Those Who Forget the Past (10 page)
VI.
His essay, all in all, seems to have been written on two levels. There is an ostensible level that criticizes Israel, although in a friendly fashion, with the criticisms meant to rescue Israel from its own errors and thereby to help everyone else who has been trapped in the conflict; and a second level, consisting of images and random phrases (the level that might attract Freud's attention), which keep hinting that maybe Israel has no right to exist. It is worth looking at the religious images and references in Judt's essay. There are two of these, and they express the two contradictory levels with a painful clarity.
In his very last lines, Judt urges the Israelis to treat the Palestinian public with dignity and to turn quickly from war to peace negotiations. And, in order to give a pungency or fervor to his exhortation, he concludes by quoting a famous rabbinical remark, “And if not now, when?” He ends, that is, on a warm note of Judaism, which is plainly a sympathetic tone to adoptâa call for Israel to adhere to Judaism's highest traditions of morality and good sense. Yet, at another point he strikes a Christian note, and of the weirdest sort.
Judt wonders about Sharon, “Will he send the tanks into the Galilee? Put up electric fences around the Arab districts of Haifa?” Judt complains that Israel's intellectuals are not mounting a suitable opposition to this kind of aggression. He describes the intellectuals and their failure to oppose in these words: “The country's liberal intelligentsia who, Pilate-like, have washed their hands of responsibility.” That is, Judt compares Israel's liberal intellectuals to Pontius Pilate, who took no responsibility for killing Jesus. That is a very strange phrase to stumble across in an essay on the Middle East. Freud's eyebrows rise in wonder. The phrase is worth parsing. If Israel's liberal intellectuals are Pontius Pilate, who is Sharon? He must be the Jewish high priest who orders the crucifixion. Who is Jesus? He can only be the people whom the high priest is setting out to killânamely, the suicide bombers. Surely Judt cannot mean that the Palestinian terrorists are God.
But then, it does seem odd that, a couple of lines down, Judt turns to the word “terrorist” and doubts its usefulness. “âTerrorist,' ” he writes, “risks becoming the mantra of our time, like âCommunist,' âcapitalist,' âbourgeois,' and others before it. Like them, it closes off all further discussion.” Words do turn into meaningless slogans. Still, is it so unreasonable, at a moment when the astounding series of mass murders in Israel is still going on, to speak of “terrorists,” that is, of people who deliberately set out to kill randomly? The suicide bombers are, in fact, terrorists, by any conventional definition of the term. Judt cannot mean to let those people off the hook, and in one portion of his essay he sternly condemns them. Yet in the passage that follows the remark about Pontius Pilate he ends up commenting, “terror against civilians is the weapon of choice of the weak.” Presumably he means that the Palestinian bombers are weak and have had no alternative way to claim their national rightsâthough he doesn't explain why the “weak” would have turned to their “weapon of choice” precisely in the aftermath of former Prime Minister Ehud Barak's offer to create the Palestinian state in Gaza and on almost all of the West Bank.
About José Saramago, I do believe, on the basis of the essay in
El PaÃs,
that the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize has gotten hung up on the Jew roiling in his head, in Barbara Solomon's phrase. Not for one moment do I believe anything of the sort about Tony Judt. I can imagine that Judt chose to write about Pontius Pilate for the simplest and most natural reasons. The notion that the suicide bombers are sacred figures fulfilling a divine function, combined with the notion that Israel's Jews are evil demons, has swept the world in the last few months. Even the notion that the Jews are guilty of deicide, which is Christian in origin, has in recent times spread to the Muslim world. The new young president of Syria expressed that very notion to the Pope, on the occasion of the Pope's visit.
But, once these ideas have been picked up by events and have been sent flying through the air like body parts in a terrorist attack, they can easily land anywhere, and a writer whose anger has gotten out of hand can end up making use of those notions, strictly by mistake. Doubtless a main lesson to be drawn from Judt's essay is that even the most brilliant of university professors, lacking training and experience in journalism, may fail to command the most workaday of journalistic skillsâthe skill that allows a cooler-headed newsroom pro to write to deadline in tense times without losing control of the nuances and hidden meanings of his own copy.
Losing control of his own rhetoric and nothing worse than that was, in Judt's case, surely the error. For just as most people in the anti-globalism movement would never chant in favor of suicide bombers (even if some people did chant in favor), and just as most of the Socialist Scholars would never support the terrorists (even if one of the honored panelists did), and just as a modern, high-minded newspaper like
El PaÃs
would not care to publish anti-Semitic demagoguery (even if it did publish such a work), Judt, I am confident, had no intention of indulging in anti-Zionism and certainly no intention of sacralizing the terrorists or demonizing the Jews (even if that is the inference of what he ended up writing).
Yet it is the unintended inferences that seem to me the most frightening of all. To go out and fight against bigots and racists of all sorts, the anti-Semites and the anti-Arab racists alike, seems to me relatively simple to do, even in these terrible times. It is not so easy to put up a fight against a wind, a tone, against an indefinable spirit of hatred that has begun to appear even in the statements of otherwise sensible people.
But that is what we are up against. The little accidents and odd behaviors do add up. The new wind is definitely blowing. A few months ago no one was chanting for murder. In those days it was pretty unusual to stumble across diatribes against Judaism or anti-Semitic phrases in the intellectual press. But look what has happened. Something has changed.
DAVID BROOKS
It's Back
AFTER JOE LIEBERMAN COMPLETED his unsuccessful campaign for the vice-presidency, I pretty much concluded that anti-Semitism was no longer a major feature of American life. I went around making the case that the Anti-Defamation League should close up shop, since the evil they were organized to combat had shrunk to insignificance.
Now I get a steady stream of anti-Semitic screeds in my e-mail, my voicemail, and my mailbox. It transpired that I couldn't have been more wrong. Anti-Semitism is alive and thriving. It's just that its epicenter is no longer on the Buchananite right, but on the peace-movement left.
“Hello. I'm a grandmother from Minnesota. I want to thank you for taking my call,” a voicemail on my machine began recently. When you hear a message like that you sort of settle back and prepare for some civil sentiment. Then it continued. “I just wanted to know: Are you related to Paul Wolfowitz and Ari Fleischer? I can usually smell you people. . . .” At that point I deleted the thing.
But it's like that week in and week out. And I'm best known for appearances on PBS and NPR, which surely have the most civilized audiences in the land. Nor is this a fringe phenomenon. Lawrence Kaplan recently wrote an op-ed in
The Washington
Post,
gathering some of the highly questionable statements politicians and columnists have made over the past few weeks, accusing Jews of dual loyalty and worse. I occasionally get reports about conversations at sophisticated Washington dinner parties that turn into gripe sessions about the Israeli agents who have grabbed control of President Bush's brain. Accusing Jews of twisting U.S. policy to suit Israel is the same as accusing Catholics of taking orders from the Pope. It's also logically absurd, since Israelis are far more concerned about Iran and Syria than Iraq. But it's become commonplace nonetheless.
Not long ago I was chatting with a prominent Washington figure in a greenroom. “You people have infested everywhere,” he said in what I thought was a clumsy but good-hearted manner. He listed a few of “us”: “Wolfowitz, Feith, Frum, Perle.” I've never met Doug Feith in my life and Wolfowitz and Perle I've barely met. Yet he assumed we were tight as thieves. After a few minutes of jibing I finally pointed out that there were many non-Jews who support the president's policy against Iraq. I mentioned Bob Kerrey. “He's a shabbas goy. He's got a lot of Jewish money supporting that school,” he shot back. Shabbas goys are Christians who perform tasks for observant Jews on Saturdays.
I am the last person who used to suspect people of antiSemitism. I was never really conscious of it affecting my life until the last few weeks. But now I wonder. I watched a town meeting in northern Virginia a few weeks ago. A Vietnam vet got up to rail against U.S. policy on Iraq, which he said was engineered by “Paul Wolfowitz and Daniel Pearl.” He got the wrong Pearl. He accidentally mentioned somebody who was beheaded for being American and Jewish. But the crowd didn't seem to notice. They roared with approval and slapped him on the back as he made his way from the microphone. Why didn't he say Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and Powell were organizing the Bush administration policy? They're higher ranking officials than Wolfowitz and actually members of the administration, unlike Perle. Would the crowd have roared as wildly if he'd mentioned Rice and Powell, I wondered, or did the words Wolfowitz and Perle somehow get their juices flowing?
It's not just the things people say. It's the things that are now socially acceptable. The leftist group ANSWER has a long and well-documented record of anti-Zionist statements so extreme and inflammatory that they are truly offensive. (Not to mention a record of supporting murderers and tyrants that is appalling and inhumane.) When the thousands gathered for the peace rally ANSWER co-organized on the Mall in Washington, I figured most of the marchers didn't really know the true nature of the group. But now principled liberals and many others have exposed its vicious and Stalinoid nature. And the peace marchers don't mind! They still flocked to the ANSWER-organized marches last weekend. The fact that the Jewish liberal Michael Lerner wasn't permitted to speak didn't bother them either! Would they march at peace rallies organized by the KKK or the American Nazi Party, groups that are about as despicable as ANSWER? Is all hatred now socially acceptable if it is organized in the cause of “peace”?
I mentioned that I barely know Paul Wolfowitz, which is true. But I do admire him enormously, not only because he is both a genuine scholar and an effective policy practitioner, not only because he has been right on most of the major issues during his career, but because he is now the focus of world anti-Semitism. He carries the burden of their hatred, which emanates not only from the Arab world and France, but from some people in our own country, which I had so long underestimated.
BARBARA AMIEL
Islamists Overplay Their Hand
But London Salons Don't See It
[
This December 2001 column, which came to be known for a French diplomat'sobscenity-studded description of Israel, was one of
the first
dramatic
indications of how anti-Semitism had become, if not acceptable, common
(in every sense of the word) in elite social circles in London.
]
IN A COLUMN in last week's
Spectator
, Petronella Wyatt noted that “since September 11 anti-Semitism and its open expression has become respectable at London dinner tables.”
This is an accurate observation and cannot be avoided by simply staying at home.
Recently, the ambassador of a major EU country politely told a gathering at my home that the current troubles in the world were all because of “that shitty little country Israel.”
“Why,” he asked, “should the world be in danger of World War Three because of those people?”
At a private lunch last month, the hostessâdoyenne of London's political salon sceneâmade a remark to the effect that she couldn't stand Jews and everything happening to them was their own fault.
When this was greeted with a shocked silence, she chided her guests on what she assumed was their hypocrisy. “Oh come on,” she said, “you all feel like that.”
Once that remark would have cost her license as a serious political hostess, but clearly she believes the zeitgeist is blowing her way.
The editor of a major British newspaper came to our home, and I can tell Petronella Wyatt that it can be just as awkward with good friends at lunch as it is with strangers at dinner.
The editor is a decent man but his paper habitually blames Israel's “opposition to peace” for the problems in the Middle East and lectures them to negotiate. “But, look,” he was asked, “Arafat does not believe in the right of the Jewish people to a state. How can the Israelis negotiate in that situation?”
The editor replied with disarming honesty: “You have put your finger on the weak point in our argument.”
All this is not as bad as it seems. True, these remarks are exceptionally painful for some British Jews who feel beleaguered aliens in their own land. For myself, it merits only a shrug.
One is irritated when, as last October, the community hall of a north London synagogue burned down in what police labeled a racist arson attack and the matter barely rated a mention except in the Jewish press.
The Monday after the triple suicide bombings in Israel that killed 26 and injured around 200, the
Evening Standard
turned to Charles Glass, an old anti-Israel hand. Glass wrote: “Palestinians kill Israelis. Israelis kill Palestinians. Who killed first? No one remembers and it does not matter.”
For the past twenty-five years, I've watched sad-faced Israeli activists trudge around Western capitals with heavy hearts beating under ill-fitting suits. They carry folders of transcripts and videotapes to document the misrepresentations in the press and the moral hypocrisy of the world towards Israel.
They want to win the war of ideas on its merits. Their attention to detail in translating the hate literature of the Middle East and the hate-filled speeches of its leaders is commendable.
It's enlightening to read, for example, their studies of Syrian and Palestinian Authority school textbooks that explain to young schoolchildren that the Jews are a people made up of murderers and thieves.
It is sad to learn that such textbooks are used by the UN in its schools for Palestinian refugees. But something new is “blowin' in the wind.”
Today, after years in the media desert, Israel's experts and front-line activists are slowly finding some media doors opening to them. They may think it is their own perseverance. But I think it is the daisy cutter effect.
For years, I said that Jews were out of fashion and I understood why. The world was sick of the Middle East problem: why should it be inconvenienced by the cost and the ripple effect of terrorism?
The West defeated the Third Reich and we Jews were no longer in need of a lifeboat: indeed, today we would probably be safer just about anywhere rather than the Middle East. But events in the past year or so changed the equation and our rehabilitation has begun. The Arab/Muslim world overplayed its hand.
Their first wrong move was the rejection of prime minister Ehud Barak's offer in 2000. Even if you looked at that proposal from an Arab point of view and believed that a Palestinian state comprising 95 percent of the West Bank and a shared Jerusalem was not sufficient, you couldn't possibly argue that such a deal should be rejected out of hand.
The second mistake was launching the Al-Aqsa intifada after rejecting that deal. Eventually, the world saw that it was not Ariel Sharon's walk on the Temple Mount that caused the new intifada (a walk pre-cleared with the Muslim authorities) but Arafat's decision to escalate violence for tactical reasons.
The greatest error of all was when bin Laden, acting in the name of the Arab/Muslim world, decidedâwith a total in-comprehension of what this would entailâto blow up Lower Manhattan and blow it up at a time when the American administration was in the hands of Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld and not Clinton and Gore.
The Arab street remained silent at best or cheered the WTC bombing even as some of their leaders made ritual condemnations of it. Almost overnight, a blindfold fell off America's eyes. Appeasement didn't work.
The problem was not Israel's intransigence, nor even the conflict that comes from Israel's existence: the problem is Islamism.
Islam itself is split between Islam as a religion that can be essentially peacefulâendorsing the qualities of charity and mercyâand militant Islam (Islamism), which is intolerant and expansionist. Islam periodically goes into this expansionary phase and is now in one.
That is why in the past few years some mosques in the West have seen violent incidents, including murders, as radical mullahs fight moderates for supremacy. Militant Islam wants to be the dominant force in the world.
Its crusade has Muslims fighting Christians in Indonesia, Sudan, and Pakistan. Christians in Lebanon have largely fled. Muslim fights Muslim in Algeria. Islamism has been on the move all right, but it hasn't a chance now, because it finally woke up America.
It took the blowing up of three planes on an airstrip outside Jordan by Palestinian terrorists in 1970 to turn the world's attention to the Palestinian question. One regrets to say that it has taken a lot more violence to get the world to focus on the true nature of Islamism.
Powerful as the truth may be, it needs a nudge from 16,000-pound daisy cutter bombs once in a while. The Arab/Muslim world's intransigence comes into sharper focus when we see the Americans liberate Afghanistan from the Taliban in six weeks and a cornered Arafat unable to go to the bathroom without the risk of being blown into the next world.
Nothing succeeds like powerful bombs, as bin Laden explained in his latest video release. “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse,” he said.
“Some of the media said that in Holland, in one of the centers, the number of people who accepted Islam during the days that followed the operations [attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon] were more than the people who accepted Islam in the past 11 years.”
Bin Laden understands the power of a successful show of force all right, though he seems slow to grasp that America's horses are stronger than his.
Don't worry, Petronella. It is both sad and true that the consequences of super-liberalism led to suicide bombers and intifadas in Israel and to the attacks in America. But the U.S. has shown it is no paper tiger.
All those people bad-mouthing the Jews and Israel will quiet down. You are looking at the tail end of the train, but the engine has already turned a corner and is going in the opposite direction.
Nothing succeeds like success. America is driving this train and the world will get on boardâthough the last carriage may be those London dinner parties.
