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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.
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
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