Goodbye to All That? (Page 2)

Europeans are also better placed to appreciate that old-style European anti-Semites were, and are, frequently quite sympathetic to Israel--and the worse Israel behaves, the fonder they become. Thus the French National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, in an interview in the Israeli daily Ha'aretz in April 2002, expressed his "understanding" of Ariel Sharon's harsh policies ("A war on terror is a brutal thing"), comparable in his opinion to France's antiterrorist practices in Algeria forty years earlier, which he thought were no less justified.

The source of American anxiety and confusion is the unstinting support given by the United States to Israel ($3 billion per annum and uncritical backing for all its actions), and the ensuing sentiment among many Americans that since criticism of Israel is close to impermissible, anti-Zionist opinions must be anti-Semitic in origin. Indeed, the gap separating Europeans from Americans on the question of Israel and the Palestinians is one of the biggest impediments to transatlantic understanding today.

This gulf is well illustrated in a recent essay by Omer Bartov, a distinguished professor of European history at Brown University. In a lengthy discussion of contemporary anti-Semitism published last February in The New Republic, Bartov argued that just as the world failed to take Hitler at his word in the 1930s, so we are underestimating or even ignoring the revival, today, of similarly virulent anti-Semitism, whose consequences might prove comparably devastating. The message of the essay was that if anti-Zionism is a camouflage for anti-Semitism (and Bartov thinks it often is), then we should call it by its real name and combat it as such. In Europe especially it has become politically correct, Bartov suggests, to ignore--or play down--expressions of anti-Semitic opinion, particularly in the academic community. The time has come, he concludes, to call a spade a spade.

Bartov himself does not make the mistake of tarring any and all criticism of Israel with the brush of anti-Semitism. But by relentlessly drawing comparisons and analogies between contemporary anti-Zionism and the anti-Jewish rhetoric of the 1930s, he ends up conflating past and present. If we were wrong seventy years ago not to take Hitler's exterminationist intentions seriously, he suggests, we are just as wrong to make any allowance for Hamas, former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad (who said at a 2003 conference that "Jews rule this world by proxy"), renegade German politicians and novelists, misguided American academics, the former French ambassador to Britain (who several years ago referred to Israel as "that shitty little country") and no doubt countless others.

In Bartov's account, people might well have good reasons to criticize the policies of the Israeli government (Bartov himself is no admirer of Ariel Sharon). But those are not the reasons many of them express such criticisms. It is the hatred of Jews--Jews in Israel, Jews in Europe, Jews everywhere and always--that accounts for the virulence of the critique. The trouble with this account of the matter is, as I suggested above, that it does indeed make the relevant link between the Middle East and modern anti-Semitism, but inverts the causality.

It is the policies of Israeli governments, especially in the past two decades, that have provoked widespread anti-Jewish feelings in Europe and elsewhere. This may seem absurd, but there is a certain tragic logic to it. Zionists have always insisted that there is no distinction between the Jewish people and the Jewish state. The latter offers a right of citizenship to Jews anywhere in the world. Israel is not the state of all its citizens, much less all its residents; it is the state of (all) Jews. Its leaders purport to speak for Jews everywhere. They can hardly be surprised when their own behavior provokes a backlash against...Jews.

Thus Israel itself has made a significant contribution to the resurgence of the anti-Semitism Bartov and others describe. This is an outcome with which many Israeli politicians are far from unhappy: It retroactively justifies their own bad behavior and contributes, as they proudly assert, to a rise in the number of European Jews leaving for Israel. At a time when many Israelis are obsessed with the prospect of becoming a minority in their own enlarged territory, the inflow of Jews fleeing real or imagined persecution is an occasion for self-congratulation.

Bartov concedes a distinction between "soft-core" and "hard-core" anti-Semitism. However, he still insists that there is a single slippery slope leading from misguided academics and intellectuals to pathological murderers. Historically this may be true. But today the implications of such a conflation of different levels of criticism and prejudice are dangerously censorious. No doubt some of Israel's strongest critics do display anti-Semitic propensities. But that doesn't disqualify anti-Zionism as ipso facto anti-Semitic: As Arthur Koestler observed back in 1948, you can't help people being right for the wrong reasons. If those of us who think Israel is behaving shamefully follow Bartov's reasoning, we'll be constrained to silence for fear of being accused of complicity in anti-Semitism ourselves.

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