At Issue:
Is anti-Zionism a
cover-up for anti-Semitism?
ANTONY LERMAN – No *
DIRECTOR, INSTITUTE
FOR JEWISH POLICY
RESEARCH
WRITTEN FOR CQ
GLOBAL RESEARCHER, JUNE 2008
http://www.jpr.org.uk/downloads/Global%20Researcher.pdf
Anti-Zionism
and hostility to Israel can be anti-Semitic if
they are expressed
using the symbols of the anti-Semitic
figure of the Jew or
of Jewry as a whole. For example,
if Zionism is
characterized as a worldwide Jewish conspiracy, or
a plan straight out
of the forged, anti-Semitic “Protocols of the
Learned Elders of
Zion,” that is anti-Semitism.
But to believe that
anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are one
and the same ignores
the history of Zionism.
For decades Zionism
was supported only by a minority of
Jews. The rest were
either indifferent or manifestly opposed to
the whole idea of
the establishment of a Jewish state. Anti-
Zionism was
therefore a perfectly respectable position to hold,
and one that
continues to be held today by hundreds of
thousands of
strictly orthodox Jews and many secular Jews
with left-liberal
perspectives.
Equating
anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism — what has become
known as the “new
anti-Semitism” — fundamentally subverts
the shared
understanding of what anti-Semitism is, built
up painstakingly
through research and study by scholars over
many years: It
drains the word anti-Semitism of any useful
meaning. The
advocates of the concept of a new anti-Semitism
argue that it is
anti-Semitic to either criticize Israeli policies or
deny Israel’s right
to exist, even if one does not hold beliefs
historians have
traditionally regarded as an anti-Semitic view:
hatred of Jews per
se, belief in a worldwide Jewish conspiracy,
belief that Jews
created communism and control capitalism, belief
that Jews are
racially inferior and so on.
Those who argue that
anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are
one claim they don’t
say criticism of Israeli policies is illegitimate.
However, in practice
this view virtually proscribes any
such thing.
As the Oxford
academic Brian Klug has written, anti-Zionism
and hostility to
Israel — if based on a political cause or moral
code that is not
anti-Jewish per se — is not anti-Semitic. And
arguing that it is
harms the all-important struggle to combat
anti-Semitism. If
people feel unfairly stigmatized as anti-Semitic
simply for speaking
out about the plight of the Palestinians and
the Israeli
government’s role in causing their suffering, they
could become cynical
and alienated whenever the problem of
anti-Semitism is
raised.
At the same site is
a Yes answer from Ben Cohen, Associate Director, Dept. on Anti-Semitism
& Extremism, American Jewish Committee, Editor,
www.z-word.com
------------
The
article by Antony Lerner published in Jewish Quarterly is at:
http://www.jfjfp.org/background7_antisemitism/lerner_Jewish-self-hatred_JQ.pdf
which as you can see is at the JfJfP website. The shorter link is:
http://tinyurl.com/5vc3k6
Here are the extracts I've chosen to give an idea of what's in the full
6-page article
ESSAY
Jewish Self-Hatred: Myth or Reality?
Antony Lerman contextualises the
time-worn accusation.
Antony Lerman is
the director of the Institute for Jewish Policy
Research and is
writing here in a personal capacity.
"... The self-hatred
accusation, now
commonly applied, has
moved beyond writers
to embrace whole
classes of people whose one
common denominator is
their alleged hatred
of Israel or their
willingness to connive in its
delegitimisation out of
a misguided sense of guilt
for what Jews have done
to the Palestinians. ...
"... The touchstone for
being a ‘good Jew’ has
increasingly become
passion for Israel. But it seems
that there is a right
and a wrong passion. Essentially,
caring about Israel can
only mean approving
of its policies.
Disapproval is synonymous with
self-hatred.
"[But when founder of
modern political Zionism Theodor]
Herzl ... painted the
weak ghetto Jew ... as the bad Jew
who speaks with a
Yiddish accent, a ‘scamp’,‘a distortion
of the human character,
unspeakably mean and repellent’,
interested only in
‘mean profit,’ he was
using anti-Semitic
attributes — and some accused
him of self-hatred. The
writer Karl Kraus, himself
Jewish (and also
branded as a self-hating Jew),
attacked Herzl for
‘creating another antisemitic
movement’. Far from
being the antithesis of Jewish
self-hatred, some argue
that Zionism was actually
a display of it....
"... [The concept
self-hatred involves two sets of assumptions]:
that there is a correct
manner and degree to which people
should express their
Jewish identities in public; and
that there is a set of
core values and institutions
which one should
favour. It is also assumed that
Jewishness ‘is or
should be a primary identity’ and
therefore rejecting it
or criticising it is somehow
unnatural and wrong.
" [For some Jewish
writers] quoted earlier, Zionism and
Israel are core Jewish
values, and rejecting them is a
pathological act
consonant with deliberate estrangement
from the group. But
there has never been a time when all
Jewish denominations
and groups have accepted
Israel and Zionism as
core values. Today, hundreds
and thousands of
strictly Orthodox Jews, many of
whom live in Israel,
utterly reject the notion that
the modern state of
Israel and the political ideology
of Zionism have
anything to do with Judaism. The
venom of the
‘self-hatred’ accusers is reserved for
those labelled
‘progressive’, ‘left-liberal’, ‘left-wing’,
for whom Israel and
Zionism do not play the
role in their Jewish
identity which their accusers
determine it should do.
Some, motivated by the
values of social
justice which are central to their
Jewishness, may well
feel that their sense of Jewish
identity is affirmed by
opposition to the policies
of the Israeli
government. But to the self-hate
accusers there are no
legitimate differences of
opinion among Jews on
key elements of Zionism
and Israel.
"The concept of the
‘self-hating Jew’ strengthens
a narrow, ethnocentric
view of the Jewish people.
It exerts a monopoly
over patriotism. It promotes
a definition of Jewish
identity which relies on
the notion of an
eternal enemy, and how much
more dangerous when
that enemy is a fifth
column within the
group. It plays on real fears of
anti-Semitism and at
the same time exaggerates the
problem by claiming
that critical Jews are ‘infected’
by it too. And it
posits an essentialist notion of
Jewish identity.
"Could the widespread
and increasingly
indiscriminate use of
the self-hatred accusation
be a sign of
desperation on the part of the
accusers? Dissenting
voices on Israel have certainly
strengthened and
multiplied in recent years. Twenty
years ago in Britain
there were one or two rather
small groups promoting
a left-wing non-Zionist or
anti-Zionist approach,
who were regarded as hate
figures by the Jewish
establishment. Today there are
more than a dozen
critical groups. Some encompass
the views of many
hundreds, if not thousands; some
are not left-wing. How
much easier to dismiss
their arguments by
levelling the charge of Jewish
self-hatred than by
engaging with them.
"It is too much to hope
that by revealing just
how bankrupt a concept
‘Jewish self-hatred’ is,
discourse among Jews on
Israel and Zionism could
become more productive,
both for Jews themselves
and for the sake of
achieving justice in the conflict
between Israelis and
Palestinians. Too much is
currently invested in
this demonising rhetoric. But
if we could edge it
closer to the rim of the dustbin
of history, we’d be
making a start."
