Goodbye to All That? (Page 3)

What, then, is to be done? Those of us who take seriously the problem of anti-Semitism--but who utterly reject the suggestion that we ourselves are in danger of sympathizing with anti-Semitism under the guise of anti-Zionism--must begin by constructing and defending a firewall between the two. Israel does not speak for Jews; but Israel's claim to speak for Jews everywhere is the chief reason that anti-Israel sentiments are transposed into Judeophobia. Jews and others must learn to shed inhibitions and criticize Israel's policies and actions just as they would those of any other established state.

It may be easier for Jews to take their distance from Israel's illegal acts and misguided calculations than it is for non-Jews--the latter are always vulnerable to moral blackmail by Zionists, especially in countries with anti-Semitic pasts. But we shall never be able to think straight about anti-Semitism until this firewall is in place. Once Germans, French and others can comfortably condemn Israel without an uneasy conscience, and can look their Muslim fellow citizens in the face, it will be possible to deal with the real problem. For indeed there is a problem. This is an arena in which legitimate responses shade all too readily into familiar prejudices.

Thus, to take one notorious example: Critics of the foreign policy of the Bush Administration who claim that it is directed in many cases by men with close ties to Israel are not mistaken. Contemporary US foreign policy is in certain respects mortgaged to Israel. Several very senior Bush appointees spent the 1990s advising politicians of the Israeli far right. But that does not mean that "Jewish interests" run the American government, as some European and many Arab commentators have inferred and suggested. To say that Israel and its lobbyists have an excessive and disastrous influence on the policies of the world's superpower is a statement of fact. But to say that "the Jews" control America for their own ends is to espouse anti-Semitism.

Moreover, the slippage between criticism of America and dislike for Jews long antedates the founding of the state of Israel. "Anti-Americanism" and anti-Semitism have been closely interwoven at least since the 1920s, when European intellectuals looked with nervous distaste across the Atlantic and saw a rootless, predatory, commercial society, the incarnation of cosmopolitan modernity, threatening the continuity and distinctiveness of their own national cultures. Many critics of America, in Germany or France or Russia, were all too quick to identify the shifting, unfamiliar contours of an Americanizing world with the essential traits of a homeless Jewry. The link with Israel is new, but the image of "Jewish" America is an old story and a troubling one.

Or, to take an even more sensitive instance: The Shoah is frequently exploited in America and Israel to deflect and forbid any criticism of Israel. Indeed, the Holocaust of Europe's Jews is nowadays exploited thrice over: It gives American Jews in particular a unique, retrospective "victim identity"; it allows Israel to trump any other nation's sufferings (and justify its own excesses) with the claim that the Jewish catastrophe was unique and incomparable; and (in contradiction to the first two) it is adduced as an all-purpose metaphor for evil--anywhere, everywhere and always--and taught to schoolchildren all over America and Europe without any reference to context or cause.

This modern instrumentalization of the Holocaust for political advantage is ethically disreputable and politically imprudent. To deplore this abuse of other people's sufferings seems to me an important civic duty. But to conclude that "the Jews" have made too much of what happened in Europe between 1933 and 1945, or that it is now time to move on--that edges us much closer to anti-Semitism.

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