The New Anti-Semitism

1. The new Anti-Semitism as a social movement

            An article in the October Mosaic Magazine by Ben Cohen discusses a new form of Anti-Semitism. The title of the article is “How Anti-Semitism Became a European Social Movement” and it is worthwhile to discuss this article at some length.

The article begins with a statement regarding traditional anti-Semitism:

Anti-Semitism was born in modern societies because the Jew did not assimilate himself,” wrote the French-Jewish thinker Bernard Lazare in 1894, a few months after the arrest of Captain Alfred Dreyfus[1] on charges of treason. “But,” Lazare continued, the “fundamental and everlasting contradiction” of anti-Semitism is identified as: “when anti-Semitism ascertained that the Jew was not assimilated,” it reacted in two conflicting directions, simultaneously “reproach[ing] him for it and . . . [taking] all necessary measures to prevent his assimilation in the future.”

Anti-Semitism has become a social movement. As defined in the article, a “social movement”:

is a creature of the post-1968, New Left-dominated theoretical landscape. Very simply: although social movements may assume organizational form—think of Greenpeace, a product of concerns about the environment, or PETA, a product of concerns about the treatment of animals—their aim is less to create enduring political vehicles than to change popular sensibilities in the name of a greater social good. Thus, to identify oneself with a social movement is to adapt one’s beliefs and behavior in accordance with its vision. A core belief—that, say, we are ruining the environment for which we are all responsible—will then lead an individual to adopt certain behaviors, like shunning some foods in favor of others, or recycling renewable materials, or owning a Prius. Once the sum of these individual behaviors reaches a critical mass, attitudes that originally may have seemed counterintuitive or peculiar become established as wholly positive moral and social norms. In some cases, such norms may become a litmus test of candidacy for office, or be enshrined in court decisions or embodied in regulation.

The author goes on:

What is the core belief of anti-Semitism as a social movement? In my view, it has two integrally related parts: opposition to Jewish national power abroad (i.e., Israel) and suspicion of Jewish loyalties at home (the sin of “communitarisme,” or “communalism,” cited by Wistrich in the French context, and essentially a fancier term for “clannishness”).  Out of this core belief, and the social movement that has gathered around it, there has emerged a standardized vocabulary and set of rhetorical tools.

Most familiar is the move to elevate the Palestinian cause—in reality, a local struggle between two peoples, not dissimilar from other national conflicts in the world today—into what might be called the ideology of “Palestinianism.” From this vantage point, the Palestinian Arabs have assumed the status of iconic, transcendental victims, rather as the Jews did for a brief period after World War II, and as Israel did until 1967. Moreover, the substitution of the one group for the other is hardly accidental. Those who kneel fervently before the altar of Palestinian victimhood can be relied on to traffic in the correlative themes of Israeli racism and brutality, casting the state of the Jews as a carbon copy of South Africa’s old apartheid regime, or as a legatee of the Nazis, or even (in the perverse Twitter hashtag #JSIL) as a Jewish version of the Islamic State gang raping, murdering, enslaving, and decapitating thousands of innocents in its rampage across Syria and northern Iraq.

The members of this social movement even go out of their way to distance themselves from “anti-Semitism” by re-defining it as a “device invented and exploited by the Jews themselves in order to censor frank discussion of the Zionist and Jewish present by invoking the sufferings of the Jewish past.”

The article goes on to discuss the ramifications of the change from traditional anti-Semitism into a social movement:

Because anti-Semitism as a social movement is so loose and “horizontal,” so politically promiscuous, so much more a matter of attitude than of argument, of fashion than of ideology, it is arguably even less susceptible of being contained than a party or a government subject to defeat or recall. In addition, insofar as it can persuade people to see themselves as reacting to illegitimate manifestations of Jewish “power,” the movement can channel the much greater countervailing power of any number of disparate and pre-existing popular discontents with contemporary European life that have nothing to do with the Jews.

Which is more frightening: theology or social movement? Both move in the same direction: Jew hatred.

1. Anti-Semitism hidden under the guise of disagreement with Israel’s Policies

See the discussion questions associated with this series (particularly question 39 and beyond) for questions relating to anti-Semitism as it seems to be metastasizing into anti-Israel thought. The next section of this essay will tackle the issue of determining when an action is anti-Semitic. One of the indicia is actions and words unfairly attacking Israel in a manner which is way out of proportion to the actions at issue and in a distorted and biased manner. Another indicia is holding Israel to a standard that is different, and usually much higher, than standards used to judge the actions of other countries[2]. The discussion questions (hopefully) will engender further thoughts on the issue of hiding anti-Semitism beneath the guise of criticizing the State of Israel.

One element of the new anti-Semitism is “White Guilt”. White guilt is a new phenomenon. White guilt is not “guilt” in the usual sense of angst over injustices suffered by others. At first blush, a definition of “White Guilt” would be: people assuage their “guilt” or conscience for past actions of others, in the common case, Whites, against a group of non-whites by identifying with (and even romanticizing and attributing nobility to) the group that had been oppressed and automatically taking their side against others, no matter what the issue.

White guilt might be a sub-genesis of guilt stemming from a zero-sum world view. That is, there are those who believe that wealth is fixed and when someone has a lot, he must be taking it from someone else – it is a zero sum. These people cannot envision the concept of wealth creation. That is, someone may be able to create an environment where everyone gets wealthy. An example of such an environment is the discovery of the Internet. The Internet has created innumerable opportunities for people to gain wealth. Creation of the Internet created the opportunity for wealth accumulation, it did not remove wealth from one person and cause it to flow to another. It created wealth, it was not zero sum. Someone who believes in the zero sum concept may look at a group of people, like the Israelis, who have a great deal of wealth and compare them to the Palestinians who have little if any wealth, and believe that the zero sum concept requires the wealthy Israelis to have gained their wealth at the expense of the Palestinians. Such a person would resent and blame the Israelis. As evidenced by the Internet, by Silicon Valley, by microengineering, by microbiology, etc., we simply do not live in a zero-sum society. Those who espouse it in the case of the Israeli/Palestinian situation may be using the concept of protecting the disadvantaged from exploitation by the wealthy as a cover for anti-Semitism.

However, it is much more than this. It is a means of establishing moral authority for one’s correct way of thinking as opposed to the wrong way of the past. It allows one to be morally superior to others, especially those that are guilty of wrong thinking, and most especially with respect to those who think wrongly about certain elements. That is, for example, deference to people of color because they were discriminated against in the past. The people giving deference had nothing to do with the past injustices, so the “guilt” cannot be shame for something they had nothing to do with. Instead, by feeling, and claiming, guilt over such injustices, one establishes a moral high ground. Such moral high ground requires an enemy so that the person can “rise above” the past. Anybody disagreeing with this stance is stigmatized as being a racist, a sexist, a homophobe, or a xenophobe.

As stated above, this moral high ground is often associated with race. However, the basic requirements of such moral posturing are: a past injustice practiced against a defenseless people; and a current enemy of those people that one can be morally superior to by identifying the heinous acts practiced by that current enemy against these defenseless people. As just stated, people of color and racism fit the formula and thus “white guilt” applies. However, this formula applies to the anti-Semitic issue of this essay. The defenseless people element of the formula is the Palestinians, and the injustice element of the formula is the suffering, both past and present, of the Palestinians. The Palestinians have done a superior PR job of focusing on Israel as the agent of their suffering. Thus, “white guilt” feels sympathy for such downtrodden people and identifies the “enemy” element of the formula as the state of Israel. Those espousing white guilt thus condemn Israel for its acts against the Palestinians, no matter what the situation, and thus allows those people suffering “guilt” over the situation of the Palestinians to have moral high ground with respect to Israel. The fact that Israel has historically been the most moral of all the countries in the Middle East adds to the cachet because one is now morally superior to a moral hero.

The further fact that Israel is a Jewish state is icing on the cake because the moral high ground can include hatred of Jews – anti-Semitism – with no downside. Jew hatred can be camouflaged as condemnation of racism, and xenophobia practiced by the state of Israel against the Palestinians[3]. In this manner, one can be an anti-Semite while standing on the moral high ground of combating injustice and assisting the downtrodden. A trifecta.

[1] About the Dreyfus affair, Theodor Herzl wrote: “The Dreyfus case embodies more than a judicial error; it embodies the desire of the vast majority of French to condemn a Jew and to condemn all Jews in this one Jew. ‘Death to Jews!’ howled the mob, as the decorations were being ripped from the capitan’s coat…A hundred years after the Declaration of the Rights of Man…the French people do not want to extnd the rights of man to Jews.”

[2] See, for example, the BDS campaigns against Israel alone while ignoring worse actions by countries such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Philippines, Indonesia, Turkey, Nigeria, North Korea, China, and the Palestinian state itself.

[3] As will be discussed in the next section, anti-Zionism can be anti-Semitism if charges leveled against Israel are not matched by similar charges against other countries for doing the same thing. For example, if someone (Jew or non-Jew) is going to seek Boycotts, Divestments and Sanctions against Israel and charge Israel with racism, crimes against an oppressed minority, apartheid colonialism, genocide, etc. for its actions against Palestinians, that same person should be charging Turkey, Nigeria, China, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Philippines, Indonesia, the Hutus in Rawanda, and the Palestinian Authority itself, with racism, xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny, terrorism as well. If not, the selective nature of the charge is telling.