"El padrino espiritual de la incitación contra los judíos fue Abner de Burgos, cabalista judío y estudioso que se convirtió al cristianismo en 1321, tras vivir una profunda crisis religiosa y espiritual, y que desde entonces fue conocido como Alfonso de Valladolid..."
escribe Edward Alexander en Jews Against Themselves: The BDS Movement and Modern Apostasy (2014), donde enmarca a numerosos judíos de esta categoría, como Steven Rose, Tony Judt, Noam Chomsky, Richard Falk, Judith Butler, Jacqueline Rose, y su hermana Gillian Rose, Philip Weiss, Joshua Schreier, Marc Ellis, Daniel Boyarin, Harold Pinter, Tom Paulin,
Edward Alexander ha venido publicando durante años artículos sobre el tema - como, por ej., The Jewish Divide Over Israel: Accusers and Defenders (Edward Alexander y Paul Bogdanor, 2006) -, algunos de los cuales ha recogido en su libro Jews Against Themselves (2015), donde comienza citando a Aharon Applefeld( NYT Book Review, February 28, 1988; mi traducción):
"El antisemitismo dirigido contra uno mismo fue una creación judía original. No sé de otra nación tan anegada de autocrítica. Incluso tras el Holocausto... prominentes judíos hicieron duros comentarios contra las víctimas... La habilidad judía para interiorizar cualquier observación crítica y condenatoria y castigarse es una de las maravillas del ser humano. ... Día y noche ... esa sensación produce miedo, sensibilidad, auto crítica y a veces auto destrucción."
En el libro Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (1986), Sander L. Gilman ya señaló la evolución (o extensión) de ese auto odio judío hasta incluir el odio judío, de algunos judíos, a la existencia de Israel, en consonancia con los tiempos:
“Una de las más recientes formas de auto odio judío es la virulenta oposición judía [de algunos judíos] a la existencia del estado de Israel.”
En “Dirty Hands:” The Jewish de-legitimization of Israel and the Jewish return to history (2013) Shlomo Fischer escribe:
"(...) In order to understand Jewish de-legitimization we must go beyond current policies and criticism to deeper themes within Jewish culture and civilization. Unlike criticism of Israel which focuses upon specific policies undertaken by the Israeli state, the de-legitimization of Israel claims that something is essentially wrong with it; that the existence of Israel constitutes a wrong in its essence. In order to understand this, we might do well if we would consider Jewish Leftist de-legitimization in the light of the other wing of Jewish de-legitimization, the Ultra-Orthodox wing.
(...)
What lies behind this common rejection of the legitimacy of the State of Israel? Despite the fact that the content of the two sectors, the ultra-Orthodox and the Jewish Left is very different, they seem to be engaging in a similar pattern of behavior vis a vis the state of Israel. (This fact was not lost on the sectors themselves. It is part of Israeli political folklore that R. Itche Mayer Levin, the representative of Agudat Yisrael, always shared a table in the Knesset cafeteria in the 1950′s with the Communist MK Shmuel Mikunis.)
I suggest that in fact, they do share a common Jewish theme. This theme was articulated by the great Israeli scholar of the Jewish religion, Gershom Scholem, who argued that the price that the Jewish people paid for their development of the Messianic idea was their own “exit from history.” During the long history of the Exile the Jewish people imagined a Messianic, redeemed world of perfect justice, perfect national restoration, perfect relationship to God and religious observance. They could develop this idea precisely because they were removed from “history” – they could not participate as a national collective in world politics, in world culture and in the endeavors of building a state, developing a national economy etc. Thus, on the national level they did not have to deal with the inevitable, mistakes, compromises and wickedness which is necessarily part of any concrete action in the world. Instead they could develop one of the most important Jewish contributions to the human spirit – The Messianic Idea. But, as Scholem points out, there was something profoundly unreal about Jewish life in the Exile.
Zionism was one of the most profound revolutions in Jewish life. It constitutes, as Scholem defined it, a departure from the Messianic Idea to the realm of history. Once Jews enter the realm of history by building a Jewish state they necessarily become implicated in a life that is less than ideal – they become implicated – simply by the fact of action in the real world – in injustice, in moral compromises, corruption and other ills and wrongs. They can no longer cling to the perfect justice and perfect religion of the Messianic Idea. But here is the rub: Only the Zionist were willing to make the leap into history. The two other Jewish streams – the (ultra) Orthodox and the Left-integrationists continued to maintain that the Jewish vocation is to remain, collectively, outside of history, and to hold up, as a measuring standard for humanity, the perfect messianic society. The ultra-Orthodox continue to affirm the religiously perfect society while, the Left continues to affirm the Messianism of perfect social justice, especially for the downtrodden and the oppressed. Both groups will only affirm and support a Jewish state if it is Messianic – that is perfect, either religiously or terms of social justice. Any Jewish state that is less than perfect is not merely an object of criticism and improvement. It is in an essential sense illegitimate and a betrayal of the Jewish vocation. (,,,)