UNDERSTANDING THE WEAPONIZATION OF ANTISEMITISM
By
ALLAN C. BROWNFELD
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The
world used to understand the meaning of the term antisemitism. In
recent years, however, there has been an effort to redefine it to
include not simply contempt for Jews and Judaism, but criticism of
Israel and Zionism as well. Recently, Jason Greenblatt, CEO of the
Anti-Defamation League (ADL) declared that, “Anti-Zionism is
antisemitism.” He argued that groups calling for equal rights for
Palestinians in Israel are “extremists” and equated liberal critics of
Israel with white supremacists. Included in this number were groups
such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which have
characterized Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as “apartheid.”
For
many years, Israel has used the term “antisemitism” to characterize its
critics, including its many Jewish critics. Some Israelis admit that
this is a tactic to silence criticism. Shulamit Aloni, a former
Minister of Education and a winner of the Israel Prize, describes how
this works: “It’s a trick. We always use it. When from Europe,
somebody criticizes Israel, we bring up the Holocaust. When, in the
United States, people are critical of Israel, then they are
antisemitic.”
In an
important new book, “Whatever Happened To Antisemitism?,” all of this is
examined by Antony Lerman , A British specialist on Jewish affairs, who
has served as director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research and a
founding member of the Jewish Forum for Justice and Human Rights, he is
now Senior Fellow at the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue
in Vienna.
At the core
of what has been characterized as the “new antisemitism,” Lerman points
out, “is the claim that Israel is the persecuted ‘collective Jew among
the nations.’ In other words, it is argued, that the classic or
pre-Israel antisemitism was hatred, discrimination, ostracization from
society and ultimately mass murder directed at Jews. Since the
establishment of the Jewish state, antisemitism has taken the form of
hatred , discrimination, ostracization from the community of nations
and, ultimately, plans for the destruction of Israel.”
Examples
of this, Lerman shows, are said to be the Boycott, Divestment and
Sanctions (BDS) movement, accusations that Israel as a Jewish state is a
racist endeavor, proposing that the entire area of what was Mandate
Palestine should become one single democratic secular state, charging
Israel with the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homes in the
1948 war and subsequent wars and singling out Israel for criticism in a
manner that would never apply to other states.
It
is Lerman’s view that referring to Israel as, somehow, the “collective
Jew” is without any basis in reality: “…a state cannot have the
attributes of a human being. Second, it is a heretical corruption of
Judaism because it entails an idolatrous deification and worship of the
state. Third, it is an antisemitic construct because it treats being
Jewish as a singular: ‘all Jews are the same.’”
Israeli
historian Neve Gordon notes that, “The Israeli government needs the
‘new antisemitism’ to justify its actions and to protect it from
international and domestic condemnation. Antisemitism is effectively
weaponized, not only to stifle free speech…but also to suppress a
politics of liberation.”
It
saddens Lerman that the “new antisemitism” is “predicated on the notion
that the state can do no wrong.” But, he points out, “…the deification
of the Jewish state is a heresy, tantamount to idolatry. This does not
seem to disturb religious Jews who increasingly see the state doing
God’s work by ‘repossessing’ the ‘land of Israel,’ working to formally
annex the West Bank, denying equal rights to Palestinians and making
them strangers in their own land in order to secure a Jewish majority
in perpetuity and hasten the coming of the Messiah.”
For
Lerman, “…this fetishization of the state is a corruption of Judaism.”
Beyond this, the tactic of using the term “antisemitism” as a weapon
against dissenters from Israeli policies is not new. Dorothy Thompson,
the distinguished American journalist, is an early example. She
interviewed Hitler and became the first American journalist expelled
from Nazi Germany and became one of the earliest and most vocal enemies
of Nazism and its persecution of Jews. Later, she became critical of
Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Despite her valiant crusade against
Hitler, she, too, was subject to the charge of antisemitism.
A
list of those who have been falsely been accused of antisemitism
because of their criticism of Israel would be a long one. In 2014,
Jerusalem Post columnist Caroline Glick declared that John Kerry is
“antisemitic.” At the same time, Moti Yegev, a Knesset member in the
governing coalition, said that Kerry’s efforts at achieving a peace
agreement between Israelis and Palestinians had “an undertone of
antisemitism.” Writing in the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot, Cameron
Kerry, brother of the then-Secretary of State and formerly general
counsel of the U.S. Department of Commerce, declared that charges of
“antisemitism” against his brother “would be ridiculous if they were not
so vile.” Cameron Kerry, a convert to Judaism, recalled relatives who
died in the Holocaust. The Kerry paternal grandparents were Jewish.
Professor
David Feldman, director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of
Antisemitism at London University, began a lecture on “The Meaning of
Antisemitism” saying: “The starting point…is our present confusion over
what antisemitism is…When it comes to antisemitism many of us literally
don’t know what we’re talking about…And as for the rest of us, who
think we do know what antisemitism is, we are congenitally unable to
agree among ourselves.”
In
his thoughtful and thoroughly documented book, Antony Lerman examines a
30-year process of redefining the meaning of the term antisemitism and
redefining the phenomenon by casting Israel as the persecuted
“collective Jew” and the main victim of antisemitism.
Rebecca
Vilkomerson, former executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace, says
that, “We desperately need this book… An essential tool to understand
the weaponization of antisemitism and its dangerous impact on free
speech, Palestinian rights, and the very real threat of actual
antisemitism.”
The
consequences of this redefinition of antisemitism are alarming. They
include suppressing free speech on Israel/Palestine and making Jews
more, not less, vulnerable. It also ignores the long history of Jewish
opposition to Zionism, an opposition which is growing at the present
time. More and more Jews are expressing the view that is sad to see
Israel, which proclaims itself a “Jewish” state, turning its back on
Jewish moral and ethical values in its treatment of Palestinians.
Beyond this, for Jews, who have suffered persecution in so many times
and places, to inflict suffering on others is difficult to understand or
reconcile.
Even before
Israel’s creation, many thoughtful Jews were concerned about where
Zionism would lead. In 1938, alluding to Nazism, Albert Einstein warned
an audience of Zionist activists against the temptation to create a
state imbued with “a narrow nationalism within our own ranks against
which we have already had to fight strongly even without a Jewish
state.” The philosopher Martin Buber spoke out in 1942 against “aim of
the minority to ‘conquer’ territory by means of international
maneuvers.” From Jerusalem in the midst of the hostilities that broke
out after Israel unilaterally declared independence in May 1948, Buber
cried with despair, “This sort of ‘Zionism’ blasphemes the name of Zion;
it is nothing more than one of the crude forms of nationalism.”
Many
Jews, in Israel and around the world, are slowly beginning to confront
this reality. Professor David Shulman of the Hebrew University in
Jerusalem laments that, “No matter how we look at it, unless our minds
have been poisoned by the ideologies of the religious right, the
occupation in a crime. It is first of all based on the permanent
disenfranchisement of a huge population…In the end, it is the ongoing
moral failure of the country as a whole that is most consequential, most
dangerous, most consequential, most unacceptable. This failure weighs
heavily upon our humanity. We are, so we claim, the children of the
prophets. Once, they say, we were slaves in Egypt. We know all that
can be known about slavery, suffering, prejudice, ghettos, hate,
expulsion, exile. I find it astonishing that we, of all people, have
reinvented apartheid in the West Bank.”
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Allan
C. Brownfeld is a nationally syndicated columnist and is editor of
ISSUES, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism. (
www.acjna.org)