January 12
2004
Talk about double standards (Evening Standard)
» Posted on January 12, 2004 07:41 AM » Category: Anti-semitism

It’s difficult thinking of Robert Kilroy-Silk as a victim. Perma-tanned, rich and as smooth as they come, he is about as far from defenceless as it is possible to imagine.

But he has moved beyond mere victimhood. The reaction to his now infamous newspaper column, in which he attacked “loathsome” Arabs for being “suicide bombers, limb-amputators, (and) women repressors”, has turned Mr Kilroy-Silk into something far more significant than a newspaper columnist who used some ill-judged phraseology and incurred the wrath of the BBC in the process.

His treatment has instead become a symbol of the hypocrisy which infects our liberal establishment, and of the double standards which govern the way it operates.

There are some countries and people one can condemn with impunity. But lay into others and you should prepare to be visited by the vengeance of polite society.

Attack America as a genocidal empire bent on world domination and you will be lauded for your sagacity. Argue that Americans as a nation are ignorant and brutal and you will merely be demonstrating your civilised values.

And if you have a truly rounded understanding of the way the world works, you will know that terrorists only resort to terror because they have no alternative. They have no alternative because they are oppressed. And they are oppressed by… aha! The true villain. Not the terrorist, who is merely a product of his environment, but those who cause him to act as he does. And we know who that is. It is, as ninety nine times out of a hundred it always has been, the Jews. It’s the Jews’ fault.

Don’t, of course, say it’s ‘the Jews’. That would be anti-Semitic, and that’s deplorable. Play, instead, the get out of jail free card: it’s the Israelis’ fault. Put it like that and you’ve free rein to rant away. Heh presto! You’re not a raving anti-Semitic bigot but a caring, compassionate liberal, speaking up for victims of Jewish – oops, I meant Israeli – oppression. It’s not the terrorists’ fault they murdered 20 Israelis. They had no choice. And anyway, some of your best friends are Jews.

When the poet Tom Paulin remarked in an interview with an Egyptian newspaper that Jewish settlers in the occupied territories "should be shot dead. I think they are Nazis, racists, I feel nothing but hatred for them”, the reaction – or, rather, lack if it – illustrated perfectly the double standards at work. (He has since claimed that his views have been taken out of context and thus distorted, but he does not deny using those words.) Mr Paulin remains a favoured guest of the BBC and a panellist on the Newsnight Review, just has he did after the publication of his poem, Killed in Crossfire, in which he suggested that the Israeli army deliberately gunned down "little Palestinian boys" and likened it to a "Zionist SS".

Clearly the BBC, acting like reservoir of the liberal establishment it is, has no problem when one of its best known cultural commentators calls for Jews to be shot. Pointing out, however, as Mr Kilroy Silk has, that that there is another side to the story is a grotesque offence against a decent world view and grounds for instant action.

When the Labour MP, and Father of the House, Tam Dalyell, said in May last year that Tony Blair is "being unduly influenced by a cabal of Jewish advisers" (Jack Straw, Peter Mandelson and Lord Levy), the response was fascinating. If Mr. Dalyell had condemned a group of Asian or West Indian advisers for "unduly" influencing domestic policy, he would have become a pariah. Indeed, that is exactly - quite rightly - what happened to the former Conservative MP John Townend when he said that the British were becoming a "mongrel" race. Since, however, it was only Jews whom Mr Dalyell attacked (although only one of the three he cited was even Jewish), he remains the doyen of many on the Left.

Not that anyone should expect the Left to object to such crude anti-Semitism. Indeed, its house magazine, the New Statesman, could see no objection to a cover which showed a gold (gold, Jews, money – get it?) Star of David stabbing a Union flag under the headline, ‘A Kosher Conspiracy?’.

I do not recall the Commission for Racial Equality reporting either Mr Dalyell or Mr Paulin – or the New Statesman, for that matter - to the police, as it has Mr Kilroy Silk. Trevor Phillips, its Chairman, has been noisily muscling in on the affair. Given his position, Mr Phillips’ behaviour is especially reprehensible. One might hope that the Chairman of such an organisation would have an appreciation of the issues involved. One might hope for that; but one would never expect it. With Mr Phillips’ impeccable liberal credentials and the history of his organisation’s behaviour, it is hardly surprising that they should have behaved so hypocritically.

Mr Kilroy-Silk certainly used some injudicious words. The relationship between Jews and Arabs is fraught enough without an extra layer of complications being added. But just because the liberal establishment chooses to relish any criticism of Israel and America, and to condemn any of the Arabs, it does not cause the underlying facts to change. Last year, the United Nations Development Programme published a report into Arab culture and politics which says, albeit in far more measured tones, many of the same things as Mr Kilroy-Silk: Arab countries, it finds, are intellectually barren, politically backward and educationally underdeveloped. There is, it adds, a growing knowledge gap with the West. The report was written in its entirety by a group of distinguished Arab scholars. Will Trevor Philips report them, and the UN, to the police?

Whatever one thinks of the language Mr Kilroy-Silk chose to use, has exposed the hypocrisy and cant which surrounds this most sensitive of issues.

UPDATE: For the sake of accuracy, I should point out that the last paragraph has changed from a version up here earlier. I put up the wrong draft, and this is now the one which appears in the Standard.


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Comments

Excellent article, Stephen.

Stated by: Tim Newman on January 12, 2004 12:07 PM

I second that. It's striking how similar the liberal elite has become to the pre-1960s establishment. Both are small, unrepresentative classes that seek to impose their values on the rest of society. Both consider themselves culturally and morally superior to the common rabble, although of course a good liberal would never admit that openly. Both consider commerce to be distasteful and morally suspect, and often see Jews in much the same light. Neither one proved able to address the real challenges of its day. The old establishment had nothing to offer after the cataclysms of World War II but the genteel management of decline. The new establishment responds to the threat of Islamofascist terrorism by blaming the victims and urging us to feel more guilty about being evil Westerners. In both cases, as soon as the world changed the establishment was exposed as incapable of adapting to new circumstances and incapable of questioning its own assumptions. Like the old establishment, the new one exists primarily in the government bureaucracy and large publicly funded bodies such as the BBC, where it maintains its dominance by ensuring that only like-minded people are appointed to positions of influence. Instead of the old boy network, there is an equally closed and self-serving persons of unspecified gender network. Most fundamentally, the new elite is as much of a dead weight on society as the old, and once again it would be both patriotic and progressive to smash the establishment.

Stated by: Andrew Zalotocky on January 12, 2004 12:43 PM

You were doing well until the Jews/Israel bit. The liberal establishment is indeed hypocritical, but so too is complaining about the bilious, censorious attacks on un-PC comments such as Kilroy's while simultaneously attempting to shut down all debate on Israel by EXPLICITLY equating criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.

"You’re not a raving anti-Semitic bigot but a caring, compassionate liberal, speaking up for victims of Jewish – oops, I meant Israeli – oppression. It’s not the terrorists’ fault they murdered 20 Israelis."

This, for example, is just non-thought - the kind of hectoring unreasonableness that I'd expect from someone like Ann Coulter. Nothing in your article leaves open the possibility that it is possible to be critical of Israel without having any malice towards Jewish people, which is the position that millions hold (including myself). To suggest that we are all Dr. Strangeloves forcing ourselves to be outwardly decent while struggling to restrain the bloodthirsty Nazi impulses that reside within is insulting, and a denial of reality.


Stated by: Janan Ganesh on January 12, 2004 1:21 PM

Janan but is criticism of Israel encompased by equating Sharon to Hitler (which is about as offensive as it gets) or denying Israel's right to exist. A great deal of the criticism of Israel I read could be summed up under either banner. Yes, it is possible to be critical of Israeli policy without to either of the above tactics. What matters is the tone of the criticism of Israel, if it is merely obviously a cover for anti-semiticism then it is simply that.

I, for one, don't think its reasonable of the Israeli goverment to expect a traiterous scumbag ,who spied for Israel, to be let off by the US government, simply because he is jew. I think he should have been executed.

The Beeb and the CRE are biased against Jews, Israel and the US. This is patently obvious.

Stated by: Andrew Ian Dodge on January 12, 2004 2:39 PM

I've said it before, I'll say it again. If you Euros don't want your peaceful, law-abiding, highly educated and economically successful Jews, send 'em on over to the United States. We Yanks can always use a few more Nobel prizewinners, rocket scientists, and inventors of life-saving vaccinations.

Stated by: Susan on January 12, 2004 7:33 PM

I maintain that countries pretty much get the public radio/TV networks they deserve. The BBC is blatantly anti-semitic and anti-Israel because British society generally has been so for many years now. Let's face it, England got its ass kicked by a few Jews straight out of Nazi-Europe and still resents it! Throughout Israel's history, England has either openly sided with Arab countries (check England's record at the UN) or stayed on the sideline. And I truly believe that this reflects the overall sentiment of British people towards Jews and Israel.
Canada (where I am from) also has a blatantly anti-Israel public network (the CBC) and low and behold, if one checks Canada's record on Israel and Jews, one sees that Canada has been drifting more and more towards a pro-Palestinian stance (for instance, Canada was one of the few countries which did not walk out of the Durban conference in 2001).
France's national radio and TV are the same and so on.
So I think that before coming down so heavily against the BBC, many in England should start by looking at a mirror. What they will see is a society which has hardly ever supported either Israel of the Jews. The BBC simply reflects this fact.

Stated by: Andre on January 12, 2004 10:30 PM

Although it appears very clear to me that attacks on the Israel's existence are often conflated implicitly (and explicitly by many islamicists) with jew hatred, I don't think that the Paulin parallel is a fair one to make.

In Tom Paulin's worldview, the settlement of jewish people from Brooklyn in the West Bank merits their extermination, in much the same way as some irish nationalists have preached (and sometimes practiced) the expulsion from Eire of Tom Paulin's protestant antecedents. He also regards the existence of the state of Israel as a colonialist enterprise. From that perspective, his comments were primarily anti-colonialist, not anti-semitic. The closest he came to pure jew hatred was his comparison of jewish settlers with the Nazi SS; which though calculated to give offence was not an attack on all jews.

When these sorts of statements are made by, say, Hamas supporters, I can point to Hamas's own Covenant, which contains a broad ranging expression of racism, which goes beyond an anticolonist critique. By contrast, I have no reason to believe that Paulin accepts, for example, the genuineness of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or that he cites the Koran as justification for his views.

I do, incidentally, think that he is wrong. But I do not think that his views are racist: merely that they are extreme.

Stated by: David T on January 13, 2004 9:58 AM

I take it that David T would see no religious aspect to Irish Catholics killing any and all Protestants living in Ireland. Or Serbs killing Bosnians or Kosovars in areas they (Serbs) consider rightfully theirs.

When, exactly, was it determined that certain areas, such as the West Bank or for that matter Palestine, must be Judenrein? Arabs, Muslim and Christian, live and exercise full civil rights in Israel, yet the presence of Jewish settlements in the West Bank or Gaza is an unacceptable barrier to peace.

This is anti-Semitism and there is no way around that fact. Some people need to look in the mirror.

Stated by: Marty on January 13, 2004 4:50 PM

Thank you for highlighting once again the appalling double-standards of the BBC. Why did Israel ban the BBC from any briefings and reportage last year? Because Israel had reached the point of such frustration at the anti-Israel bias that it was better there was no reportage than the constant, virulent articles that were filed.

Stated by: Deanna on January 13, 2004 5:54 PM

Those of us who are interested in a free and balanced press have often complained about the BBC's obvious bias against Israel that is regularly conveyed through the negative reporting of its various news networks. Now we see that while the BBC accepted Tom Paulin's remarks even though they amounted to incitment to violence, the Corporation was very quick to act on the case of Kilroy-Silk.
The police was called to investigate if the Kilroy-Silk article amounted to incitement to racial hatred. It was not called to question Paulin's remarks which clearly constitute incitement to violence. Nor have we heard about police investigations in relation to the weekly incitement to hatred and violence coming from some UK mosques like the one at Finsbury park.
As the world's leading news agency, the BBC have a responsibility to maintain the highest possible standards. They must be totally consistent, not inconsistent, upholding single and not double standards.

Stated by: Geoffrey Pearl on January 13, 2004 6:25 PM

Marty: I would see a religious aspect to catholics killing protestants: so would the radicalised catholics. Likewise, Hamas' campaign is explictly premised on a religious supremacist worldview.

The question is not the motives of the killers, but the ideological take of the people doing the supporting. When the Socialist Workers Party expresses its support for Hamas, it does so not because it has embraced an islamicist take on world events, but because it (mis)reads the conflict as a form of anticolonialist struggle, in which Israel subsists as a vassal state of the USA. Of course, of late, the SWP has leapt through hoops to reconcile its unholy alliance with religious loons with its revolutionary socialist creed. That's why the Socialist Review - edited by Lindsay "gay and womens rights are not a shibboleth" German - recently published an article which argued that the Communists in the USSR backed islamicists in the early soviet empire (until that nasty Mr Stalin came along and spoiled everything).

When I argue with these sorts of people, I try to point out that they've completely failed to understand the nature of the islamicist project.

But, you know, I'm personally prepared to live with the USA's backing for Karimov - although I'd infinitely prefer a functioning democratic state - because the other potential regional ally is Al Qaeda. I'm conscious that this commits me - without the benefit of hindsight - to support the USA's realpolitik-driven overtures in the mid 1980s to Saddam Hussein, and I'm not enormously comfortable with this ...

... but if I'm to allow myself that degree of compromise, I think I can allow Paulin's implicit support to Hamas', to the extent that he regards it as a legitimate anticolonialist struggle, rather than an expression of the real will of true muslims everywhere.

Of course, I think he has just missed the point!

On the second question you raise: of course I accept in principle the right of all people to live anywhere. I don't think that there's a special value in maintaining the ethnic or cultural homogeneity of any particular piece of land. Personally, I feel nervous in gemeinschaft societies, which tend to racism and solipsism. In fact, the only really good reason to support partition along ethnic lines is that the two groups will kill each other (or one will kill the other) if they're forced together. That isn't necessarily the case anywhere. It isn't necessarily the case in Ireland. But it clearly is the case at the moment and for the forseable future in the Middle East.

The question of whether part of the middle east occupied by arabs should have been taken to build a secular but jewish state is a tricky one. I wouldn't personally choose live in a state where my neighbours (internally and externally) wanted to kill me. However, given that the state of Israel does exist, and that its dismantling would almost certainly result in murder, and that it is home to a significant number of otherwise stateless sephardi jews whose roots are in the region and who were discriminated against and ultimately dispossessed in arab states (not to mention the descendants of long time ashkenazi jews), and given that population movements - of a more or less controversial manner have been a feature of human history throughout time, I support - and stronly argue for - its continued existence.

That said, this is a matter on which people are likely to hold a multitude of views, which they are likely to express strongly. Now, I suspect vehement opponents of the existence of the State of Israel as either racists, or fellow travellers with racists. I wonder why, for example, they are not equally informed and excited by the millions of dead in Sudan's ethnic/religious war in its south. But that is only my suspicion. It is not inevitably the case.

Given that Tom Paulin thinks of himself as a "protestant socialist irish republican" - the heir of the likes of Parnell or Wolf Tone - whose frame of reference is a bizarre form of anticolonialism, mixed with what Americans call "liberalism - I think its reasonably likely that he eschews religious hatred for secular anticolonialism. And that is where he is coming from.

Stated by: David T on January 13, 2004 10:39 PM

Oh, and - for the record - I also think Tom Paulin has a stupid wheedly voice.

Stated by: David T on January 13, 2004 11:00 PM

BBC and lib dems, you are only missing a koran in your hand and a fez on your head. Maybe a friendly post showing the islamic arab sense of justice and peace will make you feel better .. http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sr&ID=SR2403

Stated by: randall stevens on January 14, 2004 12:41 AM

Paulin expressed support for shooting settlers on the West Bank. The Arabs hardly need his incitement, but nonetheless that vile attempt at solidarity is significantly more damaging than Kilroy's observations about Arab states, which reflect a genuine, passionate, fundamentally Western solidarity with the Muslims who suffer. Kilroy's article was spot on, and no reasonable Muslim could be offended by him while Hizb ut Tahrir and al Muhajiroun types routinely criticise Arab states far more vociferously for far less.

Stated by: Dom on January 14, 2004 6:46 AM

It doesn't make much sense to me to try to differentiate antisemitism from other forms of hateful stupidity. Saying Paulin's antisemitic doesn't make the crime worse or better. He's a Hateful Stupid Person (HSP). Jews can be criticized legitimately. Only IRRATIONAL hatred of Jews is antisemitic. Irrational hatred of Israel or Israelis, you're an HSP. Legitimate criticism of Israel, no problem.
This makes more sense, and also solves the problem of defining Jews with irrational hatred of Israel.

Stated by: maor on January 14, 2004 3:04 PM

Thank you Mr Pollard for pointing out the untalked about ills in our society.

Stated by: Robert Sher on January 14, 2004 6:35 PM

Paulin is merely a representation of the underlying judenhaas of the left in the UK (and Europe). The only difference is that these days they are quite happy to be open about it.

Stated by: Andrew Ian Dodge on January 15, 2004 1:16 PM

British Jewish leaders tried to tell FM Bevin that Jews were facing mass-murder, Bevin replied, "You Jews are always wailing about something." Now we know that the British government already knew what was happening to European Jewry. It seems that that attitude is alive and well in the UK in 2004. How convenient, the BBC does not have examine its actions because the BBC is never ant-Semitic, it's just being attacked by all those "wailing" Jews for some mysterious reason.

I am a reasonably intelligent person and I am pefectly capable of seeing the difference between anti-Semitism and criticism of Israel's policies. I don't agree with Sharon's policies myself.

It is also hypocritical, as well as anti-Semitic, for a MP to be a member of a Welsh or Scottish nationalist party and be anti-Zionist.

Stated by: Susan Stein on January 15, 2004 2:55 PM

Dom, That's like saying that you don't hate French people, you hate France. Israel is a Jewish state.

Stated by: Susan Stein on January 15, 2004 3:02 PM

This is from the Very Left Wing and Dovish Jewish Magazine Tikkun that critices Israel's policies in nearly every issue. (I'm not sure of this site allows the posting of article from other sites) Here's the link: http://www.tikkun.org/magazine/index.cfm/action/tikkun/issue/tik0311/article/031111a.html

Vituperation: How We Talk About Israel, Palestine, and Anti-Semitism
Any discussion of how anti-Semitism masquerades as anti-Zionism is bound to be volatile. It's hard for many Jews, much less gentiles, to define what exactly anti-Semitism is. Except for its most virulent forms e.g. Jew-hating by neo-Nazis, we may wonder if something is truly anti-Semitic, or if Jews are just defensive and paranoid. (A history of genocide will do that to you). What is the relationship between anti-Semitism and Middle East politics? What does it have to do with the establishment of the State of Israel? With the Intifada?

The tone of conversations about questions like these easily turns to a hateful war of words that resembles, on a verbal level, the violent clash of Jews and Arabs in Israel and Palestine. Many Leftists cultivate a studied blindness to anti-Semitism around the world and conclude it is largely a thing of the past. Others charge that anyone who raises the flag of anti-Semitism in relation to the Israel/Palestine conflict has the ulterior motive of "silencing" legitimate criticism of Israel. On the other hand, right-wing Jews often take the view that any criticism of Israel is by definition anti-Semitic. There's very little neutral or calm ground here in which to have a reasonable discussion. Anyone who contemplates the tinderbox of the Middle East is likely to feel at some point a mixture of sorrow, anger, fear, despair, and confusion. We humans generally don't do very well with feelings like these. We tend to become either avoidant and silent on the one hand, or desperate and dogmatic on the other.

As a card-carrying Leftist for the past forty years, I've seen repeatedly that Leftists are hardly exempt from these human frailties. Both Michael Lerner and Chesler address the striking fact that old and new Leftists have a history of minimizing and being silent about anti-Semitism, in contrast to loudly condemning racism directed at people of color. The charge of anti-Semitism is often treated like an insult rather than taken seriously as a political criticism, on its own merit. These lapses and silences, for people who are ostensibly champions of the oppressed, can only be explained by irrational bias or emotional blockage. Generally speaking, those who subscribe to rigid orthodoxies of the Left or Right are fond of reducing the confusing morass of violence in the world to simplistic dualistic allegiances: Victims to be Championed versus Villains to be Vilified. Competing moral and political claims leave us in a state of confusion and anxiety that are dispelled by taking a "hard line." Not surprisingly, most thinking on the subject of Israel, Palestine, and anti-Semitism is limited by pre-selected information and dominated by either/or dichotomies: either the Palestinians are anti-Semitic or Israelis are racist Zionist colonialists. Either anti-Semitism has nothing to do with the righteous acts of violence of the downtrodden Palestinian people or anti-Semitism is the sole reason for their discontent. Either Israel is the Promised Land of milk and honey, the only democratic government in the Middle East and therefore unassailable, or it is a Nazi-like apartheid state bent on racial genocide and therefore must be eliminated (or held to a utopian standard that pertains to no other nation on earth). This kind of thinking, conversing, demonstrating, and hollering doesn't get us too far. I would venture to say that in the turbulent global realignments of the twenty-first century, adhering to rigid Left/Right "lines" is actually interfering with our ability to understand the political landscape. Understanding anti-Semitism today requires some open-minded critical thinking that doesn't necessarily line up with any particular "orthodoxy" and doesn't fall into the trap of either/or thinking. Chesler is eloquent in her plea for this kind of informed free-thinking, and she is to be commended for her contribution in this vein.

Having said all this, let me be clear that I don't lay claim to neutral "objectivity" on this subject. I openly state my bias: As a daughter of Holocaust survivors born in a refugee camp, I am passionately concerned about the fate of the Jewish people. I identify with Palestinians languishing in refugee camps and, at the same time, I am angry about the rabid anti-Semitism on the streets of the West Bank and Gaza. I feel a profound sense of betrayal in relation to my Leftist brothers and sisters who obsessively condemn Israeli sins while consistently ignoring tyranny, misogyny, and anti-Semitism in the Muslim world; who excuse the murder and mutilation of Jews in Israel; who have recurrently failed to understand anti-Semitism, much less to raise their voices or rally against it. I am tired and saddened by all the polarizing accusations and pseudo-rational fact-mongering and would like to see something resembling a civil conversation on the subject of the new anti-Semitism.

In the midst of a subject bathed in much heat but little light, this essay has four goals: 1) to clarify what anti-Semitism is; 2) to make the case—with Chesler—that a particular style of anti-Zionism is increasingly the new face of anti-Semitism on the Left; 3) to argue that this anti-Zionism is part of a larger politics of hatred that corrupts the legitimate grievances of the Palestinian people; and 4) to shed some light on how Jews themselves are often unwitting accomplices in supporting such a politics.

Ten Easy Ways to be an Anti-Semite
Anti-Semitism is a hardy and resilient plant, able to thrive in all sorts of climates. When China opened its doors to Westerners, one of the first ideas it warmed to was that of Jews as an evil people. Korea and Japan have been fertile ground for the dissemination of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Anti-Semitism can easily become part of a particular ideology (like fascism) that seeks dominion. Have you heard the quick summary of Jewish history and tradition? They tried to kill us. We survived. Let's eat. Any Jew who has a passing familiarity with the Jewish holidys has a gut knowledge of anti-Semitism. Yet, despite its long history, anti-Semitism is not very well understood. The trauma of Nazi genocide, on the one hand, and the (seeming) absence of anti-Semitism in the United States, on the other, befuddle many into believing that Jew-hatred is largely a thing of the past—and that only Jewish "paranoia" keeps bringing it up. In fact, anti-Semitism is a deep, abiding irrational bigotry that has a life of its own in various forms of social organization and culture. At its root, it is an age-old form of scapegoating Jews for anything that scares or threatens a population—thus relieving national and ethnic leaders of their responsibility for injustice, and giving the populace a common Enemy to rally around (hence, "the socialism of fools"). It tends to come in "waves"—periods of calm followed by periods of heightened violence (when rulers are threatened or the ruled are distressed).

It's not surprising that we're currently on the upswing of a new wave. Given the end of days apocalyptic feel of the twenty-first century, we should expect anti-Semitism (and all kinds of racism and xenophobia) to be on the rise. In times of fear, anti-Semitism is a great crowd-pleaser, and this era of uncertainty, terrorism, re-alignments of power, economic decline and globalization, and unprecedented threats to the earth itself, is not likely to be the exception to this rule. Hence, since September 11, the myth of the "international Jewish conspiracy" is enjoying a spirited revival. In a recent article in the Sunday New York Times Magazine entitled "How to Talk About Israel," Ian Buruma notes that this myth is increasingly and openly voiced in the halls of power not just in the Middle East but in Japan, Britain, France, and even in that bastion of Israel support, the United States. "American foreign policy and ancient prejudices," says Buruma "are reinforcing each other in a vicious cycle." The linkage of the Israeli Occupation and aggressive American "neo-colonialism" in the media and on the Left has taken on a distinct anti-Semitic flavor that fits very well with the rise of fanatic Islamism in places like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, etc.—where the United States and Israel are not "critiqued" for their policies but hated as the Infidel. Leftists, including Jews, who are fond of debating Israel's right to exist, or who scapegoat Israel for Western imperialism should be aware that their efforts are grist for the anti-Semite's mill.


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The hallmark of anti-Semitism is bigotry and hatred. The ideological labels attributed to Jews - Communist, Capitalist, Imperialist, Terrorist, Zionist - are simply ways to paint Jews as the Enemy.
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An important aspect of anti-Semitism's hardiness is the fact that those who fear and hate Jews know how to link their bigotry to despised ideologies. In communist countries, where capitalism was the Enemy, Jews were said to be the Leading Capitalists. In capitalist countries, where communism is the Enemy, Jews are smeared as leaders of the Communist Conspiracy. Today, among Leftists, the Enemy is global capitalism and imperialism; and once again, Jews in the "cabal" around Bush and company are seen as the motor force behind American "neo-colonialism" and are taking the rap for the W.A.S.P. elite. (As though Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld would not be warring in Iraq if it weren't for those Bad Jews). Furthermore, Jews are fast becoming the identified Terrorists of the age—witness the scapegoating of Israel and Jews for September 11, which, in Islamo-fascist quarters, is being called an act of Zionist terrorism designed to turn the West against Islam. Of course many people who subscribe to this belief also praise Osama bin Laden as the mastermind behind the attacks. But then rational consistency is hardly the hallmark of anti-Semitism. The hallmark of anti-Semitism is bigotry and hatred. The ideological labels attributed to Jews—Communist, Capitalist, Imperialist, Terrorist, Zionist—are simply ways to paint Jews as the Enemy and thereby contribute to campaigns of hatred around the world that are essentially displacements of fears and legitimate grievances onto history's most popular scapegoat.

"The international Jewish conspiracy" lie is paralleled by the idea, popular in Leftist circles, that Jews hold inordinate power in social life. According to this view, Jews, comfortably ensconced in the United States, are a dominant rather than oppressed group; and therefore all talk of anti-Semitism is bogus. Some go further and say that the fabled "monied Jews" are a lobby of power-hungry evildoers who have highjacked American foreign policy on Israel, presumably to keep Israel a stronghold of racist apartheid oppression of Palestinians. What's wrong with this picture? The focus on Jewish economic privilege in the United States conveniently ignores the fact that targeted attacks on synagogues and other Jewish institutions have been and continue to be planned by terrorist groups—and have been successfully executed in the United States as well as Europe and South America. Are we to ignore the threats against Israel, or against Jews worldwide, because American Jews are, for the most part, safe in their homes? Are we to say that synagogues that hire security guards to check for weapons on the High Holidays are simply "paranoid" and "overreacting" to threats on Jewish life? While we may agree or disagree with the right-wing bent of mainstream Jewish organizational politics, we cannot deny the simple fact that Jews are still threatened as Jews, perhaps not very much in the United States (though the bombing of a Jewish school in Los Angeles should give us pause) but certainly in Israel and around the world. Must we still remind those who see Jews as a "dominant" group that the Jews in Germany were at the height of emancipated assimilation, having risen to positions of great prominence in the professions, business, and politics, when Hitler came to power and devised and executed the Final Solution? Most Germans in the 1930's believed that Hitler was a funny little clown whose appeal would blow over. Many now put their faith in the belief that anti-Semitism will disappear if the State of Israel and the Jewish people perfect themselves; and that Islamo-fascist terrorism will go away if the U.S. stops being an international bully. Anyone who can still find a modicum of reassurance in such beliefs has not learned the lessons of history. While Jews may be safer in the United States today than they have been anywhere and at any point in history, a politics of hatred that targets Israel and Jews is always dangerous and should never be minimized.

Anti-Semites who wish to become proficient in the art of the longest hatred can do so by following some or all of the following ten maneuvers:

1. In times of trouble, blame the Jews (or Israel).

2. Say that Jews are no longer victims of anti-Semitism because they are economically privileged (i.e. all Jews are rich and rich Jews are worse than rich gentiles).

3. Pander to racist stereotypes such as: Jews are arrogant, money-grubbing, power-hungry, self-interested, narrow-minded, clannish, cheap, showy, schemers and plotters who seek world dominion, and religious vampires who drink the blood of non-Jewish children, etc.

4. Remain silent about anti-Semitism even if you recognize it, or better still, react contemptuously when Jews bring it up.

5. Use ideology to mask Jew-blaming, i.e. point to Jews as the "leaders" (and true culprits) of whatever bad thing you hate that you think threatens you, e.g. capitalism, communism, imperialism, terrorism, Bushism, AIDS, you name it (Jews are currently being blamed for all of these).

6. Always judge Jews by a double standard, i.e. if Jews are not better than good, they are worse than bad, e.g. if Israel is racist, it doesn't deserve to exist.

7. A particular variant of the last step, but worthy of its own enumeration: Jews in power are more blameworthy and vile than gentiles in power.

8. Excuse acts of violence against Jews on the basis of one ideology or another, i.e. they have it coming to them.

9. Hold Jews everywhere responsible for the policies of the Israeli government, i.e. if you're Jewish, you're personally responsible for Ariel Sharon.

10. And last but by no means least: blame Jews for anti-Semitism e.g. even the Holocaust is our fault. Or, better still, deny that anti-Semitism exists or ever did, e.g. there was no Holocaust, the Jews made it up so that they could come to Palestine and oppress Arabs while plotting to take over the world.

These ten ways to practice anti-Jewish bigotry have worked well historically; they work regardless of cultural diversity; and, in the new post-Holocaust, post-Hitler variants, they are working well today. Virtually all them are rampant in the Middle East.

The Demonization of Israel
Approaching the Israel/Palestine question, I'm reminded of the old story about three blind people touching an elephant. The guy with his hands on the trunk thinks it's a snake. The guy with his hands on the leg says it's a tree trunk. The guy touching the torso is sure it's a wall. We all share the "blindness" of partiality yet speak as though the whole and only truth belongs to us. How many readers of The Nation also read The Jewish Week? How many readers of the official Palestinian Authority newspaper also read Ha'Aretz? One can find "facts" to support almost any position one takes about Israel and Palestine. The facts themselves are in dispute and most of us are not Middle East scholars. What we choose to believe and whose "line" we adhere to depends a great deal more on where our "gut" emotions lie than most people would care to admit. And those gut feelings can include a conscious or unconscious bias against Jews, as well as a conscious or unconscious bias against Arabs. The history of Jewish/Palestinian relations will always be a contested one, written as much out of our unstated, primitive passions as by our collection of favorite excised "facts." Historical myths tend to be unchanging and unbending—they do not accommodate to uncomfortable contradictions. They maintain their integrity at the cost of disconcerting facts that might raise anxiety about whether we are the good guys or the bad guys—especially in areas where two moral imperatives co-exist.

The contested history of the Middle East is encapsulated by two fundamental mythic narratives. The Zionist narrative is that the great State of Israel was created by the blood, sweat, and tears of the Jewish people and came to birth after the genocide of the Holocaust, a phoenix arising from the ashes of Jewish history. Israel is the Promised Land—the flowering of the Jewish dream of Return for 2000 years; and its democracy is a shining light in the midst of a sea of theocratic, oligarchic, and non-democratic Muslim nations. The Palestinian narrative is that Jews were a foreign entity who created a colonial outpost in a territory to which they had no right; that they harassed, murdered, and displaced the indigenous population, and created the dismal horrors of fifty years of refugee camps for the natives. Jews now occupy a land that is the exclusive entitlement of those who lived there before the Jews arrived. They have humiliated and oppressed Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza for decades and seek permanent domination of Palestinians who want only justice and the right of return to their own land.

There is a grain of truth in both these stories, surrounded by falsehoods. As it is said, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing—and a partial history becomes a dangerous myth. Along with reducing the complexities of history into a simple hero and villain dichotomy, these myths are conspicuous for what they leave out. Dogmatic Zionists tell their story as though nobody lived in the land to which the Jews returned ("A land without a people for a people without a land"); and as though hundreds of thousands of Palestinians didn't have to be displaced for the homeland to be Jewish. Dogmatic Palestinian nationalists and terrorists tell their story as though Jews did not have a continuous presence in the land of Israel; as though Jews stole rather than purchased the land from Arab landowners; as though Arab anti-Semitism never did and still doesn't exist; as though the refugee camps had nothing to do with the fact that Palestinian leaders refused the state offered them by the UN in 1948, or the fact that the Arab nations preferred to let Palestinians simmer in their hatred of Jews for generation after generation rather than give them aid or welcome them into their borders.

The most obvious fact about the Israel/Palestine conflict is the one that both of these narratives leave out, namely that the history of this neck of the woods is a story of two competing, equally valid nationalisms for one tiny bit of turf. Anti-Semitic anti-Zionism is distinguished by its attempt to totally delegitimize Jewish nationalism while upholding a triumphalist nationalism for Palestinians. Israel has no "right to exist," say ultra-Left anti-Zionists. From my perspective, this statement has a genocidal ring. Perhaps this is because I remember my first four years in the refugee camp, where ideological debates about Zionism were a luxury no Jew could afford. We were "Zionists" of necessity. Jewish quotas existed in every one of the few countries willing to receive us—except for Israel. Zionism had a primal definition: the will to live as a Jew in a nation that would open its doors to us and defend us from annihilation.

Among those who accept the right of Israel to exist, the battle between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel nationalists hinges on the Israeli Occupation and West Bank settlerism, on the one hand, and Palestinian terrorism, on the other. Palestinians who are subject to Israeli power are justifiably angry and entitled to resist and oppose domination. Decades of humiliation of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories have increasingly, and justifiably, drawn condemnation of Israeli policy. The failure of the American Jewish establishment to criticize Israeli abuses of power has led many to feel that Jews just don't get it when they are not "victims" but "oppressors." However, this Victim/Oppressor dualism tends to blind one to the reality of anti-Semitism on the part of the "Oppressed." Anti-Occupation revolt is not the same thing as anti-Zionism; and anti-Zionism doesn't have to be infected with anti-Semitism. But the Intifada has linked all of these, and that link is embodied in the suicide bomber.

In the course of the last three decades, and particularly in the last three years of the Intifada, the once-popular post-Holocaust narrative of Jews as Victims is being re-written. In a complicated twist on an old theme, Jews—represented by the State of Israel—are increasingly being seen as the world's Villains. The Occupation and Israeli expansionism have fed into and bolstered a new version of the old myth of Jews as a perfidious race bent on world domination.

To understand this, we must have some knowledge of the history of Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism. Millions of Muslims today go to their local mosques and hear their preachers sermonize from the Holy Koran. What do they hear? That God Himself describes the "black inner selves" of the Jews. That the Jews are a race apart, an evil "Other" responsible for terrorism, Western moral degeneracy, and imperialist Empire. That Jews use the blood of non-Jewish babies for their infernal Jewish rites. That Israel is the instrument of Satan, a cancerous tumor in the Middle East, an Imperial threat to Moslems everywhere. That the Holocaust was a hoax perpetrated by the Jews in order to justify their will to dominate Muslims and rule the world. And they are called to act: the Jewish Infidel must be destroyed.

This mix of Nazi racial anti-Semitism, Islamo-fascist ideology, and Jew-hatred disguised as anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism is striking. The Nazi imagery has been added to Islamic stereotypes of Jews that have existed for hundreds of years. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem spent the war years in Berlin, where he visited Hitler and picked up some tips from the master. Since then, Nazi anti-Semitism has thoroughly penetrated the Arab and Muslim world—including the Palestinian refugee camps and the West Bank and Gaza. In Cairo one can enter any bookstore and find a full range of "respectable" anti-Semitic literature openly displayed and widely read, including so-called "revisionist" books of Holocaust denial, and sixty or more editions of the Protocols of the Elders if Zion. High-tech broadcasting—combining the aura of objective "information" with the stink of Jew-hatred—links drugs, arms, pornography, stock market scandals, and all manner of evil to the Zionist plot to rule the world. (For example, "investigative journalists" reported that Israel introduced AIDS to Egypt via Jewish prostitutes).

After Israel's decisive victory in the Six-Day War, Islamic fundamentalism and the hatred of Israel, Zionism, and Jews intensified. Envy of the Jews for their military and economic prowess played no small part in this, since the mass of Muslims in Arab nations (as well as Palestinians who are impoverished not only as a result of the Occupation but because of their own corrupt leadership) live daily with poverty and powerlessness. The Palestinian cause has been corrupted by the potent anti-Semitism of Arab and Muslim cultures; and the terrorist wing of this cause—supported and, to some degree, funded by Arafat—is infested with it. So long as the Occupation continues, this form of anti-Semitism will be provoked, under the cover of legitimate revolt. But this doesn't mean that Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism will disappear when the Occupation ends. Indoctrinated hatred dies hard.

In the West, the fear of demonic Jewish power was also heightened by the Six-Day War, following a long post-Holocaust period in which, for obvious reasons, the fear of Jews was dormant. The fact that Jews were able to outlive Hitler's plan appealed to nations that had just been at war with Germany. Jewish victims evoked guilt and pity. The creation of the Jewish State, on a psychological level, was related to guilt that the world stood by and let it happen. Let the poor Jews have their state, we don't want them anyway, was the logic of the United Nations. Hence for several decades after the Holocaust, Jews were treated to a grace period of an all time low in anti-Semitism in the West.

After 1967, the image of Israel flipped: from being the land of the Noble Victim to the land of the Arrogant Victor. The tables turned and Palestinians—who, up to this point, hadn't been championed by anyone, including their own Arab brethren—became the next Victim contest winners. By the rules of this game, there cannot be two National Victim groups—only one. Palestinians have become the cherished Victim group of the moment. (Anyone who doubts that this kind of "radical chic" exists might recall the Left's love affair with the Black Panther Party and the willingness to overlook its violent and misogynist excesses). Holocaust denial—the extreme pole of Holocaust fatigue and Holocaust hostility—is a necessary ingredient of contemporary anti-Semitism. If Jews are to be depicted as Oppressive Villains and not Meek Victims, their history of persecution has to be minimized, forgotten, or denied; Jewish desperation for a national haven from persecution in both European and Muslim nations has to be re-written. Stereotypically, Jews are supposed to be pasty-faced Yeshiva bochers, passive wimps, and effeminate men who pose no threat. If they are macho (like the State of Israel), they are Really Bad—more bad than anyone else (steps 6 and 7 of the anti-Semite's creed). The victimized Jew of the Holocaust was a "safe" Jew for the culture—hunted, murdered, disempowered, miraculously outliving the piles of cadavers in Nazi photos. But then this Jew went too far. This pathetic Jew has transmogrified into a demonic threat—the Israeli Jew, armed to the hilt and raining down missiles from the sky—the repository of the greatest evil, identified with imperialism, terrorism, Nazism, and world-wide conspiracy, the national Scapegoat in a post–September 11 world. The flip-flop from elevation to demonization is in full sway. The Islamist demonization of Jews as the Infidel is paralleled by the delegitimization of Israel by anti-Zionists.

The fact that anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jewish power are part of the demonization of Israel doesn't mean that the Israeli Occupation is justified. It doesn't excuse Israeli expansionism. It doesn't mean that Israeli militarism is better than any other militarism in the world. It is not. But it is also no worse—which is to say it is terrible, and it must be opposed. But it must be fought as a mistaken and corrupting strategy in the long war between Jew and Arab nationalists in this part of the world—not as what the right wing demagogue David Duke calls "Jewish supremacism." The occupying Jew is no more the all-purpose devil than the terrorist Palestinian is the all-virtuous victim.

Many today argue that Jews who were once victims have indeed become villains on the world stage, that Israel has brought the new anti-Semitism upon itself by being joined to American Imperial interests. That hatred of Israel is "justified." Apart from the dangerous practice of conflating Jews with Israeli policy, a logical question that arises from this line of thinking is: if Arab hatred of Israel is "justified," is then Jewish hatred of Arabs and Muslims for anti-Semitism "justified"? And if so, where will all this "justified" hatred get us?

I would argue that what we're seeing in the Middle East today, on the extreme wings of the Israel/Palestinian conflict, is a politics of hatred, which I define as any politics that relies on racist stereotypes; that joins the twin fervors of ultra-nationalism and fundamentalist religion in its demonization of the Enemy; or that is dogmatically entrenched in the political dehumanization of an unredeemably Evil "Other." When all of these features are joined together, the mixture is highly dangerous and inflammatory. This mix exists now in the Middle East, on both sides of the conflict. Racist attitudes towards Palestinians by the expansionist ultra-nationalist wing of the Israeli government and rampant anti-Semitism in Palestine have escalated the hatred on both sides.

The politics of hatred of Israel rests on the denial of the fact that the Jewish State, despite its mighty arsenal, has been the target of eliminationist Arabs since its birth. In the long war between Israel and the Palestinians, Israel is still—it has never stopped—fighting for its life. Leftists like to point to U.S. support for Israel's seemingly unassailable military force as evidence of its status as the archetypal Oppressor Nation. But imagine where Israel would be if it didn't get this support? Those who hold to the belief that Israel is invulnerable have obviously never spent the night in a sealed room, wearing a gas mask and trying to comfort a child while hoping that the SCUD missiles whizzing by are not tipped with chemical or biological poisons. In the uncertain and shifting geo-political alliances of this era, the military prowess of Israel in a Muslim world seething with Jew-hatred could easily be undone by a number of possible scenarios. One might consider what could happen if Iran's Muslim fundamentalist government, currently being supplied with Russian nuclear technology, were to develop nuclear capability within striking distance of Israel. Or if an autonomous Palestinian state joined forces with its Arab neighbors, who were more than willing to supply the thousands of eager volunteer Jihadists needed to vanquish the Zionist Infidel.

Any politics which dehumanizes, demonizes, and scapegoats Jews and Israel is a politics of hatred. And regardless of its "reasons" and justifications, a politics of hatred is always a lost cause.

The Self-Hating Jew
It's hard to ignore the fact that many of the loudest Left-wing voices of one-sided condemnation of Jews and Israel are Jewish voices. Chesler explains how such attacks are often marked by an unconscious attempt to distance the "good" (politically-correct) Jew from the "bad" (politically incorrect) Jew, in order to achieve an illusory feeling of safety. While "self-hating Jew" can be used as an epithet, internalized oppression is still an important concept. Women, blacks, and Jews internalize the damaging social messages of misogyny, racism, and anti-Semitism. Jewish shame and self-hatred are largely unaddressed features of Jewish psychology. I grew up with this shame and it took me years to recover my sense of dignity as a human being from the traumatic imprint of genocidal assault that is my roots. As well as shame, fear that has mutated to anger directed at other Jews is a prominent element of internalized anti-Semitism. Virtually all of the ways that Jews try to survive and adapt in cultures that periodically erupt in Jew-hatred are marked by these features. Assimilationists declare their Jewishness null and void, thus trying to erase the problem. Often these are Leftists who keep a low Jewish profile, don't speak up for themselves, downplay, avoid, or deny the existence of anti-Semitism, or blame other Jews for "provoking" it. Those with a strong or visible Jewish identity, on the other hand, can become Israel do-or-die ultra-nationalists who attack other Jews as "self-haters," mistaking legitimate opposition to Israeli policy as betrayal and abandonment by one's own family, so to speak. When a Jew feels radically endangered in the world, it's a lot safer to attack other Jews than to confront anti-Semitism.

The trauma of traumas in Jewish history is the Holocaust, and it continues to work its indelible mark on the Jewish psyche. Psychological features of genocide trauma are operative not only in direct survivors and their descendants but in every Jew alive who knows that Hitler would have liked to snuff us all out. This trauma is triggered every time a suicide bomber explodes another self-propelled pogrom onto the streets of Jerusalem, Haifa, or Tel Aviv. Mutilated children, limbs flying out of buses, Israelis lynched while mobs of Palestinians rejoice and dance in the streets, children killed in front of their mothers in kibbutz bedrooms, dancers at a wedding, people at a seder blown to pieces, and on and on. How can Jews hear and read about such events and not be (re-)traumatized? Jews who are unaware of the impact of the Holocaust or annihilatory anti-Semitism on their own psyches often end up blaming Jews for provoking the suicide bomber, or calling friendly critics of Israel "worse than Nazis," or allying themselves with the pro-Palestinian solidarity movement while ignoring the anti-Semitic overtones in this camp. Shame can take many forms, including a rigid ideological dogmatism. That is, Jews passionately arguing against their own nationalism (and only their own nationalism), their own people, or even their people's survival. Much of the agitated, over the top quality of debates about Israel and Palestine, from the Jewish side, is connected to this traumatic imprint. We yell at each other when our hearts are flooded with traumatic fear or grief. The fact that Michael Lerner, who has championed one of the most balanced pictures of the Israel/Palestine conflict, has been attacked by both Left and Right-wing Jews, is a sad testament to the reality of Jews who are caught up in a traumatized response to traumatic events. Internalized self-hatred, shame, denied fear, traumatic grief, and misplaced anger are features of Jewish psychology that anti-Semites can count on. Most Jews have some work to do in this area.

The Politics of Hatred
It is fashionable in certain political circles to justify and legitimate hatred as a rational response to oppression and injustice. The psychiatrist Willard Gaylin devotes his study, Hatred: the Psychological Descent into Violence, to dispelling this idea. He makes a critical distinction between hatred and justified anger or rage. A group can oppose injustice without resorting to hatred. As Gaylin defines it, hatred is more than an emotion; it is a form of delusional thinking that demonizes an Enemy. It is the sick glue that binds the hater to the object of his hatred. The desperation in the Palestinian camps does not explain or justify acts of terrorism committed by Palestinians, says Gaylin, because hatred is not a rational emotion, or a viable political program. Hatred is a social disease, and it is highly contagious: "I have heard many say, in defense of Palestinian hatred, that after generations of being kept in squalid refugee camps … feeling frustrated and humiliated by the exercise of Israeli power, Palestinians are "entitled" to their hatred. This is a sad misunderstanding of the nature of hatred. Hatred is not an entitlement like health care. It is a disease (that) may infect others, but it inevitably destroys the hater, diminishing his humanity and perverting the purpose and promise of life itself. No one is entitled to hatred any more than he is entitled to cancer."

When hatred spreads in a population, acts of barbarism like suicide bombing are the consequence. And when such acts are socially legitimized and converted to a political program, the result is what Gaylin calls a "culture of hatred," i.e. a group with a shared history in which the leadership, the educational institutions and the dominant religious forces indoctrinate the members of the community with the venom of hatred on a daily basis. Gaylin makes the case that, at the current time, Palestinian culture—regardless of just claims to the land occupied by Israel and righteous anger at displacement and dispossession—has become such a culture. I would add that peace-loving Palestinians are also victims of this culture. As one Palestinian mother, quoted in Chris Hedges' War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, puts it: "The children are fed … hatred for the Jews from the day they are born.… All they hear is that we have to get rid of the Jewish enemy. The call to fight is pumped out over the radio and the television. The trucks go through the streets of the camp praising the new martyrs and calling for more." Conscripting children to blow themselves up to kill the Jewish Infidel and live forever in Paradise, far from being a legitimate political strategy, is a horrific form of child abuse.

Since a distinguishing feature of a culture of hatred is the daily indoctrination of the entire population, that feature does not yet exist in Israel as a whole, says Gaylin. But it does, I believe, exist in some portion of the Jewish settlements on the West Bank. Certainly the long conflict between Israel and the Palestinians has stoked the hatred on both sides, contributing to what Gaylin calls the "assault on morality" that war requires. On one side, a vibrant sub-culture of anti-Semitism infects the authentic nationalism of Palestinians, exacting a burden of revenge that is as destructive of their national aspirations as the suicide bomber is to himself. On the other side, Israeli Jews, caught up in a re-enactment of the trauma of a history of annihilation, become more and more corrupted by the fantasy of force as a solution to fear, and thus give more and more to a futile, ugly, and murderous Occupation, to fundamentalist nationalist settlerism, and to collective reprisals that resemble, in lesser form, aspects of their own history of persecution.

And so the dance of death continues until, as in a Shakespearean tragedy, there is no one left on the stage. This annihilatory destruction of life is exactly where hatred and the politics of hatred leads.

While hatred may be a perennial human pathology, it doesn't come naturally. It has to be taught. In War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, Chris Hedges argues that "ancient hatreds" don't generally explode of their own accord. They need the drums of war to goad them on. These drums are beaten by leaders on both sides, who foment hatred to justify war. Even the seemingly most intransigent ethnic and religious conflicts (like that amongst the Croats, Serbs, and Muslims in the former Yugoslavia), are actually manufactured wars, fed by nationalist propaganda. Wars require lies and myths. The Zionist and Palestinian myths have promulgated years of increasing mistrust and hatred, not because Palestinians are inherently more anti-Semitic than any other people, nor because Jewish settlers are inherently more racist. The war between Israel and Palestine has been goaded by leaders on both sides who are tragically short-sighted, or worse, corrupt and morally bankrupt. "Nationalist triumphalism," as Chris Hedges refers to it, egged on by these leaders, is a plague that easily lends itself to the "collective psychosis" of war. Both Sharon and Arafat are war criminals who have cynically manipulated the intense nationalisms of their people into a long war that has accomplished nothing but to escalate the hatred, killing, and "psychosis" on both sides. "War gives a justification to what is often nothing more than gross human cruelty and stupidity," says Hedges. "It allows us to believe we have achieved our place in human society because of a long chain of heroic endeavors, rather than accept the sad reality that we stumble along a dimly lit corridor of disasters."

The psychosis of war thrives on the culture of victimhood, and both Jews and Palestinians have come by their cultures of victimhood honestly. It is this clash of two cultures of victimhood, on a psychological level, that keeps this long war going. Each side bent on proving that it has "no choice" but to defend itself by ever increasing rounds of barbarism on one side and military might on the other. "Once a group or a nation establishes that it alone suffers, then all other competing claims to injustice are cancelled out, " says Hedges. "The nation or the group falls into a collective autism … and does not listen to those outside the inner circle. Communication is impossible."

At this late date in the dance of death embraced by both Jew and Arab, calling either side "just" or "unjust" may be no more useful than saying that the Capulets and the Montagues were justified in their orgies of revenge. Justice and injustice exist on both sides. Peace, for the beleaguered victims of both nationalisms, has less to do with political correctness than it does with reconciliation. And reconciliation is, among other things, a spiritual undertaking. As peacemaker John Paul Lederach puts it, reconciliation is only possible when all parties can let go of a bitter past in order to bring about a human future for the generations to come.

On the more hopeful side, if corrupt leaders whip up the fires of racism, hatred, triumphalist nationalism, and war, such leaders are not invulnerable. They can be forced to step down—but only by their own people. There is yet hope that both Israelis and Palestinians will say "no" to the leaders on each side who are destroying their chances for peaceful co-existence. This will take considerable courage for peace-loving Israelis and Palestinians (who must defy the culture of hatred and who are labeled "collaborators" by their own terrorist organizations and subject to "street justice"—including murder). Here are some hopeful facts: 69 percent of Israelis say they would give up all or most of the settlements for an enforceable peace; and 71 percent of Palestinians say they want the violence to end. These numbers point to the fact that just as hatred is aroused under certain conditions and by certain leaders, it can die down and make way for something resembling a "live and let live" outlook. This kind of outlook would go a long way to putting out the fires of anti-Semitism and racism in this part of the world. Perhaps then future generations of Israelis and Palestinians will be raised not on fear and hatred but on mutual tolerance.

Stated by: Susan Stein on January 15, 2004 3:05 PM

Thank you. I wish more people like you will not be afraid to point out how "fashionable" it is to hate Jews and Israelis.

Stated by: Vered on January 15, 2004 11:21 PM

Stephen,

Good article that makes many points. I'm glad you do not portray Mr Kilroy Silk as a 'victim' - there's been far too much of that in the last couple of weeks - anyone thinking he is a true victim must be suffering from IOS (Imagined Oppression Syndrome)

Stated by: David on January 21, 2004 4:58 PM

This is a legitimate question, and I'm not being leading or facitious.

Why are so many people anti semetic.

Why were the jews persecuted for all thesae years.
I truly do not understand this.

Thanks

George Howell

Stated by: george howell on March 1, 2004 10:58 PM
Stated by: Gwiazdy Porno on April 14, 2006 7:10 AM
Stated by: Darmowe Tapety Erotyczne on May 22, 2006 3:06 PM

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