Those Who Forget the Past

by Ron Rosenbaum

  In the time of Goebbels, the Big Lie about the Jews was mainly confined to Germany alone; much of the rest of the world saw through it with honest clarity. In our time, the Big Lie (or Big Lies, there are so many) is disseminated everywhere, and not merely by the ignorant, but with malice aforethought by the intellectual classes, the governing elites, the most prestigious elements of the press in all the capitals of Europe, and by the university professors and the diplomats.

  The contemporary Big Lie, of course, concerns the Jews of Israel: they are oppressors in the style of the Nazis; they ruthlessly pursue, and perpetuate, “occupation” solely for the sake of domination and humiliation; they purposefully kill Palestinian children; their military have committed massacres; their government “violates international law”; their nationhood and their sovereignty have no legitimacy; they are intruders and usurpers inhabiting an illicit “entity,” and not a people entitled as other peoples are entitled; and so on and so on. Reviving both blood libel and deicide, respectable European journals publish political cartoons showing Prime Minister Sharon devouring Palestinian babies, and Israeli soldiers bayoneting the infant Jesus.

  Yet the modern history of Jews in the Holy Land overwhelmingly refutes these scurrilities. It is the Arabs, not the Jews, who have been determined to dispose of a people’s right to live in peace. Is there any point now—after so many politically willed erasures of fact by Palestinian Arabs, Muslim populations in general, and a mean-spirited European intelligentsia —to recapitulate the long record of Arab hostility that has prevailed since the demise of the Ottoman Empire? The Muslim Arab claim of hegemony (through divine fiat, possessive greed, contempt for pluralism, or all three) over an entire region of the globe accounts for the hundreds of Christian Arabs who have fled Bethlehem, Nablus, Ramallah, and all other places where Muslims dominate—a flight rarely reported. Unsurprisingly, the Christians who have not yet departed blame the Israelis for this displacement, not the Muslim extremists under whose threats of reprisal they live. As for the fate of Jews in the orbit of this self-declared Muslim imperium, the current roar of “resistance to occupation” is notoriously belied by the bloody Arab pogroms of 1920, 1921, 1929, 1936, and 1939, when there was no Jewish state at all, let alone any issue of “settlements.” The 1929 attacks left Hebron, the site of an ancient and uninterrupted Jewish community, effectively Judenrein.

  What use is there, in the face of brute political and cultural intransigence, to rehearse the events of 1948? In that year Arab rejection of an independent Palestinian state under the UN partition plan led to the invasion by five Arab armies intent on crushing nascent Jewish sovereignty; whole sections of Jerusalem were destroyed or overrun. Nineteen-forty-eight marked the second, though not the first or the last, Arab refusal of Palestinian statehood. The first came in 1937, when under the British Mandate the Peel Commission proposed partition and statehood for the Arabs of Palestine; the last, and most recent, occurred in 2000, when Arafat dismissed statehood in favor of a well-prepared and programmatic violence. (The flouting of the Road Map by Palestinian unwillingness to dismantle terror gangs will have counted as the Palestinians’ fourth refusal of statehood; but the Road Map’s callously criminalizing equation of civilian inhabitants of Jewish towns—settlements—with Palestinian murder of Jewish civilians is itself egregious.) After 1948, the Arab war against the Jews of Israel continued through the terror incursions of 1956, the Six-Day War of 1967, the Yom Kippur attacks of 1973, and the fomented violence of 1987, the so-called first intifada.

  In short, for two-thirds of a century the Arabs have warred against a Jewish presence in “their” part of the world. The 1967 war in defense of Jewish lives (when affected Jews everywhere went into mourning, fearing catastrophe) culminated in Golda Meir’s attempt to return, in exchange for peace, the territories which, in the spirit of partition, Israel had never sought to acquire, and had so unexpectedly conquered. The answer came at an Arab summit in Khartoum: no negotiations, no recognition, no peace. So much for the “crime” of occupation.

  And though the Oslo accords of 1993 strove yet again for negotiations, most energetically under Ehud Barak, both the Palestinian leadership and the Palestinian public chose killing over compromise—this time with newly conceived atrocities through suicide bombings, always directed against civilians, in buses, cafés, restaurants, supermarkets, or wherever Israelis peacefully congregate.

  This is the history that is ignored or denigrated or distorted or spitefully misrepresented. And because it is a history that has been assaulted and undermined by world-wide falsehoods in the mouths of pundits and journalists, in Europe and all over the Muslim world, the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism has finally and utterly collapsed. It is only sophistry, disingenuousness, and corrupted conscience that continue to insist on such a distinction. To fail to trace the pernicious consistencies of Arab political aims from 1920 until today, despite temporary pretensions otherwise, is to elevate intellectual negligence to a principle. To transmogrify self-defense into aggression is to invite an Orwellian horse-laugh. To identify occupation as Israel’s primal sin—the most up-to-date Hep! of all—is to be blind to Arab actions and intentions before 1967, and to be equally blind to Israel’s repeated commitments to negotiated compromise. On the Palestinian side, the desire to eradicate Jewish nationhood increases daily: it is as if 1948 has returned, replicated in the guise of fanatical young “martyrs” systematically indoctrinated in kindergartens and schools and camps—concerning whom it is cant to say, as many do, that they strap detonators to their loins because they are without hope. It is hope that inflames them.36

  Perhaps the most bizarre display of international anti-Semitism was flaunted at Durban, during a UN conference ostensibly called to condemn “Racism, Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance.” Plucked from the refuse heap, the old UN canard, “Zionism is racism,” together with a determined Arab hijacking of the agenda, brought about the bitterest irony of all: a virulent hatred under the auspices of anti-hatred. At Durban the Jewish state was declared to have been conceived in infamy, Jewish representatives were threatened, and language was violated more savagely than at any time since the Nazi era. “Political language,” said Orwell, “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Yet the rant that emerged at Durban—those instantly recognizable snarls of anti-Semitism —hardly merited the term “political.” It had the venerable sound of the mob: Hep! Hep! Hep!

  Among the sophists and intellectuals, the tone is subtler. Here it is not Jewish lives that are put in jeopardy so much as it is Jewish sensibility and memory that are humbled and mocked. Pressing political analogies, however apt, are dismissed as “confused” or “odious.” When history is invoked, it is said to be for purposes of coarse extortion: Israel is charged, for instance, with “using” the Holocaust as sympathetic coinage to be spent on victimizing others. In a New York Times Magazine piece called “How to Talk About Israel,” Ian Buruma, alluding to Israel’s 1981 demolishment of Iraq’s nuclear installation, contends that “it might have been justified in many legitimate ways”—but he derides Menachem Begin’s appeal to the memory of the one and a half million Jewish children who were annihilated by the applied technology of an earlier barbarous regime. Is the imagination’s capacity to connect worthy of such scorn, or is this how human beings ought to think and feel? Saddam Hussein’s nuclear bomb was plainly a present danger to living Israeli children; and conscious of the loss of so many children within the lifetime of a generation, Jewish memory declines to be untender. Nor is the denigration of tenderness a pretty trait in itself, or a sign of rational objectivity. “The politics of the Middle East may be murderous,” Buruma comments, “but it is not helpful to see them as an existential battle between good and evil.” This suggests a popular contemporary form of liberal zealotry, very nearly the mirror-image of religious fanaticism—a great wash of devotedly obstinate indifference
to the moral realities of human behavior and motivation, a willed inability to distinguish one thing from another thing. A switchblade is not a butter knife; the difference between them is “existential.” And “not helpful” is one of those doggedly bland (yet contemptuous) jargonlike therapeutic phrases that reveals a mind in need of a dose of Dostoyevsky. Or of Mark Twain, who understood the real nature of what he dubbed “evil joy.”

  I would not wish to equate, in any manner or degree, the disparagement of Jewish memory and sensibility with antiSemitism, a term that must be reserved for deadlier intentions. Disparagement is that much lighter species of dismissal that is sometimes designated as “social anti-Semitism,” and is essentially a type of snobbery. Snobbery falls well short of lethal hatred—but it conveys more than a touch of insolence, and insolence in a political context can begin to be worrisome. It vibrates at the outer margins of “that shitty little country”; it is, one might say, not helpful.

  Judith Butler, identifying herself as a Jew in the London Review of Books, makes the claim that linking “Zionism with Jewishness . . . is adopting the very tactic favored by anti-Semites.” A skilled sophist (one might dare to say solipsist), she tosses those who meticulously chart and expose anti-Semitism’s disguises into the same bin as the anti-Semites themselves. Having accused Israel of the “dehumanization of Palestinians”; having acknowledged that she was a signatory to a petition opposing “the Israeli occupation, though in my mind it is not nearly strong enough: it did not call for the end of Zionism”; and having acknowledged also that (explicitly) as a Jew she seeks “to widen the rift between the state of Israel and the Jewish people,” she writes:

  It will not do to equate Jews with Zionists or Jewishness with Zionism. . . . It is one thing to oppose Israel in its current form and practices or, indeed, to have critical questions about Zionism itself, but it is quite another to oppose “Jews” or assume that all “Jews” have the same view; that they are all in favor of Israel, identified with Israel, or represented by Israel. . . . To say that all Jews hold a given view on Israel or are adequately represented by Israel, or, conversely, that the acts of Israel, the state, adequately stand for the acts of all Jews, is to conflate Jews with Israel and, thereby, to commit an anti-Semitic reduction of Jewishness.

  One can surely agree with Butler that not all Jews are “in favor of Israel”: she is a dazzling model of one who is not, and she cites, by name, a handful of “post-Zionists” in Israel proper, whom she praises. But her misunderstanding of anti-Semitism is profound; she theorizes rifts and demarcations, borders and dikes; she is sunk in self-deception. The “good” anti-Zionists, she believes, the ones who speak and write in splendidly cultivated English, will never do her or her fellow Jews any harm; they are not like the guttersnipe anti-Semites who behave so badly. It is true that she appears to have everything in common with those Western literary intellectuals (e.g., Tom Paulin and the late Edward Said) whose aspirations are indistinguishable from her own: that Israel “in its current form” ought to disappear. Or, as Paulin puts it, “I never believed that Israel had the right to exist at all.” Tony Judt, a professor of European history, confirms this baleful view; writing in The New York Review of Books, he dismisses the Jewish state as—alone among the nations— “an anachronism.”

  Yet Butler’s unspoken assumption is that consonance, or collusion, with those who would wish away the Jewish state will earn one a standing in the European, if not the global, anti-Zionist world club. To a degree she may be right: the congenial welcome she received in a prestigious British journal confirms it, and she is safe enough, for the nonce, in those rarefied places where, as George Eliot has it (with a word altered), it would be “difficult to find a form of bad reasoning about [Zionism] which had not been heard in conversation or been admitted to the dignity of print.” In that company she is at home. There she is among friends.

  But George Eliot’s Zionist views are notorious; she is partial to Jewish national liberation. A moment, then, for the inventor of the pound of flesh. Here is Cinna, the poet, on his way to Caesar’s funeral:

  CITIZEN: As a friend or an enemy?

  CINNA: As a friend.

  CITIZEN: Your name, sir, truly.

  CINNA: Truly, my name is Cinna.

  CITIZEN: Tear him to pieces; he’s a conspirator.

  CINNA: I am Cinna the poet, I am Cinna the poet! . . . I am not Cinna the conspirator!

  CITIZEN: It is no matter, his name’s Cinna. . . . Tear him, tear him! Come, brands, ho! firebrands! Burn all!

  And here is Butler, the theorist, on her way to widen the rift between the state of Israel and the Jewish people:

  —As a friend, or as a Zionist?

  BUTLER: As an anti-Zionist Jew.

  —Tear her to pieces, she’s a Jew.

  BUTLER: I am Butler the anti-Zionist, I am Butler the anti-Zionist! I am not Butler the Zionist!

  What’s in a name? Ah, the curse of mistaken identity. How many politically conforming Jews will suffer from it, even as they toil to distance themselves from the others, those benighted Jews who admit to being “in favor of Israel”? As for that nobly desired rift, one can rely on Hep! to close it. To comprehend this is to comprehend anti-Semitism at its root. And to assert, as Butler does, that in the heart of this understanding lurks “the very tactic favored by anti-Semites” is not merely sophistry; not merely illusion; but simple stupidity, of a kind only the most subtle intellectuals are capable of.

  The melancholy encounter with anti-Semitism is not, after all, coequal with Jewish history; the history of oppression belongs to the culture of the oppressors. The long, long Jewish narrative is in reality a procession of ideas and ideals, of ethical legislation and ethical striving, of the study of books and the making of books. It is not a chronicle of victimhood, despite the centuries of travail, and despite the corruptions of the hour, when the vocabulary of human rights is too often turned ubiquitously on its head. So contaminated have the most treasured humanist words become, that when one happens on a mass of placards emblazoned with “peace,” “justice,” and the like, one can see almost at once what is afoot—a collection of so-called anti-globalization rioters declaiming defamation of Israel, or an anti-Zionist campus demonstration (not always peaceful), or any anti-Zionist herd of lockstep radicals, such as ANSWER, or the self-proclaimed International Parliament of Writers, or the International Solidarity Movement, which (in the name of human rights) shields terrorists. Or even persons who are distinguished and upright. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who marched at Selma, and who was impassioned in protesting the Vietnam war, appealed to his peace-and-justice colleagues to sign a declaration condemning the massacre of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Olympics. Too many refused.

  It is long past time (pace Buruma, pace Butler) when the duplicitous “rift” between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism can be logically sustained. Whether in its secular or religious expression, Zionism is, in essence, the modern flowering of a vast series of diverse intellectual and pietistic movements, all of them steeped in the yearning for human dignity—symbolized by the Exodus from slavery—that has characterized Jewish civilization for millennia. Contempt and defamation from without have sometimes infiltrated the abject psyches of defeatist Jews, who then begin to judge themselves according to the prevailing canards. Such Jews certainly are not what is commonly called self-haters, since they are motivated by the preening self-love that congratulates itself on always “seeing the other side.” Not self-haters, no; low moral cowards, rather, often trailing uplifting slogans.

  Anti-Semitism is a foolish word; we appear to be stuck with it. “Semitism” has virtually no meaning. The Semites are a linguistic group encompassing Hebrew, Akkadian, Amharic, and Arabic. The argument one occasionally gets wind of—that Arabs, being Semites, cannot be charged with anti-Semitism, or that any objection to Arab political conduct is itself an instance of anti-Semitism—is nothing if not risible. Anti-Semitism (a term fabricated a century
ago by a euphemistic German anti-Semite) signifies hatred of Jews, and hatred’s easy corollary: a steady drive to weaken, to hurt, and to extirpate Jews.

  Still, one must ask: why the Jews? A sad old joke pluckily confronts the enigma.

  —The Jews and the bicyclists are at the bottom of all the world’s ills.

  —Why the bicyclists?

  —Why the Jews?

  —implying that blaming one set of irrelevancies is just as irrational as blaming the other. Ah, but it is never the bicyclists, and it is always the Jews. There are innumerable social, economic, and political speculations as to cause: scapegoatism; envy; exclusionary practices; the temptation of a demographic majority to subjugate a demographic minority; the attempt by corrupt rulers to deflect attention from the failings of their tyrannical regimes; and more. But any of these can burst out in any society against any people—so why always the Jews? A metaphysical explanation is proffered: the forceful popular resistance to what Jewish civilization represents—the standard of ethical monotheism and its demands on personal and social conscience. Or else it is proposed, in Freudian terms, that Christianity and Islam, each in its turn, sought to undo the parent religion, which was seen as an authoritative rival it was needful to surpass and displace.

  This last notion, however, has no standing in contemporary Christianity. In nearly all Christian communities, there is remorse for the old theologically instigated crimes, and serious internal moral restitution, much of it of a very high order. But a salient fact remains, perhaps impolitic to note: relief has come through Christianity’s having long been depleted of temporal power. Today’s Islamists, by contrast, are supported and succored by states: Iran, Syria (and Lebanon, its vassal), Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Libya, Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt (which suppresses its domestic extremists, while its official press, film industry, and other institutions encourage anti-Zionist incitements). Iranian weapons flood into Gaza, whether by sea or through tunnels from Egypt. Saudi Arabia not long ago unashamedly broadcast a telethon to collect millions to be sent to Palestinian terror gangs; it continues today as Hamas’s chief funder. And though Saddam Hussein is finally gone, it will not be forgotten that he honored and enriched the families of suicide bombers. (I observe a telltale omission: those who deny any linkage between Iraq and terror universally discount Saddam’s lavish payments to Hamas and Islamic Jihad.)