What is Antisemitism? (contd)
By Michael Neumann
So far, I've suggested that it's best to narrow the definition of
antisemitism so that no act can be both antisemitic and
unobjectionable. But we can go further. Now that we're
through playing games, let's ask about the role of *genuine*,
bad antisemitism in the Israel-Palestine conflict, and in the
world at large.
Undoubtedly there is genuine antisemitism in the Arab world:
the distribution of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the
myths about stealing the blood of gentile babies. This is
utterly inexcusable. So was your failure to answer Aunt Bee's
last letter. In other words, it is one thing to be told: you
must simply accept that antisemitism is evil; to do otherwise
is to put yourself outside our moral world. But it is quite
something else to have someone try to bully you into
proclaiming that antisemitism is the Evil of Evils. We are not
children learning morality; it is our responsibility to set our
own moral priorities. We cannot do this by looking at horrible
images from 1945 or listening to the anguished cries of
suffering columnists. We have to ask how much harm
antisemitism is doing, or is likely to do, not in the past, but
today. And we must ask where such harm might occur, and
why.
Supposedly there is great danger in the antisemitism of the
Arab world. But Arab antisemitism isn't the cause of Arab
hostility towards Israel or even towards Jews. It is an effect.
The progress of Arab antisemitism fits nicely with the
progress of Jewish encroachment and Jewish atrocities. This
is not to excuse genuine antisemitism; it is to trivialize it. It
came to the Middle East with Zionism and it will abate when
Zionism ceases to be an expansionist threat. Indeed its chief
cause is not antisemitic propaganda but the decades-old,
systematic and unrelenting efforts of Israel to implicate all
Jews in its crimes. If Arab anti-semitism persists after a
peace agreement, we can all get together and cluck about it.
But it still won't do Jews much actual harm. Arab
governments could only lose by permitting attacks on their
Jewish citizens; to do so would invite Israeli intervention.
And there is little reason to expect such attacks to
materialize: if all the horrors of Israel's recent campaigns did
not provoke them, it is hard to imagine what would. It would
probably take some Israeli act so awful and so criminal as to
overshadow the attacks themselves.
If antisemitism is likely to have terrible effects, it is far more
likely to have them in Western Europe. The neo-fascist
resurgence there is all too real. But is it a danger to Jews?
There is no doubt that LePen, for instance, is antisemitic.
There is also no evidence whatever that he intends to do
anything about it. On the contrary, he makes every effort to
pacify the Jews, and perhaps even enlist their help against
his real targets, the 'Arabs'. He would hardly be the first
political figure to ally himself with people he disliked. But if
he had some deeply hidden plan against the Jews, that
*would* be unusual: Hitler and the Russian antisemitic
rioters were wonderfully open about their intentions, and
they didn't court Jewish support. And it is a fact that some
French Jews see LePen as a positive development or even an
ally. (see, for instance, "`LePen is good for us,' Jewish
supporter says", Ha'aretz May 04, 2002, and Mr.
Goldenburg's April 23rd comments on France TV.)
Of course there are historical reasons for fearing a
horrendous attack on Jews. And anything is possible: there
could be a massacre of Jews in Paris tomorrow, or of
Algerians. Which is more likely? If there are any lessons of
history, they must apply in roughly similar circumstances.
Europe today bears very little resemblance to Europe in
1933. And there are positive possibilities as well: why is the
likelihood of a pogrom greater than the likelihood that
antisemitism will fade into ineffectual nastiness? Any
legitimate worries must rest on some evidence that there
really is a threat.
The incidence of antisemitic attacks might provide such
evidence. But this evidence is consistently fudged: no
distinction is made between attacks against Jewish
monuments and symbols as opposed to actual attacks against
Jews. In addition, so much is made of an increase in the
frequency of attacks that the very low absolute level of
attacks escapes attention. The symbolic attacks have indeed
increased to significant absolute numbers. The physical
attacks have not.(*) More important, most of these attacks
are by Muslim residents: in other words, they come from a
widely hated, vigorously policed and persecuted minority who
don't stand the slightest chance of undertaking a serious
campaign of violence against Jews.
It is very unpleasant that roughly half a dozen Jews have
been hospitalized--none killed--due to recent attacks across
Europe. But anyone who makes this into one of the world's
important problems simply hasn't looked at the world. These
attacks are a matter for the police, not a reason why we
should police ourselves and others to counter some deadly
spiritual disease. That sort of reaction is appropriate only
when racist attacks occur in societies indifferent or hostile to
the minority attacked. Those who really care about recurrent
Nazism, for instance, should save their anguished concern for
the far bloodier, far more widely condoned attacks on
gypsies, whose history of persecution is fully comparable to
the Jewish past. The position of Jews is much closer to the
position of whites, who are also, of course, the victims of
racist attacks.
No doubt many people reject this sort of cold-blooded
calculation. They will say that, with the past looming over us,
even one antisemitic slur is a terrible thing, and its ugliness
is not to be measured by a body count. But if we take a
broader view of the matter, antisemitism becomes less, not
more important. To regard any shedding of Jewish blood as a
world-shattering calamity, one which defies all measurement
and comparison, is racism, pure and simple; the valuing of
one race's blood over all others. The fact that Jews have been
persecuted for centuries and suffered terribly half a century
ago doesn't wipe out the fact that in Europe today, Jews are
insiders with far less to suffer and fear than many other
ethnic groups. Certainly racist attacks against a well-off
minority are just as evil as racist attacks against a poor and
powerless minority. But equally evil attackers do not make
for equally worrisome attacks.
It is not Jews who live most in the shadow of the
concentration camp. LePen's 'transit camps' are for 'Arabs',
not Jews. And though there are politically significant parties
containing many antisemites, not one of these parties shows
any sign of articulating, much less implementing, an
antisemitic agenda. Nor is there any particular reason to
suppose that, once in power, they will change their tune.
Haider's Austria is not considered dangerous for Jews;
neither was Tudjman's Croatia. And were there to be such
danger, well, a nuclear-armed Jewish state stands ready to
welcome any refugees, as do the US and Canada. And to say
there are no real dangers now is not to say that we should
ignore any dangers that may arise. If in France, for instance,
the Front National starts advocating transit camps for Jews,
or institutes anti-Jewish immigration policies, then we should
be alarmed. But we should not be alarmed that something
alarming might just conceivably happen: there are far more
alarming things going on than that!
One might reply that, if things are not more alarming, it is
only because the Jews and others have been so vigilant in
combatting antisemitism. But this isn't plausible. For one
thing, vigilance about antisemitism is a kind of tunnel vision:
as neofascists are learning, they can escape notice by
keeping quiet about Jews. For another, there has been no
great danger to Jews even in traditionally antisemitic
countries where the world is *not* vigilant, like Croatia or
the Ukraine. Countries that get very little attention seem no
more dangerous than countries that get a lot. As for the
vigorous reaction to LePen in France, that seems to have a
lot more to do with French revulsion at neofascism than with
the scoldings of the Anti-Defamation League. To suppose that
the Jewish organizations and earnest columnists who pounce
on antisemitism are saving the world from disaster is like
claiming that Bertrand Russell and the Quakers were all that
saved us from nuclear war.
Now one might say: whatever the real dangers, these events
are truly agonizing for Jews, and bring back unbearably
painful memories. That may be true for the very few who still
have those memories; it is not true for Jews in general. I am
a German Jew, and have a good claim to second-generation,
third-hand victimhood. Antisemitic incidents and a climate of
rising antisemitism don't really bother me a hell of a lot. I'm
much more scared of really dangerous situations, like
driving. Besides, even painful memories and anxieties do not
carry much weight against the actual physical suffering
inflicted by discrimination against many non-Jews.
This is not to belittle all antisemitism, everywhere. One often
hears of vicious antisemites in Poland and Russia, both on
the streets and in government. But alarming as this may be,
it is also immune to the influence of Israel-Palestine conflicts,
and those conflicts are wildly unlikely to affect it one way or
another. Moreover, so far as I know, nowhere is there as
much violence against Jews as there is against 'Arabs'. So
even if antisemitism is, somewhere, a catastrophically
serious matter, we can only conclude that anti-Arab
sentiment is far more serious still. And since every
antisemitic group is to a far greater extent anti-immigrant
and anti-Arab, these groups can be fought, not in the name
of antisemitism, but in the defense of Arabs and immigrants.
So the antisemitic threat posed by these groups shouldn't
even make us want to focus on antisemitism: they are just as
well fought in the name of justice for Arabs and immigrants.
In short, the real scandal today is not antisemitism but the
importance it is given. Israel has committed war crimes. It
has implicated Jews generally in these crimes, and Jews
generally have hastened to implicate themselves. This has
provoked hatred against Jews. Why not? Some of this hatred
is racist, some isn't, but who cares? Why should we pay any
attention to this issue at all? Is the fact that Israel's race war
has provoked bitter anger of any importance besides the war
itself? Is the remote possibility that somewhere, sometime,
somehow, this hatred may in theory, possibly kill some Jews
of any importance besides the brutal, actual, physical
persecution of Palestinians, and the hundreds of thousands of
votes for Arabs to be herded into transit camps? Oh, but I
forgot. Drop everything. Someone spray-painted antisemitic
slogans on a synagogue.
* Not even the ADL and B'nai B'rith include attacks on Israel
in the tally; they speak of "The insidious way we have seen
the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians used by
anti-Semites". And like many other people, I don't count
terrorist attacks by such as Al Quaeda as instances of
antisemitism but rather of some misdirected quasi-military
campaign against the US and Israel. Even if you count them
in, it does not seem very dangerous to be a Jew outside
Israel.
Michael Neumann is a professor of philosophy at Trent
University in Ontario, Canada. He can be reached at: