What is Antisemitism?(Part 1)

pradeep ppillai at sprint.ca
Wed Jun 5 00:13:16 PDT 2002


http://www.counterpunch.com

June 4, 2002

What is Antisemitism?

By Michael Neumann

Every once in a while, some left-wing Jewish writer will take

a deep breath, open up his (or her) great big heart, and tell

us that criticism of Israel or Zionism is not antisemitism.

Silently they congratulate themselves on their courage. With

a little sigh, they suppress any twinge of concern that maybe

the goyim--let alone the Arabs--can't be trusted with this

dangerous knowledge.

Sometimes it is gentile hangers-on, whose ethos if not their

identity aspires to Jewishness, who take on this task. Not to

be utterly risqué, they then hasten to remind us that

antisemitism is nevertheless to be taken very seriously. That

Israel, backed by a pronounced majority of Jews, happens to

be waging a race war against the Palestinians is all the more

reason we should be on our guard. Who knows? it might

possibly stir up some resentment!

I take a different view. I think we should almost never take

antisemitism seriously, and maybe we should have some fun

with it. I think it is particularly unimportant to the

Israel-Palestine conflict, except perhaps as a diversion from

the real issues. I will argue for the truth of these claims; I

also defend their propriety. I don't think making them is on a

par with pulling the wings off flies.

"Antisemitism", properly and narrowly speaking, doesn't

mean hatred of semites; that is to confuse etymology with

definition. It means hatred of Jews. But here, immediately,

we come up against the venerable shell-game of Jewish

identity: "Look! We're a religion! No! a race! No! a cultural

entity! Sorry--a religion!" When we tire of this game, we get

suckered into another: "anti-Zionism is antisemitism! "

quickly alternates with: "Don't confuse Zionism with Judaism!

How dare you, you antisemite!"

Well, let's be good sports. Let's try defining antisemitism as

broadly as any supporter of Israel would ever want:

antisemitism can be hatred of the Jewish race, or culture, or

religion, or hatred of Zionism. Hatred, or dislike, or

opposition, or slight unfriendliness.

But supporters of Israel won't find this game as much fun as

they expect. Inflating the meaning of 'antisemitism' to

include anything politically damaging to Israel is a

double-edged sword. It may be handy for smiting your

enemies, but the problem is that definitional inflation, like

any inflation, cheapens the currency. The more things get to

count as antisemitic, the less awful antisemitism is going to

sound. This happens because, while no one can stop you from

inflating definitions, you still don't control the facts. In

particular, no definition of 'antisemitism' is going to eradicate

the substantially pro-Palestinian version of the facts which I

espouse, as do most people in Europe, a great many Israelis,

and a growing number of North Americans.

What difference does that make? Suppose, for example, an

Israeli rightist says that the settlements represent the

pursuit of aspirations fundamental to the Jewish people, and

to oppose the settlements is antisemitism. We might have to

accept this claim; certainly it is difficult to refute. But we also

cannot abandon the well-founded belief that the settlements

strangle the Palestinian people and extinguish any hope of

peace. So definitional acrobatics are all for nothing: we can

only say, screw the fundamental aspirations of the Jewish

people; the settlements are wrong. We must add that, since

we are obliged to oppose the settlements, we are obliged to

be antisemitic. Through definitional inflation, some form of

'antisemitism' has become morally obligatory.

It gets worse if anti-Zionism is labeled antisemitic, because

the settlements, even if they do not represent fundamental

aspirations of the Jewish people, are an entirely plausible

extension of Zionism. To oppose them is indeed to be

anti-Zionist, and therefore, by the stretched definition,

antisemitic. The more antisemitism expands to include

opposition to Israeli policies, the better it looks. Given the

crimes to be laid at the feet of Zionism, there is another

simple syllogism: anti-Zionism is a moral obligation, so, if

anti-Zionism is antisemitism, antisemitism is a moral

obligation.

What crimes? Even most apologists for Israel have given up

denying them, and merely hint that noticing them is a bit

antisemitic. After all, Israel 'is no worse than anyone else'.

First, so what? At age six we knew that "everyone's doing it"

is no excuse; have we forgotten? Second, the crimes are no

worse only when divorced from their purpose. Yes, other

people have killed civilians, watched them die for want of

medical care, destroyed their homes, ruined their crops, and

used them as human shields. But Israel does these things to

correct the inaccuracy of Israel Zangwill's 1901 assertion

that "Palestine is a country without a people; the Jews are a

people without a country". It hopes to create a land entirely

empty of gentiles, an Arabia deserta in which Jewish children

can laugh and play throughout a wasteland called peace.

Well before the Hitler era, Zionists came thousands of miles

to dispossess people who had never done them the slightest

harm, and whose very existence they contrived to ignore.

Zionist atrocities were not part of the initial plan. They

emerged as the racist obliviousness of a persecuted people

blossomed into the racial supremacist ideology of a

persecuting one. That is why the commanders who directed

the rapes, mulilations and child-killings of Deir Yassin went

on to become prime ministers of Israel.(*) But these murders

were not enough. Today, when Israel could have peace for

the taking, it conducts another round of dispossession,

slowly, deliberately making Palestine unliveable for

Palestinians, and liveable for Jews. Its purpose is not defense

or public order, but the extinction of a people. True, Israel

has enough PR-savvy to eliminate them with an American

rather than a Hitlerian level of violence. This is a kinder,

gentler genocide that portrays its perpetrators as victims.

Israel is building a racial state, not a religious one. Like my

parents, I have always been an atheist. I am entitled by the

biology of my birth to Israeli citizenship; you, perhaps, are

the most fervent believer in Judaism, but are not.

Palestinians are being squeezed and killed for me, not for

you. They are to be forced into Jordan, to perish in a civil

war. So no, shooting Palestinian civilians is not like shooting

Vietnamese or Chechen civilians. The Palestinians aren't

'collateral damage' in a war against well-armed communist or

separatist forces. They are being shot because Israel thinks

all Palestinians should vanish or die, so people with one

Jewish grandparent can build subdivisions on the rubble of

their homes. This is not the bloody mistake of a blundering

superpower but an emerging evil, the deliberate strategy of a

state conceived in and dedicated to an increasingly vicious

ethnic nationalism. It has relatively few corpses to its credit

so far, but its nuclear weapons can kill perhaps 25 million

people in a few hours.

Do we want to say it is antisemitic to accuse, not just the

Israelis, but Jews generally of complicity in these crimes

against humanity? Again, maybe not, because there is a

quite reasonable case for such assertions. Compare them, for

example, to the claim that Germans generally were complicit

in such crimes. This never meant that every last German,

man, woman, idiot and child, were guilty. It meant that most

Germans were. Their guilt, of course, did not consist in

shoving naked prisoners into gas chambers. It consisted in

support for the people who planned such acts, or--as many

overwrought, moralistic Jewish texts will tell you--for

denying the horror unfolding around them, for failing to

speak out and resist, for passive consent. Note that the

extreme danger of any kind of active resistance is not

supposed to be an excuse here.

Well, virtually no Jew is in any kind of danger from speaking

out. And speaking out is the only sort of resistance required.

If many Jews spoke out, it would have an enormous effect.

But the overwhelming majority of Jews do not, and in the

vast majority of cases, this is because they support Israel.

Now perhaps the whole notion of collective responsibility

should be discarded; perhaps some clever person will

convince us that we have to do this. But at present, the case

for Jewish complicity seems much stronger than the case for

German complicity. So if it is not racist, and reasonable, to

say that the Germans were complicit in crimes against

humanity, then it is not racist, and reasonable, to say the

same of the Jews. And should the notion of collective

responsibility be discarded, it would still be reasonable to say

that many, perhaps most adult Jewish individuals support a

state that commits war crimes, because that's just true. So if

saying these things is antisemitic, than it can be reasonable

to be antisemitic.

In other words there is a choice to be made. You can use

'antisemitism' to fit your political agenda, or you can use it as

a term of condemnation, but you can't do both. If

antisemitism is to stop coming out reasonable or moral, it

has to be narrowly and unpolemically defined. It would be

safe to confine antisemitism to explicitly racial hatred of

Jews, to attacking people simply because they had been born

Jewish. But it would be uselessly safe: even the Nazis did not

claim to hate people simply because they had been born

Jewish. They claimed to hate the Jews because they were out

to dominate the Aryans.

Clearly such a view should count as antisemitic, whether it

belongs to the cynical racists who concocted it or to the fools

who swallowed it.

There is only one way to guarantee that the term

"antisemitism" captures all and only bad acts or attitudes

towards Jews. We have to start with what we can all agree

are of that sort, and see that the term names all and only

them. We probably share enough morality to do this.

For instance, we share enough morality to say that all

racially based acts and hatreds are bad, so we can safely

count them as antisemitic. But not all 'hostility towards Jews',

even if that means hostility towards the overwhelming

majority of Jews, should count as antisemitic. Nor should all

hostility towards Judaism, or Jewish culture.

I, for example, grew up in Jewish culture and, like many

people growing up in a culture, I have come to dislike it. But

it is unwise to count my dislike as antisemitic, not because I

am Jewish, but because it is harmless. Perhaps not utterly

harmless: maybe, to some tiny extent, it will somehow

encourage some of the harmful acts or attitudes we'd want to

call antisemitic. But so what? Exaggerated philosemitism,

which regards all Jews as brilliant warm and witty saints,

might have the same effect. The dangers posed by my dislike

are much too small to matter. Even widespread, collective

loathing for a culture is normally harmless. French culture,

for instance, seems to be widely disliked in North America,

and no one, including the French, consider this some sort of

racial crime.

Not even all acts and attitudes harmful to Jews generally

should be considered antisemitic. Many people dislike

American culture; some boycott American goods. Both the

attitude and the acts may harm Americans generally, but

there is nothing morally objectionable about either. Defining

these acts as anti-Americanism will only mean that some

anti-Americanism is perfectly acceptable. If you call

opposition to Israeli policies antisemitic on the grounds that

this opposition harms Jews generally, it will only mean that

some antisemitism is equally acceptable.

If antisemitism is going to be a term of condemnation, then,

it must apply beyond explicitly racist acts or thoughts or

feelings. But it cannot apply beyond clearly unjustified and

serious hostility to Jews. The Nazis made up historical

fantasies to justify their attacks; so do modern antisemites

who trust in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. So do the

closet racists who complain about Jewish dominance of the

economy. This is antisemitism in a narrow, negative sense of

the word. It is action or propaganda designed to hurt Jews,

not because of anything they could avoid doing, but because

they are what they are. It also applies to the attitudes that

propaganda tries to instill. Though not always explicitly

racist, it involves racist motives and the intention to do real

damage. Reasonably well-founded opposition to Israeli

policies, even if that opposition hurts all Jews, does not fit

this description. Neither does simple, harmless dislike of

things Jewish.

(Contd. Part 2)



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