Israel: A thought exercise I'm surprised I haven't encountered before

[womzilla]

Feel free to skip this if you don't care to read about Israel-non-Israel relations.


Someone--I don't remember whom now--pointed me towards an article in a recent issue of The Nation.

The Myth of the New Anti-Semitism
by Brian Klug

The article is a wide-ranging, somewhat rambling essay in response to four recent books which all point to "the new anti-Semitism". Klug reads this phrase to mean "expressions of disapproval of Israeli policy towards the Occupied Territories", which, based on my encounters, is a fair description of the connotative sense of the term. ("Accusations of Anti-Semitism: Not Just for Anti-Semites Anymore!")

It's unmistakable that the governments (and populace) of the countries surrounding the modern state of Israel reacted very badly to the creation and continued existence of Israel. This has often been used to demonstrate the inherent anti-Semitism of opposition to Israel. But Klug proposed a simple thought-argument I've never encountered before which I found interesting.

Imagine if Israel were the same in every essential respect as the state that exists today, including its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, except in its religious identity. Suppose it were Catholic, like the Crusader states that Europeans created in the Middle East in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Let us call this imaginary state "Christiania" instead of "Israel." Would Christiania be accepted into the bosom of the region more readily than Israel has been? I doubt it. Would the animosity felt toward Christiania be qualitatively different from, or significantly less than, the hostility now directed at Israel? Again, I think not. Any differences would be a matter of nuance. In fact, Israel is often called a "crusader state" in Arab and Muslim circles. In a way, this says everything about the Israeli-Arab and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. Crusader states, like the imaginary Christiania, were Christian; the State of Israel is Jewish. But the underlying hostility toward it in the region is not hostility toward the state as Jewish but as a European interloper or as an American client or as a non-Arab and non-Muslim entity; moreover, as an oppressive occupying force. Some people see this disposition toward Israel as anti-imperialist or anticolonialist, others as chauvinist or xenophobic. But in and of itself, it is not anti-Semitic.

He goes on to point out that hostility towards Israel is shaped by traditions of anti-Semitism--he doesn't mention explicitly the modern rebirth of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the Arab countries surrounding Israel, but it's there. But he says, and I agree, that anti-Zionism drives modern Arab anti-Semitism rather than the other 'way round, and I tend to agree with him. I think that Arab anti-Israeli sentiment has cast about for tools to use in stirring up hatred towards Israel, and there are centuries of lies about Jews which some continent foolishly left lying around.

Klug also notes that the Balfour Declaration--the first Western governmental endorsement of the creation of a Jewish state in the Levant--was strongly supported by British anti-Semites, including Balfour himself; the declaration was opposed by at least some British Jews. An interesting historical footnote.



A note on terminology: In recent months, I've become increasingly frustrated by the vocabulary in which the conflict between Israel and its neighboring states is expressed. It's usually described as either an "Arab-Israel" conflict or, worse, as a "Muslim-Jew" conflict. Both of those dichotomies are, simply, wrong. There are many non-Muslims in the Arab-dominated territories around Israel--something like 5% of the population of the Occupied Territories were Arab Christians in 1967, although that percentage has dropped sharply in recent years, and the war which tore apart Lebanon for decades was largely along Muslim-Christian fault lines.

On the other dichotomy, much of the population of Israel is Arabic. There nearly a million descendents of the non-Jewish inhabitants of Cis-Jordanian Palestine--the people who one would traditionally think of as "Israeli Arabs". However, there are also several hundred thousand Arabic Jews--Jews who emigrated from the "Arab" countries to Israel in the decades following the Israeli War of Independence, or their descendents. They speak Jewish dialects of local versions of Arabic from Iraq, Morocco, Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt, Syria, and Palestine. Thus, it's a gross simplification to divide that portion of the world into "Israeli" and "Arab".

It's true that semantics is a series of compromises between the general and the specific--recognizing what is similar between a birthday cake and a cake of soap while hoping that one does not mistake them for each other in the shower. But I think that these particular terminological dichotomies lead people into false generalizations about the nature of the conflict over Palestine--even if for no other reason than that they make it easier to conflate "criticism of Israeli policies" with "anti-Semitism" because, after all, "Israel"=="Jews".

Comments

[scottscidmore.livejournal.com]

But many of those conflating do so because they find it advantageous to their goals. They have little no no incentive to change the terminology to something that would make it more difficult for them to pull off the conflation.

So while I agree with you, and think it would be useful to change the terminologies, I really doubt such a transformation is likely to take place.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

I certainly think that there are many who deliberately draw the false dichotomies I described, knowing that they're false and hoping to get some advantage out of it. My complaint was that, because there's no good short accurate term for describing the side-that-is-hostile-to-Israel in the ongoing conflict between Israel and the enemy states near it, it's really easy even for a neutral party to fall into those false dichotomies.