Anti-Semitism and its myth of a Jewish conspiracy
Note addressed to the PJP listserv:"Has anyone seen this website before--no war for israel dot com? Someone I met showed it to me, but I hadn't heard of it before. What do you think about the talk of 'Greater Israel' and 'Jewish Supremacism'? Some of the pieces look like they were written by Pat Buchanan."
Critics of the Israeli occupation are so accustomed to being falsely accused of anti-Semitism that we are at risk of ignoring it or explaining it away when it does raise its ugly head in our movement. There are many websites out there that specialize in a mix of good critical information about the Palestine problem and old-fashioned Jew-baiting. The site mentioned above is one.
It would be nice if the world were black and white, if there were no gray areas, and if (to maladroitly paraphrase Shakespeare) the devil could not quote scripture for his own purposes. But that is not the world we live in. Anti-Semitic websites regularly quote left-wing sources like Counterpunch. One such site is actually called "Jew-watch." Conversely, left-wing sites may quote suspect right-wing critics of Israel like Pat Buchanan. Sometimes there is a confusing overlap of polemical vocabulary. Left-wingers may decry "Zionist racism" or the "neo-conservative cabal" in Washington; while rightists denounce "Jewish supremacism" and the "Zionist occupation government".
One way to tell that you are dealing with anti-Semitic material is to look for signs that the criticism goes beyond the subject of Palestine in particular. In the website mentioned above, for example, there is a link to a story that says that "Jewish" Senator Diane Feinstein's husband won a very lucrative army contract.
There may be a conflict of interest issue here, but the Senator's religious heritage is irrelevant. There would be no reason to bring it up, if the website editors did not think it supports their belief that Jews are particular prone to corruption, which is an anti-Semitic stereotype. Feinstein, in fact, is not known as a militarist. Nor is the American Jewish community in general. As Mearsheimer and Walt pointed out in their London Review of Books article on the Israel lobby several months ago, though the majority of American Jews supported the Iraq war, a far greater proportion of them opposed it than did Americans overall.
The cardinal principle is this: Apart from the matter of Zionism and Israel, no one has any legitimate beef with Jews. They are not collectively guilty of anything. They have been unjustly persecuted for centuries. Insofar as the Jewish community in American is wealthy and powerful today, this is a good thing, not a bad thing. It is a result of meritocracy, not privilege. The traditional Jewish veneration for learning has helped them advance in society via higher education. Jewish influence in culture, science, and the arts has enormously benefited our civilization. If many Jews have a blind spot where Israel and Zionism are concerned, this is only human, only to be expected, because of the centuries of suffering they have lived through. Nationalism is a weakness and a source of narrow-mindedness and illusions for every people, not just Jews. What is surprising is not how many Jews are insufficiently critical of Zionism and Israel, but how many are critical. Ethical universalism is more vibrant among Jews than one would have any reason to expect after such a protracted era of conflict and tragedy. And that speaks volumes about the nobility of the Jewish religious and cultural heritage, which still shines bright, even--and perhaps especially--among those who are secular and left-wing.
Activists for Palestine should be aware that anti-Semitic websites and other sources typically have the following features:
To many Palestine activists, conservative critics of Israel are almost always a bit suspect. In Western history, conservatives have tended to see Jews as an alien and disruptive element working to undermine the Christian church and morals by promoting liberalism and the values of the Enlightenment. But for most of us on the left, the main problem with Israel is its treatment of the Palestinians. If we believed that injustice to Black Americans kept conservatives like Buchanan awake at night, we might be more willing to take their criticism of Israel at face-value. Historically, however, we feel we have reason to doubt them.
- They concentrate more on criticizing Jews than on describing the oppression of the Palestinians.
- They spend at least as much time on American Jews as they do on the Israeli government leadership.
- Criticism is not restricted to Palestine, but broadened to cover the Jewish people generally.
- They rarely quote Jewish critics of Israeli government policies (or if they do, they say that so-and-so "admits" such-and-such.) They portray Jewish opinion on Zionism and Israel as monolithic.
- They harp about the "chosen people" concept, which is widely misinterpreted as chauvinistic. They speak as if Zionism were a natural extension of Judaism rather than a radical departure from the Jewish tradition. And they habitually talk about secret cabals and conspiracies.
People interested in researching the history of anti-Semitism would do well to read a book by the British scholar Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion." Modern anti-Semitism arose in the 19th century with the myth that a secret Jewish government, working through Masonic lodges, was plotting to take control of the world. Capitalism and Communism were both said to be part of the same Jewish conspiracy, which was detailed in the famous forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
This document, probably created in Tsarist Russian secret police circles, was supposed to be the minutes of a secret night-time meeting of rabbis in a cemetery in Prague, where they discussed how to control world leaders by burdening them with debt; destroy the foundations of society by breaking up large estates; and ruin the Christian church by promulgating skepticism and free thinking, etc. According to the forgery, Western society, weakened by secret Jewish machinations, would one day fall under total Jewish domination.
As absurd as it was, the myth was accepted by many respectable people around the turn of the last century. Henry Ford, in his book The International Jew, promoted the slander in this country. The Protocols formed the basis of Hitler's ideology as well. The myth had its natural home on the political right, since its main point was that the modernizing reforms that were making Europe more progressive and democratic (land reform, separation of church and state, freedom of speech and of the press, universal suffrage, etc.) were all part of a Jewish plot. But unfortunately, it survived the Holocaust and WWII and is today occasionally spouted in the Muslim world, which in general has far less of a history of anti-Semitism than does Christendom (Hamas, for example, uses the Protocols.)
By understanding the traditional language of anti-Semitic myth, we are better able to identify and distance ourselves from anti-Semitic elements who would like to take advantage of our own movement. We should not be unduly troubled by the fact that anti-Semitic diatribes occasionally have an element of truth. So did the Protocols. It was true, for example, that the Jewish banking family, the Rothschilds, extended credit to major European governments to help fund their military establishments. It is also true that Jews were heavily involved in modern journalism and in left-wing political movements. (For some of us, the latter are especially admirable role models.) But it is not true that there was ever a secret Jewish world government or a world conspiracy.
When considering any conspiracy theory (of which there are all too many on the left), one should recall how difficult it is to get anything done by committee. A conspiracy depends on secrecy for its success. But the more people who would have to be involved in a conspiracy; the more moving parts and temporal phases it has; and the more time it lasts, the greater the risk of a slip-up leading to exposure and collapse. The Watergate conspiracy did not involve huge numbers of people and did not last very long (1970-72), but it was very easily exposed: one of the hotel burglars carried an address book with a White House phone number in it. That's the kind of dumb snafu that regularly takes place in the real world, but it is far removed from the demonological imagination.
If, then, we are asked to believe in a conspiracy that, to work at all, would involve hundreds or thousands of people working in many different countries over a period of decades--if not centuries--we are looking at snake oil. The thing is so inherently unlikely that it is unreasonable to entertain it.
One unfortunate side effect of the way the web has democratized the flow of information is that a lot of tawdry and bigoted nonsense gets to float around in cyberspace. There are websites that will tell you that Jews working in the World Trade Center got a call on Sept. 10, 2001 telling them not to show up for work the next day. But exactly the same claim was made at the time of the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995. Because nothing ever really "dies" on the Internet, it will continue to give life to such baseless, bigoted claims.
But to return to the main points of the note sent to our listserv:
"Jewish supremacism" is a copy-cat coinage derived from "white supremacism." If there were such a thing, it would presumably mean a belief that Jews were entitled to control the world. But apart from a few hardcore fundamentalist settlers, it would be hard to find even the most extreme Zionist who believes that. The problem is not that there are Jews who believe that they are inherently superior to non-Jews and deserve to control them. The problem is that there are Jews and non-Jews who so closely identify with Zionism and the state of Israel that they do not, in practice, treat the Palestinians as human beings. Some people are so heartened by the revival of a Jewish state, after two thousand years of persecution culminating in the Holocaust, that they are blind to the moral costs and complications of the project, as well as its failure to deliver the security and normality it promised to the Jewish people. Many innocent people have had to suffer because of the creation of the state of Israel. Justice has not been done to the Palestinians, and the original injustices they have suffered (in 1917, 1947-8, and 1967) continues today with the occupation, with its settlements, checkpoints, restricted roads, and the Wall. That, in our view, is the problem. Not "Jewish supremacism."
The whole issue of the relationship between anti-Semitism and feelings about Israel can get enormously convoluted. Perhaps many Jews in America and worldwide are strong supporters of Zionism; but many important Jewish intellectual leaders are not (e.g. Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, I.F. Stone (whose views changed over time), Tony Judt, Hannah Arendt, Hans Kohn, Stephen Greenblatt, Judith Butler, et al.) And some of the leading pro-Israel chauvinists have been non-Jews: (Sen. Henry Jackson, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, etc.) Some known anti-Semites are also staunchly pro-Israel (e.g. Richard Nixon, Pat Robertson, Jean-Marie Le Pen, etc.)
Is it true that there were Zionist extremists in the White House who shaped the Bush Administration's policies of invading Iraq and propping up the murderous Ariel Sharon? Yes. But these connections were exposed by, among others, Robert Dreyfuss, a Jewish-American journalist. Douglas Feith, Eliot Abrams, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz et al. represent only one current of opinion in the American Jewish community, and a minority one. Moreover, not even they can be accused of a belief in Jewish racial superiority. A term like "Jewish supremacy" can only obscure the real problem, which is moral insensitivity to the Palestinians, not a Jewish will to power. It is also insulting to the many brave Jews in the U.S., Israel, and elsewhere who dare to criticize Israel and even (increasingly) Zionism itself. Think of the great George Soros, himself a refugee from the Nazis, or Sara Roy, Harvard scholar, the daughter of Holocaust survivors.
C.S. Lewis once said that when the devil temps us, he does so in pairs. In the movement for justice in Palestine, there are two dangers to be avoided. On the one side there are anti-Semites who would distort our compassion for the Palestinians into prejudice against Jews. On the other side are the Zionists who would distort our sympathy and admiration for the Jewish people into uncritical acceptance of Zionism and Israel, and a cavalier and dehumanizing approach to Palestinian suffering. Both sides traffic in moral blindness, obscurantism, and a promotion of an in-group/out-group morality over ethical universalism.
Every person on the planet has value because they are human, not because they are Christian, Jewish, Muslim, white, Black, red, brown, or chartreuse. We've all got to get our minds around that simple concept before it's too late. And, for those of us in the Palestinian rights movement, a lack of awareness--or, worse, tolerance or even promulgation--of anti-Semitism and its myths is destructive of everything we are struggling for.