Are many anti-Zionists really just anti-Semites?

Howard Jacobson deals brilliantly with the question:

It is, anyway, a red herring. I am tired, myself, of deciding who is and who isn't. Anti-Semitism, when all is said and done, is not the only crime on the block. You don't have to be an anti-Semite to be a blackguard. And you certainly don't have to be an anti-Semite to be a fool. Boycotters assure us of their innocence of anti-Semitism as though that settles once and for all the question of their intellectual and moral rectitude. Some have even stopped dressing like Palestinians (seen as marginally compromising of their impartiality the last time round) and started paying reverential visits to Auschwitz. Since we are demonstrably not Jew haters, these new recruits to Jewish anguish ask us to accept, since we are neither Nazi sympathisers nor Holocaust deniers, our credentials are in good order. But it isn't quite as simple as that.

The rest of the essay is very powerful too.

(Hat Tip: The great Dizzy)

Comments

[Guy Herbert]

Jacobson is always good value, but I think he has it slightly twisted in this case. My take is that a lot of those who describe themselves as 'anti-Zionists' are actually anti-Israeli and that is the knee-jerk indicating a spinal reflex that is anti-American: America supports Israel, therefore Israel is to be hated. It is not surprising that many Jews feel positive about Israel for reasons little related to modern politics, but they therefore get lumped on the other side. It's a proxy war against America for much of the left; the anti-Semitism is derivative or contingent.

The proxy war has advantages for its sponsors. Outside a very few specialities, boycotting Israeli academics is a small loss of dusty seminars. Cutting off relations with US academia on the other hand would mean ignoring most of the important work, and all the best rewarded jobs and academic outings.

[John Muktananda]

There's a problem with you Finkelkraut. And that is that you, like nearly every other Jewish writer, think with the blood.
Why is Israel the least popular country on the planet, according to an Anholt survey of 35,000 people across the globe. Even the Americans rate them below most other nationalities.
When the whole world has a problem with you, you have a problem.
I don't think almost anyone knows about theology enough to hate Jews on religious-historical grounds; I think people just the Israelis as they come, and it may be that people simply dislike what they see. (People have complained Israelis' abroad cheap style and aggressive pushy manner.) It's about denotation not connotation.
Oh - and are they Jews. Well maybe the question you and the Elders have to address: is Israeli arseholeness the consequence of so much untramelled Jewishness in one place,feeding of each other, or is really a response to - violins now - the holocaust and extreme but "understandable" defensiveness.
I only found out recently it was Israel that started the wars of 56 and 67. Puts their campaign to start WW3 with Iran and wagging the American dog to bring this about into context.
Anti semitism is easy enough to test for. You have the guinea pigs sit at a dinner table with a group of Israelis nearby, behaving like Israelis. Then one guinea pig told they are Russian, another told they are Arab, a third told they are Polish, a fourth told they are Isaerli. And then sample opinion.
It may be that they are found to be arseholes wherever they are from. So: no antisemitism at play.

[jamal]

While I show my disgust for Israel’s current and continuing attack on Gaza, many have been thowing the same old "Anti-Semitic" label at me. The reality is that they do not know the meaning of the word, just as I do not fear such a label.

Semite: A member of a group of Semitic-speaking peoples of the Middle East and northern Africa.

Semetic: A description of Middle East peoples that trace their origin from the biblical Noah and his son Shem; these include Jews and Arabs.

Therefore "semetic" and "semite" does not only refer to Jews, but if they want to continue to call us Anti-Semetic for opposing Jewish/Zionist opression of Palestine then I agree with the following via Ziopedia.

"An ‘Anti-Semite’ in today’s use of the term in the media and public debate is no longer someone who hates Jews, but - the otherway round - someone the Jews hate.

Anybody criticising how the IDF is treating Palestinians, the rampant use of torture and extra-judicial killings, the bulldozing of Palestinian homes and orchards, the daily harassment by Jewish settlers of Palestinian kids on the way to school and farmers on their way to their fields, the use of army check points and illegal ’security walls’ making life in the occupied territories virtually impossible, the conversion of Gaza - one of the world’s most populated areas - into a giant concentration camp without food, water, electricity and medical supplies, the killing of hundreds of Palestinians - most of them children and teenagers - each year, the killing of over 1000 civilians and dropping of over a million cluster bombs onto civilian areas in the recent Lebanon assault, is an Anti-Semite.

In other words, being Anti-Semitic is a good thing. We should all wear this label with pride. In fact, we should all wear badges saying ‘I’m an Anti-Semite- All decent people are.’"

It is important to understand that Anti-Zionist does not equal Anti-Jew.

http://radicalmuslim.blogsome.com/2007/05/20/being-anti-semitic/

[Patrick]

How about the Jews against Zionism people here:
http://www.jewsagainstzionism.com/. Are they anti-Jewish? They are quite adamant that Judaism and Zionism are actually incompatible. Is Zionism itself virulently anti-Jewish; see the dreadful treatment of the local Jewish population, the Mizrahim Jews, by the organs of the Israeli state. See the documentary, 100,000 Radiations to see the extent of the vicious inhuman treatment meted out to the local population.

[Tom Beck]

The opening of John Muktananda’s semi-literate observations says it all: ‘There's a problem with you Finkelkraut. And that is that you, like nearly every other Jewish writer, think with the blood.’ What does it mean, to ‘think with the blood’? Why refer to D.F. in such a peremptory fashion as ‘Finkelkraut’, if not to emphasise - what? That he is Jewish. Here we have the entire problem in a nutshell – it is now considered perfectly right and proper to insult Jews, and yet claim one is not being anti-Semitic. Red Ken’s remarks to a Jewish reporter, equating him with the Nazis, are perhaps the most prominent recent example of this ever more fashionable tendency. The Mayor of London made the comparison, one suspects, precisely because the reporter was a Jew. His refusal to retract the insult suggests he knew full well what he was saying.

Anti-Semitism has in the last century and a half (roughly since Jews were allowed out of the ghettos) proved to be the sign of a society in deep trouble. This is not because anti-Semitism is necessarily worse than other forms of racism, but because its victims are, in a important sense, ‘invisible’. Muslims by and large, Blacks (is that the correct term nowadays?) and similar groups are immediately seen to be what they are. With the Jew this is very often not the case: he/she looks like any other white person. And often Jews do not have a give-away name such as Finkelkraut, but instead are called Lewis, Maxwell, and the like.

It is for this reason that Jews are accused of manifold absurdities, ‘thinking with the blood’ (as above), killing Christian children to make matzos, controlling the world’s media, and the whole catalogue of inane indictments. Indeed, if someone is disliked enough, he/she is assumed to be a Jew (Conrad Black of the Daily Telegraph springs to mind), and if no Jews, real or imagined, can be found to be doing the dirty deed, this is because it is claimed they are so good at concealing their evil machinations (the basis of ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’). Jews are thus defined as ‘different’ from the rest of the white population.

Anti-Semitism thus become the ‘racism without a victim’, to whose rescue the chattering classes rush. It was Sartre who remarked that even if there were no Jews in the world, they would have to be invented in order for anti-Semitism to exist. And that is why anti-Semitism is so particularly dangerous. So that Jews can be distinguished from other ‘whites’, they are demonised and endowed with particular and always revolting, if imagined, characteristics. They ‘think with the blood’, are portrayed as rats and other vermin, are given special powers over, for instance, white women (Hitler tells us he had recurring nightmares of a black-haired, hook-nosed Jew ravishing an Aryan maiden).

Mr. Muktananda lists further such pseudo-stereotypes: Israelis ‘abroad [have a] cheap style and aggressive pushy manner’ (new to me, hitherto I had thought it was Germans, Americans or the Japanese). The ‘Elders’ actually exist, so they and Mr Finkelkraut must answer to Mr Muktananda (he does not tell us why anyone should give a damn about him, but we’ll let that pass). Then we have virulent anti-Jewish hatred, such as Israeli ‘arseholeness’, ‘untrammelled Jewishness’ (what does that mean? Being like Einstein, or Freud or Solti, or whoever, the list is endless?). Israelis/Jews ‘feed off each other’ (the cannibal/ Christian children theme), are extremely defensive about the Holocaust (surprise surprise! Perhaps they don’t like being murdered in their millions perhaps by people such as Mr. Muktananda and his ilk). Mr. Muktananda also reveals himself to be something of a historian, albeit somewhat belated, as he tells us: ‘I only found out recently it was Israel that started the wars of 56 and 67’. Ah well, just so that we know…..

And finally he dissolves into the lurid and imbecilic Hitlerian rant with which he concludes, ‘proving’ that his entire diatribe is not anti-Semitic. ‘Anti-Semitism is easy enough to test for. You have the guinea pigs sit at a dinner table with a group of Israelis nearby, behaving like Israelis. Then one guinea pig told they are Russian, another told they are Arab, a third told they are Polish, a fourth told they are Israeli. And then sample opinion. It may be that they are found to be arseholes wherever they are from. So: no anti-Semitism at play’ (I have corrected the spelling).

Here we have the quintessence of anti-Semitism. In as much as this pernicious idiocy means anything, we can conclude that had those at the dinner table been black, or virtually any other ethnic subgroup, the test would have been unnecessary. But no, these ‘Israelis…behaving like Israelis’ reveal themselves to be ‘arseholes’ and by implication Jews, wherever they are from. In other words, Jews are naturally and always ‘arseholes’ and one does not need to be an anti-Semite to see and state this ‘obvious’ fact. Or to put it another way, to be an anti-Semite is not to be an anti-Semite.

When significant sections of society are comfortable with this kind of thinking about Jews (and perusal of the media suggests this is the case), that society itself no longer sees its innate sickness. Were such remarks to be made about any other minority group, there would be outrage. But when they are made about Jews, this time in the shape of Israelis, they are acceptable. No one would dream of banning contact with the appalling tyrannies that surround Israel, or with the many African countries in which the abuses of human rights far outweigh anything Israel may or may not have done.

But when it comes to Jews, their ‘arseholeness’, while not quite so crudely expressed as by the revolting Mr. Muktananda, becomes a mater of course, evident without qualification for all to see, like his imagined ‘‘Israelis…behaving like Israelis’ around the dinner table. The meal, however, is poisoned and the other diners, as the history of the last one and a half centuries of anti-Semitism shows, also suffer. For society, in attempting to destroy the ‘invisible’ enemy, as anyone with the slightest knowledge of history realises, is equally destroying itself. The Nazis in WWII killed some six million Jews, but far more non-Jews died as a result of the profound wickedness that Hitler and anti-Semitism represented.

[Tom Beck]

Why does it not surprise me that someone called ‘Jamal’ proclaims, “I am an anti-Semite! All decent people are.”? He points to the usual suspects, and for whatever reason omits to talk about the crimes Palestinians are committing against each other (Hamas killing off Fatah, and the other way round), let alone those committed on a daily basis by Muslims in the whole area against their fellow Muslims, not to mention those of other faiths.

But be that as it may, it should be pointed out to him, and to those others who do not realise where the word ‘anti-Semite’ comes from, that it was coined by a German journalist, Wilhelm Marr, in 1875, and was intended by its author to refer to, and only to, the Jews. All other connotations are false, and as a result either stupid or malicious, in fact - both.