Those Who Forget the Past (34 page)

FIAMMA NIRENSTEIN

How I Became an “Unconscious Fascist”

IN 1967 I WAS a young communist, like most Italian youngsters. Bored by my rebellious behavior my family sent me to a kibbutz in the upper Galilee, Neot Mordechai. I was quite satisfied there, the kibbutz used to give some money every month to the Vietcong. When the Six Day War began, Moshe Dayan spoke on the radio to announce it. I asked: “What is he saying?” and the comrades of Neot answered:
“Shtuyot,”
silly things. During the war I took children to shelters; I dug trenches, and learned some simple shooting and acts of self-defense. We continued working in the orchards, but were quick to identify the incoming MiG-im and the outgoing Mirage-im, chasing one another in the sky of the Golan Heights.

When I went back to Italy, some of my fellow students stared at me as somebody new, an enemy, a wicked person who would soon become an imperialist. My life was about to change. I didn't yet know that, because I simply thought that Israel rightly won a war after having been assaulted with an incredible number of harassments. But I soon noticed that I had lost the innocence of the good Jew, of the very special Jewish friend, their Jew: I was now connected with the Jews of the State of Israel, and slowly I was put out of the dodecaphonic, psychoanalytic, Bob Dylan, Woody Allen, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Philip Roth, Freud shtetl, the coterie that sanctified my Judaism in left-wing eyes.

I have tried for a long time to bring back that sanctification, and they tried to give it back to me, because we desperately needed each other, the Left and the Jews. But today's anti-Semitism has overwhelmed any good intention.

Throughout the years, even people that, like me, who had signed petitions asking the IDF to withdraw from Lebanon, became an “unconscious fascist” as a reader of mine wrote me in a letter filled with insults. In one book it was simply written that I was “a passionate woman that fell in love with Israel, confusing Jerusalem with Florence.” One Palestinian told me that if I see things so differently from the majority, this plainly means that my brain doesn't work too well. Also, I've been called a cruel and insensitive human rights denier who doesn't care about Palestinian children's lives.

A very famous Israeli writer told me on the phone a couple of months ago: “You really have become a right-winger.” What? Right-winger? Me? An old feminist human rights activist, even a communist when I was young? Only because I described the Arab-Israeli conflict as accurately as I could and because sometimes I identified with a country continuously attacked by terror, I became a right-winger? In the contemporary world, the world of human rights, when you call a person a right-winger, this is the first step toward his or her delegitimization.

The Left blessed the Jews as the victim “par excellence,” always a great partner in the struggle for the rights of the weak against the wicked. In return for being coddled, published, filmed, considered artists, intellectuals, and moral judges, Jews, even during the Soviet anti-Semitic persecutions, gave the Left moral support and invited it to cry with them at Holocaust memorials. Today the game is clearly over. The Left has proved itself the real cradle of contemporary anti-Semitism.

When I speak about anti-Semitism, I'm not speaking of legitimate criticism of the State of Israel. I am speaking of pure anti-Semitism: criminalization, stereotypes, specific and generic lies which have fluctuated between lies about the Jews (conspiring, bloodthirsty, dominating the world) to lies about Israel (conspiring, ruthlessly violent), starting most widely since the beginning of the second Intifada in September 2000, and becoming more and more ferocious since Operation Chomat Magen (“Defensive Shield”), when the IDF reentered Palestinian cities in response to terrorism.

The basic idea of anti-Semitism, today as always, is that Jews have a perverted soul that makes them unfit, as a morally inferior people, to be regular members of the human family. Today, this
Untermensch
ideology has shifted to the Jewish state: a separate, unequal, basically evil stranger whose national existence is slowly but surely emptied and deprived of justification. Israel, as the classic evil Jew, according to contemporary anti-Semitism, doesn't have a birthright, but exists with its “original sin” perpetrated against the Palestinians. Israel's heroic history has become a history of arrogance.

Nowadays, its narrative focuses much more on the Deir Yassin massacre than on the creation and defense of Kibbutz Degania; it focuses more and more on the suffering of the Palestinian refugees than on the surprise of seeing five armies in 1948 denying Israel's right to exist just after being established by the United Nations; much more on the Jewish underground resistance organizations, the Lechi and the Irgun, than on the heroic battle along the way to Jerusalem. The caricature of the evil Jew is transformed to the caricature of the evil state. And now the traditional hook-nosed Jew bears a gun and kills Arab children with pleasure.

On the front pages of European newspapers Sharon munches Palestinian children and little Jesuses in cradles are threatened by Israeli soldiers. This new anti-Semitism has materialized in unprecedented physical violence toward Jewish persons and symbols, coming from organizations officially devoted to human rights. Its peak occurred at the United Nations summit in Durban, when anti-Semitism officially became the banner of the new secular religion of human rights and Israel and Jews became its official enemy.

Jews, and the international community in general, have been caught unaware, and have failed to denounce the new trend of anti-Semitism. Nobody is scandalized when Israel is accused daily, without explanation, of excessive violence, of atrocities, of cruelty. Everybody is tormented about the necessity of painful attacks against terrorist nests, often located among families and children. Still, every country has the right to defend itself. Only the Jews in history have been denied the right of self-defense, and so it is today.

Why is the war on terrorism often looked upon as a strategic problem that the world still must solve (look at the U.S. war against Afghanistan and Iraq) and Israel is treated like a guilty defendant for fighting it? Is it not anti-Semitism when you act as if Jews must die quietly? Why is Israel officially accused by the human rights commission in Geneva of violating human rights, while China, Libya, Sudan, have never ever been accused? Why has Israel been denied a fixed place in regional groups in the UN while Syria sits in the Security Council? Why can everybody join a war against Iraq except Israel, despite the fact that Saddam has always threatened Israel with complete destruction? When sovereign states and organizations threaten death to Israel, why does nobody raise the question at the UN? Has Italy been threatened by France or Spain like those Iranian leaders who openly say that they will destroy Israel with an atomic bomb? And what is said when a large part of the world newspapers, TV, radio, and school textbooks recommend kicking the Jews out of Israel and killing them all over the world using terrorist bombers? The international community doesn't consider this a problem. Israel is an “Unterstate,” denied the basic rights of every other state, to exist in honor and peace. The Jewish state is not equal.

Like the mythical Medusa, this new anti-Semitism has a face that petrifies anyone who looks at it. People don't want to admit it, don't even want to name it, because doing so reveals both the identity of its perpetrators and its object. Even Jews don't want to call an anti-Semite by his name, fearing disruption of old alliances. Because the Left has a precise idea of what a Jew must be, when Jews don't match its prescription, they ask: How do you dare being different from the Jew I ordered you to be? Fighting against terrorism? Electing Sharon? Are you crazy? And here the answer of Jews and Israelis is the same. We are still very shy, very concerned about your affection. So, instead of requesting that Israel become an equal nation and that Jews become equal citizens in the world, we prefer standing with you shoulder to shoulder, even when you have come out with hundreds, thousands, of anti-Semitic statements. We prefer to stand with you at Holocaust memorials cursing old anti-Semitism while you accuse Israel, and therefore the Jews, of being racist killers.

Let's take a well-known example: A famous Italian journalist, the former director of
Corriere della Sera,
was named president of RAI, which is a very important job. RAI is an empire that shapes Italian public opinion and manages billions of dollars. The nominee's last name, Mieli, is Jewish.

Mieli is a widely appreciated journalist and historian who enjoys enormous and well-deserved prestige. When he was appointed, the same night, the walls of RAI headquarters were filled with graffiti.

RAI means Radio Televisione Italiana—Italian Radio and Television. The graffiti authors wrote the word
raus
(get out!) over it. They drew a Star of David over the
A
of the word RAI, and transformed the acronym to “Radio Televisione Israeliana”—Israeli Radio and Television. The phrase is a perfect cross-section of what we are talking about:
Raus
and the use of the Star of David are the classic signs of traditional anti-Semitic contempt and hate, and the words “Radio Televisione Israeliana,” putting Israel in the center of the picture, is a clear indication of how Israel is the focus of the left-wing anti-Semitic hate today.

Surprisingly, or perhaps predictably, such a blatant expression of anti-Semitism caused very little reaction from both the Italian authorities and the Italian Jewish community. The aggression and threat to such a famous intellectual gave rise to weak exclamations in a subdued tone and was treated like a minor issue in a debate centered on more relevant ones, such as the management of RAI and its political meaning.

Another meaningful episode: a group of professors at Ca Foscari University, the prestigious Venetian institution, signed a petition calling for a boycott of Israeli professors and researchers. The content of the document is totally irrelevant, but the reaction it provoked among the Jewish community is very interesting.

One prominent Venetian Jew, when asked for his opinion, said: “They're making a serious mistake. Those professors don't realize that they are reinforcing Sharon's policy with their boycott.”

Such an absurd reaction is the clear proof of the failure, within the Jewish world, to understand this totally new type of anti-Semitism that focuses on the State of Israel. Another document, this time a letter by a group of professors at the University of Bologna “to their Jewish friends,” was published with a very large number of signatures.

Here is an excerpt: “We have always considered the Jewish people an intelligent and sensitive one because they have been selected [that's right, selected!] by the suffering of persecution and humiliation. We have school friends and some Jewish students whom we have helped and educated, taking them to high academic levels, and today many of them teach in Israeli universities. We are writing because we feel that our love and appreciation for you is being transformed into a burning rage . . . we think that many people, also outside the university, feel the same. You have to realize that what was done to you in the past, you are now doing to the Palestinians . . . if you continue on this path, hatred for you will grow throughout the world.”

The letter is an excellent summary of all the characteristics of the new anti-Semitism. There is the pre-Zionist definition of the Jewish people as one that suffers, has to suffer by nature, a people bound to bear the worst persecutions without even lifting a finger, and is, therefore, worthy of compassion and solidarity.

And there is the well-established, democratic, militarily powerful, and economically prospering State of Israel, which is the antithesis of this stereotype. The “new Jew” that tries not to suffer, and that, above all, can and wants to defend himself, immediately loses all his charm in the eyes of the Left.

But it was different before the map of the Middle East was painted in red by the Cold War and Israel was declared the long hand of American Imperialism. The rising newborn Israel, until the 1967 war, was built on an ideology that allowed and even obliged the Left to be proud of the Jews and the Jews to be proud of the Left, even when Israelis were fighting and winning hard wars.

The Jews that survived Nazi-Fascist persecution, the persecution of the Right, created a socialist state inspired by the values of the Left, work and collectivism, and by doing so, again sanctified the Left as the shelter of the victims.

In exchange for this, the Jews were granted legitimization. But in fact, the Jews were enormously important for the Left. The people of Israel were a living accusation of the antiSemitism that marked the Holocaust, the Nazi-Fascist antiSemitism; and now they were building collective farms and an omnipotent trade union! To some degree, this absolved Stalinist anti-Semitism, or gave it a much smaller importance than it really had. The Jews became indispensable for the Left: look at the passionate and paternalistic tone of the Bologna professors, as they seem to plead: “Come back, our dear Jews. Be ours again. Let us curse Israel together and then take a trip together to the Holocaust memorials.”

But the contradiction has become even ontologically unbearable: How can you cry with the survivors for Jews killed by Nazis when the living Jews are accused to be Nazis themselves? Somebody on a European radio program said that after the diffusion of the images of Muhammed al Dura, Europe could finally forget the famous picture of the boy in the Warsaw ghetto with his hands raised. The meaning of this statement, often repeated in other forms, is obliteration of the Holocaust through the overlapping of Israel and Nazism, namely racism, genocide, ruthless elimination of civilians, women and children, an utterly unwarranted eruption of cruelty and the most brutal instincts. It means pretending to believe blindly, without investigation, the Palestinian version of a highly disputed episode and of many, many others; it means taking for granted the “atrocities” that the Palestinian spokespersons always talk about, and ignoring every proof or fact that doesn't serve this position.