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Sharon's Post-Incursion
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May 31, 2002
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June 4,
2002
What is Antisemitism?
By Michael Neumann
Every once in a while, some left-wing Jewish writer will take
a deep breath, open up his (or her) great big heart, and tell us that
criticism of Israel or Zionism is not antisemitism. Silently they
congratulate themselves on their courage. With a little sigh, they
suppress any twinge of concern that maybe the goyim--let alone the
Arabs--can't be trusted with this dangerous knowledge.
Sometimes it is gentile hangers-on, whose ethos if
not their identity aspires to Jewishness, who take on this task. Not to be
utterly risqué, they then hasten to remind us that antisemitism is
nevertheless to be taken very seriously. That Israel, backed by a
pronounced majority of Jews, happens to be waging a race war against the
Palestinians is all the more reason we should be on our guard. Who knows?
it might possibly stir up some resentment!
I take a different view. I think we should almost
never take antisemitism seriously, and maybe we should have some fun with
it. I think it is particularly unimportant to the Israel-Palestine
conflict, except perhaps as a diversion from the real issues. I will argue
for the truth of these claims; I also defend their propriety. I don't
think making them is on a par with pulling the wings off flies.
"Antisemitism", properly and narrowly speaking,
doesn't mean hatred of semites; that is to confuse etymology with
definition. It means hatred of Jews. But here, immediately, we come up
against the venerable shell-game of Jewish identity: "Look! We're a
religion! No! a race! No! a cultural entity! Sorry--a religion!" When we
tire of this game, we get suckered into another: "anti-Zionism is
antisemitism! " quickly alternates with: "Don't confuse Zionism with
Judaism! How dare you, you antisemite!"
Well, let's be good sports. Let's try defining
antisemitism as broadly as any supporter of Israel would ever want:
antisemitism can be hatred of the Jewish race, or culture, or religion, or
hatred of Zionism. Hatred, or dislike, or opposition, or slight
unfriendliness.
But supporters of Israel won't find this game as
much fun as they expect. Inflating the meaning of 'antisemitism' to
include anything politically damaging to Israel is a double-edged sword.
It may be handy for smiting your enemies, but the problem is that
definitional inflation, like any inflation, cheapens the currency. The
more things get to count as antisemitic, the less awful antisemitism is
going to sound. This happens because, while no one can stop you from
inflating definitions, you still don't control the facts. In particular,
no definition of 'antisemitism' is going to eradicate the substantially
pro-Palestinian version of the facts which I espouse, as do most people in
Europe, a great many Israelis, and a growing number of North
Americans.
What difference does that make? Suppose, for
example, an Israeli rightist says that the settlements represent the
pursuit of aspirations fundamental to the Jewish people, and to oppose the
settlements is antisemitism. We might have to accept this claim; certainly
it is difficult to refute. But we also cannot abandon the well-founded
belief that the settlements strangle the Palestinian people and extinguish
any hope of peace. So definitional acrobatics are all for nothing: we can
only say, screw the fundamental aspirations of the Jewish people; the
settlements are wrong. We must add that, since we are obliged to oppose
the settlements, we are obliged to be antisemitic. Through definitional
inflation, some form of 'antisemitism' has become morally
obligatory.
It gets worse if anti-Zionism is labeled
antisemitic, because the settlements, even if they do not represent
fundamental aspirations of the Jewish people, are an entirely plausible
extension of Zionism. To oppose them is indeed to be anti-Zionist, and
therefore, by the stretched definition, antisemitic. The more antisemitism
expands to include opposition to Israeli policies, the better it looks.
Given the crimes to be laid at the feet of Zionism, there is another
simple syllogism: anti-Zionism is a moral obligation, so, if anti-Zionism
is antisemitism, antisemitism is a moral obligation.
What crimes? Even most apologists for Israel have
given up denying them, and merely hint that noticing them is a bit
antisemitic. After all, Israel 'is no worse than anyone else'. First, so
what? At age six we knew that "everyone's doing it" is no excuse; have we
forgotten? Second, the crimes are no worse only when divorced from their
purpose. Yes, other people have killed civilians, watched them die for
want of medical care, destroyed their homes, ruined their crops, and used
them as human shields. But Israel does these things to correct the
inaccuracy of Israel Zangwill's 1901 assertion that "Palestine is a
country without a people; the Jews are a people without a country". It
hopes to create a land entirely empty of gentiles, an Arabia deserta in
which Jewish children can laugh and play throughout a wasteland called
peace.
Well before the Hitler era, Zionists came thousands
of miles to dispossess people who had never done them the slightest harm,
and whose very existence they contrived to ignore. Zionist atrocities were
not part of the initial plan. They emerged as the racist obliviousness of
a persecuted people blossomed into the racial supremacist ideology of a
persecuting one. That is why the commanders who directed the rapes,
mulilations and child-killings of Deir Yassin went on to become prime
ministers of Israel.(*) But these murders were not enough. Today, when
Israel could have peace for the taking, it conducts another round of
dispossession, slowly, deliberately making Palestine unliveable for
Palestinians, and liveable for Jews. Its purpose is not defense or public
order, but the extinction of a people. True, Israel has enough PR-savvy to
eliminate them with an American rather than a Hitlerian level of violence.
This is a kinder, gentler genocide that portrays its perpetrators as
victims.
Israel is building a racial state, not a religious
one. Like my parents, I have always been an atheist. I am entitled by the
biology of my birth to Israeli citizenship; you, perhaps, are the most
fervent believer in Judaism, but are not. Palestinians are being squeezed
and killed for me, not for you. They are to be forced into Jordan, to
perish in a civil war. So no, shooting Palestinian civilians is not like
shooting Vietnamese or Chechen civilians. The Palestinians aren't
'collateral damage' in a war against well-armed communist or separatist
forces. They are being shot because Israel thinks all Palestinians should
vanish or die, so people with one Jewish grandparent can build
subdivisions on the rubble of their homes. This is not the bloody mistake
of a blundering superpower but an emerging evil, the deliberate strategy
of a state conceived in and dedicated to an increasingly vicious ethnic
nationalism. It has relatively few corpses to its credit so far, but its
nuclear weapons can kill perhaps 25 million people in a few
hours.
Do we want to say it is antisemitic to accuse, not
just the Israelis, but Jews generally of complicity in these crimes
against humanity? Again, maybe not, because there is a quite reasonable
case for such assertions. Compare them, for example, to the claim that
Germans generally were complicit in such crimes. This never meant that
every last German, man, woman, idiot and child, were guilty. It meant that
most Germans were. Their guilt, of course, did not consist in shoving
naked prisoners into gas chambers. It consisted in support for the people
who planned such acts, or--as many overwrought, moralistic Jewish texts
will tell you--for denying the horror unfolding around them, for failing
to speak out and resist, for passive consent. Note that the extreme danger
of any kind of active resistance is not supposed to be an excuse
here.
Well, virtually no Jew is in any kind of danger from
speaking out. And speaking out is the only sort of resistance required. If
many Jews spoke out, it would have an enormous effect. But the
overwhelming majority of Jews do not, and in the vast majority of cases,
this is because they support Israel. Now perhaps the whole notion of
collective responsibility should be discarded; perhaps some clever person
will convince us that we have to do this. But at present, the case for
Jewish complicity seems much stronger than the case for German complicity.
So if it is not racist, and reasonable, to say that the Germans were
complicit in crimes against humanity, then it is not racist, and
reasonable, to say the same of the Jews. And should the notion of
collective responsibility be discarded, it would still be reasonable to
say that many, perhaps most adult Jewish individuals support a state that
commits war crimes, because that's just true. So if saying these things is
antisemitic, than it can be reasonable to be antisemitic.
In other words there is a choice to be made. You can
use 'antisemitism' to fit your political agenda, or you can use it as a
term of condemnation, but you can't do both. If antisemitism is to stop
coming out reasonable or moral, it has to be narrowly and unpolemically
defined. It would be safe to confine antisemitism to explicitly racial
hatred of Jews, to attacking people simply because they had been born
Jewish. But it would be uselessly safe: even the Nazis did not claim to
hate people simply because they had been born Jewish. They claimed to hate
the Jews because they were out to dominate the Aryans.
Clearly such a
view should count as antisemitic, whether it belongs to the cynical
racists who concocted it or to the fools who swallowed it.
There is only one way to guarantee that the term
"antisemitism" captures all and only bad acts or attitudes towards Jews.
We have to start with what we can all agree are of that sort, and see that
the term names all and only them. We probably share enough morality to do
this.
For instance, we share enough morality to say that
all racially based acts and hatreds are bad, so we can safely count them
as antisemitic. But not all 'hostility towards Jews', even if that means
hostility towards the overwhelming majority of Jews, should count as
antisemitic. Nor should all hostility towards Judaism, or Jewish
culture.
I, for example, grew up in Jewish culture and, like
many people growing up in a culture, I have come to dislike it. But it is
unwise to count my dislike as antisemitic, not because I am Jewish, but
because it is harmless. Perhaps not utterly harmless: maybe, to some tiny
extent, it will somehow encourage some of the harmful acts or attitudes
we'd want to call antisemitic. But so what? Exaggerated philosemitism,
which regards all Jews as brilliant warm and witty saints, might have the
same effect. The dangers posed by my dislike are much too small to matter.
Even widespread, collective loathing for a culture is normally harmless.
French culture, for instance, seems to be widely disliked in North
America, and no one, including the French, consider this some sort of
racial crime.
Not even all acts and attitudes harmful to Jews
generally should be considered antisemitic. Many people dislike American
culture; some boycott American goods. Both the attitude and the acts may
harm Americans generally, but there is nothing morally objectionable about
either. Defining these acts as anti-Americanism will only mean that some
anti-Americanism is perfectly acceptable. If you call opposition to
Israeli policies antisemitic on the grounds that this opposition harms
Jews generally, it will only mean that some antisemitism is equally
acceptable.
If antisemitism is going to be a term of
condemnation, then, it must apply beyond explicitly racist acts or
thoughts or feelings. But it cannot apply beyond clearly unjustified and
serious hostility to Jews. The Nazis made up historical fantasies to
justify their attacks; so do modern antisemites who trust in the Protocols
of the Elders of Zion. So do the closet racists who complain about Jewish
dominance of the economy. This is antisemitism in a narrow, negative sense
of the word. It is action or propaganda designed to hurt Jews, not because
of anything they could avoid doing, but because they are what they are. It
also applies to the attitudes that propaganda tries to instill. Though not
always explicitly racist, it involves racist motives and the intention to
do real damage. Reasonably well-founded opposition to Israeli policies,
even if that opposition hurts all Jews, does not fit this description.
Neither does simple, harmless dislike of things Jewish.
So far, I've suggested that it's best to narrow the
definition of antisemitism so that no act can be both antisemitic and
unobjectionable. But we can go further. Now that we're through playing
games, let's ask about the role of *genuine*, bad antisemitism in the
Israel-Palestine conflict, and in the world at large.
Undoubtedly there is genuine antisemitism in the
Arab world: the distribution of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the
myths about stealing the blood of gentile babies. This is utterly
inexcusable. So was your failure to answer Aunt Bee's last letter. In
other words, it is one thing to be told: you must simply accept that
antisemitism is evil; to do otherwise is to put yourself outside our moral
world. But it is quite something else to have someone try to bully you
into proclaiming that antisemitism is the Evil of Evils. We are not
children learning morality; it is our responsibility to set our own moral
priorities. We cannot do this by looking at horrible images from 1945 or
listening to the anguished cries of suffering columnists. We have to ask
how much harm antisemitism is doing, or is likely to do, not in the past,
but today. And we must ask where such harm might occur, and
why.
Supposedly there is great danger in the antisemitism
of the Arab world. But Arab antisemitism isn't the cause of Arab hostility
towards Israel or even towards Jews. It is an effect. The progress of Arab
antisemitism fits nicely with the progress of Jewish encroachment and
Jewish atrocities. This is not to excuse genuine antisemitism; it is to
trivialize it. It came to the Middle East with Zionism and it will abate
when Zionism ceases to be an expansionist threat. Indeed its chief cause
is not antisemitic propaganda but the decades-old, systematic and
unrelenting efforts of Israel to implicate all Jews in its crimes. If Arab
anti-semitism persists after a peace agreement, we can all get together
and cluck about it. But it still won't do Jews much actual harm. Arab
governments could only lose by permitting attacks on their Jewish
citizens; to do so would invite Israeli intervention. And there is little
reason to expect such attacks to materialize: if all the horrors of
Israel's recent campaigns did not provoke them, it is hard to imagine what
would. It would probably take some Israeli act so awful and so criminal as
to overshadow the attacks themselves.
If antisemitism is likely to have terrible effects,
it is far more likely to have them in Western Europe. The neo-fascist
resurgence there is all too real. But is it a danger to Jews? There is no
doubt that LePen, for instance, is antisemitic. There is also no evidence
whatever that he intends to do anything about it. On the contrary, he
makes every effort to pacify the Jews, and perhaps even enlist their help
against his real targets, the 'Arabs'. He would hardly be the first
political figure to ally himself with people he disliked. But if he had
some deeply hidden plan against the Jews, that *would* be unusual: Hitler
and the Russian antisemitic rioters were wonderfully open about their
intentions, and they didn't court Jewish support. And it is a fact that
some French Jews see LePen as a positive development or even an ally.
(see, for instance, "`LePen is good for us,' Jewish supporter says",
Ha'aretz May 04, 2002, and Mr. Goldenburg's April 23rd comments on France
TV.)
Of course there are historical reasons for fearing a
horrendous attack on Jews. And anything is possible: there could be a
massacre of Jews in Paris tomorrow, or of Algerians. Which is more likely?
If there are any lessons of history, they must apply in roughly similar
circumstances. Europe today bears very little resemblance to Europe in
1933. And there are positive possibilities as well: why is the likelihood
of a pogrom greater than the likelihood that antisemitism will fade into
ineffectual nastiness? Any legitimate worries must rest on some evidence
that there really is a threat.
The incidence of antisemitic attacks might provide
such evidence. But this evidence is consistently fudged: no distinction is
made between attacks against Jewish monuments and symbols as opposed to
actual attacks against Jews. In addition, so much is made of an increase
in the frequency of attacks that the very low absolute level of attacks
escapes attention. The symbolic attacks have indeed increased to
significant absolute numbers. The physical attacks have not.(*) More
important, most of these attacks are by Muslim residents: in other words,
they come from a widely hated, vigorously policed and persecuted minority
who don't stand the slightest chance of undertaking a serious campaign of
violence against Jews.
It is very unpleasant that roughly half a dozen Jews
have been hospitalized--none killed--due to recent attacks across Europe.
But anyone who makes this into one of the world's important problems
simply hasn't looked at the world. These attacks are a matter for the
police, not a reason why we should police ourselves and others to counter
some deadly spiritual disease. That sort of reaction is appropriate only
when racist attacks occur in societies indifferent or hostile to the
minority attacked. Those who really care about recurrent Nazism, for
instance, should save their anguished concern for the far bloodier, far
more widely condoned attacks on gypsies, whose history of persecution is
fully comparable to the Jewish past. The position of Jews is much closer
to the position of whites, who are also, of course, the victims of racist
attacks.
No doubt many people reject this sort of
cold-blooded calculation. They will say that, with the past looming over
us, even one antisemitic slur is a terrible thing, and its ugliness is not
to be measured by a body count. But if we take a broader view of the
matter, antisemitism becomes less, not more important. To regard any
shedding of Jewish blood as a world-shattering calamity, one which defies
all measurement and comparison, is racism, pure and simple; the valuing of
one race's blood over all others. The fact that Jews have been persecuted
for centuries and suffered terribly half a century ago doesn't wipe out
the fact that in Europe today, Jews are insiders with far less to suffer
and fear than many other ethnic groups. Certainly racist attacks against a
well-off minority are just as evil as racist attacks against a poor and
powerless minority. But equally evil attackers do not make for equally
worrisome attacks.
It is not Jews who live most in the shadow of the
concentration camp. LePen's 'transit camps' are for 'Arabs', not Jews. And
though there are politically significant parties containing many
antisemites, not one of these parties shows any sign of articulating, much
less implementing, an antisemitic agenda. Nor is there any particular
reason to suppose that, once in power, they will change their tune.
Haider's Austria is not considered dangerous for Jews; neither was
Tudjman's Croatia. And were there to be such danger, well, a nuclear-armed
Jewish state stands ready to welcome any refugees, as do the US and
Canada. And to say there are no real dangers now is not to say that we
should ignore any dangers that may arise. If in France, for instance, the
Front National starts advocating transit camps for Jews, or institutes
anti-Jewish immigration policies, then we should be alarmed. But we should
not be alarmed that something alarming might just conceivably happen:
there are far more alarming things going on than that!
One might reply that, if things are not more
alarming, it is only because the Jews and others have been so vigilant in
combatting antisemitism. But this isn't plausible. For one thing,
vigilance about antisemitism is a kind of tunnel vision: as neofascists
are learning, they can escape notice by keeping quiet about Jews. For
another, there has been no great danger to Jews even in traditionally
antisemitic countries where the world is *not* vigilant, like Croatia or
the Ukraine. Countries that get very little attention seem no more
dangerous than countries that get a lot. As for the vigorous reaction to
LePen in France, that seems to have a lot more to do with French revulsion
at neofascism than with the scoldings of the Anti-Defamation League. To
suppose that the Jewish organizations and earnest columnists who pounce on
antisemitism are saving the world from disaster is like claiming that
Bertrand Russell and the Quakers were all that saved us from nuclear
war.
Now one might say: whatever the real dangers, these events are
truly agonizing for Jews, and bring back unbearably painful memories. That
may be true for the very few who still have those memories; it is not true
for Jews in general. I am a German Jew, and have a good claim to
second-generation, third-hand victimhood. Antisemitic incidents and a
climate of rising antisemitism don't really bother me a hell of a lot. I'm
much more scared of really dangerous situations, like driving. Besides,
even painful memories and anxieties do not carry much weight against the
actual physical suffering inflicted by discrimination against many
non-Jews.
This is not to belittle all antisemitism,
everywhere. One often hears of vicious antisemites in Poland and Russia,
both on the streets and in government. But alarming as this may be, it is
also immune to the influence of Israel-Palestine conflicts, and those
conflicts are wildly unlikely to affect it one way or another. Moreover,
so far as I know, nowhere is there as much violence against Jews as there
is against 'Arabs'. So even if antisemitism is, somewhere, a
catastrophically serious matter, we can only conclude that anti-Arab
sentiment is far more serious still. And since every antisemitic group is
to a far greater extent anti-immigrant and anti-Arab, these groups can be
fought, not in the name of antisemitism, but in the defense of Arabs and
immigrants. So the antisemitic threat posed by these groups shouldn't even
make us want to focus on antisemitism: they are just as well fought in the
name of justice for Arabs and immigrants.
In short, the real scandal today is not antisemitism
but the importance it is given. Israel has committed war crimes. It has
implicated Jews generally in these crimes, and Jews generally have
hastened to implicate themselves. This has provoked hatred against Jews.
Why not? Some of this hatred is racist, some isn't, but who cares? Why
should we pay any attention to this issue at all? Is the fact that
Israel's race war has provoked bitter anger of any importance besides the
war itself? Is the remote possibility that somewhere, sometime, somehow,
this hatred may in theory, possibly kill some Jews of any importance
besides the brutal, actual, physical persecution of Palestinians, and the
hundreds of thousands of votes for Arabs to be herded into transit camps?
Oh, but I forgot. Drop everything. Someone spray-painted antisemitic
slogans on a synagogue.
* Not even the ADL and B'nai B'rith include attacks
on Israel in the tally; they speak of "The insidious way
we have seen the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians used by
anti-Semites". And like many other people, I don't count terrorist
attacks by such as Al Quaeda as instances of antisemitism but rather of
some misdirected quasi-military campaign against the US and Israel. Even
if you count them in, it does not seem very dangerous to be a Jew outside
Israel.
Michael Neumann is
a professor of philosophy at Trent University in Ontario, Canada. He can
be reached at: mneumann@trentu.ca
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