|
The Guardian, Comment is Free
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/matthew_yglesias/2007/02/matthew_yglesias.html
February 8, 2007 1:00 PM
As a Jewish person with a not-so-Jewish last name who occasionally
criticises the policies of the Israeli government (or, more frequently, the
policies of the United States vis-à-vis Israel), I've been known to spend
some time pondering how to work the fact that I'm Jewish into my writing.
After all, you don't want to be called an anti-Semite. The good news, then,
is that the American Jewish Committee says I don't need to bother any more.
The group, one of the oldest, largest and most respected Jewish
organisations in the America, recently published a pamphlet by Alvin
Rosenfeld on the subject of 'Progressive' Jewish Thought and the New
Anti-Semitism - a shot across the bow of those of us who thought being
Jewish might be a defence against charges of anti-Semitism.
But, according to the essay, the distinguishing characteristic of the "new
anti-Semitism" seems to be that, unlike the old anti-Semitism, it doesn't
necessarily involve a bigoted view of Jewish religion, Jewish people, Jewish
culture, or Jewish anything else.
It's not, in short, anti-Semitism. Which perhaps explains why so many Jews -
the essay names Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, historian Tony Judt,
poet Adrienne Rich, and playwright Tony Kushner, among others - are guilty
of it. How does the paper pull this off? By starting out with a transparent
fraud: identifying anti-Semitism - hatred of Jewish people - with
anti-Zionism, or the belief that Israel should not exist as a Jewish state.
The latter view, while not something I agree with, simply is not anti-Semitism.
One could imagine applying the latter label to someone who proposed the
physical destruction of the Israeli population. But the supposed sins of the
"new" anti-Semites don't even come close.
Judt's crime was simply to call for the creation of a single, binational,
secular state encompassing all the territory west of the Jordan River.
"Unrealistic" is a good label for this proposal. Anti-Semitic is an absurd
one. Cohen, for his part, went even less far, arguing simply that, in
retrospect, the establishment of Israel was "a mistake" - and not even a
mistake that should be undone.
Equating such sentiments with anti-Semitism is perverse. The concept of
Zionism was extremely controversial within the Jewish community when first
proposed; it remains at least a little controversial today (especially in
the retrospective form in which Cohen raised the issue); and it has nothing
to do with hatred of Jewish people.
This idea, so quickly lost in discussions of Israel, is so easily grasped in
other contexts. Those who oppose breaking up Belgium into separate Flemish
and Walloon entities are not Flemish-hating racists, nor are those who
advocate the break up of the Belgian people animated by racist loathing of
Walloons.
Quickly, though, Rosenfeld dances past this point to make an even less
legitimate one, when he writes:
The Israel that emerges in [the highly critical book] Radicals, Rabbis and
Peacemakers - a country characterised as "amoral", "barbaric", "brutal",
"destructive", "fascistic", "oppressive", "racist", "sordid", and "uncivilised"
- is indistinguishable from the despised country regularly denounced by the
most impassioned anti-Semites.
This point is simply a logical fallacy: agreeing with an anti-Semite does
not make one an anti-Semite (all ducks are birds, but not all birds are
ducks).
The writing that Rosenfeld condemns is simply strongly-worded rhetoric. In
context, some of it may well be accurate. (Would it really be anti-Semitic
to observe that, say, Israel's efforts to bomb Hizbullah offices in the
southern suburbs of Beirut last summer were destructive? Bombs, one assumes,
are intended to destroy.) And some of it may be unfair. Every country,
however, is regularly subjected to unfair or ill-informed criticism without
anyone leaping to the conclusion that the critic is a racist.
One doubts that any actual progressive Jews will find any of Rosenfeld's
argument persuasive. That, however, is hardly the point. Rather, the
existence of strident Jewish criticism of Israel poses a threat to the taboo
on non-Jews criticising Israel. After all, one might think, if Jews are
saying it, surely a non-Jew can say it, too - and without being accused of
anti-Semitism. Thus comes the AJC essay, a brief shot across the bow to warn
the goyim that nothing will spare them from being smeared.
|
