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)