[Peace] Commentary by Tim Wise, anti-racist activist

[David Green]

ZNet Commentary
Anti-Semitism, Real and Imagined April 30, 2002
By Tim Wise

Watching former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu speak to Congress a few weeks ago, I must
admit, I was almost sucked in. No, not by his
distorted version of reality in the Occupied
territories, nor by his opportunistic and
transparently disingenuous comparisons between Yasir
Arafat and Osama bin Laden.

Nor by his insistence that there is no political
solution to terrorism, but only a military one: a
claim, the absurdity of which is evidenced by the
fact that after decades of trying to bring peace by
way of tanks and guns, most Israelis feel less secure
than ever. (It is also disproved by the fact
that such military actions have themselves amounted to
terrorism, but that's another story for another
column).

However, after only a few minutes of his sales pitch
-- a plea for the U.S. to give the green light to
whatever slaughter is deemed necessary by Israel
in the West Bank -- I did find myself overcome by an
emotion that was both unhealthy and deeply disturbing.

And that feeling was a profound shame and revulsion at
the fact that this man and I share a faith tradition;
a common religious heritage; a kinship of sorts. And
as he spoke -- not only for Israel, but to hear most
American Jewish leaders tell it, for Jews everywhere
-- I felt the pangs of collective guilt rising up in
me in a way I had never felt before.

And that of course was tragic. Who, after all, was
this meshugganah to speak for me? Who appointed him,
or for that matter any Israeli leader, the
"spokesperson of the Jews?"

Who deemed Zionism to be synonymous with Judaism, and
decided that to be Jewish means to support the
evisceration of Palestinian rights, the slaughter of
innocent children under the rubric of stamping out
terrorism, or the IDF's firing on ambulances to ensure
that those wounded by their actions will die slowly,
rather than receive the emergency assistance to
which they are entitled under international law and
all notions of basic human decency? Who was Netanyahu
to make me feel guilty as a Jew?

The answer, unfortunately, to all of these questions,
is that an ironic combination of overt Jew-haters and
pro-Israeli Jews are the ones who have inculcated the
above-mentioned beliefs in so many. Neo-Nazis, for
example, insist that all Jews are Zionists and support
the actions of Israel: a claim that allows them to
weave their hateful narratives of Judeo-inspired evil,
undisturbed by critical thought.

But on the other hand, the blurring of the lines
between Judaism (a religious and cultural tradition
stretching back over five-and-a-half-millennia) and
Zionism (a political and ideological movement
less than a century-and-a-quarter old) has also been
perpetrated by much of the organized Jewish community
itself.

It is this community that has sought to silence Jewish
criticism of Israel and the Zionist enterprise with
cries of "anti-Semitism" or "self-hate." It was the
head of the New Orleans Jewish Federation who, in the
early 1990's, suggested I be removed from my position
in the main anti-David Duke organization because I had
written a column criticizing Israel for its
support of South Africa's apartheid governments.

To the person in question, a criticism of Israel made
me little better than Duke himself: a man who has said
Jews should "go into the ashbin of history," held
birthday parties for Hitler in his home, and called
the
Holocaust "bullshit."

To Zionists and Nazis alike, it is one for all and all
for one so far as the Jewish community is concerned.
To attempt to decouple the concepts of Zionism and
Judaism, or anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, are seen
as lost or ignoble causes by both groups. As one
writer in Commentary recently explained: "To defame
Israel is to defame the Jews."

But it is indeed necessary to decouple these concepts:
to demonstrate that one can oppose Zionism without
prejudice towards Jews as Jews, and also to show that
one's support for Israel doesn't necessarily insulate
oneself from the charge of anti-Semitism.

Indeed, such support often goes hand in hand with a
deep antipathy for Jewish people. Consider the words
of Billy Graham, who has been exposed in a
taped conversation with Richard Nixon exclaiming his
love for Israel while simultaneously ranting about the
"Jewish-controlled media" and their pernicious
behind-the-scenes political machinations.

Indeed, most fundamentalist Christians profess their
love for Israel, all the while propagating the belief
that Jews are destined for a lake of fire unless they
accept Jesus as their personal savior: in other words,
unless they cease to be Jews.

Their Zionism is opportunistic at best: based solely
on the hope that once the Jews return to Israel, the
Messiah will soon follow, damning the Jews to
hell in the process. Their goal of conversion is
itself intrinsically hostile to Judaism, irrespective
of their "love" for the Holy Land: after all, to
convert the Jews to Christianity would be to complete
an act of spiritual genocide; to end Judaism
altogether.

The fact that these fine folks might plant trees in
Israel or say prayers for her survival hardly
compensates for their desire to eradicate Judaism
just as surely as Hitler sought to do so. And yet, few
in the organized Jewish community have condemned Billy
Graham, nor do they speak much at all of the
anti-Semitism so embedded in evangelical Christianity,
as mentioned above. Perhaps they're too busy trying to
garner acceptance from the majority, or being grateful
for their support of Israel to notice.

At the just completed conference of the American
Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the same
persons who criticize anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism
gave a rousing ovation to right-wing Congressman, Tom
Delay. And why?

Because he said that Israel was entitled to the West
Bank, which he called by the Biblical names of Judea
and Samaria. That he also said earlier this month that
Christianity is the "only viable, reasonable,
definitive answer" to life's key questions -- a
statement dripping with contempt for the very
Jews about which he claims to care so much --
apparently matters less to some than his messianic
support for "Eretz Yisrael."

Of course, this all has a certain logic to it. After
all, the early Zionists cared only about acquiring
land, and had no problem with anti-Semitism, per
se--and in the case of Theodore Herzl and Chaim
Weizmann actually claimed to understand and even
sympathize with it. As I have noted previously, it was
Herzl (the father of Zionism) who issued the ultimate
in self-hating, anti-Semitic pabulum when he noted
that anti-Semitism was "an understandable reaction to
Jewish defects."

The continued blurring of the lines between Zionism
and Judaism is of course actually dangerous for the
Jewish community. So long as Zionists insist on
the inherent linkage between the two, it will only
become more and more likely that some critics of
Israel will also blur the lines, transforming a
righteous condemnation of colonialism, racism, and
imperialism, into a condemnation that includes
anti-Jewish bigotry as well.

In recent weeks there have been desecrations of
synagogues and Jewish cemeteries, apparently carried
out in protest of Israel's latest incursions
and depredations, and these have occurred in places as
far flung as Tunisia, France, and Berkeley,
California.

Anti-Semitic propaganda, like the Czarist hoax, The
Protocols of the Elders of Zion -- which professes to
"prove" a Jewish plot for world domination --
is popping up throughout the Arab world, with snippets
of its poison even finding space on otherwise
left-progressive websites like Indymedia.

In the understandable rush to condemn Israeli actions,
at least one pro-Palestinian listserv operated by
ostensible left/progressive radicals, has distributed
one of David Duke's commentaries on the conflict: a
column filled with anti-Jewish invective, which of
course undermines the credibility of the sender and
the righteousness of their insights on the struggle
for Palestine.

To be sure, we who criticize Israel must unequivocally
condemn all such anti-Jewish actions: not only because
they are hateful on their own terms, but because they
help perpetuate the lie told by the government of
Israel and its supporters: that they are the Jews and
the Jews are they.

And this is an idea that both weakens the struggle
against the Occupation -- by making all criticisms of
it suspected of anti-Jewish bias -- and puts the
Jewish community at greater risk, as they (we) become
increasingly seen as Israel Firsters, instead of
people committed to principles of peace, justice, and
fairness: those concepts that I learned in Hebrew
School were paramount to my people.

What's more, tolerating anti-Semitism within the
movement for justice in the Middle East is especially
risky for the very Palestinian people we seek to
defend. The more that anti-Jewish rhetoric and imagery
animates the struggle against Israeli occupation and
brutality, the more that Ariel Sharon can transform
his maniacal drive for power and land into a fight for
survival of the Jewish people.

And the more successful he is in casting the debate in
these terms, the more Israeli Jews and their U.S.
supporters will accede to ever-intensified levels of
violence, ever more death and destruction wrought upon
the victims of Israeli colonialism.

Let it be made clear that Zionism's problem is not
that it is Jewish nationalism, per se, but rather a
form of ethnic supremacy in thought and action. And
more than that: a form of European supremacy to boot.

After all, there were Jews who had remained in and
around Palestine continuously for millennia, without
substantial conflict with their Arab and Muslim
neighbors. Likewise, many Jews lived under Muslim rule
in the Ottoman Empire, where they received a generally
warm reception--far better indeed than the treatment
received from Christian Europe, which expelled them
from one place after another.

These Jews, unlike the European Jews who sought to
displace said Arabs from their land, lived there
peacefully and sought no grand designs for "Greater
Israel." They did not create Zionism, nor lead the
charge for the development of a Jewish state. For
that, it took a decidedly Western, European and
frankly white Jewish community.

The Jews who were most indigenous to the land of
Israel, or those of Africa, or the rest of Asia Minor
-- in short those who were most directly Semitic
peoples -- were never the problem. Nor indeed was
their faith. A decidedly colonial mentality, itself an
outgrowth of European thought and culture from
the late 1800's forward, was the fuel for the Zionist
fire. Zionism's problem is that it is a form of white
supremacy and Western domination.

And like all derivations of white supremacy, it
neglects one of the most obvious ironies of all:
namely, the close genetic relationship between the
dominant and the dominated; the reality that the
oppressor is oppressing family.

As recent research has demonstrated, there is no
significant biological difference between Palestinians
and Jews in the Middle East. Any Jew with Semitic
roots is, in effect, Arab--for whatever that's worth.
All of which is to say that Zionism and its effects,
by virtue of its immiseration of the Palestinians, is
perhaps the most profound and institutionalized form
of
anti-Semitism on the planet today.

Tim Wise is an antiracist essayist, lecturer and
activist. He can be reached
at tjwise at mindspring.com


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