming Christianity is a religion of peace. Then, someone points out Christian religious violence. The first person then responds, “those are not true Christians.”

2. They are often labeled by their opponents as “truscum” or “transmedicalists.”

3. This is one of the most peculiar features of medieval werewolf accusations and trials. Rarely was it assumed that the accused actually knew about their condition, and when they were shown “evidence” of their unconscious crimes they were recorded as having expressed extreme terror.