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| Photo/Horst Rutsch |
Winston Churchill was premature in his declaration that “all the isms are wasms”. In the twentieth century, fascism came and went, communism came and went, socialism came and waned. But today, several “isms” of extraordinary virulence still inhabit the world: anti-Americanism has burgeoned around the world and so, too, has atavistic anti-Semitism and its twentieth-century version, anti-Zionism. These latter “isms” of hatred and destruction are graffiti on the walls of history. The new anti-Semitism is not exclusively hostile to this or that individual Jew, or to Judaism. It is directed primarily against the Jewish collective, the modern State of Israel.
Just as historic anti-Semitism has denied individual Jews the right to live as equal members of society, anti-Zionism denies the collective expression of the Jewish people, the State of Israel, the right to live as an equal member of the family of nations. Its policies are subject to criticism that in effect singles out Israel when others in similar circumstances would escape criticism. Surely if any other country were bleeding from terrorism at the same rate as Israel, there would be no question of its right to defend itself, whether against armies organized by hostile States or against violence organized by terrorist groups. But Israel’s efforts to perform the minimal function of protecting its own citizens is routinely portrayed as hateful aggression.
To complain that such portrayals are unfair and illogical is not to dismiss all criticism of the Israeli Government as anti-Semitic. A democracy must welcome critics, and Israel is a democracy. The Israelis criticize their Government and their society ceaselessly and with great intensity in their free press, their parliament and even through their courts. But for many, the criticism of Israel has become so perverse, so persistent, so divorced from the reality on the ground, that it can be seen only as emotional anti-Semitism hiding behind the political mask of anti-Zionism. In Europe and the Muslim world–even in Asia—traditional anti-Semitism has resurfaced as anti-Zionism, focused on the Jews of Israel, the role of Israel and for some on the Jews of the United States and their support of Israel. The focus of post-war anti-Semitism has shifted to an attack on the collective expression of contemporary Jewish existence: the State of Israel. Israel, in effect, is emerging as the collective Jew among nations.
It dates from the 1967 Arab-Israeli war that transformed the image of the Jew. Shylock was replaced by a new all-powerful Jew, cartooned as an aggressive, excessive, brutal collective called Israel. The image of the “plucky little Jewish State” withered with the retention of the territories Israel seized when the war was over. In the succeeding years, as Israel responded again and again to Arab attacks, sympathy for Israel eroded further. The images that filled the world’s television screens tended to be not of terrorists but of armed Israelis responding to terror, and the explanatory word “responding” often got lost in the chaos. The TV pictures of armed Israeli forces seemed to imply that Israelis were guilty of a disproportionate use of force, for they were rarely accompanied by the understanding that a country with a small population of 5 million, concentrated in a narrow strip of land located in a sea of over 100 million Arabs, could never fight a war of equal attrition; that would be inevitably a losing strategy, so Israel had to adopt the approach of a disproportionate military response in order to maximize the possibility of deterring further attacks.
The impact of television has been the handmaiden of a long and subtle process for the de-legitimization of Israel. TV stories on the Middle East today are not framed to the terms of the survival of Israel, nor on the security of the States of that region, but on self-determination for the Palestinian Arabs. Israel is seen as the bully, the colonial military power oppressing the underdog. The pictures are monotonously familiar. They are the occupier and the occupied, the soldier and the child, the well-dressed Israeli and the tattered refugee, the cocky Tel-Aviv politician and the homeless Arab. The questions that emerge are natural emotive reactions. Why doesn’t Israel do something for these people? Wouldn’t you hate the Israelis if you were a displaced Palestinian? Surely the world should do something for the victims of Israeli arrogance.
Israel is portrayed as immoral for acting in self-defence. But no country with comparable threats, internal or external, has ever recorded the human rights to those who opposed them, as Israel has to Palestinians during the Intifadah. The Palestinians have succeeded in shifting the grounds of the debate. They do not present themselves as trying to destroy Israel but as merely trying to secure the right of a small minority of dispossessed Palestinian Arabs. The map has shrunk to the lethal alleys of Gaza and the West Bank. Arab States, the physical size of the United States, encircle and threaten Israel, which is smaller than New Hampshire, but you would never guess that from the nightly footage. It is not the Jews who are seen as threatened but the Palestinians. The focus has shifted from national security to human rights, that is, Israeli violations of Palestinian rights and not the human rights of people under siege in their homeland for 55 years. This attempted de-legitimization of Israel is the ideological expression of Palestinian and Arab refusal to accept the Jewish state in the Middle East. The Arabs have sought to place the blame for their own rejectionism on the Jews of Israel.
The world’s double standard for Jews has always been the essence of anti-Semitism. One is the establishment of moral standards impossible to live by, that are not applied to any other State; the other is a false moral equivalence. The world seems to believe that Israel has to win the “Moral Man of the Year” award just to defend itself; as if responding to those who seek its destruction is morally wrong; as if there is no difference between the inexcusable violence of murderers and thugs on the innocents, especially children, and the indispensable violence of lawful authority; as if there is no difference between the arsonist and the firefighter; as if Israel’s approach, which seeks to minimize civilian casualties, is equal to the terrorism that seeks to maximize it; as if the settlements are equivalents to terrorism; or as former [United States] Secretary of State Madeleine Albright put it, as if “bulldozers and bombs” are equal.
Israel seems to be absorbing Europe’s lingering anti-Jewish feeling, which is far easier for many to explain as anti-Zionism than anti-Semitism. The traditional attacks from the right, based on national, religious or ethnic reasons, have been surpassed in Europe by the moral driving force of the extreme left, which invokes political and universal reasons like human rights, anti-colonialism and economic egalitarianism, overlaid with excessive anti-Americanism. For them, the Palestinians have become the poster child for third-world victimization. They argue that Israel is an occupying power, oppressing the Palestinians, and ignore the fact that Israel is there because the Arabs made war—all to create the impression that Israel is among the world’s worst human rights violators. But Europe, the killing fields of so many Jews, should know better. It should be the first to understand that Jews, of all people, have the right to defend, even over-defend, themselves against the consequences of hate.
In the Arab Muslim world, the culture of hatred of Jews permeates all forms of public communications—newspapers, video cassettes, sermons, books, the Internet, television, radio and even school rooms. The intensity of the anti-Jewish invective surpasses that of Nazi Germany in its heyday. The public rhetoric combines the blood libel of medieval Christian Europe married to Nazi conspiracy theories that echo the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, and the fanciful notion of a Jewish drive for world dominion. The explosion of new media cable networks like Al Jazeera and Al Manard, along with the Internet, have spread these stories rapidly around the Muslim world and compounded the lethality of the anti-Semitic propaganda.
This was not simply an irrational prejudice. It was also the rational calculation of a political leadership who recognized the popular appeal of scapegoating Israel for their failure to provide for their own people and to legitimize their own regimes. In this effort of de-legitimization of Israel, they have found a forum at the United Nations, which has come a long way from the legitimization and legalization of the existence of Israel and the right of the Jewish people to have their own State, on their own land, through its 1947 resolution proposing a two-State solution—a solution rejected by Arab Member States. Since then, the United Nations has adopted an increasingly automatic anti-Israeli stance, canted to the anti-Israeli majority of its membership. It has become a forum for vicious anti-Israel attacks, conferring to the spurious and biased the false cloak of reason and legitimacy. It has become an organization for the conservation, not the reduction, of the Middle East conflict and the anti-Semitism that goes with it, generating a large number of resolutions critical only of Israel and holding Israel to a unique set of standards not applied to other Member States. Singling out Israel for differential and discriminatory treatment at the United Nations is, in substance, a rationalization of anti-Semitism.
Many members of the United Nations assert that the lack of peace in the region must be blamed on Israel’s failure to yield sufficient land. Indeed, the implication is that all Israel needs is an enlightened government for reason and rationality to prevail. In this way, Israel becomes responsible for Palestinian aggression. But with 20,000 terrorist attacks since the second Intifadah began, the only effective way to date that Israel has been able to reduce the number of suicide bombers is to eliminate their sanctuary by control of the main cities of the West Bank through reinstituting occupation and sealing off Gaza. When Israel proposes an alternative in the form of a security fence, it gets equally condemned by the UN General Assembly.
But the story is not of occupation. If that had any relevance at all, it was lost four years ago with Yasser Arafat's rejection of Ehud Barak's proposal for a Palestinian state. The core issue is the Palestinian refusal to grant Israel the right to exist as a Jewish state, an extension of the hatred of the Jews and of their connection to the land of Israel. How else to comprehend the Palestinian rejection of Jerusalem as the sacred city of the Jews and the Western Wall as part of the Second Temple, questioning the core of Jewish faith.
The insight of Amos Oz, a liberal Israeli writer, is pertinent. He is haunted, he said, by the observation that before the Holocaust European graffiti read, “Jews to Palestine”, only to be transformed in modern times into “Jews out of Palestine”. The message to Jews, Oz said, is simple: “Don’t be here, and don’t be there. That is, don’t be.” |
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