This is one from the archives (2002) but I think it still holds up pretty well.
It's by Canadian-Jewish academic Michael Neumann and when it came out, it made quite an impression.
What is Antisemitism?
By Michael Neumann
June 4, 2002
Every once in a while, some left-wing
Jewish writer will take a deep breath, open up his (or her) great big heart,
and tell us that criticism of Israel or Zionism is not antisemitism. Silently
they congratulate themselves on their courage. With a little sigh, they
suppress any twinge of concern that maybe the goyim--let alone the Arabs--can't
be trusted with this dangerous knowledge.
Sometimes it is gentile hangers-on, whose
ethos if not their identity aspires to Jewishness, who take on this task. Not
to be utterly risqué, they then hasten to remind us that antisemitism is
nevertheless to be taken very seriously. That Israel, backed by a pronounced
majority of Jews, happens to be waging a race war against the Palestinians is
all the more reason we should be on our guard. Who knows? it might possibly
stir up some resentment!
I take a different view. I think we should
almost never take antisemitism seriously, and maybe we should have some fun
with it. I think it is particularly unimportant to the Israel-Palestine
conflict, except perhaps as a diversion from the real issues. I will argue for
the truth of these claims; I also defend their propriety. I don't think making
them is on a par with pulling the wings off flies.
"Antisemitism", properly and
narrowly speaking, doesn't mean hatred of semites; that is to confuse etymology
with definition. It means hatred of Jews. But here, immediately, we come up
against the venerable shell-game of Jewish identity: "Look! We're a
religion! No! a race! No! a cultural entity! Sorry--a religion!" When we
tire of this game, we get suckered into another: "anti-Zionism is
antisemitism! " quickly alternates with: "Don't confuse Zionism with
Judaism! How dare you, you antisemite!"
Well, let's be good sports. Let's try
defining antisemitism as broadly as any supporter of Israel would ever want:
antisemitism can be hatred of the Jewish race, or culture, or religion, or
hatred of Zionism. Hatred, or dislike, or opposition, or slight unfriendliness.
But supporters of Israel won't find this game as much
fun as they expect. Inflating the meaning of 'antisemitism' to include anything
politically damaging to Israel
is a double-edged sword. It may be handy for smiting your enemies, but the
problem is that definitional inflation, like any inflation, cheapens the
currency. The more things get to count as antisemitic, the less awful
antisemitism is going to sound. This happens because, while no one can stop you
from inflating definitions, you still don't control the facts. In particular,
no definition of 'antisemitism' is going to eradicate the substantially
pro-Palestinian version of the facts which I espouse, as do most people in
Europe, a great many Israelis, and a growing number of North Americans.
What difference does that make? Suppose,
for example, an Israeli rightist says that the settlements represent the
pursuit of aspirations fundamental to the Jewish people, and to oppose the
settlements is antisemitism. We might have to accept this claim; certainly it
is difficult to refute. But we also cannot abandon the well-founded belief that
the settlements strangle the Palestinian people and extinguish any hope of
peace. So definitional acrobatics are all for nothing: we can only say, screw
the fundamental aspirations of the Jewish people; the settlements are wrong. We
must add that, since we are obliged to oppose the settlements, we are obliged
to be antisemitic. Through definitional inflation, some form of 'antisemitism'
has become morally obligatory.
It gets worse if anti-Zionism is labeled
antisemitic, because the settlements, even if they do not represent fundamental
aspirations of the Jewish people, are an entirely plausible extension of
Zionism. To oppose them is indeed to be anti-Zionist, and therefore, by the
stretched definition, antisemitic. The more antisemitism expands to include
opposition to Israeli policies, the better it looks. Given the crimes to be
laid at the feet of Zionism, there is another simple syllogism: anti-Zionism is
a moral obligation, so, if anti-Zionism is antisemitism, antisemitism is a
moral obligation.
What crimes? Even most apologists for Israel
have given up denying them, and merely hint that noticing them is a bit
antisemitic. After all, Israel
'is no worse than anyone else'. First, so what? At age six we knew that
"everyone's doing it" is no excuse; have we forgotten? Second, the
crimes are no worse only when divorced from their purpose. Yes, other people
have killed civilians, watched them die for want of medical care, destroyed
their homes, ruined their crops, and used them as human shields. But Israel does these things to correct the
inaccuracy of Israel Zangwill's 1901 assertion that "Palestine is a country without a people; the
Jews are a people without a country". It hopes to create a land entirely
empty of gentiles, an Arabia deserta in which
Jewish children can laugh and play throughout a wasteland called peace.
Well before the Hitler era, Zionists came
thousands of miles to dispossess people who had never done them the slightest
harm, and whose very existence they contrived to ignore. Zionist atrocities
were not part of the initial plan. They emerged as the racist obliviousness of
a persecuted people blossomed into the racial supremacist ideology of a
persecuting one. That is why the commanders who directed the rapes, mutilations
and child-killings of Deir Yassin went on to become prime ministers of
Israel.(*) But these murders were not enough. Today, when Israel could have peace for the taking, it
conducts another round of dispossession, slowly, deliberately making Palestine unliveable for
Palestinians, and liveable for Jews. Its purpose is not defense or public
order, but the extinction of a people. True, Israel has enough PR-savvy to eliminate
them with an American rather than a Hitlerian level of violence. This is a
kinder, gentler genocide that portrays its perpetrators as victims.
Israel is
building a racial state, not a religious one. Like my parents, I have always
been an atheist. I am entitled by the biology of my birth to Israeli
citizenship; you, perhaps, are the most fervent believer in Judaism, but are
not. Palestinians are being squeezed and
killed for me, not for you. They are to be forced into Jordan, to perish in a civil war.
So no, shooting Palestinian civilians is not like shooting Vietnamese or
Chechen civilians. The Palestinians aren't 'collateral damage' in a war against
well-armed communist or separatist forces. They are being shot because Israel
thinks all Palestinians should vanish or die, so people with one Jewish
grandparent can build subdivisions on the rubble of their homes. This is not
the bloody mistake of a blundering superpower but an emerging evil, the
deliberate strategy of a state conceived in and dedicated to an increasingly
vicious ethnic nationalism. It has relatively few corpses to its credit so far,
but its nuclear weapons can kill perhaps 25 million people in a few hours.
Do we want to say it is antisemitic to
accuse, not just the Israelis, but Jews generally of complicity in these crimes
against humanity? Again, maybe not, because there is a quite reasonable case
for such assertions. Compare them, for example, to the claim that Germans
generally were complicit in such crimes. This never meant that every last
German, man, woman, idiot and child, were guilty. It meant that most Germans
were. Their guilt, of course, did not consist in shoving naked prisoners into
gas chambers. It consisted in support for the people who planned such acts,
or--as many overwrought, moralistic Jewish texts will tell you--for denying the
horror unfolding around them, for failing to speak out and resist, for passive
consent. Note that the extreme danger of any kind of active resistance is not
supposed to be an excuse here.
Well, virtually no Jew is in any kind of
danger from speaking out. And speaking out is the only sort of resistance
required. If many Jews spoke out, it would have an enormous effect. But the
overwhelming majority of Jews do not, and in the vast majority of cases, this
is because they support Israel.
Now perhaps the whole notion of collective responsibility should be discarded;
perhaps some clever person will convince us that we have to do this. But at
present, the case for Jewish complicity seems much stronger than the case for
German complicity. So if it is not racist, and reasonable, to say that the
Germans were complicit in crimes against humanity, then it is not racist, and
reasonable, to say the same of the Jews. And should the notion of collective responsibility
be discarded, it would still be reasonable to say that many, perhaps most adult
Jewish individuals support a state that commits war crimes, because that's just
true. So if saying these things is antisemitic, than it can be reasonable to be
antisemitic.
In other words there is a choice to be
made. You can use 'antisemitism' to fit your political agenda, or you can use
it as a term of condemnation, but you can't do both. If antisemitism is to stop
coming out reasonable or moral, it has to be narrowly and unpolemically
defined. It would be safe to confine antisemitism to explicitly racial hatred
of Jews, to attacking people simply because they had been born Jewish. But it
would be uselessly safe: even the Nazis did not claim to hate people simply
because they had been born Jewish. They claimed to hate the Jews because they
were out to dominate the Aryans. Clearly such a view should count as
antisemitic, whether it belongs to the cynical racists who concocted it or to
the fools who swallowed it.
There is only one way to guarantee that the
term "antisemitism" captures all and only bad acts or attitudes
towards Jews. We have to start with what we can all agree are of that sort, and
see that the term names all and only them. We probably share enough morality to
do this.
For instance, we share enough morality to
say that all racially based acts and hatreds are bad, so we can safely count
them as antisemitic. But not all 'hostility towards Jews', even if that means
hostility towards the overwhelming majority of Jews, should count as
antisemitic. Nor should all hostility towards Judaism, or Jewish culture.
I, for example, grew up in Jewish culture
and, like many people growing up in a culture, I have come to dislike it. But
it is unwise to count my dislike as antisemitic, not because I am Jewish, but
because it is harmless. Perhaps not utterly harmless: maybe, to some tiny
extent, it will somehow encourage some of the harmful acts or attitudes we'd
want to call antisemitic. But so what? Exaggerated philosemitism, which regards
all Jews as brilliant warm and witty saints, might have the same effect. The
dangers posed by my dislike are much too small to matter. Even widespread,
collective loathing for a culture is normally harmless. French culture, for instance,
seems to be widely disliked in North America,
and no one, including the French, consider this some sort of racial crime.
Not even all acts and attitudes harmful to
Jews generally should be considered antisemitic. Many people dislike American
culture; some boycott American goods. Both the attitude and the acts may harm
Americans generally, but there is nothing morally objectionable about either.
Defining these acts as anti-Americanism will only mean that some
anti-Americanism is perfectly acceptable. If you call opposition to Israeli
policies antisemitic on the grounds that this opposition harms Jews generally,
it will only mean that some antisemitism is equally acceptable.
If antisemitism is going to be a term of
condemnation, then, it must apply beyond explicitly racist acts or thoughts or
feelings. But it cannot apply beyond clearly unjustified and serious hostility
to Jews. The Nazis made up historical fantasies to justify their attacks; so do
modern antisemites who trust in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. So do the
closet racists who complain about Jewish dominance of the economy. This is
antisemitism in a narrow, negative sense of the word. It is action or
propaganda designed to hurt Jews, not because of anything they could avoid
doing, but because they are what they are. It also applies to the attitudes
that propaganda tries to instill. Though not always explicitly racist, it
involves racist motives and the intention to do real damage. Reasonably
well-founded opposition to Israeli policies, even if that opposition hurts all
Jews, does not fit this description. Neither does simple, harmless dislike of
things Jewish.
So far, I've suggested that it's best to
narrow the definition of antisemitism so that no act can be both antisemitic
and unobjectionable. But we can go further. Now that we're through playing
games, let's ask about the role of *genuine*, bad antisemitism in the
Israel-Palestine conflict, and in the world at large.
Undoubtedly there is genuine antisemitism
in the Arab world: the distribution of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the
myths about stealing the blood of gentile babies. This is utterly inexcusable.
So was your failure to answer Aunt Bee's last letter. In other words, it is one
thing to be told: you must simply accept that antisemitism is evil; to do
otherwise is to put yourself outside our moral world. But it is quite something
else to have someone try to bully you into proclaiming that antisemitism is the
Evil of Evils. We are not children learning morality; it is our responsibility
to set our own moral priorities. We cannot do this by looking at horrible
images from 1945 or listening to the anguished cries of suffering columnists.
We have to ask how much harm antisemitism is doing, or is likely to do, not in
the past, but today. And we must ask where such harm might occur, and why.
Supposedly there is great danger in the
antisemitism of the Arab world. But Arab antisemitism isn't the cause of Arab
hostility towards Israel
or even towards Jews. It is an effect. The progress of Arab antisemitism fits
nicely with the progress of Jewish encroachment and Jewish atrocities. This is
not to excuse genuine antisemitism; it is to trivialize it. It came to the Middle East with Zionism and it will abate when Zionism
ceases to be an expansionist threat. Indeed its chief cause is not antisemitic
propaganda but the decades-old, systematic and unrelenting efforts of Israel
to implicate all Jews in its crimes. If Arab anti-semitism persists after a
peace agreement, we can all get together and cluck about it. But it still won't
do Jews much actual harm. Arab governments could only lose by permitting
attacks on their Jewish citizens; to do so would invite Israeli intervention.
And there is little reason to expect such attacks to materialize: if all the
horrors of Israel's
recent campaigns did not provoke them, it is hard to imagine what would. It
would probably take some Israeli act so awful and so criminal as to overshadow
the attacks themselves.
If antisemitism is likely to have terrible
effects, it is far more likely to have them in Western
Europe. The neo-fascist resurgence there is all too real. But is
it a danger to Jews? There is no doubt that LePen, for instance, is
antisemitic. There is also no evidence whatever that he intends to do anything
about it. On the contrary, he makes every effort to pacify the Jews, and
perhaps even enlist their help against his real targets, the 'Arabs'. He would
hardly be the first political figure to ally himself with people he disliked.
But if he had some deeply hidden plan against the Jews, that *would* be
unusual: Hitler and the Russian antisemitic rioters were wonderfully open about
their intentions, and they didn't court Jewish support. And it is a fact that
some French Jews see LePen as a positive development or even an ally. (see, for
instance, "`LePen is good for us,' Jewish supporter says", Ha'aretz May 04, 2002, and Mr.
Goldenburg's April 23rd comments on France TV.)
Of course there are historical reasons for
fearing a horrendous attack on Jews. And anything is possible: there could be a
massacre of Jews in Paris
tomorrow, or of Algerians. Which is more likely? If there are any lessons of
history, they must apply in roughly similar circumstances. Europe today bears
very little resemblance to Europe in 1933. And
there are positive possibilities as well: why is the likelihood of a pogrom
greater than the likelihood that antisemitism will fade into ineffectual
nastiness? Any legitimate worries must rest on some evidence that there really
is a threat.
The incidence of antisemitic attacks might
provide such evidence. But this evidence is consistently fudged: no distinction
is made between attacks against Jewish monuments and symbols as opposed to
actual attacks against Jews. In addition, so much is made of an increase in the
frequency of attacks that the very low absolute level of attacks escapes
attention. The symbolic attacks have indeed increased to significant absolute
numbers. The physical attacks have not.(*) More important, most of these
attacks are by Muslim residents: in other words, they come from a widely hated,
vigorously policed and persecuted minority who don't stand the slightest chance
of undertaking a serious campaign of violence against Jews.
It is very unpleasant that roughly half a
dozen Jews have been hospitalized--none killed--due to recent attacks across Europe. But anyone who makes this into one of the world's
important problems simply hasn't looked at the world. These attacks are a
matter for the police, not a reason why we should police ourselves and others
to counter some deadly spiritual disease. That sort of reaction is appropriate
only when racist attacks occur in societies indifferent or hostile to the
minority attacked. Those who really care about recurrent Nazism, for instance,
should save their anguished concern for the far bloodier, far more widely
condoned attacks on gypsies, whose history of persecution is fully comparable
to the Jewish past. The position of Jews is much closer to the position of
whites, who are also, of course, the victims of racist attacks.
No doubt many people reject this sort of
cold-blooded calculation. They will say that, with the past looming over us,
even one antisemitic slur is a terrible thing, and its ugliness is not to be
measured by a body count. But if we take a broader view of the matter,
antisemitism becomes less, not more important. To regard any shedding of Jewish
blood as a world-shattering calamity, one which defies all measurement and
comparison, is racism, pure and simple; the valuing of one race's blood over
all others. The fact that Jews have been persecuted for centuries and suffered
terribly half a century ago doesn't wipe out the fact that in Europe today,
Jews are insiders with far less to suffer and fear than many other ethnic
groups. Certainly racist attacks against a well-off minority are just as evil
as racist attacks against a poor and powerless minority. But equally evil
attackers do not make for equally worrisome attacks.
It is not Jews who live most in the shadow
of the concentration camp. LePen's 'transit camps' are for 'Arabs', not Jews.
And though there are politically significant parties containing many
antisemites, not one of these parties shows any sign of articulating, much less
implementing, an antisemitic agenda. Nor is there any particular reason to
suppose that, once in power, they will change their tune. Haider's Austria is not considered dangerous for Jews;
neither was Tudjman's Croatia.
And were there to be such danger, well, a nuclear-armed Jewish state stands
ready to welcome any refugees, as do the US
and Canada.
And to say there are no real dangers now is not to say that we should ignore
any dangers that may arise. If in France, for instance, the Front
National starts advocating transit camps for Jews, or institutes anti-Jewish
immigration policies, then we should be alarmed. But we should not be alarmed
that something alarming might just conceivably happen: there are far more
alarming things going on than that!
One might reply that, if things are not
more alarming, it is only because the Jews and others have been so vigilant in
combating antisemitism. But this isn't plausible. For one thing, vigilance
about antisemitism is a kind of tunnel vision: as neofascists are learning,
they can escape notice by keeping quiet about Jews. For another, there has been
no great danger to Jews even in traditionally antisemitic countries where the
world is *not* vigilant, like Croatia
or the Ukraine.
Countries that get very little attention seem no more dangerous than countries
that get a lot. As for the vigorous reaction to LePen in France, that seems to have a lot
more to do with French revulsion at neofascism than with the scoldings of the
Anti-Defamation League. To suppose that the Jewish organizations and earnest
columnists who pounce on antisemitism are saving the world from disaster is
like claiming that Bertrand Russell and the Quakers were all that saved us from
nuclear war.
Now one might say: whatever the real
dangers, these events are truly agonizing for Jews, and bring back unbearably
painful memories. That may be true for the very few who still have those
memories; it is not true for Jews in general. I am a German Jew, and have a
good claim to second-generation, third-hand victimhood. Antisemitic incidents
and a climate of rising antisemitism don't really bother me a hell of a lot.
I'm much more scared of really dangerous situations, like driving. Besides,
even painful memories and anxieties do not carry much weight against the actual
physical suffering inflicted by discrimination against many non-Jews.
This is not to belittle all antisemitism,
everywhere. One often hears of vicious antisemites in Poland and Russia, both on the streets and in
government. But alarming as this may be, it is also immune to the influence of
Israel-Palestine conflicts, and those conflicts are wildly unlikely to affect
it one way or another. Moreover, so far as I know, nowhere is there as much
violence against Jews as there is against 'Arabs'. So even if antisemitism is,
somewhere, a catastrophically serious matter, we can only conclude that
anti-Arab sentiment is far more serious still. And since every antisemitic
group is to a far greater extent anti-immigrant and anti-Arab, these groups can
be fought, not in the name of antisemitism, but in the defense of Arabs and
immigrants. So the antisemitic threat posed by these groups shouldn't even mak
e us want to focus on antisemitism: they are just as well fought in the name of
justice for Arabs and immigrants.
In short, the real scandal today is not
antisemitism but the importance it is given. Israel has committed war crimes. It
has implicated Jews generally in these crimes, and Jews generally have hastened
to implicate themselves. This has provoked hatred against Jews. Why not? Some
of this hatred is racist, some isn't, but who cares? Why should we pay any
attention to this issue at all? Is the fact that Israel's race war has provoked
bitter anger of any importance besides the war itself? Is the remote
possibility that somewhere, sometime, somehow, this hatred may in theory,
possibly kill some Jews of any importance besides the brutal, actual, physical
persecution of Palestinians, and the hundreds of thousands of votes for Arabs
to be herded into transit camps? Oh, but I forgot. Drop everything. Someone
spray-painted antisemitic slogans on a synagogue.
* Not even the ADL and B'nai B'rith include
attacks on Israel
in the tally; they speak of "The insidious way we have seen the conflict
between Israelis and Palestinians used by anti-Semites"
(http://www.adl.org/presrele/ASInt_13/4084_13.asp). And like many other people,
I don't count terrorist attacks by such as Al Qaeda as instances of
antisemitism but rather of some misdirected quasi-military campaign against the
US and Israel. Even if you count them in, it does not seem very dangerous to be
a Jew outside Israel.
