Those Who Forget the Past (17 page)

Similarly in Norway, where in 1994 the Nobel committee had awarded its peace prize to Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, and Yasir Arafat. At that time, one honest member of the committee, Kaare Kristiansen, had resigned in protest, rightly calling Arafat a terrorist unworthy of this award. Now, however, other members, one of them a Lutheran bishop, said they wanted to strip not Arafat but Shimon Peres of the prize; his crime—participating in a government that was violating the “intention and spirit” of the award. Not to be outdone, the leader of the Socialist Left party demanded reparations from Israel for destroying Palestinian infrastructure paid for by Norwegian aid money—never mind that this sort of subsidized “infrastructure” regularly shelters armed Palestinian terrorists and their activities.

In Denmark, a Lutheran bishop delivered a sermon in Copenhagen Cathedral likening Ariel Sharon to the biblical King Herod, who ordered the death of all male children in Bethlehem under the age of two; Denmark's foreign minister, Per Stig Moller, branded Israel's anti-terror incursion a “war against a civilian population.” The Portuguese writer José Saramago, a Nobel laureate in literature, delivered himself of this delicacy: “We can compare what is happening on the Palestinian territories with Auschwitz.”

In Germany, Norbert Bluem, a minister under former chancellor Helmut Kohl, called Israel's offensive in the West Bank a “limitless war of annihilation,” while Juergen Moellemann, an official of the Free Democrats, openly defended Palestinian violence against Jews: “I would resist too, and use force to do so . . . not just in my country but in the aggressor's country as well.” Wrote one commentator in the
Suddeutsche Zeitung:
“It's been a long time since the hatred of Jews—once disguised as anti-Zionism—has been as socially acceptable in Germany as it is today.”

In Italy,
La Stampa,
the liberal daily, resurrected the oldest Christian anti-Semitic canard of all: deicide. A cartoon depicted the infant Jesus looking up from his manger at an Israeli tank and pleading, “Don't tell me they want to kill me again.” From voices in the Vatican, utter indifference to the murder of Jews was coupled with the charge that the Jews themselves were committing genocide. “Indescribable barbarity” was the phrase of Franciscan officials in Rome describing Israel's attempt to arrest Palestinian terrorists who had taken shelter in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. In the hallowed “land of Jesus,” complained the Vatican daily L'Osservatore Romano, Israel was exhibiting an “irritating haughtiness” and engaging in “aggression that turns into extermination.”

If France has led Europe in anti-Semitic violence, Great Britain may be where the elite expression of anti-Semitic ideas has been most uninhibited. (In his February
Commentary
article, Hillel Halkin memorably quoted the columnist Petronella Wyatt: “Since September 11, anti-Semitism and its open expression has become respectable at London dinner tables.”) Thus, Claire Rayner, the president of the British Humanist Association, asserted in April that the notion of Israel as a homeland for the Jewish people was “a load of crap”; by contrast, the suicide bombings of Israeli restaurants and buses were both understandable and justifiable: “If you treat a group of people the way Palestinians have been treated they will use the only weapon they have, which is their individual lives.”

More established figures voiced sentiments fully as bizarre as Claire Rayner's and, if anything, nastier. Last autumn, the highly regarded British novelist and biographer A. N. Wilson had “reluctantly” announced in the (London)
Evening Standard
that the state of Israel no longer had a right to exist. More recently, he used his talents to accuse the Israeli army of the “poisoning of water supplies” on the West Bank, thereby availing himself of another time-honored canard, traceable back to the fourteenth century and repeated on countless occasions since then to justify the mass murder of Jews.

Wilson is a self-described “unbelieving Anglican” who is certainly well aware of the shameful history of Christian religious anti-Semitism to which he was now making his own signal contribution. Tom Paulin is a professor at Oxford, an arts commentator for the British Broadcasting Corporation, and a poet whose recent verse includes a lament for a small Palestinian boy “gunned down by the Zionist SS.” “I never believed that Israel had the right to exist at all,” Paulin told the Egyptian
Al-Ahram Weekly
in April, and Jews from Brooklyn who have settled in the West Bank “are Nazis, racists. . . . They should be shot dead.”

To
Al-Ahram,
Paulin is that “rare thing in contemporary British culture, ‘the writer as conscience.'” Some Europeans apparently agree with this judgment.
The Irish Times
found him “a rigorous respecter of language” who “does not dilute his words” while remaining free of any trace of personal prejudice. Chiming in, A. N. Wilson called him a “brilliant scholar and literary critic” and noted that “many in this country and throughout the world would echo his views on the tragic events in the Middle East.”

On this last point, at least, Wilson may be right. One could devote many more pages to, for example, the malevolent myth-making of the British and European press in reporting on the “massacre” of Palestinians in Jenin, where the Israelis aimed for “the near-total destruction of the lives and livelihoods of the camp's 15,000 inhabitants,” according to the
Evening Standard
. A “crime of especial notoriety,” blared
The Guardian
about an operation that cost the lives of over two dozen Israeli reservists in an effort, successful but hideously costly, to eliminate terrorists while avoiding civilian Palestinian casualties. Or one could dwell on the reflexive hatred of the Jewish state that now appears to be rife within the Anglican Church: “Whenever I print anything sympathetic to Israel,” admits the editor of the church's official newspaper, “I get deluged with complaints that I am Zionist and racist.” Or one could quote again from the many examples adduced by Halkin and freely available in the public prints and on the web. But we must once again move on.

The Palestinians who insisted that there was an Israeli massacre in Jenin surely had their reasons for fabricating such a claim. Those reasons are no doubt related to hatred of Jews per se—for such hatred exists, abundantly. But they are also closely related to the tactics of the Palestinian struggle, which has successfully relied on the readiness of many in Europe (and elsewhere) to accept such fabrications at face value, to spread and amplify them while ignoring all contrary evidence, and to pillory Israel on the basis of lies that they themselves have tended and fed.

Where this eager readiness comes from is another question. A considerable literature has been devoted to plumbing the nature of Europe's enduring “Jewish problem,” and the current flare-up has already given rise to a fresh round of theorizing about its root causes, old and new. Among the factors regularly adduced, at least by those willing to acknowledge that it is a problem, are the seemingly indelible brand that has been left on European consciousness by centuries of ubiquitous anti-Semitic myths; hatreds rooted in Christian theological concepts; a deep-seated psychological need to lighten the burden of European guilt for the Holocaust by defaming its victims posthumously; a no less pressing need to atone for European colonialism and imperialism by casting Israel as the world's worst colonial power; and on and on. One can spin more theories with ease and find evidence to support each of them, for anti-Semitism is a disease with no single cause.

But one salient fact about the picture I have been painting is this: there is a clear fit between anti-Israel or anti-Jewish hatred and the general ideological predispositions of the contemporary European Left. As historical trends go, this is relatively new. For most of the last century, what predominated in Europe was the racialist and nationalist anti-Semitism of the Right, fused with and colored by Christian theological teachings. Today, though the neo-Nazis and the Holocaust deniers occupy their accustomed place, and though anti-Semites figure among the constituents of Jörg Haider in Austria and Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, the anti-Semitism in swiftest motion is the left-wing strain, the strain that loathes the Jews not on explicitly racialist or religious grounds but on “universalist” ones.

This tradition, too, has a long and ignoble history, from the Enlightenment's Voltaire (who regarded the Jews as “the most abominable people in the world”) through socialism's Karl Marx (to whom Polish Jews were the “filthiest of all races”), through seven decades of Soviet Communism with its pro-Arab foreign policy and its harshly oppressive attitude toward Soviet Jewish citizens, through the New Left, through the German and Italian terrorism of recent decades and the post-60's alignment of the Left with the cause of Palestinian “liberation.” Today, a new chapter is being written. There are, to be sure, neo-Nazis to be found among those burning the star of David and chanting obscene slogans against the Jewish state in the streets of Europe; but the ranks are more heavily composed of environmentalists, pacifists, anarchists, anti-globalists, and socialists. “I have difficulties with the swastika,” said a member of Belgium's Flemish-Palestine Committee at an April demonstration, registering by his perturbance the anomaly of that Nazi symbol amid the placards of his ideological comrades.

The pattern continues in the upper reaches of European politics. True, anti-Semitic impulses cannot always be readily disentangled from the many other considerations that govern political behavior—like raw electoral calculations in a continent with many Muslims and (except for France) very few Jews. But surely it is significant that among Europe's governing bodies, it is the political Left that has been leading the charge against Israel. It was Germany's Social Democratic–Green coalition government that this past April, in the midst of Israel's battle for survival, and despite its much vaunted “special relationship” with the Jewish state, opted to halt further exports of spare parts for the Merkava tank. It was France's socialist foreign minister, Hubert Vedrine, who in April publicly castigated American Jews for being so “intransigent” as to fail to make “the switch toward peace.” When the European Parliament passed a resolution on April 10 calling for trade sanctions against Israel, it was propelled forward by Europe's Liberal Democrat and Green parties, with the Socialists denouncing Israel in the most perfervid tones of all.

If one moves even higher up the rungs of political life, into the multilateral institutions that shape the world polity and in which the Europeans have invested so much of their diplomatic capital, the die is cast from the same mold. (The degree to which the United Nations has turned itself into an anti-Semitic mob warrants an extended essay of its own.) Thus, when the UN Human Rights Commission passed a resolution in April condemning Israel for “war crimes,” “acts of mass killing,” and an “offense against humanity,” while simultaneously backing without reservation the “right of the Palestinians to resist,” the European countries voting in favor included the socialist or Left-coalition governments of France, Belgium, Sweden, and Portugal, with centrist Spain and right-wing Austria joining in. Outside of Europe, needless to say, every left-wing dictatorship in the world voted in support of the resolution, including that shining protector of human rights, the People's Republic of China.

It would be unfair to leave the subject of Europe without noting the courageous efforts of those in England, France, Italy, and Germany who have stood up to or spoken back to the anti-Semites. Perhaps foremost among them lately has been the Italian writer Oriana Fallaci, who in a lengthy and impassioned indictment published in the weekly
Panorama
declared, in part:

I find it shameful . . . that state-run television stations [in Italy] contribute to the resurgent anti-Semitism, crying only over Palestinian deaths while playing down Israeli deaths, glossing over them in unwilling tones. I find it shameful that in their debates they host with much deference the scoundrels with turbans or kaffiyehs who yesterday sang hymns to the slaughter at New York and today sing hymns to the slaughters in Jerusalem, at Haifa, at Netanya, in Tel Aviv.

I find it shameful that the press does the same, that it is indignant because Israeli tanks surround the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, that it is not indignant because inside that same church two hundred Palestinian terrorists well armed with machine guns and munitions and explosives (among them are various leaders of Hamas and Al-Aqsa) are not unwelcome guests of the monks (who then accept bottles of mineral water and jars of honey from the soldiers of those tanks).

But these exceptions are notorious because they are exceptions. Elsewhere, and especially on the cultural and political Left, Europeans have tended to speak in a very different voice.

What about here, in the United States? Mercifully, antiSemitism on these shores lacks Europe's rich traditionalism. Violent attacks on Jews have been exceedingly rare in our history, and although genuine social movements have at times been built—most famously by Father Charles E. Coughlin in the 1930s—on anti-Jewish hostility, the few attempts to harness this hostility to electoral purposes have all come to naught. The question is, under what circumstances might this change?

One relatively new factor in the American equation, as in the European, is a sizable Muslim influx. Reliable numbers remain hard to come by: a U.S. Department of State fact sheet offers a figure of six million, which is almost certainly much too high, while other estimates range from two to four million. But there is no disagreement that the Muslim population has grown dramatically in recent decades, or that this growth has already affected Jewish security. If physical attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions once came mostly from right-wing or nativist groups, now they come increasingly from Arab militants. One of the most well-known such attacks was the murder of Ari Halberstam, a Hasidic schoolboy, shot in 1994 by Arab gunmen while traversing the Brooklyn Bridge.