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 very age
begets the anti-Semitism best suited to it. And while the key emotion
driving it may be a visceral hatred of Jews, the critical intellectual
aim is to delegitimize them. In a spiritual age, the Jews are delegitimized
spiritually. In early church polemics, they are deemed no longer
worthy of their own Scriptures because they have failed to accept
Christ as the Messiah — a message that justified almost 2,000
years of persecution, and was only halted through the courage of
an enlightened papacy and like-minded Protestant churchmen.
Islam has shown two faces to the Jews, one benevolent, one less
so. Mohammed welcomed both Jews and Christians to the new faith
and saw them as teachers. His early dealings with them left a heritage
by which they were treated as dhimmis, people who were at
once protected and subservient. But the second chapter of the Koran,
Al Baqarah, "the Cow,'' is suffused with injunctions against
the Jews for rejecting Mohammed's mission. Chastisement, in this
case, is not only justified but divinely sanctioned, and it comes
through the instruments of the Prophet's armies, who drive the Jewish
tribes first from Medina and then altogether from the Hijaz —
a campaign punctuated by assassination, broken pledges, massacre,
and despoliation. Though not unusual by the standards of the time,
the legacy seems to have persisted in alternating periods of persecution
and tolerance through the following 1,400 years.
More recently, as faith gave way to materialism, anti-Semitism
assumed a correspondingly secular mode, harnessing itself to the
dominant ideologies of both the Left and the Right. The wave of
nationalism that swept over Europe from the late-19th to the mid-20th
centuries held as a tenet that the Jew was a priori an outsider,
exploitive and subversive — a belief that ultimately led to
their systematic exclusion and destruction.
The Left practiced its own brand of anti-Semitism. By simply turning
xenophobia on its head — Socialist Nationalism — the Communists
were able to attack their Jewish subjects as rootless cosmopolitans
and class enemies. The terms of opprobrium were based on Marxism
rather than fascism, but the intent was the same: to eradicate the
Jews.
Now, in the era of post-colonialism, anti-Semitism has been cast
in correspondingly post-colonial terms. A bracing example is the
recent World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia
and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa, which was commandeered
by the Arab states and their allies as an occasion to both vilify
Israel and dust off the old canard equating Zionism with racism
— the sanitized, politically acceptable version of the ancient
blood libel. Putatively a forum to encourage tolerance, the meeting
devolved into little more than a latter-day Nuremberg rally, with
scurrilous attacks replacing torch-lit parades. Egyptian delegates,
for instance, distributed booklets with swastikas, and pictures
of Jews with hooked noses and fangs dripping blood — items
that would not have been out of place in Julius Streicher's Nazi
party organ Der Sturmer.
One would think that with all the ongoing oppression and injustice
in the world, there would have been enough to keep the delegates
at Durban busy. Muslim delegates concerned about rights in Palestine
could have brought their enthusiasm closer to home by addressing
the fate of black Christians being slaughtered and enslaved in the
Sudan — where there have been a million deaths in the last
20 years — or the attempt to impose Islamic law on all subjects
in northern Nigeria, or the oppression of the Berbers in Algeria,
or the massacre of thousands of Kurds by Iraq's Saddam Hussein.
One could also add, for good measure, the recurrent persecution
of the Copts in Egypt, the theocratic excesses and treatment of
women by the mullahs in Iran, the persecution of gays throughout
the Arab world — and, of course, the fanatic intolerance of
the Taliban in Afghanistan. And certainly, under the Durban conference's
rubric of "Related Intolerance,'' it would be hard to ignore
the absence of democracy in any Arab nation, which makes one wonder
whether their delegates should not have been more concerned about
the rights of their own people before those of any other.
But given all these ripe opportunities to right human wrongs, what
was the single situation that most obsessed the delegates at Durban?
Palestine. How can this be? The answer, of course, is that the Arab
representatives and their followers at Durban were not interested
in the persecuted millions throughout the world (particularly in
their own backyards); rather, they were fixed on a political agenda
that distracted the world from their own serious shortcomings in
the human-rights department, and focused on what they consider the
West's last bastion in the third world: Israel. And the assault
on Israel — whatever the disclaimers of its apologists —
has become indistinguishable, by the reckoning of its own zealots,
with an attack on Jews everywhere.
The critical tactic in carrying out an anti-Semitic agenda is to
attack the Jewish people at its strong point — where, ironically,
it is both most exposed and most vulnerable. In the Middle Ages
and beyond, the target was the Court Jew who had the ear of the
ruler; during the Inquisition it was the Cristianos Nuevos —
the Spanish Jews who had thrived after their conversion to Christianity.
Under Hitler it was the entrepreneurial and professional classes
who were the first victims of Nazi boycotts and exclusion. And today
it is Israel, the most powerful symbol of Jewish national resurgence
in two millennia.
The most striking analogy between the current Arab onslaught and
its fascist precedents is the use of propaganda. Like Goebbels,
its practitioners have learned the efficacy of 1) the Big Lie (the
more outrageous the better), brazenly repeated so that people will
ultimately accept it as at least part of the truth; 2) hijacking
the language and symbols of the enemy so that you tar them with
your vices; 3) trivializing and muddling the very meaning of words,
so that your transgressions can be blurred and your opponent's responses
magnified. Two key tactics in advancing this agenda are moral equivalence
— for instance, equating the prevention of terror with terror
itself, so that interdiction is seen as reprisal — and a distorted-numbers
game, in which the only deaths that count in a violent conflict
are one side's "martyrdoms" — since the other side's
deaths are deserved.
The most flagrant example of the Big Lie is the Arab assertion
that there was never a Jewish presence in Palestine until modern
times. The evidence of a Jewish civilization going back more than
two millennia is overwhelmingly borne out in the archaeology of
the region. The heritage of the Jews in Palestine is documented
in the records of the peoples who prevailed against them, and not
least in the annals of Muslim chroniclers. It is engraved in Rome's
Arch of Titus depicting the captive Hebrews being brought to Rome
after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. What brought Helen, mother
of the Emperor Constantine, to the Holy Land in the fourth century
A.D., was the search for relics of Christ, who preached as a Jew
in the very Hebrew Temple whose existence the Arabs deny and whose
Wall they appropriate as their own.
Turning the history of the Jews against them is another commonplace
of anti-Semitism. If the Jews were victims in an actual genocide,
what better way to transfer sympathy from them to their rivals than
by painting them as modern Nazis, and their policies as a new holocaust?
Genocide is an attempt to exterminate a people, not to alter their
behavior. The Israelis — who employed a third of the Palestinian
population, armed the Palestinian Authority and offered Yasser Arafat
a state consisting of 95 percent of the West Bank — were hardly
practicing genocide. Israel, however, is now sustaining a war for
its own existence. A nation defending its citizens against terrorist
bombings, mortar assaults, sniper attacks, and a military and diplomatic
onslaught by an array of Arab foes is practicing survival, not genocide.
Equally damning is the collateral charge of "apartheid,"
which tars Israel with the brush of the truly racist former regime
in South Africa, and further equates Palestinians with the blacks
suffering white colonial domination. Since apartheid — keeping
people apart — can only be practiced within a sovereign state,
the only analogy would have to be made not with the Palestinians,
but with the Israeli Arabs. And what is their condition? Yes, there
is still some degree of discrimination, but Israeli Arabs have more
political rights than any other Arabs in the Middle East —
including their compatriots in the Palestinian Authority. And, whatever
their grievances, they are still economically better off than the
majority of their fellows in virtually every other Arab country.
If they still face inequality it is because of the mutual hostility
and mistrust between both communities, not because of race. Beyond
Israel's borders, the situation in the West Bank and Gaza involves
a military occupation amid urban guerrilla warfare, analogous to
the British security measures in Northern Island, that hopefully
will end with a cease-fire and a Palestinian state. This is unfortunate,
it is tragic, but it is not apartheid — and to call it so is
to deliberately distort language for political advantage.
Which brings us to a corollary tactic: Avoid context and specifics;
whenever possible, generalize and keep repeating the generalization.
Blowing up houses and tearing down olive groves and keeping people
locked in their communities is horrendous — in peacetime, but
not in the context of an urban guerrilla war. When many of these
towns have sent out suicide bombers, when the houses have served
as hilltop redoubts to fire incessantly and indiscriminately into
Jewish communities, and when the orchards have served as cover for
snipers — they become legitimate targets. When Arab apologists
wring their hands over an Israeli military incursion, they never
mention what the Israelis are reacting to, or else diminish and
distort it. A fair observer only has to ask: "If there is violence,
who profits?"
Two other word distortions often used together are "colonial"
and "settler," conjuring up images of whites exploiting
indigenous populations in Africa. But the truth is that Jews are
not part of a European ruling class imposed on helpless natives,
but are caught up in a tragedy in which two peoples are struggling
for the same piece of land. Jewish and Palestinian nationalism are
virtually contemporaneous, and grew out of the disruptions that
created new national movements from the ruins of the old empires
— including the Ottoman Empire. As for settlements, the matter
of borders for the new Palestinian state was one of the issues to
be determined by negotiations over the final status of the West
Bank territory to which Jordan renounced its claim. For the Palestinians
to assume that all of this is their sovereign territory — before
there is even a sovereign Palestine, and before a final status agreement
— is a unilateral end run around serious negotiations. Nor
should it go unremarked that in the heated rhetoric of Arab polemics,
all Israelis are indiscriminately lumped together as settlers. The
developing agenda of the Palestinians — which Hamas makes no
secret of trumpeting — is that Israel is a foreign implant
in the heart of the Islamic world, and all of its citizens
are settlers — usurpers who must be disgorged, however long
it takes. The only potential genocide in play here is not that of
the Palestinians, but that of the Jews. The West should understand
that the intifada is being driven ever more by the religious fanatics
of Hamas — with whom Arafat has increasingly made common cause
— whose goals are not only destructive to Israel, but inimical
to the West, as the recent terror attacks on New York and Washington
have made clear. The radicalization of the Palestinian cause is
fueled not by the secular Left, but by Muslim zealots whose aim
is not to achieve a democratic Palestine, but to impose an Islamic
theocracy akin to that of their Iranian sponsors. While Muslims
may insist that the zealotry of Hezbollah and the Taliban are not
representative of Islam, it has now been made chillingly clear that
this intolerant strain of the faith is on the ascendancy, claiming
the allegiance of up to 15 percent of the world's 1.2 billion Muslims.
For many, the religious movement has become a political ideology
which is totalitarian, anti-democratic, violent, and terroristic.
Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, is one of its primary
targets. It is not the last outpost of colonialism, but the first
bulwark of democracy.
One of the most effective acts of Arab topsy-turvy has been harnessing
Israel's concept of "the right of return" to the Palestinian
agenda. A response to centuries of persecution, this right was fostered
by Israel to offer a haven to Jews in the Diaspora who had heretofore
lacked a refuge. It was granted by a sovereign state and obtained
exclusively within its borders. The Palestinian mockery of this
process is to "invite" half a million compatriots, not
back to their own burgeoning state, but to another country —
Israel. Imagine if India were to "invite" millions of
Hindus back to their pre-partition homes in Pakistan. The idea would
be absurd. It would destabilize the Muslim nation (which is exactly
what the Palestinians have in mind for the state of Israel by insisting
on this "right"). The world has yet to insist on returning
the three million Sudetan Germans to the Czech Republic, or on the
mass repatriation of any civilian population unmoored in the global
turmoil that followed World War II — with only one exception:
Israel. (It might be noted that the 1948 General Assembly Resolution
194 so often cited by Arabs, according the Palestinians the right
of return, stipulates that the refugees must be willing "to
live at peace with their neighbors." Given the climate of hatred,
violence, and revanchism ubiquitous in the refugee camps, the likelihood
of meeting this requirement is nil.) Why does Israel have to pay
a price higher than any other nation in this context? One of the
tenets of anti-Semitism over the centuries has been a reverse exceptionalism
in which Jews are judged more harshly for acting like everyone else.
Naturally, a criminal nation must be led by a war criminal, and
so it is not surprising that the Arabs — with help from their
European friends — have decried Israel's premier as such. It
is now a given in these circles that Ariel Sharon has blood on his
hands, and that he was responsible for the massacre of hundreds
of Palestinians at the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in 1982.
People may have forgotten by now that the killings were actually
done by Maronite Christians known as the Lebanese Forces. Many of
them came from the Christian town of Damour, where hundreds of people
had been massacred by Palestinians who attacked and destroyed the
town six years earlier. This was part of a bloody civil war in Lebanon
— in which the PLO played a brutal, and perhaps seminal, role
— with massacres and counter-reprisals that had gone on for
years before the Israelis ever arrived. At the time, the Palestinians
had set up a quasi-state-within-a-state in Lebanon, informed by
terror, intimidation, and corruption, and led by none other than
Yasser Arafat. Yet there appears to be no great enthusiasm in Belgium
to try him as a war criminal. The world may also have forgotten
that what triggered the Sabra massacre was the Syrian-sponsored
terrorist explosion that killed Lebanese president-elect Bashir
Gemayel, head of the Phalangist party and a Palestinian foe, along
with 21 other party and militia officials. To be sure, Sharon's
forces should have intervened earlier, and accordingly he was forced
by Israel's own Kahan Commission to resign as defense minister.
But failing to prevent a massacre is a far cry from perpetrating
one. Why then is Sharon being held up to standards to which no others
are held accountable? If the U.N. is interested in examining ethnic
cleansing, it should begin with the PLO atrocities in Damour —
whose survivors cannot remind us of what happened, since Lebanon
itself is under the occupation of Syria (itself no timid nation
when it comes to mass murder, as it demonstrated in the massacre
of 20,000 Muslim fundamentalists in Hama). And, indeed, if the world
wants to accuse someone of a crime for the massacres at Sabra and
Shatila, it can prosecute Elie Hobeika, the leader of the Phalangist
forces who perpetrated the massacre after his own people were slaughtered
by the Palestinians. He currently resides in Lebanon under the protection
of the Syrians. No one seems interested in putting him in the dock.
Palestinian ideology has become a lethal cocktail of radical nationalism
and Islamic fundamentalism. In its Islamist mode it is remorseless
in its exhortations to drive the Jews into the sea, and revert all
of Palestine to a Muslim trust; in its secular form it has adopted
Frantz Fanon's maxims that "truth is that which hurries on
the breakup of the colonial regime," and that "the good
is quite simply that which is evil for them." Consequently,
Palestinian propagandists can say and do anything they please without
concern for the truth, in the belief that if they repeat it often
enough it will simply become the truth. Thus, Arab propagandists
ask: "In the current political climate, what is the worst thing
of which we can accuse the Jews?" The answer: Racism, Apartheid.
Genocide. Colonialism. Is it true? It doesn't matter. Let the Jews
worry about whether it's true. The paradox of anti-Semitism is that
it is invariably up to the Jews to explain away the charges. The
anti-Semite simply has to make them. It is not surprising that some
pro-Taliban Pakistanis are now complaining because the U.S. failed
to put Israel on its target list of terrorism. The goal is to vitiate
the meanings of words so that, in the subsequent confusion, the
onus is taken off the perpetrators and equivalence placed on the
victims. We have entered an Orwellian realm in which the Palestinian
Authority has created its own Ministry of Truth, with a vociferous
global bully pulpit. It's a world where a conference on racial tolerance
is turned into a hate rally, where mass murder is called martyrdom,
where people who indulge in lynching complain about persecution,
in which accusations of Israeli disrespect are made by Palestinians
whose airwaves and newspapers and pulpits are rife with obscene,
anti-Semitic venom, in which condemnations of Zionism are conflated
with attacks on the Jewish people so that there is no longer a distinction
between the Palestinian movement's professed anti-Zionism and its
rampant anti-Semitism. What is at the heart of the Islamist assault
on the Zionist project is not the issue of national rights, but
the humiliation engendered by a formerly subject people ruling where
Muslims once held sway. This can only be eradicated by subjugating
the offenders and restoring them to their humble status. It explains
why the Islamists no longer bother to distinguish between attacking
Zionists and Jews. In their worldview, the Israelis, by their nation's
very existence, are committing blasphemy.
We have seen in the last century that it is possible for virtually
an entire society to be seized with a fury that causes unfathomable
harm until it abates. For the Palestinians — awash in self-righteousness,
disdainful of compromise, and convinced of their ultimate victory
— to indulge in this marriage of delusion and triumphalism,
is one thing. For their Arab sponsors to abet them is, regrettably,
also understandable. But what of the West? How do we explain the
daily diet of distorted coverage, vilification of Israel, and conflation
of its sins with anti-Semitic imagery in mainstream European newspapers
such as the Guardian in England (which has editorialized
on its front page that "the international community cannot
indefinitely support the very high cost in human rights and human
lives" of the establishment of Israel), Le Monde in
France (which suggested that the Jews themselves were responsible
for the Tel Aviv disco bombing), and the Spanish press (where it
is now open season on anti-Semitic caricatures of hook-nosed Jews
wearing yarmulkes, imagery of swastikas inside Stars of David, and
editorials equating Israelis with Nazis)?
The answer may reside in a new strain of politically correct anti-Semitism.
Forty years of indoctrinating an elite on a diet of post-colonialism,
racism, and class, have paid bizarre dividends. Worse still, a historically
challenged generation more impressed by images than analysis, impelled
by a herd instinct, and easily manipulated by a simplistic David-and-Goliath
show, is now reporting from the Middle East. Add to this a growing
cluster of Europeans who feel that enough reparations have been
paid to the Jews and their lawyers — the sectors who traditionally
have never cared too much for Jews anyway — and the Left in
whose gun sights the Jews were re-targeted from class enemy to colonial
enemy. And add to them the old-fashioned patrician elites, who still
considered Jews unwashed and pushy (and, oh yes, arrogant) and were
never comfortable with them running their own state. To this combustible
fuel, add the match of the growing Islamist rancor in the West,
and we have the makings of a new conflagration of anti-Semitism.
Aside from rabid Islamists, no one who wishes to be taken seriously
can publicly say anything bad about the old Jews of Europe —
most of whom are gone — without sounding like reactionary troglodytes.
But many can transcend the problem by embracing the cause of Palestinian
rights. By identifying with a post-colonial liberation movement,
they can be ideologically fashionable, in favor of the downtrodden,
against oppression, supportive of an even-handed approach in diplomacy,
applauded by the Third World, and insulated from the charge of anti-Semitism
— because how can anyone who is against racism (in its Zionist
form) be an anti-Semite?
As noted at the outset, every age begets the anti-Semitism that
most suits it; and in this era of anti-racist enthusiasm, it is
anti-Zionism. In all ages, the goal of the anti-Semitic project
is to delegitimize Jews. In this one, it's to undermine the legitimacy
of the Jewish state, as a prelude to its ultimate destruction. The
"fairness" that Palestinian supporters advocate has the
ultimate goal of sufficiently weakening Israel that it will be unable
to defend itself. And without a Jewish state, the iron truth of
history is that the Jewish people sooner or later become even more
vulnerable to the next wave of anti-Semitism. The metaphor of Exodus
is one that has dogged the Jews from the outset. Their very success
attracts resentment — as they learned in Egypt where, according
to Scripture, a new king arose "who did not know Joseph."
The issue is no longer, Will there be a Palestinian state —
that is inevitable — but rather, Will there be a Jewish one?
The disappearance of the Jewish state will not mean the disappearance
of anti-Semitism — quite the opposite.
In 1968, Martin Luther King Jr., addressed his listeners with the
following words: "You declare that you do not hate Jews, you
are merely anti-Zionist. And I say, let the truth ring forth from
high on the mountaintops... When people criticize Zionism, they
mean Jews... What is anti-Zionism? It is the denial of the Jewish
people of a fundamental right that we justly claim for the people
of Africa and freely accord all other nations of the globe.'' Dr.
King, who recognized bias when he saw it, knew what he was talking
about.
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