On to Esther

As I was saying, Meryl suggested that I might have a few words to say about this article. Naturally, I do. I have many words, and they probably won’t all fit here. We’ll see.

Esther Kaplan published this essay, called “Antisemitism [sic] After September 11th,” in the Summer 2002 issue of Public Eye Magazine. The magazine is a mouthpiece of Political Research Associates, a “progressive” community organization. On September 19, 2001, PRA issued this statement, urging “caution” in the aftermath of 9/11. Some excerpts:

For all of our 20 years we have been justifiably critical of the behavior of the United States internationally, and we emphasize in this time of crisis the need for the country and the administration to be introspective and to reflect on US foreign policy.

PRA's job at this moment is to analyze the role of the political Right Wing in the Bush administration's response to the attacks. As the approval rating of George W. Bush rises and with it the chorus of nationalistic pro-American rhetoric, we fear blanket support for the administration's actions. We join progressive and peace-loving people around the world in calling for the response to be within the bounds of human rights and international law. We are concerned that in several areas, the aftermath of the attacks will turn this country even further to the right:

. . . . President Bush has appointed a number of men to his administration who are veterans of previous US international wars, both overt and covert, and whose roles in those conflicts were morally questionable. We are concerned that the urgency of this moment will discourage a thorough review of who is conducting the response to these attacks.

With that context and the title of her essay in mind, one might have expected to find a discussion here of the relationship between the terrorist attack on America and the increase in anti-Semitic rhetoric and incidents thereafter. One does, but the discussion is short because Ms. Kaplan concludes early on that, in fact, anti-Semitic activity did not increase (but in fact decreased) in the aftermath of 9/11. Rather, the global increase in anti-Semitism began as a consequence of something quite different.

But there is a critical component in the outbreak of anti-Jewish violence documented in “Les Antifeujs,” as well as in the incidents documented in a similar, global report from the Israel-based Stephen Roth Institute: both tie the upsurge in hate crimes against Jews not to the events of September 11th, but to a date a year earlier —the beginning of the al-Aqsa intifada, and Israel’s brutal response.

That last clause, “Israel’s brutal response” hints at what’s to come. While deploring anti-Semitism in all its manifestations, Ms. Kaplan advises us that it is, indeed, our fault. No punches are pulled here. She tells it like it is. We are guilty of bringing these woes down upon our own heads and here are the reasons.

First and foremost, Jews are guilty of over-identification with Israel and Israel, in turn, is guilty of overplaying its identification with Jews, to our detriment. This scenario plays out as follows: Israel is brutal, its victims and their sympathizers justifiably react to this brutality by attacking Israel; Israel says it represents world Jewry; world Jewry agrees; those attacking Israel understandably expand their attacks to world Jewry.

Next, Zionism is responsible for depriving the Arab populace of interaction with Jews and thus of having the opportunity to see our good side. The only Jews they see now are “Israeli soldiers on the evening news.”

“Mohammed Fadel, a member of the post-9/11 New York City-based organization, Muslims Against Terrorism, and a specialist in Islamic law, says that Egyptians of his father’s generation had Jewish neighbors, colleagues, and schoolmates, and there were Jews in prominent positions in the government—but that’s no longer the case. One of the unintended consequences of Zionism,” Fadel argues, “is that you no longer have a social presence of Jews in the Arab world. And without any kind of reality check in society to limit the tendency of people to view their enemies in the worst possible way, it’s not hard to understand how antisemitic rhetoric can grow and spread.”

Ms. Kaplan doesn’t say whether she believes that all of those Egyptian (and Iraqi, Iranian, Mocorran, etc.) Jews just voluntarily picked up and left their wonderful lives on a whim or whether they were encouraged or in fact expelled as a result of the natural outrage that the very existence of a Jewish State provoked among their Arab neighbors. The evidence proves the latter, of course, but does it really matter? The point is, Zionism is the culprit.

Finally, Israel and its supporters have abused the memory of the Holocaust to justify their own evil deeds. The use of Nazi rhetoric against us is the logical, though unfortunate, result of this abuse.

With Israel using the Holocaust to justify its military aggressions, the temptation has clearly become strong, within the movement against the occupation, to take that moral authority away. . . . “It is precisely because anti-Semitism is used and abused by the likes of Sharon,” writes Naomi Klein, “that the fight against it must be reclaimed.”

Ms. Kaplan concludes by helpfully providing the Jewish community with advice in the form of two “critical challenges” we must meet. It’s unclear what the goal of these challenges might be. First, we must “reject the fear-mongering of pro-Israeli sectors,” emphasize the distinction between “Jews everywhere” and Israel and forcefully challenge “truly” anti-Semitic actions and statements (that sounds like three already, but who’s counting). Second, we must feel and acknowledge the pain that Israel is inflicting on the palestinians, we must deplore the “intensity of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim violence” in the U.S. since 9/11 and we must take solace in the solidarity shown us by Muslims in Europe and here at home (see, we did finally get back to 9/11, sort of). Whew!

Kaplan’s reference to “truly” anti-Semitic acts and statements brings us back to the crux of the argument that I tried to address yesterday. We don’t get a clue as to where she draws the line, but this quote from a “significant leader in the French Jewish community” is illuminating.

When a political solution for the Middle East conflict can be found, and a viable Palestinian state coexists with Israel, then we shall see that the Muslim community in no way cherishes the anti- Semitic hatred that characterized the Fascist movement in France and Europe before 1950.

Is that a fact? According to Ms. Kaplan, “an end to the occupation” can be expected to bring an end to the current surge of anti-Semitism. If not, she consoles, then at least the nature of the attacks on Jews will become “abundantly clear.” Now that gives me a lot of comfort, because we all know that the Muslim community cherished no anti-Semitic hatred prior to Israel’s “occupation” of the territories it won in the Six-Day-War. Before that, we all got along splendidly. Of course this doesn’t jibe too well with her assertion that the very existence of Israel created so much rage back in 1948 that the Arab nations were forced to expel the vast majority of their Jewish populations. In order to reconcile that, you see, we have to acknowledge that the “occupation” that needs to end is the occupation by Jews of one single solitary square inch of territory in the Middle East. That, unfortunately, is the name of the game, and nothing in this essay even begins to suggest otherwise.

But that’s to be expected. Ms. Kaplan has selected a wide variety of “progressive,” anti-Zionist and anti-globalization spokespeople to support her thesis and there’s unlikely to be one among them who would shed many tears if Israel ceased to exist tomorrow. I was particularly impressed, though, by Ms. Kaplan’s choice of Ali Abunimah as her Arab liaison. Mr. Abunimah, who is described as “vice-president of the Chicago-based Arab American Action Network,” comes off in her piece as a champion of the “sounder voices in the Arab and Muslim communities.”

What Ms. Kaplan neglects to mention is Mr. Abunimah’s principal role at an outfit called “Electronic Intifada.” I’ve mentioned this organization before, most recently here and here in connection with Mr. Abunimah’s letter to The Economist in which he tried to assert that the palestinians never claimed there was a “massacre” at Jenin and that news reports to the contrary were part of an Israeli plot intended to damage Arab credibility. So much for “sounder voices.”

Speaking of voices, I hear a small one whispering that this is all fine and good but that I have yet to refute Ms. Kaplan’s point. It’s hard to argue that the vast majority of Jews have tried to distance themselves from Israel or that Israel has tried to distance itself from us. It’s equally hard to refute the accusation that Israelis at times “have wrapped themselves in the language of the Holocaust.” Since Kaplan is starting from the premise that these are bad things, her argument more or less makes itself.

But I’ll argue that far from distancing themselves from each other, Jews and Israel actually need to increase their mutual identification if we’re to weather this storm. I’ll argue that such identification has no bearing on the ability or inclination of Diaspora Jews to criticize Israel and that, in fact, some of the harshest criticism (as opposed to rabid attack) comes from those who feel most identified with Israel, both on the left and on the right. I'll argue that Zionism, far from being the cause of anti-Semitism, was in large part a reaction to it and represented the last best hope of survival for the Jews living in many Arab countries. And I’ll argue that most of those Israelis who have “wrapped themselves in the language of the Holocaust” do so because their deepest reservoirs of pain, grief, despair and loss are still rooted in that event and that experience, and because when they feel threatened they find themselves back there again, in a horror none of us who didn’t share it can begin to comprehend.

But I’ll have to argue all that (and probably more) another day. I’m out of juice for now.