Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism

The Dynamics of Delegitimization

Alvin H. Rosenfeld, Alvin H. Rosenfeld

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780253038746
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios judíos

Seventeen essays by scholars examining the links between anti-Semitism and attitudes toward Israel in the current political climate. How and why have anti-Zionism and antisemitism become so radical and widespread? This timely and important volume argues convincingly that today's inflamed rhetoric exceeds the boundaries of legitimate criticism of the policies and actions of the state of Israel and conflates anti-Zionism with antisemitism. The contributors give the dynamics of this process full theoretical, political, legal, and educational treatment and demonstrate how these forces operate in formal and informal political spheres as well as domestic and transnational spaces. They offer significant historical and global perspectives of the problem, including how Holocaust memory and meaning have been reconfigured and how a singular and distinct project of delegitimization of the Jewish state and its people has solidified. This intensive but extraordinarily rich contribution to the study of antisemitism stands out for its comprehensive overview of an issue that is both historical and strikingly timely.

PART I

Ideological and Theoretical Sources and Implications

ONE

The New Replacement Theory

Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, and the Denial of History

JAMES WALD

ANTISEMITISM HAS HISTORICALLY tended to focus on the most prominent manifestation of Judaism in a given era: originally, religion; in modern times, race; and today, Jewish nationhood in the form of Zionism and Israel.¹ As a result, the relation between anti-Israel discourse and antisemitism has become increasingly contested. At the center of this issue is the debate over not just the definition but the very existence of the so-called new antisemitism.² Anthropologists tell us that such liminal areas—in this case, between the boundaries of legitimate and illegitimate criticism, academic and popular debate, and innocent or insidious use of antisemitic memes—are dangerous territory, but it is there that this chapter deliberately ventures.³

I examine the intersection of traditional antisemitic thinking with denial or radical revision of the historical record, aimed at or tending toward delegitimization of the Jewish state. Ironically, the complexity of the task is in some ways the result of progress in three areas:

1. Today, in contrast to the past, no respectable person openly admits to being an antisemite or harboring antisemitic views.⁴

2. With the scientization of discourse, even extremists now feel compelled to argue on rational grounds of science and scholarship (or at least appear to). Rather than simply asserting that the biblical narrative trumps Darwin’s theory, opponents of evolution have invented “creation science” to cloak their fundamentally unscientific views in the mantle of modern knowledge. Holocaust deniers, rather than simply dismissing the event as a fantastic lie, cite arcane historical details and evidence from physics and chemistry in their attempt to prove that the genocide could not have occurred. Even some of the cruder popular anti-Zionist and anti-Israel discourse now avails itself of vocabulary and concepts borrowed from academe.⁵

3. With increasing public sophistication comes a welcome skepticism toward received wisdom and “standard narratives,” but the negative corollary is a willingness to lend credence even to deeply flawed alternatives.⁶ Reflexive doubt thus becomes the ironic doorway to new certainty.

In the present case, the received wisdom is that (1) the Jews were a people indigenous to the ancient Near East; (2) the Jewish national movement, Zionism, was morally as well as substantively comparable to any other; and (3) the reestablishment of a Jewish commonwealth was therefore an act of restoration rather than usurpation (its unfortunate distinction, as Mark Lilla observes, being that the suffering or injustices inherent in its creation occurred within living memory rather than in the mists of antiquity).⁷ The negation of these three postulates increasingly takes the form of calls for the end of the Jewish state. It is a stunning development. In 1922, the fifty-one members of the League of Nations unanimously approved the Palestine Mandate, whose preamble includes the rationale: “Whereas recognition has been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.”⁸ Today, not just the reconstitution but even the once self-evident “historical connection” on which it was premised is called into doubt. That a view once “marginal and unworthy of serious refutation” is now “commonly held” and “increasingly seen as legitimate” commands the attention of the historian, not least when world leaders such as the pope feel the need to intervene.⁹ After all, contemporaneous upheavals arising from the redrawing of borders and state formation—expulsion of the ethnic Germans and Indian Partition—were far bloodier.¹⁰ We may, as academics or citizens, reflect on the necessity or ethicality of the action; only the founding of Israel moves respectable voices to demand its reversal.

The past, as well as the present, has thus become a battleground. This chapter focuses on three such historical areas hitherto not treated together: the Holocaust, archaeology, and genetics and ethnicity.¹¹ What renders these discourses so insidious is the fact that (1) each exists in “extreme” and “soft” versions—the former preposterous, pseudoscientific, and antisemitic, and the latter straddling the boundary between legitimate academic debate and the inherently or potentially antisemitic (ironically, the existence of the former adds to the credibility of the latter, causing it to appear more acceptable by comparison); (2) they often entail an explicit assault on Israeli and Jewish scholarship; and (3) they are moreover linked in what I call the new replacement theory. In church doctrine, supersessionism or replacement theology asserted that the New Covenant had superseded the old, and Christianity thus replaced Judaism as the new or true Israel (verus Israel).¹² In the new replacement theory, Palestine replaces Israel as the sole moral and practical heir to the land. Not coincidentally, the involvement of the churches in anti-Israel activism has led to a revival of literal replacement theory in some quarters.¹³

THE HOLOCAUST AND THE NEW DISCOURSE OF REMORSE

Holocaust denial has flourished in some sectors of Arab and Muslim society because attacking the historicity of the presumed cause of Israel’s creation is seen as a way to undermine the legitimacy of the state.¹⁴ In contrast to Holocaust denial, the soft instrumentalization of the Holocaust in anti-Israel arguments enjoys growing academic as well as popular acceptance, though on closer scrutiny, it proves to be built on false premises and false analogies. A new discourse of remorse holds that the creation of Israel was a mistake founded on an injustice, with further proof retroactively adduced through denunciations of current Israeli policy that often assume an antisemitic character. The argument may be summarized as follows: (1) Israel’s purported right to exist derives from the Holocaust; (2) Europe created Israel based on emotions of guilt rather than reason and fairness; (3) Palestinians thus paid the price for the crimes of Europeans; (4) Israel has failed to learn the lessons of the Holocaust and has itself become an oppressor; and (5) in the most extreme instances of Israel acting as an oppressor, Israelis become latter-day Nazis.

The first and second parts of the argument assert not just that the great powers created a Jewish state out of Holocaust guilt (although this factor played no role) but that the Jews sought statehood because of the Holocaust. Of the five points, this one seems the most innocuous;¹⁵ yet it is in some ways the most insidious because it is untrue and sets almost all the others in motion. By fixing the starting point as the Holocaust, this view conflates immediate circumstances with ultimate causes. It telescopes Jewish attachment to the land of Israel by both modernizing and secularizing it, thereby rendering invisible the entire history of political and religious Zionism, not to mention the centrality of the land in the Hebrew Bible, liturgy, Talmud, and Jewish tradition. In the process, it implicitly defines or recontextualizes Israelis as Europeans rather than indigenes (even though antisemites historically saw Jews as Asiatic aliens) and makes the right of self-determination for the Jews alone contingent on having suffered a world-historical tragedy rather than possession of intrinsic peoplehood.¹⁶ Einat Wilf refers to the phenomenon as “Zionism denial.”¹⁷

If the first two points of the argument are accepted, then the third necessarily follows. If Europe created Israel out of guilt over the Holocaust, then Palestinians are not just the unfortunate losers in a tragic conflict but the doubly blameless victims, defeated in one because of what happened to their adversary in another. It is a concept captured in Edward Said’s seductive phrase, “the victims of the victims, the refugees of the refugees.”¹⁸ Rather than serving as a call for Israelis to heed the narrative of the other side, this notion serves to negate the Israeli narrative. The injustice entailed in or arising from the creation of Israel could occur only because the Jews failed to learn the lessons of their own history (the fourth part of the argument). British member of Parliament David Ward, on Holocaust Memorial Day, said, “Having visited Auschwitz twice—once with my family and once with local schools—I am saddened that the Jews, who suffered unbelievable levels of persecution during the Holocaust, could within a few years of liberation from the death camps be inflicting atrocities on Palestinians in the new state of Israel and continue to do so on a daily basis in the West Bank and Gaza.”¹⁹

Portuguese Nobel laureate José Saramago saw the cruelty as deliberate: “Living under the shadows of the Holocaust and expecting to be forgiven for anything they do on behalf of what they have suffered. . . . They didn’t learn anything from the suffering of their parents and grandparents.”²⁰ The notion of “the victims of the victims” of course carries with it not just an irony but an accusation: the Jews—of all people—should have known better, and it is here that a clearly supersessionist element creeps in. Supersessionism, we need to remind ourselves, was not just a matter of a new doctrine arising to replace an old one. Rather, the Jews, through their errors, actively brought about the abrogation of their covenant. Blind to the meaning of their own scripture, they rejected their prophets and the prophecy of salvation. The resultant crime of deicide was punished by loss of sovereignty and humiliating subjugation.²¹ The anti-Zionist version charges Israelis with both failure to learn the lessons of Auschwitz and blindness to the secular gospel of human rights.

The inevitable conclusion of this new discourse of remorse is that the creation of Israel was a mistake, the only debate revolving around whether it is to be reversed or merely regretted. This view has the added psychological advantage of permitting Europeans to engage in moral preening by acknowledging their guilt while absolving themselves of any sin worse than an excess of misdirected humanitarianism. Poet Tom Paulin called Israel “a historical obscenity” that “never . . . had the right to exist,” while novelist and historian A.N. Wilson, more in sorrow than in anger, called “the 1948 experiment” “lazy thinking.”²² If such views are no longer marginal, the stalled peace process may be partly to blame, but so, too, is the fact that, as Andrei Markovits puts it, “the post-Auschwitz moratorium is gradually coming to an end. The Jews are not ‘off limits’ anymore in Europe.”²³

What has been called “Holocaust inversion” (Manfred Gerstenberg) or “Holocaust reversal” (Einat Wilf) takes the foregoing to its ultimate conclusion in the fifth point of the argument and holds that the Israelis not only have forgotten the lesson of the Nazis but also have even become the new Nazis, doing to others what was done to them.²⁴ From the panoply of examples, we may bracket the many vulgar manifestations in popular discourse and social media and instead focus on a few cases from presumably more sophisticated quarters.²⁵ What is striking is that a viewpoint formerly confined to the domain of Soviet Cold War propaganda, right-wing extremism, and Arab popular media is increasingly found in the mainstream of “sophisticated” Western discourse. This view began to surface at the time of the First Lebanon...