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ОглавлениеPreface to the Paperback Edition
The seven weeks of war between Israel and Hamas in the summer of 2014 occasioned the greatest outpouring of raw anti-Semitism since the demise of Nazism. Ironically, relatively little of this occurred in the Arab world, at least less than usual. Cairo, Damascus, Beirut, Baghdad were quieter than during any of the other wars between Israel and its neighbors. But across Europe and here and there in Latin America, Africa, even America and Canada, incident followed upon incident of vicious Jew baiting and sometimes violence.
To recall some highlights: On Paris’s Rue de la Roquette, three hundred worshippers were besieged in a synagogue by a mob that, in the words of a French Jewish photojournalist present, “had murder on its mind,” while a similar scene played out at another synagogue on the nearby Rue des Tournelles. According to witnesses, the attackers shouted “death to the Jews,” and Le Parisien reported that six police and two members of a Jewish self-defense squad were injured holding them off. Similar chants were reported at a demonstration outside a synagogue in the Parisian suburb, Belleville, while a firebomb was thrown at yet another suburban synagogue at Aulnay-sous-Bois. In all, eight synagogues were attacked.
In Berlin, marchers chanted “Jew, Jew, cowardly swine, come out and fight,” while in Frankfurt they rhymed, “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the Gas.” In Antwerp, a loudspeaker led the crowd in intoning “slaughter the Jews” at an anti-Israel protest featuring local politicians of the Socialist, Labor, and Green parties.
In Turkey, Prime Minister (and soon to be President) Recep Erdoğan opened the floodgates of interfaith rage—claiming that Israel “attempt[s] systematic genocide every Ramadan”—and a torrent of anti-Semitism flowed forth, including violent protests at Israel’s diplomatic missions in Istanbul and Ankara. A Turkish website reported that in one day 27,000 Turks had tweeted in praise of Hitler. And little wonder: Erdoğan accused Israel of “barbarism that surpasses Hitler.” If that were so, then Hitler was the lesser evil. Had he only finished the job, the world would have been spared something worse.
In keeping with this spirit, an Erdoğan-allied daily newspaper published a column urging the murder of Turkish Jews who support Israel:
As a Muslim I believe that it is not in line with Islam’s justice to think that a person, just because they are a Jew, should “die” or “be exterminated.” I mean, if they were, I would not be upset, but I also would not argue that they should be treated this way simply because they are Jewish. . . . But if you come out with your “Jewish” identity and . . . start siding with . . . Israel, which implies a complete genocide on my religious-brothers in Palestine, . . . I will have earned the right to ask for the “an eye for an eye” approach towards you.
The “eye for an eye” threat was also voiced in South Africa, aimed at the Jewish Board of Deputies, that country’s principal Jewish body, by Tony Ehrenreich, a top labor leader and a nominee of the dominant political party, the African National Congress, for mayor of Cape Town. Also, a member of the African National Congress’s campaign team posted a picture of Hitler on her Facebook page, glossing it with “Yes, man, you were right.”
In Boston, anti-Israel protesters attacked a smaller pro-Israel group, calling them “Christ-killers.” In Los Angeles, pro-Israel demonstrators were set upon by four men with sticks. Anti-Israel demonstrators in Seattle carried a sign depicting a man wearing a bib with a Star of David, dining on a baby and drinking down a tumbler of blood. And in Calgary, Canada, a small group holding pro-Israel signs was assaulted by a contingent from a much larger anti-Israel demonstration.1
By odd coincidence, Making David into Goliath was released on the very day that Israeli forces moved into Gaza in response to a wave of Hamas rockets that put an end to the ceasefire that had been in place. In it, I had written little about anti-Semitism, a point on which I was repeatedly challenged, or at least questioned, when I spoke before Jewish audiences. Given that the world’s current hostility to Israel is manifestly unreasonable, many Jews assume that its source must lie in that ancient hatred. So, why have I neglected it, except for incidental mentions, in this book?
The main reason is that I am aiming to explain change. No nation, except some that were transformed by political revolution, has ever experienced such a dramatic reversal in the way it is perceived and treated by the rest of the world. Israel was popular in 1967 in quarters where it seems to be detested now. For example, on the eve of the Six Day War, polls showed that French and British publics favored Israel over the Arabs by near-unanimous ratios (28 to 1). In recent years, in contrast, those same publics have registered intense hostility to Israel.
Surely the world was not devoid of anti-Semitism in 1967. Granted, the Holocaust may have “inoculated” certain populations against it, to borrow the term used by the essayist Jeffrey Goldberg,2 and this effect may have worn off, or be wearing off, as that unbearable episode fades further into the past. But would the inoculation have prevented people from feeling hatred of Jews or merely from expressing it aloud? Certainly the Holocaust had not touched the hearts of those Poles and other eastern Europeans who in its aftermath murdered returning Jewish survivors to prevent them from reclaiming stolen property, nor had it evoked much sympathy from British officials who in those years kept other Holocaust survivors penned up in Displaced Persons camps to prevent their resettling in Palestine. As for inhibiting public displays, even today there is, at least in the Western world and to some extent beyond, a considerable taboo against giving plain voice to anti-Semitism. Indeed those who argue that anti-Semitism lies behind animosity to Israel are suggesting that Israel is used as a foil for the real target—Jews—whom it is less acceptable to openly hate. Would not the same ploy have been possible in 1967?
Rather than anti-Semitism, Making David into Goliath focuses on three other explanations of the turn against Israel. First, the situation on the ground changed. The 1967 war left Israel occupying the West Bank and the Gaza Strip where a few million Palestinian Arabs lived, and by demolishing pan-Arabism, it paved the way for the crystallization of Palestinian nationalism. This transformed the image of the conflict from one pitting the vast Arab world against tiny Israel to one pitting mighty Israel against the pitiful Palestinians. Second, the Arabs, having failed dismally to translate their numerical advantage into military achievements, learned belatedly to use it politically, for example making the UN the world’s most bully pulpit for the vilification of Israel and the engine room of anti-Israel campaigns, such as the so-called BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) movement. Third, the world’s notions of “social justice” came to focus on the struggles of the darker-skinned people against colonialism and racism. In the Middle East, the Jews appear as the white Westerners (although many are neither, and no one has suffered more at the hands of white Westerners than the Jews) and the Arabs or Palestinians as the inherently virtuous “people of color.”
There was also a secondary reason why I did not focus on anti-Semitism. It is difficult to know another person’s motives, the more so to prove one’s interpretation. Where animus toward Jews is proclaimed in tandem with hostility to Israel—as is often the case in the Arab world or among neo-Nazis—there is no problem identifying anti-Semitism. The question at hand, however, is the more frequent phenomenon of anti-Israel sentiment expressed without any accompanying disparagement of the Jews. In such cases, I am reluctant to lay a charge of anti-Semitism.
Instead, in this book, I aim to show that most of the attacks on Israel are false, tendentious, or disproportionate. These are things that I can demonstrate. I can and do also indict various detractors for being biased against Israel—and often I can show that they are acting in bad faith; for example, officials of “human rights” organizations whose partisanship regarding the Middle East anteceded their interest in human rights and manifestly goes deeper. But, except for those who bare their Jew hatred, it is difficult to show that anti-Semitism lies behind attacks, even unfair ones. Mostly, this leads to a sterile debate. I say that someone’s jaundice toward Israel shows him to be an anti-Semite, and he denies being anything of the sort. I can repeat my accusation, and he his denial. I have witnessed such debates, and my sense is that the audience soon loses interest. In most cases, although not all, it seems to me more effective to prove that a given attack on Israel is insupportable or unfair and perhaps also that the attacker has a history of doing this, and to leave it there.
Moreover, with or without the fillip of anti-Semitism, hatred of Israel, or refusal to accept its existence, is in itself the most deadly thing facing Jews since Hitler. Israel has suffered roughly twenty-five thousand dead and a larger number wounded in its wars and terror attacks, all the carnage traceable ultimately to the feeling among many Arabs that any Jewish sovereignty in their midst is unbearable (or until 1948, that the prospect of one was so). This sentiment keeps peace perpetually beyond the horizon, ensuring that the casualties will continue to mount. (It is no solace, quite the contrary, that the Arabs have lost even more from their obduracy, with casualties roughly four times the number of Jews.)
In addition, hostility to Israel may prove extremely harmful even in the actions of those who would shrink from committing violence with their own hands. For example many of Israel’s detractors outside the Arab world today support the so-called BDS campaign. It cynically invokes the tradition of nonviolent protest made famous by Gandhi’s struggle for Indian independence and the U.S. civil rights movement, but its goal is to destroy Israel. Its cofounder and leader, Omar Barghouti, has taken pains to make clear his decades-old opposition to the continued existence of Israel within any borders. “You cannot reconcile inalienable Palestinian rights with a two-state solution. . . . So . . . the two-state solution . . . has to go,” he says.3 In a like vein, some Western human rights organizations and jurists who participate in UN-sponsored kangaroo courts of Israeli “war crimes” seek to saddle Israel with constraints that no army has ever operated under and would make it difficult for Israel to defend itself against murderous foes.
Therefore, it seemed, alas, sufficient to deal with anti-Israelism without tackling the subject of anti-Semitism. At least that was how I felt at the time I completed Making David into Goliath in 2013. However, the anti-Jewish vitriol laced through the reactions to the war in Gaza in the summer of 2014 persuaded me of the need to revisit this issue. For one thing, it grew apparent that, whether or not anti-Semitism is the unspoken source of hostility to Israel, the converse is true: namely, that hatred of Israel has grown so febrile that it has unleashed unvarnished Jew hatred. In addition to the venomous and sometimes violent demonstrations I have mentioned, this progression was exemplified by so prominent a figure as Turkey’s Erdoğan who had in one period been characterized as President Obama’s favorite foreign leader. Having reversed, step-by-step, his country’s longstanding close ties to Israel, a process culminating in his 2014 accusation that Israel was worse than the Nazis, Erdoğan and his deputies began next to attribute opposition to his government to the “Jewish lobby”4 and to control of the New York Times by “Jewish capital.”5 Ultimately, I concluded that whichever comes first, the boundary between anti-Israelism and anti-Semitism is growing fainter.
Yet, paradoxically, all of these coarse expressions of animosity to Jews do not mean that anti-Semitism is growing more widespread. The incidents I have mentioned played out in a period when polls suggest that prejudice against Jews is growing less common in the United States and Europe. In fact, in the United States, a Pew survey taken in 2014 suggested a degree of philo-Semitism that must be without precedent in the whole history of the diaspora. Respondents to a “thermometer poll” were asked to score their feelings on a scale of cold to warm toward each of eight different groups—Jews, Catholics, Evangelicals, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Mormons, and atheists. The group receiving the warmest score was Jews.
No comparable poll has been taken in Europe, but a 2015 Pew survey of six major European countries asked respondents, among other things, about their feelings toward Jews. There were many more who said “favorable” than “unfavorable”—although the minority that professed itself “unfavorable” was not negligible, ranging from 7 percent in England and France to 28 percent in Poland. Whether these numbers in themselves should be taken as good news or bad, the relevant point is that the negatives were lower than in previous years. In other words, anti-Semitism is in some sense decreasing.
And yet the frequency of hate crimes against Jews has climbed sharply. In other words, in Europe, while the numbers who nurture hostility to Jews have diminished, their behavior has grown more abusive and violent. Some of this is attributable to skinheads or neo-Nazis, but the lion’s share is the work of Muslim immigrants or their offspring.
In contrast to Christianity, where the distinction between the authority of God and that of Caesar was laid down by Jesus himself, for Muslims and for Jews before the dispersion, the religious community and the polity were one and the same. Polls show that Arabs often place their identity as Muslims ahead of any national identity. By the same token, in the Arab world, the distinction between Israel and Jews is rarely recognized. Saudi Arabia, for example, once practiced a policy of barring all Jews from the country. (Visa applications there require specifying one’s religion.)
Similarly, the Charter of the Palestinian movement, Hamas, says: “Israel, Judaism and Jews challenge Islam and the Moslem people,” adding a purported quote from Prophet Mohammed: “The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews, [and] the stones and trees will say O Moslems, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”6 The other main Palestinian organization, the Palestinian Authority dominated by Fatah, is not so sanguinary but often also conflates Jews and Israel, such as when a PA ambassador told an international conference in 2015 that the “Elders of Zion” have a master plan for “dominating life in the entire planet.”7 As these examples suggest, antipathy to Israel melds readily with traditional religious prejudices.
Jews bulk large in the Scripture of Islam, and figured prominently in the life of its prophet as adversaries. Against this background, the success of Israel in its struggle with the Arabs is especially infuriating and has imbued Jews in the popular imagination with something like demonic powers.
A hilarious account of this mystique in Egyptian politics was given by the brilliant young Egyptian intellectual, Samuel Tadros. After the ouster in 2013 of the Muslim Brotherhood–led government of Mohamed Morsi and the rise of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Brotherhood-sponsored news outlets put out the story that al-Sisi was in fact a Jew, alleging that his mother was a Moroccan Jew. Although meaningful evidence of this does not exist, the story has been repeated so frequently that Tadros reported that “if you Google Sisi’s name in Arabic, the first search option comes up as ‘Sisi Jewish.’”8 Sisi’s supporters struck back in kind, producing revelations that it is not Sisi but the Muslim Brotherhood itself that is a stalking horse for the Jews. Tadros paraphrases mirthfully:
The founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan Al Banna, is a Jew. Both his parents are Moroccan Jews, and he was implanted by Zionists in Egypt in order to form the Muslim Brotherhood, as another government newspaper claims. . . . Nine months earlier, a former military general explained to Al Ahram that Banna is indeed Jewish and that establishing the Brotherhood was part of a Jewish conspiracy to create disorder among Muslims and divide Egypt so that Jews can occupy it.
For the most part, however, the demonization of Jews is far from a laughing matter; indeed it has often been deadly. Just to take incidents purportedly related to the existence of Israel but aimed at non-Israeli Jews: in 1980, a synagogue bombing in Paris killed four and injured forty; in 1981, terrorists attacked a worship service in Vienna, killing two; in 1982, a two-year-old was killed and dozens wounded in another such attack in Rome. In 1986, gunmen attacked a synagogue in Istanbul, massacring twenty-two worshippers and wounding others. Most of these attacks were perpetrated by Palestinians. After the rise of the Khomeini regime, Iran became active in targeting Jews. Soon after it midwifed the birth of Hizbullah in the mid-1980s, that group carried out a wave of murders of Lebanon’s few remaining Jews. Then, in 1994, Iran masterminded the bombing of the Jewish community center of Buenos Aires, killing eighty-five and wounding hundreds.
In more recent years, Sunni jihadists have emerged as leading Jew killers. In 2003, truck bombs were driven into two Istanbul synagogues, killing more than twenty and injuring some three hundred more. In 2008, a team of Pakistani terrorists struck Mumbai, slaying hundreds and making a special point of including among their targets the small Jewish community center where they murdered the rabbi, his wife who was in an advanced state of pregnancy, and four other Jewish hostages. According to Indian police, the attackers had been told that “the lives of Jews were worth fifty times more than the lives of non-Jews.”9 In 2012, a French-born jihadist of Algerian parents attacked a Jewish school in Toulouse, murdering the rabbi and three young children. In May 2014, another jihadist of French Algerian background shot dead two men and two women at the Belgian Jewish Museum in Brussels. Then, in January 2015, the jihadist attacks in Paris included the special targeting of Jews. The target of the second attack linked to the more sensational one on the magazine Charlie Hebdo was a kosher supermarket, where the terrorist singled out four Jews to murder in cold blood. Less noticed was the fact that in the initial attack, at the magazine offices, the women present were spared except for one whom the killers apparently knew to be a Jew.
In a 2014 global survey, the Anti-Defamation League found that 75 percent of Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa hold anti-Semitic views, while in Western Europe 29 percent do.10 The latter, far smaller, number is reassuring about the power of the surrounding culture to transform received attitudes. Nonetheless, 29 percent amounts to a proportion hostile to Jews that is higher than among non-Muslim Europeans, constituting a pool of animosity that in some of its depths is highly toxic.
More than one of the continent’s political leaders has warned against the importation of the Middle East conflict to Europe. This formulation, however, is facile. In the Middle East, the “conflict” exists because the Jews of Israel are able to fight back. In Europe, Jews are assaulted by Arabs but virtually never the reverse. Yes, self-defense organizations have been formed to try to provide some security at synagogues and the like. But the ability of Jews to live in safety in that part of the world depends on the willingness of governments to take measures sufficiently energetic to protect them.
The flight from assault has been a perpetual part of Jewish history and was a major factor in the creation of Israel, which has indeed provided a shelter to Jews from many corners. At the same time, the birth of the Jewish state also opened a new chapter in persecutions in the diaspora.
Jews were driven from the Arab countries. Ancient communities, descendants of those who fled the Romans two thousand years ago and of those who were expelled from Spain in 1492, together numbering nearly a million individuals, were reduced by 99 percent. Remaining Jewish pockets in other Muslim countries have largely collapsed since then. After the rise of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini is reported to have told Jewish leaders there: “We recognize our Jews as separate from those godless, bloodsucking Zionists.” If these words were intended to reassure despite intensifying persecutions, they seem not to have done the trick, for that community has since shrunk from around 100,000 to at most one-quarter, and by some counts less than one-tenth, that number. The rise of Turkey’s Islamist movement over the past decade, on top of mass murders at synagogues in 1986 and 2003, have prompted a flight of Jews from that country, accelerating the last few years in the face of open Jew baiting in the media and boycotts of Jewish businesses.
Non-Muslim countries whose governments are allied with anti-Israel forces—for example, Venezuela, whose dictator, Hugo Chavez, embraced Iran, or South Africa, where the dominant African National Congress has long maintained close ties to the Palestine Liberation Organization—have also witnessed waves of abusive words and violent deeds aimed at indigenous Jews and thus a radical reduction of their Jewish populations. In short, the number of places on Earth where Jews can reside in peace and security has been shrinking, and the question of the day is whether the countries of Europe will continue to be among them.
The events of the summer of 2014 convinced some serious observers that the answer is no. “We are seeing the beginning of the end of Jewish history in Europe,” said Natan Sharansky, the chairman of the Jewish Agency. In his widely noted article in the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg reviewed these Gaza War–related events as well as murderous attacks on Jews in Toulouse in 2012, in Belgium in May 2014, and in Paris in January 2015 and posed the question: Is it time for the Jews of Europe to leave? Goldberg’s own answer was saved for the final sentence, after noting that his forebears had once lived in Romania in a town where no Jews remain. He, himself, is alive, he said, “because [my] ancestors made a run for it when they could.”11
In the Middle Ages, Jews were expelled from one European country after another at a time when antipathy must have been near unanimous, although there were no public opinion polls then. It would be bitter irony if Jews were again today in effect driven from the continent at a time when the Christian populations are more accepting of Jews than ever before. Yet, this may happen unless officials in those countries are prepared to act with unwonted rigor to suppress the predations of radical Islamists.
The situation may be symbolized by Malmö, Sweden. In a survey by the Anti-Defamation League, the incidence of anti-Jewish attitudes was lowest in Sweden of all European countries—a mere 4 percent.12 But Malmö is today heavily Muslim, and its tiny Jewish population, comprising a single congregation maintained by an American rabbi from the global Chabad movement, has suffered harassment and abuse. Its members confessed to Goldberg that they live in fear. “Teenagers . . . told me that wearing a Star of David necklace can incite a beating,” he reported. Yet Goldberg saw nary a policeman when he attended Sabbath services together with eighteen other worshippers and accompanied them as they rushed through the streets anxiously afterward. In a similar spirit of indifference, municipal officials of The Hague rejected appeals by the Simon Wiesenthal Center to block a rally in support of ISIS at which participants, some with faces masked ominously, chanted “death to the Jews.”13
If a mixture of Israel hatred and anti-Semitism is most widespread among Muslims, it is not uniquely their own. Alas, far from it, although among Westerners who want to remain respectable, such sentiments are invariably accompanied by insistence that the speaker is no anti-Semite. Perhaps the first in recent decades to execute this rhetorical maneuver was Patrick J. Buchanan, who ignited a controversy following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 by declaring that, “there are only two groups that are beating the drums . . . for war in the Middle East—the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States.” This drew sharp rebukes to which Buchanan in turn replied that anti-Semitism is “a grave sin . . . a variant of racism,” of which he was completely innocent. But he then he went on to sprinkle his columns with barbs against Jews and to defend Nazi war criminals, including some who professed innocence and others who confessed guilt. Bizarrely, he went so far as to embrace the claim of Holocaust-deniers that the exhaust from diesel fuel (used by the Nazis in some gas chambers) is in fact nonlethal (a theory he conspicuously made no attempt to vindicate by testing it on himself).
It is hard to say whether Buchanan’s initial sallies against Israel were motivated by an underlying antipathy to Jews that he had kept under wraps or whether his dislike of Israel was the starting point from which he developed a broader hostility. It is a question that applies equally to others—for example, John Mearsheimer. He and Stephen Walt declared in their initial paper on “the Lobby” (that grew into their famous book) that far from being anti-Semitic they were “philo-Semites.” But a couple of years later, Mearsheimer proposed the thesis that Jews fall into two categories: “righteous Jews,” meaning those who hate Israel or at least blame it for the conflict with the Arabs, and all the rest, whom he labeled “Afrikaners.” This shed little light on Jews but a lot on how Mearsheimer felt toward them. Then he provided a cover blurb for The Wondering Who by the Israeli-born anti-Semite Gilad Atzmon, who argues that “Jewishness is an ethno-centric ideology driven by exclusiveness, exceptionalism, [and] racial supremacy.” Atzmon topped this off by writing “65 years after the liberation of Auschwitz we should be able to ask. . . . Why were the Jews hated?”14—suggesting they got what they deserved in the Holocaust. Mearsheimer glossed all this with the encomium: “a fascinating and provocative book [that] should be widely read by Jews and non-Jews alike.”15
Atzmon boldly proclaims himself a “self-hating Jew,” but Mearsheimer and Buchanan insist they are not anti-Semites. Buchanan complains that “anti-Semitism” is “a word . . . used to frighten, intimidate, censor, and silence; to cut off debate; to . . . smear men’s reputations.” And Mearsheimer writes that “anyone who criticizes Israeli actions or says that pro-Israel groups have significant influence over U.S. Middle East policy stands a good chance of getting labeled an anti-Semite.”16 Others have said much the same. Given that virtually every editorial of the New York Times and every column by its foreign affairs commentator Thomas Friedman that deals with the Middle East criticizes Israel, at least in part, and that this is also true for most of the major print and electronic media, except the Wall Street Journal and Fox TV; given that much the same can be said for the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, the National Interest, and most of the other intellectual and foreign policy magazines and that the New Republic, the Atlantic, and such Jewish outlets as Tablet and the Forward routinely include sharp critical asides even in articles that defend Israel; and given, too, that the Middle East Studies Association, the dominant professional organization of academics who teach in this field is fiercely critical of Israel, to put it mildly, and one might cite much more in this vein—given all that, Mearsheimer’s claim is preposterous. It would be more accurate to turn his charge around and say that anyone who claims that “anyone who criticizes Israel is labeled an anti-Semite” is probably an anti-Semite seeking to preempt criticism.
A similar example is the blogger Andrew Sullivan who has spent half a decade or more pouring vitriol on Israel and its supporters, all the while complaining that “criticizing AIPAC [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee] is something forbidden for non-Jews—for fear of being labeled an anti-Semite.” How forbidden is it? I counted forty-five blog posts on Sullivan’s site with “AIPAC” in the title, all in attack mode and without scruple for accuracy. (This was in addition to two hundred–plus titles about Israel—all in a similar spirit.) AIPAC and seemingly all other supporters of Israel are routinely referred to by Sullivan as “the Greater Israel lobby,” “Greater Israel” being an allusion to that small faction in Israel that opposes trading land for peace, a position rejected by the overwhelming majority of Israelis and almost all of Israel’s supporters in the United States.
These diatribes prompted Sullivan’s former colleague at the New Republic, Leon Wieseltier, to offer this indictment: “the explanation that Sullivan adopts for almost everything that he does not like about America’s foreign policy . . . that it is all the result of the clandestine and cunningly organized power of a single and small ethnic group . . . has a provenance that should disgust all thinking people.”17 Jonathan Chait, a former colleague of both men, entered the fray, agreeing with Wieseltier’s characterization of Sullivan’s viewpoint but objecting to Wieseltier’s imputation of anti-Semitic motive: “just because an idea has a revolting provenance, it does not follow that everybody who subscribes to any version of it has the same motive.”18 And the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg seconded Chait on this point, although noting that Sullivan “disseminate[s] calumnies that can cause hatred of Jews” and adds that the role of AIPAC should be discussed “without prejudice; without the axiomatic assumption that American Jews who love Israel are disloyal to America; and without the Judeocentrism of the neo-Lindbergh set.”19 In other words, Chait and Goldberg agree that Sullivan indulges in fantastic and defamatory accusations against Jews, but they do not believe he hates Jews in his heart. Much the same was said about Buchanan in 1990 by people who had worked with him. It may all be true, but it strikes me as a distinction without a difference.
The British MP George Galloway is another who waxes indignant when accused of anti-Semitism. He calls Israel “a very ugly society”20 and says he “wish[es] for the destruction of that political state,”21 which he refers to as “this illegal, barbarous, savage state that calls itself Israel.”22 Galloway embraced Saddam Hussein in Baghdad in 1994, declaring “we are with you . . . until victory, until Jerusalem.”23 He also declared himself to have been so “enthralled” by Atzmon’s anti-Jewish book that he “read [his wife] a chapter . . . every night.”24 Yet, when a reporter for the Guardian tweeted that Galloway was an anti-Semite, he sued her under Britain’s notoriously vague libel laws in which even the truth of a statement is not an absolute defense.
Roger Waters (perhaps a friend of Atzmon’s since the latter, a professional musician, has sometimes played with Waters’s band, Pink Floyd) likewise denies being an anti-Semite. Yet he campaigns to persuade other rock musicians to boycott Israel on the grounds of “human rights” even while he has had no qualms about performing in Russia and China, and he has used a floating inflated pig emblazoned with a Star of David and some other symbols as a prop at concerts. From a very different walk of life, Karel De Gucht, a Belgian politician serving as the European commissioner for trade, told a radio audience that “the Jewish lobby” has a “grip . . . on American politics” and that “it is not easy to have, even with moderate Jews, a rational discussion about . . . the Middle East.” He, too, denied harboring any anti-Semitism and said he “did not mean . . . to cause offense.”25 It seems that while disparaging words and gestures are directed at Jews from various quarters, no one in today’s world is an anti-Semite.
While Buchanan is a man of the right, Galloway, Waters, and Atzmon are of the left, as is Sullivan today, although his ideological history has been a restless peregrination. Historically, anti-Semitism has most often been associated with the right, but today, rabid and obsessive hatred of Israel that reaches the borders of anti-Semitism and sometimes crosses them is mostly to be found on the left.
This is most evident in the BDS campaign, which is notable for its flagrant double standards. Although this campaign usually claims Palestinian human rights as its purpose, it has never addressed the universal mistreatment of Palestinians in Arab countries. Jordan has the best record, granting Palestinians citizenship and allowing them to practice professions like law and medicine from which they are barred in Lebanon, but even Jordan severely restricts the number of Palestinians allowed seats in its legislature. No such professional or political constraints exist in Israel. More broadly, Israel’s record on human rights is by all measures light years better than that of all of the states that surround it and most other states. The annual survey of Freedom House, highly respected by scholars and democratic governments for its rigor and objectivity, rates Israel 1.5 on its scale of freedom, on which 1 is the best possible score and 7 the worst. The median of the Arab countries is 5.5 and of the whole world, 3.5. Yet, neither the BDS movement itself, nor any of the churches, unions, or student governments that have voted to boycott or sanction Israel has ever done the same to any other state. This prompted Lawrence Summers, the former president of Harvard University, to say that this campaign is “anti-Semitic in effect if not in intent.”26
In respect not only to liberté but also the other two elements of the traditional principles of progressivism—égalité and fraternité—as well as such latter-day issues as environmentalism, Israel’s record ranks among the world’s best, while those of its enemies are among the worst. (I have documented this with careful details and statistics in Liberal Oasis: The Truth about Israel, the e-book companion to this volume.**) And yet in the dominant discourse of the contemporary left, all of this is trumped by the trope of the noble third world versus the malevolent West.
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The intensification of anti-Israel sentiment on the left also serves to generate a pool of Jewish denigrators of Israel whose ethnic background gives them added polemical leverage. Atzmon is one, and The Wandering Who sports an endorsement from another, Professor Richard Falk, urging “Jews . . . who care about real peace, as well as their own identity, [to] not only read, but reflect upon [it].” Falk, himself, crossed the line when he posted a cartoon on his blog, depicting a dog urinating on a representation of justice while wearing a garment marked “USA” and a skull cap with a Star of David. The website, Mondoweiss, perhaps the most ferociously anti-Israel American-based site (short of the lunatic fringe), whose editors as well as most writers are Jewish, offers itself as a kind of shield for anti-Semites. For example, it produced a story challenging the authenticity of genocidal remarks toward Jews by Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah even while the original words were available (in Arabic) on Nasrallah’s website. And when an anti-Israel mob besieged Paris’s de la Roquette synagogue, Mondoweiss ran a story claiming that the confrontation was initiated by the Jewish defenders, even though the French press and police reported the opposite. A more reputable example is the former New Republic editor Peter Beinart, who called for a boycott of goods from Jewish settlements in the West Bank, thus enlisting with reservations in the BDS movement as if oblivious to import of that campaign as well as to the memory that a boycott of Jewish businesses constituted the first salvo of the Holocaust.
Another consequence of the left-wing provenance of most Israel bashing and the anti-Semitism that sometimes accompanies it is the sharp rise of these phenomena on college and university campuses, where leftish opinion tends to dominate. In addition to a steady increase in BDS activity, recent school years have seen several incidents in which Jewish students have been harassed or even assaulted by anti-Israel demonstrators. In addition, in 2015 the student government at UCLA voted to reject a candidate of the school’s judicial body on the grounds that being Jewish would make her biased (although this was reversed out of embarrassment after it made a splash in the press).
A national survey of Jewish college students conducted by the Louis D. Brandeis Center and Trinity College in 2014 found that 54 percent said they had personally experienced or witnessed an anti-Semitic incident. The number is startlingly high, and since no prior studies exist for comparison, these data are hard to interpret. Perhaps anti-Semitism is spiking, but it may be that the current environment of extreme solicitousness toward racial and gender sensitivities prompts some Jewish students to take note of relatively minor slights that they might have ignored in a different era.
If so, they may be in for a surprise, for the prevailing atmosphere is less acutely reactive to anti-Semitism than insults to other identity groups. When a campaign at UCLA demanded that candidates for student government sign pledges not to take part in trips to Israel sponsored by pro-Israel organizations, the university chancellor registered his disapproval but insisted that the campaign “fall[s] squarely within the realm of free speech, and free speech is sacrosanct to any university campus.” Yet, within the year, when the David Horowitz Freedom Center put up dramatic posters linking the radical anti-Israel group Students for Justice in Palestine with Hamas and adding the hashtag, #JewHaters, the campus administration ordered them torn down. The posters were surely provocative, and the Horowitz center is not a student group, but either free speech is “sacrosanct” or it isn’t. If the pledge campaign had been aimed at a black or Latino or women’s or gay project, one wonders whether the sanctity of free speech would have seemed equally dispositive to the university administration.
In this respect, the university is only reflecting the outside political atmosphere, as emblemized by the president of the United States. Barack Obama has injected himself into controversies with a racial aspect, such as the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. and the shooting of Trayvon Martin; the president even enlisted the inflammatory militant, Al Sharpton, as his informal representative following the shooting of Michael Brown by a policeman in Ferguson, Missouri. Then, after the massacre of black worshippers by a white supremacist in South Carolina, Obama delivered a stirring funeral oration with a meditation on race. Obama apparently believed that these incidents touched on a transcendent issue for our country even though none involved the federal government.
Such a view is entirely understandable. What is hard to understand is how little moved the president seems to be by anti-Semitism. When French Muslim jihadists massacred editors of Charlie Hebdo and patrons at one of Paris’s main kosher markets in January 2015, singling out four Jews for death in the latter (and apparently one in the former, too), Obama displayed startling indifference. More than forty presidents and prime ministers joined a solidarity march of a million-plus Parisians, but Obama, who had nothing else listed on his schedule and whose presence would have been powerful, chose to stay home. Of course, an American president has less call to go to Paris than to Charleston, but the decision to stay away and also not send the Vice President or Secretary of State was baffling, all the more so the decision that the Attorney General, who happened to be in Paris, would not put in an appearance. More mystifying still, in an interview, Obama went out of his way to obscure the motive of this hate crime which was no less horrific and no less racist than the one in Charleston, dismissing it as “zealots . . . randomly shoot[ing] a bunch of folks in a deli.”
In response to the Charleston church massacre, Obama declared that “racism is in our DNA,” a rather sweeping indictment of the country that he leads. If it is true, it is no less true that anti-Semitism can be found in the DNA of Islam and Christianity, each of which defined itself in contradistinction to Judaism. Moreover, the world’s great sensitivity to racism is a post–World War Two development stemming from Hitler’s genocide of the Jews that the Nazis justified, indeed celebrated, in terms of “race.” How ironic, then, that today’s culture registers less alarm at threats or derision aimed at Jews than at other groups.
The rubber of Obama’s insouciance meets the road of Jewish endangerment at the point of Iran’s quest for a nuclear bomb. Trying to blunt the opposition by supporters of Israel, Obama gave an interview to Jeffrey Goldberg that stoked the very anxieties it was intended to allay. About the thinking of Iran’s rulers, he said:
The fact that you are anti-Semitic, or racist, doesn’t preclude you from being interested in survival. It doesn’t preclude you from being rational about the need to keep your economy afloat; it doesn’t preclude you from making strategic decisions about how you stay in power . . . . They may make irrational decisions with respect to discrimination, with respect to trying to use anti-Semitic rhetoric as an organizing tool. At the margins, where the costs are low, they may pursue policies based on hatred as opposed to self-interest. But the costs here are not low. . . . There are deep strains of anti-Semitism in the core regime, but . . . they also are interested in maintaining power, having some semblance of legitimacy inside their own country, which requires that they get themselves out of what is a deep economic rut that we’ve put them in.
Apart from the fact that there are no signs that the Iranian regime’s grip on power is weakening, a calculus that Obama himself seemed to make in 2009 when he conspicuously failed to speak in favor of the post-election uprising; and apart from the fact that long before nuclear sanctions, the Islamic Republic of Iran was one of numerous twentieth-century governments that made decisions driven by ideology that defied economic rationality, sometimes with catastrophic effects (for example China’s “Great Leap Forward” that generated a famine claiming an estimated twenty to fifty million lives)—apart from all that, no argument could be less reassuring to Jews than the premise that economic self-interest will trump Jew hatred. Considering the role Jews have played in commerce, the persecutions Jews suffered throughout their history were almost always economically counterproductive for their persecutors. Above all, there is the Holocaust, most of which was carried out after the tide of battle had already begun to turn against the Nazi regime. Despite its needing all possible resources for the war effort, men and materiel were diverted from military uses to the industrial-scale killing of noncombatant Jews. Contrary to Obama’s thought that policies based on hatred only hold “when the costs are low,” Hitler sacrificed his country, his regime, and his own life to the single-minded pursuit of his hatred. Is Obama innocent of all this history, or is he simply unable or unwilling to take it on board?
Jews face mounting peril. It makes little difference which comes first, hatred of Jews or hatred of Israel. The peril does not arise because the hatred is spreading: indeed it may not be spreading. The peril arises because the hatred is growing more lethal as radical Islam becomes ever more extreme. The Islamic republic of Iran once shocked the world with its wanton use of terror, its abuse of diplomatic immunity, its vaunting ambitions, and its festivals of hate. Then Al-Qaeda, which seemed so much more outré, eclipsed this, and now the self-styled Islamic State has in its turn outdone Al-Qaeda. The Jews of course are far from being the only targets, but they are a vulnerable one, and the attacks grow more frequent and more violent, making it increasingly difficult or impossible for Jews to live in various parts of the Diaspora.
The question of the hour is whether it will also make it impossible for Jews to live in Israel—or for the Jews of Israel to live. A regime that never tires of announcing its genocidal intent stands on the threshold of possessing a nuclear bomb that would fulfill its aim of becoming the hegemon of the Muslim Middle East and would give it the power to perpetrate a second Holocaust. Despite Obama’s jejune theories, Iran will not abandon this quest in order to raise its GDP.
This points to the second source of the peril confronting the Jews in addition to the heightening violence of radical Islam. It is the lethargy, cowardice, and even indifference of Western leaders. Thus, as before, the Jews are left on their own to contend with a threat to their very existence even though, as before, what threatens them will also come to threaten others. The outcome is uncertain, but thank God they are far better prepared to defend themselves this time.
Notes
1. Jen Gerson, “Pro-Gaza protests worldwide tainted by anti-Semitism; Calgary organizer to apologize for violence,” National Post, July 21, 2014. http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/pro-gaza-rallies-worldwide-tainted-by-anti-semitism-calgary-organizer-to-apologize-for-violence.
2. Jeffrey Goldberg, “Is It Time for the Jews to Leave Europe?,” Atlantic, April 2015.
3. “Omar Barghouti, 4 March 2009 University of Ottawa, Part 2 - Q&A.” https://vimeo.com/9605827.
4. “Turkey’s PM Says AKP Will not succumb to ‘Jewish Lobby,’” Hurriyet Daily News, February 8, 2015. http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/turkeys-pm-says-akp-will-not-succumb-to-jewish-lobby-.aspx?pageID=238&nID=78079&NewsCatID=338.
5. “Turkey’s Erdogan: ‘Jewish Capital’ Is Behind New York Times,” Haaretz, June 7, 2015. http://www.haaretz.com/news/middle-east/1.659931.
6. Article 28, Article 7, translation by the Avalon Project, Yale Law School. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp.
7. Stuart Winer, “Palestinian envoy says Jews plotting world domination,” Times of Israel, July 8, 2015. http://www.timesofisrael.com/palestinian-envoy-says-jews-plotting-world-domination/?utm_source=The+Times+of+Israel+Daily+Edition&utm_campaign=744ab22984-2015_07_08&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_adb46cec92-744ab22984-54382445.
8. Samuel Tadros, “The Sources of Egyptian Anti-Semitism,” American Interest, April 21, 2014. http://www.the-american-interest.com/2014/04/21/the-sources-of-egyptian-anti-semitism/.
9. Gardiner Harris, “Fulfilling a Promise, Jewish Center in India Reopens After Terror Attack in 2008,” New York Times, August 26, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/27/world/asia/mumbai-jewish-center-reopens-after-08-terror-attack.html.
10. “ADL Poll of Over 100 Countries Finds More Than One-Quarter of Those Surveyed Infected With Anti-Semitic Attitudes,” Press Release, Anti-Defamation League, New York, New York, May 13, 2014. http://www.adl.org/press-center/press-releases/anti-semitism-international/adl-global-100-poll.html#.VZGMRRtVhHw?referrer=http://global100.adl.org/.
11. Goldberg, “Is it Time?”
12. “ADL Poll,” 2014.
13. Damien Sharkov, “Pro-ISIS Demonstrators Call for ‘Death to Jews’ in the Netherlands,” Newsweek Europe, July 30, 2014.
14. Gilad Atmon, The Wandering Who: A Study of Jewish Identity Politics (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2011), pp. 54, 188, 175.
15. Ibid.
16. John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), p. 188.
17. Leon Wieseltier, “Something Much Darker,” New Republic, February 8, 2010. http://www.newrepublic.com/article/something-much-darker.
18. Jonathan Chait, “Andrew Sullivan Is Not an Anti-Semite,” New Republic, February 9, 2010. http://www.newrepublic.com/blog/andrew-sullivan-not-anti-semite.
19. Jeffrey Goldberg, “Leon Wieseltier, Andrew Sullivan and Anti-Semitism,” Atlantic, February 10, 2010. http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/02/leon-wieseltier-andrew-sullivan-and-anti-semitism/35682/.
20. “George Galloway Blames Israel for Ukraine Revolution.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ecTkBDwDKg. I am grateful to Adam Levick of UK Media Watch whose research pointed me to the various video clips of Galloway cited in this paragraph.
21. “G. Galloway on the difference between anti Zionism & anti Semitism.” https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=544780715569990.
22. “Galloway: Bradford is an Israel Free Zone.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMSM5vvAmYs.
23. “‘I Greet You in the Name of Thousands of Britons,’” Times (London), January 20, 1994.
24. “Episode 59,” RT Question More. Sputnik. http://rt.com/shows/sputnik/218959-gilhad-atzmon-dj-motown/.
25. Stephen Castle, “European Trade Chief Accused of Anti-Semitism,” New York Times, September 3, 2010.
26. “Academic Freedom and Anti-Semitism,” Remarks of Lawrence H. Summers, Columbia Center for Law and Liberty, January 29, 2015. http://larrysummers.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/AcademicFreedomAndAntiSemitism_FINAL1-2.pdf.
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