All surveys of American Jewry show anti-Semitism as the No. 1 obsession. Yet every objective measure of the attitudes of non-Jewish Americans demonstrates that obsession to be absurd, Buford Furrow notwithstanding.
Things Jewish are hip — Seinfeld, bagels, Yiddishisms, even Kabbalah. Nothing more clearly demonstrates the acceptance of Jews than the willingness of non-Jews to marry them.
Old-fashioned racial anti-Semitism — the view that even a drop of Jewish blood contains and transmits some irremediable taint — is deep underground, if it has not disappeared altogether. Yet, American Jews persist in seeing anti-Semites around every corner primarily as a psychological salve. To paraphrase Descartes: I am hated as a Jew, therefore I exist as a Jew.
So has anti-Semitism disappeared? Hardly. “Esau hates Jacob” is one of the fundamental spiritual principles governing our world, our sages tell us. Hatred of Jacob may take many different forms, but it will never go away.
Jew hatred today rarely takes the form of racial anti-Semitism. Rather it is directed at the idea of the Jews as a nation. And Israel, however imperfect a model of Jewish nationhood it may be, signifies Jewish peoplehood to the world.
“To the Jews as individuals, everything; to the Jews as a nation, nothing,” Napoleon said, and today much of the world follows suit.
The United Nations’ obsession with Israel is but one proof that something deeper than a concern with human rights or even national self-interest underlies the animosity toward Israel. The hijacking of this week’s conference on racism in Durban, South Africa, to condemn Israel as a state founded on an ideology of apartheid is but the most recent example.
While Pol Pot was murdering 2 million of his own people, the international community still devoted more time and energy to the status of Palestinian “refugees.” Hutus and Tutsis chop one another’s heads off with machetes in the tens of thousands with fewer calls for intervention than are heard after the death of one Palestinian in an Israeli retaliatory strike.
The double standards to which Israel is held further hint at the deeper source of the hatred of Israel. The BBC proclaims Prime Minister Ariel Sharon a war criminal, and Belgium would put him on trial for what he should have known about the murderous capabilities of the Christian Phalangists. Yet Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat, whose hands are drenched in blood, including 241 Marines killed in a 1983 car bombing of their barracks in Lebanon, is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Arafat fears neither arrest in Belgium nor the documentation of his crimes by the BBC.
Israel is threatened with economic sanctions while China, where citizens are routinely executed for minor economic “crimes,” religion brutally suppressed and couples sterilized after one child, is awarded the 2008 Summer Olympics.
Every response by Israel to lethal attacks on its civilians and soldiers is condemned as “excessive force.” Compared to what? The 1,000 Panamanian civilians killed by U.S. forces in order to arrest Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega on drug-running charges? The hundreds of Somalian civilians, including many unarmed women and children, killed by U.S. peacekeepers in 1993? Did the United States have more important interests in Panama or Somalia than Israel has in protecting its citizens from attack in its heartland?
No European state has yet explicitly called for an end of Israel. But make no mistake about it: The very legitimacy of the Jewish state is on the table. The Guardian, the British daily, has posed the rhetorical question: Is Palestinian suffering too great a price to have paid for the creation of Israel? The same question is implicit in European attitudes toward the current conflict.
Note that the same argument made today against the settlements — a Jewish population has been imposed on a majority Arab population — can be turned against Israel itself. True, the United Nations voted in 1947 to create the state of Israel, but that is a mere legal technicality at the bar of morality before which Israel stands charged.
No matter where one draws Israel’s borders, it is possible to demonstrate that more Arabs than Jews lived there at some point freeze-framed in time. Presto, the Jews are European colonizers of a native population. In that freeze-frame, all context becomes irrelevant.
That same stripping away of context typifies the way the world views the current violence. For CNN, the BBC and the New York Times, the rights and wrongs of the last 10 months are all summarized in one box score: Palestinian dead vs. Jewish dead. Who initiated the violence and why? Were those killed deliberately murdered or killed in military confrontations? All irrelevant.
No European government has gone so far as to deny Israel the right to self-defense. Yet the list of tools granted Israel in practice turns out to be a null set. No Israeli response, apart from passive victimhood, has escaped condemnation.
Increasingly, the world has come to view the conflict through Palestinian eyes — at Palestinian funerals, at Israeli checkpoints (again without wondering why such checkpoints are erected in the first place). And not just the last 10 months, but the entire conflict since what the Palestinians refer to as al-Nakba, the catastrophe of Israel’s creation.
Esau mocks Jacob by limiting him to his traditional tool: prayer. What should Israel do about suicide bombers who find safe haven in the Palestinian Authority? The world answers: Pray, Jew. Allow the bombers to be booby-trapped and sent on their way. Then pray they get second thoughts or that the bombs go off prematurely or that an alert bus driver miraculously disarms the bomber.
The only prescription offered Israel — return to the bargaining table and offer further concessions. Won’t that inevitably lead to the end of Israel, as each new flare-up of violence elicits further concessions, until there is nothing left to concede?
Of course. That’s the point, you see.