(Author: Chuck Volpe, Vol. 66, #3, Chanukah 2011)
Introduction
The political Left is a broad church, so it follows that any discussion of its views and tendencies apply to some of its constituent groups and not to others. The groups to which I will be referring are those on the political Left who, in their support for the Palestinian cause, seek to delegitimise Israel. While they represent a mere sub-group of the Left, they are nevertheless a product of its history, its thought processes, and in particular, its quasi-religious utopian sentiments.
My argument in this paper will follow a fairly circuitous route, beginning with utopian thinking and its dangers and how these unfold in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I will touch on the contradictions inherent in Leftist policy today and on why the Jewish anti-Zionist contributes, sometimes unwittingly, to the campaign to delegitimise Israel. Finally, I will suggest that Jewish history provides the one reliable guide to the future. Throughout I will use this terms Left, Liberal Left, and Leftist interchangeably.
Contradictions
While their roots lie in conceptions of social democracy and justice, it is evident that for some time the political Left have been in the grip of an identity crisis. During the Cold War, they never seemed to know whose side they were on and now that it is over, they are once again identifying with causes which seem directly opposed to their core values and principles. This is especially evident in their support for Hamas and Hezbollah, two openly totalitarian movements with blatantly antisemitic programmes. In fact, they go beyond just playing the role of fellow-traveller in the manner of those who once supported the Soviet Union; they actively pursue a programme to delegitimise the Jewish state in the West by means similar to those used to delegitimise Jews in the 1930s. It takes only a short excursion into socialist history to reveal that the contradictions inherent in the present-day Leftist position have their precedents in earlier times.
The Left are the heirs to the socialist tradition, whose values probably go back to Moses, but which in more recent times were forged in the French Revolution and developed to maturity by Marx, Lenin and others. For 200 years, the socialist idea was the focus of man’s brightest hopes and the inspiration to large segments of mankind. Its promise was an imagined “brotherhood of man” that would bring about an end to human strife and give Man the freedom to become his perfect natural self.
In the end, all these hopes came to nothing and left in their wake a trail of destruction so great it is almost impossible to measure: in the Soviet Union and Communist China alone, one hundred million dead and millions more buried in despondency and poverty. In the process, whole cultures were desecrated, civilisations destroyed and generations deprived of the barest essentials of a tolerable life.
One might imagine that such wretched failure would have consigned the socialist dream directly to the dustbin of history, but this is not the case. Despite all the evidence of failure after failure, there is still no shortage of recruits willing to man the barricades in support of this elusive utopia. Today, these groups include trade unionists, pacifists, Christian humanitarians, anti-globalists, anti-capitalists, human rights activists, gay and lesbian groups, environmentalists, sections of the Leftist press, humanities departments in academia, and other groups calling themselves ‘progressive’.
Even if it were the case that the majority in these groups had never studied socialist history, they still could not plead ignorance of its disastrous outcomes, for this is widely known. Furthermore, it is clear that the socialist idea – that the end justifies the means or the future promise justifies present sacrifice – has for too long functioned as a blank check for appalling violence and injustice. Even if the original intentions of the movement may have been just and noble, historical hindsight imposes on us a moral obligation to condemn the socialist project, not only in its outcome but in its conception as well. One wonders whether it is the Left’s wish to sidestep this obligation that has resulted in its present warped thinking and self deception.
An example of such thinking was evident when Leftists in Europe marched alongside Islamists in Gaza in support of Hamas during Operation Cast Lead. Banners reading “Gays and lesbians for a free Palestine” and “Pacifists for Peace” were seen alongside banners showing the Star of David intertwined with the swastika. Now we all know that Hamas is the elected government of the Palestinians and we also know that human rights are not their strong suit, especially when it comes to the rights of women and gays. In addition to being impeccable religious bigots, their well-publicised Charter enjoins them to re-establish the Islamic caliphate by violent means.
The question is: How can Liberal Leftists who in the past campaigned for the rights of women, homosexuals and ethnic minorities and promoted secularism and pacifism, make common cause with theocratic fascists? How gays and lesbians explain this to themselves is a mystery.
Furthermore, by pointing out human rights abuses committed by Israel while overlooking far more egregious abuses committed by Hamas and the Palestinians, the Left display a double standard which immediately raises a question mark alongside their commitment to justice and other social values. They have only to consult the Freedom House 2010 report – a report which rates human rights abuses around the world – to see that Israel is the only country in the Middle East deemed to be free and that quite a number of Arab countries appear on the Freedom House ‘Worst of the Worst’ list.
How have the Left got themselves into this mess?
Hope – a double edged sword
If anyone believes that human beings can’t act irrationally, not just individually but collectively, they should read Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay. Mackay lists some of the most extraordinary instances of mass lunacy in history; for instance, the tulip craze in Holland in the 17th Century, when a rush on tulips pushed the price higher than gold; and the South Sea Bubble, when investors managed to convince themselves they were going to make hundreds of millions and in the end lost everything. The tale of Shabtai Tzvi, the Jewish false messiah, is another extraordinary example of this. When people’s beliefs become entangled with their hopes they end up behaving irrationally.
The pivotal emotion here is hope which, in a world where many people “lead lives of quiet desperation”, can be a good thing for sustains and consoles through times of hardship and doubt. But if we look more closely, we find that hope is a double edged sword, which if not regulated by at least a small dose of reality, leads to self-delusion and worse; and as history has emphatically shown, when false hope becomes the foundation of a utopian political programme, it systematically leads to disaster.
The unscrupulous optimist
If we examine how hope manifests itself in the human heart, we find that it divides people into two types: optimists and pessimists. An optimist is someone who hopes for the best, a pessimist someone who expects the worst (one could say he has a deficit of hope). But this is rough carpentry; for our purposes, we need to draw finer distinctions. In his book The Uses of Pessimism, Roger Scruton distinguishes between two different kinds of optimist – the scrupulous optimist and the unscrupulous optimist.
The scrupulous optimist is a ‘realist’. He is upbeat but at the same time understands the world and is not under any illusions about the way it works. His optimism is not based on dreams but on what he knows and understands. He thinks carefully before he acts and he plans with care. He recognises that his knowledge has limits and so does not generalise it to people, communities and cultures he does not understand.
Furthermore, the scrupulous optimist accepts that the world is a complex place and recognises that it cannot be improved by quick-fixes and grand plans; rather he believes in “small-scale work on the ground”. When making his plans, he hopes for the best (best-case scenario) but at the same time takes into account the possibility of a bad outcome (worst-case scenario). One can say he tempers his optimism with a small dose of pessimism. The scrupulous optimist always considers the possibility of failure and holds himself accountable if this happens. Most importantly, he takes responsibility for his actions and never transfers the cost of failure to others.
As parents, we do our best to bring our children up to become scrupulous optimists. We instil in them an understanding of what it is to live a life in a world that is and will always be, imperfect. We teach them that while life has its difficulties, these can be managed by careful thinking and prudent action. We teach them that they are no shortcuts, easy fixes and blanket solutions. We teach them to be responsive to the facts on the ground and to adjust their plans accordingly if they don’t work out at first. Most importantly, we teach them to take responsibility when they fail and not to pass the cost of failure on to others. If we succeed, our children will be well-balanced individuals and useful members of society.
On the other hand, the unscrupulous optimist is a utopian. He too is upbeat but he is not particularly interested in the world and how it works. He relies instead on a utopian vision which, like a template, he superimposes upon the world in order to interpret it. His optimism is based on an ideology, not on ‘the facts on the ground’, and his actions consist in the single-minded implementation of this. He regards his ideology as universal and has no qualms in applying it to everyone, including communities and cultures very different from his own. Conveniently, this spares him the painstaking task of pondering the detail and complexity of the real world.
The unscrupulous optimist sees the world as simple and straightforward. When he looks at it, he sees only the confirmation of his own beliefs. He does not see the “facts on the ground”, or if he does, disregards them as irrelevant or of small importance. He is so focused on the successful outcome of his plans (best-case scenario) that he never considers the possibility that his plans may fail (worst-case scenario). When they do fail, he does not hold himself responsible and simply transfers the cost of his failure to others.
In his classic work The True Believer, Eric Hoffer speaks of the unscrupulous optimist and his difficulty in dealing with the real world’s complexity. According to Hoffer, this leads him to become estranged or alienated from both himself and his group, an alienation to which he himself is completely blind. This alienation is the spark that sets off the utopian journey in which he fantasises about building a perfect world – a utopia – where he will finally fit in.
Utopias
‘Utopia’ is defined as a place or state of ideal perfection. In the political context, it is an idealistic scheme to bring about political and social perfection. The original utopias were religious and generally took the form of a “life after death” or a “messianic age”, but from the mid-19th Century we begin to see the rise of secular conceptions of utopia. The best-known of these is Marxism, first outlined by Karl Marx in The Communist
Manifesto. It is important to note that even secular utopias are essentially religious at heart and like religions constitute a ‘faith’ – a compelling and all-encompassing view of what the world could and should be.
Leszek Kolakowski, the Polish philosopher and historian of ideas, described Marxism as a post-religious messianic faith. Its key texts are derived from the traditional Judeo-Christian eschatologies, that is, there is the Fall from an idyllic communal state, a journey through a vale of suffering and tears, and finally, through adherence to the doctrine of the Faith, a social redemption. Bearing in mind that Marx came from a long line of rabbis, his vision, which included the golden chain of Jewish values from Abraham through to the Hebrew prophets, was a factor in persuading many Jews that this was the new way of tikkun olam, “healing the world”.
An essential difference between religious and secular utopias is that the former utopias draw a clear distinction between the sacred and the profane; final judgement is left to God and it is God who damns, forgives, and redeems. But in secular utopias, the judging is done by human beings, a task which is, given the weaknesses that flesh is heir to, beyond that which one can reasonably expect from the species; the result is that these utopias leave behind them a long trail of blood.
Such an instance is Marxism – first realised in practice in the Soviet Union – a utopian vision which succeeded in motivating millions of people to throw themselves lemming-like into a project to change the world. By the time it crashed seventy years later, 60 million people had died and Russia as a state was virtually destroyed. Some say it will never recover. And this is not the only instance. The socialist idea played itself out in many other countries – Cambodia, China, the countries of Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, and in each case it ended in disaster.
Western guilt and the religion of the Left
Notwithstanding this dismal record utopian Leftists continue their crusade – a community of faith “sentenced to hope”, to quote the Syrian playwright Saadallah Wannous. They have constructed around their agenda a sacred framework with themselves at the centre. Like many religions, they hold a Manichaean worldview, i.e., they see the world in binary terms as a world divided between the forces of light and the forces of darkness – between good and evil. On the good side are the former victims of colonialism – the Arab states and the Third World – which are innocent and forever deserving of recompense. On the bad side are the ex-colonial powers, the Liberal democracies, and in particular, the United States and Israel. They are the forces of evil that have committed and continued to commit all the sins of the world.
Western guilt for the evils of colonialism is axiomatic and can never be erased. Pascale Bruckner and Bernard Henri Levy have described this Western liberal guilt as a form of masochism or self-hatred, tyrannical in its intensity, which takes the form of a quasi-religious version of original sin based on the belief that Western power is at its roots malevolent.
The Left have taken it upon themselves to do penance on behalf of the West. They have designated themselves the high priests of this new religion, in the service of which, they cultivate a sensitivity which manifests as a readiness to shoulder the blame and assume responsibility for all the ills of the Third World. The French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut has called the Left’s appetite for guilt ‘penitential narcissism’.
He draws a distinction between the acknowledgement of historical injustice, which is a moral and rational duty, and the Lefts twisted emotional reflex of taking responsibility for all the world’s ills.
Let me illustrate this by way of an example: Let’s assume that terrorists blow up the Old Trafford football stadium in the middle of a game, killing and maiming tens of thousands of people. The first response from the sensitive folk on the Left would be to urge us to blame ourselves. The logic is as follows: because we were attacked, we must be guilty; and in any case, we are reaping the reward for our past colonial sins, our arrogance, and our great wealth relative to the poverty of the Third World, and so forth. And then, by way of a perfectly circular argument, it follows, that if we judge ourselves to be sinful, our attackers must be righteous. So great is the panic to explain these atrocities when they happen that the terrorist does not even need to open his mouth; the broadminded and thoughtful Liberal does it for him.
Another consequence of colonial guilt is that the West is now disqualified from even judging the policies and practices of the Third World. We have the right only to remain silent. Our advice is no longer required nor can we play a part in the affairs of our time. The liturgy of this religion is written in the language of political correctness, which is enforced no differently from blasphemy. Only by signing on to this can we be redeemed. So, the West is divided into two: Old Europe, with its Leftist opinion-makers in the press and academia, accepts this view and is the good West; the United States, that doesn’t, and which continues to intervene and meddle in everything, is the bad West. There is a convenient adjunct to this: Europe, by standing in opposition to the United States and Israel, simultaneously obtains relief from the sin of colonialism by blaming the United States and from the crime of the Shoah by blaming Israel.
Of course, for the Liberal Left, this stance is not without its rewards: by posing as an army of saints on the march against injustice they are made to feel good about themselves and their commitment to this righteous cause adds excitement and meaning to what otherwise would be modest and rather ordinary lives.
The last utopia
I now come to the last utopia of the Liberal Left – human rights. To understand how human rights function in the hands of the Left today, we have to start with a short history. Contrary to popular opinion, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed by the United Nations on 10 December 1948, while motivated by the Holocaust, was not its direct result. The fact that the Declaration did not focus primarily on genocide prevention is proof of this. Had it done so, then dayenu – it would have been sufficient for more than anything else the Holocaust dismembered the very idea of a shared humanity. Genocide prevention only became a focus of the human rights agenda in the late 1970s with the revelation of the Cambodian genocide and then again in the mid-1990s, when “ethnic cleansing” took place on the European continent.
When the Declaration was proclaimed, it was subject to two major forces. First, it focused on national liberation from colonialism – something entirely different from individual rights. Ho Chi Minh made the point when he interpreted the statement from the American Declaration of Independence that all men have “inalienable rights to mean that all peoples have them. What mattered was collective liberation from empire not individual rights enshrined in international law. Second, the Declaration was seen as a replacement for the failed socialist utopias which had now begun to collapse.
Nevertheless human rights first emerged as a minimalist programme with the limited mission of monitoring the behaviour of nation-states. Unlike its former utopian cousins, it was intended to transcend politics and take a neutral stance between competing political visions. Furthermore, it was launched with the intention of not being divisive in the manner which had brought on the terrible wars of the previous century. All in all it was an inspiring vision.
Henry Steiner, the head of the Harvard Law School human rights program, had cautioned the movement at an early stage that it needed to distinguish carefully between two different missions – between human rights as catastrophe prevention and human rights as utopian politics. Preventing catastrophe through minimalist ethical norms was entirely different from building a utopia through a maximalist political vision. One represented a global morality of human rights; the other, a political programme which, like all utopian programmes, was practically unachievable and inevitably divisive. While the minimalist role seeks ways to prevent a clash of competing political visions, the maximalist role becomes one competing vision amongst many.
If we look at how human rights are applied in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it is evident that it is applied in exactly the maximalist sense against which Steiner had warned. It constitutes a political programme in which the complexity of the conflict is reduced to a single-issue – human rights. In the manner of all utopians, so-called human rights activists apply their idealistic template blindly, studiously ignoring the politics, sociology, culture, and history of the region. They are blithely indifferent to outcomes, even when the worst-case scenario is not just a possibility but a probability; and they act recklessly, as only those who do not have to bear the cost of failure can do.
This near-total lack of interest in the facts on the ground combined with a profound reservoir of poise strongly suggests pathological utopianism. The faith in the redeeming power of human rights is so powerful that nothing else matters. Attempts to call it proponents to account are futile for they will not be convinced by anything as gentle as an argument; their pious virtue runs amok; it precedes reason – the errors in logic, history, theology, and politics, come later.
The Leftist- Islamist alliance
Let us return to the contradiction we spoke of
the earlier: How can the ostensible defenders of Western liberal values align themselves with Islamist fundamentalists? To understand this, we have to start with the West’s victory in the Cold War at the beginning of the 1990s. Since then, the Left has had an almost non-existent role in mainstream politics, even if they have managed to retain their influence in academia, the trade unions, in certain sections of the press and in the anti-globalisation movement. It seemed as if history had come to an end for them. Communism was gone, the Western proletariat had been written off as a lost cause, and most Third World liberation movements had either been defeated or were now in government and, horror of horrors, were themselves embracing capitalism (even the ANC).
Then, out of the blue, they saw an opportunity to revive their fortunes. A partner arose who shared their vision of a crusade against the nexus of evils led by America, and that partner was militant Islam. For Leftists, their hatred of America was worth a few compromises regarding fundamental rights. In turn Islamic fundamentalists, disguised as friends of multicultural tolerance, used the Left to advance their interests under the guise of a progressive rhetoric. The deception runs both ways: one side overlooks the suppression of women and religious violence in the name of the struggle against racism and neo-colonialism; the other side joins the attack on globalisation in order to promote their religious objectives. This temporary alliance starts to make sense when one realises that it is based not on a positive agenda but on a negative one – not on what they jointly support, but on what they jointly oppose.
It is my guess that when the Left denounce Israel in the name of anti-colonialism and human rights, they have only the vaguest idea of what they are talking about. In their minds there is a conceptual blurring between concepts like America, Israel, the West, colonialism, imperialism, racism and globalisation. Anti-Zionism is sometimes a metaphor for anti-Americanism, sometimes for antisemitism. When they say ‘America’, they are thinking ‘Jews’; when they say ‘American imperialism’ they are thinking Jewish power, domination, and conspiracy.
This enmity towards Israel as ersatz anti-Americanism is particularly cowardly, for Israel is a much easier target to attack than the United States. It goes without saying that there is no hope of the Left ever winning a struggle against America. A boycott of American universities or the American economy is simply ludicrous; but subjecting Israel to an academic or economic boycott is a different matter. Israel’s predicament is far more precarious. Naomi Klein, the Leftist anti-globalisation activist, made the point explicitly when she called for an anti-apartheid style boycott of Israel in January 2009. As she put it: “Why single out Israel when the US, Britain and other Western countries do the same things in Iraq and Afghanistan? Boycott is not a dogma; it is a tactic. The reason the strategy should be tried is practical: in a country so small and trade dependent it could actually work”.
In the broader scheme of things the Palestinian cause has become the litmus test of Leftist credentials. Like Che Guevara in Latin America, it is the symbolic flame that lights the way for the oppressed of the world, the banner under which the Left attacks its varied enemies.
Arab Annihilationism
At this point I feel the need to declare an assumption I hold which underpins much of my thinking on the Middle East conflict and that is that the Arab world will never accept a Jewish state in their midst. I base this view on the Arab position stated most succinctly in the three no’s of the Khartoum Conference in 1968 – no peace, no negotiation, no recognition. This Arab position, incorporated into the PLO covenant, remained unchanged until the Oslo accords when Yasser Arafat under enormous international pressure agreed to revise it and opened negotiations with Israel. There is much to suggest that this relaxation on the ‘no negotiation’ injunction was a sham and that Arafat at no stage envisaged it leading to peace. Despite his promise to draft a new covenant, this was never done and nothing was ever ratified. Arafat justified himself to the Palestine Legislative Council by invoking the Islamic concept of a temporary truce or hudna – a tactic also mooted by Hamas in their war to annihilate Israel.
It is also difficult to ignore the fact that Arab and Palestinian enmity is directed not just against Israel but against Jews as well. One has only to open an Arab newspaper, watch Palestinian television or listen to the weekly sermon in a mosque to become aware of how endemic Jew hatred is in the Arab world. I use the term Jew hatred rather than anti-Semitism because on the scale of obscenity, it ranks with the worst antisemitic hatred produced by the Nazis in the 1930s. Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are bestselling books throughout the Arab world, and the belief that Jews are the incarnation of evil and are planning to take over the world is taken as common knowledge.
Israel is geographically located in an especially unstable region. Since the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire almost century ago, not a single democratic Arab state under the rule of secular law has emerged. The problem is partly tribal and sectarian; but it is also Islam, which has never gone through a Reformation or Enlightenment or the separation of church and state. As things stand, Islamic religious law, the sharia, trumps every secular legal regime that manages to put down tentative roots in the region. Religion holds sway to a degree not seen in the West since the peace of Westphalia in 1648, when, after centuries of devastating religious wars, European nations got together and took the decision to remove religion from politics. Without taking all these factors into account, it is difficult to see how anyone can understand let alone play a useful role in the politics of the region.
Notwithstanding Israel’s imperfections and in particular her counter-productive settlement policy on the West Bank, the annihilationist aims of the Arab world emphatically trump and relegate to lesser status all other issues.
Self-defence as the ultimate right
According to the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, self-preservation is the first “right of nature”, and in his opinion, the only right. Similarly, the Constitution of the United States undertakes to “establish justice, ensure domestic tranquillity [and] provide for the common defence”. Providing for the common defence was a luxury Jews did not enjoy before the creation of their own state. When Hitler singled them out for extermination, they had no strategy for defence. Their focus had always been on moral improvement and that did nothing to defend Jewish civilisation. Providing for the common defence means having power and until 1948, power was something entirely foreign to Jews. In her book Jews and Power, Ruth Wisse relates a story which captures the clash of Jewish values and Jewish power and powerlessness. In Warsaw in the autumn of 1939, shortly after the Germans captured the city, a couple of Nazi soldiers were seen harassing a Jewish child on the street. The child’s mother ran up, picked up her bruised little boy, placed his cap on his head, and said to him, “Come inside the courtyard and za a mensch.” She was instructing him to be a decent human – to take the traditional Jewish injunction to be a mensch seriously – and not to become like the Germans.
This incident was related by a certain Shmuel
Zygelboym, who himself championed menschlikheit as the essence of being Jewish. He had recently adopted socialism as the modern embodiment of Jewish values and which was then regarded as the new political home for Jews who wanted to involve themselves in tikkun olam. Not long after this incident, the little boy was dead, together with the majority of Warsaw’s 380 000 Jews; and so was Zygelboym, who had committed suicide in protest over the Allies’ indifference to the extermination of the Jews.
How can you be a mensch when you are dead? For a Jew to follow the path of menschlikheit, without taking into account the outcome of this story is to be morally obtuse to the point of wickedness. It is to assume a position called moral solipsism; to be preoccupied with one’s own righteousness to the exclusion of everyone else.
I ask myself whether this is not the position adopted by some Jewish anti-Zionists whose moralistic utopian ideal – a maximalist conception of human rights – disregards the dangers faced by Israel. It is as if, in their single-minded determination to save the Jewish soul, they are prepared to sacrifice the Jewish body.
Jewish anti-Zionists
Since the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban, which became an orgy of antisemitic hatred, the Jew in the diaspora has been called upon to proclaim loudly and clearly his aversion to Zionism. The pressure to do this combines with the tendency that some Jews have to find fault in themselves, especially under the gaze of the antisemite. Fearing contempt and rejection, the Jewish anti-Zionist takes on the political position of the antisemite, and the payback is not inconsequential. He is seen as part of an admirable and embattled minority, credited with having the ‘guts’ to speak out, and receives the kind of praise usually reserved for dissident truth-tellers in totalitarian societies. For the antisemite, the Jewish anti-Zionist is a godsend, not only because he provides the antisemite with cover but because it comes in the name of human rights and democracy to boot.
Over time, the Jewish anti-Zionist loses the ability to sense antisemitism in others and may himself become susceptible to its tropes and turns of phrase. He defends and protects people holding antisemitic positions and may himself come to believe propositions such as antisemitism is caused by Israel’s actions; Jews are oversensitive to antisemitism and that there is a ‘Jewish Lobby’ in the United States.
Sometimes the Jewish anti-Zionist defends himself by pointing out that there are voices just like his in Israel that strongly oppose the policy of the present Israeli government. But there is an essential difference. The voices of the Left in Israel form part of a game called the Israeli democratic system. Outside of Israel, the Jewish anti-Zionist voice forms part of a very different game and that game is called the delegitimisation of Israel campaign.
The Israeli philosopher Elhanan Yakira introduced a phrase “The Community of
Opprobrium” to describe the total collective of all those who oppose, denigrate, delegitimise, and wish to destroy Israel. This community is like a mosaic composed of many different facets. It includes those who would destroy Israel by violence, like Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah; Holocaust-deniers like Robert Faurisson and David Irving; far-Right antisemites like Le Pen in France; Leftists like Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein (who takes malicious pleasure in chiding Jews for the remembrance of their own suffering); crooked historians like Ilan Pappe, who on his own admission is ideologically motivated and not objective; add to this the Leftwing media and academia; the old, the radical and the Liberal Left, and of course, the Jewish antiZionists of whom we have spoken. All these constitute the community of opprobrium. Each is a facet in the mosaic which, from the outside, shows a single face and delivers a single message; and that message is that Israel as a Jewish state must go. Jewish anti-Zionists, in this country and elsewhere, who call for boycotts against Israel or who align themselves with Israel’s enemies, place themselves within this mosaic. The nuances of their position – say, that they only oppose settlements on the West Bank – are lost to the onlooker; their finely-constructed and possibly more limited goals are simply swamped by greater forces set in motion long before their arrival and quite independent of them. Their public criticism of Israel identifies them with the community of opprobrium, and they in turn are identified with it. In this way the Jewish anti-Zionist contributes to the delegitimisation of Israel and to antisemitism as well.
Why Jewish history is important
So where does this leave us? I have no final answers but I do believe in the educative power of history, for as William Faulkner expressed it, “The past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past”. For 150 years, antisemitism has played a central role in European politics and there is no reason to believe that it will disappear any time soon. Most frightening is the fact that in the 20th Century Jews featured prominently in the politics of the two totalitarian regimes that threatened world peace Hitler’s Germany and the Soviet Union. Now, in the 21st Century, the clerical-fascist regime in Teheran and its proxies Hamas and Hezbollah are calling for the destruction of Israel – a member state of the UN which, for those who may have
forgotten, is an organisation whose job it is to secure the equal rights of nations. The UN’s response to this has been muted at best.
Like the accusations facing the protagonist in Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial, the accusations against Jews are multifarious and indeterminate and for this reason difficult to counter. As soon as the Jew deflects one accusation, another springs up in its place. There is a sense that the verdict has been reached even before the evidence is led, and no matter what the evidence, nothing can undo the guilty verdict for it is taken as read that the sins of the Jew are primal and existential: You are the anti-Christ, you are untermenschen, you are Nazis, you are human rights abusers – No! You are the worst human rights abusers! The implication is that Jewish membership of the species ‘humankind’ is somehow provisional.
The use of antisemitism as a political weapon should be studied in university political science departments around the world. Its dynamic, its tropes and the cynical use to which it is put should be analysed and understood. Ironically, the massive presence of the Holocaust has played a role in occluding the prior, long history of antisemitism – in particular, its virus-like ability to morph and change. Because of this, antisemitism today is not always obvious, for no longer is it dressed in its traditional garb but assumes an alibi, a “presumptive respectability”, in the form of anti-Zionism. When the Leftist or the Jewish anti-Zionist denies that his actions are antisemitic, it is not that he is not telling the truth; he does not know the truth in order to tell it.
In our world of easy communication, words can break bones as effectively as sticks and stones. Let us remember that the memorial at Yad Vashem does not begin with an account of the death camps but with the cultural campaign of dehumanisation by the press, writers, academics and politicians in Germany. Europe was methodically prepared before the mass killing of Jews began, by which time the thought that Europe was being emptied of its Jews was no longer so shocking. Similarly, the delegitimisation of Israel is intended as the first step towards dismantling the Jewish state. If the world is persuaded that Israel is not a legitimate state, it is then an easy step for people to get used to a world without Israel.
We are at a critical stage in the history of the Jewish state, and dare I say, the history of the Jewish people. We must recognise that in respect of antisemitism, the more the world changes, the more it stays the same. Israel will take care of its Arab enemies; but Jews in the Diaspora must recognise the lethal consequences of the delegitimisation campaign – not only to Israel but to Jews as well – and take an active stand against it. If we do not respond appropriately and effectively to this threat in the first instance, there may not be an opportunity to respond in the final one.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
Chuck Volpe is a Port Elizabeth-based businessman and Jewish communal leader. He is currently chairman of the Eastern Cape Council of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies. This article is based on his paper delivered at the 2011 Johannesburg Limmud conference.
