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.

[lavendertook.livejournal.com]

My understanding was that the "new anti-semitism" refers to western, predominantly Christian nations' attitudes toward Israel as a Jewish state, not Arabic nations. Therefore, the whole premise of the first argument is completely off, as far as I understand it.

[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.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

I think it's more that I elided a step. The majority of the article is about Western attitudes towards Israel, and the use of the idea of the "new anti-Semitism" to deflect any criticism of the state of Israel. (I've seen people imply that anyone who opposes the expulsion of the Palestinian Arabs from the Occupied Territories is an anti-Semite. I've seen people state outright that advocacy of a double-state solution to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict is antisemitism. I've also seen people who argue that a single-state solution that doesn't involve either disenfranchising or expelling all of the non-Jews from Greater Israel is anti-semitism.)

As a part of this discussion, Kulg brought up the "Catholica" analogy, which I think does point out that (at least) some of the negative feelings towards Israel are not inherently a consequence of its unique identity as a Jewish state, but are instead a consequence of its unique identity as a European colony created by fiat around Jerusalem.

Of course, it's really hard to imagine circumstances which would have lead to the creation of a Catholic "Crusader state" in the middle of the 20th century. There are excellent reasons why Israel exists and "Catholica" doesn't, and why Israel has the support of western nations that a colony of the Knights Templar wouldn't.

But I'm just suprised that I've never seen anyone make the precise point he made, considering how much discussion and argumentation I've witnessed about the situation of Israel.

Re:

[lavendertook.livejournal.com]

I've seen more attacks on the use of the term anti-semitism myself, than the use of charges of anti-semitism to characterize any opposition to the existence of Israel, but then I'm pretty a leftist, and my exposure has been more to fellow leftists among whom I have found anti-semitism. But then I am characterizing anti-semitism as arguments that deny the history of anti-semitism, and characterize Israel as an outpost of the West or the fall guy for the history of Western Christian imperialist expansion, as this argument you are citing sounds like it's doing. I don't know all the ways the term "new anti-semitism" is being used, but if it includes the denial of the history of anti-semitism, then Klug's argument falls under the definition of what it's arguing against.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

[Corrected punctuation and broken HTML in the original comment, and added another point I forgot to address.]

No, I don't think Klug is saying that Israel is either denying the history of Western anti-semitism, since he starts the article with a discussion of the origin of the term with Wilhelm Marr's Antisemiten-Liga (League of Anti-Semites) in 1879 and discusses the important role that British anti-Semitism played in the arguments over the Balfour Declaration. He's also not saying that Israel is a Western Crusader state, but inviting people to compare the reaction such a state would have received in 1948 to the reaction that Israel did receive.

My comment that Israel has a "unique identity as a European colony created by fiat around Jerusalem" is my phrasing, not Klug's. Most of the Zionists were European Jews, fleeing a European disaster, arriving in Asia. The Asian inhabitants of the land they arrived in viewed them as Europeans, even though they weren't the agents of any European national power. Asian and African Jews (which is to say, the Jews from the Arab world) mostly arrived in Israel after the War of Independence--sometimes significantly after; for example, the sizable Egyptian Jewish population mostly stayed in Egypt until 1955.

Re:

[aethereal-girl.livejournal.com]

Of course, to call Jews with Middle Eastern ethnic backgrounds Arabs is much the same as Golda Meir's statement that there is no such thing as a Palestinian people: There may be significant factual (particularly historical) evidence to back up such a position, but it is unhelpful in the extreme to use it as a model for understanding how people think, feel, and act now.

The vast majority of Jews with Middle Eastern ethnic backgrounds do not consider themselves Arabs. The vast majority of Jews with European backgrounds don't consider those with Middle Eastern backgrounds to be Arabs. And the vast majority of non-Jewish Arabs don't consider Jews with Middle Eastern background to be Arabs. So it is difficult to see what one can accomplish by calling such people Arabs.

Also true is that there is currently a large number of Ethiopians, who are African and African-descended Jews living in Israel who have never spoken Arabic or lived in an Arab country, nor have their ancestors for many generations. They are recent arrivals and a relatively small group, compared with Europeans and Middle Easterners, but it's worth noting that Non-European Jew != Middle Eastern Jew, in non-trivial quantities.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Second point first--I meant to say "North African" instead of "African". I am aware of the Ethiopian Jews. Even "North African" would be an oversimplification, though, so that I regret.

As to the first point, I was not looking to define Arabic-speaking Jews as cultural Arabs. Certainly I am not that positing that Arabic-speaking Jews are "really Arabs" in the sense that they are somehow more similar to "Arabs" (Arabic-speaking non-Jews) than they are "Jews" (non-Arabic-speaking Jews).

I was, instead, trying to highlight the many problems of using the word "Arab" to describe "those outside of Israel", which is very often done. The word "Arab" encompasses all those who speak Arabic as their first language, which includes a great many Israelis, both Jew and non-Jew.

It is using the word "Arab" as the opposite of "Israeli" or "Jew" that troubles me, because the sets those words describe are not formed along the same lines.

Hating People

[dmsherwood53.livejournal.com]

When you really hate someone arguing with them is not a matter of debate in the Socraic sense of mutually seeking enlightenment more a matter of throwing heavy sharp edged objects in a marital punchup. You don't really care in the moment wether your throwing a perfect Ming Vase or the cats Litter tray. To spelll out the Allogory wether a poisoned ditribe is TRUE is so so irelevant in this context. If its plausible that counts wether it hurts much more. One of the most stubborn illusion of well-meaning folk is 'It wouldn't hurt if it wasn't true" Like Duh man wake up and smell the coffee

Re:

[lavendertook.livejournal.com]

Sorry for the delay--been exhausted lately.

You didn't mean "saying that Israel is either" to be in that first sentence right? I'm reading that sentence without that phrase--correct me if I'm wrong.

First off, that analogy isn't new--I've heard it used a lot by people who are opposed to Israel's existance as a Jewish state or its existence period. The problem with that analogy is it elides Israel's unique history. Where I'm coming from is that in an ideal world, there would be no Jewish state or Christian states or Muslim states, but since there are very many of the latter two, one little Jewish state is still needed. And it is the power of Western imperialism that made that area where Israel now is a Jewish state, rather than New York and New Jersey, which I thought would have been a better idea, but, ya know, fat chance the US would have given those up. But Western imperialism also has a lot to do with which regimes came to power in all the Middle-Eastern states--call israel a western outpost--you might as well call Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia the same--the US gives more money to those nations combined than it does to Israel anyway.

Without even reading his argument, Klug's title sets out a position in itself that, unless he's being ironic in it's use--and nothing you have told me suggests that, is propagating anti-semitic stances, despite what he may list about it's history. Calling any brand of anti-semitism a myth (even if is being wrongly applied by those you have encountered who would make it synonomous with criticism of Israel) just follows in line with the kind of denial that has plagued this particular variety of racism. Denial of anti-semitism's existence is an old tactic, Holocaust Denial being just one manifestation of this. Why would Klug give his article this title? There are many ways he could point out his problems with the term "the new anti-semitism" without calling it "a myth" and falling into this tradition of denial of the existence of anti-semitism. And if he has done his research, then he is aware of this tradition. So who is his audience? Certainly not me, who he knows he's going to lose before I finish reading his title. So he obviously isn't inviting an oppositional audience of any kind and has no desire to convince. Who is he appealing to with this title? Well, those who would embrace the denial of anti-semitism and those who haven't dealt enough with this issue to be aware that denial is the first line of attack used by those who hold anti-semitic views. Hence, I think he is presenting an anti-semitic argument here--forget "new" or "old" distinctions. Does that make sense?

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Errant phrase in my sentence: Yes--the sentence makes sense as "No, I don't think Klug is either denying the history of Western anti-semitism...".

As I said, I've never heard anyone discuss a hypothetical non-Jewish European colony around Jerusalem before. It struck me as an obvious ground for fruitful discussion, which is why I said that I was surprised not to have encountered it before.

A key difference between Egypt and Israel that would make it reasonable to call one a Western "outpost" (your word, but not an unreasonable one) and the other not is that the population of Egypt is not mostly either recent European immigrants or the descendents of recent European immigrants.

You're right that it is reasonable--I would even say important--to discuss the nations of the Middle East as the legacy of colonialism. A great much of Near East and Middle East tension arises from the lasting effects of the capricious and poorly executed breakup of the Ottoman state in the wake of The Great War and the withdrawl of the colonial powers from the region after World War II.

And no, I don't think that dismissing "the new anti-semitism" as a myth is denying the existence of the "old" anti-semitism. "The New Anti-Semitism" is the term used by the books that Klug is engaging, and he clearly feels that it is a pernicious misnomer, trying to tar positions which might be defensible--criticism of Israeli governmental policies--with the legacy of something indefensible. The distinction between "old" and "new" anti-semitism is vital to his article:

There is certainly reason to be concerned about a climate of hostility to Jews, including vicious physical attacks. On one Saturday this past November, for example, two synagogues in Istanbul were truck-bombed during Sabbath services, while an Orthodox Jewish school in a Paris suburb was largely destroyed by arson. Some researchers report a 60 percent worldwide increase in the number of assaults on Jews (or persons perceived to be Jewish) in 2002, compared with the previous year.
...
The claim that I am criticizing is not that there is a new outbreak of "old" antiSemitism but that there is an outbreak of anti-Semitism of a new kind.

Klug is, to my reading, careful to draw distinctions between anti-Semitism on the one hand and criticism of Israeli policy on the other, and he thinks that the works under consideration deliberately conflate the two to a negative effect. I agree with him; I've seen people try to shut down discussions of Israeli policy by asserting that someone is an anti-Semite for advocating a single-state resolution to the Palestinian crisis, and the state of intellectual discourse is worsened by such attempts.

The only use of the word "Myth" is in the title, which makes me suspect that Klug did not choose the title (as is frequently the case with magazine articles).

I think that there are people who disguise their anti-Semitism as "acceptable" anti-Israeli sentiment. I also think that there are people who want to undercut any criticism of Israeli policies by labelling such criticism as anti-Semitism.