Those Who Forget the Past

by Ron Rosenbaum

  If fighting it unremittingly is not a “progressive” cause, then what kind of progress does progressivism have in mind? What do you think?

  ELI MULLER

  Necessary Evils

  (THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2003) It has been an unpleasant week to be Jewish at Yale. On Tuesday, Dean Pamela George published a column to the effect that it was no more inappropriate to invite rabid anti-Semite Amiri Baraka to speak than it was to invite former members of the Israeli military. That afternoon, Baraka spoke to a standing ovation. On Wednesday, Sahm Adrangi ’03 informed readers of this page that condemnation of Baraka stemmed from the eagerness of Jews in the media to shield Israel from criticism (“Not Just Another Conspiracy Theory: Manipulating Anger”). For the next twenty-four hours, I watched more postings than I care to recall pile up on the Yale Daily News Web site, praising Sahm for his courage and denouncing Jews in the media for serving as Israeli shills. Hatred of Israel and its suspected apologists has never seemed more prevalent on this campus. In my years here I have heard unending discussion of whether anti-Zionism constitutes antiSemitism. I have concluded that while the two are not identical, hatred of Israel constitutes a moral pathology in its own right, one that is still regarded as legitimate by many of my classmates. Some Jews will invariably denounce any criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic, using a powerful allegation as a barrier to dialogue. This pernicious tendency has contributed to the development of an equally false counter-proposition: that nothing you could say about Israel could possibly be anti-Semitic.

  The truth is twofold: There are many things about the actions of the Israeli government that are deserving of criticism. On the other hand, some denunciations of the Israeli government are so hyperbolic, so wedded to a notion of Israel as an incarnation of the demonic, that they do constitute antiSemitism. In other words, many negative things can and should be said about Israel’s current policies without the speaker being subjected to charges of anti-Semitism. But when such remarks take on a reckless disregard for the factual, the proportional, or the right of individuals to be assessed on their own merits rather than on the basis of their ethnicity, such rhetoric begins to reek of bigotry.

  For example, arguing that Israel should demolish all settlements in the West Bank and Gaza strip is far from anti-Semitic. Nor is it anti-Semitic to note the objective fact of the extent of Palestinian suffering. To suggest that Israel is an apartheid state, Nazi-like in its policies, intent on genocide or ethnic cleansing, however, is to bury the truth beneath the vilest of epithets. To demonize Israel in this way, to see it as a monster among the nations perpetrating “affronts to humanity,” smacks of a level of hatred beyond the limits of criticism. Perhaps we ought not to call the condemnation of Israelis qua Israelis anti-Semitic, but it is nonetheless a form of fetishistic hatred, one which imputes the demonic to a state and its people such that the reality of the political entity disappears into a symbol of human evil.

  The transformation of a real, complex nation into a scapegoat for the world’s ills constitutes the essence of bigotry. This type of thinking transforms the social conscience into fuel for the smug hysteria of the ignorant and the dogmatic. What I sense in the ideology of Baraka’s apologists is the notion that because Israel’s defenders protest too much when confronted on the merits, any attack on Israel contributes to meaningful dialogue, no matter how scurrilous or devoid of merit. “The stanza on Israel by far doesn’t constitute the main body of the poem. But that is where the attention was shifted, not by Baraka, but by certain members of the audience,” wrote one student poster on the Yale Daily News Web site. “This debate is not about anti-Semitism, it’s not about propaganda. It’s about the Zionist supporters of Israeli occupation on campus refusing to accept any form of criticism of their cause.”

  How, I ask, does saying that the Israelis blew up the World Trade Center criticize the occupation? The underlying assumption seems to be that since American supporters of Israel are uncritical in their support for Israel, that any accusation against Israel is somehow an appropriate response to their intransigence. The hatred of Israel contained in such a sentiment is so virulent that I am at a loss to explain it. As a columnist, there is no empirical means of discovering how a significant number of my fellow students arrive at such extremes of prejudice. I suspect that antipathy to Israel stems from the automatic tendency to sympathize with the perceived underdog in any given conflict. A general aversion to the use of military force may also play a role in shaping campus attitudes toward Israel. Indeed, Adrangi and numerous posters cited Baraka’s nod to the Rosenbergs, Rosa Luxembourg, and victims of the Holocaust in his poem as evidence to refute claims of anti-Semitism. It’s worth noting that the philo-Semitic remarks only get applied to Jews as victims. For Jews who take up arms in their own defense, Baraka seems to have little room for sympathy.

  Perhaps campus anti-Zionists are driven by an analogous impulse, by a distaste for power and the ethical complexities which come with it. If Jews were still powerless, stateless, and passive, perhaps people like Baraka would be as widely loathed at Yale as Ariel Sharon. But since Israel is not a mere collection of helpless victims but a real state with real flaws, capable of both great triumphs and profound injustice, it fails to merit collegiate sympathy. Sometimes I wonder, idly, what it would take to get these students to deal with the accomplishments and moral failings of the state of Israel in an even-handed, thoughtful way. But ultimately the genesis of anti-Zionist fanaticism at Yale is less important than the indisputable fact that such fanaticism exists. Its adherents are no anonymous horde but include friends, professors, and longtime colleagues. For better or for worse, they are my peers, and their bigotry an inextricable component of my Yale education.

  MARK STRAUSS

  Antiglobalism’s Jewish Problem

  THERE IS NO SHORTAGE of symbols representing peace, justice, and economic equality. The dove and the olive branch. The peace sign. The rainbow flag. Even the emblem of the United Nations. So why did some protesters at the 2003 World Social Forum (WSF) in Porto Alegre, Brazil, display the swastika?

  Held two months prior to the U.S.-led attack on Iraq, this year’s conference—an annual grassroots riposte to the well-heeled World Economic Forum in Davos—had the theme “Another World Is Possible.” But the more appropriate theme might have been “Yesterday’s World Is Back.” Marchers among the 20,000 activists from 120 countries carried signs reading NAZIS, YANKEES, AND JEWS: NO MORE CHOSEN PEOPLES! Some wore T-shirts with the Star of David twisted into Nazi swastikas. Members of a Palestinian organization pilloried Jews as the “true fundamentalists who control United States capitalism.” Jewish delegates carrying banners declaring TWO PEOPLES— TWO STATES: PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST were assaulted.

  Porto Alegre provides just one snapshot of an unfolding phenomenon known as the “new anti-Semitism.” Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the oldest hatred has been making a global comeback, culminating in 2002 with the highest number of anti-Semitic attacks in twelve years. Not since Kristallnacht, the Nazi-led pogrom against German Jews in 1938, have so many European synagogues and Jewish schools been desecrated. This new anti-Semitism is a kaleidoscope of old hatreds shattered and rearranged into random patterns at once familiar and strange. It is the medieval image of the “Christ-killing” Jew resurrected on the editorial pages of cosmopolitan European newspapers. It is the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement refusing to put the Star of David on their ambulances. It is Zimbabwe and Malaysia—nations nearly bereft of Jews—warning of an international Jewish conspiracy to control the world’s finances. It is neo-Nazis donning checkered Palestinian kaffiyehs and Palestinians lining up to buy copies of Mein Kampf.

  The last decade had promised a different world. As statues of Lenin fell, synagogues reopened throughout Russia and Eastern Europe. In a decisive 111-to-25 vote, the U.N. General Assembly overturned the 1975 resolution equating Zionism with racism. The leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization shook hands with
the prime minister of Israel. The European Union (EU), mindful of the legacy of the Holocaust and the genocidal Balkan wars, created an independent agency to combat xenophobia and anti-Semitism within its own borders. Confronted with a resurgence in hatred after what had seemed to be an era of extraordinary progress, the Jewish community now finds itself asking: Why now?

  Historically, anti-Semitism has fluctuated with the boom and bust of business cycles. Jews have long been scapegoats during economic downturns, as a small minority with outsized political and financial influence. To some extent, that pattern still applies. Demagogues in countries engulfed by the financial crises of the late 1990s fell back on familiar stereotypes. “Who is to blame?” asked General Albert Makashov of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation following the collapse of the ruble in 1998. “Usury, deceit, corruption, and thievery are flourishing in the country. That is why I call the reformers Yids [ Jews].” But other countries don’t fit this profile. How, for instance, does one explain anti-Semitism’s resurgence in Austria and Great Britain, which have enjoyed some of the lowest unemployment rates in Europe?

  Rising hostility toward Israel is also a significant factor. The 2000 Al-Aqsa Intifada was more violent than its 1987 predecessor, as helicopter gunships and suicide bombers supplanted rubber bullets and stones. This second Intifada also marked the emergence of the Al-Jazeera effect, with satellite television beaming brutal images of the conflict, such as the death of twelve-year-old Palestinian Muhammed al-Dura, into millions of homes worldwide. In Europe, Muslim extremists took out their fury on Jews and Jewish institutions. Some in the European press, even as they dismissed anti-Jewish violence as random hooliganism or a political grudge match between rival ethnic groups, used incendiary imagery that routinely drew comparisons between Israel and the Nazi regime. This crude caricature of Israelis as slaughterers of the innocent soon morphed into the age-old “blood libel”—as when the Italian newspaper La Stampa published a cartoon depicting the infant Jesus threatened by Israeli tanks imploring, “Don’t tell me they want to kill me again.”

  Then came the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The U.S.–Israeli relationship—bound together by shared values, shared enemies such as Iran and Iraq, $2.7 billion a year in economic aid, and a powerful U.S. Jewish lobby—had allegedly brought down the wrath of the Islamic world and dragged the West into a clash of civilizations. This sentiment only deepened with U.S. military action against Iraq, when anti-Semitism bandwagoned on the anti-war movement and rising anti-Americanism. How else to explain a war against a country that had never attacked the United States, it was argued, if not for a cabal of Jewish neocon advisors who had hoodwinked the U.S. president into conquering Iraq to safeguard Israel?

  But another element of the new anti-Semitism is often overlooked: The time frame for this resurgence of judeophobia corresponds with the intensification of international links that took place in the 1990s. “People are losing their compass,” observes Dan Dinar, a historian at Hebrew University. “A worldwide stock market, a new form of money, no borders. Concepts like country, nationality, everything is in doubt. They are looking for the ones who are guilty for this new situation and they find the Jews.” The backlash against globalization unites all elements of the political spectrum through a common cause, and in doing so it sometimes fosters a common enemy—what French Jewish leader Roger Cukierman calls an anti-Semitic “brown-green-red alliance” among ultra-nationalists, the populist green movement, and communism’s fellow travelers. The new anti-Semitism is unique because it seamlessly stitches together the various forms of old anti-Semitism: the far right’s conception of the Jew (a fifth column, loyal only to itself, undermining economic sovereignty and national culture), the far left’s conception of the Jew (capitalists and usurers, controlling the international economic system), and the “blood libel” Jew (murderers and modern-day colonial oppressors).

  FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE WTO

  Jews have always aroused suspicion and contempt as a people apart, stubbornly resisting assimilation and clinging to their own religion, language, rituals, and dietary laws. But modern anti-Semitism made its debut with the emergence of global capitalism in the nineteenth century. When Jews left their urban ghettos and a small but visible number emerged as successful bankers, financiers, and entrepreneurs, they engendered resentment among those who envied their unfathomable success, especially given Jews’ secondary status in society.

  Some left-wing economists, such as French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, depicted Jews as the driving force behind global capitalism. Other socialist thinkers saw their theories corrupted by the racism of the era. In 1887, German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies published his classic work Community and Society, wherein he blamed capitalism for undermining society’s communitarian impulses and creating a merchant class that was “unscrupulous, egoistic and self-willed, treating all human beings as his nearest friends as only means to his ends.” A few years later, German social scientist Werner Sombart took Tönnies’s theories to their next step and meticulously explained how Jews “influenced the outward form of modern capitalism” and “gave expression to its inward spirit.” Sombart’s book The Jews and Economic Life would influence an entire generation of German anti-Semitic authors, including Theodore Fritsch, who was honored by the Nazis as the altmeister (“old master”) of their movement. Anti-Semitism would become the central defining ideology of the Third Reich, the “glue that held Nazism together,” notes historian Robert Katz. “It delivered up the external enemy, ‘international-finance Jewry,’ by which Hitler succeeded in galvanizing and mesmerizing a Germany feeling itself victimized by otherwise less-definable outside forces.”

  Modern-day globalization—the opening of borders to the greater movement of ideas, people, and money—has stirred familiar anxieties about ill-defined “outside forces.” Last June [2002], the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press published a survey conducted in forty-four countries revealing that, although people generally have a favorable view of globalization, sizable majorities of those polled said their “traditional ways of life” are being threatened and agreed with the statement that “our way of life needs to be protected against foreign influence.” And many believe “success is determined by forces outside their personal control.”

  With familiar anxieties come familiar scapegoats. Today’s financial crashes aren’t on the same scale as the economic dislocations of the 1880s and 1930s. But, as the 1997 Asian crisis revealed, in an era of volatile capital flows, damaging financial contagion can sweep through nations in a matter of weeks. Countries in the developing world, who view themselves as victims of globalization, sometimes see conspiratorial undertones. Modern-day resentment against the perceived power of international financial institutions has merged with old mythologies. The nineteenth century had its Rothschilds; the current era has had Lawrence Summers and Robert Rubin at the U.S. Treasury Department, Alan Greenspan at the U.S. Federal Reserve, James Wolfensohn at the World Bank, and Stanley Fischer at the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad once lashed out against “Jews who determine our currency levels, and bring about the collapse of our economy.” The spokesman for the Jamaat-i-Islami political party in Pakistan complained: “Most anything bad that happens, prices going up, whatever, this can usually be attributed to the IMF and the World Bank, which are synonymous with the United States. And who controls the United States? The Jews do.” Economic chaos in Zimbabwe, where a once thriving Jewish community of 8,000 has dwindled to just 650, prompted President Robert Mugabe to deliver a speech declaring that the “Jews in South Africa, working in cahoots with their colleagues here, want our textile and clothing factories to close down.”

  Throughout the Middle East, where economic growth remains stagnant everywhere but Israel, Islamists and secular nationalists alike portray globalization as the latest in a series of U.S.–Zionist plots to subjugate the Arab world under Western economic control and erase it
s cultural borders. A former spokesman for the militant group Hamas warned in the early 1990s that if Arab governments accepted the Jewish state’s existence, “Israel would rule in the region just as Japan dominates Southeast Asia, and all the Arabs will turn into the Jews’ workers.” Mainstream Arab media outlets, such as the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram and the Palestinian newspaper Al-Ayyam, publish columns that praise Osama bin Laden as the “man who says ‘no’ to the domination of globalization,” and which cite “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion”—the infamous nineteenth-century forgery of a purported blueprint for Jewish world domination—as hard evidence of globalization’s true intent.

  In the West, anxiety over globalization provides opportunities for far-right political parties, who exploit the fears of those who see their way of life threatened by migrants from the developing world and who believe their sovereignty is besieged by regional trade pacts and monetary union. Jörg Haider, the head of Austria’s far-right Freedom Party, and Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of France’s National Front Party—who both rode to electoral success on anti-immigrant, anti-Europe platforms—kept their anti-Semitic sentiments under wraps as they campaigned before the media. But other far-right organizations in Europe are not shy about pointing a finger at the “true culprits” behind their countries’ woes. In Italy, the Movimento Fascismo e Libertà identifies globalization as an “instrument in the hands of international Zionism.” In Russia and Eastern Europe, “brown” ultra-nationalists and “red” communist stalwarts have formed an ideological alliance against foreign investors and multinational corporations, identifying Jews as the capitalist carpetbaggers sacking their national heritage.