Those Who Forget the Past (47 page)

In his conversation with Vendler, Paulin agreed that the English Department would announce that the decision about the lecture had been made “by mutual consent.” But consent to what? Paulin declined to discuss the matter, and he told friends that he had agreed only to a postponement of his appearance, not a cancellation. Vendler and the others on the committee have said that they, too, believed Paulin would ultimately give the reading. On that Tuesday, Buell posted an announcement on the English Department's Web site saying, “By mutual consent of the poet and the English Department, the Morris Gray poetry reading by Tom Paulin originally scheduled for Thursday November 14 will not take place. The English Department sincerely regret [
sic
] the widespread consternation that has arisen as a result of this invitation, which had been originally decided on last winter solely on the basis of Mr. Paulin's lifetime accomplishment as a poet.” There was no suggestion that Paulin's lecture would ever take place.

That, at least initially, seemed fine with just about everyone at Harvard. Summers praised the English Department's decision. “My position was that it was for the department to decide,” he said in a statement, “and I believe the department has come to the appropriate decision.” Rita Goldberg, the unlikely initiator of the controversy, was astonished and delighted by the success of her electronic “chain letter.” She said, “This was an honor for Paulin. Do you want to give this man this honor, when he has this history? This was an actual call to murder people. It's not a joke in wartime. Someone might take him up on it. It's incitement.” As for Paulin himself, he had disavowed his call for the murder of the settlers months earlier, in a letter to the
Telegraph
of London. Since returning to Oxford in December, he has limited his public comments to a self-pitying poem, “On Being Dealt the Anti-Semitic Card,” published in January in the
London Review of Books,
which referred to “the ones who play the a-s card - /of death threats hate mail talking tough/the usual cynical Goebbels stuff . . .”

Controversial speakers have been coming to Harvard for decades, and over the years there have been occasional unpleasant incidents, most memorably in 1966, when Robert McNamara, then Secretary of Defense, was noisily confronted during the Vietnam War. But Yasir Arafat, Malcolm X, the Shah of Iran, and scores of others have all spoken without incident. As Charles Fried, a professor at Harvard Law School, observed, “We've had Fidel Castro here, we've had Al Sharpton, we've had monsters, charlatans, and scoundrels.” So why not Tom Paulin?

Fried had served as Solicitor General in the Reagan Administration and as a Republican appointee to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, and the Paulin matter roused his libertarian instincts. “I heard they were withdrawing the invitation because it caused ‘consternation,' ” Fried told me. “The reason that was given is they were disinviting him because people didn't like what he'd said. There's a difference between what you decide to listen to and what you silence. This is silencing.”

Fried wrote a letter to the editor of the
Crimson,
the campus newspaper, and he recruited two law-school colleagues from a different end of the political spectrum, Alan M. Dershowitz and Laurence H. Tribe, to sign it with him. “By all accounts this Paulin fellow the English Department invited to lecture here is a despicable example of the anti-Semitic and/or anti-Israel posturing unfortunately quite widespread among European intellectuals,” Fried wrote. “What is truly dangerous is the precedent of withdrawing an invitation because a speaker would cause, in the words of English department chair Lawrence Buell, ‘consternation and divisiveness.' . . . If Paulin had spoken, we are sure we would have found ways to tell him and each other what we think of him. Now he will be able to lurk smugly in his Oxford lair and sneer at America's vaunted traditions of free speech. There are some mistakes which are only made worse by trying to undo them.”

The law professors' letter—along with the controversy— prompted the English Department to call a meeting for the following Tuesday, to discuss the Paulin invitation. “The department, rightly, felt it has been misrepresented by the notion —untrue—that Paulin, because of statements and views attributed to him on the Internet, and then somehow distributed to selected media over the weekend, had been ‘disinvited' by us,” Jorie Graham said. At the meeting, on November 19, the thirty to forty senior and junior faculty members voted to reaffirm their own prerogatives. As Robert Kiely, the former department chair, recalled, “There was a unanimous reassertion that departments should be autonomous, free to invite whom they wish. And, after a long discussion, despite the unpleasantness of his views it was unanimous with two abstentions that the department should reinstate its invitation.” So far, Paulin hasn't said whether he will come to Harvard after all.

MARTIN PERETZ

The Poet and the Murderer

“POETRY MAKES NOTHING HAPPEN,” wrote W. H. Auden in a paradoxical homage to William Butler Yeats. But two poets—one an Oxford don, the other Saudi Arabia's ambassador to Britain—did make something happen last week. It was something ugly, but it was news.

Tom Paulin, a lousy but famous poet and a regular panelist on the BBC2 arts program
Late Review,
gave an interview to the Egyptian weekly
Al-Ahram
in which he said that “Brooklyn-born” settlers in Israel “should be shot dead. . . . [T]hey are Nazis. . . . [I] feel nothing but hatred for them.” Paulin's venom toward Israel is nothing new. He once called its army the “Zionist SS” and charged that it systematically murders “little Palestinian boy[s].” In
Al-Ahram
he explained, “I can understand how suicide bombers feel. It is an expression of deep injustice and tragedy.” He did, to be fair, express one scruple about the random butchery of innocent Israelis: He worried that the murders might not crush Israel's spirit. The attacks on Israeli “civilians, in fact, boost morale” among the Jews, admitted Paulin despairingly. If only the Jews would collapse in the face of terror and abandon their country to the people who want them dead.

But, as reported in the April 14
Sunday Observer,
the other poet, Ghazi Algosaibi, Saudi Arabia's man in London for more than one decade, felt no need for such tactical caveats. Algosaibi, it is worth remembering, is one of Prince Abdullah's senior diplomats, the envoy of a monarch whose “peace plan” has elicited cheers throughout Europe. In the Arab world, Algosaibi is known as something of a poet himself. And he has at least once remarked that “[p]oetry is the soul of the Arabs.” The ambassador's most recent verse was published in the London-based Arabic daily
Al-Hayat,
and it is called “The Martyrs.” We know that it was not long in the writing, because “The Martyrs” is a paean to Ayat Akhras, the eighteen-year-old who detonated herself in a Jerusalem supermarket on March 29, taking two Israelis with her and maiming twenty-five others. Here's a snippet:

Tell Ayat, the bride of loftiness . . .
She embraced death with a smile . . .
While the leaders are running away from death,
Doors of heavens are opened for her.

And then, in case you missed the poet's meaning:

You died to honor God's word.
(You) committed suicide?
We committed suicide by living
Like the dead.

And finally, the United States as Satan:

We complained to the idols of the White House
Whose heart
is filled
with darkness.

The soul of the Arabs, indeed!

I am reminded by The Daily Telegraph's Tom Payne of a line by Russian poet Osip Mandelstam about Stalin. “He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries.” And, if they had their way with the Jews, so would Tom Paulin and Ambassador Algosaibi. But poets reflect politics; they do not make it. I do not know how many Arabs live in the United Kingdom. But some 15,000 of them marched from Hyde Park Corner to Trafalgar Square last Sunday in a protest that might have led you to believe it was Israelis who were dynamiting themselves to kill Palestinians—and not the reverse. The fatwa faithful from Bradford and Birmingham, Wolverhampton and London's Edgware Road, carried the flag that their cousins might have planted firmly in Palestine had Yasir Arafat not told Ehud Barak (and Bill Clinton) to fuck off.

The marchers brandished placards accusing Israel of genocide, specifically in Jenin. It will be a bitter pill for them, having conjured up gruesome holocaust images, to learn the truth: There were no more than 200 dead, and probably far less, in Jenin. Of course, any civilian death is a tragedy. But most of the Palestinian dead are not civilians; they are armed combatants. The civilian numbers are this low because of the scrupulous-ness of the Israel Defense Forces, whose troops risk their own lives so as not to kill innocents. You wouldn't know this from most of the British press. But, then, you wouldn't know it from much of the American press either.

The “Jenin massacre” is a case in point. The Palestinians claim the Israelis murdered hundreds of civilians in the city and buried them in “mass graves” to hide their heinous deeds. Their ideological partisans in the media parrot these assertions. Then your ordinary press stiff, having heard it from someone he had a drink with the night before—a nice-enough chap—reports it too. Suddenly, everybody is fuming about Israel's cover-up of a great atrocity. And, in Brussels and Paris, Oslo and Madrid, they are talking about trying Ariel Sharon for war crimes in front of the newly minted international criminal court. As Thomas Friedman admitted a bit shamefacedly in
From Beirut
to Jerusalem,
one reason journalists repeat Palestinian lies, and fail to report Palestinian crimes, is fear—fear for their safety on the ground. But that doesn't quite explain those journalists who live in safe, far-off capitals and repeat the same hysterical, Israel-hating lies. To hear them tell it, Israel destroyed homes in Jenin just for the hell of it. But as even superdove Shimon Peres has noted, “There wasn't a house [in Jenin] that wasn't booby-trapped, and there was no way to neutralize the danger without demolishing the structure.” And, of course, the Israelis, said Peres, “also encountered booby-trapped men, Palestinians who raised their hands to surrender while wearing explosive belts in an attempt to detonate themselves among our soldiers.”

Well-intentioned European friends (and even some younger members of my own family) implore me to understand that it is the imagery of these tough Israelis with guns that is inciting anti-Semitism around the world. Yes, it is true; the killing of Jews can no longer occur with impunity and without consequence. But since the year 135 C.E., when Bar Kochba's second revolt against the Romans collapsed, Jews have almost always been without weapons. In the Middle Ages in Germany, they actually exchanged their right to bear arms for the promise of protection by the prince! (It was not long before they were slaughtered.) And so could we not say that this utter defenselessness was also a spur to anti-Semitism? Zionism strived for many ideals, some of which it has achieved. One of these is that Jews no longer go helplessly into the fire. So let us say that in this way we are like the gentiles: a normal community whose blood is not shed easily.

JONATHAN FREEDLAND

Is Anti-Zionism Anti-Semitism?

THERE ARE SOME QUESTIONS that need only be debated in the seminar room or lecture theater. There are others that battle it out on the wider university campus but also on the airwaves, in the newspapers, and, occasionally, even the streets. These questions have an importance that goes beyond mere intellectual or academic interest. They matter in the real world, with implications for individuals and even whole nations. This is one of those questions.

Does anti-Zionism equal anti-Semitism—sometimes, always, or never? That is the question. Occasionally it is argued head on. In 2002 the British Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, delivered a lecture on the resurgence of anti-Semitism, which sought, among other things, to delineate where one ended and the other began. In early 2003 the Oxford academic, Tom Paulin, answered those who had accused him of Jew-hatred with a poem,
On Being Dealt the Anti-Semitic Card
. In its own roundabout fashion, it too tried to argue that opposition to Zionism was distinct from loathing of Jews.

But most of the time the argument is not discussed so frontally. Instead it lies, implicit, beneath almost every row that pits Israel's friends against its critics. So when a university student union acts against a Jewish Society for its pro-Israel stance—a battle that seems to be played out on a British campus every year or so—the Jews complain of anti-Semitism, while their opponents claim mere anti-Zionism. Who is right and who is wrong hinges on our question: does anti-Zionism equal anti-Semitism?

In October 2002 this discussion spilled onto street level when the Stop the War coalition, together with the Muslim Association of Britain, marched in protest at a possible attack on Iraq. Jewish peace activists later complained that they had been “surrounded by hate-filled chanting and images in which anti-Israel and anti-Jewish imagery were blurred.” They described posters with blood-curdling slogans; a handful of fellow marchers dressed in the garb of the suicide bomber—complete with Hamas-style “martyr's” headbands—even children, six or seven years old, brandishing toy Kalashnikovs, just like the shahids in those pre-bombing videos; and banners which linked, via an equals sign, the Star of David with the swastika. A fiery post-march exchange between these disappointed Jewish leftists and the demonstration organizers hinged on whether the Star of David was a Jewish symbol or an emblem of the Jewish state. Since it had been “co-opted” by Israel, and placed at the heart of the country's flag, said the Stop the War coalition, it was an Israeli totem. No, its history long predated the creation of the state in 1948, making it “an ancient symbol for all Jews everywhere,” insisted the protesters. The dispute was not resolved but, once again, it turned on the same core question: is an attack on Israel an attack on all Jews?

But the arena where this argument has been slugged out most ferociously is not the campuses or the streets but the media. (Indeed, it often seems as if the principal form of identification with Israel currently practiced by Diaspora Jews is consumption of, and complaints about, the mainstream media's depiction of the Arab-Israeli conflict.) When Jewish viewers protest to the BBC or readers condemn, say,
The Guardian,
their objection is rarely confined to a quibble over accuracy. Whether stated explicitly or not, the complaint usually contains the accusation that the inaccuracy was committed
for a
reason,
that the journalist or organization involved was biased against Israel and that that bias itself has a root cause—antiSemitism. The media defense is consistent: “But we were only criticizing Israeli policy/the Israeli government/Ariel Sharon —we were not attacking Jews.” Yet the viewers and readers experience it differently; they see or hear in the attack on Israel an attack on themselves. Once again, what's needed is a clear ruling on what counts as “mere” anti-Zionism and what crosses the line into anti-Semitism. Editors and broadcasters would certainly appreciate a universally-accepted, easy-to-use rule that would tell them which is which. They would like to know what counts as anti-Zionism (acceptable) and what is anti-Semitism (unacceptable), so that they could air a bit of the former while never being accused of the latter.

So pursuit of this debate will bring a double benefit. It should settle some currently vexing questions and, in the process, enable Jews to classify their adversaries with accuracy, separating mere critics from genuine enemies. But an inquiry into anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism promises a deeper reward, too. It cannot help but touch on much larger questions of Jewish identity. Are the Jews a nation or not? What is the nature of their connection to and claim on the land of Israel? To what extent has affinity with the Jewish state become fused with our very identity as Jews?

A useful starting point, as always, is with definitions. At one end of the dictionary lies
anti-Semite:
“
n
. a person who persecutes or discriminates against Jews.” That seems clear enough. Now flip the book over and open the other end: Z for Zionism. “
n
. 1. a political movement for the establishment and support of a national homeland for Jews in Palestine, now concerned chiefly with the development of the modern state of Israel. 2. a policy or movement for Jews to return to Palestine from the Diaspora.”

That's a bit trickier, isn't it? You could stage a two-day seminar on either one of those definitions. (Anti-Zionists would certainly recoil from the second, with its acceptance that a Jewish move to Palestine constitutes a “return.” Such is the sensitivity of this topic, it's all but impossible to craft even a sentence that will not be seen as biased by one side or other and, occasionally, both.) For our purposes, the Collins Dictionary was probably overzealous, saying more than it needed to. It's more helpful to stick with the initial definition it offered in its first clause: a movement for the establishment and support of a national homeland for Jews in Palestine. Loosely translated, Zionism represents nothing more than a belief in the right of a Jewish state in Palestine to exist. It says nothing about the borders of that state (that was, and remains to this day, an argument between different versions of Zionism). Nor does Zionism say anything about the nature, shape, or direction of that state (that, instead, is the realm of day-to-day Israeli politics). A belief in Zionism clearly does not relate to, let alone require support for, whichever government happens to rule Israel at any one time. It is a simple, ideological proposition: a Zionist believes in the Jewish state's right to exist, an anti-Zionist opposes it.

This should make life simpler. We can now happily remove from this discussion criticism of Ariel Sharon or of the post-1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza: such sentiments are more accurately described as anti-Likudism or anti-Sharonism. They are views that not only many Jews subscribe to, but also many Israelis and Zionists. Since such views do not, on their own, dispute Israel's right to exist, they cannot, in themselves, constitute anti-Zionism. If a hypothetical critic reviled everything Israel had done in practice since May 15, 1948, while upholding the right, in principle, of a Jewish state to exist in Palestine, even he should not count as an anti-Zionist. He would be guilty of something we might want to call anti-Israelism, were it not such an ugly word.

A clear space should be opening up. While anti-Semitism is a blanket hatred of Jews, anti-Zionism is opposition to a specific idea—an opposition that began among, and which has always included, Jews. Judged like this, all those rows on campus and with the media should melt away: after all, on these definitions anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism stand miles apart, with barely any risk of confusion between the two. Fierce criticism of Israeli government policy, including opposition to the 35-year occupation, does not even meet the definition of anti-Zionism, let alone anti-Semitism. With these standards in mind, Jews should be able to see or read even the most withering assaults on current Israeli conduct on the BBC or in
The Guardian
without flinching: they are one thing, not the other.

Intellectually, that sounds right enough. But there are two threats to this neat separation of anti-Semitism from anti-Zionism and, indeed, criticism of Israel. The first is a matter of real-world practical expression; the second is located in the realm of ideas.

In the first category belong those critiques of Israel or Zionism which—judged strictly on their content—should not qualify as anti-Semitism at all, but which nevertheless have Jews reaching for their protective armor. Somehow Jews have sensed a foe, even when no outright hostility has been expressed. For example: I know of otherwise calm, reasonable people who insist that the reports a specific BBC Middle East correspondent files are unexceptionable in their content, but it doesn't matter: “You can tell from her voice that she's very ‘anti.' ” It's not what she says, it's the way she says it.

This should not count as a rational line of argument at all: people should surely be judged by what they say, not by their tone of voice. And yet Jews are not alone in applying such a demanding standard. I have heard black contemporaries denounce a white speaker whose crime had merely been to deliver a string of liberal platitudes. Yet something in his voice had given him away: his black listeners had intuited that all the nice talk concealed a set of outdated and condescending attitudes. They could not have offered proof to satisfy a court, but somehow they just knew: in front of them was a mild, reforming racist. In a neat reversal of the anti-Semite's old line about being able to “sniff out a Jew from a hundred yards,” so it seems blacks can spot a racist, and Jews an anti-Semite, from an equal distance.

In the latter case, the alarm goes off when criticism is presented of Israel with an aggression, malice, or fervor the speaker somehow lacks on all other topics. He is delivering the very same list of anti-Sharon arguments you might serve up yourself in a different context, but somehow it's not the same. There is a zeal there, an almost gleeful pleasure in the flaws and crimes of the Jewish state, that makes one suspect the worst: maybe this person's passion is not really support for the Palestinians so much as hatred of Israel. You start wondering about his motives. Of all the faraway conflicts in the world, why does this one matter to him so much? It is nothing more than a hunch. But just as gays enjoy a gay joke from Graham Norton, but feel uncomfortable when the same gag is told by Bernard Manning, so Jews can take even the bitterest criticism of Israel from the pages of
Ha'aretz,
but feel twitchy when they read it in, say,
The Independent
. Intentions are all.

For those seeking a clear way through this whole complex business, don't worry: this is the grayest, most nebulous zone of the debate. The rest does not rest on mere hunch and intuition, but consists of more robust material. For, happily, there is more to expression than inflection of voice and body language. There are also the words, and tactics, people use.

The clearest collision comes when anti-Zionists, inadvertently or otherwise, deploy anti-Semitic language or imagery to press their case. In Britain the most straightforward example in recent memory occurred in 2002, when the
New Statesman
magazine ran a cover story on the perceived might of the “pro-Israel lobby.” It showed a gleaming, brassy gold Star of David impaling a supine Union flag. The cover line read:
A Kosher
Conspiracy?

As the magazine later admitted in an apologetic editorial, they had “used images and words in such a way as to create unwittingly the impression that the
New Statesman
was following an anti-Semitic tradition that sees the Jews as a conspiracy piercing the heart of the nation.” As it happens, the magazine had almost provided a service: their cover was a masterclass in how anti-Zionism becomes anti-Semitic when it expresses itself in the vernacular of the Jew-hater. Crammed onto a single sheet of paper was a virtual crash course in anti-Semitic iconography, including motifs that may well have been forgotten by much of the British liberal left which reads the
New
Statesman
. The brassiness of the star conveyed ostentatious wealth; the defeat by the star of the British flag suggested an overmighty Jewry had won mastery over the humble, beleaguered UK; the use of kosher as a synonym for Jewish contained both street level crudity and a hint of cowardice, fighting shy of the J-word itself; and of course, the heart of the matter— conspiracy itself, with its ancient allegation that Jews are engaged in a secret plot to take over the world.

The
New Statesman
case was rare for being so egregious. Usually, this is a less open-and-shut business, one that not even all Jews agree on. The range of expressions which set Jewish antennae a-quiver can stretch from an unfortunate verb—a recent claim from leading anti-Zionist Paul Foot that pro-Israel forces were “bleating” had an unpleasant ring—to a problematic noun: why is it always the black “community” but the Jewish “lobby”?

Anti-Zionist tactics, as well as words, can have similarly highly-charged associations. The proposed academic boycott of Israel has aroused such a fierce Jewish response partly because it stirs a very specific memory for Jews: the boycott of Jewish shops and businesses under the Nazis in the 1930s. Supporters of the boycott loathe that link, and of course the two are not the same, but the emotional point still stands: like it or not, reasonable or not, that is the chord that a boycott strikes in Jewish hearts and minds.

Which makes it unsurprising that the most problematic of all anti-Zionist expressions is the equation of Israel, Zionism, and Jews with Hitler and Nazism. Nothing enrages Jews more, and no other move by an anti-Zionist is likelier to bring allegations of anti-Semitism. The critic Tom Paulin—whose poems have spoken of the “Zionist SS”—has learned this fact the hard way.

Does this style of anti-Zionist invective necessarily cross the line into anti-Semitism? Perhaps it is possible to imagine a very tight comparison of one specific aspect of Israeli conduct with an equally narrow item of Nazi policy that somehow did not feel like an assault on Jews—but it's hard to see what that might be. The more generalized comparisons, used rhetorically
à la
Paulin, strike most Jews as fundamentally anti-Jewish for these reasons. First, they are hyperbolic: no matter how bad Israel is, it is not the Third Reich. Second, they seem designed to cancel out the world's empathy for Jewish suffering in the 1930s and 1940s: under this logic, the Holocaust has now been “matched” by Israeli misbehavior, therefore the Jews have forfeited any claim they might once have had to special understanding. The world and the Jews are now “even.” Third, and worse, the Nazi-Zionist equation does not merely neutralize memories of the Holocaust—it puts Jews on the wrong side of them. The logic of Paulin's position is that all the anger we feel toward Nazi brutality should not make us sympathetic to Jews but, on the contrary, compel us to redouble our efforts against the Zionists. After all, says Paulin, they are today's Nazis. Jews end up with the gravest hour in their history first taken from them—and then returned, with themselves recast as villains rather than victims. If anti-Zionists wonder why Jews find this anti-Semitic, perhaps they should imagine the black reaction if the civil rights movement—or any other vehicle of black liberation—was constantly equated with the white slave traders of old. It feels like a deliberate attempt to find a people's rawest spot—and tear away at it.