Those Who Forget the Past (25 page)

Wieseltier's failure even to mention a seminal course of events at such extreme odds with his own recitation of recent history suggests less an oversight than a cover-up, an attempt to dodge responsibility for a catastrophically misconceived policy. This is no doubt why some diehard champions of the Oslo “process” have so eagerly seized on his
New Republic
article. “A Bracing Response to Current Hysteria,” exulted the columnist Leonard Fein, a founding member of Peace Now and, for over two decades, an enthusiastic promoter of concessions to Arafat who has yet to account for the gap between his predictions and their results. Similar obeisance was paid by Tony Judt, who as an expert in modern European history has repeatedly likened Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza to the French colonization of Algeria and attributed the lack of “credible Palestinian interlocutors” to Israel's own imperious behavior ever since its “hubris-inducing victory” of 1967.

To hold the Jews responsible for the aggression against them, as Judt does; to affirm the peaceful intentions of Arab terrorists, as Fein does; to transform American Jews who recently pimped for the PLO into paranoid hysterics of the Right, as Wieseltier does, is to disfigure political reality beyond recognition. Even if the Jews were the most rotten and misguided people on earth, they do not number 280 million in nationality (let alone one billion in religious affiliation); they have not organized
their
politics around the destruction of twenty-one Arab countries, or trained a generation of suicide bombers to achieve that goal; they have not used the United Nations as a medium for spreading a genocidal ideology around the globe, or their synagogues to preach “death to the Arabs!” Jews did not bomb America in the name of the Torah, or foment anti-Muslim sentiment throughout Europe.

It is certainly true that memories of the Holocaust and invocations of anti-Semitism can be used to justify militancy. They can also be used to justify pacifism, appeasement, and much else besides.

Which brings us to another point of similarity between “then” and “now”—namely, the agitation among intellectuals not only over the relative significance of political anti-Semitism but also over the uses to which it is allegedly put by Jews themselves. During the 1930s, in the pages of
The New Republic
and elsewhere, a few Jewish intellectuals did track the danger to Jews in Europe and in Palestine, warning, in Ludwig Lewisohn's words, of “the pathological bloodthirstiness of the Nazi anti-Semitic campaign.” But Lewisohn's was a minority voice. Most intellectuals urbanely mocked such apocalyptic scenarios, and some of the Jews among them worried lest their coreligionists exploit the whole issue either to further Zionist ambitions in Palestine or to resuscitate an “archaic” Jewish religion.

Today, too, when deadlier forms of anti-Semitism are on the rise, there is massive intellectual resistance to acknowledging the threat, and most political analysts still treat anti-Semitism like a hiccup that will soon give way to regular breathing. Tony Judt writes that the solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict is in plain sight: “Israel exists. The Palestinians and other Arabs will eventually accept this; many already do.” He states this conclusion as though it complied with some obvious and inexorable logic, though he might as well be saying that fish will fly because they have fins and will eventually use them.

As a European historian, Judt presumably knows that the Jews of Europe also “existed,” and that by 1939 many, if not most, Germans and Austrians “already” accepted their existence. Nevertheless, a dedicated minority of motivated idealists was able to cleanse their countries of the blight within an astonishingly brief period of time. Today's situation is once again arguably worse: one no longer needs to hold mass rallies in Nuremberg to spread the sort of genocidal anti-Jewish propaganda that Egyptian television carries nightly to millions of homes, and preachers who call for holy struggle against Israel are no less committed than Judt is to
their
sense of the inevitable. This is not to say that the Arabs will succeed, any more than that the Germans and Austrians had to succeed; it means that one cannot dismiss anti-Semitism just because it offends one's sense of rational possibility.

Nor, on similar grounds, can one dismiss the possibility of Israel's physical defeat by its Arab and Muslim enemies just because its military power is for the moment unmistakably preponderant. Even greater powers—the United States, for one— have been defeated in palpably unequal contests with lesser but more determined forces. The suicide bomber is a strategic weapon of immense effectiveness for those who feel they have expendable populations; more crucially still, the possession, imminent or actual, of weapons of mass destruction on the part of nations that have already declared their eagerness to use them against the Jewish state changes the regional balance of power definitively. And much as Israel may resemble the United States in other respects, it cannot lose a war to its enemies and necessarily expect to survive. Observers like Judt who point to Israel's defensive capabilities as evidence that it has little to fear from Arab aggression are playing a cruel game of loading up the donkey to see how much it can carry before it collapses.

Judt's views—I focus on them because they may be taken to represent the liberal academic consensus—are interesting in another respect as well: they illustrate how anti-Semitism makes inroads into the liberal mindset. In the years immediately following the creation of Israel, when Arab hostility was expected to give way “eventually” to recognition and acceptance, Israel was the beneficiary of widespread liberal sympathy. The question Western liberals posed to themselves was: how long would it take before the Arabs came to their senses, relinquished their intransigence, and accepted the reality of a Jewish state? But the paradoxical truth is that, the longer and more energetically the Arabs continued their aggression, the costlier it became for others—ideologically, as well as politically or militarily—to defend Israel. As the hostility escalated, it turned neutral onlookers not against the aggressors but against their intended victims.

Anti-Semitism offends Western sensibilities because it is not amenable to the kind of reasoning that we believe is innate in human beings. (“Israel exists. The Palestinians and other Arabs will eventually accept this; many already do.”) In attacking Jews, the anti-Semite also attacks, by proxy, the Western belief in tolerance, and the freedoms implicit in the Rights of Man. What is a good liberal to do? He knows hostility when he sees it, and he surely does not want it directed at himself. Since confronting Arab anti-Semitism would require confronting the entire Arab world, no less than confronting German antiSemitism once meant confronting Germany itself, liberals and democrats find it much easier to blame the rising “anger” and “frustration” of the Arabs on
Israel's
intransigence, and to urge Israel to concede to them.

This helps explain why anti-Semitism began to be taken seriously only after the events of September 11. As long as Israel alone was being assaulted by terror and genocidal propaganda, there was little general credence in the idea that its destruction was the point at issue. But when nineteen homicidal Arabs coordinated a sophisticated attack on New York City and the Pentagon, it became harder to deny that something was afoot in the world that transcended “normal” international behavior. Once one is prepared to acknowledge that a given act of aggression is incommensurate with any offense that may have been given, terms like evil—and anti-Semitism—become permissible.

In the case of the so-called Arab-Israel conflict, to permit the concept of anti-Semitism into the discussion is to acknowledge that the origins of Arab opposition to the Jewish state are to be located in the political culture of the Arabs themselves, and that such opposition can end only if and when that political culture changes. For some supporters of the “peace process,” this post–September 11 realization hit with the force of a revelation, and it has led to much salutary rethinking of former positions. For others, alas, it clearly remains a bridge too far.

“Is the peril ‘as great, if not greater' than the peril of the 1930s? I do not see it,” writes Leon Wieseltier. The determination not to see it is what has helped make the peril greater.

Consider the case of Michael Kamber, a correspondent of
The Village Voice
who had been reporting from Pakistan just before the disappearance of Daniel Pearl. When Kamber learned of Pearl's kidnapping, he knew for a certainty that Pearl would be murdered, and he was simultaneously shaken by the realization that he himself, being the son of a Jewish father, might just as easily have been the victim. After the murder was confirmed, Kamber filed a belated column, a kind of obituary-report about this land “where anti-Semitism flows as easily as water.”

Kamber's column describes Pakistan as a country of 140 million inhabitants, 98 percent Muslim and 75 percent illiterate, all of whom seem to be obsessed with Jewish iniquity:

In interviews conducted while I was there, government officials would occasionally veer off into long diatribes about the Jews; fundamentalist religious leaders, who educate hundreds of thousands of children in the country's
madrassa
s, spoke of little else. In Islamabad . . . an elderly mullah responsible for the education of hundreds of youngsters said, “To me [the bombing of the World Trade Center] seems the design of the Jewish lobby. The Jewish lobby wants to pit Islam against Christianity.”

As Kamber tells the tale, Pakistan's uneducated populace, having no personal contact with Jews and no training in independent thought, takes its cues from religious and political authorities. Those authorities, unaccustomed to assuming any responsibility for the gross deficiencies of their society, blame the “Jews” for all that they need to explain away. No distinctions are made between Jews and Israel, or indeed between Israel and America—except when it is politically expedient to blame Jews for what is hateful about America, too. In such a climate, writes Kamber, now justifying his decision to hide his own half-Jewish identity, “to admit to being Jewish . . . would have been unthinkable.”

This is a very significant admission. If the effect of antiSemitism on Michael Kamber was to inhibit any mention of his Jewish identity to others while he was in Pakistan, its effect on his published journalism, up until this final act of intellectual penance, was to inhibit any mention of a huge and central fact of life in the society he was writing about. Western journalists are paid to report accurately on reality. But the very enormity of anti-Semitism—the fact that, in certain parts of the world, politicians and clerics turn abhorrence of Jews into an essential element of
their
reality—creates an inclination to turn away from it, if for no other reason than to retain the good will of the anti-Semites. Thus, in the name of maintaining “access,” do American journalists affirm the power of dictators to control our putatively free and open press.

The problem transcends the case of Michael Kamber, and is again not a new one. When Arthur Hays Sulzberger took control of
The New York Times
in 1935, he seemed far more afraid of having it thought that he ran a “Jewish newspaper” than of the rise of Adolf Hitler. He believed that the threat of anti-Semitism was being used by some Jews as a political cover for a kind of nationalism he abhorred, and he instructed his city editor not to give “too much space” to the efforts of the American Jewish Committee to aid European Jews. When Zionist leaders charged him with failing to present the news impartially, he blamed
them
for turning him from a non-Zionist into an “anti-Zionist.” In 1942 he wrote to Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, chairman of the American Zionist Emergency Council, “I am opposed to Goebbels' tactics whether or not they are confined to Nazi Germany,” equating Nazi pressure on the Jews of Germany with Rabbi Silver's pressure on him.

The effect of this was to upend the stated editorial principles of the
Times
. Ostensibly, the family wanted the paper to remain evenhanded and free of bias, by which it meant that it would not allow its own Jewish origins to dictate favorable coverage of the Jews. But in practice the paper carried this to the point of
creating
bias: lest it be accused of favoring the views of one side, it banned all letters to the editor concerning Hitler in the years that he was coming to power. The Ochs-Sulzbergers also believed that, since the Jews were not a people—the very claim that would one day be enshrined in the charter of the PLO—they were not in need of a Jewish homeland; and this, too, dictated a policy of minimizing antiSemitism lest, by promoting sympathy for the Jewish plight, the
Times
play into the hands of Zionists.

Although the Ochs-Sulzberger families have since apologized for the “meager coverage” the
Times
gave to the Holocaust as it was unfolding, they have never made a connection between their prejudiced view of Jewish peoplehood and the paper's coverage of world news in general. They thus perpetuate the cycle of parochialization, as if the problem were one that affected only the Jews. But let us suppose for a moment that the publishers of
The New York Times
had acted truly without bias. They would then have responded to Hitler's virulent anti-Semitism as signaling a broader danger to everything precious to themselves and to America. They would have assiduously gathered information about Hitler's program of rearmament, as Winston Churchill tried to do once he became convinced that Hitler was planning to attack the West. They would have drawn daily attention to Germany's abuses of democratic freedoms, its perversion of the law, its abrogation of civil liberties.
And
they would have registered the way that Nazi anti-Semitism cloaked darker anti-democratic purposes behind an enmity directed against the Jews alone.