Debunking  

The New Anti-Semitism

by Merrel Clubb

Contrary to what the media suggest, disagreement with Israel's policies does not constitute pathological hatred of Jews. Nor does disagreement with George W. Bush's policies constitute pathological hatred of Americans.

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Far too many people seem not to recognize the full complexity of the meanings of the two expressions anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism. They continue to use them as though each has only a single, simple meaning. Both expressions belong to a small group of words with dual meanings in political discourse: a literal or dictionary meaning and a political or propagandistic meaning. But unlike such words as terrorism, both anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism also belong to another class of words similar to one an early semanticist referred to as "snarl-words" (in contrast to "purr-words"). In some contexts anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism, especially in their adjectival forms, mean little more than "I don't like."

Although from time to time someone will note that one must take care to distinguish clearly between criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism, as well as between criticism of America's policies and what might be called "true" anti-Americanism, many who use the expressions simply do not make the distinction.

Charges of anti-Semitism are so common today in newspapers and elsewhere that many critics of Israel's policies are afraid to voice their objections for fear they will be labeled anti-Semitic, or if Jewish, self-hating Jews.

Those who do have the courage to speak out are often quickly marginalized. In September 2002, Harvard's president, Lawrence Summers, gave an address, which later appeared in the Providence Journal and was widely reprinted in other newspapers. He said, "Where anti-Semitism and views that are profoundly anti-Israel have traditionally been the primary preserve of poorly educated right-wing populists, profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities. Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect, if not their intent." He went on to declare, "Some here at Harvard and some at universities across the country have called for the university to single out Israel among all nations as the lone country where it is inappropriate for any part of the university's endowment to be invested."

What Summers glossed over too easily was a countrywide student protest movement on more than 50 campuses calling upon universities to divest their stock holdings in American companies which do significant business with Israel, as a protest against such Israeli actions as expropriating more and more Palestinian land for Jewish settlements and connecting roads, killing Palestinian civilians (including women and children), uprooting their orchards, and destroying their houses in both the West Bank and Gaza. The students were not singling out Israel as the "lone country" for protest. They were calling for a boycott as an objection to the actions of a government against another people, hoping to force a change, as did happen eventually in apartheid South Africa when democratic policies were established. All too often, criticism of Israeli policies in the West Bank and Gaza has been equated with anti-Semitism to cut off any debate by smearing the critic with the brush of racism. Such usage can only be termed political propaganda.

On Jan. 20, 2003, Warren Kinsella published an article in the Canadian magazine Maclean's entitled "The New Anti-Semitism," in which he defined "new" anti-Semitism as criticism of Israel's Zionist policies. However, equating criticism of Zionist policies to anti-Semitism is nothing new. Even before Israel became a state in 1948, David Ben Gurion declared, "henceforth to be anti-Zionist was to be anti-Semitic." And in 1973, Israel's foreign minister Abba Eban said, "One of the chief tasks of any dialogue with the Gentile world is to prove that the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is no distinction at all. Anti-Zionism is merely the new anti-Semitism." And such an illustrious thinker as Elie Wiesel, in effect, cut off all alien criticism of Israel's policies when he said: "A person who does not live Israel's ordeals and challenges has no right to criticize its decisions." In other words, only those Jews who live in Israel have a right to criticize Israel's policies in the West Bank and Gaza.

In 1984, Robert Westrich, who lived most of his life in Great Britain, delivered a lecture in the home of Israel's president, Chaim Herzog, on what he called "the new anti-Semitic anti-Zionism in the 1980s." Placing his topic in the larger context of what he referred to as a globally "orchestrated campaign against the Jewish state, Zionism, and the Jewish people as a whole," he first asked, "How can we be sure that anti-Zionism . . . is not primarily motivated by sympathy with the Palestinian cause or by opposition to specific Israeli policies?" But quickly answering his own question, he said, "Anti-Zionism has undoubtedly provided a wonderful alibi for anti-Semitism . . . a vehicle for the re-emergence of anti-Jewish attitudes."

Later in his talk he went further: "[W]e witness a conscious effort to delegitimize Jewish self-definition. . . . Delegitimization is no longer racial or religious but ideological and political." He explained: "Delegitimization of Israel and its ideological basis — Zionism — is the most direct way in our time to damage Jewish interest and prepare the way for the destruction of Jewish identity."

A 1988 editorial in The New Republic sounded a similar theme: "Salient anti-Semitism is anti-Semitism with a program . . . the delegitimization of the Jewish national movement." And shortly after Summers' Sept. 2002 address, Harvard's Alan Dershowitz chimed in, "There's nothing wrong with criticizing Israel. But to compare Israel's policies to the worst human rights abuses, that's an attempt to delegitimize Israel."

And there are those who have claimed that when criticism of Israel becomes excessive, it is anti-Semitism or "Israel bashing." But the obvious question becomes, "Who is to say when criticism of the killing of women and children and young boys, along with the destruction of houses and entire sections of towns, becomes excessive?" The argument that other countries have committed far worse crimes than Israel's against the indigenous Palestinians, as for example, the Hutus' murder of over 800,000 Tutsis in 1994, is irrelevant to any judgment of Israel's atrocities in the West Bank and Gaza. One crime does not justify another one.

The phenomenon often long precedes the word that comes to represent it, and the English expression anti-Semitism first appeared in English at the end of the 19th century to refer to the vicious hatred of Jews simply for being Jews — a hatred that was rampant in France and eastern Europe at that time and a form of racism on a par with color-based racism in the earlier part of the 20th-century American South. And, of course, such racist anti-Semitism continues to plague Jews in many parts of the world today. Zionism, in its first manifestation, also arose in the late 19th century, as a reaction to anti-Semitic persecutions in Europe, and a small number of "Lovers of Zion" emigrated to Palestine to find freedom. But soon after, another wave of "Political Zionists" began to arrive, ultimately with the expressed goal of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine — which was not "a land without a people for a people without a land," but a territory already inhabited for centuries by a large number of Arabs and a small minority of Jews, who did not welcome the Political Zionists and had no desire to live in a Jewish state in their own land. Initially, most Jews in Europe were highly critical of Zionism and were among its leading opponents, but it is hard to imagine that those Jewish critics were "anti-Semites" or "self-hating Jews." Eventually, however, any opposition to political Zionism was thought of by Zionists as anti-Semitism, and after Israel became a state, any criticism of Israel's Zionist policies came to be called anti-Semitism, often as a form of political propaganda intended to belittle such criticism.

Racist bigotry and anti-Semitism, of course, still exist in places all over the world, as illustrated by recent anti-Arab and anti-Semitic assaults in France. And while it is certainly true that criticism of Israel's policies can be motivated by anti-Semitism, and equally true that sympathy for the Palestinian cause can be a cover for resurgent anti-Semitism, in the sense of "anti-Jewish attitudes," most of the time now they are not. Criticism of Israel's policies in the West Bank and Gaza, at least in the Western world, is more often motivated by a sense of justice, not by racism or by a desire to delegitimize Israel or to destroy Jewish identity; sympathy for the Palestinians is a result of Israel's policies as they have been carried out in Palestine, not an alibi for racism. Sympathy for the suffering of Palestinians does not entail ignoring or condoning Palestinian terrorism in Israel and the suffering of Israelis, as is sometimes suggested.

To say that criticism of Israel's treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank is the same as anti-Semitism is not only ridiculous but much the same as saying that criticism of the white regime's treatment of blacks and coloreds in apartheid South Africa was anti-white, or that criticism of 16th-century Spanish and British attacks on indigenous Indians in the Americas was anti-Spanish and anti-British, or that criticism of American destruction of Indian villages and killing of women and children as pioneers moved westward and settled Indian land was anti-American.

The expressions anti-American and anti-Americanism, like anti-Semitic and anti-Semitism, are often tossed about to denigrate critics of a government's policies and actions. Both terms, of course, do have literal meanings that represent realities; however, unlike anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism does not refer to a form of racism; it refers to a hatred or dislike of America for what it is. But anti-Americanism, like anti-Semitism, also has a political meaning and is often used as a propaganda weapon against criticisms of various policies of the American government. Certainly, what can be called "literal" anti-Americanism is prevalent in many parts of the world, as illustrated by the appellation "The Great Satan" and by the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but the so-called anti-Americanism that exists in European countries today is really widespread objection to the Bush administration's arrogant, unilateral foreign policies. Eric Alterman (The Nation, Feb. 10, 2003) wrote that he had recently visited Germany, France, Italy, and Britain looking for anti-Americanism, in the sense of dislike of Americans or America as such, and found little that could properly be thought of as genuine anti-Americanism; but he did find what New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has called the "new anti-Americanism," that is, strong criticism of Bush's obvious intention at the time to plunge headlong into a preemptive war in Iraq. Anti-Bushism, yes; anti-Americanism, no.

Before the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration and sympathizers in the media labeled European objections to Bush's policies as anti-Americanism to discredit opposition in much the same way as the Israeli government and its sympathizers have leveled charges of anti-Semitism in order to smear critics of Israel's policies in Palestine. When the United Nations' Human Rights Commission in Geneva voted the United States off the Commission, the Washington Post announced a "new period of anti-Americanism." Even as Israel continues its terrorist tactics in the West Bank and Gaza, critics of America's large military and financial support of Israel are sometimes charged with anti-Semitism or anti-Americanism.

Individuals both abroad and at home use the term "anti-Americanism" to disparage what they do not like to hear or read. On a visit to the United States before the Iraq war, Prime Minister Tony Blair was quoted as saying in reference to extensive criticism in England of President Bush's plans to invade Iraq: "Some of what I read . . . is just straight forward anti-Americanism." As though there had been no such criticism in America!

The term is often used by Americans to attack other Americans when they voice unpopular views, as for example when anyone publicly attempted to understand the reasons for the hatred which led to the 9/11 attacks on New York City and Washington. There is almost a knee-jerk reaction at times by some conservatives to call liberals anti-American, as when David Frum in National Review (April 7, 2003) referred to Robert Fisk, Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, Alexander Cockburn, and "other anti-Americans of the far left." And the editor of The Progressive (Feb. 2003) related how a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, an American citizen who happened to have been born in Iraq, was visited by a campus police officer and an FBI agent. When the professor asked the reason for the visit, they responded it had been reported that he was anti-American, because he opposed the president's war on Iraq. Charges of anti-Americanism, of course, were commonplace before and during the Iraq war when many Americans, who most certainly did support our troops, spoke out in opposition to a foolish war in which many of those troops, as well as many Iraqis, would needlessly lose their lives, as for example when Rush Limbaugh said, "these anti-war demonstrators . . . let's call them what they are: anti-American demonstrators," and when William Kristol in The Weekly Standard (April 7, 2003) referred to the "Teddy Kennedy wing of the Senate Democrats" and the "Nancy Pelosi faction of the House Democrats" as anti-American. Or when an airline security agent opened a passenger's bag and found two signs saying "No War With Iraq," and left a note criticizing the passenger's "anti-American attitude."

The assumption that America can do no wrong, and even that history — or rather, historical descriptions — must always be true is common. When historians maintain, as most (not all) who have focussed on the topic do, that atomic bombs were not necessary to defeat Japan and end World War II, they are often characterized as "anti-American" or "un-American." In the course of the 1995 Enola Gay controversy, when the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum proposed to mount a serious educational exhibit which would, for the first time by a public institution, raise questions many historians had been asking since the 1950s about the use of the atomic bombs at the end of WWII, that famous professor of American history Newt Gingrich was quoted in The New Republic (March 13, 1995) as saying that the exhibit was "anti-American, and distorted history" (the words many veterans also used during the controversy) simply because he did not like the implications of the questions raised. Similarly, on Oct. 25, 1994, Charles Sweeney, the pilot of the B-29 that dropped the plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, characterized the exhibit as "un-American" and "close to treason." He made it clear in his memoir that in his opinion the exhibit did not represent "the facts" of the war, facts that only a veteran who was an "eyewitness" to the war could know — not a historian, of course, who was "not there." This is similar to Elie Wiesel's claim that only Jews in Israel have the knowledge and understanding to criticize Israel.

Although there is much to admire in both the Israeli and the American people, as well as in Israel and America, there appear to be all too many who accept the simplistic and puerile notion that "you are either with us or against us": you are either uncritically with Israel or against Israel; you are either uncritically with America or against America. When faced with facts or questions they dislike to hear about the actions or proposals of the governments of Israel or of the United States, many people cry "anti-Semitism" or "anti-Americanism" — words which, in such circumstances, have become little more than expressions of emotions.

© Copyright 2008, Liberty Foundation

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