Semite and anti-Semite. The French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, in a book called just that, published in 1956, located this phenomenon exclusively in Europe. But suppose he were still with us and asked today, “Who are the anti-Semites?” That’s easy: Arabs and the American left.
Anti-Semitism, like any form of bigotry directed at a people purely on the basis of their ethnic background, is as equally repugnant as any other. But to accuse the American left of it? This motely group of intellectuals, writers, ideologues and activists whose preoccupation is putatively social justice and freedom, and who consider themselves the ultimate, as it were, anti-anti-Semites?
Looks like it. In recent months, as commentators, those few of them in the US who are not afraid to say it the way it is, condemned Israel’s excesses against Palestinians, there has been a brisk vulgarization of the public debate by Israel’s supporters aimed at silencing critics with a kind of “j’accuse” posture. That is, Alexander Cockburn, Noam Chomsky et al. are all anti-Semitic or self-hating pond scum.
In short, commentators on the American left (not to be confused with their anemic Arab counterparts) who feel that criticism of Israel should not be seen per se as evidence of anti-Semitism, have become so intimidated (which is the prime motive behind the whole campaign) that caution in writing about the Palestinian conflict is now the norm.
Why even examine the intriguing issue, say, of how Congress recently voted overwhelmingly to support Sharon’s policies and thus risk having to talk about the shenanigans of AIPAC, in the process highlighting the power of the Jewish lobby on the Hill? (Can I please, pretty please, write “Jewish lobby” here without someone raising an eybrow?)
The sad fact is that this kind of intellectual terrorism has prevented many critics from demonstrating — fighting for, more like — the integrity of the public debate. In the hands of those who support “Israel right or wrong,” the threat of leveling the accusation of anti-Semitism at a critic, albeit irresponsibly, has proven to be an idispensable ideological weapon.
Through the facile use of this weapon, Israel, one of the most formidable military powers this side of NATO, an occupying power with a long track record of abusing the human rights of a subjugated people, has succeeded in projecting itself as a “victim state” surrounded and outgunned by its neighbors, fighting against a well-organized and determined “terrorist infrastructure.”
Quite an accomplishment to accrue from that specious stance, no? The accomplishment being immunity from criticism, however justified, and insurance against Israel’s policies ever becoming a rational subject of inquiry as are those of any other state.
To be sure, the success of Jewish American elites in the United States is only partly due to the qualitatively disproportionate influence of their community in the arts, literature, theater, the world of academe, the film industry, and the skills its representatives wield in organized political activism, and largely to the uniquely American phenomenon of “identity politics,” which nurtures the emergence of a “culture of victimization” among minorities, where each identity grounds its history in a particular bachground of oppression.
For American Jews, it is the holocaust. And Israel is adduced as being the product of that holocaust. It’s a given that you don’t criticize the holocaust narrative, ergo, you don’t mess with the Zionist narrative.
Let me repeat what I have said on this page several times in the past: I consider those Arabs who deny that as many as six million Jews died there (arguing for a figure closer to one million, and what have you ) or for that matter that the killings were in any significant way different from the other atrocities of World War II, are cranks who want to bend historical evidence until it conforms with their ideological perceptions.
My problem is with how American Zionists have devilishly hatched the notion of the Jewish holocaust to the yoke of Israel.
The holocaust — and by association, Israel — is by now so firmly entrenched in American life that fully seventeen states in the Union mandate holocaust programs in their universities. No less than 10,000 scholarly studies, according to Professor Norman Finkelstein, who teaches at the City University of New York, have been released on the subject in the United States. Consider by comparison the some ten million Africans who died in the Belgium-run mines in the Congo between 1891 and 1911, about whom only one sole seminal scholarly work was published, in 1998, namely Adam Hochschild’s “King Leopold’s Ghost.”
In the Arab world there have been numerous commentaries in the media that, at first blush, appear as rabid anti-Semitic rants. This is ironic — ironic to consider how Arab commentators, whose world had never developed an-anti-Semitic tradition in its history and never produced a body of anti-Semitic work (along the lines, say, of The Protocols of the Elders of of Zion) always draw on the racist literature from Europe when they want to wax anti-Semitic.
The truth is that where this sentiment against Jews exists in the Arab discourse, it is basically a function of the rage Arabs feel again Israel, rather the expression of an anti-Semitic impulse rooted in the Arab archetype. For consider the Inspector Clouseau-like clumziness with which these commentaries are articulated.
The bottom line is that we are fighting against Israelis not because they are Jews, but because they are occupiers and colonizers. Palestinians would have fought them with the same determination even if they had been, say, Dutch Catholic.
That is why I say that, because anti-Semitism never existed in our history, its European incarnation in certain quarters in the Arab world today is a stain on our culture, and a contravention of the edicts of our holy scripture. It is a morally bankrupt practice. What is needed is for us to openly declare it so.
For Israeli advocates in the US to deploy the weapon of anti-Semitism to silence dissent is an egregious exercise clearly aimed at subverting the public debate. And for commentators in the Arab world to appropriate anti-Semitic lingo as a vehicle of self-expression is as pernicious as it is wrong. The exploitation of anti-Semitism by the one and its recent appropriation for self-expression by the other is a degradation. Certainly from the Arab perspective, it debases the moral stature of our culture, a culture noted throughout history for the tolerance it displayed toward its multicultural, multiracial and mltilinguistic populations.
Perhaps this is not a truth that bigots, whoever and whatever they are, want to hear.
