I
once thought it possible to address the world’s turn against Israel without
bringing in antisemitism. No longer.
By
Joshua Muravchik
The seven weeks of
war between Israel and Hamas in the summer of 2014 occasioned the greatest
outpouring of raw antisemitism since the demise of
Nazism. Ironically, relatively little of this, or at least less than usual,
occurred in the Arab world: Cairo, Damascus, Beirut, and Baghdad were quieter
than during any earlier wars between Israel and its neighbors. But across
Europe and here and there in Latin America, Africa, and even in the U.S. and
Canada, incident followed upon incident of vicious Jew-baiting and occasional
violence.
By odd
coincidence, my 2014 book, Making David Into Goliath: How the World
Turned Against Israel, had been released on the very day that Israeli
forces moved into Gaza in response to a wave of Hamas rockets. In it, I wrote
much about anti-Zionism and anti-Israelism but little about antisemitism, a
point on which I was repeatedly challenged when I spoke before Jewish
audiences. Given that the world’s current hostility to Israel is manifestly
unreasonable, many assume that its source must lie in the world’s most ancient
hatred. So why did I neglect it?
The main reason
is that I was aiming to explain change. No nation other than Israel
has ever experienced such a dramatic reversal in the way it is perceived and
treated by the rest of the world. On the eve of the Six-Day War, polls showed
French and British publics favoring Israel over the Arabs by near-unanimous
ratios (28 to 1). In recent years, in contrast, those same publics have
registered intense hostility to Israel. But surely the world was not devoid of antisemitism
in 1967. If “Israel” is a stand-in for the real target, Jews, would that not
have been manifest back in 1967 as well?
Rather than antisemitism,
therefore, my book focused on the concrete historical and political forces that
might help to account for the turn against Israel. First, the occupation: the
1967 war left Israel in control of territories inhabited by a few million
Palestinian Arabs and, by demolishing pan-Arabism, paved the way for the
crystallization of Palestinian nationalism. This transformed the image of the
conflict from one pitting the vast Arab world against tiny Israel to one
pitting an apparently mighty Israel against the pitiable Palestinians. Second,
world politics: the Arabs, having failed dismally to translate their numerical
advantage into military achievements, learned belatedly to use it
diplomatically, turning the UN into the world’s bully pulpit for the
vilification of Israel and the engine-room of anti-Israel activism. Third, the
global campaign for “social justice,” which cast the Jews as white colonialist
Westerners and the Arabs or Palestinians as “people of color.”
There was also a
secondary reason why I did not focus on antisemitism: except where animus
toward Jews is expressed openly, it is difficult to know another person’s
motives. Therefore, in my book I concentrated on what could actually be
demonstrated: namely, that most of the charges against Israel are false,
tendentious, disproportionate, and often made in bad faith. On the whole,
demonstrating this seemed to me more effective than engaging in a sterile
debate over motives. Besides, with or without antisemitism, hatred of Israel is
in itself the most deadly thing facing the Jewish people since Hitler, and even
those who would shrink from committing violence against Israel with their own
hands work vigorously to harm it or, in the case of the BDS campaign, aim to
undermine and destroy it.
And yet: if, in
2013-14, I still thought it possible to deal with anti-Israelism without
tackling the issue of antisemitism, I no longer think so. The naked anti-Jewish
vitriol laced through reactions to the war in Gaza, and only intensifying since
then, makes it clear that whether or not antisemitism is the unspoken source of
hostility to Israel, the converse is certainly true: hatred of Israel has grown
so febrile as to have unleashed an unvarnished hatred of Jews. Ultimately,
whichever comes first, the boundary between anti-Israelism and antisemitism
grows fainter by the day.
There is a
paradox here: coarse or violent expressions of animosity to Jews don’t
necessarily mean that antisemitism itself is growing more common. In fact,
recent society-wide polls suggest that it is becoming less common
in the United States and even in Europe. At the same time, however, the
frequency of hate crimes against Jews, notably in Europe, has climbed sharply.
And here we can zero in with some precision. Some of the abuse and violence is
attributable to skinheads or neo-Nazis. But the lion’s share is the work of
Muslim immigrants or their offspring.
The source is not
hard to find: in much of the Islamic world, and in virtually the entire Arab
world, the distinction between Israel and Jews is rarely recognized. Thus, the
Hamas charter states that “Israel, Judaism, and Jews [emphasis
added] challenge Islam and the Muslim people,” adding a purported quotation
from Muhammad: “The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the
Jews, [and] the stones and trees will say O Muslims, there is a Jew behind me,
come and kill him.” The Palestinian Authority (PA), somewhat less sanguinary,
similarly conflates Jews and Israel, as when a PA ambassador tells an
international conference that the “Elders of Zion” have a master plan for
“dominating life in the entire planet.”
As these examples
suggest, antipathy to Israel melds readily with traditional religious prejudice
tracing back to the Quran and the life of the prophet. Against this background,
the success of Israel in its struggle with the Arabs is especially galling, and
in the popular imagination has endowed Jews with something like demonic powers.
In turn, that demonization has often had deadly consequences, as witness the
many incidents of violent aggression purportedly related to Israel but aimed at
non-Israeli Jews by Muslims in Europe.
In France alone,
the tale begins with a 1980 synagogue bombing in Paris that killed four and
injured 40 and stretches to this past January’s jihadist attack on the kosher
supermarket. Add to these the less noticed fact that in the assault days
earlier on the offices ofCharlie Hebdo, all the women present were
spared except one whom the killers evidently knew to be Jewish, and the more
recent disclosures about the intentions of the November 13 Islamic State
plotters to move on from their initial targets to specifically Jewish ones. And
add to these the attacks in Vienna (1982) and Rome (1984) and on the Chabad
house in Mumbai (2004); the bombing, masterminded by Iran, on the Jewish
community center in Buenos Aires that killed 84 and wounded hundreds (1994);
and many more.
One result of
this prolonged violence has been the worldwide flight of Jews from countries
that hitherto sheltered them. It all started in the Middle East, where the
birth of the Jewish state in 1948 opened a new chapter in persecution as Jews
were driven from Arab countries and, after the Islamic revolution in 1979, fled
Iran. The rise of Turkey’s Islamist movement over the past decade, on top of
mass murders at Turkish synagogues in 1986 and 2003, have prompted a flight of
Jews from that country, accelerating recently in the face of open abuse in the
media and boycotts of Jewish businesses.
Non-Muslim
countries whose governments are allied with anti-Israel forces—Venezuela, whose
dictator, Hugo Chavez, embraced Iran, or South Africa where the dominant African
National Congress has long maintained close ties to the PLO—have also witnessed
waves of abuse and violence aimed at indigenous Jews and a consequent radical
reduction of their Jewish populations.
As the number of
places on earth where Jews can reside in peace and security has shrunk, the
question has arisen as to whether Europe will continue to be among the few
remaining. Events before and since June 2014 have convinced some serious observers that
the answer is no. Jews have been
departing Europe, and especially France, in numbers not seen since the 1930s.
“We are seeing the beginning of the end of Jewish history in [Western] Europe,”
said Natan Sharansky, the chairman of the Jewish Agency. Unless officials in
these countries are prepared to act with unwonted rigor to suppress the
predations of radical Islamists, a sizable exodus is well-nigh inevitable.
What all this
suggests is that the mixture of Israel-hatred and antisemitism, while most
widespread among Muslims, is hardly unique to them. Although Westerners who
want to remain respectable invariably insist that their anti-Israel sentiments
don’t make them antisemites, the evidence often implies or demonstrates
otherwise.
Take, for
example, the American political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt,
who in an essay on the malign influence of the “Israel lobby”, elaborated in
their 2007 book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, pointedly
declared themselves to be “philo-Semites.” Only a couple of years later,
however, Mearsheimer was proposing to divide Jews into two categories: “righteous
Jews,” meaning those who hate Israel or at least blame it for the conflict with
the Arabs, and all the rest, whom he labeled “Afrikaners.” The distinction
sheds no light on Jews but a great deal on how Mearsheimer feels toward them.
When charged with
antisemitism, Mearsheimer and those who think like him, they include the blogger
Andrew Sullivan, who has spent the better part of a decade pouring vitriol on
Israel and its supporters, typically respond by accusing their critics of
“playing the antisemitism card” in an attempt to silence them. In Mearsheimer’s
words: “anyone who criticizes Israeli actions or says that pro-Israel groups
have significant influence over U.S. Middle East policy stands a good chance of
getting labeled an antisemite.” In Sullivan’s words: “criticizing AIPAC is
something forbidden for non-Jews, for fear of being labeled an antisemite.”
The claim is
absurd. Consider that virtually every editorial of theNew York Times dealing
with the Middle East is critical of Israel at least in part; that the same goes
for the paper’s foreign-affairs columnist Thomas Friedman; that this is no less
true of most of the major print and electronic media, including the New
Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the National Interest,
and other intellectual and foreign-policy magazines; that Jewish outlets likeTablet and
the Forward also routinely include sharp critical comments
even in articles that defend Israel; and that the Middle East Studies
Association, the dominant professional organization of academics in the field,
is fiercely and all but uniformly hostile to Israel.
In brief, to
attack Israel never in itself evokes a charge of antisemitism from serious
quarters, and even to attack it fiercely and obsessively seems not to remove a
person from polite society. Better to turn the charge around: anyone protesting
that to criticize Israel is to be risk being unfairly labeled an antisemite is
likely an antisemite seeking to preempt criticism.
Historically, antisemitism
has most often been associated with the right, but today rabid and obsessive
hatred of Israel that reaches and sometimes crosses the borders of antisemitism
is mostly to be found on the left. This is most evident, again, in the BDS
campaign, notable for its flagrant double standards. Although supporters
usually claim that BDS’s purpose is to protect Palestinian human rights, the
movement has never addressed the universal mistreatment (or slaughter) of
Palestinians in Arab countries, most recently Syria. Israel’s
own record on human rights is better by light years than that of all the states
surrounding it combined, but neither BDS itself nor any of the churches,
unions, academic associations, or student governments that have voted to
boycott or sanction Israel has ever subjected any other state to its
strictures. This is what prompted Lawrence Summers, the former president of
Harvard University, to say with perfect accuracy that BDS is “antisemitic in
effect if not in intent.”
In addition to
the steady increase in BDS activity, recent years have seen a sharp rise in
Israel-bashing and antisemitism on college and university campuses where
leftist opinion tends to dominate, including the harassment or assault on Jewish
students by “anti-Israel” demonstrators. In a 2014 national survey, 54 percent
of Jewish college students said they had personally experienced or witnessed an
antisemitic incident.
That figure is
startlingly high; unfortunately, since no prior studies exist for the sake of
comparison, the data are hard to interpret. Perhaps antisemitism is spiking on
campuses, perhaps not. But one can confidently say this: the prevailing
atmosphere of acute academic sensitivity to any sort of slight or perceived
insult to other identity groups is markedly less evident when it comes to open antisemitism.
Thus, when a
campaign at UCLA demanded that candidates for student government sign pledges
not to take part in trips to Israel sponsored by pro-Israel organizations, the
university chancellor, after duly registering his personal distaste for the
requirement, nevertheless insisted that the campaign’s position “fall[s]
squarely within the realm of free speech, and free speech is sacrosanct to any
university campus.” If an equivalent demand had been made of blacks or Latinos
or feminists or gays, no administration would have leapt so quickly to invoke
the sanctity of free speech.
Of course, the
universities themselves only magnify currents in the political culture at
large, as emblemized by the U.S. president. Although Barack Obama has injected
himself into controversies with a racial aspect, like the arrest of Henry Louis
Gates, the shooting of Trayvon Martin, and the massacre of black worshippers by
a white supremacist in South Carolina, he seems little moved by antisemitism.
After French Muslim jihadists massacred patrons at the kosher supermarket in
Paris, singling out four Jews for death, the president displayed remarkable
indifference, not only declining to attend the subsequent solidarity march in
Paris or send a representative in his stead but, in an interview, dismissing
the killer as a “zealot . . . randomly shoot[ing] a bunch of folks in a deli.”
The rubber of
Obama’s insouciance meets the road of Jewish endangerment at the point
of Iran’s quest for a nuclear bomb. Trying to blunt the opposition to his
cherished nuclear deal by supporters of Israel, Obama stoked the very anxieties
he ostensibly intended to allay. About the virulent antisemitism of Iran’s
rulers, he said:
The fact that you
are antisemitic, or racist, doesn’t preclude you from being interested in
survival. It doesn’t preclude you from being rational about the need to keep
your economy afloat; it doesn’t preclude you from making strategic decisions
about how you stay in power.
As it happens,
Iran had long been at one with other dictatorial regimes whose decisions were
driven by ideologies defying rational considerations, sometimes to catastrophic
effect—as in Communist China’s “Great Leap Forward,” which generated a famine
claiming an estimated 20 to 50 million lives. No argument could be less
reassuring to Jews in particular than the premise that economic self-interest
will always trump antisemitism. Jews have been driven from many places,
invariably to the economic detriment of those societies. And this pattern was
repeated and topped off in the Holocaust, the larger part of which was carried
out after the tide of battle had already begun to turn against Hitler and all
possible resources were needed for the German war effort. Nevertheless,
contrary to Obama’s theory that policies based on hatred are pursued only “when
the costs are low,” Hitler was willing to divert men and materiel and sacrifice
his country, his regime, and his own life to the single-minded pursuit of his
hatred.
Today, a regime
that never tires of announcing its genocidal intentions toward Jews stands on
the threshold of possessing a nuclear bomb, thus fulfilling its aim of becoming
the hegemon of the Muslim Middle East and giving it the power to perpetrate a
second Holocaust. Despite Obama’s jejune theories, Iran will not abandon this
quest in order to raise its GDP.
In the face of
mounting peril, it makes little difference to the Jews which comes first,
hatred of Jews or hatred of Israel. The peril does not arise because the hatred
is spreading; the peril arises because the hatred is becoming more lethal as
radical Islam becomes ever more extreme. Iran once shocked the world with its
wanton recourse to terror, its abuse of diplomatic immunity, and its festivals
of hate. Then al-Qaeda, which seemed so much more outré, eclipsed Iran for
shock value, and now Islamic State has outdone al-Qaeda. The Jews are far from
the only targets, but they are an especially vulnerable one, and as the attacks
grow more frequent and more violent in various parts of the Diaspora, life for
Jews becomes increasingly difficult or impossible.
And this, in
addition to the heightening violence of radical Islam, points to the second
source of the peril confronting today’s Jews. That source is the lethargy,
cowardice, and indifference of Western leaders, policy elites, churchmen,
artists and intellectuals, and university administrators and faculty. Thus have
the Jews once again been left on their own to contend with a threat to their
very existence even though, once again, what threatens them will also come—as,
in New York and Washington and Paris and London and Madrid and elsewhere it has
already come—to threaten and to murder others.
The present essay
has been adapted from Mr. Muravchik’s new introduction to the paperback edition of Making
David into Goliath: How the World Turned against Israel, to be released
next week by Encounter Books.
Joshua Muravchik is a fellow at the School of Advanced International
Studies (SAIS) of Johns Hopkins University. His book, Trailblazers of the Arab
Spring: Voices of Democracy in the Middle East, was published in 2013. Making
David Into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel was published by Encounter
Books in 2014.
