Desperation Drives Stepped-Up Efforts to Stifle Criticism of Israel as “Anti-Semitic”
By Allan C. Brownfeld
AS CRITICISM OF Israeli policies in the occupied Palestinian territories increases, efforts to stifle such criticism as “anti-Semitic” have taken on what appear to be the characteristics of desperation.
Attempts to discredit former President Jimmy Carter for his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid have become increasingly vehement. The lead article in the February 2007 issue of Commentary, published by the American Jewish Committee, was titled “Our Worst Ex-President.” In examining Carter’s career, author Joshua Muravchik, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, implied that Carter embraced segregation on his way to becoming governor of Georgia and that his criticism of Israel stemmed from the fact that the Carter Center has received contributions from Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries. “Something of the old-fashioned pre-Vatican II Christian animus toward Jews may be at work,” Muravchik argued.
Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) described Carter as “outrageous” and “bigoted,” and accused his book of raising “the old canard and conspiracy theory of Jewish control of the media, Congress, and the U.S. government.”
The charge of “anti-Semitism” is hardly confined to President Carter and other non-Jewish critics of Israel, however. Jews who challenge Israel’s policies—and they are increasing in number—also have been subject to harsh attack.
Last December, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) published on its Web site (<acj.org>) an essay entitled “Progressive Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism,” written by Prof. Alvin H. Rosenfeld of Indiana University. Rosenfeld argues that, through their speaking and writing, Jewish critics of Israel are feeding a rise in virulent anti-Semitism. In his introduction to the essay, AJC executive director David A. Harris comments that, “Perhaps the most surprising—and distressing—feature of this new trend is the very public participation of some Jews in the verbal onslaught against Zionism and the Jewish State.”
The “new” anti-Semitism, then, is not hatred of Jews or Judaism, but instead criticism of Israel. Professor Rosenfeld’s essay spends a good deal of time highlighting examples of the “old” anti-Semitism in the contemporary world, such as the success of a Turkish translation of Mein Kampf, distribution of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and post-9/11 conspiracy theories, expressed in such books as The Jewish Role in the 9/11 Destruction of the World Trade Centre. Rosenfeld also cites a rising number of anti-Jewish acts in various Western European countries. Needless to say, all men and women of good will are concerned about manifestations of anti-Semitic attitudes. But Rosenfeld then proceeds to take the leap of associating Jewish criticism of Israeli policies and actions with this allegedly “new” anti-Semitism.
Among those he criticizes in this category are Prof. Jacqueline Rose, author of The Question of Zion, New York University Prof. Tony Judt, playwright Tony Kushner, poet Adrienne Rich, Prof. Daniel Boyarin of the University of California at Berkeley, Prof. Noam Chomsky of M.I.T. and a host of others.
It is not only such Jews in the U.S., Britain and elsewhere who are guilty of fomenting this “new” anti-Semitism, in Rosenfeld’s view, but Israelis as well. According to Rosenfeld: “To the dismay of many, Israel itself has provided a disturbingly large number of writers, scholars, journalists and others to feed this poisonous stream. One such was the philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who felt no reservations in talking about the ‘Nazification’ of Israeli society and was fond of using the epithet ‘Judeo-Nazi’ in referring to the Israeli army. And Leibowitz was hardly alone in employing such corrosive language. It is a sad but familiar fact that some of Israel’s most passionate defamers live within the borders of the state and have judged it guilty of ‘racism,’ ‘fascism,’ ‘apartheid,’ ‘ethnic cleansing,’ ‘’genocide’—vilification drawn from the same devil thesaurus of anti-Zionist derisions and excoriations that the Jewish state’s harshest enemies regularly dip into when leveling their own attacks.”
Despite the growth of efforts to isolate Israel’s critics as “anti-Semites,” it seems clear that those who promote such views represent only a narrow—and ever-shrinking—segment of the American Jewish community. Those speaking out to oppose this tactic are growing in number—and prominence.
Daring to Speak Out
Yossi Beilin, a member of the Knesset and chairman of Israel’s Meretz-Yahad party, wrote an article entitled “Carter Is No More Critical of Israel Than Israelis Themselves,” which appeared on the front page of The Forward’s Jan. 19, 2007 issue. “What Carter says in his book about the Israeli occupation and our treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories—and perhaps no less important, how he says it—is entirely harmonious with the kind of criticism that Israelis themselves voice about their own country,” Beilin pointed out. “There is nothing in the criticism that Carter has for Israel that has not been said by Israelis themselves…If we are to read Carter’s book for what it is, I think we would find in it an impassioned personal narrative of an American former president who is reflecting on the direction in which Israel and Palestine may be going if they fail to reach agreement soon…Somewhere down the line…the destructive nature of occupation will turn Israel into a pariah state, not unlike South Africa under apartheid…Carter’s choice is clearly peace, and, for all its disquieting language, the book he has written is sustained by the hope that we choose peace as well.”
Reviewing Carter’s book in The Nation of Jan. 22, 2007, Henry Siegman, a former national director of the American Jewish Congress and now director of US/Middle East Project, declared: “The reason for the controversy was the book’s title more than its content, for it seemed to suggest that the avatar of democracy in the Middle East may be on its way to creating a political order that resembles South Africa’s apartheid model of discrimination and repression, albeit on ethnic-religious rather than racial grounds…Not the least of the ironies of the controversy…[is that] there appear in virtually all major Israeli newspapers and in its other media far more extreme criticism of the policies of various Israeli governments than one finds anywhere in the U.S. Most of Israel’s adversarial editorializing would not be accepted in the op-ed pages of America’s leading newspapers.”
In Siegman’s view, outspoken national Jewish organizations have “never been an accurate barometer of the political thinking or behavior of American Jews…To be sure, the overwhelming majority of American Jews care deeply about Israel’s security and well-being. But that concern does not translate for most of them into mindless support for the policies of Israeli governments that seem to undermine Israel’s security…Accusations…that Carter is indifferent to Israel’s security only proves that no good deed goes unpunished. Arguably the single most important contribution to Israel’s security by far was the removal of Egypt—possessing the most powerful military forces in the Arab world—from the Arab axis that was intent on the destruction of the State of Israel in its early years…The magnitude of that accomplishment places the pettiness of the critics of President Carter and his latest book in proper perspective.”
Responding to Rosenfeld’s AJC essay linking Jewish critics of Israel with the allegedly “new” anti-Semitism, Tony Judt, one of the author’s targets, said he believed the real purpose was to stifle harsh criticism of Israel. “The link between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is newly created,” Judt stated, adding that he feared “the two will have become so conflated in the minds of the world “ that references to anti-Semitism and the Holocaust will come to be seen as “just a political defense of Israeli policy.”
The “new” anti-Semitism is not hatred of Jews or Judaism, but criticism of Israel.
“Does Abe Foxman Have An Anti-Semitism Problem?” asked the lead article in the Jan. 14, 2007 issue of The New York Times Magazine. Discussing the ADL director’s tendency to label as “anti-Semitic” all who challenge his own narrow agenda with regard to Israel and the Middle East, author James Traub began his article as follows: “In certain precincts of the Jewish community, a person who insists that the sky is falling, despite ample evidence to the contrary, is said to gevaltize—a neologism derived from the famous Yiddish cry of shock or alarm [oy gevalt!]. The word is sometimes applied to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, known as AIPAC, the hard-line and notoriously successful pro-Israel lobby. But in the world of Jewish leaders, one man stands alone in the annals of gevalthood—Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League and scourge of anti-Semitism of high estate and low, in Hollywood and Tehran, on campus and in the tabloids.”
A Stupefying Claim
In his most recent book—Never Again?—Foxman makes what Traub described as “the stupefyingly counterintuitive claim that high rates of Jewish assimilation are a reaction to discriminatory treatment, rather than a proof of the opposite. ‘One out of three people in these United States believes that the Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the U.S.’ he growled. ‘That’s a classic anti-Semitic canard.’ And yet a Pew Global Attitudes Poll in 2004 found that anti-Semitism had declined in much of the West and was lowest in the United States. A Pew poll last year found American support for Israel as strong now as at any time in the last l3 years.…
“Fox is an anachronism,” Traub concluded. “The demographic of which he is a member—Holocaust survivor—is rapidly disappearing. Young people don’t know quite what to make of him. In a recent column in The Jewish Journal, David A. Lehrer, formerly the head of the ADL’s Los Angeles office, observed that Jews are now the most widely admired religious group in America, as well as the most successful, and lamented that Jewish leaders—Foxman specifically—continue to harp on Jewish ‘insecurity’ and the threat of anti-Semitism. Lehrer says that when he raised his view that the ADL has to learn to speak to this new, confident but less affiliated generation of Jews, Foxman dismissed it out of hand. The generational question does not interest him. “It’s not my job to judge whether they should feel beleaguered or not,’ Foxman snapped…. ‘I do feel. And I’ve got news for you: Every one of them, in their maturing process, will experience this.”
In an article in the Jan. 26, 2007 Forward entitled “Not All Critics Are Our Enemies,” Leonard Fein, a long-time leader in Reform Judaism, wrote: “Most American Jews have never, not ever, personally experienced anti-Semitism. No matter. Public opinion surveys may show—and they do—that we are America’s most admired community, but surveys of American Jews show that we believe anti-Semitism is a serious problem and is likely to get worse in the years ahead. Our sense of self as a once and future victim people is deeply ingrained, reinforced by current events and by major Jewish organizations that appeal to our sense of vulnerability in order to raise funds, thereby affirming our self-image…The way to deal with both enemies and critics is to begin to see ourselves as who we are—a newly empowered, but hardly omnipotent, people in Israel and in America, that is not crippled by its yesterdays and those among us who would manipulate them. Iran is Iran, not Germany; this is 2007, not 1938; the lessons of the past must not become a trap.”
The voices condemning the Jewish establishment’s attempt to stifle criticism of Israel as “anti-Semitism” represent a positive sign—one which, hopefully, will lead to free and open debate of Middle East policy. Such a debate has been needed for too long.
Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism. |
