Today, too, when deadlier forms of anti-Semitism are on the rise, there is massive intellectual resistance to acknowledging the threat, and most political analysts still treat anti-Semitism like a hiccup that will soon give way to regular breathing. Tony Judt writes that the solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict is in plain sight: “Israel exists. The Palestinians and other Arabs will eventually accept this; many already do.” He states this conclusion as though it complied with some obvious and inexorable logic, though he might as well be saying that fish will fly because they have fins and will eventually use them.
As a European historian, Judt presumably knows that the Jews of Europe also “existed,” and that by 1939 many, if not most, Germans and Austrians “already” accepted their existence. Nevertheless, a dedicated minority of motivated idealists was able to cleanse their countries of the blight within an astonishingly brief period of time. Today’s situation is once again arguably worse: one no longer needs to hold mass rallies in Nuremberg to spread the sort of genocidal anti-Jewish propaganda that Egyptian television carries nightly to millions of homes, and preachers who call for holy struggle against Israel are no less committed than Judt is to their sense of the inevitable. This is not to say that the Arabs will succeed, any more than that the Germans and Austrians had to succeed; it means that one cannot dismiss anti-Semitism just because it offends one’s sense of rational possibility.
Nor, on similar grounds, can one dismiss the possibility of Israel’s physical defeat by its Arab and Muslim enemies just because its military power is for the moment unmistakably preponderant. Even greater powers—the United States, for one— have been defeated in palpably unequal contests with lesser but more determined forces. The suicide bomber is a strategic weapon of immense effectiveness for those who feel they have expendable populations; more crucially still, the possession, imminent or actual, of weapons of mass destruction on the part of nations that have already declared their eagerness to use them against the Jewish state changes the regional balance of power definitively. And much as Israel may resemble the United States in other respects, it cannot lose a war to its enemies and necessarily expect to survive. Observers like Judt who point to Israel’s defensive capabilities as evidence that it has little to fear from Arab aggression are playing a cruel game of loading up the donkey to see how much it can carry before it collapses.
Judt’s views—I focus on them because they may be taken to represent the liberal academic consensus—are interesting in another respect as well: they illustrate how anti-Semitism makes inroads into the liberal mindset. In the years immediately following the creation of Israel, when Arab hostility was expected to give way “eventually” to recognition and acceptance, Israel was the beneficiary of widespread liberal sympathy. The question Western liberals posed to themselves was: how long would it take before the Arabs came to their senses, relinquished their intransigence, and accepted the reality of a Jewish state? But the paradoxical truth is that, the longer and more energetically the Arabs continued their aggression, the costlier it became for others—ideologically, as well as politically or militarily—to defend Israel. As the hostility escalated, it turned neutral onlookers not against the aggressors but against their intended victims.
Anti-Semitism offends Western sensibilities because it is not amenable to the kind of reasoning that we believe is innate in human beings. (“Israel exists. The Palestinians and other Arabs will eventually accept this; many already do.”) In attacking Jews, the anti-Semite also attacks, by proxy, the Western belief in tolerance, and the freedoms implicit in the Rights of Man. What is a good liberal to do? He knows hostility when he sees it, and he surely does not want it directed at himself. Since confronting Arab anti-Semitism would require confronting the entire Arab world, no less than confronting German antiSemitism once meant confronting Germany itself, liberals and democrats find it much easier to blame the rising “anger” and “frustration” of the Arabs on Israel’s intransigence, and to urge Israel to concede to them.
This helps explain why anti-Semitism began to be taken seriously only after the events of September 11. As long as Israel alone was being assaulted by terror and genocidal propaganda, there was little general credence in the idea that its destruction was the point at issue. But when nineteen homicidal Arabs coordinated a sophisticated attack on New York City and the Pentagon, it became harder to deny that something was afoot in the world that transcended “normal” international behavior. Once one is prepared to acknowledge that a given act of aggression is incommensurate with any offense that may have been given, terms like evil—and anti-Semitism—become permissible.
In the case of the so-called Arab-Israel conflict, to permit the concept of anti-Semitism into the discussion is to acknowledge that the origins of Arab opposition to the Jewish state are to be located in the political culture of the Arabs themselves, and that such opposition can end only if and when that political culture changes. For some supporters of the “peace process,” this post–September 11 realization hit with the force of a revelation, and it has led to much salutary rethinking of former positions. For others, alas, it clearly remains a bridge too far.
“Is the peril ‘as great, if not greater’ than the peril of the 1930s? I do not see it,” writes Leon Wieseltier. The determination not to see it is what has helped make the peril greater.
Consider the case of Michael Kamber, a correspondent of The Village Voice who had been reporting from Pakistan just before the disappearance of Daniel Pearl. When Kamber learned of Pearl’s kidnapping, he knew for a certainty that Pearl would be murdered, and he was simultaneously shaken by the realization that he himself, being the son of a Jewish father, might just as easily have been the victim. After the murder was confirmed, Kamber filed a belated column, a kind of obituary-report about this land “where anti-Semitism flows as easily as water.”
Kamber’s column describes Pakistan as a country of 140 million inhabitants, 98 percent Muslim and 75 percent illiterate, all of whom seem to be obsessed with Jewish iniquity:
In interviews conducted while I was there, government officials would occasionally veer off into long diatribes about the Jews; fundamentalist religious leaders, who educate hundreds of thousands of children in the country’s madrassas, spoke of little else. In Islamabad . . . an elderly mullah responsible for the education of hundreds of youngsters said, “To me [the bombing of the World Trade Center] seems the design of the Jewish lobby. The Jewish lobby wants to pit Islam against Christianity.”
As Kamber tells the tale, Pakistan’s uneducated populace, having no personal contact with Jews and no training in independent thought, takes its cues from religious and political authorities. Those authorities, unaccustomed to assuming any responsibility for the gross deficiencies of their society, blame the “Jews” for all that they need to explain away. No distinctions are made between Jews and Israel, or indeed between Israel and America—except when it is politically expedient to blame Jews for what is hateful about America, too. In such a climate, writes Kamber, now justifying his decision to hide his own half-Jewish identity, “to admit to being Jewish . . . would have been unthinkable.”
This is a very significant admission. If the effect of antiSemitism on Michael Kamber was to inhibit any mention of his Jewish identity to others while he was in Pakistan, its effect on his published journalism, up until this final act of intellectual penance, was to inhibit any mention of a huge and central fact of life in the society he was writing about. Western journalists are paid to report accurately on reality. But the very enormity of anti-Semitism—the fact that, in certain parts of the world, politicians and clerics turn abhorrence of Jews into an essential element of their reality—creates an inclination to turn away from it, if for no other reason than to retain the good will of the anti-Semites. Thus, in the name of maintaining “access,” do American journalists affirm the power of dictators to control our putatively free and open press.
The problem transcends the case of Michael
Kamber, and is again not a new one. When Arthur Hays Sulzberger took control of The New York Times in 1935, he seemed far more afraid of having it thought that he ran a “Jewish newspaper” than of the rise of Adolf Hitler. He believed that the threat of anti-Semitism was being used by some Jews as a political cover for a kind of nationalism he abhorred, and he instructed his city editor not to give “too much space” to the efforts of the American Jewish Committee to aid European Jews. When Zionist leaders charged him with failing to present the news impartially, he blamed them for turning him from a non-Zionist into an “anti-Zionist.” In 1942 he wrote to Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, chairman of the American Zionist Emergency Council, “I am opposed to Goebbels’ tactics whether or not they are confined to Nazi Germany,” equating Nazi pressure on the Jews of Germany with Rabbi Silver’s pressure on him.
The effect of this was to upend the stated editorial principles of the Times. Ostensibly, the family wanted the paper to remain evenhanded and free of bias, by which it meant that it would not allow its own Jewish origins to dictate favorable coverage of the Jews. But in practice the paper carried this to the point of creating bias: lest it be accused of favoring the views of one side, it banned all letters to the editor concerning Hitler in the years that he was coming to power. The Ochs-Sulzbergers also believed that, since the Jews were not a people—the very claim that would one day be enshrined in the charter of the PLO—they were not in need of a Jewish homeland; and this, too, dictated a policy of minimizing antiSemitism lest, by promoting sympathy for the Jewish plight, the Times play into the hands of Zionists.
Although the Ochs-Sulzberger families have since apologized for the “meager coverage” the Times gave to the Holocaust as it was unfolding, they have never made a connection between their prejudiced view of Jewish peoplehood and the paper’s coverage of world news in general. They thus perpetuate the cycle of parochialization, as if the problem were one that affected only the Jews. But let us suppose for a moment that the publishers of The New York Times had acted truly without bias. They would then have responded to Hitler’s virulent anti-Semitism as signaling a broader danger to everything precious to themselves and to America. They would have assiduously gathered information about Hitler’s program of rearmament, as Winston Churchill tried to do once he became convinced that Hitler was planning to attack the West. They would have drawn daily attention to Germany’s abuses of democratic freedoms, its perversion of the law, its abrogation of civil liberties. And they would have registered the way that Nazi anti-Semitism cloaked darker anti-democratic purposes behind an enmity directed against the Jews alone.
In brief, had the Times been truly neutral in reporting on Hitler’s war against the Jews, it would have done a newspaper’s proper job of ferreting out the painful but necessary truth about Hitler’s war against the West. And the same holds true today, when embarrassment over Jewish causes still governs Times coverage of the Middle East and elsewhere, resulting in the same betrayal of professional standards. Had the Times been truly neutral, and doing its proper job, it would have long since reported in copious detail on the unmistakable signs of growing Arab extremism, an extremism that erupted with spectacular force in the attacks on America of September 11. The reluctance to expose dangers to the Jews suppressed recognition of much that threatened, and still threatens, the West.
Not that the Times is alone in this submission to anti-Semitic regimes. The same pattern prevails everywhere today in the academic community, which if anything is even more sensitive than the press to questions of “access.” Scholars who work in politically controlled areas of research are rewarded for their sympathies and punished for their criticisms, sometimes in bizarre ways. A professor of ancient Middle East studies has told me that his German colleagues are embarrassed by Arabs in the places where they conduct research who congratulate them on what “they” did to the Jews; they dare not reveal their discomfort lest it prejudice their working relations with local personnel. More often, what begins as passive accommodation becomes active acquiescence. In American universities, the belief that Israel is to blame for the manifold failures of Arab society is by now such a corrupting feature of Middle East studies departments that it has assumed the status of a natural condition, like smog in Los Angeles.
Arab terrorism against Israel has exacerbated this situation without raising a peep from university administrations. Citing the difficulty of securing proper insurance coverage, Harvard recently followed the lead of other American universities in forbidding travel to Israel on Harvard funding. A longstanding archeological dig in Israel had to be abandoned this past summer, and students and faculty had to cancel programs of study and research—this, at the very moment when Harvard is promoting a new commitment to study abroad as a direct way of learning about the world.
Meanwhile, Jewish students attending American-sponsored Arabic programs in Arab countries have been instructed not to reveal their Jewishness and have been provided with false identities: a concession to Arab anti-Semitism that has neither been officially protested by any academic official nor brought to the attention of the American public. Thus do universities casually accede to policies of genocidal hatred, all the while proclaiming their dedication to multiculturalism, pluralism, and anti-discrimination.
What is it that, in the end, the record of anti-Semitism in Europe suggests? It suggests that the Jews are just the warm-up act to farther-reaching political ambitions. The ease with which Hitler was able to isolate the Jews, disenfranchise them, blackmail them, and begin persecuting them gave him the confidence to expand his conquests; he used the war against the Jews to encourage his followers to flex their muscles.
Anti-Semitism in this sense is not just a generic term for discrimination against Jews or even persecution of Jews. It is not just a means of scapegoating, though it is assuredly that. Nor is it merely a projection onto Jews of the desire to dominate, to “rule the world.” More precisely than any of these, modern anti-Semitism achieved its power as a political instrument through its opposition to liberal democracy itself—as personified by the Jews.
Wilhelm Marr created the League of Anti-Semites in the 1870s to save Germany from what the Jews represented. “We have among us,” he said, “a flexible, tenacious, intelligent, foreign tribe that knows how to bring abstract reality into play in many different ways.” By “abstract reality,” Marr meant everything the Jews could be made to stand for, summarized in the freedoms—religious, political, economic—that undergird modern democratic culture.
Marr’s perception of the Jews as incarnations of modernity harnessed ancient prejudice to brand-new fears in societies that were in the process of losing their religious certainties and shedding many aspects of their traditional way of life, including the sense of security provided by autocratic rule. What some Europeans were certain was progress seemed to others a mortal danger, and politicians found that they scored well when they concretized those fears in the image of the ubiquitous Jews—a small, highly adaptive people with arguably the largest image on earth, a people desperately seeking acceptance and targetable at no political cost.
As the Jews were the practice range for anti-democratic and anti-liberal forces in pre-Hitler Europe, so in the second half of the twentieth century the state of Israel took the brunt of the Arab/Muslim war against Western democracy. But, unlike the Jews of Europe, the Jews of Israel toughened under the assault, at least initially. Having acquired the means of self-defense, the Jewish state seemed to grow stronger the more it was attacked. And for a long time, in a reverse dynamic to the process I have been describing, the democratic West as a whole reaped the benefit.
“We may never know how much time Israel bought for us in our decades of negligence,” writes William Bennett, how many American lives it saved by its long-kept refusal to negotiate with or capitulate to terrorist murder and extortion, its resolve to use every means to track down, confront, and undo those who captured and killed its citizens, its crystalline message of defiance. What
we do know is that all over the world, especially in the Soviet gulag and in the prisons of Eastern Europe, captive men gulped great draughts of hope whenever word filtered through of an act of Israeli rescue and punishment: palpable and too rare signals in those dark decades [of the cold war] that evil was not everywhere triumphant, everywhere accommodated, everywhere appeased.
Bennett is surely right that, apart from America itself, Israel still stands as the world’s brightest model of national self-liberation based on ideals of individual responsibility and human freedom. Israel’s ability to withstand Arab attempts to destroy it in one of the longest and most lopsided wars ever fought serves as an indelible testimony to the strength of democratic culture.
Israel had to be gritty; otherwise it would not exist. Nevertheless, in the 1990s it too began to tire under the perpetual assault. In systematic and sustained terrorism, the Arabs discovered the first weapon that really works against a democracy, destroying the trust, the openness, of an open society, and exploiting its precious freedoms to expose its acute vulnerability. Here once again Israel has served as a test case. How well can democracies withstand this new form of all-out foreign aggression? We know from the past that the West paid dearly for ignoring Hitler’s war against the Jews. One can only hope it will not pay as dearly for having ignored or underestimated for so long the Arab war against Israel and the Jews.
Those Who Forget the Past Page 24
