THE HATE THAT DARES NOT SPEAK ITS NAME
Walter Russell Mead
American Interest, July 18, 2011
This time of year it is worth remembering Mein Kampf, the turgid and unreadable Bible of the Nazi movement that was published back in July of 1925. The last time I looked, you could still buy it at the international airport newstand in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur—along with other classics of anti-Semitism like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the collected rants of Henry Ford in the Dearborn Independent. Jeffrey Goldberg tells me that he recently saw Hitler’s masterwork on the bestseller shelf of the Borders book store at the Mall of the Emirates in Dubai.
When Hitler wrote, it was still socially OK to be an anti-Semite. In some circles it was mandatory. As a consequence of Hitler’s life’s work, it is now as unfashionable to be an anti-Semite as it is to name your child Adolf.
The truth is that anti-Semitism is alive and well and not even particularly rare; it’s just that many of today’s anti-Semites like to think of themselves as enlightened, modern people and get all huffy and hissy if anyone accuses them of prejudice in any form. Many who in past times would have been open and honest about their anti-Semitism, now try to hide the truth even from themselves.
But anti-Semitism involves belief in any or all of the following ideas:
–Jews are more clannish than other people and act in concert to support a specifically Jewish agenda.
–Jews deploy extraordinary wealth with almost superhuman cunning in support of the Jewish agenda.
–As a religious and national minority, Jews cannot flourish without attacking the traditional values of their host society. In every country Jews seek to weaken national culture, religion, values and cohesion.
–Jews are not a national group or a people in the way that others are; they do not have the same right to establish a nation state that other peoples do.
–Where Jewish interests are concerned, the appearance of open debate in our society and many others is a carefully constructed illusion. In reality, Jews work together to block open debate on issues they care about and those who resist the Jewish agenda are marginalized in public discussion.…
Hitler added a sixth pillar of anti-Semitism that the only way to successfully oppose the Jewish agenda was to kill all the Jews.
Since Hitler’s death, the world has defined anti-Semitism down. Nurturing ancient fantasies of secret Jewish cabals that control the media and play politicians like puppets on a string, and making political judgments based on these fantasies isn’t sort of or almost anti-Semitic. To believe that Jews control public discourse and the media and bend the gentile masses to their sinister agenda is the essence of old fashioned anti-Semite. In some countries these beliefs are so common that they are no longer recognized as an aggressive and communicable mental disease. These ideas have become so widely accepted that they are seldom questioned or examined; when that happens, a whole society is poisoned and distorted.
On the anniversary of Mein Kampf’s publication people of good will everywhere should remember the need to fight one of the most vicious forms of prejudice that the world has ever known.… In Nazi Germany people were imprisoned and even killed for trying to fight anti-Semitism. In America we are free to fight it, but too many of us choose to ignore this hate that dares not speak its name. Anti-Semitism is real, it is murderous, and it is very much with us today. Speak the truth and shame the devil. Whatever your religion, your politics, your views about Israeli policy, fighting anti-Semitism is part of what it means to be a decent human being.
We must all do our part to keep this filthy hatred in the ignominious pit where it belongs.
WHAT EXPLAINS FASHIONABLE HOSTILITY TOWARD ISRAEL?
Martin Peretz
New Republic, July 20, 2011
We live in a world in which the contagion of anti-Semitism is spreading once again. Indeed, the profusion of hostility to Israel is the proof that hatred of Jews is now quite alright, thank you. But, whatever individual and isolated wrongs Israel commits, there are comparisons to be drawn. And the comparisons are to the Arab states and to Palestinian Arab society, in which oppression has flourished since the early years of the last century. And has not stopped flourishing yet.
There must be a certain frisson that attaches to the loathing of Jews and of Israel by the chic folk who express it and cotton to it, like those who carried around Mao’s “Little Red Book” in a previous generation or wore a Che Guevara sweatshirt long after everyone knew he was a murderer. In the last few months and around the Cannes movie festival season, the world was treated to notable outbursts of malignance targeting the Jewish people and its polity. From the first generation of the new cinema to its most recent fashionable eminence came declarations of revulsion against the nation designated for hate: the first from Jean-Luc Godard and the last from Lars von Trier. At just about the same time, the idolized Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis pronounced his wisdom: “Everything that happens in the world today has to do with the Zionists,” including the Greek financial catastrophe. And, of course, John Galliano, poor John Galliano who worked in the schmata trade. This is actually something of an epidemic. In Europe, the epidemic has also infected both the political and journalistic congregations—although in somewhat, but only somewhat, less hateful language. Western Europe does not especially like Jews or Israelis, but it also doesn’t want Arabs or Muslims as neighbors.
America is not alone in the world in its friendship for Israel or in its historical hospitality to Jews. Already, in the days of the early Jewish migration to the United States, the new arrivals grasped that this was di goldene medinah, the golden country. The American people are allies of the state of Israel, however much its prime minister irritates Barack Obama. More to the point: The relationship between America and Israel is about historic and strategic ties, not about whether Obama is offended by Bibi’s rhetorical style. But why is he so offended? Is he as offended by President Chavez of Venezuela?
Right-wing anti-Semitism in the country is now fundamentally a bad memory. Yes, of course, Pat Buchanan! And who else? But left-wing anti-Semitism is now an advancing reality, one that traces its past to the scheissjuden of Karl Marx. Still, essential anti-Semitism is hard to express except in jokes about the garish Jewish rich, which itself is an expiring phenomenon. The timorous Jew no longer exists: He has been replaced by the skilled and defiant Israeli soldier. Perhaps because of this soldier, Israel has become the vehicle for anti-Semitism as well as its target. Some feel this soldier is more than a bit uppity, reversing the sacred cerebral role of the Jew in history. (You can tell that to the Jewish Nobelists and to the scientists and scientific entrepreneurs who have made Israel the most fertile intellectual soil in the world, maybe excluding California.)
Not everyone on the left who is bothered by this is an anti-Semite. Many are simply Jews who cannot reconcile themselves to the notion of a strong Israel. Consider Roger Cohen, the International Herald Tribune columnist, who told us about the happy state of the Jews of Iran and who virtually non-stop tells us about the sins of the Jewish state, almost like I do about its virtues. He has also told us, poor man, that he was called a “Yid” at Westminster, “one of Britain’s top private schools, an inspiring place hard by Westminster Abbey,” and suffered other minor indignities that American Jews ordinarily do not. Anyway, he now fits in quite comfily, and, when he writes about Israel, he follows the model ofThe Guardian, which is known to, well, sort of improvise. He doesn’t much appear in The New York Times, the IHT’s blood relative. But this is hardly because the Times editors don’t like his opinions, like the ones they turned down when Richard Goldstone wrote about the colossal errors of his own report. The judge’s confession was subsequently published by The Washington Post.
In the same category, are some of the writers at The New Yorker. Frankly, I don’t usually read the magazine (although it has come to me gratis for years), which sometimes makes me sit dumb-faced at Cambridge dinner parties where its opinions are the last word. And I’ve completely sworn off some of its writers. I don’t believe a single word Seymour Hersh writes: His last report, I’m told, informed his readers that Iran doesn’t have a nuclear device and is not close to having one, and he was informed of this by a man wearing a raincoat on a bench in Dupont Circle.… The New Yorker…is now moving to the World Trade Center site perhaps because it wants to be close to the mosque that may or may not be built.…
The thick-with-ads, oh-so gracefully written weekly is a model of fashionable views on Israel. David Remnick, its editor, whose work on Russia I do really greatly admire, recently published a spate of his own articles about Israel, which I read. My judgment is that he knows squat about Israel, maybe because the only reportage he seems to read about the Jewish state is from Ha’aretz, which is to Israel what PM used to be for the United States. Well, you don’t know what PM was? All I can say is that it was not quite the Daily Worker. But let me confess: Ha’aretz is my home page. I am a masochist, and I like to see how far journalists can stray from the facts. Very far. Every day, actually.
Then, there is Rick Hertzberg, who was my student at Harvard.… We are friends—I would even say loving friends—but with a deep undercurrent of testy ideological distrust. His hero is Mahatma Gandhi. Mine is George Washington. Maybe there’s the difference in a nutshell, one a nutcase and a pretentious nutcase at that, the other a hard nut.…
[Rick wrote a recent] “Talk of the Town” piece titled “O’Bama vs. Netanyahoo.” Maybe the placement and the headline are a tip-off that this is not serious. But Rick’s frivolity—he is congenitally but congenially frivolous—doesn’t disguise the fact that he is writing about deadly serious matters. One by one, he ticks off the rhetorical contentions between Israel and the Palestinians about which, he basically says, the Palestinians win hands down. I am afraid that the way he examines the first contention is so simple-minded that I’ll have to repeat myself or send Rick back to school.
He quotes Netanyahu as saying in his speech to Congress that, in any agreement, “Israel will be ‘required to give up parts of the ancestral Jewish homeland.’” So Rick responds on behalf of Mahmoud Abbas, “Yes, but the Palestinians have already been required to give up parts of an ancestral Arab homeland.” Actually, the greatest part of Palestine is Jordan, where most Palestinians live. So, in a very real sense, they already have a country, except that it is ruled by an authoritarian monarchy that was imposed on them by the British. That the Arabs of eastern Palestine don’t live under democratic rule is the fault of neither David Ben-Gurion nor Netanyahu. It is a result of a deeply ingrained, political and social structure that, across the huge swath of land from Morocco to Iraq, has been imposed, without a single exception, by dictators. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t want Israel to operate or control or, for heaven’s sake, absorb the West Bank. Let the Arabs on the east and west banks of the Jordan River team up and see what they can make of their soon-to-be one country. I don’t think it will be pretty. You do? Good luck.
I also don’t believe that the Arabs of Palestine want to retire this conflict and certainly not in a reasonable way. A reasonable way means no right of return, and it also means that Israel needs, for its own elementary security, for its densest population strip to be wider than ten miles. So it demands with the insistent backing of the citizenry—except some (and only some) of the local Arabs and Remnick’s coterie of friends at Ha’aretz—that border adjustments in its favor be made. Please do remember that Israel also won two wars to turn back invasions of its tiny turf, which many, most Palestinians would deny it. With the Arab world in tumultuous flux, and the tumult now spreading and intensifying in Jordan, it is possible, even likely that the kingdom will be no longer. And then, you will have perhaps 75 percent to 80 percent of historic Palestine under Palestinian control. A civil society it will not be.…
Hertzberg accuses Netanyahu of having, in his speech, “laid down maximal demands.” This first of these is a precondition: “recognition of Israel as a Jewish state.” This goes back to November 29, 1947, when the General Assembly passed the Partition Plan for Palestine for a “Jewish state” and an “Arab state.” The Jewish Agency, which was the democratically elected proto-government of Zionism in Palestine, accepted partition, even though the territory allotted to the new state was tiny and not contiguous. (By the way, Obama promised the Palestinians contiguity. Nifty. So how, then, will Israel remain contiguous? Oh, so finicky and so careless, Mr. President. During the campaign, I testified in Florida day after day to Obama’s savvy about and commitment to Israel’s security. I no longer think he cares much. And contiguity would only deepen the ongoing civil war between Fatah and Hamas, with which the administration will surely soon begin talks, like the drawn-out talks with Syria of which doubtless the president is proud and unrepentant. Oops! As of last week, the president and Hillary Clinton no longer think Assad possesses legitimacy.)
Each for their own geographical interests, five Arab states began a war on May 14, 1948, the morrow of Jewish independence. And the Palestinians? Some few of them joined up with the certified Nazi, Haj Amin al-Husseini who, from Cairo, called for resistance. Most of the fighters (and they weren’t legion) teamed up with Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, which had their own categorical territorial designs, none of which translated into an independent Palestine. The Palestinian Arab fighters were not fighting for an Arab Palestine. In the end, what they won was the West Bank for Jordan and the Gaza Strip for Egypt. This is a national history of which to be proud, is it not?
“Nearly as appalling as Netanyahu’s intransigence was the mindlessness of the senators and representatives, Republican and Democratic, who rewarded him with ovation after ovation.” Rick attributes this response to “certain Jewish and evangelical constituencies.” Of course, why didn’t I think of this? After all, the Jewish population of the United States ranges from 1.4 percent to 2.5 percent, depending on who does the counting. But all Jews are rich. So that balances out their small numbers. And they are also covert and crafty. Besides, given their cunning, they’ve teamed up with evangelicals who are certainly not covert and crafty but frank and folksy. It’s an unbeatable combination, these two ends of the social structure. One thing Rick knows from his own experience is that the widespread, but much exaggerated, ownership of the media by Jews does not explain America’s support for Israel. Take his own magazine, owned by the Newhouse family. Hardly a kind word has been printed about Israel since 1963, when Hannah Arendt assailed the Jewish state for putting Adolf Eichmann on trial. And what about The New York Times? Nuf said. Anyway, it’s now owned by its creditors.
Let me go back to those senators and congressmen who so offended Hertzberg. And how dare they so offend Obama! One conclusion I draw is that J-Street is a flop, a complete flop. It has spent millions of dollars—much of it George Soros’s, I presume—and can’t get more than a handful of politicians to sit on their hands as all of their other colleagues rise to enthusiasm and applause.
But there is this persistent coterie, influential among the elites, and especially the smart-ass Jewish elites, who do not rise and are not enthusiastic. And so, despite all the true evil in the world, the designated target of the chic progressives, including alienated Jews, is the Jewish state. There are many predecessors of the type in history.
(Martin Peretz is editor-in-chief emeritus of The New Republic.)
IN THE HEART OF ISRAEL, JEW HATRED IS ON FULL DISPLAY
Jonathan Spyer
Pajamas Media, July 5, 2011
Entering the bookshop at the American Colony Hotel recently, I noted a prominently placed display of four books directly facing the entrance. The books were the first thing seen by any visitor to the shop. They were evidently intended to give a representative sample of the kind of fare available there. They succeeded in this, and in something more.
The American Colony is one of the best hotels in the city, a favored place for European diplomats, journalists, peace processors, and others in the colorful array that the city attracts. While sometimes described as “neutral ground,” it may more accurately be seen as the main stronghold of the international pro-Palestinian presence and sentiment in Jerusalem. It is therefore as good a place as any for assessing that sector of opinion.
The choice of books displayed at the bookshop’s entrance sums up elegantly the main components of the disturbing ethos among supporters of the Palestinians in the West.
The books on display were The Founding Myths of Modern Israel, by Roger Garaudy; Married to another Man: Israel’s dilemma in Palestine, by Ghada Karmi; I Shall Not Hate, by Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish; and The Palestine Papers—the end of the Road?, by Clayton Swisher. Come with me on a brief tour through them. And let’s speak plainly, as the time requires.
Roger Garaudy is a veteran French Communist who later converted to Islam. His book combines Holocaust denial with calls for the destruction of Israel. He marshals the “evidence” assembled by Holocaust deniers over the years to dispute the existence of gas chambers in Nazi death camps. The Holocaust, Garaudy thinks, was a myth intended to create sympathy for the theft of Palestine by the Jews. Hitler’s main enemies were Communists, says Garaudy, and he had no plan for the destruction of the Jews. Garaudy’s book is a straightforward example of Jew hatred of the most vitriolic and extreme type.
Ghada Karmi’s book seeks to refute the idea of Jewish peoplehood. She repeats a number of myths recently revived by anti-Zionist propagandists in the current battle to delegitimize Israel. The claim that Ashkenazi Jews are descended in the main from Turkic “Khazars” is re-aired. This claim, a favorite of anti-Israel propaganda recently restated by Professor Shlomo Sand, is intended to disprove the notion that Ashkenazi Jews descend from Jewish communities originating in ancient Israel. Karmi blithely dismisses as “open to question” recent evidence deriving from thousands of DNA studies that refute these claims. She believes, as she has stated elsewhere, that the Israelis and Palestinians are heading for an apocalyptic “cataclysm,” out of which a Palestinian Arab state will emerge.
Clayton Swisher’s contribution is to argue that there is no basis for a peace process that includes accepting the continued existence of any Jewish state. He argues that recent leaks from the offices of PA chief negotiator Saeb Erekat mark the final demise of the “two state solution.” Swisher argues that it is all Israel’s fault, despite the fact that the leaks show many examples of the opposite. For example, the leaks showed Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert expressing willingness for concessions including the redivision of Jerusalem and the ceding of 98.7% of the West Bank. Swisher, as he has said elsewhere, favors those Arabs “committed to liberating all of historic Palestine.”
Dr. Abuelaish’s book is a work by a Gaza physician whose three daughters were tragically killed during Operation Cast Lead. They died as IDF troops battled Hamas snipers and mortar teams in the area of Beit Lahiya. There is no reason to believe that Abuelaish shares any of the opinions contained in the other three volumes. But given the overall display, it is reasonable to assume that the store’s goal is to stress Israel as committing war crimes rather than Abuelaish favoring conciliation. Certainly, and unsurprisingly, one would search in vain for any volumes discussing similar losses of civilian life among Israeli Jews.
Here, then, is the display that greets European diplomats, salaried peace processors, and elegant locals meeting in the courtyard and coffee shop, passing or entering the bookshop of the beautiful and peaceful American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem.…
This is the ideology behind the flotillas, boycotts, and furious demonstrations against Israel in the year 2011, decades after the Palestinians supposedly accepted Israel’s existence and turned toward seeking a two-state solution. This is the idea behind which Islamists and “progressives” can happily unite. This is the channel through which the familiar and foul substance of antisemitism is going to flow right back into the Western mainstream. Unless it is prevented from doing so.
LEFT BEHIND
David Greenberg
Slate, July 1, 2011
Some welcome news: After enduring several weeks of criticisms, both fair and foul, Yale University has launched a new program for the study of anti-Semitism that replaces the center it shuttered. The new director, Maurice Samuels, a professor of French literature (whose scholarship has examined attitudes toward Jews in 19th-century France), is someone I know and admire as a scholar and a person. Samuels has said to me and in his public statements that the reconstituted program won’t shrink from uncomfortable aspects of anti-Semitism in the world today. There is every reason to take him at his word.
Why Yale closed the institute in the first place remains hard to discern. Universities, for all their talk of openness, can be as secretive and byzantine as intelligence agencies, and any reporting about academia, especially on politically fraught topics, has to be read cautiously. Depending on whom you believe, a faculty review board killed off the original institute either because it buckled to the forces of political correctness or because the institute’s director, Charles Small, who had no other connection to the university, used his platform too frequently to air conservative, stridently pro-Israel journalistic advocacy. These accounts aren’t mutually exclusive.…
The flap about [the Institute’s] closure still raises important historical questions: How did a concern with anti-Semitism, whether scholarly or political, come to be seen as the province of the right? How did liberalism—historically the philosophy of toleration and equal rights—come to be so squeamish about confronting Jew-hatred in its contemporary forms? Though little asked or discussed, these questions form a troubling undercurrent to the debate.…
My fellow liberals are especially muted when anti-Semitism takes the form of anti-Zionism. Yes, yes: Criticism of Israel isn’t necessarily anti-Semitic. Everyone agrees about that. What liberals seem to have a hard time admitting these days is that criticisms of Israel can ever be anti-Semitic. Common sense and social science both tell us there’s a correlation.…
The small number of liberal intellectuals who regularly address anti-Semitism—people like Paul Berman, Jeff Goldberg, Alan Dershowitz, and Ron Rosenbaum—get labeled, or libeled, as neocons or Likudniks. Those epithets reveal just how much the right has come, at least in American journalistic discourse, to own the terrain of supporting Israel and calling out anti-Semitism.
The historical reasons for this shift are complex. Although the reasons predate 9/11, the terrorist attacks and the events they set in motion have a lot to do with the rapidity of the change in the last decade. For many liberals, especially Jews, September 11 had the effect of awakening them to the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism in the world, after having long treated anxieties about Jew-hatred as an atavistic obsession of their parents.
For others, however, the attacks triggered what might be called a double backlash. Liberals (and many conservatives), anticipating an outbreak of nationalistic anti-Islamic feeling in an angry and wounded country, admirably took pains to fight negative depictions of Islam. But those laudable demonstrations of toleration sometimes became muddled, leading some liberals, as Leon Wieseltier put it, to start “granting Muslims a reprieve from the rigors of liberalism.…”
A watershed was reached in 2006 with the publication of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s tract The Israel Lobby. The book trafficked in age-old anti-Semitic stereotypes to conjure up the demon of a cabal of Jews and their allies who led America to war in Iraq against its national interest and were trying to do so again in Iran. Although soberly refuted from many angles, the book uncorked a bottled-up resentment against Israel’s American backers, allowing extremist arguments to migrate from the fringes into the mainstream. Coming at the high point of dissatisfaction with the Iraq war, it amplified and encouraged conspiratorial explanations that blamed the decision for war on second-tier neoconservative Jewish officials, like Paul Wolfowitz, more than on top-tier, gentile, not-particularly-neo conservatives like George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Don Rumsfeld.
As these developments opened the door to the frank expression and reflexive rationalization of anti-Semitic views, another, longer-term trend was eroding the cultural taboos against that expression: the vanishing memory of the Holocaust. The murder of 6 million moved the world’s conscience enough to finally bless the formation of a Jewish state in 1948. More than six decades later, the generation that liberated the death camps is dying off; so are the survivors. It’s becoming easier to treat the Holocaust as part of a dusty history—important to study, like the French Revolution or the fall of Rome, but no more pertinent to today’s politics than those long-ago events.
Stanley Fish, the New York Times’ most consistently stimulating op-ed columnist and an occasional commentator on matters Jewish, wrote with self-awareness some time ago about his sensitivity to anti-Zionism. It was magnified, he said, by two factors: the time he spends on campuses, “where anti-Israel sentiment flourishes and is regarded more or less as a default position,” and his age (now 73). Unlike friends just 10 years younger, Fish remembered World War II—as do his peers everywhere. For decades those memories chilled anti-Semitism and extended the world’s concern and protection to the Jewish people. Now they are fading.
In the face of this sad, historical inevitability, what is likely to recommit liberals in America (and the West generally) to a concern with anti-Semitism? It is a question worthy of dispassionate study.