Those Who Forget the Past (16 page)

BEREL LANG

Self-Description and the Anti-Semite: Denying Privileged Access

IN A RECENT REVIEW of a comprehensive history of Europe, the reviewer pointed out certain blatant distortions in the book's account of European Jewish history—but concluded that since the book's author had denied being anti-Semitic,
this
explanation of the distortions could be ruled out: “On that matter,” the reviewer wrote, “we have to take the author at his word.”
²⁴
In a letter to the editor (published, no doubt, because of its brevity), I asked a simple question about this conclusion: “Why?” The question seemed to me obvious, not only as it applied to that book's author, but to any writer or speaker who asserts that he or she is not anti-Semitic or an anti-Semite. It is not that self-descriptions of this sort should not count as evidence
at all,
but that they are at most only partial evidence (in both senses: fragmentary and self-interested) to be considered in judging the presence or absence of anti-Semitism.

On the surface, this thesis will seem no more than a commonplace. After all, a large number of public figures who by any reasonable measure were clearly anti-Semitic have, for a variety of reasons, explicitly rejected that description. (I think here, at an extreme, of Eichmann's memorable line, that he had “nothing personal” against the Jews.) Such denials, when confronted by independent and contradictory evidence, are no more persuasive or interesting than other mistaken or deceptive self-descriptions, which are, after all, a familiar part of our moral and psychological landscape. But a conceptual issue is at stake here that goes more deeply into the ascription of antiSemitism than the fact that certain anti-Semites (like many other people) may lie or deceive themselves about their private feelings.

The issue I refer to here is part of a broader one in the theory of knowledge; it concerns assertions which claim “privileged access”—that is, the group of statements made by speakers who are supposedly in a position of special (in the event, final) authority so far as concerns their truth or falsity. In the statement, “I feel warm,” for example, the speaker might of course be lying because of a wish to deceive the person(s) being addressed. But putting this possibility aside (it applies, after all, to
any
statement), we would not ordinarily consider responding to that statement by disagreeing: “No, you're mistaken; you
don't
feel that way.” And we would not venture this response even if everyone else in the room had just been commenting on how cold the room was. (Someone might suggest that the person who “felt warm” was ill [or ironic], but these are different matters.)

The presumption at work here is that where feelings are concerned, it is the bearer of the feelings who knows best—not only best but definitively; they're his or her feelings, after all, nobody else's. Even if someone lies about those feelings to others, it is still the person who feels them who knows better than anyone else what those feelings truly are. But does this same authority of “privileged access” extend to a person's judgment of being anti-Semitic? It is just this claim that the book-reviewer referred to above implied, and it is also just this claim that analysis of the concept of privileged access in matters of self-description demonstrates to be unwarranted.

To be sure, the question cannot be avoided here of exactly what actions or words, and how many of them, are required to meet the “standard” of anti-Semitism; there is an evident problem as well in applying that single term to individuals as distant from each other in the expressions of their anti-Semitism as (for example) Hitler and T. S. Eliot. It is also clear that as for any theoretical criteria applied to practical circumstance, there will be boundary-line cases about which doubts remain; there is no simple litmus test to produce immediate and certain findings. One point that does emerge clearly, however, against the background of the concept of privileged access is that the “title” of anti-Semite cannot be ascribed either exclusively or decisively as a function of feelings, not even as the measure of a
disposition
to act or to speak in a certain way. The reasons for this view should now be apparent: For one thing, as already noted, if anti-Semitism were judged on that basis, then the “feeler” of anti-Semitic feelings would indeed have the last word on his own status. And more than this, not feelings alone, and not even words, are in fact decisive for such judgment; they can be assessed only in conjunction with the actions that accompany them, and these, too, can be judged only in a context of the whole.

The positive side of this argument adds still greater weight to the negative side, as pertinent not only to issues of antiSemitism but to the status of self-descriptive statements in general. It is commonly recognized, for example, that other people are at times more accurate interpreters of our actions than we are ourselves: we often intend (or believe we intend) to say or to do one particular thing—and discover when someone else points it out to us that we have done or said something quite different. Even at the level of intention, the person whose intentions they are is not necessarily the only or the best judge. We are all familiar with apologies or excuses that end with the phrase “but my intentions were good.” And here, too, the audience, especially if they have heard the same refrain from the same person many times before, might well be skeptical. It is not only that people sometimes deliberately misrepresent their intentions, but that at times they are not the best or even good judges of what those intentions are.

If anti-Semitism then is not simply a set of feelings or a state of mind (to which privileged access
would
hold the key); and if, furthermore, people can sometimes be mistaken about what exactly the intentions behind their actions are—then it should not be surprising to find that someone could deny being anti-Semitic, and yet be judged from the outside, by others, to be just that. Required for this reversal of judgment is no more than what is required for any judgment of someone's state or condition: the gathering of evidence. This would of course
include
self-descriptions by the person being judged, but also much more: accounts of conduct and actions (including other words) in which the person has engaged.

It is only by such broader criteria, for example, that the cliché that recurs in self-descriptive denials of anti-Semitism— “But some of my best friends are Jews”—can be understood as not at all inconsistent with being anti-Semitic. There is nothing in the concept of anti-Semitism to prevent the anti-Semite from making exceptions for
some
Jews; when that happens, it is just
because
they were exceptions—which invariably means that they are not like the “others,” that is, like the much greater majority of Jews—that the anti-Semite accepts them. But for us to be able in this way to override the denial of being anti-Semitic requires the possibility of appealing to other external evidence, not to the person's words alone, and certainly not to the person's feelings about Jews. For this, again, is the point: anti-Semitism is not only or decisively a state of mind or a psychological disposition. For one thing, no one has clear access to these (not even the person whose they are); and for another thing, by themselves, so long as they do not manifest themselves in words or actions, they hardly count as anti-Semitic or anti-anything. Where anti-Semitism matters is in the acts or conduct for which the concept (and term) stand. And although the person responsible for those actions may well also provide an interpretation of them, that remains but one account among several possible ones.

This skeptical analysis of statements in the form, “I am not an anti-Semite,” has the odd consequence that someone might say that he or she
was
an anti-Semite—but turn out to be mistaken about
that
. We might prove, in other words, that also this self-description was, on balance, without a basis in fact—for here, too, there is no privileged access: If we have rejected privileged access in this area as such, that rejection would apply no matter what a particular self-description asserted. Such instances as these are rare, of course; when they do occur, they appear more as a parody or ironic joke than anything else. But the possibility cannot be ruled out (I've known at least one person like this, a good friend, in fact), and it is in any event a small price to pay for understanding the basis on which we feel entitled to reject the much more common claim of privileged access as it is used to support denials of being anti-Semitic. If anti-Semites were as transparent in their denials as was the English author/diplomat Harold Nicolson when he wrote that “Although I loathe anti-Semitism, I do dislike Jews,” we would have no need for this, or indeed for any, clarification. And certainly for many instances of anti-Semitism, self-descriptions and acts appear in close harmony; nobody is in doubt about the fact itself. But there are also instances of denial which base themselves on the claim of privileged access—and there is no need, I have argued, to accept those denials, certainly not at face value.

GABRIEL SCHOENFELD

Israel and the Anti-Semites

HAS A NEW and potent form of anti-Semitism come to life in the world? If so, what does it portend?

Let us for the moment bracket off the Muslim world. The evidence of anti-Jewish hatred in that immense pocket of humanity has been copiously documented and is simply too overwhelming to warrant extended discussion. The more interesting question concerns Europe—a continent, it was widely assumed, effectively inoculated against a toxin that a mere half-century ago had reduced it to ruin and that, in the decades since World War II, had been confined to obscure recesses of political life.

Events over the past months suggest otherwise. It was only this past February that Hillel Halkin, writing in
Commentary
about an “accumulating record of actual anti-Semitic incidents” around the world, cautioned that evidence of a substantial resurgence in Europe was so far only “circumstantial.” Since then, the continental landscape has begun to shift with astonishing speed.

The immediate occasion for the shift was, of course, Israel's incursion into the West Bank in late March and April. That military operation was precipitated by the daily terror within Israel itself that had been going on for many months and that culminated in the bombing of a hotel ballroom in Netanya in which 29 Israelis perished and more than 140 were injured while sitting at their seder tables on the first night of Passover. To put an end to this relentless campaign of terror, Israel's national-unity government dispatched the army into Palestinian cities and camps to uncover and destroy bomb factories and to apprehend those responsible for the mass killings of Israeli civilians. “In the month of March, we lost the lives of more than 126 persons,” explained Israel's dovish foreign minister, Shimon Peres; “we did not have any other alternative.”

Though the incursion did not achieve all of its objectives, one visible result, at least as long as Israel's forces remained in place, was the near-total cessation of terrorist attacks inside the country. Another was the seizure of a trove of intelligence information, including documents confirming (to anyone who still doubted it) that Yasir Arafat, Israel's ostensible partner in the Oslo peace process and a man richly subsidized by the European Union, was in possession of arms forbidden to him by the Oslo accords and was personally funding and directing the civilian bombing missions of at least one armed unit, the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.

That sectors of Europe would be critical of any Israeli military action against Arafat's Palestinian Authority, even one so self-evidently defensive in character, was hardly a surprise; the cause of Palestinian statehood is, after all, a cherished item on the European diplomatic and political agenda. But the scale and the venom of the reaction, on both the elite and the popular level, were something else again. At least we can now see things as they are.

Let us begin at the popular level, where there has been, first of all, a rash of physical attacks on Jewish symbols, Jewish institutions, and Jews themselves. The list of such violent incidents from the first two weeks of April alone is too long to summarize adequately.

In the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, for example, some fifty youths chanting “Kill the Jews” descended on a synagogue on a Saturday evening, broke twenty windows, and beat the rector of the religious school with stones. In Greece, Jewish cemeteries were vandalized in what the press termed “anti-Jewish acts of revenge,” and the Holocaust memorial in Salonika, a city whose 50,000 Jews were rounded up and deported to Nazi death camps in 1943, was defaced with Palestinian slogans. In Slovakia, Jewish cemeteries were desecrated in what an official described as the “biggest attack on the Jewish community since the Holocaust.”

In peaceful, democratic, law-abiding Western Europe—a part of the world that for the past half-century has prided itself on the degree of personal safety it affords its inhabitants—the story was similar. One scene of violent anti-Israel demonstrations was Holland, where protestors hurled rocks and bottles and small roving bands used stones and bicycles to shatter store windows in the heart of Amsterdam. In neighboring Belgium, five firebombs were tossed into a synagogue in a working-class district of Brussels, and a Jewish bookstore was severely damaged by arsonists; a synagogue in Antwerp was firebombed with Molotov cocktails, and in the same city a travel agency specializing in trips to Israel was also set alight.

In Germany, two Orthodox Jews were beaten while strolling on Berlin's chic Kurfuerstendamm, the heart of the city's shopping district. A woman wearing a star-of-David necklace was attacked in the subway. Jewish memorials in Berlin were defaced with swastikas; a synagogue was spray-painted with the words “Six Million Is Not Enough. PLO.” Anti-Israel demonstrators hurled bricks through windows as they marched.

In England, reported the
London Express,
“race-hate attacks on the Jewish community have soared.” In the first ten days of April there were fifteen anti-Semitic incidents, including eight physical assaults. Most of the attacks in England were on Jews walking alone, set upon and beaten by small roving bands. At least two of the victims required hospitalization.

France was the epicenter of aggression. Gangs of hooded men descended on Jewish victims and struck them with iron clubs. Buses carrying Jewish schoolchildren were stoned. Cemeteries were desecrated. Synagogues, Jewish schools, student facilities, and kosher stores were defaced, battered, and firebombed. On April 1, the Or Aviv synagogue in Marseille was burned to the ground, its prayerbooks and Torah scrolls consumed by flames; it was one of five synagogues in France attacked. The first half of the month saw “nearly 360 crimes against Jews and Jewish institutions,” according to the French interior ministry—amounting, in the words of
The New York
Times,
to “the worst spate of anti-Jewish violence” in France since World War II.

Some observers have drawn comparisons between this violent crime wave and Kristallnacht—the pogrom unleashed by the Nazis against German Jews on November 9 and 10, 1938. Unlike in the 1930s, however, there was no organized power behind the assaults, let alone a government, and in every European country the police, so far as one knows, did their duty (though the political authorities often stood aside until matters threatened to get out of control). Still, physical violence against Jews has undeniably become a pan-European phenomenon, visible in every country north and south, east and west. Everywhere one turns, moreover, this physical violence has been accompanied, and abetted, by an explosion of verbal violence.

The themes are also the same everywhere. Israel, a country victimized by terrorism, stands accused of perpetrating terrorism; the Jews, having suffered the most determined and thoroughgoing genocide in history, stand accused of perpetrating genocide. The language in which these accusations are leveled is extravagantly hateful, drawn from the vocabulary of World War II and the Holocaust but entirely and grotesquely inverted, with the Jews as Nazis and their Arab tormentors in the role of helpless Jews.

Still sticking to the popular level, events in early April were once again particularly instructive. In the course of two weeks, anti-Israel street demonstrations took place not only in every major European capital but in hundreds of minor cities and towns. In Tuzla, a town in Bosnia, some 1,500 demonstrators carried placards reading “Sharon and Hitler, Two Eyes in the Same Head” and “Israel—the Real Face of Terrorism.” In Dublin, Ireland, the banners, several featuring Nazi swastikas superimposed over stars of David, read “Stop the Palestinian Holocaust” and “Jerusalem: Forever Beloved, Forever Palestinian.” In Barcelona, Spain, demonstrators carried placards inscribed “Israel Murderer; USA Accomplice,” and “No to Genocide.” In Paris, the posters read “Hitler Has a Son: Sharon”; in Belgium, “Hitler Had Two Sons: Bush and Sharon.” In Salonika, a solidarity concert was staged under the slogan “Stop the Genocide Now—We Are All Palestinians.” In Bilbao, Spain, thousands marched through the streets chanting “No to Zionist terrorism.” In Berlin, the placards read “Stop the Genocide in Palestine” and “Sharon is a Child Murderer.” In cities and towns across France, “Death to Jews” and “Jews— murderers” were refrains heard at a multitude of rallies.

The catalog is infinitely expandable, for not only is it incomplete in itself but the passage of each day has brought new acts of violence, new demonstrations, and new and more vicious slogans. Who is behind all this street-level activity?

Actual physical violence against Jews has been, for the most part, the work of Muslims. According to the French ministry of the interior, the perpetrators have generally been “Arab youths from North African countries.” Arriving from societies where hatred of Jews is fostered by government, government-controlled media, and radical clerics, these immigrants are fed a rich and stimulating diet from the Arab and European Arab-language press, whose brand of anti-Semitism is as hallucinatory as anything ever peddled by Julius Streicher in the Nazi organ
Der Stürmer
.

Some of this fare stems ultimately from Saudi Arabia, a great and unceasing fount of wild anti-Jewish vitriol.
Al-Riyadh,
a government-controlled newspaper in that country, has, for example, parlayed a twist on an ancient libel to excite and terrify its readers—the Jewish use of the blood of Gentile adolescents not for Passover matzah but for Purim pastry:

Let us now examine how the victims' blood is spilled. For this, a needle-studded barrel is used; this is a kind of barrel, about the size of the human body, with extremely sharp needles set in it on all sides. [These needles] pierce the victim's body, from the moment he is placed in the barrel.

These needles do the job, and the victim's blood drips from him very slowly. Thus, the victim suffers dreadful torment—torment that affords the Jewish vampires great delight as they carefully monitor every detail of the blood-shedding with pleasure and love that are difficult to comprehend.
²⁵

And so forth. The lesson that readers are supposed to draw from this ghastly fantasy is likewise inflammatory: a Saudi cleric enjoined his Muslim brothers in a recent government-sponsored sermon “not to have any mercy or compassion on the Jews, their blood, their money, their flesh. Their women are yours to take, legitimately. God made them yours. Why don't you enslave their women? Why don't you wage jihad? Why don't you pillage them?”

The fact that Islamic immigrants are behind most of the physical attacks on European Jews hardly suggests that the problem is easily containable. Thanks to Europe's welcoming immigration policies, and to their own high fertility, Muslims are now a significant demographic factor on the continent. If in 1945 they numbered fewer than a million, today they are more than fifteen million, with some two million in England, more than four and a half million in France, three million in Germany, nearly a million apiece in Italy, Spain, and Holland, and the remainder scattered across more than a dozen other countries. They are, of course, a heterogeneous population, and most of them are no doubt neither in the grip of radical Islam nor susceptible to appeals to violence. But some significant number of them are, and the challenge they pose can only grow.

In any case, if Muslims have taken the lead in perpetrating physical violence, others have enthusiastically joined in or blazed the way when it comes to incitement and verbal abuse. The various demonstrations illustrate this well. Thus, at the event in Dublin, organized by a group known as the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign, half the demonstrators were reportedly Irishmen. Similarly, in Brussels, not only Arab students but representatives of Belgian social and political organizations took part, including the Catholic movement Pax Christi, the Belgian Socialist party, and the Belgian Green party. The solidarity concert in Salonika was organized by, among others, two Greek trade-union bodies; the dean of Athens University also lent his support, issuing a statement condemning Israel for its “continuing cruel violation in Palestine of human rights.” In Barcelona, where some 10,000 people turned out, unions, political parties, and nongovernmental organizations campaigned against Israeli “genocide” and set fire to a star of David. In France, at the rallies where chants of “death to the Jews” were heard, one could find, according to Agence France-Presse, not only the Muslim Students of France and the Committee of Moroccan Workers but also officials of various trade unions and members of the Revolutionary Communist League, the Greens, and the French Communist party, along with officials of the Human Rights League. In the front ranks was José Bové, the French Luddite formerly known for vandalizing McDonald's hamburger outlets.

But these events at street level are only the beginning; it is in the world of politics and elite opinion that the nature of the burgeoning movement of European anti-Semitism becomes fully clear. And anti-Semitism is, incidentally, the right and the only word for an anti-Zionism so one-sided, so eager to indict Israel while exculpating Israel's adversaries, so shamefully adroit in the use of moral double standards, so quick to issue false and baseless accusations, and so disposed to invert the language of the Holocaust and to paint Israelis and Jews as evil incarnate.

A mild (in relative terms) expression of this current could be found in a petition being circulated among European academics. Passing over in silence the suicide bombings that were devastating Israeli civilian life, not to mention the eighteen months of unremitting violence that were Arafat's answer to Prime Minister Ehud Barak's offer of 97 percent of the territory of the West Bank and the division of Jerusalem, the statement denounced Israel's government as “impervious to moral appeals” and then called for a moratorium on grants by European educational institutions to Israeli scholars and researchers. (The reason, one assumes, was their tacit complicity in genocide.) Among the hundreds of signers of this meretricious document were scholars from institutions of higher learning in virtually every country of the continent, including the famed British Darwinist, Richard Dawkins.