Like most American Jews of my post-Holocaust generation, I’ve never suffered significant harm from anti-Semitism. Sure, I’ve experienced the random rude remark, or expression of distaste, or hints of ethnic and religious hostility, but Jew-hatred in no way has interfered with my success, happiness or sense of well-being in this grand, glorious and good-hearted nation.
Recent debates about the Middle East war, however, make it inescapably clear that anti-Semitic attitudes remain a significant factor for an embittered minority of Americans, emerging with special force at times of stress. When callers to my talk radio show insist that Israel remains at fault for the current fights in Gaza or Lebanon, traditional Jew hatred (or delusional psychology) probably plays a role in the analysis.
It doesn’t matter that Israel withdrew from both areas—occupying no square inch of Gaza, nor of Lebanon’s internationally recognized territory. It doesn’t matter that the Israelis endured daily Qassam rocket attacks from Gaza, and frequent (and much more deadly) Katyusha rocket assaults from Lebanon: even if Israelis go to war to defend their innocent civilians, for some people it’s still the Jews who must be at fault. The instinct for “blaming the Jews” flourishes alongside the similar instinct for “excusing the terrorists” – as long as their chief targets happen to be Jews.
Callers to my talk show have fingered the long-retired Henry Kissinger, Paul Wolfowitz (head of the World Bank), AIPAC (The America Israel Public Affairs Committee), the Illuminati, “international bankers,” “the Rockefellers”(in the mistaken belief that they’re Jewish and somehow connected to Israel),” “the media elite,” and other traditional anti-Semitic bogeymen in their efforts to discredit the Israeli response.
“Pitchfork Pat” Buchanan even accuses Israel (and her American supporters) of an “un-Christian” approach to self-defense – a very peculiar charge from a long-time advocate of muscular, self-interested, tough-minded policy for his own country.
I resist imputing bigotry as an explanation for legitimate dissent, but isn’t it logical to assume some underlying prejudice when Israel is judged by a different standard from any other nation? What other people on earth would be expected patiently to absorb literally hundreds of rocket attacks, not to mention the kidnapping of its soldiers from its own sovereign territory, without launching some firm, decisive response?
Buchanan tried to compare Israel’s reaction to the kidnapping of its soldiers to America’s restrained reaction to the seizure of our troops in Iraq – without making the obvious point that our GI’s were thousands of miles from home in a dangerous war zone, where the captured Israelis were safely in their own nation, clearly on their side of a recognized international boundary. Would the U.S. have reacted differently if Islamo-Nazis had kidnapped our troops from San Diego – rather than from Baghdad? Every American knows the answer to that.
It’s eminently possible to disagree with Israeli policy, or to oppose American aid to Israel, without raising suspicions of anti-Semitism—after all, Israeli Jews and American Jews frequently (in fact, incessantly) argue over government decisions made by the Cabinet and the Knesset in Jerusalem. But when attitudes toward the one Jewish nation on the planet suggest that this state possesses less right to exist, less right to defend itself, than all other nations on earth, it raises questions about underlying bias.
Classical anti-Semitism insisted that Jews deserved less respect, fewer rights, than other members of a given community. The new anti-Semitism suggests that the Jewish State deserves less respect, and fewer rights, than all other members of the community of nations.
This current struggle isn’t about the survival of Lebanon – not even the most rabid right-wingers in Israel advocate a long-term occupation or annexation of the deeply troubled nation to their north. Nor is the fight about the right of Palestinians to live in the Gaza Strip or the West Bank; no Israeli government has ever tried to dislodge the millions of Arabs who live in those territories, or the million more who live (as citizens) within Israel proper, for that matter.
The battle, as always, is ultimately about the survival of Israel – and the right of the Jewish people to live in their ancient homeland. There is no significant opposition to the continued existence of other sovereign states (Montenegro? Slovakia? Uzbekistan? Trinidad-Tobago?), which were created and recognized far more recently than Israel.
Those who suggest that Israel is ultimately to blame for its current war of self-defense may advance various conspiratorial and cynical claims to justify their position but the chances are that those arguments only mask a deeper, irrational hatred.