A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism (55 page)

As news of Israel’s victory spread through the Middle East and North Africa, angry mobs attacked the few Jews who remained in Arab nations. When the UN and the Red Cross tried to intervene, they were turned away. The leaders of Egypt, Syria, and Iraq responded to the anti-Jewish violence by expelling nearly every Jew within their borders. Only King Hassan of Morocco and President Habib Bourgiba of Tunisia condemned the riots.

Not long after the war ended, a number of Arab leaders made plans for yet another war. On October 6, 1973, Egypt led a surprise attack against
Israel. Although Israel was caught unprepared, in less than three weeks its army had gained the initiative. On October 26, the UN imposed a cease-fire to prevent a regional war from escalating into a world war.

Although Egypt did not win the 1973 War, its success in the early battles showed that Israel was not invincible. The war also revealed the power of a new factor in the conflict—oil. The leaders of Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing states raised the price of oil for nations they considered pro-Israel. The sharp increases hit many countries hard. Some began to rethink their support for Israel.

Arab losses in the two wars gave groups like Fatah new legitimacy. Fatah took over the PLO soon after Yasir Arafat became chairman in 1969. By the 1970s, the group was not only raiding Israeli settlements but also attacking Jews abroad. Its 1968 charter described Zionism as “racist and fanatic in its nature, aggressive, expansionist, and colonial in its aims, and fascist in its methods” and called for the destruction of Israel. The charter also claimed that the Zionists were using Israel as “a geographical base for world imperialism.”
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To many Israelis, the document was proof that anti-Zionism was a form of antisemitism.

The Muslim Brotherhood saw the Arabs’ defeat in the two wars as evidence that Arab leaders had strayed from the “pure teaching of Islam.” Some leaders, including Nasser, agreed. Nasser once again aligned himself with the group, telling his followers that “Almighty God wanted to give us a lesson.”
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After Nasser’s death in 1970, Anwar al-Sadat became president. He continued to support the radically conservative Islamic ideology that marked Nasser’s final years.

The Middle East and North Africa were not the only places where the two wars had an impact. Israel’s victories shattered old stereotypes about the “cowardliness of the Jews.” In Western Europe, those old stereotypes were quickly replaced with new ones. In a 1967 press conference, French President Charles de Gaulle described Jews as “an elite people, self-confident, and domineering” and claimed that they were responsible for “provoking ill will in certain countries and at certain times.”
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In Britain, novelist Colin MacInnes observed:

Before the battle started most Englishmen thought of Jews only as the oppressed, the victims, “Little Israel”; surrounded by foes dedicated to its destruction. After their swift victory, the Jews seemed transformed into the conquerors, even oppressors. And Arabs, who were thought of as arrogant attackers, seemed to have become overnight the victims, the wronged, the weak.
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T
HE
E
MIGRATION OF
J
EWS FROM
M
USLIM
N
ATIONS
(1948–1967)

Jews have lived in the Middle East and North Africa for thousands of years. By the 1960s, most of those communities were gone. Some Jews left because they no longer saw a future for themselves in the country of their birth. Many others were forced out by extreme nationalists or governments that increasingly saw all Jews as potential traitors.

Leaders of the Soviet Union and its allies in Eastern Europe insisted that Israel’s victories were the result of a “powerful international conspiracy” linked to the Nazis. Several brochures promoting that lie appeared in the Ukraine. According to the
New York Times
, they “accused Zionist leaders of conspiring against the Government of the Soviet Union and charged that they had collaborated with the Nazi regime in Germany.”
³¹

Similar accusations appeared in government-controlled media throughout the Soviet bloc. In 1968, British philosopher Bertrand Russell expressed his outrage at those charges in a letter to Wladyslaw Gomulka, the first secretary of Poland’s Communist Party:

Over the past eighteen months in Poland, the Press, the secret police and the Government have instigated anti-Semitism quite deliberately. By some twisted logic, all Jews are now Zionists, Zionists are fascists, fascists are Nazis, and Jews, therefore, are to be identified with the very criminals who only recently sought to eliminate Polish Jewry.
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Despite such criticism, the Soviet Union continued to provide Arab nations with military and economic support. That aid persuaded the United States to supply Israel with arms in order to “balance” Soviet influence in the region. To many Soviet and Arab leaders, American support for Israel was proof that the Israelis were “in league with” the Americans.

The Soviet Union, along with its allies in the Soviet bloc (except for Romania), broke off diplomatic relations with Israel immediately after the Six-Day War and launched a new anti-Zionist campaign at home and abroad. That campaign marked a turning point for many Soviet Jews. They were now more eager than ever to leave the Soviet Union and reclaim their Jewish identity. Boris Kochubiyevsky, a young radio engineer from Kiev, attributed their eagerness to antisemitism—“the new brand which was implanted from above and, as a means of camouflage, is called anti-Zionism.”
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To emigrate, a Soviet citizen needed permission from the government, and Soviet officials routinely denied almost all such requests. In 1970, eleven Soviet activists—eight Jews and three non-Jews—took the matter into their own hands. They planned to hijack a plane and fly it to Finland.
They were arrested before they could do so, however, and charged with treason. Ten of the eleven were found guilty. Two received the death penalty; the others were sentenced to 5 to 15 years in prison.

In New York City, Mayor John Lindsay spoke at a rally attended by more than 2,000 people. He said: “We meet this afternoon as Jew and Gentile, black and white, young and old… to speak out for thousands of Soviet Jews who cannot speak for themselves.”
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Similar rallies were held in cities across the United States and Western Europe.

In the end, Soviet leaders gave in and reduced the sentences issued at the Leningrad trials. Jews had found a way to be heard. In the 1970s, only a few hundred Jews were allowed to emigrate each year. Throughout the 1980s, the numbers grew. More than 8,000 left in 1987, about 70,000 in 1989, and nearly 300,000 in 1990.

Throughout the 1970s, Soviet and Arab leaders falsely linked Zionism to racism and imperialism by arguing that Zionism was “an imperialistic militant ideology of racial hatred which should be universally condemned.”
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That language had a powerful impact on nations that had only recently been under colonial rule and were still struggling with the consequences of racism and imperialism. As a result, many people in the world’s newest nations (most of whom had never met a single Jew) came to believe that “Zionist organizations” and “Zionist capital” dominated the world. Zionism was increasingly viewed as a huge, invisible power linked to American imperialism.

The Soviets and the Arabs also used the United Nations to promote anti-Zionism. In 1948, the year Israel declared its independence, the UN had 58 members; by 1965, it had 117. Over the next ten years, an additional 27 nations would join the UN. Many of them supported a 1975 UN resolution backed by the Soviet Union and Arab nations that defined Zionism as a “form of racism.”

Still, after listening to the debate, a delegate from Sierra Leone reminded his colleagues that Kwame Nkrumah, a leader of the African nationalist liberation cause, used the term
black Zionism
to describe a movement to return to Africa those people whose African ancestors had been sold into slavery. He noted that Nkrumah did not consider black Zionism racist. Israeli ambassador Chaim Herzog began his speech on a similar note:

Zionism is to the Jewish people what the liberation movements of Africa and Asia have been to their own people…
.

Historically it is based on a unique and unbroken connection, extending some four thousand years, between the People of the Book and the Land of the Bible. In modern times, in the late nineteenth century, spurred by the twin forces of anti-Semitic persecution and of nationalism, the Jewish people organized the Zionist movement in order to transform their dream into reality…
.

Zionism is our attempt to build a society, imperfect though it may be, in which the visions of the prophets of Israel will be realized. I know that we have problems. I know that many disagree with our government’s policies. Many in Israel too disagree from time to time with the government’s policies… and are free to do so because Zionism has created the first and only real democratic state in a part of the world that never really knew democracy and freedom of speech.
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In the end, the resolution passed with 72 votes in favor, 35 against, 32 nations abstaining. Jews in many places were immediately branded as “racists worse than the Nazis,” and anti-Zionism was incorporated into UN documents. It took Israel and its allies, including the United States, 16 years to overturn the resolution. They succeeded in part because of the collapse of the Soviet Union’s Communist government in 1991.

Despite the resolution, some progress toward peace took place in the Middle East. In November 1977, Anwar al-Sadat flew to Israel to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. As a result of that journey and the support of the United States, Sadat and Begin signed a peace treaty in March 1979. It aroused fierce opposition not only in other Arab nations but also in Egypt. On October 6, 1981, Sadat was assassinated by the Muslim Brotherhood, a group to which he had once belonged. Although the new leaders who governed Egypt after Sadat’s death did not revoke the treaty, they continued to support the antisemitic propaganda that made the conflict so difficult to resolve.

By 1987, Israel had occupied the West Bank and Gaza for 20 years, and one effort after another to negotiate a settlement had failed. That year, young Palestinians expressed their frustration with the continuing occupation
by rioting, throwing stones at Israeli soldiers, and setting off homemade bombs. These attacks were known as an
intifada
, an Arabic word that means “shaking off,” in the sense of shaking off the power of an oppressor.

As the rioting continued, Palestinians formed new factions that challenged the PLO. Hamas, with its ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, was the most popular. Both Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood viewed Israel as the enemy not just because it held land that Palestinians claimed but because “Israel, by virtue of its being Jewish and of having a Jewish population, defies Islam and the Muslims.”
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In their view, the conflict was a religious as well as a political struggle.

During the fighting, the United States and several European nations encouraged Israel and the PLO to negotiate a peace agreement. The two sides met publicly in Madrid, Spain, and then secretly in Oslo, Norway. In 1993, they agreed on a course of action known as the Oslo Peace Process, with the goal of establishing two separate states—Israel and Palestine. The following year, Israel and Jordan signed a peace treaty.

As part of the peace process, Israel transferred administrative power over the territories to an elected Palestinian Authority headed by Yasir Arafat. The next step was to work out solutions to the issues that continued to divide Israelis and Palestinians—including the rights of Palestinian refugees, the status of Jerusalem, the future of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, and security arrangements on both sides.

Even though most Israelis and Palestinians favored a two-state solution to the conflict, some Palestinians and some Israelis opposed any compromise. Hamas was among the most vocal opponents of the peace process, and it played a major role in the violence that defined the second intifada, which began in 2000.

The first intifada was dominated by young Palestinians who threw stones at soldiers; the second was marked by young people who exploded bombs that killed civilians within Israel’s borders. Within Israel, the attacks hardened distrust of Palestinians. There were other differences between the two intifadas as well. Significantly by the second intifada, the Cold War was over, and the Soviet Union no longer existed. In the Middle East, several nations scrambled to take its place as a powerful benefactor. Perhaps the most aggressive was Iran, an oil-rich Muslim nation with a Shi’a majority.
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In 1979, Islamists had overthrown the shah, or monarch, of Iran and created a new government strictly based on Islamic law.