Atlantic Blog:
It's all Sharon's fault
Mark Mazower, a history professor at Birkbeck College London, writes in the Times that European anti-Semitism is Sharon's fault.
There has always been a debate among Jews about the importance of anti-Semitism in Europe, and Zionists for obvious reasons have tended to emphasise the threat it poses. But today Israel itself looks more like a source of danger for Jews worldwide than a refuge, and even Israelis — though the emigration statistics remain a closely guarded official secret — are voting with their feet.
If Sharon is seriously concerned about anti-Semitism, there is no one better placed than he to do something about it by changing his Government’s policies towards the Palestinians.
I don't buy it. What I have seen here in the last decade is a shift from anti-Jew to anti-Israel noise from the same people. I have heard the same people who tell me they would not hire an Israeli hire Russians (notwithstanding Chechnya) and Indians (nothwithstanding the Kashmir dispute) or, closer to home, Northern Irish. In Semites and Anti-Semites, Bernard Lewis wrote in the introduction:
On September 21, 1982, after the first reports of the massacre of Palestinians at Sabra and Shatilla, a group of teachers at one of the major French high schools, the Lycée Voltaire in Paris, declaring themselves to be "outraged by the massacres in the Palestinian camps in Beirut," stopped all courses between 10 A.M. and midday. They drafted two letters, one to the president of the French Republic, demanding the breaking of diplomatic and economic relations with the state of Israel and the official recognition of the PLO; the other to the Israel Embassy in Paris, demanding the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Israeli troops from Beirut and Lebanon. These two letters, with appropriate explanations, were read to the students of the school assembled in the main courtyard. There is no evidence that the teachers of this or other schools had ever been moved to such action by events in Poland or Uganda, Central America or Afghanistan, South Africa or Southeast Asia, or for that matter in the Middle East where the massacre at Sabra and Shatila, with all its horror, lacked neither precedents nor parallels.
But in Mazower's tripe, I found this particularly intriguing.
Recently there has been a remarkable increase in the number of Israelis settling in Germany: so much for anti-Semitism there.
The argument has huge implications. Large numbers of blacks moved from the American south to the north in several waves after the Civil War. So much for the claim that there was racism in the north. The Irish fled to Australia and the Americas in the 1850s. So much for the claim that there was prejudice against the Irish. The Chinese came to America, so obviously there was no prejudice against the Chinese in America. During the apartheid years, there was immigration of black Africans into South Africa. So much for the claim that apartheid hurt blacks.
I know quite a few Israelis, mostly young, in this country, and I have met Israelis who are living in other parts of Europe. They left Israel because their parents are terrified that they will be the next ones blown up on a bus or in a nightclub. In Europe, they run into a lot of fashionable anti-Semitism (from the Israelis I know, apparently Ireland is better than Britain, and way better than France; I don't know any Israelis who have lived in Germany), but however unpleasant or nasty it may be, it is better than being hit with a nail bomb. Andrew Wilkie may be a jerk, an anti-Semite, an obnoxious trendy leftist, a pompous ass, whatever, but he is unlikely to actually shoot a Jew. Tom Paulin may encourage others to shoot Jews, but he is not likely to do it himself
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