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.
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:
mneumann@trentu.ca
Source Article:
http://www.counterpunch.org/neumann0604.html