| Fear of the Other Conference papers |  |
| Fear of the Other Conference papers | |
I wish my talk today could be lighthearted, but antisemitism is no laughing matter. Which reminds me of a Jewish joke. That’s not quite as paradoxical as it sounds when you remember that irony, especially self-mockery, is a staple of Jewish humour. Why, I’m not sure. But I know it’s true, not just because I grew up in a Jewish household but because Freud says so, and he took humour very seriously. In his treatise Jokes and their Relation to the Unconsious he remarked, “I do not know whether there are many other instances of a people making fun to such a degree of its own character.” On the other hand, it’s not just the Jews. Saul Bellow once said that “oppressed people tend to be witty”. Why? Why would you mock yourself when everyone else is laughing at your expense? Maybe that’s why: if you’re paying for it, you might as well enjoy it too. Why should you miss out? Or it could be a shrug of resignation: as we Brits say, “You’ve gotta laugh!” Or perhaps it’s a way to belong: to laugh at the fact that you don’t. Be that as it may, the joke of which I am reminded is about Moishe the peddler. Moishe was pushing his cart down an alley in Vitebsk (a town in the so-called Jewish ‘Pale of Settlement’ in Russia), 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 [extended family]!”
There is nothing amusing about antisemitism. But to my grandparents, all of whom were from Eastern Europe (including one from Vitebsk), the very idea of Jewish power would have sounded like a Jewish joke. Yes, there were families like the Rothschilds. But the vast majority of Jews in Europe were people like Moishe, barely able to run their own lives, never mind control the world. To the antisemite (in the joke that I just told) Moishe is indeed a peddler; but not a mere peddler. For he is a Jewish peddler and therefore part of a worldwide web, a cousinhood that operates as one family, run by a cabal of wealthy well-placed Jews, a collective with a collective purpose, whose hidden hand controls the banks, the markets, the media and even governments; all with a view to promoting the ambitions of Jews at the expense of the nations in whose midst they dwell and on whom they prey. If Moishe could see himself through the eyes of the antisemite he would not know whether to laugh – or scream.
As the joke illustrates, the question ‘What is antisemitism?’ is not unrelated to the question ‘What is a Jew?’ Indeed, one way of answering the first is to say that an antisemite is someone who gives a certain answer to the second. This is how the words ‘antisemite’ and ‘antisemitism’ came into existence. When Wilhelm Marr founded the Antisemiten-Liga (League of Antisemites) in 1879, he did so in opposition to so-called ‘Semitism’. ‘Semitism’, for Marr, meant “the Jewish spirit and Jewish consciousness”. It is true that he conceived of Jews specifically as a biological race. But his racial ideology can be detached from his image of the ‘Jew’. Indeed, he did not invent the latter. He found it in the culture of Christian Europe, where it had been lying around for centuries, deposited there by a certain way of interpreting (or misinterpreting) the Gospels, long before secular-minded thinkers dreamt up the newfangled theory of race. Whether Jewish identity is seen as religious, racial, cultural or national, this image of the ‘Jew’ – the image projected onto Moishe in the joke – is the constant element (more or less) in the meaning of the word ‘antisemitism’.
Or should I say old antisemitism? For we hear a lot these days about a so-called new variety. According to those who speak this way, it is not the content of antisemitism that has changed but its object. In his article ‘The hatred that won’t die’, Britain’s Chief Rabbi Dr. Jonathan Sacks has explained why antisemitism is, as he puts it “undeniably the most successful ideology of modern times”. “Its success,” he explains, “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.” “The ‘oldest hatred’,” writes Melanie Phillips, “has mutated from a desire to rid the world of the Jews into a desire to rid the world of the Jewish state”. Natan Sharansky in his article ‘On Hating the Jews’ puts it graphically: “Israel,” he says, “has effectively become the world’s Jew”. In other words, Israel has become Moishe, or Moishe has become Israel. Either way, the idea is that the State of Israel today is the personification of the persecuted Jew of old. This view is what puts the ‘new’ into ‘new antisemitism’.
Now, on the face of it, this seems absurd. Among the many differences between the modern State of Israel and the persecuted Jew of old, one stands out: the power of the one as against the impotence of the other. 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. And in this respect, you can say, it succeeded; some would say with a vengeance. At any rate, the State of Israel today is the principal regional power 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. Moreover, the Jewish state enjoys the full backing of the most powerful nation on earth, the United States. It is not in the position of being persecuted by the Tsar. Israel, in other words, is not Moishe.
Moreover, power tends to antagonize, especially when it’s abused. Successive Israeli governments have been abusing their power for decades in the Occupied Territories and defying international law. 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.
Yet there are people, as I have been saying, who equate the two; and they’re not kidding. Why? Why is it that highly intelligent individuals with keen discerning minds, including rabbis trained in the talmudic discipline of pilpul where you learn to make fine distinctions between closely-related concepts (and believe me I know whereof I speak because we had more Jewish Studies lessons at the Hasmonean, the orthodox Jewish school I attended from the age of 5 to 18, than any other subject in the curriculum): Why are such people unable to distinguish between Israel and Moishe?
This is the question at the centre of my talk today. You might say, “Who cares? It’s their problem.” But you’d be wrong. Anyone who cares about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and who seeks a resolution that will enable Palestinians and Israelis to get on with their lives, to live together in the region, whether in two states or one, should care. This includes those of us who are not on the frontline, so to speak, who live here in the UK or elsewhere in the world outside the Middle East. What we can contribute might be limited. But at the very least we can avoid making things worse. We make things worse when we confuse legitimate political anger with antisemitic bigotry. But also when we speak or act in ways that promote this confusion by fuelling the deep antisemitic vein that persists in European culture and that exists elsewhere. With both these things in mind, I shall now discuss the view that Israel, in Sharansky’s phrase, is ‘the world’s Jew’.
II. The inner voice
One reason why some people latch onto this view is that it dissolves, at a stroke, all the troubling complexity of this subject into a simple solution. Moreover, it is a solution that many of us, as Jews, imbibe with our mother’s milk. Here is the voice that we hear in our heads: “It’s happened to us before, and now it’s happening again. It’s like the 1930s or even worse. People hate Israel because they hate Jews. Any excuse will do. They hate us for being capitalists and they hate us for being communists. They want to get rid of us because, they say, we’re a state within a state. Now they hate us for having a state of our own. Like Koheleth says in the Bible, there is nothing new under the sun. Okay, so Israel isn’t perfect. And if it were, would they love us? They’d hate us because we were too good. Go figure! Antisemitism is irrational. There’s no point in trying to get inside the mind of an antisemite. They hate us and there’s an end of it. All we can do is stand together and defend ourselves – and our state – against our enemies.”
Now, if this inner voice is beguiling, this is partly because it is not altogether wrong. We Jews did not imagine our persecution in the past, nor the catastrophe that befell us with the Shoah. Moreover, Zionism was a reaction to persecution, and the very existence of the State of Israel is tied to the Nazi genocide. Furthermore, antisemitism has not gone away; and, although the historical record is complicated, it is one reason for hostility to the Jewish state.
All of which is true, more or less, as far as it goes. But this does not make Israel ‘the world’s Jew’. Granted that Israel today is not the most popular state in the world, we need a criterion, a method for testing whether or not this hostility is antisemitic; and funnily enough we can derive it from the joke about Moishe. Recall the image projected onto Moishe: the Jew as alien, powerful, cohesive, cunning, parasitic, etc. As I said at the time, the content of this image is the constant element (more or less) in the meaning of the word ‘antisemitism’. Accordingly, we can apply the following test: Whenever a text or a person projects this image onto Israel for the reason that Israel is a Jewish state, then that text or person is antisemitic.
“But,” objects the inner voice, “do you really think that all antisemites wear their bigotry on their sleeve? Don’t be so naïve! Don’t you know that ‘Zionist’ is code for ‘Jew’ and that anti-Zionism is a mask for antisemitism?” Well, it can be. I remember clearly the so-called anti-Zionist purges carried out by the Polish government in 1968. I was a freshman at University College London (just up the road from here). In those days, being a student meant being a fulltime activist, and going to classes in your spare time. Representing my college at a conference of the National Union of Students, I argued that these purges should be condemned for what they really were: antisemitism in disguise. So, I know from my earliest days of political activism that anti-Zionism can be a mask for antisemitism.
But think what this means. On the one hand, if it can function as a mask this implies that, in and of itself, anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitic; 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 fictitious image 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.
“Okay,” replies the inner voice, “but what about someone whose criticism of Israel is intemperate? Isn’t this proof positive of antisemitism?” At this point the inner voice sounds very like Alan Dershowitz who argues that when criticism of Israel “crosses the line from fair to foul” it goes “from acceptable to anti-Semitic”. People who take this view say the line is crossed when critics single Israel out unfairly; when they use a double standard and judge Israel by harsher criteria than they apply to other states; when they distort the facts to put Israel in a bad light; when they vilify the Jewish state; and so on. All of which undoubtedly is foul. But is it necessarily antisemitic? No, it is not. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a tragic and bitter struggle between two peoples. The issues are complex, passions inflamed, and the suffering in both populations is great. In such circumstances, there is bias on both sides. On both sides, people ‘cross the line from fair to foul’. When partisans of Israel’s cause cross that line, this does not make them anti-Arab racists. By the same token, if partisans of the Palestinian cause cross the line, this does not make them antisemites. It cuts both ways.
I don’t think that what I am stating is anything more than common sense, and at this point the inner voice is temporarily fazed. But it quickly rallies. “Maybe,” it concedes, “you have a point there. But how could anyone be a partisan of Palestinian nationalism and at the same time oppose Jewish nationalism? This can only be prejudice against Jews.” This brings us to an issue that lies at the heart of so much misunderstanding about Zionism in connection with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: its deep ambiguity.
(What I am about to say is oversimplified but the oversimplification brings out a distinction that I think is important.) Historically, Zionismhas seen itself as the national liberation movement of the Jewish people. But like the Greek god Janus, it has two faces that look in two different directions at once. That is to say, it belongs to two opposite histories at one and the same time. On the one side, it saw itself as a movement for self-determination by (or on behalf of) the Jews, the ‘inside outsiders’ of Europe, a people with a long history of exclusion, oppression and persecution. On the other side, it was itself part of a European expansion into non-European territory. This is because, unlike the case of other self-styled national liberation movements, there was no existing national territory under occupation; the project was to gather in the exiles and populate a land rather than expel an invader. From the beginning, starting with Herzl’s address to the first Zionist congress in 1897, Zionism spoke the language of “colonization”; although this was conceived as colonization for the sake of emancipation, not empire. Seen from this side, Zionism historically was a flight from Europe, not an extension of the European homeland. But seen from the other side, the Jews who came as settlers were Europeans by any other name. And they were. They were both. They were Jewish as distinct from European, and they were European as distinct from Arab.
Yes, antisemitic prejudice can and does motivate some of the hostility to Israel. But by and large, and in the first place, this antagonism is directed against one face – the European colonizing face – of Zionism. This is the face that has loomed larger since the war of 1967 and the growth of Jewish settlements in Occupied Territories; even larger since the collapse of the peace talks in 2000; and larger still since Operation Defensive Shield in the spring of 2002.
“But,” interrupts that inner voice, turning my argument on its head, “if people on the left can see this face of Zionism, why are they blind to its other face? They sympathize with the plight of the Palestinians; have they forgotten the plight of the Jews? This one-sidedness is proof that the anti-Zionist left is fundamentally antisemitic.”
The objection overlooks other possibilities, but it does have some merit. Zionism, after all, was a reaction to antisemitism – not the only Jewish reaction, but nonetheless that’s what it was. Because of antisemitism, Jews in Europe were marginalized and excluded. When people on the left seem oblivious to this history, when they simply fold the Jewish story into a larger narrative of Western imperialism, Jews, whether Zionist or not, are liable to feel marginalized and excluded all over again. It is understandable that this feels like antisemitism, even when it isn’t. Similarly, when critics of Israel or Zionism speak loosely about a ‘Jewish cabal’ or ‘Jewish power’, they are pressing hot buttons – not only in the minds of many Jews but also in the wider culture. Steve Cohen, the Jewish socialist, makes a point that is apropos in his study of antisemitism on the left, called That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Anti-Semitic. He writes, “Any group which claims to be against anti-semitism should be ultra-vigilant in the imagery it evokes…”. This is not only a matter of morality, it is also sound political advice. Recall the closing words of the initial speech made by the inner voice: “They hate us and there’s an end of it. All we can do is stand together and defend ourselves – and our state – against our enemies.” This is the political bottom line to the view that Israel is ‘the world’s Jew’. In one way, this view is oddly disempowering, casting the Jewish state in the old mould of Jewish victim. In another way, it is a license to pursue a brand of politics based on the idea that only the exercise of unilateral power, especially military power, will secure a future for Israel in the Middle East. It does not help the cause of peace or justice to reinforce the voice that sustains this view.
III. Not kosher
I’d like, in closing, to say a word about this inner voice. I have been speaking about it as something that I too hear in my head. But it’s one thing to hear voices, another to heed them. For me, this voice is not authoritative. I don’t trust it. And the reason I don’t trust it has nothing to do with the distinctions and arguments that I have been making today. It’s for a different kind of reason altogether, one that takes me back to where this talk began. Quite simply (don’t laugh), the voice isn’t funny. It’s too straight, too po-faced. It takes itself too seriously. There’s no self-mockery, no self-criticism. But to take self-criticism out of Jewishness is like taking the light out of a candle or the heat out of a flame: it means taking the ‘Jewish’ out of the Jewish people. You know how some Jews say they can smell antisemitism? Well, when I hear this inner voice, claiming to be Jewish, I smell a rat. In short, it’s not – kosher.
Brian Klug
St. Benet’s Hall
Oxford
This talk draws on recent work I have done in this area, including the essay ‘Is Europe a Lost Cause? The European Debate on Antisemitism and the Middle East Conflict’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 39, no. 1, March 2005.
Quoted in Jules Chametzky, ‘Jewish Humor’, in Leonard H. Ehrlich et al (eds.), Textures and Meanings: Thirty Years of Judaic Studies at University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2004, pp. 228-229.
Quoted in ‘Jewish Humour’ in Wikipedia, available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_humour.
Wilhelm Marr, Der Sieg des Judenthums ueber das Germanenthum vom nicht confessionellen Standpunkt ausbetrachtet, (Bern: Rudolph Costenoble, 1879), pp. 30-35, excerpted in and translated by Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz (eds), The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 332.
Jonathan Sacks, ‘The hatred that won’t die’, Guardian, February 28, 2002, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4364620-103677,00.html.
Melanie Phillips, ‘The “oldest hatred” survives in Britain’, Jerusalem Post, 21 April 2005, available at: http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1113963510494&p=1006953079865.
Natan Sharansky, ‘On Hating the Jews’, Commentary, November 2003, available at http://www.geocities.com/munichseptember1972/on_hating_jews.htm; reprinted in The Wall Street Journal, 17 November 2003, available at http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110004310.
Jerome Slater, ‘Israel, Anti-Semitism and the Palestinian Problem’, in: Tikkun, vol. 16, no. 3, May 2001, available at http://www.tikkun.org/magazine/index.cfm/action/tikkun/issue/tik0105/article/010512b.html.
Alan Dershowitz, The Case for Israel, Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley & Sons, 2003, p. 1.
Theodor Herzl, “First Congress Address” (1897), in Arthur Hertzberg, The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader, Philadephia: The Jewish Publicaton Society, 1997, pp. 226-230.
The point I am making is not quite the same as the one made by Tony Klug in his writings on the Middle East, beginning with A Tale of Two Peoples, London: Fabian Society, 1973, but it is inspired by his approach.
Steve Cohen, That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Anti-Semitic, Leeds: Beyond the Pale Collective, 1984, p. 86.