How are antisemitism and anti-Zionism the same? .Harvey CameronHarvey Cameron Today the anti-Semitic meme has mutated and the characteristics that it has always attributed to Jews – the alleged conspirators behind all that is wrong in the world – have been applied to their collective incarnation, the State of Israel. Indeed, what other explanation can there be for the irrational and exceptional nature of the hatred for Israel other than that it derives from hatred of the Jewish people? Golda Meir expressed this quite well when she said “Israel is the Jew among nations.” When approached by a student who attacked Zionism, Dr. Martin Luther King responded: “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. Youre talking anti-Semitism.” German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer stated that: Anti-Zionism inevitably leads to antisemitism. Anti-Zionism is the position that the Jewish people should be dispossessed, against their will, of a fundamental right that they currently enjoy: namely, the right of self-determination. Whatever one believes about whether the Jewish people had a moral right to self-determine in 1948, this right is now a fact of international law, which states that “all peoples have the right freely to self-determine”, recognises that the Jewish people constitute a people and, although the law does not require self-determination to be manifested through political independence, accepts that the creation of the State of Israel was the valid manifestation of this right. Anti-Zionism has become the most dangerous and effective form of anti-Semitism in our time, through its systematic delegitimization, defamation, and demonization of Israel. The calls to dismantle the Jewish state, whether they come from Muslims, the Left, or the radical Right, increasingly rely on an anti-Semitic stereotypization of classic themes, such as the manipulative Jewish lobby, the Jewish/Zionist world conspiracy, and Jewish/Israeli warmongers. The argument that it is Israels behaviour, and Jewish support for it, that invite prejudice sounds hollow at best and sinister at worst. That argument means that sympathy for Jews is conditional on the political views they espouse. This is hardly an expression of tolerance. It singles Jews out. It is anti-semitism. Anti-Zionists may claim that the international community was wrong to grant Jews a legal right that had no moral basis, but anti-Zionism today is the demand that Jewish people should be deprived of their internationally recognised legal right to self-determine, and that Jews worldwide should be divested of a right that they already lawfully possess as Jews. Dina Porat (head of the Institute for Study of Antisemitism and Racism at Tel-Aviv University) contends that anti-Zionism is anti-semitic because it is discriminatory: ...antisemitism is involved when the belief is articulated that of all the peoples on the globe (including the Palestinians), only the Jews should not have the right to self-determination in a land of their own. Or, to quote noted human rights lawyer David Matas: One form of antisemitism denies access of Jews to goods and services because they are Jewish. Another form of antisemitism denies the right of the Jewish people to exist as a people because they are Jewish. Antizionists distinguish between the two, claiming the first is antisemitism, but the second is not. To the antizionist, the Jew can exist as an individual as long as Jews do not exist as a people Anti-Zionists may argue that Zionism has deprived the Palestinians of their political rights, and self-determination exercised in a repressive form has neither legal nor moral basis: Israel is a racist regime, and has no more right to exist than did the white supremacist Apartheid regime in South Africa. The fine distinction, however, is between those who seek justice by accommodating Jewish and Palestinian claims for self-determination through a pragmatic partition of the land, helpfully suggesting adjustments to bring the practice of Jewish self-determination closer to liberal ideals, and between those who believe that justice can only be attained if the rights of one community are allowed to override those of another: fiat justitia, ruat caelum, as the old saying goes. The selective deprival of fundamental rights is the essence of discrimination. There is simply no conceivable sense in which attempts to retroactively strip Jews, and only Jews, of fundamental rights can be anything other than anti-Semitic. Anti-Zionism is a stance that necessarily fails to treat Jews as political equals. It is the insistence that Jews should return to being permanent minorities, restored to an irreversibly weaker and more vulnerable position vis-à-vis other groups. It is the demand that Jews, and only Jews, should be forcibly subordinated against their will to other majorities, having already been given their freedom. Anti-Zionism may be accompanied by a caveat that Jews should have full and equal civil rights wherever they live, but this operates against the implicit understanding that the majority will determine the cultural fabric of the state: the flag, the anthem and its dominant values. In denying Israel’s legitimacy, anti-Zionists tell Jews that they wish to treat them as equals, but only on their terms. Jews have rights only as individuals, but not as a collective. For those anti-Zionists who are members of national majorities in their respective states, the claim is that while they may enjoy individual and collective rights, Jews may only entertain the former. There is no way that this assertion of political supremacy over Jews can fail to constitute anti-Semitism. Anti-Zionism is complacent with exposing Jews to dangers for which the anti-Zionists have no answer. Zionism was first conceived as an answer to the Jewish Question: the controversy around the political status of Jews as an anomalous, transnational, religious-cum-national minority. Zionism is, at its core, the belief that self-determination in Israel is the answer to this Jewish Question and to millennia of persecution. Anti-Zionism not only rejects as irrelevant Jews’ desires for the determination of their own fate, but crucially fails to articulate a better alternative. Where do you want the Jews to go, then? Anti-Zionists are simply not bothered with formulating an answer to the Jewish Question that takes into account the agency, aspirations or basic security of Jews who either live in Israel or depend on it as a safe haven. They implicitly recognise that if Israel were to disappear, Jews would face a problem as Jews, but this is none of their concern. Anti-Zionists may promise that Jews will be safe as minorities in other countries, but Israel exists precisely because Jews learnt that they could never trust these promises. The anti-Zionists’ insensitivity to Jewish existential fears is, ironically, part of the problem that Zionism is meant to address! Anti-Zionism logically requires that anti-Semitism – an acute problem for vulnerable Jewish minorities – will have to be solved in a context in which Jews are once more vulnerable minorities. If Israel were forced to swallow a one-state solution, it would have an Arab majority either immediately or very shortly after. Those who chant, with venom in their eyes, that from the river to the sea, Palestine must be free, either simply presume that Jews would be safe as Jews in such a state, or they just do not care. If Israel were to cease to exist, the question of how to protect Jews from anti-Semitism the day after is not the anti-Zionists’ problem. The outburst of late White House correspondent Helen Thomas that Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine” and “go home” to Germany or Poland, is just one such example. In a post-Israel world, anti-Semitism would continue. Anti-Zionists refuse to elaborate a vision of how this should be combatted, while rejecting point blank the Jewish people’s preferred solution to anti-Semitism: self-determination in Israel. Anti-Zionists are content to throw Jews under a bus, and only then turn their attention to how to stop the bus running them over. This callous insensitivity to Jews’ concerns for their own basic security as Jews, given the dangers they would face in a post-Israel world as Jews, and the willingness to put Jews in this precarious position, is unambiguously anti-Semitic. Anti-Zionism often draws on classical anti-Semitic tropes, but this is mere embellishment for an inherently anti-Semitic agenda. The problem is with the political position more than simply its presentation. Critics will no doubt say that the equation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism is a sinister attempt to silence legitimate political discourse. It should be self-evident, however, that there is no room in civilised debate for singling out Jews for the deprivation of fundamental, internationally recognised rights. It may be objected that there are many nations without corresponding nation-states, so to deny the Jewish nation a right to its own state is not to single it out: the Kurds, Basques and Tibetans lack their own states too. If the denial of Kurdish statehood is not expressive of anti-Kurdish prejudice, the argument might go, then the denial of the Jewish statehood cannot be anti-Semitic. This objection, however, overlooks the uniquely retroactive nature of anti-Zionism, which is a demand to revoke certain rights, rather than a refusal to grant them. As indicated in the above distinction between Philosophical and Programmatic varieties of anti-Zionism, the question is not whether it is racist to deny a certain people the right to self-determine as a nation-state. The answer to that is probably ‘no’: international law, at least, does not recognise a right for minorities to secede “because it is their wish… [as this] would be to destroy order and stability within States and inaugurate anarchy in international life”. Anti-Zionism, however, is not rooted in this reluctance to destabilise the international order, for it represents an explicit challenge to the norm of sovereignty and the present order. Whether the Jewish right to self-determination should have been recognised in 1947 is a different matter from whether this right, once recognised, should be revoked. The fact that the international community refuses to entertain certain further claims to statehood is no defence for those who want to retroactively revoke a right to statehood once exercised. Far from Zionism being a form of racism, anti-Zionism is racist to boot. Advocates of the Palestinian cause too often couple a defence of Palestinian rights with a denial of Jewish rights, as if the two are in zero-sum competition: justice for Palestinians must come at the expense of justice for Jews, but since the Jews never had any legitimate rights to self-determine in the first place, nobody’s rights would be violated by the elimination of Israel anyway. Israel’s detractors are not interested in reconciling Jewish and Palestinian right where they appear to clash, instead treating the latter as a trump card. Zionism is reconcilable with Palestinian statehood: but anti-Zionism is not reconcilable with Jewish statehood. The tragedy of the situation is that Zionism gets routinely denounced as racist by the very states whose racism against Jews generated this demand for Jewish self-determination in the first place. The irony is that in denouncing this ideal as necessarily racist, rather than merely attacking what has been done in its name, these detractors are engaging in racist discourse themselves. So are Jews who oppose the existence of a homeland for themselves also anti-Semites? Well, yes or certainly if you think you shouldnt be allowed a home of your own you might want to consider therapy. There is certainly no logical contradiction in the idea of a Jewish anti-Semite: the self-hating Jew is well-rehearsed trope. Being Jewish has never precluded someone from being anti-Semitic. In fact, many of the most brutal polemical assaults against Jews and Judaism have been accomplished at the hands of their former co-religionists. The first time the Talmud was burned, in the 13th century, it was at the behest of a Jewish apostate to Christianity named Nicholas Donin, who denounced the Talmud as heretical. To choose a more modern example, the Bolshevik government in 1920s Russia organized its persecution of Orthodox Judaism mainly through the services of the Jewish Bund; an anti-religious socialist movement which had, ironically, played no small part in the February Revolution which toppled the Czar. And, of course, there is Noam Chomsky. The proposition that anti-Zionism is inherently anti-Semitic does not mean that anti-Zionists necessarily hold classically anti-Semitic beliefs: anti-Zionism is a variant of anti-Semitism, even if it sometimes also manifests itself as a cover for a more traditional variety of anti-Semitism. Many anti-Zionists are probably sincere, therefore, when they deny accusations of anti-Semitism. That is irrelevant, however, because their agenda can be anti-Semitic in deed if not in intent. The bearer of prejudiced views may still be prejudiced even while ignorant of the nature of his offence: one need not be a wife-beater to be a misogynist, if one also believes that a woman’s place is in the home. Once one accepts that anti-Zionism is inherently anti-Semitic, the world presents itself as a much darker and more sinister place. It means that people to whom we were previously willing to give the benefit of the doubt should now be taken to task. It requires the sober realisation that colleagues whose anti-Israel prejudice we could previously isolate as a merely political difference, are part of a malicious historical trend of treating Jews as politically inferior, whether they know it or not. There is no reason to tolerate the illusion that challenges to Israel’s existence are only anti-Israel rather than clearly anti-Semitic. It’s time to call a racist spade a racist spade, and to refuse to be beaten with it. Some people even exhibit extreme anti-Zionism (Israel hatred): the belief that the Jewish state is not only illegitimate, but also the embodiment of evil. There are three characteristics that go along with Israel-hatred: First, Israel is special. It is not like any other country. Second, the Israel-hater knows in advance (i.e., prejudges = is prejudiced) that Israel is wrong or evil, without needing to check the evidence. And third, the reaction is always highly emotional, far out of proportion to reality. Well, how is Israel ‘special’? There are many other countries accused of colonialism and worse. The US, Australia, and others can be reasonably accused of having exterminated indigenous inhabitants. Other nations have historical backgrounds that can be considered less ‘legitimate’ — most of today’s Middle Eastern nations were created by imperialist fiat. There are many examples of disputed territories in the world, and many peoples that claim to be oppressed. None of these characteristics is sufficient to trigger the hatred response. But Israel is the only Jewish state. People who take this position display certain related attitudes: for one, they see Israel’s alleged crimes as far more horrible than even worse evils committed by other nations. In all of 2013, for example, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict claimed 42 lives—that is, roughly the monthly homicide rate in the city of Chicago. Jerusalem, internationally renowned as a city of conflict, had slightly fewer violent deaths per capita last year than Portland, Ore., one of America’s safer cities. In contrast, in three years the Syrian conflict has claimed an estimated 190,000 lives, or about 70,000 more than the number of people who have ever died in the Arab-Israeli conflict since it began a century ago. Anti-Zionists who say they are only concerned with Israels crimes against humanity have nonetheless decided that Israels alleged crimes are more important than, for example, the more than 1,600 women murdered in Pakistan last year (271 after being raped and 193 of them burned alive), the ongoing erasure of Tibet by the Chinese Communist Party, the carnage in Congo (more than 5 million dead as of 2012) or the Central African Republic, and the drug wars in Mexico (death toll between 2006 and 2012: 60,000). These are rarely discussed, but any civilian deaths caused by Israel defending herself provoke a UN resolution. West bank checkpoints and the security fence are called ‘genocide’ by Israel-haters who don’t mention actual genocides in Africa. Even the United States, hated as it is in some quarters for alleged imperialist crimes, is often attacked just because of its support for Israel. The prejudice is so clear to anyone who opens their eyes to it. When 850,000 Jews were kicked out of Egypt in 1956, and all their property, businesses and lands confiscated, did any demonstrations to repatriate them take place? Did the UN pass any resolution condemning them? Or did the Jewish people once again accept their loss and move on? Very recently, Egypt razed 700 Palestinian houses to the ground and closed the borders to restrain Hamas. Where are the anti-Egyptian demonstrations? Can you point me in the direction of the comedians and movie stars who are irate because of that? Israel errs like all other nations: it is normal. What anti-Zionists find so obscene is that Israel is neither martyr nor saint. Their outrage refuses legitimacy to a peoples national liberation movement. Israels stubborn refusal to comply with the invitation to commit national suicide and thereby regain a supposedly lost moral ground draws condemnation. Jews now have the right to self-determination, and that is what the anti-semite dislikes so much. If anti-Zionism wants to be an intellectually respectable position, it needs to directly address the charges against it by answering these questions: 1. Which other nations have lost their right to self-determine through their conduct, or are the Jews singularly evil? Alternatively, which other countries that should not have been created should also have their independence reversed? 2. With the horrors of persecution fresh in living memory, is it reasonable to expect Jews to exchange the sovereign equality they presently enjoy for permanent subordination to the very states that once persecuted them? 3. How will anti-Zionists fully guarantee Jews’ personal safety from anti-Semitic persecution after they revoke the right of Jews to be the ultimate guarantors of their own security?
Posted on: Fri, 28 Nov 2014 00:51:08 +0000
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