In the last communique I enclosed an initial draft of my attempt to use the Roth novel "Plot against America" as a springboard to examine identity, anti-Zionism and antisemitism in the public outcry against Israel and, more specifically, in some of the public Jewish contribution to this phenomenon.
In this final draft I have cleaned up most of the grammar, tightened the language, sharpened the logical progression, added some more references and introduced a few new points which seemed to me important. It follows below and will be posted to the site http://froggyfarm.blogspot.com.
Mike Berger
This article has arisen from a previous blog on the resonances between modern anti-Zionism and the antisemitism explored in Philip Roth’s novel, “The plot against America”. But it is also personal, especially at the two ends, where I briefly explore my own reactions to the complex predicament facing Israel and its diaspora. I make no apology for introducing the personal element since I have never pretended to the status of dispassionate expert. On the contrary, I identify completely with what I see as the core idea of Zionism – that Jews are entitled to a a national identity and homeland in which they can embody their own history and evolving national personality in the same way as the other peoples of this increasingly globalised planet. This makes me the implacable opponent of those, Jewish or non-Jewish, who wish to destroy that possibility.
I make no demands that others share this vision, though I know that it is widely shared, only that they desist from actively working for its demise. This ethnic identity must also share emotional and intellectual space with my other commitment to a universal humanity, not to mention my South African persona. Such sharing is not always comfortable since brothers may engage in murderous sibling rivalry and my universalist leanings at times must take temporary second place to my Zionist affiliations. But there are no simple formulae for such coexistance so I, and others in the same predicament, accommodate the conflicting demands as best we can in each situation.
A fair amount of print space over the past few years has been devoted to examining the treatment of Israel in much of the Western media and, by extension, the role of prejudice (antisemitism and irrational anti-Zionism)1 in the kind of coverage Israel receives. In essence, along with many other commentators, I have argued that the media coverage of Israel is seriously prejudiced and distorted and this continues in the face of rational argument and fact. The historical roots of antisemitism run deep but it is clear that its modern manifestation is the result both of deliberate propaganda as a component of a conscious paramilitary strategy and as the expression of more random forces within the global – especially Western - left.
Such developments have forced Jews who regard themselves as progressive, espousing universalist and humanist values, to confront their own relationship with Israel. Most, like myself, see no deep contradiction between their support for Israel and their broader ideological commitments, and any disquiet experienced with specific aspects of Israeli policy and society does not require a reorientation of their priorities. In fact, many find that their moral and political values impel them to support Israel especially strongly in the international arena in view of the manifestly unjust barrage of criticism it attracts and the retrograde and even fascist practices of the regimes and political groupings which confront Israel both in the Middle East and elsewhere. However, a significant and vociferous section of Jewry have taken up covert or openly antagonistic positions vis-à-vis Israel.
In the following paragraphs I look at some issues determining attitudes towards Israel and the implications these have for the majority of Jews, and many non-Jews, who support Israel. My position is predicated on the view that political choice is a multi-dimensional process determined by both universal and personal psychological processes, by ideological (political) orientations, by intellectual disposition and by situational and interactional factors operating at the material, cultural, political and social levels2. These are all mutually interactive. Although such an analysis can slip easily into a rigidly determinist paradigm, I take the view that all individuals have freedom of choice and, along with Isaiah Berlin, that such freedom is extended by knowledge and self-reflection.3
It is widely recognised that identification with an ethnic or religious group or with an ideological belief or some other collective ideal, plays an important role in determining political attitudes and choice – “Political identity emerges from a dynamic interplay between the psychological make-up of individuals, their embeddedness in particular political and social structures and institutions, and the major political experiences of their lives, which together influence their political ideologies and roles.”4 I can think of no better way of conveying the essence of identity, than through some quotes from Philip Roth’s extraordinary novel, “The plot against America”: “Their being Jews issued from being themselves…” “It was… as fundamental as having arteries and veins…” “(They) needed no profession of faith or doctrinal creed…”.5 He was referring to ordinary middle class Jews, mainly immigrants or the children of immigrants from the ghettoes of Eastern Europe, living in predominantly Jewish suburbs in mid-twentieth century USA. The quote captures the essence of deep identity in which the personal and the collective are indistinguishable and inseparable.
In Roth’s fictionalised but eerily plausible account, the USA was stealthily led into pro-Nazi and insidiously antisemitic policies at the outbreak of World War 2 from which it was rescued only by the mysterious disappearance of Lindbergh, its shadowy and iconic President. What makes his book especially relevant to our time and theme is how closely current Western anti-Zionism mirrors the dynamics of the antisemitism of the mid-twentieth century as depicted by Roth.
A leitmotif throughout the novel is the question: where does paranoia, fear and parochialism end and true antisemitism begin? Do the bland, seemingly innocuous and apparently reasonable criticisms of Jewish cultural difference, exclusivity and failure to assimilate more thoroughly into the predominantly white, Protestant host population disguise a deeper and more sinister threat or are they to be taken at their face value, as some more “enlightened” members of the Jewish community would have their compatriots believe? In essence, according to the “enlightened” argument , the Jewish community should not be immune to rational criticism and serious self-reflection. To claim that such negative comment disguises antisemitic prejudice and evil intentions is precisely the reason why Jews are disliked by their host populations: by using self-serving victimhood as camouflage, so runs the accusation, Jews license themselves to remain an exclusive, self-seeking community free to manipulate the good intentions and tolerance of their non-Jewish neighbours for their own ends.
The resemblance of this line of argument to the debate around Israel is striking. Robert Fine characterises the currently fashionable Western discourse as follows, “…the accusation of antisemitism (by Israel’s defenders) is now used to trash anyone who is critical of the policies of the Israeli government. …(As a consequence) - The struggle against antisemitism, once seen as central to the construction of a new Europe after the war, is increasingly disavowed since the charge of antisemitism merely serves to deflect or devalue criticism of Israeli occupation, Israeli human rights abuses, Israeli racism toward Arabs, and Israeli military force in Lebanon and Gaza.”6
Fine goes on to demonstrate the hollowness of this argument and, while Roth’s answer is more indirect, it is also unequivocal. The ordinary American Jew, reacting with horror, confusion and indignation to Lindbergh’s plausibly rational and ambiguous pronouncements, is right on the money. They were largely accurate in their perception that the Jewish community was being singled out and stigmatised, and correctly perceived such unfair criticism would encourage antisemitism in the general population.
Thus, according to Roth, the Jews were not the only ones who understood the coded messages behind the plausible words; antisemites within the American population took full advantage of the licence afforded by the new discourse to take out their prejudices on their fellow citizens. The DNA of racial stereotyping and exclusion from moral concern is universal and any individual (whether predator or prey) is alert to cues of ostracism and exclusion. It is important to note that Roth does not descend into a simplistic Manichean universe of innocent Jews surrounded by evil predatory foes. On the contrary, he invests his characters with the full gamut of human good and evil regardless of their religious and ethnic affiliations.
Roth’s fictional narrative is acutely relevant to the issue of Israel. Just like the flawed Jews of America, Israel is imperfect despite its enormous successes. Corruption, especially within its political domain, is too frequent for comfort. Racism is prevalent amongst some sections of the population. Social and economic inequality has increased and education policy and funding, on which the future of Israel rests, is far from optimal. Fundamentalist religion exerts an unhealthy influence on Israel’s political and civil life and Israel needs to find ways of living more humanely and harmoniously with its unassimilated and often fractious minority populations. Above all, Israel hasn’t been able to disengage from its role as an occupying power, however reluctant and indirect, over an alien hostile population with all the consequences on its own social and moral fabric.
None of this should occasion any surprise given the history of Israel and the region in which it is embedded and the multiple antagonistic agendas it has to deal with, both within and outside its borders. Some of these are solvable by Israel alone and others depend on the cooperation of others. None are easy and some may be utterly intractable, but they all provide a challenge to those who wish to make tangible contributions to the Zionist project.
Israel’s imperfections and transgressions, however, cannot objectively explain the flood of obsessive and unbalanced criticism levelled at it. David Hirsh in his speech to the Global Forum for Combating Antisemitism - Jerusalem, 25 Feb 08 – puts it this way, “Jews are involved in a real conflict in the Middle East ...When Jews are involved in conflicts there is a danger that the ways people think about those conflicts get mystified in the language of antisemitism. Anti-Zionism is not a reasonable response to the actual situation; it is a response to a narrative of the actual situation which has become mystified by antisemitism....Real human rights abuses are mystified as being genocidal like Nazism; institutional racism is mystified as being worse than apartheid; the occupation is mystified as being unique and as being a manifestation of a Zionist essence; Jewish power is mystified as an ‘Israel lobby’ capable of perverting the policy of the only super power on the planet against its own interest....contemporary antisemitism is not explicitly or obviously antisemitic. ... Antisemitism of this sort is not explicit, is not obvious, and is not self-aware. It is necessary to analyze and interpret a text to know whether it is antisemitic.”7
A vivid example is provided by a recent correspondence in the SA Jewish Report. Daniel Mackintosh8 claims that racism is prevalent amongst Israelis (specifically, in this context, Jewish Israelis) and contrasts this with the implied tolerance, except for a few extremists, displayed by Palestinians9. Yet Pew surveys ((http://pewglobal.org/reports/pdf/268.pdf) show an extremely high level (97%) of anti-Jewish sentiment amongst Palestinians, a finding repeated in many other largely Muslim communities and one that comes as no surprise to anyone with knowledge of the political structure, culture and educational practices in many such communities. Of course, surveys also show that anti-Arab and anti-Muslim feelings are significant amongst Israelis (see Chris McGreal at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/mar/24/israel), at the 40 to 50 percent level within the population. Without nitpicking over methodology and precise percntages it is clear that racism is high in both societies, but the ideological, anti-Zionist bias of the writer leads him to imply that racial prejudice is largely confined to Israelis.
Besides the objective inaccuracy of Mackintosh’s claim it ignores the fact that Israeli society as a whole is legally and informally committed to non-racism, further reinforced by the proliferation of vociferous human rights groups and judicial institutions committed to combatting racist practices by individual Israelis or civil society10. Surprisingly, given the severity of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the provocations often faced by Israelis in their interactions with Palestinians11, serious racist actions by Israelis are relatively infrequent and examples of productive coexistence common12. It is legitimate to ask whether such restraint would be shown by many other Western societies with a similar history and on-going predicament?
The problem encountered in analysis is that antisemitism can be used in two related but distinct ways. One refers to objectively irrational and selective criticism of - or behaviour towards - Jews as a whole or a significant and core sector of Jewish society, Israel for example. The other usage refers to the emotion, conscious or unconscious, of hostility towards Jews or Israel/Israelis specifically. It is widely assumed that the former implies the latter, but need that be the case? Is it possible that a dominantly biased discourse (perhaps itself derived from conventionally antisemitic sources) compounded by simple ignorance, other ideological loyalties, identification with the perceived underdog, conformity impulses or more serious situational pressures, can produce an objectively biased (antisemitic) belief and action pattern while free of conventional antisemitic prejudice? And is this important? Does it really matter, in practical terms, whether biased behaviour is caused by faulty information processing and situational factors or by internal disposition?
In my view the short answer is that one cannot easily generalise about the sources of irrational anti-Zionism in individual cases and, secondly, it probably doesn’t much matter. Given the multi-dimensional processes whereby political choices are made, the individual pathway can vary from one individual to another. In many cases the mechanism may be obvious: some are clearly motivated by old-fashioned antisemitism revealed by the virulent tone and abusive content. This can infect Jews and non-Jews alike and is marked by the significant presence of the following cues: fixity of belief and resistance to contrary evidence, obsessiveness, a low trigger threshold to expression of hostility, excessively emotive language and choice of metaphor, stereotyping and essentialising, a tendency to select, exaggerate and misrepresent and, of course, unambiguous statements of hatred and threats of destruction. All these gradations are apparent in considerable portions of the Western media and on the Internet.
In other cases the cause may include a mix, in varying proportions, of the other personal and social factors mentioned above. While of great interest to various academic disciplines, the individual motivations underlying irrational anti-Zionism is, arguably, of less importance than its prevalence (and hence potential for social spread) and its political and military impact. It must be remembered that the diplomatic and media campaigns are significantly driven by a deliberate strategy to use “public opinion” as an offensive weapon to undermine, psychologically, economically and diplomatically, the capacity of Israel to resist13. The provocations of Hamas and its approach to its military action are components of this strategic agenda. A prime example on the diplomatic-public opinion front is the Goldstone Report14 which, on a host of objective criteria15, is a plainly prejudicial and politicized document intended to stigmatise Israel.
It would be perverse to believe that the flood of anti-Zionist comment, irrespective of motivation, pervading much of the Western media does not result in secondary antisemitism of the conventional variety. It would imply a compartmentalization of rational thought and emotion for which no evidence exists and which is contradicted by the very content and volume of the critical comment, by the mass meetings and inflammatory placards and slogans, by the spike in antisemitic acts in many Western countries and by the abusive and clearly antisemitic tone of large number of contributions to Internet threads. The reality is captured in the following quote “It has often been asserted by left authors (for example, Noam Chomsky) that the link between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is a tenuous one. Chomsky asserts that the linkage is a device used by Zionists to squash dissent. Yet the linkage would not be possible—or at least would be much more difficult—if there was no past or current demonstration of anti-Semitism among Israel’s opponents. Simply stated, while it is absolutely true that all anti-Zionists are not Jew hating bigots, anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic in intent.”4 And, I would add, as an outcome.
As shown in numerous studies, pervasive social prejudice is internalised by the exposed population and by the targets (specifically here, Jews and Israelis) themselves. The overt response to such an assault on self-image varies between individuals and according to situational factors. Not surprisingly, it has driven many Jews into an ultra-nationalist stance in which Israel figures as a paragon of virtue in a sea of evil and hostility. Many others have been impelled into a more moderate, but equally obdurate, resistance to the programme of stigmatisation and delegitimisation. At the very least, few Jews for whom the Zionist project represents something positive and admirable, are eager to add their tuppence worth of criticism to the malevolent chorus and thus keep their counsel when otherwise they may have been willing to publicly chastise their brethren.
But for a significant minority the ideological assault on Israel has had a different effect. Simple observation attests to the fact that the individual may may succumb to such stereotyping. In this case we expect, and see, a spectrum of graduated responses ranging from disengagement to the role of actively hostile internal critic. Underlying much of the critical comment directed at Israel from within idealistic segments of Jewry, especially the younger generation, is the intrusion of middle class guilt, historically naïve and unrealistic ideals and decontextualised analysis into the historically and politically fraught territory of the Middle East.
But personal psychology and temperament can also contribute. In Roth’s novel the character of Rabbi Bengelsdorf, Lindbergh’s tame Jewish apologist, is depicted in distinctly unflattering terms. Specifically, he and others like him have taken on board the antisemitic prejudices they encounter in popular society or in groups to which they wish to belong, and thus seek to distinguish themselves from the Jewish common man. Laura Miller, in a review of Roth’s novel, put it this way16 “Bengelsdorf is a marvelous creation, part object lesson in the perils of collaboration and part meticulous parody of self-important men everywhere…”. In extreme cases, we encounter Jews who strenuously compete with the most bitter antisemites in the unrestrained expression of hostility towards Zionism and Israel17.
What lessons can be drawn? Public antisemitism and anti-Zionism constitute an existential threat to Israel through their multi-dimensional impact on Jews and non-Jews alike. This is now widely recognised, as is the importance of countering other paramilitary challenges of various kinds. The response cannot be predicated simply on answering prejudice with counter prejudice. Israel cannot afford the same retrogressive politics and racist stereotyping practiced by many of its enemies. It must appeal to its own highest ideals and those of the democratic world, not solely as.a public relations exercise or for some abstract ethical imperative, but also because its democratic and open culture provides Israel and Jewry with the creative edge and strategic flexibility to counter their numerically superior enemies.
The challenge is to reconcile democratic freedoms with the immediacy of existential threats. Such tensions are unavoidable in a conflict-ridden world. It is through the resolution of these difficult dilemmas that democracies derive their competitive edge, and all of us will have our own idea on where lines should be drawn. As a broad principle such lines must not curtail criticsm, especially uncomfortable criticism. But where this strays systematically into betrayal and incitement constitutes a grey but important junction where democracies under threat need to erect barriers. More important is the constant ideological repair and maintenance of the Zionist project so that it retains its potential for renewal and sturdy growth. It is only in this way that Jewish youth will remain committed to Israel and to the idea of a Jewish people living as respected members of a globalised world. Our ability to adroitly navigate these stormy waters may the be key to the survival of Israel as a Jewish state for all its peoples.
Mike Berger
1. I use the words antisemitism and anti-Zionism in this article in different ways. Anti-Zionism is hostility towards Israel that goes beyond criticism of one or more specific acts, social features or policy decisions, but is a systematic and encompassing critique of the philosophy, the country and society. In some instances, this may arise from a variably rational view which sees the Zionist project as misguided or even partaking of colonial and imperialist characteristics. At some ill-defined point such anti-Zionism passes over into what I term, in places, “irrational anti-Zionism” in which Zionism is essentialised as an evil movement fascist in spirit and intent and comparable to other widely condemned movements like apartheid or Naziism. Antisemitism, as pointed out in this article may have, at least, two meanings. One is the conventional antisemitism expressed by significant sectors of Christian Europe and much of the Muslim world in which Jews as a people are depicted as inherently evil, treacherous, devious, cruel, cowardly, greedy and aesthetically repugnant. Clearly the intensity and virulence of such feelings vary. Antisemitism may also be applied to the excessive and selective criticism of Jews or prominent aspects of of the Jewish world, eg. Israel, which is relatively unaccompanied by pan-Jewish prejudice but derives from other sources, like ideology, conformity, ignorance and so forth. Much antisemitism, both conventional and unconventional, is expressed in the form of anti-Zionism, especially irrational anti-Zionism – but the two terms are not identical in meaning. Nevertheless, irrational anti-Zionism, irrespective of its origins, can be defined as objectively antisemitic even where its motivation does not arise from conventional antisemitic prejudice. Also see, for example, “England’s not so pleasant aspect” by Anthony Julius in The Jewish Chronicle, 4 Feb 2010 at http://www.thejc.com/print/26775.
2. See for example: The new synthesis in moral psychology. Jonathan Haidt, et al.Science 316, 998 (2007); Collective psychological processes in anti-semitism. Avner Falk Jewish Political Studies Review 18:1-2 (Spring 2006); Spontaneous Inferences, Implicit Impressions, and Implicit Theories. James S. Uleman, S. Adil Saribay, and Celia M. Gonzalez In Annual Review of Psychology Vol. 59: 329-360 (2008); Political Psychology: Situations, Individuals, and Cases, by David P. Houghton. Publ. Routledge, December 2008, (ISBN: 978-0-415-99013-4).
3. From hope and fear set free. Isaiah Berlin in The Proper Study of Mankind: an anthology of essays. Eds. Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer, Publ. Farar, Straus and Giroux, NY, 2000.
4. Leaving the Radical Left: Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism, and Jewish Response (Part Three, Draft 1). From the New Centrist Blog at http://newcentrist.wordpress.com/2008/07/18/leaving-the-radical-left-anti-zionism-anti-semitism-and-jewish-response-part-three-draft-1/
5. The plot against Ameica: a novel. Philip Roth, Publ. by Vintage International, Sept 2005.
6. Re-membering the Holocaust. Robert Fine at http://engageonline.wordpress.com/2010/02/01/robert-fines-talk-to-the-ucu-meeting-legacy-of-hope-anti-semitism-the-holocaust-and-resistance-yesterday-and-today/ .
7. Speech at Global Forum for Combating Anti-semitism, Jerusalem 8 Feb 2008. David Hirsh see ENGAGE http://www.engageonline.org.uk/blog/printarticle.php?id=1683.
8. SA Jewish Report, 22 Jan 2010: “I have met young Jewish people who are not proud of the racism that is so prevalent in Israel...”
9. SA Jewish Report 4 Dec 2009: “South African Jewish youth have started to meet Palestinians, and although there are those violent, anti-Semitic extremists, many.... have found that the majority of Palestinians want to live in coexistence with their Jewish neighbours under a just peace.”
10. Arab citizens of Israel. Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_citizens_of_Israel; Coexistence between Arabs and Jews in Israel. The Israel Project. See http://www.theisraelproject.org/site/apps/nlnet/content2.aspx?c=hsJPK0PIJpH&b=883997&ct=5667281; Israel at 61. The Israel Project. See http://www.theisraelproject.org/site/c.hsJPK0PIJpH/b.5118555/k.5CB4/Israel_at_61/apps/nl/newsletter2.asp.
11. “Hello Police? Scew your sister!”. In The Jerusalem Post byYaacov Lappin, 12 Feb 2010. See http://www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=168520.
12. The surprise of it all. In The Jerusalem Post by Daniel Doron, 10 Feb 2010. See at http://www.danieldoron.com/en/commentary/full/the-surprise-of-it-all/.
13. See launch of International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN) at http://www.globalwomenstrike.net/AntiZionism/internationalJewishAnti-ZionistNetworkerCharter.htm; Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at the Center for Special Studies http://www.terrorism-info.org.il/malam_multimedia/html/final/eng/sib/aic2_04/aic_hp.htm; NGO Monitor, 13 Oct 2008 at http://www.ngo-monitor.org/article/ngo_lawfare_new_monograph_from_ngo_monitor; Manipulating the marketplace of ideas, Gerald M. Steinberg at Haaretz, 29 Nov. 2009; Viewpoint by Gerald Steinberg, Jerusalem Report, 17 Aug 2009.
14. HUMAN RIGHTS IN PALESTINE AND OTHER OCCUPIED ARAB TERRITORIES. Report of the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict at http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/12session/A-HRC-12-48.pdf.
15. Memorandum to the Human Rights Council re the Goldstone Report at http://maurice-ostroff.tripod.com/id235.html; Open letter to Goldstone by Trevor Norwitz, see http://www.goldstonereport.org/open-letters-to-goldstone/428-open-letter-from-trevor-norwitz; The Goldstone Illusion, Moshe Halbertal in The New Republic 6 Nov 2009.
16. Review of “The plot against America: a novel” (Philip Roth) by Laura Miller, 8 Oct 2004 at http://www.powells.com/review/2004_10_08.html.
17. Jewish Anti-Zionism Unravelled: The Morality of Vanity (Part 1) by Anthony Julius in Z-word (blog), March 2008 at http://www.z-word.com/z-word-essays/jewish-anti-zionism-unravelled; Jewish Anti-Zionism Unravelled, Part Two: Questioning Antisemitism by Anthony Julius in Z-word (blog) at http://www.z-word.com/z-word-essays/jewish-anti-zionism-unravelled%253A- questioning-antisemitism-%2528part-2%2529.html.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Anti-Zionism and antisemitism reconsidered
David Sacks has invited me to work up one of my recent posts, leaning on the Roth novel "The plot against America", into an article for the periodical Jewish Affairs. I enclose below a draft of the article for input - critical and otherwise. It goes over old ground of motivation and explanation for the unbalanced treatment of Israel in much of the Western media, but I hope it clarifies some points and maybe introduces a better understanding of the phenomenon. A couple more references will be added in due course and this draft will be posted on the site http://froggyfarm.blogspot.com/.
kind regards
Mike Berger
I have occupied a fair amount of print space over the past few years examining the treatment of Israel in much of the Western media and, by extension, the role of prejudice (antisemitism and irrational anti-Zionism)1 in the kind of coverage Israel receives. In essence, I, along with many other commentators, have argued that the media coverage of Israel is seriously prejudiced and distorted and this continues in the face of rational argument and fact. The historical roots of antisemitism run deep but it is clear that its modern manifestation is the result both of deliberate propaganda as a component of a conscious strategy of stigmatization and delegitimisation and as the expression of more random forces within the global – especially Western - left.
These developments have forced Jews, both within and outside Israel, who would regard themselves as progressive, espousing universalist and humanist values, to confront their own relationship with Israel. Most see no deep contradiction between their support for Israel and their broad ideological commitments, and their disquiet with some aspects of Israeli policy and society does not necessitate a reorientation of their priorities. In fact, many find that their moral and political values impel them to support Israel especially strongly in view of the manifestly unjust barrage of criticism it attracts and the retrograde and frankly fascist practices of the regimes and political groupings which confront Israel both in the Middle East and elsewhere. However, a significant and vociferous section of Jewry have taken up openly antagonistic positions vis-à-vis Israel.
In this article I look at some issues around identity, social dynamics and prejudice in determining attitudes towards Israel. This is predicated on the view that political choice is a multi-dimensional process determined by both universal and personal psychological operations, by ideological (political) orientation, by intellectual disposition and by situational and interactional factors operating at the material, cultural, political and social levels2. These are all mutually interactive. Although such an analysis can slip easily into a rigidly determinist paradigm, I take the view that all individuals have freedom of choice and, along with Isaiah Berlin, that such freedom is extended by knowledge and self-reflection.3
It is widely recognised that identity, whether to an ethnic or religious group or with an ideological belief or some other collective ideal, plays an important role in determining political attitudes and choice – “Political identity emerges from a dynamic interplay between the psychological make-up of individuals, their embeddedness in particular political and social structures and institutions, and the major political experiences of their lives, which together influence their political ideologies and roles.”4 Identity may be fluid and multiple or more limited and fixed. I can think of no better way of conveying the essence of identity, than through an abbreviated quote from Philip Roth’s extraordinary novel, “The plot against America”: “Their being Jews issued from being themselves…” “It was… as fundamental as having arteries and veins…” “(They) needed no profession of faith or doctrinal creed…”.5 He was referring to ordinary middle class Jews, mainly immigrants or the children of immigrants from the ghettoes of Eastern Europe, living in the Jewish suburbs in mid-twentieth century USA. The quote captures the essence of deep identity in which the personal and the collective are indistinguishable and inseparable. This subjectivity is given more substance in neurocognitive studies which show that personal and social identity are processed in the same parts of the brain.
The quote is embedded in Roth’s fictionalised, but eerily plausible, account of the USA being stealthily led into pro-Nazi and insidiously antisemitic policies at the outbreak of World War 2 from which it was rescued only by the mysterious disappearance of Lindbergh, its shadowy and iconic President. What makes it relevant to our time and theme is how closely Western anti-Zionism mirrors the dynamics of the antisemitism of the mid-twentieth century as depicted by Roth.
A leitmotif throughout the novel is the question: where does paranoia, fear and parochialism end and true antisemitism begin? Do the bland, seemingly innocuous and apparently reasonable criticisms of Jewish cultural difference, exclusivity and failure to assimilate more thoroughly into the predominantly white, Protestant host population disguise a deeper and more sinister threat or are they to be taken at their face value, as some more “enlightened” members of the Jewish community would have their compatriots believe? In essence, according to the “enlightened” argument, the Jewish community should not be immune to rational criticism and serious self-reflection. To claim that such negative comment disguises antisemitic prejudice and evil intentions is precisely the reason why Jews are disliked by their host populations: using self-serving victimhood as camouflage, Jews license themselves to remain an exclusive, self-seeking community free to manipulate the good intentions and tolerance of their non-Jewish neighbours for their own ends.
The resemblance of this line of argument to the debate around Israel is striking. Robert Fine characterises the currently fashionable Western discourse as follows, “…the accusation of antisemitism (by Israel’s defenders) is now used to trash anyone who is critical of the policies of the Israeli government. …(As a consequence) - The struggle against antisemitism, once seen as central to the construction of a new Europe after the war, is increasingly disavowed since the charge of antisemitism merely serves to deflect or devalue criticism of Israeli occupation, Israeli human rights abuses, Israeli racism toward Arabs, and Israeli military force in Lebanon and Gaza.”6
Fine goes on to demonstrate the hollowness of this argument and, while Roth’s answer is more indirect, it is also unequivocal. The ordinary Jew, reacting with horror, confusion and indignation to Lindbergh’s plausibly rational and ambiguous pronouncements, is right on the money. Ordinary Jews were largely accurate in their perception that the Jewish community was being singled out and stigmatised, and correctly perceived such criticism would encourage antisemitism in the general population. More sinisterly, their suspicion of a larger agenda was probably correct.
Thus, according to Roth, the Jews were not the only ones who understood the coded messages behind the plausible words; antisemites within the American population took full advantage of the licence afforded by the new discourse to take out their prejudices on their fellow citizens. The DNA of racial stereotyping and exclusion from moral concern is universal and any individual (whether predator or prey) is alert to cues of ostracism and exclusion. It is important to note that Roth does not descend into a simplistic Manichean universe of innocent Jews surrounded by evil predatory foes. On the contrary, he invests his characters with the full gamut of human good and evil irrespective of their religious and ethnic affiliations.
Roth’s fictional narrative is acutely relevant to the issue of Israel. Just like the flawed Jews of America, Israel is imperfect despite its enormous successes. Corruption, especially within its political domain, is too frequent for comfort. Racism is prevalent amongst some sections of the population. Social and economic inequality has increased and education policy and funding, on which the future of Israel rests, is far from optimal. Fundamentalist religion exerts an unhealthy influence on Israel’s political and civil life and Israel needs to find ways of living more humanely and harmoniously with its unassimilated and often fractious minority populations. Above all, Israel hasn’t been able to disengage from its role as an occupying power, however reluctant and indirect, over an alien hostile population with all the consequences on its own social and moral fabric.
None of this should occasion any surprise given the history of Israel and the region in which it is embedded and the multiple antagonistic agendas it has to deal with, both within and outside its borders. Some of these are solvable by Israel alone and others depend on the cooperation of others. None are easy and some are utterly intractable.
But none of Israel’s failures, imperfections and transgressions can objectively explain the flood of obsessive and unbalanced criticism levelled at it. David Hirsh in his speech to the Global Forum for Combating Antisemitism - Jerusalem, 25 Feb 08 – puts it this way, “Jews are involved in a real conflict in the Middle East ...When Jews are involved in conflicts there is a danger that the ways people think about those conflicts get mystified in the language of antisemitism. Anti-Zionism is not a reasonable response to the actual situation; it is a response to a narrative of the actual situation which has become mystified by antisemitism....Real human rights abuses are mystified as being genocidal like Nazism; institutional racism is mystified as being worse than apartheid; the occupation is mystified as being unique and as being a manifestation of a Zionist essence; Jewish power is mystified as an ‘Israel lobby’ capable of perverting the policy of the only super power on the planet against its own interest....contemporary antisemitism is not explicitly or obviously antisemitic. ... Antisemitism of this sort is not explicit, is not obvious, and is not self-aware. It is necessary to analyze and interpret a text to know whether it is antisemitic.”7
The problem is that antisemitism can be used in two related but distinct ways. One refers to objectively irrational and selective criticism of - or behaviour towards - Jews as a whole or a significant and core sector of Jewish society, Israel for example. The other usage refers to the emotion, conscious or unconscious, of outgroup hostility towards Jews or Israel/Israelis specifically. It is widely assumed that the former implies the latter, but need that be the case? Is it possible that a dominantly biased discourse (perhaps itself derived from conventionally antisemitic sources) compounded by simple ignorance, other ideological loyalties, identification with the perceived underdog, conformity impulses or more serious situational pressures, can produce an objectively biased (antisemitic) belief and action pattern while free of conventional antisemitic prejudice? And is this important? Does it really matter, in practical terms, whether biased behaviour is caused by faulty information processing and situational factors or by internal disposition?
In my view the short answer is that one cannot easily generalise about the sources of irrational anti-Zionism in individual cases and, secondly, it probably doesn’t much matter. Given the multi-dimensional processes whereby political choices are made, the individual pathway can vary from one individual to another. In some cases the mechanism may be obvious: some are clearly motivated by old-fashioned antisemitism revealed by the virulent tone and abusive content. This can infect Jews and non-Jews alike and are marked by the significant presence of the following cues: fixity of belief and resistance to contrary evidence, obsessiveness, a low trigger threshold to expression of hostility, excessively emotive language and choice of metaphor, stereotyping and essentialising, a tendency to select, exaggerate and misrepresent and, of course, unambiguous statements of hatred and threats of destruction. All these gradations are apparent in considerable portions of the Western media and on the Internet.
In other cases the cause may include a mix, in varying proportions, of “detribalisation”, ideological commitment, social pressures, personal ambition, idealistic identification with the perceived underdog, a contrarian streak or resistance to change, a search for relevance and meaning – or indeed simple arrogance and vanity. In Roth’s novel the character of Rabbi Bengelsdorf, Lindbergh’s tame Jewish apologist, is depicted in unflattering terms as ambitious, vain, arrogant and detached from the run-of-the-mill Jew. As summarised in Laura Miller’s excellent short review8 of the novel “Bengelsdorf is a marvelous creation, part object lesson in the perils of collaboration and part meticulous parody of self-important men everywhere…”.
While of great interest to various academic disciplines, the individual motivations underlying objectively irrational anti-Zionism is, arguably, of less importance than its prevalence (and hence potential for social spread) and its political and military impact. It must be remembered that the diplomatic and media campaigns are partly driven by a deliberate strategy to use “public opinion” as an offensive weapon to undermine, psychologically, economically and diplomatically, the capacity of Israel to resist. The provocations of Hamas and its approach to its military action are components of this strategic agenda. A prime example on the diplomatic-public opinion front is the Goldstone Report which, on a host of objective criteria, is a plainly prejudicial and politicized document intended to stigmatise Israel.
At the same time, it would be perverse to believe that the flood of anti-Zionist comment pervading much of the Western media does not result in secondary antisemitism of the conventional variety. It would imply a compartmentalization of rational thought and emotion for which no evidence exists and which is contradicted by the very content and volume of the critical comment, by the mass meetings and inflammatory placards and slogans, by the spike in antisemitic acts in many Western countries and by the abusive and clearly antisemitic tone of large number of contributions to Internet threads. This occurs despite still significant normative prohibitions on the public expression of antisemitism in the classical sense in most Western countries. The reality is captured in the following quote “It has often been asserted by left authors (for example, Noam Chomsky) that the link between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is a tenuous one. Chomsky asserts that the linkage is a device used by Zionists to squash dissent. Yet the linkage would not be possible—or at least would be much more difficult—if there was no past or current demonstration of anti-Semitism among Israel’s opponents. Simply stated, while it is absolutely true that all anti-Zionists are not Jew hating bigots, anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic in intent.”4 And, I would add, as an outcome.
As shown in numerous studies, pervasive social prejudice is internalised by the exposed population and by the targets (specifically here, Jews and Israelis) themselves. The overt response to such an assault on self-image varies between individuals and according to situational factors. Not surprisingly, it has driven many Jews into an ultra-nationalist stance in which Israel figures as a paragon of virtue in a sea of evil and hostility. Many others have been impelled into a more moderate, but equally obdurate, resistance to the programme of stigmatisation and delegitimisation. At the very least, few Jews for whom the Zionist project represents something positive and admirable, are eager to add their tuppence worth of criticism to the malevolent chorus and thus keep their counsel when otherwise they may have been willing to publicly chastise their brethren.
But for a significant minority, for whom Rabbi Bengelsdorf of Roth’s novel stands as a partial representative, the ideological assault on Israel has had a different effect. Psychological and sociological research - and simple observation - attest to the fact that the individual may resist such stereotyping - or may succumb. In the latter case we expect, and see, a spectrum of graduated responses ranging from disengagement to the role of actively hostile internal critic. Underlying some of the critical comment directed at Israel from within idealistic segments of Jewry, especially the younger generation, is the inappropriate intrusion of middle class guilt, historically naïve and unrealistic ideals and decontextualised analysis into the historically and politically fraught territory of the Middle East. In extreme cases, we encounter Jews who strenuously compete with the most bitter antisemites in the unrestrained expression of hostility towards Zionism and Israel.
For the majority of individuals, especially in democratic cultures, identity is fluid and multidimensional. It is thus possible to be simultaneously adamantly supportive of Israel while subscribing, perhaps more in hope than expectation, to the universalistic ideal of a community of peoples. Defenders of Israel need not descend into the traps of stereotyping and essentialising their opponents and should not close the doors to understanding, dialogue and incremental improvement. The common ground of universal global membership can be kept available for reconciliation and compromise when, and if, the context warrents it. Every situation requires balance between the stark (sometimes subtle) imperatives of reality and the ideal. Our ability to adroitly navigate these treacherous waters may the be key to the survival of Israel as a democratic, Jewish state for all its peoples and even to a peaceful solution to the Middle East conflict.
Mike Berger
1. I use the words antisemitism and anti-Zionism in this article in different ways. Anti-Zionism is hostility towards Israel that goes beyond criticism of one or more specific acts, social features or policy decisions, but is a systematic and encompassing critique of the country and Israeli society. In some instances, this may arise from a variably rational view which sees the Zionist project as misguided or even partaking of colonial and imperialist characteristics. At some ill-defined point such anti-Zionism passes over into what I term, in places, “irrational anti-Zionism” in which Zionism is essentialised as an evil movement fascist in spirit and intent and comparable to other widely condemned movements like apartheid or Naziism. Antisemitism, as pointed out in this article may have, at least, two meanings. One is the conventional antisemitism expressed by significant sectors of Christian Europe and much of the Muslim world in which Jews as a people are depicted as inherently evil, treacherous, devious, cruel, cowardly, greedy and aesthetically repugnant. Clearly the intensity and virulence of such feelings vary. Antisemitism may also be applied to the excessive and selective criticism of Jews or prominent aspects of of the Jewish world, eg. Israel, which is relatively unaccompanied by pan-Jewish prejudice but derives from other sources, like ideology, conformity, ignorance and so forth. Much antisemitism, both conventional and unconventional, is expressed in the form of anti-Zionism, especially irrational anti-Zionism – but the two terms are not identical in meaning. Nevertheless, irrational anti-Zionism, irrespective of its origins, can be defined as objectively antisemitic even where its motivation does not arise from conventional antisemitic prejudice.
2. See for example: The new synthesis in moral psychology. Jonathan Haidt, et al.Science 316, 998 (2007); Collective psychological processes in anti-semitism. Avner Falk Jewish Political Studies Review 18:1-2 (Spring 2006); Spontaneous Inferences, Implicit Impressions, and Implicit Theories. James S. Uleman, S. Adil Saribay, and Celia M. Gonzalez In Annual Review of Psychology Vol. 59: 329-360 (2008); Political Psychology: Situations, Individuals, and Cases, by David P. Houghton. Publ. Routledge, December 2008, (ISBN: 978-0-415-99013-4).
3. From hope and fear set free. Isaiah Berlin in The Proper Study of Mankind: an anthology of essays. Eds. Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer, Publ. Farar, Straus and Giroux, NY, 2000.
4. Leaving the Radical Left: Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism, and Jewish Response (Part Three, Draft 1). From the New Centrist Blog at http://newcentrist.wordpress.com/2008/07/18/leaving-the-radical-left-anti-zionism-anti-semitism-and-jewish-response-part-three-draft-1/
5. The plot against Ameica: a novel. Philip Roth, Publ. Vintage Intnl. Sept 2005
6. Re-membering the Holocaust. Robert Fine at http://engageonline.wordpress.com/2010/02/01/robert-fines-talk-to-the-ucu-meeting-legacy-of-hope-anti-semitism-the-holocaust-and-resistance-yesterday-and-today/ .
7. Speech at Global Forum for Combating Anti-semitism, Jerusalem 8 Feb 2008. David Hirsh see ENGAGE http://www.engageonline.org.uk/blog/printarticle.php?id=1683.
8. Review of “The plot against America: a novel” (Philip Roth) by Laura Miller, 8 Oct 2004 at http://www.powells.com/review/2004_10_08.html.
kind regards
Mike Berger
I have occupied a fair amount of print space over the past few years examining the treatment of Israel in much of the Western media and, by extension, the role of prejudice (antisemitism and irrational anti-Zionism)1 in the kind of coverage Israel receives. In essence, I, along with many other commentators, have argued that the media coverage of Israel is seriously prejudiced and distorted and this continues in the face of rational argument and fact. The historical roots of antisemitism run deep but it is clear that its modern manifestation is the result both of deliberate propaganda as a component of a conscious strategy of stigmatization and delegitimisation and as the expression of more random forces within the global – especially Western - left.
These developments have forced Jews, both within and outside Israel, who would regard themselves as progressive, espousing universalist and humanist values, to confront their own relationship with Israel. Most see no deep contradiction between their support for Israel and their broad ideological commitments, and their disquiet with some aspects of Israeli policy and society does not necessitate a reorientation of their priorities. In fact, many find that their moral and political values impel them to support Israel especially strongly in view of the manifestly unjust barrage of criticism it attracts and the retrograde and frankly fascist practices of the regimes and political groupings which confront Israel both in the Middle East and elsewhere. However, a significant and vociferous section of Jewry have taken up openly antagonistic positions vis-à-vis Israel.
In this article I look at some issues around identity, social dynamics and prejudice in determining attitudes towards Israel. This is predicated on the view that political choice is a multi-dimensional process determined by both universal and personal psychological operations, by ideological (political) orientation, by intellectual disposition and by situational and interactional factors operating at the material, cultural, political and social levels2. These are all mutually interactive. Although such an analysis can slip easily into a rigidly determinist paradigm, I take the view that all individuals have freedom of choice and, along with Isaiah Berlin, that such freedom is extended by knowledge and self-reflection.3
It is widely recognised that identity, whether to an ethnic or religious group or with an ideological belief or some other collective ideal, plays an important role in determining political attitudes and choice – “Political identity emerges from a dynamic interplay between the psychological make-up of individuals, their embeddedness in particular political and social structures and institutions, and the major political experiences of their lives, which together influence their political ideologies and roles.”4 Identity may be fluid and multiple or more limited and fixed. I can think of no better way of conveying the essence of identity, than through an abbreviated quote from Philip Roth’s extraordinary novel, “The plot against America”: “Their being Jews issued from being themselves…” “It was… as fundamental as having arteries and veins…” “(They) needed no profession of faith or doctrinal creed…”.5 He was referring to ordinary middle class Jews, mainly immigrants or the children of immigrants from the ghettoes of Eastern Europe, living in the Jewish suburbs in mid-twentieth century USA. The quote captures the essence of deep identity in which the personal and the collective are indistinguishable and inseparable. This subjectivity is given more substance in neurocognitive studies which show that personal and social identity are processed in the same parts of the brain.
The quote is embedded in Roth’s fictionalised, but eerily plausible, account of the USA being stealthily led into pro-Nazi and insidiously antisemitic policies at the outbreak of World War 2 from which it was rescued only by the mysterious disappearance of Lindbergh, its shadowy and iconic President. What makes it relevant to our time and theme is how closely Western anti-Zionism mirrors the dynamics of the antisemitism of the mid-twentieth century as depicted by Roth.
A leitmotif throughout the novel is the question: where does paranoia, fear and parochialism end and true antisemitism begin? Do the bland, seemingly innocuous and apparently reasonable criticisms of Jewish cultural difference, exclusivity and failure to assimilate more thoroughly into the predominantly white, Protestant host population disguise a deeper and more sinister threat or are they to be taken at their face value, as some more “enlightened” members of the Jewish community would have their compatriots believe? In essence, according to the “enlightened” argument, the Jewish community should not be immune to rational criticism and serious self-reflection. To claim that such negative comment disguises antisemitic prejudice and evil intentions is precisely the reason why Jews are disliked by their host populations: using self-serving victimhood as camouflage, Jews license themselves to remain an exclusive, self-seeking community free to manipulate the good intentions and tolerance of their non-Jewish neighbours for their own ends.
The resemblance of this line of argument to the debate around Israel is striking. Robert Fine characterises the currently fashionable Western discourse as follows, “…the accusation of antisemitism (by Israel’s defenders) is now used to trash anyone who is critical of the policies of the Israeli government. …(As a consequence) - The struggle against antisemitism, once seen as central to the construction of a new Europe after the war, is increasingly disavowed since the charge of antisemitism merely serves to deflect or devalue criticism of Israeli occupation, Israeli human rights abuses, Israeli racism toward Arabs, and Israeli military force in Lebanon and Gaza.”6
Fine goes on to demonstrate the hollowness of this argument and, while Roth’s answer is more indirect, it is also unequivocal. The ordinary Jew, reacting with horror, confusion and indignation to Lindbergh’s plausibly rational and ambiguous pronouncements, is right on the money. Ordinary Jews were largely accurate in their perception that the Jewish community was being singled out and stigmatised, and correctly perceived such criticism would encourage antisemitism in the general population. More sinisterly, their suspicion of a larger agenda was probably correct.
Thus, according to Roth, the Jews were not the only ones who understood the coded messages behind the plausible words; antisemites within the American population took full advantage of the licence afforded by the new discourse to take out their prejudices on their fellow citizens. The DNA of racial stereotyping and exclusion from moral concern is universal and any individual (whether predator or prey) is alert to cues of ostracism and exclusion. It is important to note that Roth does not descend into a simplistic Manichean universe of innocent Jews surrounded by evil predatory foes. On the contrary, he invests his characters with the full gamut of human good and evil irrespective of their religious and ethnic affiliations.
Roth’s fictional narrative is acutely relevant to the issue of Israel. Just like the flawed Jews of America, Israel is imperfect despite its enormous successes. Corruption, especially within its political domain, is too frequent for comfort. Racism is prevalent amongst some sections of the population. Social and economic inequality has increased and education policy and funding, on which the future of Israel rests, is far from optimal. Fundamentalist religion exerts an unhealthy influence on Israel’s political and civil life and Israel needs to find ways of living more humanely and harmoniously with its unassimilated and often fractious minority populations. Above all, Israel hasn’t been able to disengage from its role as an occupying power, however reluctant and indirect, over an alien hostile population with all the consequences on its own social and moral fabric.
None of this should occasion any surprise given the history of Israel and the region in which it is embedded and the multiple antagonistic agendas it has to deal with, both within and outside its borders. Some of these are solvable by Israel alone and others depend on the cooperation of others. None are easy and some are utterly intractable.
But none of Israel’s failures, imperfections and transgressions can objectively explain the flood of obsessive and unbalanced criticism levelled at it. David Hirsh in his speech to the Global Forum for Combating Antisemitism - Jerusalem, 25 Feb 08 – puts it this way, “Jews are involved in a real conflict in the Middle East ...When Jews are involved in conflicts there is a danger that the ways people think about those conflicts get mystified in the language of antisemitism. Anti-Zionism is not a reasonable response to the actual situation; it is a response to a narrative of the actual situation which has become mystified by antisemitism....Real human rights abuses are mystified as being genocidal like Nazism; institutional racism is mystified as being worse than apartheid; the occupation is mystified as being unique and as being a manifestation of a Zionist essence; Jewish power is mystified as an ‘Israel lobby’ capable of perverting the policy of the only super power on the planet against its own interest....contemporary antisemitism is not explicitly or obviously antisemitic. ... Antisemitism of this sort is not explicit, is not obvious, and is not self-aware. It is necessary to analyze and interpret a text to know whether it is antisemitic.”7
The problem is that antisemitism can be used in two related but distinct ways. One refers to objectively irrational and selective criticism of - or behaviour towards - Jews as a whole or a significant and core sector of Jewish society, Israel for example. The other usage refers to the emotion, conscious or unconscious, of outgroup hostility towards Jews or Israel/Israelis specifically. It is widely assumed that the former implies the latter, but need that be the case? Is it possible that a dominantly biased discourse (perhaps itself derived from conventionally antisemitic sources) compounded by simple ignorance, other ideological loyalties, identification with the perceived underdog, conformity impulses or more serious situational pressures, can produce an objectively biased (antisemitic) belief and action pattern while free of conventional antisemitic prejudice? And is this important? Does it really matter, in practical terms, whether biased behaviour is caused by faulty information processing and situational factors or by internal disposition?
In my view the short answer is that one cannot easily generalise about the sources of irrational anti-Zionism in individual cases and, secondly, it probably doesn’t much matter. Given the multi-dimensional processes whereby political choices are made, the individual pathway can vary from one individual to another. In some cases the mechanism may be obvious: some are clearly motivated by old-fashioned antisemitism revealed by the virulent tone and abusive content. This can infect Jews and non-Jews alike and are marked by the significant presence of the following cues: fixity of belief and resistance to contrary evidence, obsessiveness, a low trigger threshold to expression of hostility, excessively emotive language and choice of metaphor, stereotyping and essentialising, a tendency to select, exaggerate and misrepresent and, of course, unambiguous statements of hatred and threats of destruction. All these gradations are apparent in considerable portions of the Western media and on the Internet.
In other cases the cause may include a mix, in varying proportions, of “detribalisation”, ideological commitment, social pressures, personal ambition, idealistic identification with the perceived underdog, a contrarian streak or resistance to change, a search for relevance and meaning – or indeed simple arrogance and vanity. In Roth’s novel the character of Rabbi Bengelsdorf, Lindbergh’s tame Jewish apologist, is depicted in unflattering terms as ambitious, vain, arrogant and detached from the run-of-the-mill Jew. As summarised in Laura Miller’s excellent short review8 of the novel “Bengelsdorf is a marvelous creation, part object lesson in the perils of collaboration and part meticulous parody of self-important men everywhere…”.
While of great interest to various academic disciplines, the individual motivations underlying objectively irrational anti-Zionism is, arguably, of less importance than its prevalence (and hence potential for social spread) and its political and military impact. It must be remembered that the diplomatic and media campaigns are partly driven by a deliberate strategy to use “public opinion” as an offensive weapon to undermine, psychologically, economically and diplomatically, the capacity of Israel to resist. The provocations of Hamas and its approach to its military action are components of this strategic agenda. A prime example on the diplomatic-public opinion front is the Goldstone Report which, on a host of objective criteria, is a plainly prejudicial and politicized document intended to stigmatise Israel.
At the same time, it would be perverse to believe that the flood of anti-Zionist comment pervading much of the Western media does not result in secondary antisemitism of the conventional variety. It would imply a compartmentalization of rational thought and emotion for which no evidence exists and which is contradicted by the very content and volume of the critical comment, by the mass meetings and inflammatory placards and slogans, by the spike in antisemitic acts in many Western countries and by the abusive and clearly antisemitic tone of large number of contributions to Internet threads. This occurs despite still significant normative prohibitions on the public expression of antisemitism in the classical sense in most Western countries. The reality is captured in the following quote “It has often been asserted by left authors (for example, Noam Chomsky) that the link between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is a tenuous one. Chomsky asserts that the linkage is a device used by Zionists to squash dissent. Yet the linkage would not be possible—or at least would be much more difficult—if there was no past or current demonstration of anti-Semitism among Israel’s opponents. Simply stated, while it is absolutely true that all anti-Zionists are not Jew hating bigots, anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic in intent.”4 And, I would add, as an outcome.
As shown in numerous studies, pervasive social prejudice is internalised by the exposed population and by the targets (specifically here, Jews and Israelis) themselves. The overt response to such an assault on self-image varies between individuals and according to situational factors. Not surprisingly, it has driven many Jews into an ultra-nationalist stance in which Israel figures as a paragon of virtue in a sea of evil and hostility. Many others have been impelled into a more moderate, but equally obdurate, resistance to the programme of stigmatisation and delegitimisation. At the very least, few Jews for whom the Zionist project represents something positive and admirable, are eager to add their tuppence worth of criticism to the malevolent chorus and thus keep their counsel when otherwise they may have been willing to publicly chastise their brethren.
But for a significant minority, for whom Rabbi Bengelsdorf of Roth’s novel stands as a partial representative, the ideological assault on Israel has had a different effect. Psychological and sociological research - and simple observation - attest to the fact that the individual may resist such stereotyping - or may succumb. In the latter case we expect, and see, a spectrum of graduated responses ranging from disengagement to the role of actively hostile internal critic. Underlying some of the critical comment directed at Israel from within idealistic segments of Jewry, especially the younger generation, is the inappropriate intrusion of middle class guilt, historically naïve and unrealistic ideals and decontextualised analysis into the historically and politically fraught territory of the Middle East. In extreme cases, we encounter Jews who strenuously compete with the most bitter antisemites in the unrestrained expression of hostility towards Zionism and Israel.
For the majority of individuals, especially in democratic cultures, identity is fluid and multidimensional. It is thus possible to be simultaneously adamantly supportive of Israel while subscribing, perhaps more in hope than expectation, to the universalistic ideal of a community of peoples. Defenders of Israel need not descend into the traps of stereotyping and essentialising their opponents and should not close the doors to understanding, dialogue and incremental improvement. The common ground of universal global membership can be kept available for reconciliation and compromise when, and if, the context warrents it. Every situation requires balance between the stark (sometimes subtle) imperatives of reality and the ideal. Our ability to adroitly navigate these treacherous waters may the be key to the survival of Israel as a democratic, Jewish state for all its peoples and even to a peaceful solution to the Middle East conflict.
Mike Berger
1. I use the words antisemitism and anti-Zionism in this article in different ways. Anti-Zionism is hostility towards Israel that goes beyond criticism of one or more specific acts, social features or policy decisions, but is a systematic and encompassing critique of the country and Israeli society. In some instances, this may arise from a variably rational view which sees the Zionist project as misguided or even partaking of colonial and imperialist characteristics. At some ill-defined point such anti-Zionism passes over into what I term, in places, “irrational anti-Zionism” in which Zionism is essentialised as an evil movement fascist in spirit and intent and comparable to other widely condemned movements like apartheid or Naziism. Antisemitism, as pointed out in this article may have, at least, two meanings. One is the conventional antisemitism expressed by significant sectors of Christian Europe and much of the Muslim world in which Jews as a people are depicted as inherently evil, treacherous, devious, cruel, cowardly, greedy and aesthetically repugnant. Clearly the intensity and virulence of such feelings vary. Antisemitism may also be applied to the excessive and selective criticism of Jews or prominent aspects of of the Jewish world, eg. Israel, which is relatively unaccompanied by pan-Jewish prejudice but derives from other sources, like ideology, conformity, ignorance and so forth. Much antisemitism, both conventional and unconventional, is expressed in the form of anti-Zionism, especially irrational anti-Zionism – but the two terms are not identical in meaning. Nevertheless, irrational anti-Zionism, irrespective of its origins, can be defined as objectively antisemitic even where its motivation does not arise from conventional antisemitic prejudice.
2. See for example: The new synthesis in moral psychology. Jonathan Haidt, et al.Science 316, 998 (2007); Collective psychological processes in anti-semitism. Avner Falk Jewish Political Studies Review 18:1-2 (Spring 2006); Spontaneous Inferences, Implicit Impressions, and Implicit Theories. James S. Uleman, S. Adil Saribay, and Celia M. Gonzalez In Annual Review of Psychology Vol. 59: 329-360 (2008); Political Psychology: Situations, Individuals, and Cases, by David P. Houghton. Publ. Routledge, December 2008, (ISBN: 978-0-415-99013-4).
3. From hope and fear set free. Isaiah Berlin in The Proper Study of Mankind: an anthology of essays. Eds. Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer, Publ. Farar, Straus and Giroux, NY, 2000.
4. Leaving the Radical Left: Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism, and Jewish Response (Part Three, Draft 1). From the New Centrist Blog at http://newcentrist.wordpress.com/2008/07/18/leaving-the-radical-left-anti-zionism-anti-semitism-and-jewish-response-part-three-draft-1/
5. The plot against Ameica: a novel. Philip Roth, Publ. Vintage Intnl. Sept 2005
6. Re-membering the Holocaust. Robert Fine at http://engageonline.wordpress.com/2010/02/01/robert-fines-talk-to-the-ucu-meeting-legacy-of-hope-anti-semitism-the-holocaust-and-resistance-yesterday-and-today/ .
7. Speech at Global Forum for Combating Anti-semitism, Jerusalem 8 Feb 2008. David Hirsh see ENGAGE http://www.engageonline.org.uk/blog/printarticle.php?id=1683.
8. Review of “The plot against America: a novel” (Philip Roth) by Laura Miller, 8 Oct 2004 at http://www.powells.com/review/2004_10_08.html.
Monday, February 1, 2010
Fine on the uses and abuses of antisemitism
In my previous communique, I used Roth and Hirsh as models for a critique of antisemitism, its uses and abuses and its relationship to the anti-Zionism of sections of the Western left.
I have received another extremely thoughful and subtle article on the same subject - see below. I really cannot find anything with which I would be in serious disagreement. Despite its length and somewhat rarified tone I strongly suggest everyone reads it in full.
kind regards
Mike Berger
Legacy of Hope: Anti-Semitism, the Holocaust and Resistance Yesterday and Today.
27 January 2010
Robert Fine, UCU member and Professor of Sociology, University of Warwick.
Thanks to the UCU executive for organising this series of important meetings on antisemitism and for inviting me to speak on this occasion.
Re-remembering the Holocaust
When we remember the Holocaust, what is it that we try to keep in mind? Remembering the past is an act of investigation, study, selection, comparison, interpretation and reflection. The past is past but how we understand it has much to do with the present.
When I teach my course on the Sociology of the Holocaust I often refer to passage from Hannah Arendt’s fine book on the Eichmann trial where she writes:
‘the supreme crime it (the court) was confronted with, the physical extermination of the Jewish people, was a crime against humanity perpetrated on the body of the Jewish people, and … only the choice of victims, not the nature of the crime, could be derived from the long history of Jew-hatred and antisemitism’.
The passage is not simple to decode but its gist,as I understand it, is this: the physical extermination of around six million Jewish people was both a crime against Jews and a crime against humanity; it was derived from the long history of European antisemitism and it was an attack on human plurality as such; it had to do with Europe’s longest hatred and also with Europe’s capacity to dehumanise other people. It has a particular meaning for Jews and a universal meaning for humanity.
Holocaust education has to do two things at once. It has to bring out the universal lessons of the Holocaust – about racism, ultra-nationalism, genocide, the role of ordinary men, etc. – and it must tell the story of what happened to Jews. These tasks are not remotely contradictory – any more than a focus on what happened to Armenians in Turkey or Moslems in Bosnia or indigenous peoples in South America lies in opposition to universal history.
In the aftermath of the war the antisemitic dimension of the destruction of European Jews was largely subsumed to narratives concerning the struggles of European nations against the Nazis. In some instances this allowed for new antisemitic campaigns to be waged under the umbrella of anti-Nazism or antizionism. After the Eichmann trial the old biblical term ‘Holocaust’ was recovered to refer to the destruction of Jews and to bring to the fore the antisemitic dimension of this event. There followed a tendency to sacralise the Holocaust, or if we use the phrase of my late friend and colleague, Gillian Rose, to preach a kind of ‘Holocaust piety’. The difficulty we all face today is how to combine the specificity of the event with its universal resonance.
Today we hear another yet more troubling refrain. It is that Holocaust memory has become exclusive: that it’s all about Jewish suffering; that it ignores the non-Jewish people who were also murdered by the Nazis; that Jews have become obsessed by their own suffering at the expense of others; that no longer is any universal meaning drawn from collective memory. It is said that today we suffer from a surfeit of Holocaust museums, films, histories and stories as if this were the only injustice we need to remember. It is said that it is inconsistent to make Holocaust-denial illegal but not genocide denial more generally. It is said that the Holocaust is now used instrumentally to protect Israel from criticism and justify the crimes Israel commits. At the extreme it is said that what Israel does to Palestinians is ‘like’ the Holocaust or that the victims of the Holocaust have now become the victimisers of the Palestinians.
These criticisms are alluring because they appear universalistic. Most of us would agree that memory of the Holocaust ought not to privilege the suffering of Jews at the expense of other sufferings. The cry of ‘Never Again’ ought not to be converted into an injunction that ‘never again’ refers only to Jews. Memory of the Holocaust ought not to protect Israel from criticism. Concern over antisemitism ought not to blind us to other racisms. Collective memory of the Holocaust should not make us blind to the suffering of others. Emphasis on Jewish suffering should not subvert the universal meaning of the Holocaust. And to misquote W H Auden, those to whom evil is done should certainly not do evil in return.
We may all agree that memory of the Holocaust should serve rather as a ‘fire alarm’ alerting us all human atrocities and our need to confront them. But who says otherwise? Who does not share this view? I hear some of my colleagues say: ‘they’ are sensitive only to the mass murder of Jews, ‘they’ turn the Holocaust into an excuse to ignore other crimes, ‘they’ shout antisemitism every time someone attacks Israel or defends Palestinians; ‘they’ instrumentalise the Holocaust for their own political purposes. Who are the ‘they’ in question? The amorphousness of the ‘they’ designation is part of the problem.
There are, to be sure, certain Jewish ultra-nationalists who think only of Jewish suffering and ignore the suffering of others. Such blinkered views are generally true of how nationalists respond to racism against their own people. They do so in nationalistic ways. There is nothing I know that marks out Jewish nationalists here from the general phenomenon that opposition to racism against one’s own people can be nationalistic rather than antiracist, particularistic rather than universal. A critique of Jewish ultra-nationalism only makes sense alongside a critique of other forms of ultra-nationalisms in Europe and the Middle East. It must be distinguished from the notion that Jews or Israeli Jews think only of their own people and nothing of the suffering of others. This problem is not resolved by saying that the ‘they’ who ignore the suffering of others are ‘Zionists’ and ‘defenders of Israel’. We can of course defend the right of the state of Israel to exist and not be threatened by its neighbours without endorsing the views of Israeli ultra-nationalism. Slippage of this sort takes us from the realm of political argument into that of vilifying a whole nation.
2. Denying antisemitism
A now familiar refrain among ‘critics of Israel’ is that the question of antisemitism is only raised to devalue or deflect criticism of Israel. Within our own union I frequently hear this refrain. A UCU motion of 2007 on Israel included the words: ‘criticism of Israel cannot be construed as antisemitic’ and a motion of 2008 repeated that ‘criticism of Israel or Israeli policy is not, as such, antisemitic’. It seems fitting on this occasion that we reflect carefully about this refrain and what it means.
One colleague I was reading the other day wrote that ‘antisemitism charges are just part of the deal for anyone who speaks out for Palestine’ and added that ‘the important point in all this is that we keep speaking out for Palestine’. Well, it is important to speak out for Palestinians. But in the eyes of this colleague at least it is clear that he should not worry about antisemitism since the charge of antisemitism functions in his view only or mainly to demonize opposition to Israel.
Another colleague wrote that the term ‘antisemitism’ has become little more than a rhetoric used to translate what one is actually hearing, say a protest against the killing of children and civilians by the Israeli army, into hatred of Jews. Another laments that ‘by shouting antisemitism every time someone attacks Israel or defends the Palestinians’, defenders of Israel rob the word of its universal resonance.
The feeling expressed in all these statements is that the accusation of antisemitism is now used to trash anyone who is critical of the policies of the Israeli government. It seems that the value of this coinage is undercut by its over-use. The struggle against antisemitism, once seen as central to the construction of a new Europe after the war, is increasingly disavowed since the charge of antisemitism merely serves to deflect or devalue criticism of Israeli occupation, Israeli human rights abuses, Israeli racism toward Arabs, and Israeli military force in Lebanon and Gaza. It would seem that the trouble with Europe is no longer antisemitism but talk of antisemitism. Sometimes we hear people speaking ‘as Jews’ and offering the authority of their Jewishness to confirm that criticism of Israel is not in fact antisemitic.
This emphatic insistence that criticism of Israel is not antisemitic but is labelled antisemitic by ‘defenders of Israel’ seems to me hugely problematic. Let me offer three reasons why I think we should reflect very hard about what’s going on.
First, emphatic denial that criticism of Israel is antisemitic is a way of saying that people only raise concerns and fears about antisemitism in bad faith. It insinuates that those who, rightly or wrongly, raise concerns over antisemitism, are not really concerned about antisemitism at all but only about defending Israel at all costs. It implies that since we cannot defend Israel overtly, we do so covertly and deceptively. The premise is that individuals and organisations which express a sense of alarm about the re-emergence of antisemitism in Europe are dishonest – especially when they connect antisemitism with ‘criticism of Israel’. Since there are a large number of bona fide bodies that have expressed alarm about the ties that bind criticism of Israel with antisemitism, it appears that they are conniving toward the same dishonest end.
Second, emphatic denial that criticism of Israel is antisemitic represents a disturbing tendency in some quarters to wear the charge of antisemitism as almost a badge of honour. It appears as a sign that you are a true friend of the Palestinians, rather than as a stimulus to self-reflection. Refusal to take antisemitism seriously must be a problem for a movement committed to antiracism, that is to say, to opposition to all forms of racism and not only to some. It represents a real regression from the principle established by the McPherson Inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 that if people sees themselves as victims of racism, this does not mean that they are victims of racism but it does mean that there is a duty on institutions to take seriously what is alleged. Emphatic denial of antisemitism encourages institutions not to take allegations of antisemitism seriously whether or not they are directly to do with Israel. There is no doubt in my mind that this has been a major problem within our own union.
Third, emphatic denial that criticism of Israel is antisemitic refuses to distinguish between legitimate and antisemitic criticism of Israel. Let me exemplify the problem by reference to the reports of the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights, the British All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism and the OSCE. These reports have all accepted that criticism of Israel is not as such antisemitic but warn that criticism of Israel can and does sometimes overlap with antisemitism. No one who looks, for example, at David Duke’s website should need further persuasion on this issue. They say that criticism of Israel can become antisemitic if it takes the form, for example, of selecting Israel as uniquely evil or violent among nations, or holding Jews or Israeli Jews collectively responsible for the actions of the state of Israel, or comparing the military occupation of Palestine with the Nazi extermination of Jews, or representing Israel through long established antisemitic myths of world conspiracy, control of the media, murder of non-Jewish children, etc. In such cases they maintain that the substitution of the word ‘Zionists’ for ‘Jews’ makes little substantial difference to the hostility in question. They also say, on an issue that is closer to home, that to campaign to boycott Israeli universities but no other overseas universities in the world is discriminatory and falls foul of anti-discrimination legislation.
These more or less official reports raise the issue of where legitimate political criticism of Israel stops and antisemitism kicks in. They may or may not have got it right; we may want to draw the line elsewhere; but let us not disavow the question itself. If we accept that some kinds of ‘criticism’ of Israel are manifestly antisemitic, for example, criticism based on the notion that Jews as such, by virtue of their Jewishness, are indifferent to the suffering of non-Jews, then the question is where we draw the line – not whether we draw one.
The reduction ad Hitlerum that we find in recent representation of Israelis as blood-thirsty Nazis laughing at the misery of Palestinians is a way of wiping the Israeli Jew off the moral map. There is a worrying tendency either to ignore these inquiries altogether or to deny the message they bring by trashing the messenger. Within two radical Jewish organisations, Jews for Justice for Palestinians and Independent Jewish Voices, colleagues have argued that the commissions that produced these reports were influenced by the ‘Israel lobby’, that they grossly exaggerated the threat posed by antisemitism in Europe, and that they gave excessive weight to the subjective claims of Jews to suffer from antisemitism. The punch line of all these criticisms is that the reports are wrong because they give credence to the notion that criticism of Israel is antisemitic.
If the outcome of these meetings is that we no longer hear the words: ‘criticism of Israel is not or is not as such antisemitic’, this would be hugely worthwhile. For at best such statements are glib and unserious. At worst, they sanction antisemitism in a way that we would never sanction racism.
3. On European self-identity
I never cease to be amazed at the ability of Europeans to recreate ourselves as the civilised continent, the ones who have learnt the universal lessons of the Holocaust, and to treat Jews as those who have failed to learn the lesson. European hubris sometimes takes the form of a constantly repeated narrative of progress which pays tribute to the success of the new Europe in transcending its longest hatred. It acknowledges that antisemitism was a monstrous feature of Europe’s past but insists that the conditions that gave rise to antisemitism have now come to an end with the defeat of Nazism, the rise of the European Union and the reunification of Europe. How often do we hear it said that in the new Europe antisemitism has been marginalised and delegitimised to such an extent that there is now no need to confront it.
The more radical discourse I hear is one that resists this liberal faith in progress and is far more sensitive to the recurrence of racism in European societies. It may declare that antisemitism has been replaced by Islamophobia as the real racism of the moment but it shares the conviction that antisemitism itself has run its course. The race question, we are told, is no longer whether Jews can be good Germans or good Brits but whether Muslims can be good Europeans. Either in its liberal or radical forms, the factual claim that antisemitism is no longer a problem in Europe only serves to exclude antisemitism from the list of racisms Europe now has to confront if a new postnationalist Europe is to be built. This rewriting of history, based on the assumption that antisemitism has been well and truly overcome in the new Europe, leaves out the multiple ways in which the past weighs upon the present.
Today we see the re-emergence of ultra-nationalist parties in Europe. We might think, for example, of the Tories’ new friends in the EU, the Conservatives and Reformists grouping, led by the Polish politician, Michal Kaminski, who began his political journey in a neo-Nazi organisation, wore fascist antisemitic symbols and continues to hold that Poles should not apologise for the 1941 pogrom at Jedwabne until Jews have apologised for the wrongs they inflicted on Poles. Or we might think of the Latvian affiliate to this grouping, the For Fatherland and Freedom party, which has been a prime mover behind annual parades celebrating the Latvian legion of the Waffen-SS. We know that Kaminski and the For Fatherland and Freedom party are but the tip of a large and ugly iceberg of a growing nationalist politics in Europe.
It would be foolish to see the liberal establishment as exempt from antisemitic temptations. The new Europeans are quite capable of re-creating a moral division of the world between themselves and others that stigmatises others as ‘nationalist’ as much as it idealises themselves as ‘postnationalist’. It is not inevitable that the new Europe must be exclusionary in this way, witness the considerable efforts being made to monitor and combat racism, antisemitism and xenophobia, but the urge is internal to it. The representation of Israel in particular as the incarnation of the negative properties Europe has succeeded in overcoming is a case in point. ‘Israel’ and ‘Zionism’ serve as vessels into which the new European can project all that is bad in European history – its colonial past, ethnic divisions, institutionalised racisms, excesses of superfluous violence, etc. – and preserve the good for themselves. In European thought there has long existed a conviction that if we can only rid ourselves of some alien element – be it the bourgeoisie, parasites, terrorists or Jews – then all will be well with the world. Representation of Israel as a pariah state or even a pariah people can perform a similar mythic function for a European consciousness anxious to divest itself of the legacy not only of its own past but also its present.
Antizionists ‘conspire’ just as Zionists do but the denial of antisemitism can no more be explained in terms of any conspiracy theory than can new antisemitism theory. Conspiracies exist but conspiracy theory explains nothing. The antisemitism denial of which I speak cannot be explained by any conspiracy to forge an anti-Israel alliance. Its roots are far more mundane and socially grounded. They lie in the experience most of us have that antisemitism have not been a day to day problem in much of Europe or the UK. They lie in the identity politics embraced by many radical Jews who are intent on absolving themselves, declaring they are not like the ‘Zionists’, making it clear that what the Jewish state does is not done in their name. They lie on the Left in a politics of anti-imperialism which divides the world between oppressor and oppressed nations without allowing any complication or indeed any intersubjective dynamics to enter this binary dichotomised picture of the world. They lie in the idealist philosophy of Rawlsian liberalism that measures the constitution and actions of a particular state against the ideal of what a rational state ought to be without comparing the justice and injustices of the Jewish state against the material practices of other states. They lie finally perhaps in the dynamics of political argument itself which tends to divide the world into opposing camps, leads the members of one camp to caricature the beliefs of the other, and to raise an essentially local struggle into the emblem or signifier of the camps themselves. Which side you are on is determined by your stance on Israel: ‘support’ it and you believe in racism and ethnic cleansing; ‘criticise’ it and you are on the side of progress.
4. Antisemitism and criticism of Israel
I have focused in this polemic on Europe but let me end on this note. The struggle for justice for Palestinians and the struggle against antisemitism often seem worlds apart but this is not so. They belong to one another and draw from the same sources. As far as justice for Palestinians is concerned, the antisemitism question is not a red herring. It is a key to breaking out of the current impasse.
Antisemitism does no favours to the Palestinian cause. In Europe it diminishes support for Palestinian rights because until now at least most people, consciously or intuitively, won’t have anything to do with a movement that has a whiff of antisemitism around it. In Israel it reinforces the grip of ultra-nationalists and religious extremists who know very well how to exploit antisemitism for their own ends. In Palestine it reinforces the grip of fundamentalist leaderships that threaten the freedom of Palestinians from within as much or more than they threaten the existence of Israel from without. In surrounding Arab states it allows reactionary rulers to divert social and political opposition into hatred of Jews and somehow to receive little international criticism for so doing. In the world generally it allows people to blame Israel and Israel alone for the suffering of Palestinians as if the end of Israel and beginning of justice for Palestinians were one and the same thing. It diverts from the real responsibilities of power that Israel is failing to meet.
We have to be careful not to invert the problem we are addressing. If ultra-nationalists in Israel racialise Arabs and turn them into a unitary category, the temptation is to respond with an act of reversal that turns ‘Zionists’ into an equally ‘otherised’ unitary category. We also have to be careful not to place Palestinians in a single identity script as victims and hear only the voice we want to hear. I am not suggesting that Palestinians are not victims but they are not only victims and not only victims of Israel. The problem we need to tackle is that our sense of injustice about the treatment of Palestinians can incline those who feel compassion for them to see this injustice as the formative experience in their lives and replace recognition of their agency with contempt for the people we charge with excluding and oppressing them. No human being is entirely ‘other’ than another, even where unequal social structures make this hard to see. No human being is entirely in solidarity with a whole people, however much he or she affords herself the right to speak on their behalf.
In Europe and the Middle East we see the rise of ultra-nationalism taking many forms – all of which are deeply threatening to our own universal values. What we call ‘antizionism’ today is an anti-nationalism of fools. It casts all the sins of ultra-nationalism onto Zionists and Israel. It won’t see antisemitism because it breaks their world view. In the past antisemitism provided a unifying ideology for a very diverse array of social and political grievances. Today the danger is that ‘antizionism’ may provide a point of unification around which sections of the far right, the anti-imperialist left, radical Islam and even the liberal establishment might coalesce.
I have received another extremely thoughful and subtle article on the same subject - see below. I really cannot find anything with which I would be in serious disagreement. Despite its length and somewhat rarified tone I strongly suggest everyone reads it in full.
kind regards
Mike Berger
Legacy of Hope: Anti-Semitism, the Holocaust and Resistance Yesterday and Today.
27 January 2010
Robert Fine, UCU member and Professor of Sociology, University of Warwick.
Thanks to the UCU executive for organising this series of important meetings on antisemitism and for inviting me to speak on this occasion.
Re-remembering the Holocaust
When we remember the Holocaust, what is it that we try to keep in mind? Remembering the past is an act of investigation, study, selection, comparison, interpretation and reflection. The past is past but how we understand it has much to do with the present.
When I teach my course on the Sociology of the Holocaust I often refer to passage from Hannah Arendt’s fine book on the Eichmann trial where she writes:
‘the supreme crime it (the court) was confronted with, the physical extermination of the Jewish people, was a crime against humanity perpetrated on the body of the Jewish people, and … only the choice of victims, not the nature of the crime, could be derived from the long history of Jew-hatred and antisemitism’.
The passage is not simple to decode but its gist,as I understand it, is this: the physical extermination of around six million Jewish people was both a crime against Jews and a crime against humanity; it was derived from the long history of European antisemitism and it was an attack on human plurality as such; it had to do with Europe’s longest hatred and also with Europe’s capacity to dehumanise other people. It has a particular meaning for Jews and a universal meaning for humanity.
Holocaust education has to do two things at once. It has to bring out the universal lessons of the Holocaust – about racism, ultra-nationalism, genocide, the role of ordinary men, etc. – and it must tell the story of what happened to Jews. These tasks are not remotely contradictory – any more than a focus on what happened to Armenians in Turkey or Moslems in Bosnia or indigenous peoples in South America lies in opposition to universal history.
In the aftermath of the war the antisemitic dimension of the destruction of European Jews was largely subsumed to narratives concerning the struggles of European nations against the Nazis. In some instances this allowed for new antisemitic campaigns to be waged under the umbrella of anti-Nazism or antizionism. After the Eichmann trial the old biblical term ‘Holocaust’ was recovered to refer to the destruction of Jews and to bring to the fore the antisemitic dimension of this event. There followed a tendency to sacralise the Holocaust, or if we use the phrase of my late friend and colleague, Gillian Rose, to preach a kind of ‘Holocaust piety’. The difficulty we all face today is how to combine the specificity of the event with its universal resonance.
Today we hear another yet more troubling refrain. It is that Holocaust memory has become exclusive: that it’s all about Jewish suffering; that it ignores the non-Jewish people who were also murdered by the Nazis; that Jews have become obsessed by their own suffering at the expense of others; that no longer is any universal meaning drawn from collective memory. It is said that today we suffer from a surfeit of Holocaust museums, films, histories and stories as if this were the only injustice we need to remember. It is said that it is inconsistent to make Holocaust-denial illegal but not genocide denial more generally. It is said that the Holocaust is now used instrumentally to protect Israel from criticism and justify the crimes Israel commits. At the extreme it is said that what Israel does to Palestinians is ‘like’ the Holocaust or that the victims of the Holocaust have now become the victimisers of the Palestinians.
These criticisms are alluring because they appear universalistic. Most of us would agree that memory of the Holocaust ought not to privilege the suffering of Jews at the expense of other sufferings. The cry of ‘Never Again’ ought not to be converted into an injunction that ‘never again’ refers only to Jews. Memory of the Holocaust ought not to protect Israel from criticism. Concern over antisemitism ought not to blind us to other racisms. Collective memory of the Holocaust should not make us blind to the suffering of others. Emphasis on Jewish suffering should not subvert the universal meaning of the Holocaust. And to misquote W H Auden, those to whom evil is done should certainly not do evil in return.
We may all agree that memory of the Holocaust should serve rather as a ‘fire alarm’ alerting us all human atrocities and our need to confront them. But who says otherwise? Who does not share this view? I hear some of my colleagues say: ‘they’ are sensitive only to the mass murder of Jews, ‘they’ turn the Holocaust into an excuse to ignore other crimes, ‘they’ shout antisemitism every time someone attacks Israel or defends Palestinians; ‘they’ instrumentalise the Holocaust for their own political purposes. Who are the ‘they’ in question? The amorphousness of the ‘they’ designation is part of the problem.
There are, to be sure, certain Jewish ultra-nationalists who think only of Jewish suffering and ignore the suffering of others. Such blinkered views are generally true of how nationalists respond to racism against their own people. They do so in nationalistic ways. There is nothing I know that marks out Jewish nationalists here from the general phenomenon that opposition to racism against one’s own people can be nationalistic rather than antiracist, particularistic rather than universal. A critique of Jewish ultra-nationalism only makes sense alongside a critique of other forms of ultra-nationalisms in Europe and the Middle East. It must be distinguished from the notion that Jews or Israeli Jews think only of their own people and nothing of the suffering of others. This problem is not resolved by saying that the ‘they’ who ignore the suffering of others are ‘Zionists’ and ‘defenders of Israel’. We can of course defend the right of the state of Israel to exist and not be threatened by its neighbours without endorsing the views of Israeli ultra-nationalism. Slippage of this sort takes us from the realm of political argument into that of vilifying a whole nation.
2. Denying antisemitism
A now familiar refrain among ‘critics of Israel’ is that the question of antisemitism is only raised to devalue or deflect criticism of Israel. Within our own union I frequently hear this refrain. A UCU motion of 2007 on Israel included the words: ‘criticism of Israel cannot be construed as antisemitic’ and a motion of 2008 repeated that ‘criticism of Israel or Israeli policy is not, as such, antisemitic’. It seems fitting on this occasion that we reflect carefully about this refrain and what it means.
One colleague I was reading the other day wrote that ‘antisemitism charges are just part of the deal for anyone who speaks out for Palestine’ and added that ‘the important point in all this is that we keep speaking out for Palestine’. Well, it is important to speak out for Palestinians. But in the eyes of this colleague at least it is clear that he should not worry about antisemitism since the charge of antisemitism functions in his view only or mainly to demonize opposition to Israel.
Another colleague wrote that the term ‘antisemitism’ has become little more than a rhetoric used to translate what one is actually hearing, say a protest against the killing of children and civilians by the Israeli army, into hatred of Jews. Another laments that ‘by shouting antisemitism every time someone attacks Israel or defends the Palestinians’, defenders of Israel rob the word of its universal resonance.
The feeling expressed in all these statements is that the accusation of antisemitism is now used to trash anyone who is critical of the policies of the Israeli government. It seems that the value of this coinage is undercut by its over-use. The struggle against antisemitism, once seen as central to the construction of a new Europe after the war, is increasingly disavowed since the charge of antisemitism merely serves to deflect or devalue criticism of Israeli occupation, Israeli human rights abuses, Israeli racism toward Arabs, and Israeli military force in Lebanon and Gaza. It would seem that the trouble with Europe is no longer antisemitism but talk of antisemitism. Sometimes we hear people speaking ‘as Jews’ and offering the authority of their Jewishness to confirm that criticism of Israel is not in fact antisemitic.
This emphatic insistence that criticism of Israel is not antisemitic but is labelled antisemitic by ‘defenders of Israel’ seems to me hugely problematic. Let me offer three reasons why I think we should reflect very hard about what’s going on.
First, emphatic denial that criticism of Israel is antisemitic is a way of saying that people only raise concerns and fears about antisemitism in bad faith. It insinuates that those who, rightly or wrongly, raise concerns over antisemitism, are not really concerned about antisemitism at all but only about defending Israel at all costs. It implies that since we cannot defend Israel overtly, we do so covertly and deceptively. The premise is that individuals and organisations which express a sense of alarm about the re-emergence of antisemitism in Europe are dishonest – especially when they connect antisemitism with ‘criticism of Israel’. Since there are a large number of bona fide bodies that have expressed alarm about the ties that bind criticism of Israel with antisemitism, it appears that they are conniving toward the same dishonest end.
Second, emphatic denial that criticism of Israel is antisemitic represents a disturbing tendency in some quarters to wear the charge of antisemitism as almost a badge of honour. It appears as a sign that you are a true friend of the Palestinians, rather than as a stimulus to self-reflection. Refusal to take antisemitism seriously must be a problem for a movement committed to antiracism, that is to say, to opposition to all forms of racism and not only to some. It represents a real regression from the principle established by the McPherson Inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 that if people sees themselves as victims of racism, this does not mean that they are victims of racism but it does mean that there is a duty on institutions to take seriously what is alleged. Emphatic denial of antisemitism encourages institutions not to take allegations of antisemitism seriously whether or not they are directly to do with Israel. There is no doubt in my mind that this has been a major problem within our own union.
Third, emphatic denial that criticism of Israel is antisemitic refuses to distinguish between legitimate and antisemitic criticism of Israel. Let me exemplify the problem by reference to the reports of the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights, the British All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism and the OSCE. These reports have all accepted that criticism of Israel is not as such antisemitic but warn that criticism of Israel can and does sometimes overlap with antisemitism. No one who looks, for example, at David Duke’s website should need further persuasion on this issue. They say that criticism of Israel can become antisemitic if it takes the form, for example, of selecting Israel as uniquely evil or violent among nations, or holding Jews or Israeli Jews collectively responsible for the actions of the state of Israel, or comparing the military occupation of Palestine with the Nazi extermination of Jews, or representing Israel through long established antisemitic myths of world conspiracy, control of the media, murder of non-Jewish children, etc. In such cases they maintain that the substitution of the word ‘Zionists’ for ‘Jews’ makes little substantial difference to the hostility in question. They also say, on an issue that is closer to home, that to campaign to boycott Israeli universities but no other overseas universities in the world is discriminatory and falls foul of anti-discrimination legislation.
These more or less official reports raise the issue of where legitimate political criticism of Israel stops and antisemitism kicks in. They may or may not have got it right; we may want to draw the line elsewhere; but let us not disavow the question itself. If we accept that some kinds of ‘criticism’ of Israel are manifestly antisemitic, for example, criticism based on the notion that Jews as such, by virtue of their Jewishness, are indifferent to the suffering of non-Jews, then the question is where we draw the line – not whether we draw one.
The reduction ad Hitlerum that we find in recent representation of Israelis as blood-thirsty Nazis laughing at the misery of Palestinians is a way of wiping the Israeli Jew off the moral map. There is a worrying tendency either to ignore these inquiries altogether or to deny the message they bring by trashing the messenger. Within two radical Jewish organisations, Jews for Justice for Palestinians and Independent Jewish Voices, colleagues have argued that the commissions that produced these reports were influenced by the ‘Israel lobby’, that they grossly exaggerated the threat posed by antisemitism in Europe, and that they gave excessive weight to the subjective claims of Jews to suffer from antisemitism. The punch line of all these criticisms is that the reports are wrong because they give credence to the notion that criticism of Israel is antisemitic.
If the outcome of these meetings is that we no longer hear the words: ‘criticism of Israel is not or is not as such antisemitic’, this would be hugely worthwhile. For at best such statements are glib and unserious. At worst, they sanction antisemitism in a way that we would never sanction racism.
3. On European self-identity
I never cease to be amazed at the ability of Europeans to recreate ourselves as the civilised continent, the ones who have learnt the universal lessons of the Holocaust, and to treat Jews as those who have failed to learn the lesson. European hubris sometimes takes the form of a constantly repeated narrative of progress which pays tribute to the success of the new Europe in transcending its longest hatred. It acknowledges that antisemitism was a monstrous feature of Europe’s past but insists that the conditions that gave rise to antisemitism have now come to an end with the defeat of Nazism, the rise of the European Union and the reunification of Europe. How often do we hear it said that in the new Europe antisemitism has been marginalised and delegitimised to such an extent that there is now no need to confront it.
The more radical discourse I hear is one that resists this liberal faith in progress and is far more sensitive to the recurrence of racism in European societies. It may declare that antisemitism has been replaced by Islamophobia as the real racism of the moment but it shares the conviction that antisemitism itself has run its course. The race question, we are told, is no longer whether Jews can be good Germans or good Brits but whether Muslims can be good Europeans. Either in its liberal or radical forms, the factual claim that antisemitism is no longer a problem in Europe only serves to exclude antisemitism from the list of racisms Europe now has to confront if a new postnationalist Europe is to be built. This rewriting of history, based on the assumption that antisemitism has been well and truly overcome in the new Europe, leaves out the multiple ways in which the past weighs upon the present.
Today we see the re-emergence of ultra-nationalist parties in Europe. We might think, for example, of the Tories’ new friends in the EU, the Conservatives and Reformists grouping, led by the Polish politician, Michal Kaminski, who began his political journey in a neo-Nazi organisation, wore fascist antisemitic symbols and continues to hold that Poles should not apologise for the 1941 pogrom at Jedwabne until Jews have apologised for the wrongs they inflicted on Poles. Or we might think of the Latvian affiliate to this grouping, the For Fatherland and Freedom party, which has been a prime mover behind annual parades celebrating the Latvian legion of the Waffen-SS. We know that Kaminski and the For Fatherland and Freedom party are but the tip of a large and ugly iceberg of a growing nationalist politics in Europe.
It would be foolish to see the liberal establishment as exempt from antisemitic temptations. The new Europeans are quite capable of re-creating a moral division of the world between themselves and others that stigmatises others as ‘nationalist’ as much as it idealises themselves as ‘postnationalist’. It is not inevitable that the new Europe must be exclusionary in this way, witness the considerable efforts being made to monitor and combat racism, antisemitism and xenophobia, but the urge is internal to it. The representation of Israel in particular as the incarnation of the negative properties Europe has succeeded in overcoming is a case in point. ‘Israel’ and ‘Zionism’ serve as vessels into which the new European can project all that is bad in European history – its colonial past, ethnic divisions, institutionalised racisms, excesses of superfluous violence, etc. – and preserve the good for themselves. In European thought there has long existed a conviction that if we can only rid ourselves of some alien element – be it the bourgeoisie, parasites, terrorists or Jews – then all will be well with the world. Representation of Israel as a pariah state or even a pariah people can perform a similar mythic function for a European consciousness anxious to divest itself of the legacy not only of its own past but also its present.
Antizionists ‘conspire’ just as Zionists do but the denial of antisemitism can no more be explained in terms of any conspiracy theory than can new antisemitism theory. Conspiracies exist but conspiracy theory explains nothing. The antisemitism denial of which I speak cannot be explained by any conspiracy to forge an anti-Israel alliance. Its roots are far more mundane and socially grounded. They lie in the experience most of us have that antisemitism have not been a day to day problem in much of Europe or the UK. They lie in the identity politics embraced by many radical Jews who are intent on absolving themselves, declaring they are not like the ‘Zionists’, making it clear that what the Jewish state does is not done in their name. They lie on the Left in a politics of anti-imperialism which divides the world between oppressor and oppressed nations without allowing any complication or indeed any intersubjective dynamics to enter this binary dichotomised picture of the world. They lie in the idealist philosophy of Rawlsian liberalism that measures the constitution and actions of a particular state against the ideal of what a rational state ought to be without comparing the justice and injustices of the Jewish state against the material practices of other states. They lie finally perhaps in the dynamics of political argument itself which tends to divide the world into opposing camps, leads the members of one camp to caricature the beliefs of the other, and to raise an essentially local struggle into the emblem or signifier of the camps themselves. Which side you are on is determined by your stance on Israel: ‘support’ it and you believe in racism and ethnic cleansing; ‘criticise’ it and you are on the side of progress.
4. Antisemitism and criticism of Israel
I have focused in this polemic on Europe but let me end on this note. The struggle for justice for Palestinians and the struggle against antisemitism often seem worlds apart but this is not so. They belong to one another and draw from the same sources. As far as justice for Palestinians is concerned, the antisemitism question is not a red herring. It is a key to breaking out of the current impasse.
Antisemitism does no favours to the Palestinian cause. In Europe it diminishes support for Palestinian rights because until now at least most people, consciously or intuitively, won’t have anything to do with a movement that has a whiff of antisemitism around it. In Israel it reinforces the grip of ultra-nationalists and religious extremists who know very well how to exploit antisemitism for their own ends. In Palestine it reinforces the grip of fundamentalist leaderships that threaten the freedom of Palestinians from within as much or more than they threaten the existence of Israel from without. In surrounding Arab states it allows reactionary rulers to divert social and political opposition into hatred of Jews and somehow to receive little international criticism for so doing. In the world generally it allows people to blame Israel and Israel alone for the suffering of Palestinians as if the end of Israel and beginning of justice for Palestinians were one and the same thing. It diverts from the real responsibilities of power that Israel is failing to meet.
We have to be careful not to invert the problem we are addressing. If ultra-nationalists in Israel racialise Arabs and turn them into a unitary category, the temptation is to respond with an act of reversal that turns ‘Zionists’ into an equally ‘otherised’ unitary category. We also have to be careful not to place Palestinians in a single identity script as victims and hear only the voice we want to hear. I am not suggesting that Palestinians are not victims but they are not only victims and not only victims of Israel. The problem we need to tackle is that our sense of injustice about the treatment of Palestinians can incline those who feel compassion for them to see this injustice as the formative experience in their lives and replace recognition of their agency with contempt for the people we charge with excluding and oppressing them. No human being is entirely ‘other’ than another, even where unequal social structures make this hard to see. No human being is entirely in solidarity with a whole people, however much he or she affords herself the right to speak on their behalf.
In Europe and the Middle East we see the rise of ultra-nationalism taking many forms – all of which are deeply threatening to our own universal values. What we call ‘antizionism’ today is an anti-nationalism of fools. It casts all the sins of ultra-nationalism onto Zionists and Israel. It won’t see antisemitism because it breaks their world view. In the past antisemitism provided a unifying ideology for a very diverse array of social and political grievances. Today the danger is that ‘antizionism’ may provide a point of unification around which sections of the far right, the anti-imperialist left, radical Islam and even the liberal establishment might coalesce.
Monday, January 18, 2010
Roth, Hirsh and Antisemitism
I have not posted to this blog since June last year. I'm not entirely sure it serves a purpose but producing the occasional bulletin for distribution at least helps me clarify my own thoughts. So my newsletter has been coming out at rather irregular intervals without actually being posted to this blog. From here on I will make a point of ensuring that the blog is updated whenever I actually get around to putting pen to paper.
In the meantime it accumulated a few comments - 6 from David Zinn who is so incorrigibly abusive and compulsively one-track that I will no longer bother with him. There is enough abysmal trash on the Internet without adding more garbage.
There was a comment from Steven Robins which I will try to add here and address. If it does not appear it is because I cannot access it any longer. My apologies for that, but the post below actually addresses some of his issues - albeit indirectly.
I will continue to publish comments - supportive, analytical or critical - where I deem them to have merit. I will also either answer them personally or publish worthwhile responses from others.
Roth, Hirsh and Antisemitism
Those at the top of the celebrity food chain are painfully exposed to the fickleness of public opinion; Tiger Woods and Blair come to mind but the list is a long one. From hero to zero is not really a danger to those of us at the bottom of the celebrity ladder, but even we know that we get undeserved bouquets and brickbats at times. This is probably the reason Kipling called “success” and “failure” the two imposters.
Speaking from a personal perspective, the task of countering the persistent and insidious anti-Israel media bias, can lead to errors of fact, emphasis and judgement. Besides the failure of the media to provide a balanced treatment of the multi-faceted and convoluted conflicts which flourish within the Middle East hothouse, one needs to deal with more-or-less orchestrated campaigns from activists who for various reasons (psychological and ideological) and are committed to unending propaganda warfare against the state of Israel. Truly reliable facts are difficult to come by, space is immensely limited and the level of debate is generally polarised and abysmally low. Fatigue, the pressures of time and simple irritation compound the problem.
Thus I hope to occasionally use this newsletter/blog to bring to your attention some of the better articles and books pertaining to Israel or to Jewry more broadly and to raise issues which are neither suitable nor possible to deal with properly in the popular press.
It is important to frame this within the context of an Israel engaged in an existential war against those who like to destroy it altogether. Some of our co-religionists, who have arrogated to themselves the mantle of universal ethical spokespersons, would like to you to believe this assertion is paranoia or simply a device to silence criticism. It is neither. There is more than sufficient evidence ranging from the actual statements of those who make their ambitions quite plain all the way through to actions whose only consequence is in fact the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state. The fact that in narrow military terms Israel is considerably stronger than her enemies, does not make their intentions any less sinister. Nor is the military battlefield the only arena in which this conflict is being fought. As important are the arenas of demography, geostrategic resources and public opinion – to mention only some. In all of these Israel’s enemies are equal or superior with extremely important implications for Israel’s’ security, and indeed for the security of global Jewry.
Nor does the fact that Israel is engaged in an existential struggle absolve it from criticism. But it does make it imperative that those who claim to support it take great care not to become the handmaidens of Israel’s enemies – a topic I have discussed previously and do not wish to revisit here.
The first theme of this issue is the question of anti-semitism arising, strangely enough, out of a novel, which many of you may have already read, and I have belatedly got around to finishing. I’m referring to Philip Roth’s “The plot against America”. I came away overwhelmed by its extraordinarily ambitious scope – a combination of an acutely observed socio-political treatise on an adolescent and still raw America, a polemic, a scrupulous and partly autobiographical examination of character, all embedded in an imaginative and complex narrative rich in incident and unexpected twists. Despite its polemical undertone at no stage did this undermine the honesty with which Roth parades his vast cast of Jewish and non-Jewish characters before us; nor does he rub our noses in the lessons to be drawn from them but allows the reader to form his own conclusions.
A leitmotif throughout the novel is the question: where does paranoia, fear and parochialism end and true anti-semitism begin? Do the bland, seemingly innocuous and apparently reasonable criticisms of Jewish cultural difference, exclusivity and failure to assimilate more thoroughly into the predominantly white, Protestant host population disguise a deeper and more sinister threat or are they to be taken at their face value, as some more “enlightened” members of the Jewish community would have their compatriots believe?
While Roth’s answer is indirect, it is also unequivocal. The ordinary Jew, reacting with horror, confusion and indignation to Lindbergh’s plausible and ambiguous pronouncements, is right on the money. In some way the ability to detect and decipher the true meaning lies within the Jewish psychological DNA, honed by centuries of uncertainty and oppression. Such gut recognition can be blocked by excessive education laced with ambition, vanity and arrogance, represented by the oleaginous and politically adroit, Rabbi Bengelsdorf - whose career of pandering and sycophancy comes to a satisfyingly nasty end by the end of the book.
Nor are the Jews the only ones who understand the code. The anti-semites and opportunists within the American population also understand the new licence to take out their prejudices on their fellow Jews. But Roth does not descend into a simplistic Manichean universe of innocent Jews surrounded by evil predatory foes. On the contrary, he invests his characters with the full gamut of human good and evil irrespective of their religious ethnic affiliations, none of which undermines the central insight: that anti-semitism can come cunningly disguised, perhaps especially to the anti-semite himself. This does not mitigate its profoundly sinister origins in the darker reaches of the human psyche or the dangers it holds for Jew and non-Jew alike.
Of course, this analysis is acutely relevant to the issue of Israel. Just like the Jews of America, Israel is an imperfect society despite its enormous successes. Corruption is rife especially within its political space. Racism is prevalent amongst some sections of the population. Social and economic inequality is becoming worse and education, on which the future of Israel rests, is far from optimal. Fundamentalist religion exerts an unhealthily excessive influence on Israel’s political and civil life and Israel needs to deal more humanely and effectively with its minority populations. Above all, Israel hasn’t solved the problem of ruling, however distantly and indirectly, over an alien hostile population with all the consequences on its own social and moral fabric.
None of this should occasion any surprise given Israel’s history, the neighbourhood in which it is embedded and the multiple antagonistic agendas it has to deal with, both within and outside its borders. Some of these are solvable by Israel alone and others depend on the cooperation of others. None are easy and some are utterly intractable.
But none of Israel’s failures, imperfections and transgressions remotely justify the obsessive and unbalanced criticism leveled at it. These, like the anti-semitism of Lindbergh’s America, reflect the psychological twists and political agendas of Israel’s critics rather than an objective view of Israel itself. The carefully calibrated and disguised criticisms of some of its more sophisticated enemies are clearly and correctly understood both by the ordinary Jew and by those who wish Israel harm as threats. Only those blinded by some combination of denialism, internalised and unexamined anti-semitism, free-floating guilt, vanity, ignorance or simple ambition and greed can believe otherwise.
Some of this is put extremely well by David Hirsh in his speech to the Global Forum for Combating Antisemitism - Jerusalem, 25 Feb 08, and I quote extensively from it below..
“Jews are involved in a real conflict in the Middle East where not all the rights and wrongs are on one side, where neither nation has always acted wisely and where in the absence of peace, things can only get worse.
When Jews are involved in conflicts there is a danger that the ways people think about those conflicts get mystified in the language of antisemitism. Anti-Zionism is not a reasonable response to the actual situation; it is a response to a
narrative of the actual situation which has become mystified by antisemitism.
Real human rights abuses are mystified as being genocidal like Nazism; institutional racism is mystified as being worse than apartheid; the occupation is mystified as being unique and as being a manifestation of a Zionist essence; Jewish power is mystified as an ‘Israel lobby’ capable of perverting the policy of the only super power on the planet against its own interest.
In Britain we have dealt a fairly heavy blow, for the moment, to the boycotters. In my view the main manifestation of antisemitism in the near future is going to be conspiracy theory.
The kind of antisemitism which really worries me is the kind which is difficult to spot. Governments can imprison those who commit racist assaults and they can ban hate-speech. But we cannot shut down the Guardian newspaper or my
trade union or the Green Party.
Why not? Because contemporary antisemitism is not explicitly or obviously antisemitic.
We can respond that according to the EUMC working definition this or that piece in the Guardian is in fact antisemitic, irrespective of what people think. But the counter-response will be “of course, you wrote it”.
I am not against bringing legal or bureaucratic power to bear against antisemitism when that is possible – interestingly the boycott in my own union was ended with the help of a combination of the two. But we have to lead with a political fight, by making and winning arguments.
We should not base our strategy on the assumption that the powerful in the world - or in America - will be prepared to oppose antisemitism. We should not act as though the "lobby" rhetoric was true. It isn’t. Moshe Postone tells us that antisemitism can appear to be anti-hegemonic. But we shouldn’t act as though antisemitism was in fact anti-hegemonic.
We don’t aim to change the mind of Ilan Pappe or Saumas Milne but we do aim to change the mind of those who may be influenced by them. Yesterday John Mann said that the boycotters are afraid of us. And I think they are. They’re not afraid of being denounced as wild-eyed leftists or as antisemites or as self-haters. They love that.
But they are afraid of coming up against people who have a chance of influencing their own followers or of sewing (sic)doubt amongst those who they aim to influence. This is a difficult job. ...
The contemporary way of doing antisemitic conspiracy theory was given a stamp of professorial legitimacy by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in 2006. They created a vocabulary which one could use to express conspiracy theory and which did not seem to be antisemtic.
Conspiracy theory is nearly always, today, articulated using the Livingstone Formulation, which claims that Jews play the antisemitism card in bad faith in order to de-legitimize criticism of Israeli human rights abuses. In this way, anyone who raises a worry about contemporary antisemitism already stands accused of doing so maliciously; and they stand accused of doing so as part of a common plan with others. Livingstone’s formulation also denies the distinction between criticism and demonization.
Thursday’s Guardian had the rhetoric and the images of antisemitic conspiracy theory running through it, from the front page to the inside pages, to the leader. Antisemitism of this sort is not explicit, is not obvious, and is not self-aware. It is necessary to analyze and interpret a text to know whether it is antisemitic.”
I will leave this theme here. The message is to all of us is that it is not necessary to believe Israel is perfect or wholly right to support or defend it. It is not necessary to believe or claim others are intrinsically evil or that they have no legitimacy in order to oppose them. The story of Israel and the Palestinians contains hurts suffered and wrongs committed by both sides. But until the Palestinians can free themselves from the narrative of endless victimhood, the ideologies and anti-semitism of the Western left and the Muslim world, the medieval visions of Jihadi Islamism and the corrupt gangsters ruling over them, their ability to find creative solutions to their existential problems will remain stillborn.
Israel, hopefully, will continue to avoid that trap as they have managed so far at least partially. They have a recent history of heroic achievement to provide them with the confidence to get beyond their own fears and prejudices and fulfill their destiny.
I would be interested in other people’s perceptions of the issues discussed in this post.
Mike Berger
In the meantime it accumulated a few comments - 6 from David Zinn who is so incorrigibly abusive and compulsively one-track that I will no longer bother with him. There is enough abysmal trash on the Internet without adding more garbage.
There was a comment from Steven Robins which I will try to add here and address. If it does not appear it is because I cannot access it any longer. My apologies for that, but the post below actually addresses some of his issues - albeit indirectly.
I will continue to publish comments - supportive, analytical or critical - where I deem them to have merit. I will also either answer them personally or publish worthwhile responses from others.
Roth, Hirsh and Antisemitism
Those at the top of the celebrity food chain are painfully exposed to the fickleness of public opinion; Tiger Woods and Blair come to mind but the list is a long one. From hero to zero is not really a danger to those of us at the bottom of the celebrity ladder, but even we know that we get undeserved bouquets and brickbats at times. This is probably the reason Kipling called “success” and “failure” the two imposters.
Speaking from a personal perspective, the task of countering the persistent and insidious anti-Israel media bias, can lead to errors of fact, emphasis and judgement. Besides the failure of the media to provide a balanced treatment of the multi-faceted and convoluted conflicts which flourish within the Middle East hothouse, one needs to deal with more-or-less orchestrated campaigns from activists who for various reasons (psychological and ideological) and are committed to unending propaganda warfare against the state of Israel. Truly reliable facts are difficult to come by, space is immensely limited and the level of debate is generally polarised and abysmally low. Fatigue, the pressures of time and simple irritation compound the problem.
Thus I hope to occasionally use this newsletter/blog to bring to your attention some of the better articles and books pertaining to Israel or to Jewry more broadly and to raise issues which are neither suitable nor possible to deal with properly in the popular press.
It is important to frame this within the context of an Israel engaged in an existential war against those who like to destroy it altogether. Some of our co-religionists, who have arrogated to themselves the mantle of universal ethical spokespersons, would like to you to believe this assertion is paranoia or simply a device to silence criticism. It is neither. There is more than sufficient evidence ranging from the actual statements of those who make their ambitions quite plain all the way through to actions whose only consequence is in fact the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state. The fact that in narrow military terms Israel is considerably stronger than her enemies, does not make their intentions any less sinister. Nor is the military battlefield the only arena in which this conflict is being fought. As important are the arenas of demography, geostrategic resources and public opinion – to mention only some. In all of these Israel’s enemies are equal or superior with extremely important implications for Israel’s’ security, and indeed for the security of global Jewry.
Nor does the fact that Israel is engaged in an existential struggle absolve it from criticism. But it does make it imperative that those who claim to support it take great care not to become the handmaidens of Israel’s enemies – a topic I have discussed previously and do not wish to revisit here.
The first theme of this issue is the question of anti-semitism arising, strangely enough, out of a novel, which many of you may have already read, and I have belatedly got around to finishing. I’m referring to Philip Roth’s “The plot against America”. I came away overwhelmed by its extraordinarily ambitious scope – a combination of an acutely observed socio-political treatise on an adolescent and still raw America, a polemic, a scrupulous and partly autobiographical examination of character, all embedded in an imaginative and complex narrative rich in incident and unexpected twists. Despite its polemical undertone at no stage did this undermine the honesty with which Roth parades his vast cast of Jewish and non-Jewish characters before us; nor does he rub our noses in the lessons to be drawn from them but allows the reader to form his own conclusions.
A leitmotif throughout the novel is the question: where does paranoia, fear and parochialism end and true anti-semitism begin? Do the bland, seemingly innocuous and apparently reasonable criticisms of Jewish cultural difference, exclusivity and failure to assimilate more thoroughly into the predominantly white, Protestant host population disguise a deeper and more sinister threat or are they to be taken at their face value, as some more “enlightened” members of the Jewish community would have their compatriots believe?
While Roth’s answer is indirect, it is also unequivocal. The ordinary Jew, reacting with horror, confusion and indignation to Lindbergh’s plausible and ambiguous pronouncements, is right on the money. In some way the ability to detect and decipher the true meaning lies within the Jewish psychological DNA, honed by centuries of uncertainty and oppression. Such gut recognition can be blocked by excessive education laced with ambition, vanity and arrogance, represented by the oleaginous and politically adroit, Rabbi Bengelsdorf - whose career of pandering and sycophancy comes to a satisfyingly nasty end by the end of the book.
Nor are the Jews the only ones who understand the code. The anti-semites and opportunists within the American population also understand the new licence to take out their prejudices on their fellow Jews. But Roth does not descend into a simplistic Manichean universe of innocent Jews surrounded by evil predatory foes. On the contrary, he invests his characters with the full gamut of human good and evil irrespective of their religious ethnic affiliations, none of which undermines the central insight: that anti-semitism can come cunningly disguised, perhaps especially to the anti-semite himself. This does not mitigate its profoundly sinister origins in the darker reaches of the human psyche or the dangers it holds for Jew and non-Jew alike.
Of course, this analysis is acutely relevant to the issue of Israel. Just like the Jews of America, Israel is an imperfect society despite its enormous successes. Corruption is rife especially within its political space. Racism is prevalent amongst some sections of the population. Social and economic inequality is becoming worse and education, on which the future of Israel rests, is far from optimal. Fundamentalist religion exerts an unhealthily excessive influence on Israel’s political and civil life and Israel needs to deal more humanely and effectively with its minority populations. Above all, Israel hasn’t solved the problem of ruling, however distantly and indirectly, over an alien hostile population with all the consequences on its own social and moral fabric.
None of this should occasion any surprise given Israel’s history, the neighbourhood in which it is embedded and the multiple antagonistic agendas it has to deal with, both within and outside its borders. Some of these are solvable by Israel alone and others depend on the cooperation of others. None are easy and some are utterly intractable.
But none of Israel’s failures, imperfections and transgressions remotely justify the obsessive and unbalanced criticism leveled at it. These, like the anti-semitism of Lindbergh’s America, reflect the psychological twists and political agendas of Israel’s critics rather than an objective view of Israel itself. The carefully calibrated and disguised criticisms of some of its more sophisticated enemies are clearly and correctly understood both by the ordinary Jew and by those who wish Israel harm as threats. Only those blinded by some combination of denialism, internalised and unexamined anti-semitism, free-floating guilt, vanity, ignorance or simple ambition and greed can believe otherwise.
Some of this is put extremely well by David Hirsh in his speech to the Global Forum for Combating Antisemitism - Jerusalem, 25 Feb 08, and I quote extensively from it below..
“Jews are involved in a real conflict in the Middle East where not all the rights and wrongs are on one side, where neither nation has always acted wisely and where in the absence of peace, things can only get worse.
When Jews are involved in conflicts there is a danger that the ways people think about those conflicts get mystified in the language of antisemitism. Anti-Zionism is not a reasonable response to the actual situation; it is a response to a
narrative of the actual situation which has become mystified by antisemitism.
Real human rights abuses are mystified as being genocidal like Nazism; institutional racism is mystified as being worse than apartheid; the occupation is mystified as being unique and as being a manifestation of a Zionist essence; Jewish power is mystified as an ‘Israel lobby’ capable of perverting the policy of the only super power on the planet against its own interest.
In Britain we have dealt a fairly heavy blow, for the moment, to the boycotters. In my view the main manifestation of antisemitism in the near future is going to be conspiracy theory.
The kind of antisemitism which really worries me is the kind which is difficult to spot. Governments can imprison those who commit racist assaults and they can ban hate-speech. But we cannot shut down the Guardian newspaper or my
trade union or the Green Party.
Why not? Because contemporary antisemitism is not explicitly or obviously antisemitic.
We can respond that according to the EUMC working definition this or that piece in the Guardian is in fact antisemitic, irrespective of what people think. But the counter-response will be “of course, you wrote it”.
I am not against bringing legal or bureaucratic power to bear against antisemitism when that is possible – interestingly the boycott in my own union was ended with the help of a combination of the two. But we have to lead with a political fight, by making and winning arguments.
We should not base our strategy on the assumption that the powerful in the world - or in America - will be prepared to oppose antisemitism. We should not act as though the "lobby" rhetoric was true. It isn’t. Moshe Postone tells us that antisemitism can appear to be anti-hegemonic. But we shouldn’t act as though antisemitism was in fact anti-hegemonic.
We don’t aim to change the mind of Ilan Pappe or Saumas Milne but we do aim to change the mind of those who may be influenced by them. Yesterday John Mann said that the boycotters are afraid of us. And I think they are. They’re not afraid of being denounced as wild-eyed leftists or as antisemites or as self-haters. They love that.
But they are afraid of coming up against people who have a chance of influencing their own followers or of sewing (sic)doubt amongst those who they aim to influence. This is a difficult job. ...
The contemporary way of doing antisemitic conspiracy theory was given a stamp of professorial legitimacy by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in 2006. They created a vocabulary which one could use to express conspiracy theory and which did not seem to be antisemtic.
Conspiracy theory is nearly always, today, articulated using the Livingstone Formulation, which claims that Jews play the antisemitism card in bad faith in order to de-legitimize criticism of Israeli human rights abuses. In this way, anyone who raises a worry about contemporary antisemitism already stands accused of doing so maliciously; and they stand accused of doing so as part of a common plan with others. Livingstone’s formulation also denies the distinction between criticism and demonization.
Thursday’s Guardian had the rhetoric and the images of antisemitic conspiracy theory running through it, from the front page to the inside pages, to the leader. Antisemitism of this sort is not explicit, is not obvious, and is not self-aware. It is necessary to analyze and interpret a text to know whether it is antisemitic.”
I will leave this theme here. The message is to all of us is that it is not necessary to believe Israel is perfect or wholly right to support or defend it. It is not necessary to believe or claim others are intrinsically evil or that they have no legitimacy in order to oppose them. The story of Israel and the Palestinians contains hurts suffered and wrongs committed by both sides. But until the Palestinians can free themselves from the narrative of endless victimhood, the ideologies and anti-semitism of the Western left and the Muslim world, the medieval visions of Jihadi Islamism and the corrupt gangsters ruling over them, their ability to find creative solutions to their existential problems will remain stillborn.
Israel, hopefully, will continue to avoid that trap as they have managed so far at least partially. They have a recent history of heroic achievement to provide them with the confidence to get beyond their own fears and prejudices and fulfill their destiny.
I would be interested in other people’s perceptions of the issues discussed in this post.
Mike Berger
Monday, June 15, 2009
David Zinn in his own words
David Zinn in his own words
Ryan Rutherford, aka David Zinn, (for reasons unknown to me at least) challenged me to reproduce his immortal thoughts in my blog, in his normal courteous manner - which I reproduce here here for your edification “I wonder if you’ll be brave enough to publish my rebuttal on your blog, or is your site nothing but a one-way street where you slander people with impunity and provide them no recourse to correct the record and your deplorable distortions?”
Of course it requires little bravery from me since there are few things which better convict the fanatic than their own words. To be honest I have not read through it since I catch the drift fairly early on; perhaps some of you will be hardy enough.
Needless to say I will not be responding but this blog is open to anyone who wishes to respond, or indeed to support Zinny. I will not include any more of Zinny on my blog. He can be found in full torrent on IAS and probably elsewhere.
I am prepared to take considered input, critical or otherwise, minus undue ad hominem irrelevancies and preferably moderately brief.
Mike Berger (aka SOLAR PLEXUS www.froggyfarm.blogspot.com )
Dear Mr Berger
Firstly, let me just say that I feel somewhat honoured that your blog reflects a newfound obsession with my words and what you presume to be my outlook. Your references to me as Zinny are too precious for words, so thanks for the smile that this nickname engendered when I first read it on your blog.
I was also going to apologise profusely for implying that you were a liar, rather than sticking with just gullible, because we really are so poorly served by the mainstream media so it is often difficult, without a bit of work, to know what’s going on in the real world. However, after reading through your take on some of my comments I have begun to wonder whether dishonesty isn’t an integral part of your strategy, which is far from unknown among Zionists.
Let’s now deconstruct, or perhaps reconstruct, those quotations of mine that you referred to in the relevant blog entry.
I wrote that “Israel is a colonialist, deeply racist and apartheid-style state is plainly obvious to anyone who knows anything about the country and isn't a rabid right wing pro-Israel apologist”, and I absolutely stand by this comment based on extensive and wide ranging research on the issue. You are also correct that I don’t need any conference or HSRC report to tell me about what sort of country Israel is. I’m glad that the HSRC has compiled such a report as now there is yet more ammunition against the pro-Israel apologists of this world though, true to form, they’ve gone on the hysterical defensive trying to slander the researchers. The only element of this comment that I admit was rather ill-judged was my reference to “rabid right wing pro-Israel apologists” because there are people who are quite liberal in their outlook who still defend Israel, usually because of their Jewish heritage, or because they are simply ignorant about Israel’s actions. So apologies for having smeared everyone who supports Israel as being ultra right wing extremists.
You go on to quote me as having written “Ahmadienjad doesn’t really wish to eliminate Israel as ‘we know it’ – that is, as a Jewish State. His comments have been misrepresented”, which is a ridiculous distortion of what I actually wrote. In the relevant article on ‘It’s Almost Supernatural’ you are quoted as having written “Ahmadinejad's threat to reality, namely, the elimination of Israel as we know it”. Now this term, “as we know it”, is admittedly vague so I presumed you were referring to his misquoted statements that he wished to “wipe Israel off the map”. As I pointed out in my post, there is no such expression in Farsi and that Ahmadinejad was quoting the late Ayatollah Khomeini who once said that he hoped the “regime in Jerusalem would vanish from the pages of history”, a quotation carrying a very different meaning to the one generally ascribed to Ahmadinejad. I pointed out twice in the relevant thread that to refer to Ahmadinejad’s quote, even if we concede that he used the term “wipe out” or something similar, by not referring to the context is to perpetuate a falsehood. For the record here is my reference to the issue in its entirety:
“…Ahmadinejad never ever proposed "the elimination of Israel as we know it". The mainstream media incorrectly reported that he had threatened to "wipe Israel off the map" which was a woefully inaccurate translation of the Farsi. In fact, this language has no such expression. Ahmadinejad was quoting the late Ayatollah Khomeini who once said that he hopes that "the Zionist regime in Israel vanishes from the pages of history". There's a massive difference between this and hoping for some genocidal elimination of all Jews. He was basically saying, and by extension so was Ahmadinejad, that the State of Israel as it is now constituted must change, a sentiment which I and all humane people throughout the world share. Just as calling for an end to Apartheid was not suggesting that white people be wiped out, so calling for Israel to no longer be a racist Zionist state is not wishing for the Jews to be vanquished from this earth”.
You write that Ahmadinejad is “developing a nuclear weapon as fast as he can” though strangely you provide no proof of this. Have you heard of the NIE, aka the National Intelligence Estimate, which is an intelligence report compiled by 16 US intelligence agencies? In late 2007 they released a report that Iran stopped developing its nuclear weapons programme in 2003.
Considering how you’ve misrepresented me I find it altogether rather rich that I am accused of misrepresenting you. I will concede that I should have taken more care in noting the ambiguity in your original statement which referred to Ahmadinejad wishing to “eliminate Israel as ‘we know it’”. I just assumed, perhaps incorrectly, that you were trotting out that much circulated canard against the Iranian president. Your blithe reference to a “Jewish state” also needs some clarification, so perhaps you’d care to do so. I mean if Israel withdrew from the Occupied Territories tomorrow and worked actively to assist the Palestinians in setting up an independent state, Israel would still remain “Jewish” by virtue of the majority population being of this cultural/religious persuasion. As a result of this action I seriously doubt one would hear many pronouncements from Ahmadinejad, or any other major figures in the Middle East, about Israel being “wiped out”, or at least these figures would have their real agendas exposed as there would no longer be any real world ammunition to fuel the fire of people in the region. You see, Mr Berger, the question isn’t about Israel being “Jewish” so much as it is about being a brutal occupying power and terror state.
You quote my statement that “I find it interesting that people like John Dugard are described as "ideologues" because they take "anti-Zionist positions", which suggests that to be pro-Zionist one would be free of ideology”, yet fail to tackle it in any meaningful sense, instead you just repeat that Dugard, like myself and Virginia Tilley evidently, are “ideologues”. Under that sweet photo of yourself on your blog you have written that the “blog subscribes to an inclusive Jewish identity and support for the right of Israel to exist in security and peace”. Elsewhere you express predictable sympathy for the “Zionist project”, which is by definition an ideological enterprise. I harbour no such allegiance to any state or political philosophy, except perhaps for universality, in other words applying to ourselves the same standard we apply to others. In Jesus and Confucius’ formulation this is known as the “golden rule” while Kant referred to it as the “categorical imperative”. So why don’t you point out what my ideology is, seeing as though you seem to be an expert on the issue.
I also don’t “hate Israel”, anymore than I “hated” South Africa because of the Apartheid government. I have a problem with many states around the world, but that doesn’t mean I hate the entire population. I have English heritage on my father’s side, and am still in regular contact with my family in England, but that doesn’t mean I somehow excuse that terrorist Tony Blair from illegally invading another country, nor do I ever make apologies for Britain’s horrific imperial history. The idea that one should either hate or love a particular state, without any nuance allowed, is a textbook case of ideological identification.
I did indeed write that “Just because Sudan has a horrendous human rights record does that magically exculpate Israel from any and all abuses against the Palestinians? Ditto for the question of ‘xenophobic hatred’ in South Africa, and on and on.” And you respond that “no-one said it did”. If you go back to the original thread you will notice that I was responding to the following comments from Sun:
“South Africa aint gonna spend no dollars on research into what makes the Sudanese Arabs hate, disposses and kill black (Muslim) Sudanese now will they?
Maybe even a proper funding of research into what lay behind the xenophobic hatred last year. No siree.”
So yes, someone, namely Sun, encouraged me to ask the quoted question as this was what he was seemingly implying. By referring to “Chechnia (sic), Tibet and Sri Lanka” you simply confirm the observation I implied in the above quotation and yet again fail to answer the question.
Your last quote has me observing that “Instead of fixating on who wrote and funded the HSRC report, why not actually review the report and tackle it on the basis of facts, and not mere ad hominem attacks. Or is this just standard operating procedure for pro-Israel zealots who cannot address factual information and must constantly go on the offensive with smear campaigns against those who disagree with their perspective of Israel as a paragon of purity?” and once more you fail to address the issue and confirm what I wrote by contending that the report is “fruit of a poisoned tree”. You also seem to think I’m motivated by “negative obsessions” without specifying what these are, and even imply that I am akin to a Holocaust denier like David Irving. You really do appear to harbour a pathological hatred for me, and by extension I presume you exhibit similar hatred towards all critics of Israel.
I notice with some interest that your latest blog entry is entitled ‘Ideologues and Bigots’ which is a perfect description of yourself. You clearly hold to a rigidly doctrinaire belief system and don’t seem too upset by the treatment of the Palestinians, past or present. You have a lot to say about the HSRC and the likes of Virginia Tilley, but where is your outrage at some of the pronouncements of Avigdor Lieberman, surely one of the most repugnant individuals to ever be part of the Israeli government? He has said that if Arabs in Israel don’t give a loyalty oath to Israel they should be expelled, and has proposed dropping all Palestinian prisoners in the ocean to drown. Where’s the indignation, Mike? Or does bigotry only apply to statements that are critical of poor little old Israel?
I’m not sure what’s more revolting, equating me to that despicable anti-Semite Irving or with those racist right wing rejects who Max Blumenthal interviewed in Jerusalem. The first thuggish lowlife he interviews says that Obama is a “f&*$head who should be shot” while others say that Obama should go and “f^$# himself”. The same fine gentleman who eagerly desires to see the President of the United States assassinated later says “white power…f*%^ the niggers”. An overweight and unattractive young woman says that Obama is “a Muslim for sure, and who even knows if he was born in the United States?…we haven’t seen his birth certificate…he’s like a terrorist”, thus revealing her ignorance and bigotry in one foul sweep. One clearly drunk buffoon called Obama a “p*#$y and faggot”, while another repeatedly said “f&$# Obama”. Yet another fine specimen of American Jewish youth said that he’d like to eat a watermelon with Obama who is “another nigger from the town”.
When have I even remotely expressed such sentiments? You have repeatedly asked, in a highly arrogant manner, who I am as if I first have to pass some Mike Berger test before I can say anything about the Israel/Palestine conflict, so why not actually try and find out who I am and what values I hold before making such sick, disgusting, utterly egregious and deeply reprehensible comparisons between me and some asinine scumbags who don’t deserve to scrub my shoes or work in my garden, let alone have a conversation with me. People, furthermore, whose entire value system I loathe with all my being and who should make all decent people sick to the core of their stomach. You may quibble with my interpretation of your person based on what I assumed you wrote, but at least I took your words on, and didn’t begin spewing all manner of obscene insults based on no evidence whatsoever.
On the “Guess who’s coming to SA” thread you write that you “don't really wish to get into the F(inkelstein) - Dershowitz or F(inkelstein) - anyone debate”. Could this be because you’re afraid that Finkelstein will be shown to have destroyed the likes of Dershowitz who is so loved by the Zionist brigade? It is actually very important to compare the work of Dershowitz and Finkelstein because then one will be able to see that the former is nothing but a liar, fabricator and outright propagandist. Dershowitz even relied largely on another hoax, namely Joan Peters’ From Time Immemorial, for his famous book The Case for Israel, which should suggest the kind of scholarship that the famous litigator is responsible for. He even made changes to his book for the paperback addition after Finkelstein had exposed some of his fraudulence.
Instead of hurling insult after insult, clearly something of a speciality with you, such as calling me and others “Hyde Park corner nutters” and “grade A paranoids”, perhaps you might like to provide a critical assessment of Finkelstein’s work and to show where he displays all this so-called “paranoia”. As Woody Allen once said, “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean people aren’t out to get you”. In all seriousness, paranoia usually implies that someone holds a belief with virtually no correlation to the real world. Considering that Finkelstein has displayed a consummate scholarly skill in his work that has been lauded by many experts on the Israel/Palestine issue, while exposing others as frauds and fabricators, the charge of paranoia doesn’t fit all that well without clear substantiation. The US is a major terror state, and Israel’s international terrorism, while on a much smaller scale to that of its chief donor, is also very well-known. To acknowledge this point, whether one is Norman Finkelstein or David Zinn or Nigel Parry or Pete Sampras, isn’t to display paranoia but mere acknowledgement of the world as it actually is. Considering how you’ve displayed yourself to be the consummate ideologue and also a disgraceful smear merchant, I realise that reality rarely intrudes upon your warped brain and that for you those who live in the real world are to be reduced to objects of your vile scorn.
I can’t help but notice the irony that you accuse others of paranoia yet you are one of the chief contributors to a site devoted to “Exposing anti-Israel bias in the South African media and promoting a balanced South African foreign policy towards the Middle East”. If anything, the media in South Africa isn’t critical enough of Israel, nor is our government, at least not publicly among the top echelons. I am also rather curious as to what you could possibly mean by “balanced”, seeing as though you and most of those on ‘It’s Almost Supernatural’ appear to be uncritical adherents of everything Israel does and never utter so much as a peep about the sickening violations of Palestinian rights in the Occupied Territories or within Israel proper. It seems that “bias” and “balanced” have very different meanings for ideological extremists and those who hold to a higher standard of factual integrity.
I wonder if you’ll be brave enough to publish my rebuttal on your blog, or is your site nothing but a one-way street where you slander people with impunity and provide them no recourse to correct the record and your deplorable distortions?
I eagerly await your response.
Regards
David Zinn
Ryan Rutherford, aka David Zinn, (for reasons unknown to me at least) challenged me to reproduce his immortal thoughts in my blog, in his normal courteous manner - which I reproduce here here for your edification “I wonder if you’ll be brave enough to publish my rebuttal on your blog, or is your site nothing but a one-way street where you slander people with impunity and provide them no recourse to correct the record and your deplorable distortions?”
Of course it requires little bravery from me since there are few things which better convict the fanatic than their own words. To be honest I have not read through it since I catch the drift fairly early on; perhaps some of you will be hardy enough.
Needless to say I will not be responding but this blog is open to anyone who wishes to respond, or indeed to support Zinny. I will not include any more of Zinny on my blog. He can be found in full torrent on IAS and probably elsewhere.
I am prepared to take considered input, critical or otherwise, minus undue ad hominem irrelevancies and preferably moderately brief.
Mike Berger (aka SOLAR PLEXUS www.froggyfarm.blogspot.com )
Dear Mr Berger
Firstly, let me just say that I feel somewhat honoured that your blog reflects a newfound obsession with my words and what you presume to be my outlook. Your references to me as Zinny are too precious for words, so thanks for the smile that this nickname engendered when I first read it on your blog.
I was also going to apologise profusely for implying that you were a liar, rather than sticking with just gullible, because we really are so poorly served by the mainstream media so it is often difficult, without a bit of work, to know what’s going on in the real world. However, after reading through your take on some of my comments I have begun to wonder whether dishonesty isn’t an integral part of your strategy, which is far from unknown among Zionists.
Let’s now deconstruct, or perhaps reconstruct, those quotations of mine that you referred to in the relevant blog entry.
I wrote that “Israel is a colonialist, deeply racist and apartheid-style state is plainly obvious to anyone who knows anything about the country and isn't a rabid right wing pro-Israel apologist”, and I absolutely stand by this comment based on extensive and wide ranging research on the issue. You are also correct that I don’t need any conference or HSRC report to tell me about what sort of country Israel is. I’m glad that the HSRC has compiled such a report as now there is yet more ammunition against the pro-Israel apologists of this world though, true to form, they’ve gone on the hysterical defensive trying to slander the researchers. The only element of this comment that I admit was rather ill-judged was my reference to “rabid right wing pro-Israel apologists” because there are people who are quite liberal in their outlook who still defend Israel, usually because of their Jewish heritage, or because they are simply ignorant about Israel’s actions. So apologies for having smeared everyone who supports Israel as being ultra right wing extremists.
You go on to quote me as having written “Ahmadienjad doesn’t really wish to eliminate Israel as ‘we know it’ – that is, as a Jewish State. His comments have been misrepresented”, which is a ridiculous distortion of what I actually wrote. In the relevant article on ‘It’s Almost Supernatural’ you are quoted as having written “Ahmadinejad's threat to reality, namely, the elimination of Israel as we know it”. Now this term, “as we know it”, is admittedly vague so I presumed you were referring to his misquoted statements that he wished to “wipe Israel off the map”. As I pointed out in my post, there is no such expression in Farsi and that Ahmadinejad was quoting the late Ayatollah Khomeini who once said that he hoped the “regime in Jerusalem would vanish from the pages of history”, a quotation carrying a very different meaning to the one generally ascribed to Ahmadinejad. I pointed out twice in the relevant thread that to refer to Ahmadinejad’s quote, even if we concede that he used the term “wipe out” or something similar, by not referring to the context is to perpetuate a falsehood. For the record here is my reference to the issue in its entirety:
“…Ahmadinejad never ever proposed "the elimination of Israel as we know it". The mainstream media incorrectly reported that he had threatened to "wipe Israel off the map" which was a woefully inaccurate translation of the Farsi. In fact, this language has no such expression. Ahmadinejad was quoting the late Ayatollah Khomeini who once said that he hopes that "the Zionist regime in Israel vanishes from the pages of history". There's a massive difference between this and hoping for some genocidal elimination of all Jews. He was basically saying, and by extension so was Ahmadinejad, that the State of Israel as it is now constituted must change, a sentiment which I and all humane people throughout the world share. Just as calling for an end to Apartheid was not suggesting that white people be wiped out, so calling for Israel to no longer be a racist Zionist state is not wishing for the Jews to be vanquished from this earth”.
You write that Ahmadinejad is “developing a nuclear weapon as fast as he can” though strangely you provide no proof of this. Have you heard of the NIE, aka the National Intelligence Estimate, which is an intelligence report compiled by 16 US intelligence agencies? In late 2007 they released a report that Iran stopped developing its nuclear weapons programme in 2003.
Considering how you’ve misrepresented me I find it altogether rather rich that I am accused of misrepresenting you. I will concede that I should have taken more care in noting the ambiguity in your original statement which referred to Ahmadinejad wishing to “eliminate Israel as ‘we know it’”. I just assumed, perhaps incorrectly, that you were trotting out that much circulated canard against the Iranian president. Your blithe reference to a “Jewish state” also needs some clarification, so perhaps you’d care to do so. I mean if Israel withdrew from the Occupied Territories tomorrow and worked actively to assist the Palestinians in setting up an independent state, Israel would still remain “Jewish” by virtue of the majority population being of this cultural/religious persuasion. As a result of this action I seriously doubt one would hear many pronouncements from Ahmadinejad, or any other major figures in the Middle East, about Israel being “wiped out”, or at least these figures would have their real agendas exposed as there would no longer be any real world ammunition to fuel the fire of people in the region. You see, Mr Berger, the question isn’t about Israel being “Jewish” so much as it is about being a brutal occupying power and terror state.
You quote my statement that “I find it interesting that people like John Dugard are described as "ideologues" because they take "anti-Zionist positions", which suggests that to be pro-Zionist one would be free of ideology”, yet fail to tackle it in any meaningful sense, instead you just repeat that Dugard, like myself and Virginia Tilley evidently, are “ideologues”. Under that sweet photo of yourself on your blog you have written that the “blog subscribes to an inclusive Jewish identity and support for the right of Israel to exist in security and peace”. Elsewhere you express predictable sympathy for the “Zionist project”, which is by definition an ideological enterprise. I harbour no such allegiance to any state or political philosophy, except perhaps for universality, in other words applying to ourselves the same standard we apply to others. In Jesus and Confucius’ formulation this is known as the “golden rule” while Kant referred to it as the “categorical imperative”. So why don’t you point out what my ideology is, seeing as though you seem to be an expert on the issue.
I also don’t “hate Israel”, anymore than I “hated” South Africa because of the Apartheid government. I have a problem with many states around the world, but that doesn’t mean I hate the entire population. I have English heritage on my father’s side, and am still in regular contact with my family in England, but that doesn’t mean I somehow excuse that terrorist Tony Blair from illegally invading another country, nor do I ever make apologies for Britain’s horrific imperial history. The idea that one should either hate or love a particular state, without any nuance allowed, is a textbook case of ideological identification.
I did indeed write that “Just because Sudan has a horrendous human rights record does that magically exculpate Israel from any and all abuses against the Palestinians? Ditto for the question of ‘xenophobic hatred’ in South Africa, and on and on.” And you respond that “no-one said it did”. If you go back to the original thread you will notice that I was responding to the following comments from Sun:
“South Africa aint gonna spend no dollars on research into what makes the Sudanese Arabs hate, disposses and kill black (Muslim) Sudanese now will they?
Maybe even a proper funding of research into what lay behind the xenophobic hatred last year. No siree.”
So yes, someone, namely Sun, encouraged me to ask the quoted question as this was what he was seemingly implying. By referring to “Chechnia (sic), Tibet and Sri Lanka” you simply confirm the observation I implied in the above quotation and yet again fail to answer the question.
Your last quote has me observing that “Instead of fixating on who wrote and funded the HSRC report, why not actually review the report and tackle it on the basis of facts, and not mere ad hominem attacks. Or is this just standard operating procedure for pro-Israel zealots who cannot address factual information and must constantly go on the offensive with smear campaigns against those who disagree with their perspective of Israel as a paragon of purity?” and once more you fail to address the issue and confirm what I wrote by contending that the report is “fruit of a poisoned tree”. You also seem to think I’m motivated by “negative obsessions” without specifying what these are, and even imply that I am akin to a Holocaust denier like David Irving. You really do appear to harbour a pathological hatred for me, and by extension I presume you exhibit similar hatred towards all critics of Israel.
I notice with some interest that your latest blog entry is entitled ‘Ideologues and Bigots’ which is a perfect description of yourself. You clearly hold to a rigidly doctrinaire belief system and don’t seem too upset by the treatment of the Palestinians, past or present. You have a lot to say about the HSRC and the likes of Virginia Tilley, but where is your outrage at some of the pronouncements of Avigdor Lieberman, surely one of the most repugnant individuals to ever be part of the Israeli government? He has said that if Arabs in Israel don’t give a loyalty oath to Israel they should be expelled, and has proposed dropping all Palestinian prisoners in the ocean to drown. Where’s the indignation, Mike? Or does bigotry only apply to statements that are critical of poor little old Israel?
I’m not sure what’s more revolting, equating me to that despicable anti-Semite Irving or with those racist right wing rejects who Max Blumenthal interviewed in Jerusalem. The first thuggish lowlife he interviews says that Obama is a “f&*$head who should be shot” while others say that Obama should go and “f^$# himself”. The same fine gentleman who eagerly desires to see the President of the United States assassinated later says “white power…f*%^ the niggers”. An overweight and unattractive young woman says that Obama is “a Muslim for sure, and who even knows if he was born in the United States?…we haven’t seen his birth certificate…he’s like a terrorist”, thus revealing her ignorance and bigotry in one foul sweep. One clearly drunk buffoon called Obama a “p*#$y and faggot”, while another repeatedly said “f&$# Obama”. Yet another fine specimen of American Jewish youth said that he’d like to eat a watermelon with Obama who is “another nigger from the town”.
When have I even remotely expressed such sentiments? You have repeatedly asked, in a highly arrogant manner, who I am as if I first have to pass some Mike Berger test before I can say anything about the Israel/Palestine conflict, so why not actually try and find out who I am and what values I hold before making such sick, disgusting, utterly egregious and deeply reprehensible comparisons between me and some asinine scumbags who don’t deserve to scrub my shoes or work in my garden, let alone have a conversation with me. People, furthermore, whose entire value system I loathe with all my being and who should make all decent people sick to the core of their stomach. You may quibble with my interpretation of your person based on what I assumed you wrote, but at least I took your words on, and didn’t begin spewing all manner of obscene insults based on no evidence whatsoever.
On the “Guess who’s coming to SA” thread you write that you “don't really wish to get into the F(inkelstein) - Dershowitz or F(inkelstein) - anyone debate”. Could this be because you’re afraid that Finkelstein will be shown to have destroyed the likes of Dershowitz who is so loved by the Zionist brigade? It is actually very important to compare the work of Dershowitz and Finkelstein because then one will be able to see that the former is nothing but a liar, fabricator and outright propagandist. Dershowitz even relied largely on another hoax, namely Joan Peters’ From Time Immemorial, for his famous book The Case for Israel, which should suggest the kind of scholarship that the famous litigator is responsible for. He even made changes to his book for the paperback addition after Finkelstein had exposed some of his fraudulence.
Instead of hurling insult after insult, clearly something of a speciality with you, such as calling me and others “Hyde Park corner nutters” and “grade A paranoids”, perhaps you might like to provide a critical assessment of Finkelstein’s work and to show where he displays all this so-called “paranoia”. As Woody Allen once said, “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean people aren’t out to get you”. In all seriousness, paranoia usually implies that someone holds a belief with virtually no correlation to the real world. Considering that Finkelstein has displayed a consummate scholarly skill in his work that has been lauded by many experts on the Israel/Palestine issue, while exposing others as frauds and fabricators, the charge of paranoia doesn’t fit all that well without clear substantiation. The US is a major terror state, and Israel’s international terrorism, while on a much smaller scale to that of its chief donor, is also very well-known. To acknowledge this point, whether one is Norman Finkelstein or David Zinn or Nigel Parry or Pete Sampras, isn’t to display paranoia but mere acknowledgement of the world as it actually is. Considering how you’ve displayed yourself to be the consummate ideologue and also a disgraceful smear merchant, I realise that reality rarely intrudes upon your warped brain and that for you those who live in the real world are to be reduced to objects of your vile scorn.
I can’t help but notice the irony that you accuse others of paranoia yet you are one of the chief contributors to a site devoted to “Exposing anti-Israel bias in the South African media and promoting a balanced South African foreign policy towards the Middle East”. If anything, the media in South Africa isn’t critical enough of Israel, nor is our government, at least not publicly among the top echelons. I am also rather curious as to what you could possibly mean by “balanced”, seeing as though you and most of those on ‘It’s Almost Supernatural’ appear to be uncritical adherents of everything Israel does and never utter so much as a peep about the sickening violations of Palestinian rights in the Occupied Territories or within Israel proper. It seems that “bias” and “balanced” have very different meanings for ideological extremists and those who hold to a higher standard of factual integrity.
I wonder if you’ll be brave enough to publish my rebuttal on your blog, or is your site nothing but a one-way street where you slander people with impunity and provide them no recourse to correct the record and your deplorable distortions?
I eagerly await your response.
Regards
David Zinn
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