Those Who Forget the Past (6 page)

This shift was the not-so-buried implication of the warning that Lawrence Summers delivered in September 2002 to the Harvard community in now-famous remarks he made at Memorial Chapel.

Summers was reacting to an accumulation of incidents in the year since 9/11. Not just synagogue burnings in Europe or the “suicide bombings” in Israel but disturbing developments in some left-wing rhetoric here in America. Chiefly on campuses, in the “Israel divestiture” movement, for instance, which seeks to delegitimize (as well as disinvest from) Israel. It was there as well in the “anti-globalist” and “peace” demonstrations that, after 9/11, prominently featured anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and sometimes anti-Semitic rhetoric and imagery.

What Summers focused on was not just that a point had been reached at which anti-Zionism tipped over into antiSemitism, but that it came from an unexpected place. He defined himself as not an alarmist, not a victim of “ethnic panic,” so to speak, described himself as not the kind of person who hears “the sound of breaking glass,” of
Kristallnacht,
in every insult or slight to Jews.

Nonetheless, he said, he felt compelled to sound an alarm:

“[W]here anti-Semitism and views that are profoundly anti-Israel have traditionally been the primary preserve of poorly educated right-wing populaces, profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities. Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not intent.” The perception of a new anti-Semitism, he continued, is “less alarmist in the world of today than [in the world of a] year ago.”

It is that phrase—anti-Semitic in “effect if not intent”— that may have been even more provocative than his description of the shift from Right to Left in the debate that followed. It spoke to the question of when anti-Zionism became antiSemitism.

“Effect if not intent . . .” I believe it's clear what Summers was trying to say. The effect/intent relationship was elucidated this way by the British historian Peter Pulzer:
¹⁴
Some anti-Zionists deny their
intent
is anti-Semitic, and are thus heedless of the
effect
of their double standard in singling out the Jewish state for human rights opprobrium ignored elsewhere. “Effect simply consists,” Pulzer wrote, “ultimately of the resurfacing of the underground repertoire of anti-Jewish stereotypes, instinctively understood by both the utterer and their recipient.” Effect was evident in indisputably anti-Semitic incidents growing out of “anti-Zionist” activism on American campuses such as those reported on by eyewitnesses such as Dr. Laurie Zoloth at San Francisco State and Eli Muller at Yale.

I'd tend to agree with Pulzer. Purportedly “anti-Zionist” criticism of Israel increasingly couched in the rhetoric of ancient anti-Semitic stereotypes—“grasping” Jews, hook-nosed caricatures of money-grubbing Jews—is not mere anti-Zionism. Consider the cartoon that appeared in the
Chicago Tribune
in 2003 that featured Ariel Sharon crossing a bridge labeled “peace”
only
because the bridge had been “baited,” so to speak, with dollar signs (symbolizing U.S. subsidies). That would surely persuade the stiff-necked but money-grubbing Jew Sharon (drawn with an exaggeratedly hooklike beak for a nose) to be reasonable! I think one can safely say this is no longer simple anti-Zionism. Whatever the “intent,” the effect is anti-Semitic.
¹⁵
It is here that one finds special relevance in Berel Lang's reflections on the very popular defense that denying one is anti-Semitic proves that one
can't
be anti-Semitic.

But to return to the question of the shift in the locus of antiSemitism from Right to Left, I don't mean to imply that more traditional right-wing anti-Semitism has evaporated. There are of course old-fashioned white racists and neo-Nazis scattered throughout the Western world. As Andrew Sullivan put it, “It's important to realize that old far-Right anti-Semitism has not been replaced by the new far-Left variety. Just supplemented.” One can find it among some “paleoconservatives,” as they're called. And while there is some reason to welcome the apparent philo-Semitism of the fundamentalist movement in America, there is also some reason for concern about the doctrine beneath some of the philo-Semitism: the belief in the ultimate conversion, or self-erasure, of the Jews in the eschatology of the Last Days.

But the appearance of anti-Semitism on the Left is, at least on the surface, paradoxical. The Left is, or was supposed to be, about Tolerance, against prejudice, the friend of the Jews (or, as the more cynical have said, on the side of the Jews as long as they were victims). Many Jews, including to some extent myself, saw democratic socialism as embodying some of the ethical spirit of Judaism's prophets and sages.

But there is another side to the Left's relationship to Judaism. Something that became apparent in that year 2002 when some icons of the Left, such as Naomi Klein and Todd Gitlin, felt compelled to speak out about it, sought to separate the Left from “the socialism of fools,” as anti-Semitism has been called.
¹⁶

There were those who argued that in some ways anti-Semitism found a
natural home
on the Left. At the heart of that argument was the notion of Reason. The Left's Enlightenment faith in human perfectibility had replaced God with an almost religious faith in Reason. And (as the writer David Samuels suggested to me) for the first Enlightenment philosophers, such as the notoriously anti-Semitic Voltaire, religion represented unReason, and Jewishness was the fount of all religion and thus of all un-Reason.

Paul Berman put the Left's devotion to Reason at the heart of his analysis of the double standard the Left applied to the “suicide bombings” in Israel. Deploring them, of course (with some exceptions), but always with a “but”:
but
they are understandable in some way. They
must
be. And to understand all is to forgive all, we're told by Enlightenment
philosophes
.

What Berman argued was that, confronted with a “suicide bomber” blowing himself and dozens of men, women, and children to bits, the Left in effect could not look directly at the act, because it's so unbearable, because to take it all in might lead to admitting that some things can't be contained or explained within the framework of Reason—especially murderous religious fanaticism. That not all problems are soluble. That some, history suggests, are ineluctably tragic. Left theories of history, from Whig Progressivism to Marxist dialectical materialism, tend to lack a tragic sense of life—and of history.

And so one saw variations on “looking away” again— explaining it, distancing it, “contextualizing” it with “reasons.” This accomplished two goals: first, it removed the element of unreason from the “suicide bomber's” act itself. Made it “understandable” in both senses of the word. And second, it allowed a shift of blame to the victims of the blast. Made them part of the oppressive hegemony that in some abstract—horribly abstract—way “deserved it.” Thus, there
was
Reason behind their death. Thus, there
was
a measure of justice to it. As there was to those who responded to the attacks of September 11 by saying, in one way or another, “Sorry about the three thousand dead, but America had it coming,” or, alternately, “America needed the lesson.”

Another, deeper connection of the Left to anti-Semitism is to be found in Marxism itself. I'm not the first to point out that much Marxist imagery is a kind of universalized version of anti-Semitic imagery. The greedy capitalist is substituted for the greedy Jew, the suffering proletariat for the suffering Jesus scourged by Jews. The promised Marxist future dissolution of the state and universal peace, once the exploiter (read, Jewish) class is eliminated, is substituted for the promise of Heaven for the Elect.

In fact I'd suggest there is a darker element in some of the Left's willingness to demonize Israel. It has to do with a different kind of denial, not the neo-Nazi Holocaust denial but the denial of—and then the equanimity about—the
Marxist
holocausts of the twentieth century. The reaction—or lack of reaction—to the emerging evidence for mass murders in the millions in Stalin's Russia, in Mao's China, in somewhat lesser numbers (but greater percentage of the population) in Pol Pot's Cambodia. None of which has resulted in many on the Left questioning whether there might be some
connection
between Marxist ideology and the frequency of mass murder in Marxist regimes. Well, they're not
really
Marxist regimes—they weren't doing Marxism
right,
some will say. Or even if there were mass murders, they came from
good intentions,
utopian aspirations that somehow seemed to go awry—so it's not like Hitler's mass murder at all.

Well, there are certainly differences. But the Heideggerian equanimity, the deafening silence, the lack of outrage of much of the Left about the mass murders and the gulags in Marxist regimes—during
and
after—has its most practical and disheartening effect in the way it has not succeeded in altering the longstanding
corollary
perception on the Left that the locus of greatest evil in recent history is the United States. Only by ignoring Marxist genocides can one come to this conclusion.
¹⁷

U.S. allies, such as Israel, thus tend to be judged by the same a priori prejudice, as agents of intrinsically evil American imperialism. So anti-Zionism, along with the anti-Semitism it encourages or shades into, is, in some instances, a derivative of a kind of ahistorical, knee-jerk Left anti-Americanism which ignores Marxist genocides and still views the United States as
the
evil empire—and lacks the willingness to question judgments that proceed from that. Such as the Left judgment on Israel.

I was particularly impressed by the analysis of the antiSemitism of the Left by Melanie Phillips in London's
Spectator
. She suggests an even deeper, more provocative source of Left anti-Semitism, one elucidated by a Polish intellectual at a Jerusalem conference who argued: “The Left could not face the fact that they had totally misconstrued the Middle East because this would undermine their whole philosophy . . . founded on the premise that reason could reconcile all differences; all that was needed in Israel was an enlightened government for reason to prevail. The evidence that we are facing a phenomenon which is not susceptible to reason would destroy that world view.”

Whether you agree or not with this take on the subject, it has become apparent to me that Reason, reasonableness, unreasonableness, and how they're defined are central to the argument over what is mere anti-Zionism and what is antiSemitism. To many anti-Zionists, there can be no
reasonable
explanation for Israelis' “unreasonableness”—their unwilling ness to trust the 300 million Muslims surrounding them— except for some unreasonable stiff-necked character apparently intrinsic to Jewish nature. Or a malign Jewish disposition to torment those who share their land. Thus anti-Zionism elides into anti-Semitism. To me the most pernicious implication of some anti-Zionists, the heart of anti-Zionist anti-Semitism, is in the implication that, somehow, malevolent Jews enjoy imposing an occupation with its attendant restrictions and suffering on Palestinians. Jews want to live in peace, but three wars in which Arab states tried to drive them into the sea, and a terror campaign by Palestinians who reject the idea of a Jewish state, have left Israelis with the tragic choice between self-defense and self-destruction. The root cause of Palestinian suffering has been the rejection by Arab and Palestinian leadership of the Jewish state's right to exist at all.

To many Israelis and many Jews, their people are asked to be “reasonable” under a definition of “reasonableness” that once again puts the existence of their state, of their people, in peril. This is why Amos Oz's essay is so important. Important because, however brief, it appeared in a Left publication such as
The Nation
.

It is, in fact, the shortest piece in this collection, but it says something very significant, from a very significant standpoint. Oz, the celebrated Israeli novelist, has been well known as a founder of Peace Now. And while he still supports the Palestinian right to statehood and has opposed the occupation and the Jewish settlements in the disputed territories, he recognizes that things have changed. That one can't just look narrowly at Israel, Palestine, and the lovely vision of a two-state solution in isolation.

Rather, Oz writes that one must take into account the war “waged by fanatical Islam from Iran to Gaza and from Lebanon to Ramallah, to destroy Israel and drive the Jews out of their land.”

He then asks the difficult question that goes to the heart of the “reasonableness” issue, the issue that is itself at the heart of the mutation of anti-Zionism into anti-Semitism. This is Amos Oz's question: “[W]ould an end to occupation [of the West Bank] terminate the Muslim holy war against Israel?”

His answer: “This is hard to predict. If jihad comes to an end, both sides would be able to sit down and negotiate peace. If it does not, we would have to seal and fortify Israel's logical border, the demographic border, and keep fighting for our lives against fanatical Islam.” (This is why the discussion of the origin and reformability of Muslim anti-Semitism, engaged in here by Bernard Lewis and Tariq Ramadan, is so important: is jihad against unbelievers intrinsic to Islam?)

Here are Amos Oz's final words: “If, despite simplistic visions, the end of occupation will not result in peace, at least we will have one war to fight rather than two. Not a war for our full occupancy of the holy land, but a war for our right to live in a free and sovereign Jewish state in part of that land. A just war, a no-alternative war. A war we will win. Like any people who were ever forced to fight for their very homes and freedom and lives.”