Jewish Forum for Justice and Human Rights

Koebner Center for German History
& Austrian Institute for International Affairs
International Workshop
Perceptions of the Middle East: Between Antisemitism and Islamophobia
Session 2: Perceptions of Antisemitism in Europe

Hebrew University, Jerusalem
29 May 2005

This paper is about the point at which the perception of two things ñ the Middle East and antisemitism ñ meet in the minds of many people in the ‘mainstream’ Jewish community in Britain.

I. Why Israel?

In last week’s Jewish Chronicle, Britain’s Chief Rabbi Dr. Jonathan Sacks asked “Why?” And why not? ‘Why?’ seems a good question for a wise rabbi to ask; the whole of the Talmud is essentially an interrogation of the text of the Torah. But the Chief Rabbi’s questions were not about the Torah; they were, according to the strap line, about “the scapegoating and demonisation of Israel”.  Moreover, they were more a series of sighs than whys (pun on ‘wise’ intended). Let me read the first seven questions (out of eight or nine) and you will see what I mean:

Why, after 57 years and more of seeking peace, is Israel still seen as the aggressor?
Why, after 10 years of negotiation, in which the Palestinians were offered their own state in all of Gaza, 97 per cent of the West Bank, with a capital in East Jerusalem, is Israel still seen as the sole obstacle to peace?
Why, in a world in which there are 57 Islamic states and something like 100 Christian ones, is the desire of the Jewish people to have just one state of its own seen as ñ God forbid ñ racist, exclusionary, retrograde?
Why, when Israel occupies a quarter of one per cent of the land mass of the Arab world, is it seen to be Goliath against David?
Why, alone among the almost 200 nations that comprise the United Nations, is Israel the only one whose very right to be is still called into question?
Why is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seen by one European public after another as the greatest threat to world peaceÖ?

Finally: “Why is Israel blamed for almost every problem reflecting the 21st century?”

That last question in particular might ring a bell. It recalls the joke, now a clichÈ, about the Jews and the bicyclists. There are different versions. As Hannah Arendt tells it, the joke was told after the First World War: “An antisemite claimed that the Jews had caused the war; the reply was: Yes, the Jews and the bicyclists. Why the bicyclists? asks the one. Why the Jews? asks the other.”  The point of the question ñ the point of the joke ñ is to imply that there is no reason, or no good reason, or no rational one, to blame the Jews. Then why the Jews? In a word, antisemitism: hatred of Jews because they are Jews, and because Jews are seen a priori as powerful, conniving and subversive, the hidden hand behind the troubles that afflict the rest of the world. And the Chief Rabbi’s point? Unless I am mistaken, it’s identical. When he asks, “Why is Israel blamed for almost every problem reflecting the 21st century?” he implies “Why not the bicyclists?” So, why Israel? In a word, antisemitism.

Rabbi Sacks does not make this conclusion explicit. The nearest he comes to giving an answer to his series of questions is when he uses the word ‘hate’: hatred explains why Israel is blamed. But this only gives rise to a further question: Why is Israel hated? It is open to someone to argue that Israel is hated because of its institutions, its policies or its conduct, especially in the Occupied Territories. But this avenue is closed off by Rabbi Sacks. He describes what he calls “the five overriding problems that will face humanity in the 21st century” ñ the environment, asylum seekers, terror, economic divisions, and democratic freedom ñ and finds that Israel excels on all five fronts. What is there to hate? “If there were justice in the world,” he concludes, “Israel, a tiny country of indomitable courage, would be seen as a role model among the nations, not as a pariah among the nations.” Then why is the Jewish state hated? If not the state qua state, then it must be the state qua Jewish. Why else?

I have singled out this article by Rabbi Sacks not because it is exceptional but, on the contrary, because it is typical. It represents the kind of view of Israel (and of hostility to Israel) that tends to dominate coverage of the Middle East in the Jewish press in Britain. This in turn reflects (and of course conditions) the way Israel tends to be seen by British Jews in general, at least in the mainstream of the ‘organized’ Jewish community. It is, moreover, the lynchpin, the central or pivotal idea, in the so-called ‘new antisemitism’. In an article published in the Guardian three years ago, ‘The hatred that won’t die’, Rabbi Sacks wrote as follows: “Anti-semitism is undeniably the most successful ideology of modern times.” Why? “Its success,” he explained, “is due to the fact that, like a virus, it mutates. At times it has been directed against Jews as individuals. Today it is directed against Jews as a sovereign people.”  In the literature proclaiming a new antisemitism, this view of Israel, along with the metaphor of metamorphosis, is ubiquitous. Writing in the Jerusalem Post last month, Melanie Phillips, a columnist for both the Daily Mail and the Jewish Chronicle, reproduced these ideas in an article whose very headline ‘The “oldest hatred” survives in Britain’, echoed the headline of the Chief Rabbi’s Guardian piece. “The ‘oldest hatred’,” she wrote, “has mutated from a desire to rid the world of the Jews into a desire to rid the world of the Jewish state”.  Drawing on Nazi vocabulary, Per Ahlmark, former Deputy Prime Minister of Sweden, underscored the point this way in a speech to the American Jewish Committee annual meeting last year: “We certainly could say that in the past the most dangerous antisemites were those who wanted to make the world Judenrein. Today the most dangerous anti-Semites might be those who want to make the world Judenstaatsrein.”  In this clever wordplay, the very term has mutated, reinforcing the fundamental idea, namely, that the State of Israel is the personification of the persecuted Jew of old.

This is the idea that I would like to examine today. As I see it, it is part of a whole mindset or mentality that consists in (or results in) a predisposition to overstate hostility towards Israel and Jews, or to assume that this hostility is antisemitic, or both.

There are two points I wish to make at the outset. First, in speaking of a mindset, I do not mean to suggest that this is merely the product of collective imagination, nor that it is the whole story. Jews in the past did not imagine their marginalisation and persecution, nor the catastrophe that befell them with the Nazi Holocaust. And no one with a sense of history can doubt that antisemitism in Europe runs deep. Let me quote Beate Winkler, Director of the European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC): “[W]e know ñ and opinion polls show ñ that anti-Semitism is permanently present in Europe in a more or less hidden way…”  Moreover, no one who has been following events over the last few years can think that Jews around the world can afford to be complacent about their security. Even the EUMC’s cautious report on the subject noted: “[T]here is practically a consensus among almost all participants in the current debate on the ‘new antisemitism’ that there has been a significant increase in verbal and physical attacks directed against Jews or Jewish institutions since the year 2000.”  That was the year, of course, when the Camp David peace talks broke down and the second Intifada began. As for Israel, the increase in hostility around the world in the same period is palpable. (The idea of an academic boycott of Israel, for example, was seriously mooted in Britain for the first time only three years ago. ) The question, however, is this: Why? Why all this hostility to Jews and to Israel? And unlike the Chief Rabbi, I mean this to be a real question, not a rhetorical one. As a matter of fact, I think there is a manifold of questions, since circumstances in different countries are strikingly different. Unless the enquiry is grounded in these differences, it is liable to lose touch with reality, and either become purely speculative or arrive at a pre-determined conclusion. The mindset I am discussing results in the latter. It fixes everything with the same stare, so that wherever it looks it sees the same spectre: antisemitism. But antisemitism is just one explanatory factor among others. We should not overstate its role.

Second, there is another kind of overstatement, one that comes, as it were, from the opposite camp. Partisans of the Palestinians sometimes accuse partisans of Israel of using the word ‘antisemite’ as a deliberate tactic to shut them down. There is some truth in this claim; I myself have made the point. But it is far from being the whole truth. It treats the charge of antisemitism as if it were always a cynical ploy. This countercharge, however, is itself too cynical. When I speak of a mindset I am implying that many Jews believe, spontaneously and sincerely, that if you scratch an anti-Zionist you find an antisemite. Furthermore, sometimes it’s true.

II. A Mindset about Israel

A striking image haunts the pages of the literature on antisemitism today: the State of Israel as the ‘Jew of the world’. The phrase is from a book by Phyllis Chesler, The New Anti-Semitism, which, in its way, is representative of the genre. She writes: “Israel has fast become the Jew of the world ñ scorned, scapegoated, demonized, and attacked.”  I remember a television ad from the early 1990s that featured the tennis star Andre Agassi. The product was a camera, and the motto was: “Image is everything”. Well, the motto fits here too: the image of Israel as ‘the Jew of the world’ says it all. It captures the view that puts the ‘new’ into ‘new antisemitism’.

This image is now a commonplace. But according to Yossi Klein Halevi, it was the Israeli historian Jacob Talmon who first referred to Israel as ‘the “Jew” of the nations’.  This was in 1976, in the wake of the United Nations (UN) resolution equating Zionism with racism. Talmon’s phrase is quoted with approval by Gabriel Schoenfeld in The Return of Anti-Semitism, published last year.  In Alan Dershowitz’s The Case for Israel (2003), it is inflected as ‘the “Jew” among the states of the world’ and ‘the Jew among nations’.  Both Irwin Cotler and Mortimer Zuckerman, in their writing on the subject, expand it into ‘the collective Jew among the nations’.  In his essay ‘On Hating the Jews’, Natan Sharansky says his country has become ‘the world’s Jew’.  But has it?

Well, what does it mean to say that it has? It means (we are told) that the ‘virus’ of antisemitism has ‘mutated’. But what does this mean? It strikes me that this metaphor of mutation is somewhat slippery; it could allow the user to smuggle almost anything in under the rubric of ‘mutation’. But in nature there are limits to the extent to which a virus can mutate before it ceases to be what it was and becomes, so to speak, another animal. Here too there are limits ñ semantic rather than natural ñ that constrain the proper use of the term. According to Helen Fein, antisemitism is “a persisting, latent structure of hostile beliefsÖ”.   The authors of the EUMC report call it a “stereotypical construction”.  It could also be called an ideology, as in “the most successful ideology of modern times” (quoting the Chief Rabbi). But if it does not incorporate some set of ideas, then it isn’t a structure of beliefs, nor a stereotype, nor an ideology.

However, the concept of antisemitism does have a content, even if that content is somewhat flexible, variable and (we can all agree) mutable. To unpack it, you don’t have to be a scholar. On the street, as it were, the word denotes a form of bigotry in which Jews are seen as alien, powerful, cohesive, cunning, materialistic, legalistic, parasitic, rootless, and so on. Not all these themes, always and everywhere, receive equal emphasis. But whether Jewish identity is seen as racial, religious, cultural or national, and whether antisemitism comes from the right or the left, such, more or less, is the antisemitic figure of the ‘Jew’ down the centuries.
Using this figure as a benchmark, we can derive a number of criteria of antisemitism, including the following: Whenever a text (such as a speech, article or graphic) projects this figure onto Israel or its government for the reason that Israel is a Jewish state, then the content of that text is antisemitic. In such a case we can say, truthfully if poetically, that Israel is the ‘Jew of the world’ in that text. Used this way, it is a perfectly legitimate figure of speech. However, it is one thing to say this about a text, quite another to say it about the world. When Sharansky et al call Israel the ‘the world’s Jew’ or the equivalent, they mean that this is how ‘the world’ itself sees the Jewish state; as if ‘the world’ has a text (or is a text) with a hook-nosed Israel writ large within it. But the script, I contend, is in their heads, not ‘the world’s’.

What would it take to sustain their claim that the world itself sees Israel as, so to speak, its Jew? In the first place, who or what do they mean by ‘the world’? At times ‘the world’ sounds like some superperson, as though it were one in the same sense in which you or I are one, but bigger. At other times, the phrase seems to be shorthand for people in general. Either way, it hints at a mythic state of affairs in which ‘the world’ is to ‘the Jews’ what (in an antisemitic delusional fantasy) ‘the Jews’ are to ‘the world’; as when Chesler claims that “the facts confirm that the world has indeed been against the Jews as a group” for “nearly three thousand years”.  Hold this claim up to the logical mirror and what do you see? “The facts confirm that the Jews as a group have indeed been against the world” for “nearly three thousand years”. In other words, Chesler’s claim is a mirror image of antisemitism.

But is it not conceivable that, in the here and now, there is such widespread hostility to Israel that we can say, loosely speaking, that ‘the world’ is against the Jewish state? It is conceivable. But even if true, in and of itself this would not make Israel the world’s Jew. This description fits if and only if the antisemitic figure of the ‘Jew’ is projected onto Israel routinely and universally. The onus is on Sharansky et al to show that this is the case. The difficulty for them is that, by and large, it is not the case; or not explicitly. So, in practice, they have to show that the antisemitic figure of the ‘Jew’, typically if not invariably, lurks between the lines. Hence their claim that anti-Zionism, over and again, is a mask for antisemitism. In Chesler’s words: “[H]idden behind that smoke screen of anti-Israeli fervor isÖ a familiar hatred of the Jew, the ‘other,’ the Christ killer, the Elder of Zion: the powerful, secret, international conspirator, the pariah and scapegoat of the Earth”.

Now, it is true that antisemitism does not always lie on the surface of a text, visible to the naked eye. Often it is hidden from view, so that no amount of analysis of the text as such ñ by itself ñ will reveal it. Certainly, ‘Zionist’ is sometimes code for ‘Jew’. And some people express outrage at Israel when what they really feel is hatred of Jews. Anti-Zionism, in short, can be a mask for antisemitism. But, on the one hand, if it can function as a mask this implies that, in and of itself, it is not antisemitic; a mask that looks like what it is masking is no mask. (It would be like a wolf in wolf’s clothing.) On the other hand, if what is hidden is antisemitism, then the fiction of the ‘Jew’ still inhabits the text, even if it lies between the lines. In other words, it would be a subtext; and there are ways of bringing subtexts to light by taking in evidence from other sources. This means the long, hard road of making a case based on evidence, analysis and inference. But what we get in the ‘new antisemitism’ literature, time and again, is the short cut of polemics: a potpourri of sweeping generalization, emotive language, tendentious description, and rhetorical questions of the kind that the Chief Rabbi uses to construct his series of ‘whys’.

Why? Why is it that when the subject is Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, so many intelligent, educated and informed people ñ people of good character and goodwill ñ abandon the canons of rational argument? What happens to their critical faculties? Why does the Chief Rabbi present naked propaganda as if it were a series of questions? The reason, I suggest, is that he is speaking out of an a priori conviction; and what I’m calling ‘propaganda’ probably doesn’t seem like propaganda to him. He is convinced, a priori, that Israel is basically a force for the good, fallible but innocent, the personification of the persecuted Jew of old. In this regard, conviction, however sincere, is like mendacity: both are economical with the truth.

III. Why not Israel?

There is one respect in which the modern State of Israel could hardly be more different than the persecuted Jew of old: the power of the one as against the impotence of the other. The notion of Jewish power is, of course, a staple of antisemitic discourse. To my grandparents before they left the shtetls of Eastern Europe, it might have sounded like a Jewish joke. Like the one about Moishe the peddler. Moishe was pushing his cart down an alley in Vitebsk, minding his own business, when he was stopped by an antisemite. “Hey Jew!” yelled the antisemite. “Who gave you the right to control the world?” Moishe looked puzzled. “You mean me, personally?” he asked. “Don’t be a smart aleck,” retorted the antisemite. “I mean you, the Jews, collectively.” Moishe was amazed. “You know something I don’t know?” “You know perfectly well what I mean,” said the antisemite gruffly. “I’m talking about your cousins, the Rothschilds.” Suddenly Moishe’s face lit up with pleasure. “The Rothschilds!” he exclaimed. “I had no idea they were mishpachah!”  Moishe stands for Jews in general who down the centuries did not possess any real power; such power as they had was limited, contingent, and temporary. It certainly was not enough to prevent one disaster after another befalling their communities, nor the ultimate catastrophe of the Nazi Holocaust. Zionism saw itself precisely as a political movement to empower the powerless. On its own terms it succeeded; some would say with a vengeance. At any rate, the State of Israel today is the principal military power in the region and a major actor on the world stage. Successive Israeli governments pride themselves on their ability to create ‘facts on the ground’ in the face of hostile forces. Israel, in other words, is not Moishe.

Power antagonizes, especially when it is abused or perceived as abusive, as is the case with Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and its treatment of the Palestinians. Writing in Tikkun, Jerome Slater sums it up succinctly: “[I]t has not been Israeli ‘powerlessness’ that has been the problem,” he says, “but precisely the opposite.”  Israel’s problem, in a nutshell, is the opposite of Moishe’s.

The mindset I have been discussing is incapable of telling Moishe and Israel apart; which is rather like seeing no difference between black and white. Why do many Jews seem to suffer from this ‘colour blindness’? Fundamentally, it is because the two stories ñ Moishe’s and Israel’s ñ are so intertwined. In particular, the Nazi Holocaust, seen as the culmination of the persecution of Jews down the centuries, is written into the official narrative of the Jewish state. The Holocaust, says Tom Segev, has formed the “collective identity” of Israel, “not just for the survivors who came after the war but for all Israelis, then and now”.  This, in and of itself, is not necessarily detrimental. As Segev says, “[I]t does not follow from the risks inherent in Israeli memorial culture that Israelis would do best to forget the Holocaust. Indeed, they cannot and should not forget it.”  The same could be said about Jewish memorial culture in general. But memory can play tricks; and I am not referring to the accuracy with which we recollect the past but to our perception of things in the present. Seeing the State of Israel today as ‘the Jew of the world’ is an example of a trick of memory.

There are other ways of remembering. In her essay, ‘Living with the Holocaust’, Sara Roy describes a scene she witnessed twenty years ago, in 1985, while standing on a street somewhere on the West Bank. It was her first visit to the Occupied Territories. The image is vivid and disturbing: an Israeli soldier forcing an old Palestinian man to bend down and kiss his donkey’s backside, humiliating him in front of his young grandson and a crowd of fellow Palestinians, while other Israeli soldiers look on and laugh.  What is the meaning of this image? How should we make sense of this incident? Here is how Roy saw it at the time: “I immediately thought of the stories my parents had told me of how Jews had been treated by the Nazis in the 1930s, before the ghettos and death camps, of how Jews would be forced to clean sidewalks with toothbrushes and have their beards cut off in public.”  Instead of clouding her vision, memory enabled Roy to recognize what was happening before her eyes. She writes: “In this critical respect, my first encounter with the occupation was the same as my first encounter with the Holocaust, with the number on my father’s arm. It spoke the same message: the denial of one’s humanity.”  She goes on to say: “It is important to understand the very real differences in volume, scale, and horror between the Holocaust and the occupation and to be careful about comparing the two, but it is also important to recognize parallels where they do exist.”

Undoubtedly, this is the message that Primo Levi had in mind when, following the invasion of Lebanon in June 1982, he spoke out about Israel, drawing a parallel between the Palestinians and the persecuted Jew of old. “Everybody is somebody’s Jew,” he said. “And today the Palestinians are the Jews of the Israelis.”  This is as good a way as any to make sense of the scene that Sara Roy witnessed on the West Bank. I cannot imagine a more eloquent answer to the image of Israel as the ‘Jew of the world’. Nor a stronger voice to silence the Chief Rabbi’s Why?’

Brian Klug
St. Benet’s Hall
Oxford