A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism (56 page)

The new Iranian government supported Hamas, which shared its views of Israel and “the Jews.” Those views included the notion that the Jews were an evil force in the world and that Israel was the “greatest enemy” of Islam. Such views were echoed in the 1988 Hamas charter, which declared, “The Zionist plan is limitless. After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates…. Their plan is embodied in the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying.”
³⁸

This extreme language had—and continues to have—consequences. As in earlier times, it has spurred a rise in violence against Jews; this violence has reawakened many to the fact that antisemitism is still a very convenient hatred.

In the 1990s, many Jews came to believe that widespread antisemitism no longer limited what they could achieve or how far they could go in life—that unlike Jews at earlier times in history, they had no need to deny or mask their identity in order to realize their dreams. And yet, by the turn of the twenty-first century, a growing number of Jews and non-Jews were uncomfortably aware that antisemitism was still a force in the world. In 2002, journalist Jonathan Rosen wrote:

When I was growing up, my father would go to bed with a transistor radio set to an all-news station. Even without a radio, my father was attuned to the menace of history. A Jew born in Vienna in 1924, he fled his homeland in 1938; his parents were killed in the Holocaust. I sometimes imagined my father was listening for some repetition of past evils so that he could rectify old responses, but he may just have been expecting more bad news. In any event, the grumbling static from the bedroom depressed me, and I vowed to replace it with music more cheerfully in tune with America. These days, however, I find myself on my father’s frequency. I have awakened to anti-Semitism.
¹

In many respects, the antisemitism to which Rosen awoke is similar to the antisemitism explored in earlier chapters of this book. As Nicholas Weill, a French journalist, noted, “Synagogues are still set on fire” and “Jews are still blamed for their supposed excessive money or power, and the cartoon and newspaper caricatures revive the oldest clichés of antisemitism: vampirism, ritual murder, and so on.”
²
And hate speech still sparks bloodshed. Words have power, and the link between the language of extremism and actual violence remains as strong as ever. So is the scapegoating that has turned antisemitism into a convenient hatred.

And yet antisemitism today is not exactly like the hatred that Rosen’s father experienced, or even like the antisemitism his ancestors knew. Like other hatreds, antisemitism is almost always a current event—one that is triggered by the fears and anxieties of the moment. And in an age when
anyone almost anywhere can stir anger with a lie broadcast widely and repeated endlessly on satellite TV or the Internet, today’s antisemitism is frequently an international affair.

In the 1990s, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Britain’s chief rabbi, was among those who believed that widespread antisemitism no longer threatened Jews. In 2005, he explained why he changed his mind:

It happened in a little place called Durban [South Africa] one week before September 11 [2001], [at] the United Nations Conference Against Racism. Mary Robinson [the UN high commissioner on human rights], who convened that conference, knew that it was going to be a catastrophe, and she asked me and [Prince El Hassan bin Talal of Jordan] several months before it began [to rewrite the draft of the conference declaration] in a way to do justice [to] Palestinian aspirations without doing injustice to Jews, Israel, and the Holocaust. And we did. We got together a think tank… in King’s College, London, and we got Muslims—the World Council of Churches—we got a lot of people. We did it in three days. We sent it in, and it was rejected at the preconference in Geneva.
³

That pre-conference meeting took place during the second intifada (see
Chapter 15
). Mary Robinson and other UN officials had turned to Rabbi Sacks and Prince Hassan of Jordan for help because they feared that the ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians would dominate the World Conference Against Racism (WCAR). The refusal of many delegates to even consider a compromise confirmed those fears. Nevertheless, nearly 4,000 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) sent representatives to Durban. Among them was the European Union of Jewish Students (EUJS). About a dozen members of the group attended the two forums that overlapped with the governmental conference—one for youth organizations and the other for NGOs.

Joëlle Fiss, then chair of the EUJS, kept a diary throughout her stay in Durban. To her surprise, she and her colleagues found themselves the focus of angry demonstrations by Palestinian activists and their supporters. The demonstrators insisted that they were not antisemitic; they were simply showing their outrage at Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians in the territories it occupied after the Six-Day War in 1967 (see
Chapter 15
).

Yet as Fiss and her colleagues repeatedly pointed out, they were not Israelis, nor did they have any influence on Israeli policies. But they found no one willing to listen.

As the harassment continued, Fiss looked forward to a session on antisemitism. According to the rules of the NGO forum, it would be an opportunity for Jews to tell their story without interruption. Despite the rules, the audience heckled every Jewish speaker. Then, suddenly, several dozen people standing just outside the tent in which the session took place mounted an assault. Fiss wrote:

They storm into the tent and scream at the top of their lungs: “You are all murderers! You have Palestinian blood on your hands!” They approach us as we gather at the center of the room around the table where the panelists are seated. Panic drives some to run away. “You don’t belong to the human race!” “Chosen people? You are cursed people! I won’t speak to you, as long as you do not remove this thing,” a man yells at David, who is wearing a
kippa
[a skullcap traditionally worn by religious Jewish men]
.

The assault continues. “Why haven’t the Jews taken responsibility for killing Jesus? They have sucked our blood, all these years. We don’t want you here. Jews don’t belong in Jordan. Jews don’t belong in Israel.” “I believe in a Jewish state… on Mars!” “[Ariel] Sharon [the Israeli prime minister], Golda Meir [a former Israeli prime minister]…. They are all the same. We cannot convince Sharon to be a human being.”

… The anger against us can no longer be contained. We have no refuge. The violence becomes physical.
⁴

Nearly every slander hurled at Jews over the centuries was expressed in that moment. And, as in the past, the mob’s anger was directed not just at Israel or at “Zionists” but at all Jews everywhere.

Although the forums were sponsored by the UN, officials did not intervene at that session or any other. Nor did they remove the antisemitic literature, banners, and posters on display throughout the WCAR. They were not the only ones who failed to take a stand. About 18,000 activists from 166 nations attended the conference. Although most did not participate in the catcalls, chants, or physical intimidation of Jewish participants, they too failed to intervene.

ICARE (Internet Centre Anti Racism Europe), a virtual network that provides information on issues related to human rights, issued daily reports throughout the conference. Its staff was struck by the fact that “antisemitism against and intimidation of anyone who was thought to be Jewish, friendly to Jews, or a member of a Jewish organisation ran wild. It was a hijack and we all let ourselves be hijacked, some even fully assisted the hijackers.”
⁵

The NGO forum was supposed to produce a declaration and a plan of action. Both would then be submitted to the governmental conference for approval. Claiming that Zionism was a form of racism, the two documents singled out only one nation in the world as “racist”—Israel. In doing so, they deliberately challenged the 1991 UN resolution that renounced the idea that Zionism was racist (see
Chapter 15
).

The vote to approve the two documents was by caucus. A caucus in this context was a group of NGOs that shared a theme (such as “human rights”), belonged to the same victim group, or lived in the same region (such as Africa or Eastern and Central Europe). Delegates could join and vote in more than one caucus, and many did.

In the end, just four caucuses—the Jewish, European, Roma, and Eastern and Central European ones—opposed the draft. After the vote, the Jewish and Eastern and Central European caucuses walked out of the NGO forum in protest. The Roma (a group sometimes referred to as “Gypsies”) stayed briefly to explain why its members opposed the “blatantly intolerant anti-Semitic spirit plaguing the entire process.”
⁶
As a result of that “anti-Semitic spirit,” the governments of the United States and Israel refused to participate in WCAR. Members of the European caucus stayed to negotiate a more tolerant declaration and plan of action at the governmental conference.

After the UN conference, ICARE summed up what its staff had learned:

The fact that racism was allowed to run rampant during the WCAR is astonishing. What is even more astonishing, shameful, and harmful for the antiracism cause and for the victims of racism is that the majority of the organisers and participants let that happen, did nothing to stop it and did not speak out during or after the WCAR. The fight against racism and discrimination is a fight against all forms of racism and discrimination. The moment antiracists tolerate or even promote one kind of racism and only fight the other kinds they are no longer antiracists.
⁷

In reflecting on what she had learned, Joëlle Fiss wrote in 2008, “The UN Conference teaches us that the impossible is still possible.”

Before Durban [she noted], the large majority of public opinion basked comfortably in the peaceful days of the ‘90s, when, despite the fragile situation in the Middle East, today’s younger generation of Diaspora Jews no longer suffered from any existential threat. Durban reminded [us that] hatred can resurface with no prior notice.
⁸

On September 11, 2001, just two days after the Durban conference ended, 19 men—15 from Saudi Arabia, one each from Egypt and Lebanon, and two from the Arab Emirates—hijacked four passenger planes in the United States. They flew two of the planes into the World Trade Center in New York City and one into the Pentagon in Washington, DC. The fourth plane crashed into a field in Pennsylvania, killing everyone on board. That day, approximately 3,000 men, women, and children of many religions and more than 60 nationalities were murdered.

The perpetrators belonged to a terrorist group known as al-Qaeda. Its members were Islamists who, like the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas (see
Chapter 15
), were motivated at least in part by hatred of the modern world, which they associated with the West in general and the United States in particular. The 2002 trial of a member of an al-Qaeda cell in Hamburg, Germany—the same cell to which Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the September 11 attacks, belonged—suggested that antisemitism played a part in those attacks. Shahid Nickels, a former member of that cell, testified that he, Atta, and other members regarded New York City as “the center of world Jewry.” They believed that from that center in New York, Jews controlled the U.S. government, the media, and the economy.
⁹

Conspiracy theories are rarely logical. It is not surprising, then, that even as al-Qaeda “took credit” for the September 11 attacks, the group did nothing to stop a rumor claiming that “the Jews” were really responsible. That rumor alleged that Israel—specifically Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency—was behind the plot and had warned Jews not to go to work at the World Trade Center on the day of the attacks.

On September 18, an editor for a website known as the Information Times posted a message claiming that the “terrorist government of Israel… cannot be ruled out” as a suspect.
¹⁰
The editor did not identify a motive or provide evidence in support of his allegation. In his words, he was simply
raising a “reasonable question.” Five days later, al-Manar, a TV station based in Lebanon, stated that Mossad had indeed warned 4,000 Jews who worked at the World Trade Center to stay home on September 11.

Al-Manar is owned by Hezbollah, a radical Shi’a group based in Lebanon that is inspired by the revolution that turned Iran into an Islamic state. A number of journalists questioned officials at both al-Manar and Hezbollah about the station’s claim that Jews were to blame for the attacks. In a December 2001 interview, Sayyid Hasan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s secretary general, told journalists that al-Manar “didn’t make that story up.” He went on to say that the station “just limited itself to reproducing what was being said, even if we’re not totally sure that the theory is true.”
¹¹

Al-Manar presented the rumor as a fact, however, not a theory. Within days, that rumor appeared in newspapers and electronic mailing lists around the world. People continued to believe the lie despite the fact that about 18 percent of the known dead were identified in obituaries as Jews.

When an editor in Pakistan was asked why people there blamed the attacks on Jews, he replied that it might have had something to do with the Internet: “When you see something on a computer, you tend to believe it is true.”
¹²
The same has been said about images seen on TV. Perhaps that is why Hezbollah and other Islamist groups have used both to spread their ideas.