Anti-Semitism and the Left that Doesn’t Learn
By Mitchell Cohen (online)
I.
A DETERMINED offensive is underway. Its target is in the Middle East, and it is an old target: the legitimacy of Israel. Hezbollah and Hamas are not the protagonists, the contested terrains are not the Galilee and southern Lebanon or southern Israel and Gaza. The means are not military. The offensive comes from within parts of the liberal and left intelligentsia in the United States and Europe. It has nothing to do with this or that negotiation between Israelis and Palestinians, and it has nothing to do with any particular Israeli policy. After all, this or that Israeli policy may be chastised, rightly or wrongly, without denying the legitimacy of the Jewish state, just as you can criticize an Israeli policy—again, rightly or wrongly—without being an anti-Semite. You can oppose all Israeli settlements in the occupied territories (as I do) and you can also recognize that Benjamin Netanyahu, not just Yasir Arafat, was responsible for undermining the Oslo peace process without being an anti-Semite or anti-Zionist. You don’t have to be an anti-Semite or anti-Zionist to think that some American Jewish organizations pander to American or Israeli right-wingers.
The assault today is another matter. It is shaped largely by political attitudes and arguments that recall the worst of the twentieth-century left. It is time to get beyond them. But let me be clear: I am “left.” I still have no problem when someone describes me with the “s” word—socialist—although I don’t much care if you call me a social democrat, left-liberal, or some other proximate term. My “leftism” comes from a commitment to—and an ethos of—democratic humanism and social egalitarianism.
What I care about is the reinvention of the best values of the historical left—legacies of British Labour, of the Swedish Social Democrats, of Jean Jaurès and Léon Blum in France, of Eduard Bernstein and Willy Brandt in Germany, of what has always been the relatively small (alas!) tribe in the U.S. associated with names like Eugene V. Debs, Norman Thomas, Michael Harrington, and Irving Howe. It’s not so much a matter of political programs, let alone labels, as it is of political sensibility. I care about finding a new basis for that old amalgam of liberty, equality, and solidarity, a basis that makes sense for our “globalizing age.” But I also want a left that draws real, not gestural, conclusions from the catastrophes done in the name of the left in the 20th century.
There is a left that learns and there is a left that doesn’t learn. I want the left that learns to inform our Western societies (a difficult task in George W. Bush’s America) and to help find ideas that actually address poverty in what used to be called the third world—rather than romanticizing it.
After 1989, the left that doesn’t learn was in retreat. It was hushed up by the end of all those wretched communist regimes, by images broadcast worldwide of millions in the streets demanding liberation from dictatorships that legitimized themselves in left-wing terms. You know who I mean by the left that never learns: those folks who twist and turn until they can explain or ‘understand’ almost anything in order to keep their own presuppositions—or intellectual needs—intact. Once some of them were actual Leninist; now they more regularly share some of Leninism’s worst mental features—often in postmodern, postcolonial, or even militantly liberal guise. Sometimes they move about on the political spectrum, denouncing their former selves (while patting their moral backs). You can usually recognize them without too much difficulty: same voice, that of a prosecuting commissar, even if their tune sounds different. It’s a voice you can often hear as well in ex-communists turned neoconservative.
Their explanations, their “understandings,” often rewrite history or re-imagine what is in front of their eyes to suit their own starting point. Since their thinking usually moves along a mental closed circuit, it is also the end point. Sometimes it is an idea, sometimes a belief system (which they refuse to recognize in themselves), sometimes really a prejudice, and sometimes just ambition. Goblins were often part of the story for the older left that never learned, and so too is the case today. If things don’t work out as you know they must, some nefarious force must lurk. After all, the problem couldn’t possibly be your way of thinking, or your inability to see the world afresh, or that you got something very wrong in the past. No, it is much easier to announce that you, unlike anyone who could disagree with you, engage in ‘critical’ thinking. And if your critical thinking is criticized in any way, denounce your foe immediately for “McCarthyism.” Pretend that your denunciation is an argument about the original subject of dispute. That’s easier than answering any of the criticism.
Consider the collateral damage done by such cries of “McCarthyism” from professors with lifetime job security: their students will never understand the evils of McCarthyism. Consider how an understanding of the evils of McCarthyism is subverted when its characteristic techniques—innuendo, for example—are used by opinionated journalists in magazines with wide circulations. Take, for instance, the case of Adam Shatz, once literary editor of the Nation and now with the London Review of Books. He published an article half a year before the beginning of the Iraq war suggesting that people around Dissent were busy hunting for a “new enemy” following the end of the cold war, and that they found it in a combination of militant Arab nationalism and Saddam Hussein.
“Though rarely cited explicitly,” Shatz also explained, “Israel shapes and even defines the foreign policy views of a small but influential group of American liberals” (the Nation, September 23, 2002). In other words, these liberals composed the Israel lobby within the left, and they sought the American war in Iraq for the sake of the Jewish state. True, Shatz didn’t hold up a file and say, “I have a list of names of liberals who are really dual loyalists.” Instead he pointed to Paul Berman “and like-minded social democrats,” even though the overwhelming majority of Dissent’s editorial board including co-editor Michael Walzer was opposed to the war.
Shatz didn’t deign to engage any of Berman’s actual points. And those Berman advanced in the actual run-up to the Iraq invasion did not focus on Israel, but on liberalism, democracy, and totalitarianism. Arguments made by the author of the words you now read, who was a left hawk (and is now an unhappy one), likewise had nothing to do with Israel and were different—significantly so—from those made by Berman. Nothing that appeared in Dissent before or after Shatz’s article lends credence to his innuendos.
II.
HISTORY MAY not progress but sometimes it regurgitates. Over the last decade, a lot of the old junk has come back. The space for it opened for many reasons. They range from the sad failures of the social-democratic imagination in the era of globalization to the postmodern and postcolonial influence in universities to George W. Bush’s ascendancy with its many, many miserable consequences (not only in Iraq). The left that never learns often became the superego of the twentieth century’s left. Its attempt to play that same role in the twenty-first century needs to be frustrated.
Nothing exemplifies the return of old junk more than the ‘new’ anti-Semitism and the bad faith that often finds expression in the statement: “I am anti-Zionist but not anti-Semitic.” The fixation on Israel/Palestine within parts of the left, often to the exclusion of all other suffering on the globe, ought to leave any balanced observer wondering: What is going on here? This fixation needs demystification.
In theoretical terms, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are pretty easy to distinguish. Anti-Semitism is a form of race or national prejudice that crystallized in the nineteenth century. In part, it displaced or reinvented anti-Jewish religious prejudice (although centuries of religious prejudice easily wafted into racial and national bigotry). Its target was clearly Jews, not simply “Semites.” It also, for some, mixed matters up further by identifying Jews with capitalism. Sadly, this became a steady feature within parts of the left that would later, habitually, conflate Jews, capitalism, and Zionism. Oddly enough, that is also what Jewish neoconservatives have tried to do in recent decades.
Anti-Zionism means, theoretically, opposition to the project of a Jewish state in response to the rise of anti-Semitism. Let’s be blunt: there have been anti-Zionists who are not anti-Semites, just as there have been foes of affirmative action who are not racists. But the crucial question is prejudicial overlap, not intellectual niceties.
Remember the bad old days, when parts of the left provided theoretical justifications of things like “democratic dictatorship.” In fact, if you understood—especially if you bought into—all sorts of assumptions and especially Leninist definitions, the justification works. Any professor of political theory can construct it for you and it will make perfect theoretical sense. But if you lived in a “democratic dictatorship,” it was intellectual poison. It was also poison if you were committed to the best values of the left.
They are again at stake when we ask: To what extent does much anti-Zionism replicate the mental patterns of anti-Semitism? And to what extent do demagogic articulations of anti-Zionism enhance anti-Semitism? There is a curious thing about anti-Semitism, and it was captured in a remark by British novelist Iain Pears that ought to be quoted and re-quoted these days: “anti-Semitism is like alcoholism. You can go for 25 years without a drink, but if things go bad and you find yourself with a vodka in your hand, you can’t get rid of it.” (International Herald Tribune, August 11, 2003).
Much may be gleaned from the fact that the recent campaign by some British academic unions to boycott Israel was thwarted because it was found to violate anti-discrimination laws.
LAST YEAR, Denis MacShane, British Labour Parliament Member, chaired a committee of parliamentarians and ex-ministers that investigated rising anti-Semitism in Britain and beyond. “Hatred of Jews has reached new heights in Europe and many points south and east of the old continent,” he wrote recently in a very brave article in the Washington Post (September 4, 2007). He describes a wide array of incidents. “Militant anti-Jewish students fueled by Islamist or far-left hate” seek on campuses “to prevent Jewish students from expressing their opinions.” There is “an anti-Jewish discourse, a mood and tone whenever Jews are discussed, whether in the media, at universities, among the liberal media elite or at dinner parties of modish London. To express any support for Israel or any feeling for the right of a Jewish state to exist produces denunciation, even contempt.”
MacShane points out that this sort of behavior is distinct from specific disputes about this or that Israeli politician. Criticism, the investigatory committee “made clear,” was “not off-limits.” Rightly so; the same should be true with the policies and office- holders of every government on the globe. But MacSchane also warns that something else has been going on, that old demons are reawakening and that “the old anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism have morphed into something more dangerous.” The threat, he says eloquently, doesn’t only concern Jews or Israel, but “everything democrats have long fought for: the truth without fear, no matter one's religion or political beliefs.”
What is “truth without fear” when we speak of the relation between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism? Is it to be found in Tony Judt’s declaration to the New York Times that “the link between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is newly created”? (January 31, 2007). How a historian—or anyone else—could assert this is astonishing. Consider what it airbrushes out of the twentieth century—the anti-Semitic binge of Stalin’s later years, just for starters.
And surely Judt, who is based at New York University and is now taking what has turned into obsessive anti-Zionist campaigning to the École Normale Supérieure in Paris [1] recalls the arrests and assassinations of the leading Jewish cultural figures of Soviet Russia on the grounds that they were “Zionist agents of American imperialism.” Surely a historian of Europe like Judt—who was once a hard leftist but then rose to intellectual celebrity in the United States in the 1980s (that is, during the Reagan era) by attacking all French Marxists for not facing up to Stalinism—recalls the charges of “Zionist conspiracy” against Jewish communists who were victimized in the Czech purge trials in the early 1950s.
If he doesn’t recall them when he speaks to the New York Times, he might check them out in his own book Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. There he cites Stalin’s secret police chief, Lavrenti Beria, urging Czech Communists to investigate the “Zionist plot” among their comrades. Surely a historian of Europe, especially one who now refers to himself as an “old leftist,” recalls the campaign in 1967 and 1968 to cleanse Poland of “Zionist” fifth columnists (I suppose they were the Israel Lobby of the Polish Communist Party). If Judt doesn’t recall it when he talks to the New York Times, he might again look at his own book which cites Polish Communist chief Wladyslaw Gomulka’s conflation of his Jewish critics with Zionists. Since he is a historian of Europe and not the Middle East, perhaps Judt hasn’t noticed how “anti-Zionism” in broad swaths of the Muslim and Arab media has been suffused by anti-Jewish rhetoric for decades—rhetoric against “al-Yahud” not Ehud Olmert or Ehud Barak.
Remember how air-brushing was done in the bad old days? Trotsky (or someone else) would suddenly disappear from a photo. Lenin or Stalin and the cheering crowds would still be there. The resulting picture is not entirely false. Does all this make Judt an anti-Semite? The answer is simple: no. It does make his grasp of the history of anti-Semitism tendentious. And tendentious history can be put to all sorts of pernicious use.
Judt’s political judgment complements his historical perceptions, especially when it comes to a declared concern about Palestinian suffering. Recall his article in the New York Review of Books (October 23, 2003) advocating a binational state to replace Israel. A Jewish state, he explained, is an anachronism. But since then, Hamas, a political movement of religious fanatics, won the Palestinian elections, and later seized power—by force—in Gaza. Israel, in the meantime, had withdrawn entirely from Gaza and torn down all Jewish settlements there in summer 2005. Yet if you follow Judt’s logic, Israel should not have withdrawn but instead integrated Gaza into itself. Obviously this would have enabled a new, better life for Palestinians, perhaps even have prevented them from turning to Hamas. And it would have taken a first happy step toward saving Israel from its anachronistic status by affording Israelis, together with Palestinians, a domestic future of perpetual ethnic civil war—a feature of modern politics that farsighted historians, but perhaps not policymakers, who have to worry about real lives, will imagine is also an anachronism. Likewise, I suppose India can save itself from being an unfortunate anachronism by a reintegration with Pakistan.
A FEW YEARS ago I sought to outline commonalities between anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist discourses in a scholarly journal. It is worth reproducing. Here are major motifs that inform classical anti-Semitism:
1) Insinuations: Jews do not and cannot fit properly into our society. There is something foreign, not to mention sinister about them.
2) Complaints: They are so particularistic, those Jews, so preoccupied with their “own.” Why are they so clannish and anachronistic when we need a world of solidarity and love? Really, they make themselves into a “problem.” If the so-called “Jewish problem” is singular in some way, it is their own doing and usually covered up by special pleading.
3) Remonstrations: Those Jews, they always carp that they are victims. In fact, they have vast power, especially financial power. Their power is everywhere, even if it is not very visible. They exercise it manipulatively, behind the scenes. (But look, there are even a few of them, guilty-hearted perhaps, who will admit it all this to you).
4) Recriminations: Look at their misdeeds, all done while they cry that they are victims. These ranged through the ages from the murder of God to the ritual slaughter of children to selling military secrets to the enemy to war-profiteering, to being capitalists or middlemen or landlords or moneylenders exploiting the poor. And they always, oh-so-cleverly, mislead you.
Alter a few phrases, a word here and there, and we find motifs of anti-Zionism that are popular these days in parts of the left and parts of the Muslim and Arab worlds:
1) Insinuations: The Zionists are alien implants in the Mideast. They can never fit there. Western imperialism created the Zionist state.
2) Complaints: A Jewish state can never be democratic. Zionism is exclusivist. The very idea of a Jewish state is an anachronism.
3) Remonstrations: The Zionists carp that they are victims but in reality they have enormous power, especially financial. Their power is everywhere, but they make sure not to let it be too visible. They exercise it manipulatively, behind people’s backs, behind the scenes – why, just look at Zionist influence in Washington. Or rather, dominance of Washington. (And look, there are even a few Jews, guilty-hearted perhaps, who admit it).
4) Recriminations: Zionists are responsible for astonishing, endless dastardly deeds. And they cover them up with deceptions. These range from the imperialist aggression of 1967 to Ehud Barak’s claim that he offered a compromise to Palestinians back in 2000 to the Jenin “massacre” during the second Intifidah. [2]
No, anti-Zionism is not in principle anti-Semitism but it is time for thoughtful minds—especially on the left—to be disturbed by how much anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism share, how much the dominant species of anti-Zionism encourages anti-Semitism.
And so:
If you judge a Jewish state by standards that you apply to no one else; if your neck veins bulge when you denounce Zionists but you’ve done no more than cluck “well, yes, very bad about Darfur”;
if there is nothing Hamas can do that you won’t blame ‘in the final analysis’ on Israelis;
if your sneer at the Zionists doesn’t sound a whole lot different from American neoconservative sneers at leftists;
then you should not be surprised if you are criticized, fiercely so, by people who are serious about a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians and who won’t let you get away with a self-exonerating formula—“I am anti-Zionist but not anti-Semitic”—to prevent scrutiny. If you are anti-Zionist and not anti-Semitic, then don’t use the categories, allusions, and smug hiss that are all too familiar to any student of prejudice.
It is time for the left that learns, that grows, that reflects, that has historical not rhetorical perspective, and that wants a future based on its own best values to say loudly to the left that never learns: You hijacked “left” in the last century, but you won’t get away with it again whatever guise you don.
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
Yes Yosi we're all familiar with the history and ongoing issues with anti-semitism through history, but to make the leap that every time some dummy makes a comment, everyone has to be outraged and react as such is over the top and a bit ridiculous. Seems like it's an easy and cheap way to pass off your version of current events and affairs by using some history to pass off your opinions... ie, antisemitism, the holocaust or similar to somehow equate to policy any practice in the Middle East via Israel now.
Lastly, I find it very hypocritical for people to be so overly emotional and sensitive about racism, genocide and similar, yet only it apply it to their own people while ignoring the same occurring to others.
Post edited by FiveB247x on
CONservative governMENt
Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. - Louis Brandeis
Yes I did read the articles and don't really agree with them. Part of these type of commentary's always attempt to discredit legitimate claims which don't show Israel in a positive manner and convey that it is either untrue or really the veil for some type of antisemitism. Also, there's always the correlation to pre-WW2 or holocaust fears, which is so greatly overstated and misplaced in today's age. It's nothing more than fear politics in order to extrapolate the opinion of "it could happen or will happen again soon cause it's rising". But in reality this just brings me back to my point earlier, about hypocrisy.. because I don't see you or anyone else posting items talking about racism or genocide regarding any other group, race or religion of recent whatsoever. So in sum, the whole "never again" and humanist view on genocide, racism or similar by jews regarding such historic actions is nothing more than hypocrisy aimed at self-interest, not some type of real moral statement about humanity or anything similar. I, myself come from a jewish family and have heard it my whole life,and I find it disgusting. Racism, genocide, and other crimes aimed at discrimination should be acknowledged and viewed in the same manner, not simply the one's that effect or you find important. Also, any time someone discredits harsh commentary on policy of governments by simply saying "they're only saying that cause of x", it's typically a pathetic way to pass it off than to address the commentary.
Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. - Louis Brandeis
Anti-Semitism and the Left that Doesn’t Learn
By Mitchell Cohen (online)
I.
A DETERMINED offensive is underway. Its target is in the Middle East, and it is an old target: the legitimacy of Israel. Hezbollah and Hamas are not the protagonists, the contested terrains are not the Galilee and southern Lebanon or southern Israel and Gaza. The means are not military. The offensive comes from within parts of the liberal and left intelligentsia in the United States and Europe. It has nothing to do with this or that negotiation between Israelis and Palestinians, and it has nothing to do with any particular Israeli policy. After all, this or that Israeli policy may be chastised, rightly or wrongly, without denying the legitimacy of the Jewish state, just as you can criticize an Israeli policy—again, rightly or wrongly—without being an anti-Semite. You can oppose all Israeli settlements in the occupied territories (as I do) and you can also recognize that Benjamin Netanyahu, not just Yasir Arafat, was responsible for undermining the Oslo peace process without being an anti-Semite or anti-Zionist. You don’t have to be an anti-Semite or anti-Zionist to think that some American Jewish organizations pander to American or Israeli right-wingers.
The assault today is another matter. It is shaped largely by political attitudes and arguments that recall the worst of the twentieth-century left. It is time to get beyond them. But let me be clear: I am “left.” I still have no problem when someone describes me with the “s” word—socialist—although I don’t much care if you call me a social democrat, left-liberal, or some other proximate term. My “leftism” comes from a commitment to—and an ethos of—democratic humanism and social egalitarianism.
What I care about is the reinvention of the best values of the historical left—legacies of British Labour, of the Swedish Social Democrats, of Jean Jaurès and Léon Blum in France, of Eduard Bernstein and Willy Brandt in Germany, of what has always been the relatively small (alas!) tribe in the U.S. associated with names like Eugene V. Debs, Norman Thomas, Michael Harrington, and Irving Howe. It’s not so much a matter of political programs, let alone labels, as it is of political sensibility. I care about finding a new basis for that old amalgam of liberty, equality, and solidarity, a basis that makes sense for our “globalizing age.” But I also want a left that draws real, not gestural, conclusions from the catastrophes done in the name of the left in the 20th century.
There is a left that learns and there is a left that doesn’t learn. I want the left that learns to inform our Western societies (a difficult task in George W. Bush’s America) and to help find ideas that actually address poverty in what used to be called the third world—rather than romanticizing it.
After 1989, the left that doesn’t learn was in retreat. It was hushed up by the end of all those wretched communist regimes, by images broadcast worldwide of millions in the streets demanding liberation from dictatorships that legitimized themselves in left-wing terms. You know who I mean by the left that never learns: those folks who twist and turn until they can explain or ‘understand’ almost anything in order to keep their own presuppositions—or intellectual needs—intact. Once some of them were actual Leninist; now they more regularly share some of Leninism’s worst mental features—often in postmodern, postcolonial, or even militantly liberal guise. Sometimes they move about on the political spectrum, denouncing their former selves (while patting their moral backs). You can usually recognize them without too much difficulty: same voice, that of a prosecuting commissar, even if their tune sounds different. It’s a voice you can often hear as well in ex-communists turned neoconservative.
Their explanations, their “understandings,” often rewrite history or re-imagine what is in front of their eyes to suit their own starting point. Since their thinking usually moves along a mental closed circuit, it is also the end point. Sometimes it is an idea, sometimes a belief system (which they refuse to recognize in themselves), sometimes really a prejudice, and sometimes just ambition. Goblins were often part of the story for the older left that never learned, and so too is the case today. If things don’t work out as you know they must, some nefarious force must lurk. After all, the problem couldn’t possibly be your way of thinking, or your inability to see the world afresh, or that you got something very wrong in the past. No, it is much easier to announce that you, unlike anyone who could disagree with you, engage in ‘critical’ thinking. And if your critical thinking is criticized in any way, denounce your foe immediately for “McCarthyism.” Pretend that your denunciation is an argument about the original subject of dispute. That’s easier than answering any of the criticism.
Consider the collateral damage done by such cries of “McCarthyism” from professors with lifetime job security: their students will never understand the evils of McCarthyism. Consider how an understanding of the evils of McCarthyism is subverted when its characteristic techniques—innuendo, for example—are used by opinionated journalists in magazines with wide circulations. Take, for instance, the case of Adam Shatz, once literary editor of the Nation and now with the London Review of Books. He published an article half a year before the beginning of the Iraq war suggesting that people around Dissent were busy hunting for a “new enemy” following the end of the cold war, and that they found it in a combination of militant Arab nationalism and Saddam Hussein.
“Though rarely cited explicitly,” Shatz also explained, “Israel shapes and even defines the foreign policy views of a small but influential group of American liberals” (the Nation, September 23, 2002). In other words, these liberals composed the Israel lobby within the left, and they sought the American war in Iraq for the sake of the Jewish state. True, Shatz didn’t hold up a file and say, “I have a list of names of liberals who are really dual loyalists.” Instead he pointed to Paul Berman “and like-minded social democrats,” even though the overwhelming majority of Dissent’s editorial board including co-editor Michael Walzer was opposed to the war.
Shatz didn’t deign to engage any of Berman’s actual points. And those Berman advanced in the actual run-up to the Iraq invasion did not focus on Israel, but on liberalism, democracy, and totalitarianism. Arguments made by the author of the words you now read, who was a left hawk (and is now an unhappy one), likewise had nothing to do with Israel and were different—significantly so—from those made by Berman. Nothing that appeared in Dissent before or after Shatz’s article lends credence to his innuendos.
II.
HISTORY MAY not progress but sometimes it regurgitates. Over the last decade, a lot of the old junk has come back. The space for it opened for many reasons. They range from the sad failures of the social-democratic imagination in the era of globalization to the postmodern and postcolonial influence in universities to George W. Bush’s ascendancy with its many, many miserable consequences (not only in Iraq). The left that never learns often became the superego of the twentieth century’s left. Its attempt to play that same role in the twenty-first century needs to be frustrated.
Nothing exemplifies the return of old junk more than the ‘new’ anti-Semitism and the bad faith that often finds expression in the statement: “I am anti-Zionist but not anti-Semitic.” The fixation on Israel/Palestine within parts of the left, often to the exclusion of all other suffering on the globe, ought to leave any balanced observer wondering: What is going on here? This fixation needs demystification.
In theoretical terms, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are pretty easy to distinguish. Anti-Semitism is a form of race or national prejudice that crystallized in the nineteenth century. In part, it displaced or reinvented anti-Jewish religious prejudice (although centuries of religious prejudice easily wafted into racial and national bigotry). Its target was clearly Jews, not simply “Semites.” It also, for some, mixed matters up further by identifying Jews with capitalism. Sadly, this became a steady feature within parts of the left that would later, habitually, conflate Jews, capitalism, and Zionism. Oddly enough, that is also what Jewish neoconservatives have tried to do in recent decades.
Anti-Zionism means, theoretically, opposition to the project of a Jewish state in response to the rise of anti-Semitism. Let’s be blunt: there have been anti-Zionists who are not anti-Semites, just as there have been foes of affirmative action who are not racists. But the crucial question is prejudicial overlap, not intellectual niceties.
Remember the bad old days, when parts of the left provided theoretical justifications of things like “democratic dictatorship.” In fact, if you understood—especially if you bought into—all sorts of assumptions and especially Leninist definitions, the justification works. Any professor of political theory can construct it for you and it will make perfect theoretical sense. But if you lived in a “democratic dictatorship,” it was intellectual poison. It was also poison if you were committed to the best values of the left.
They are again at stake when we ask: To what extent does much anti-Zionism replicate the mental patterns of anti-Semitism? And to what extent do demagogic articulations of anti-Zionism enhance anti-Semitism? There is a curious thing about anti-Semitism, and it was captured in a remark by British novelist Iain Pears that ought to be quoted and re-quoted these days: “anti-Semitism is like alcoholism. You can go for 25 years without a drink, but if things go bad and you find yourself with a vodka in your hand, you can’t get rid of it.” (International Herald Tribune, August 11, 2003).
Much may be gleaned from the fact that the recent campaign by some British academic unions to boycott Israel was thwarted because it was found to violate anti-discrimination laws.
LAST YEAR, Denis MacShane, British Labour Parliament Member, chaired a committee of parliamentarians and ex-ministers that investigated rising anti-Semitism in Britain and beyond. “Hatred of Jews has reached new heights in Europe and many points south and east of the old continent,” he wrote recently in a very brave article in the Washington Post (September 4, 2007). He describes a wide array of incidents. “Militant anti-Jewish students fueled by Islamist or far-left hate” seek on campuses “to prevent Jewish students from expressing their opinions.” There is “an anti-Jewish discourse, a mood and tone whenever Jews are discussed, whether in the media, at universities, among the liberal media elite or at dinner parties of modish London. To express any support for Israel or any feeling for the right of a Jewish state to exist produces denunciation, even contempt.”
MacShane points out that this sort of behavior is distinct from specific disputes about this or that Israeli politician. Criticism, the investigatory committee “made clear,” was “not off-limits.” Rightly so; the same should be true with the policies and office- holders of every government on the globe. But MacSchane also warns that something else has been going on, that old demons are reawakening and that “the old anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism have morphed into something more dangerous.” The threat, he says eloquently, doesn’t only concern Jews or Israel, but “everything democrats have long fought for: the truth without fear, no matter one's religion or political beliefs.”
What is “truth without fear” when we speak of the relation between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism? Is it to be found in Tony Judt’s declaration to the New York Times that “the link between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is newly created”? (January 31, 2007). How a historian—or anyone else—could assert this is astonishing. Consider what it airbrushes out of the twentieth century—the anti-Semitic binge of Stalin’s later years, just for starters.
And surely Judt, who is based at New York University and is now taking what has turned into obsessive anti-Zionist campaigning to the École Normale Supérieure in Paris [1] recalls the arrests and assassinations of the leading Jewish cultural figures of Soviet Russia on the grounds that they were “Zionist agents of American imperialism.” Surely a historian of Europe like Judt—who was once a hard leftist but then rose to intellectual celebrity in the United States in the 1980s (that is, during the Reagan era) by attacking all French Marxists for not facing up to Stalinism—recalls the charges of “Zionist conspiracy” against Jewish communists who were victimized in the Czech purge trials in the early 1950s.
If he doesn’t recall them when he speaks to the New York Times, he might check them out in his own book Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. There he cites Stalin’s secret police chief, Lavrenti Beria, urging Czech Communists to investigate the “Zionist plot” among their comrades. Surely a historian of Europe, especially one who now refers to himself as an “old leftist,” recalls the campaign in 1967 and 1968 to cleanse Poland of “Zionist” fifth columnists (I suppose they were the Israel Lobby of the Polish Communist Party). If Judt doesn’t recall it when he talks to the New York Times, he might again look at his own book which cites Polish Communist chief Wladyslaw Gomulka’s conflation of his Jewish critics with Zionists. Since he is a historian of Europe and not the Middle East, perhaps Judt hasn’t noticed how “anti-Zionism” in broad swaths of the Muslim and Arab media has been suffused by anti-Jewish rhetoric for decades—rhetoric against “al-Yahud” not Ehud Olmert or Ehud Barak.
Remember how air-brushing was done in the bad old days? Trotsky (or someone else) would suddenly disappear from a photo. Lenin or Stalin and the cheering crowds would still be there. The resulting picture is not entirely false. Does all this make Judt an anti-Semite? The answer is simple: no. It does make his grasp of the history of anti-Semitism tendentious. And tendentious history can be put to all sorts of pernicious use.
Judt’s political judgment complements his historical perceptions, especially when it comes to a declared concern about Palestinian suffering. Recall his article in the New York Review of Books (October 23, 2003) advocating a binational state to replace Israel. A Jewish state, he explained, is an anachronism. But since then, Hamas, a political movement of religious fanatics, won the Palestinian elections, and later seized power—by force—in Gaza. Israel, in the meantime, had withdrawn entirely from Gaza and torn down all Jewish settlements there in summer 2005. Yet if you follow Judt’s logic, Israel should not have withdrawn but instead integrated Gaza into itself. Obviously this would have enabled a new, better life for Palestinians, perhaps even have prevented them from turning to Hamas. And it would have taken a first happy step toward saving Israel from its anachronistic status by affording Israelis, together with Palestinians, a domestic future of perpetual ethnic civil war—a feature of modern politics that farsighted historians, but perhaps not policymakers, who have to worry about real lives, will imagine is also an anachronism. Likewise, I suppose India can save itself from being an unfortunate anachronism by a reintegration with Pakistan.
A FEW YEARS ago I sought to outline commonalities between anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist discourses in a scholarly journal. It is worth reproducing. Here are major motifs that inform classical anti-Semitism:
1) Insinuations: Jews do not and cannot fit properly into our society. There is something foreign, not to mention sinister about them.
2) Complaints: They are so particularistic, those Jews, so preoccupied with their “own.” Why are they so clannish and anachronistic when we need a world of solidarity and love? Really, they make themselves into a “problem.” If the so-called “Jewish problem” is singular in some way, it is their own doing and usually covered up by special pleading.
3) Remonstrations: Those Jews, they always carp that they are victims. In fact, they have vast power, especially financial power. Their power is everywhere, even if it is not very visible. They exercise it manipulatively, behind the scenes. (But look, there are even a few of them, guilty-hearted perhaps, who will admit it all this to you).
4) Recriminations: Look at their misdeeds, all done while they cry that they are victims. These ranged through the ages from the murder of God to the ritual slaughter of children to selling military secrets to the enemy to war-profiteering, to being capitalists or middlemen or landlords or moneylenders exploiting the poor. And they always, oh-so-cleverly, mislead you.
Alter a few phrases, a word here and there, and we find motifs of anti-Zionism that are popular these days in parts of the left and parts of the Muslim and Arab worlds:
1) Insinuations: The Zionists are alien implants in the Mideast. They can never fit there. Western imperialism created the Zionist state.
2) Complaints: A Jewish state can never be democratic. Zionism is exclusivist. The very idea of a Jewish state is an anachronism.
3) Remonstrations: The Zionists carp that they are victims but in reality they have enormous power, especially financial. Their power is everywhere, but they make sure not to let it be too visible. They exercise it manipulatively, behind people’s backs, behind the scenes – why, just look at Zionist influence in Washington. Or rather, dominance of Washington. (And look, there are even a few Jews, guilty-hearted perhaps, who admit it).
4) Recriminations: Zionists are responsible for astonishing, endless dastardly deeds. And they cover them up with deceptions. These range from the imperialist aggression of 1967 to Ehud Barak’s claim that he offered a compromise to Palestinians back in 2000 to the Jenin “massacre” during the second Intifidah. [2]
No, anti-Zionism is not in principle anti-Semitism but it is time for thoughtful minds—especially on the left—to be disturbed by how much anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism share, how much the dominant species of anti-Zionism encourages anti-Semitism.
And so:
If you judge a Jewish state by standards that you apply to no one else; if your neck veins bulge when you denounce Zionists but you’ve done no more than cluck “well, yes, very bad about Darfur”;
if there is nothing Hamas can do that you won’t blame ‘in the final analysis’ on Israelis;
if your sneer at the Zionists doesn’t sound a whole lot different from American neoconservative sneers at leftists;
then you should not be surprised if you are criticized, fiercely so, by people who are serious about a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians and who won’t let you get away with a self-exonerating formula—“I am anti-Zionist but not anti-Semitic”—to prevent scrutiny. If you are anti-Zionist and not anti-Semitic, then don’t use the categories, allusions, and smug hiss that are all too familiar to any student of prejudice.
It is time for the left that learns, that grows, that reflects, that has historical not rhetorical perspective, and that wants a future based on its own best values to say loudly to the left that never learns: You hijacked “left” in the last century, but you won’t get away with it again whatever guise you don.
The occupation is illegal under international law and the settlements constitute a flagrant breach of international humanitarian law under article 49 of the Geneva Convention. Under international law Israel is obliged to make a full and immediate withdrawal from territories it occupied during the June 1967 war. This is supported by the whole of the international community, excluding Israel and the U.S.
Israel's obligations under international law have nothing to do with Anti-Semitism. This is just an attempt by supporters of Israels land grab and ethnic cleansing to deflect attention from the real issues.
Anyone interested in the real motives behind these regular outcrys of anti-semitism should read the following if they want to see what the real issue is:
B, if that is all that they are doing then I don't classify such people as racists, and neither do the authors that I've cited. Why is it that you are so uncritically sure that all accusations of antisemitism are always made in bad faith? Besides the fact that you couldn't possibly know for certain the motivations of others, isn't it dangerous to so casually dismiss bigotry? And would you do the same if the accusation was of Islamophobia? Or racism targeting blacks? My guess is that you would not, and neither should you here.
Five, I'm not sure why you feel that the motive is to discredit anyone that doesn't portray Israel positively. All the articles I've cited have been careful to note that there is legitimate criticism of Israel, and to differentiate that legitimate criticism from what they are talking about.
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
At some point, zionism (in todays form - not mere existence as you claim it, but growth of it) enables anti-semitism .. it fuels the fire, so basically it all goes hand and hand. It's easy to overlook this fact cause you don't believe it, but it doesn't make it any less true.
Anti-Zionism means, theoretically, opposition to the project of a Jewish state in response to the rise of anti-Semitism.
CONservative governMENt
Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. - Louis Brandeis
B, if that is all that they are doing then I don't classify such people as racists, and neither do the authors that I've cited. Why is it that you are so uncritically sure that all accusations of antisemitism are always made in bad faith? Besides the fact that you couldn't possibly know for certain the motivations of others, isn't it dangerous to so casually dismiss bigotry? And would you do the same if the accusation was of Islamophobia? Or racism targeting blacks? My guess is that you would not, and neither should you here.
Five, I'm not sure why you feel that the motive is to discredit anyone that doesn't portray Israel positively. All the articles I've cited have been careful to note that there is legitimate criticism of Israel, and to differentiate that legitimate criticism from what they are talking about.
How come you never mention racism targeting Palestinians?
If the sign of a healthy, living organism is its ability to develop and mature in harmony with its surroundings, then Israel must be declared dead, or at least terminally moribund.
Its politicians, generals and armies of hasbarats regurgitate the same tired boilerplate to justify Israel’s strangulation of Palestine, and are still obsessed with sabotaging discussion of the Holocaust and the dispossession of Palestinians in 1947–1948 that led to the creation of the Zionist entity.
In 1997, I wrote a column called “Israel can’t hide from its history forever,” http://www.gregfelton.com/middle/1997_05_11.htm
and in the intervening 13 years Israel has shown no signs of moral or political growth, much less the ability to outrun its past. In fact, it is plumbing ever-greater depths of depravity to prevent the world from discussing why Israel continues to deprive Palestinians of the basic necessities of life, humiliate them, murder their children, and steal their land.
Like the grotesque picture of Dorian Gray locked away in the attic, Israel gets uglier with each act of cruelty, and no amount of canned hasbara or phony “anti-Semitism” conferences can make it look pretty. What Israel was and what it did in 1948 is being revealed in what Israel is and is now doing. The reason Israel can’t hide from its history is that it has stagnated and history has caught up with it.
The murderous excesses of Cast Lead and the piratical assault on the international aid flotilla have rightly appalled the civilized world, even alienating growing numbers of Jews and Jewish groups. Inside and outside Israel, Jews are taking the lead in condemning Israel’s brutality, and joining the Boycott Divestment Sanctions movement. The delicious irony now is the greatest existential threat to Israel comes not from Hamas, Hizbullah, Iran or the mythical “al-Qa‘ida,” but from Jews.
As welcome as this development is, it is rather slow in coming since Israel has been committing war crimes against Arabs over its entire history, and for the most part the world has let Israel get away with murder. Dr. Ilan Pappé, a Jewish professor at Tel Aviv university who fled to England after receiving death threats for his defence of Palestinians, said that although some Zionists are willing to criticize Israel’s post-1967 expansionism, the period 1882-1967 is still off limits.
As Israel persecutes these honourable Jews, especially academics like Drs. Pappé and Norman Finkelstein, the very concept of Israel as a “Jewish State” becomes exposed as a moral and political absurdity, and this invites further questioning of the image of Israel as the po’ l’il Jewish state as the perpetual victim of aggression.
As history catches up with Israel, its “self-defence” propaganda also becomes risible and disgusting. The most recent act of fraud involves the complicity of hasbarats at the BBC, whose show Panorama glorified the Israeli military and spread disinformation that the aid ship Mavi Marmara represented a military threat. The fact that this odious fraud comes out so long after the event destroys any pretense to credibility and betrays a pathetic desperation.
Similarly desperate is the president of Tel Aviv University’s craven decision to review the syllabi for several sociology courses. According to Ha’aretz, The Institute for Zionist Strategies (!?) alleged that a “post-Zionist” bias was creeping into the departments. The institute defines post-Zionism as “the pretense to undermine the foundations of the Zionist ethos and an affinity with the radical leftist stream,” but since Zionism has no ethos, and since “radical leftist stream” is gratuitous name-calling, this must be seen as yet another attempt to keep Israel’s real history hidden.
Hasbara is fundamentally non-cognitive because it is not meant to communicate meaningful information or relate to any specific event. Hasbara is analogous to a cant that is intoned by religious mystics. Hasbarats and government hasbaratchiks chant the same generic slogans, invoke the same generic stereotypes, and recite the same generic falsifications all in the name of buttressing a pseudo-reality of their own making. Hasbarats do not expect understanding; they demand belief, and so what they regurgitate for public consumption does not qualify as language in any meaningful sense of the word.
A good example of this is the thoroughly stupid behaviour of Israel’s president Shimon Peres during his recent visit to London. In an obvious response to British Prime Minister David Cameron’s July 27 equation of the experience of Palestinians in the blockaded Gaza Strip to that of a prison camp, Peres uttered this fusillade of folly:
“[The British] abstained in the [pro-Zionist] 1947 UN partition resolution… They maintained an arms embargo against us in the 1950s… They had a defense treaty with Jordan, they always worked against us…They think the Palestinians are the underdog… Even though this is irrational.” (Note that Peres makes no direct reference to Cameron’s comment.)
The definition of “irrational” is an Israeli president whinging about events 60 to 70 years old like a paranoid Don Quixote. What did he hope to accomplish? In the end, even Rabbi Dr. Jonathan Romain, spiritual leader of Maidenhead Synagogue, had to speak out against Peres’s stupidity: “It is a sweeping statement that is far too one-sided… The tolerance and pluralism here make Britain one of the best countries in the world in which to live.”
The more Israel fights the same war against the same invisible enemy, the more its history catches up to it. In my 1997 article I wrote that if myths are used to prop up ideologies and false histories, they will sooner or later tear a country apart. It seems I have been proven right.
Greg Felton is an investigative journalist specializing in the Middle East,
Basically zionism nowadays isn't the simple creation of a jewish state, it is the growth of a jewish state, not just maintenance of the current one. Whether it's through continued growth or holding of certain lands or that ever growing notion of "defending yourself" stance which has many detrimental aspects to say the least. The basic notion which you and many others point to about those who don't want Israel as a nation to exist is outdated beyond belief. Yes there are a few extreme terrorist groups, but certainly not on a national level as it once was. That type of mentality is merely used as a scapegoat to excuse Israel's terrible policies and actions in recent times rather than a clear and defined view on the Middle East wanting to push the jews to the sea. There's been countless peace talks all aimed and discussed with a duel state plan and even non-nuclear Middle East talks, and it has stalled as a result of Israel and US intervention. In my opinion, in today's time frame, we're well beyond the point of saying one side is more responsible for wrong-doing than the other and in order to create a long term peace, both sides need to do lots. To say otherwise just simply is biased beyond fact.
At some point, zionism (in todays form - not mere existence as you claim it, but growth of it) enables anti-semitism .. it fuels the fire, so basically it all goes hand and hand. It's easy to overlook this fact cause you don't believe it, but it doesn't make it any less true.
CONservative governMENt
Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. - Louis Brandeis
Five, I agree that both sides are at fault, and that both sides will need to do a lot differently for peace. I don't think I've ever said otherwise. If it seems that I am unflinchingly supportive of everything Israel does, let me assure you that I am not. Perhaps I come off that way on this board, but that is probably because I feel that I serve in some small way as a counterweight to the opposite imbalance in perspective. I'm still not sure, though, what you mean by zionism contributing to antisemitism. My definition of zionism is the simplest possible; that Jews, as a nation, have a right to self-determination in our homeland. Nothing beyond that. I'm not sure how that principle alone could contribute to antisemitism, except to that of someone who is already antisemitic. And if you are speaking about Israeli actions, well then I think you need to distinguish Israel's actions from zionism as a principle. The two are not the same.
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
B, I don't mention it because to do so would be redundant here. It isn't as if the Train is lacking for people denouncing such racism. But since you ask, yes, racism against Palestinians, as against any group, is deplorable, and should never be tolerated. Now that I've answered your question to me could you please answer my question to you?
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
Why is it that you are so uncritically sure that all accusations of antisemitism are always made in bad faith?
Not all accusations, but most of them. It's pretty hard to take such accusations seriously when an anti-semitic incident is defined by the ADL as 'any occasion "perceived" to be anti-Semitic by the "Jewish community", and which include 'not just violent acts and incendiary speech but "conversations, discussions, or pronouncements made in public or private, which cross the line of acceptability," as well as "the mood and tone when Jews are discussed."
I've read 'Beyond Chutzpah', and it pretty conclusively demolishes these claims of a world-wide wave of anti-semitism and exposes them for what they are: a red herring, and an attempt to divert attention from Israel's ongoing crimes against the Palestinians.
I could just as easily argue that your claim that most claims of antisemitism are attempts to silence criticism of Israel is itself a red herring meant to deflect attention away from real antisemitism while simultaneously impugning the credibility of Israel's defenders.
Why not admit that antisemitism is real, and that sometimes arguments against Israel cross a very ugly line. We don't have to agree on how often that happens, but at least don't dismiss it out of hand. Keep an open mind and take each case as it comes.
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
i don't dismiss anti semitism, it is real, it happens. human beings prejudice, its in the nature of the ignorant.
but the original post said this....
Here, then, was a case not of "criticism of Israel" or "anti-Zionism," the usual sheets under which this sort of mentality hides...
that is using anti semitism as an excuse to silent dissent, to end debate.
its what many in this thread are saying could happen when you are so ready to throw the anti semitism label out, and they are absolutely right.
CONservative governMENt
Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. - Louis Brandeis
Do you regard the following as an example of Anti-semitism? Because as far as I'm concerned there's nothing Anti-semitic, or even controversial, about this statement at all.
"Do not underestimate the Jewish lobby on Capitol Hill. This is the best organized lobby, you shouldn't underestimate the grip it has on American politics—no matter whether it's Republicans or Democrats.
There is indeed a belief—it's difficult to describe it otherwise—among most Jews that they are right. And it's not so much whether these are religious Jews or not. Lay Jews also share the same belief that they are right. So it is not easy to have, even with moderate Jews, a rational discussion about what is actually happening in the Middle East."
Edit: But then under the self-serving definition of anti-semitism as used by apologists of Israel, which defines anti-Semitism as 'any occasion "perceived" to be anti-Semitic by the "Jewish community" I suppose that any comment critical of Israel, or the Israel lobby in the U.S, can be described as antiSemitic. In fact, any comment that defends the rights of the Palestinians can be judged anti-Semitic, which is probably why the ADL regards the U.N as anti-Semitic, along with Amnesty international, and Human Rights Watch.
'...the Pew Research Center published the findings of it's latest international survey, conducted from late February to early March 2004 in the United States and eight other countries. "Despite concerns about rising anti-Semitism in Europe," it found, "there are no indications that anti-Jewish sentiment has increased over the past decade. Favourable ratings of Jews are actaully higher now in France, Germany and Russia than they were in 1991." Put simply, the claims of a rampant new anti-Semitism are a sham. A non-ideologically driven political agenda would rank animus directed at Muslims as the priority concern given that "Europeans hold much more negative views of Muslims than of Jews." But the hysteria over a new anti-Semitism hasn't anything to do with fighting bigotry - and everything to do with stifling criticism of Israel.'
Do you regard the following as an example of Anti-semitism? Because as far as I'm concerned there's nothing Anti-semitic, or even controversial, about this statement at all.
"Do not underestimate the Jewish lobby on Capitol Hill. This is the best organized lobby, you shouldn't underestimate the grip it has on American politics—no matter whether it's Republicans or Democrats.
There is indeed a belief—it's difficult to describe it otherwise—among most Jews that they are right. And it's not so much whether these are religious Jews or not. Lay Jews also share the same belief that they are right. So it is not easy to have, even with moderate Jews, a rational discussion about what is actually happening in the Middle East."
Edit: But then under the self-serving definition of anti-semitism as used by apologists of Israel, which defines anti-Semitism as 'any occasion "perceived" to be anti-Semitic by the "Jewish community" I suppose that any comment critical of Israel, or the Israel lobby in the U.S, can be described as antiSemitic. In fact, any comment that defends the rights of the Palestinians can be judged anti-Semitic, which is probably why the ADL regards the U.N as anti-Semitic, along with Amnesty international, and Human Rights Watch.
if they consider amnesty international anti-semitic they are fucked.
AI frees political prisoners...and after having written letters to political prisoners in asia, and after having heard their responses, directly, i can say that that endeavor was just, it was positive, it was worthwhile, for everyone involved.
i've never read a more powerful piece of writing as that response to our letters after an individual was freed....
to attack amnesty international as anti semitic is absurd.
The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment
June 10, 2010
Peter Beinart
'...Not only does the organized American Jewish community mostly avoid public criticism of the Israeli government, it tries to prevent others from leveling such criticism as well. In recent years, American Jewish organizations have waged a campaign to discredit the world’s most respected international human rights groups. In 2006, Foxman called an Amnesty International report on Israeli killing of Lebanese civilians “bigoted, biased, and borderline anti-Semitic.” The Conference of Presidents has announced that “biased NGOs include Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Christian Aid, [and] Save the Children.” Last summer, an AIPAC spokesman declared that Human Rights Watch “has repeatedly demonstrated its anti-Israel bias.” When the Obama administration awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Mary Robinson, former UN high commissioner for human rights, the ADL and AIPAC both protested, citing the fact that she had presided over the 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa. (Early drafts of the conference report implicitly accused Israel of racism. Robinson helped expunge that defamatory charge, angering Syria and Iran.)
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International are not infallible. But when groups like AIPAC and the Presidents’ Conference avoid virtually all public criticism of Israeli actions—directing their outrage solely at Israel’s neighbors—they leave themselves in a poor position to charge bias. Moreover, while American Jewish groups claim that they are simply defending Israel from its foes, they are actually taking sides in a struggle within Israel between radically different Zionist visions. At the very moment the Anti-Defamation League claimed that Robinson harbored an “animus toward Israel,” an alliance of seven Israeli human rights groups publicly congratulated her on her award. Many of those groups, like B’Tselem, which monitors Israeli actions in the Occupied Territories, and the Israeli branch of Physicians for Human Rights, have been at least as critical of Israel’s actions in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank as have Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
All of which raises an uncomfortable question. If American Jewish groups claim that Israel’s overseas human rights critics are motivated by anti- Israeli, if not anti-Semitic, bias, what does that say about Israel’s domestic human rights critics? The implication is clear: they must be guilty of self-hatred, if not treason. American Jewish leaders don’t generally say that, of course, but their allies in the Netanyahu government do. Last summer, Israel’s vice prime minister, Moshe Ya’alon, called the anti-occupation group Peace Now a “virus.” This January, a right-wing group called Im Tirtzu accused Israeli human rights organizations of having fed information to the Goldstone Commission that investigated Israel’s Gaza war. A Knesset member from Netanyahu’s Likud promptly charged Naomi Chazan, head of the New Israel Fund, which supports some of those human rights groups, with treason, and a member of Lieberman’s party launched an investigation aimed at curbing foreign funding of Israeli NGOs.
To their credit, Foxman and other American Jewish leaders opposed the move, which might have impaired their own work. But they are reaping what they sowed. If you suggest that mainstream human rights criticism of Israel’s government is motivated by animus toward the state, or toward Jews in general, you give aid and comfort to those in Israel who make the same charges against the human rights critics in their midst...'
I could just as easily argue that your claim that most claims of antisemitism are attempts to silence criticism of Israel is itself a red herring meant to deflect attention away from real antisemitism while simultaneously impugning the credibility of Israel's defenders.
Why not admit that antisemitism is real, and that sometimes arguments against Israel cross a very ugly line. We don't have to agree on how often that happens, but at least don't dismiss it out of hand. Keep an open mind and take each case as it comes.
Talking of racism, why are illegal Jewish-only settlements still being built?
'The Israeli Declaration of Independence states that the State of Israel would ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex, and guaranteed freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture[48]. While formally equal according to Israeli law, Irish writer and politician Conor Cruise O'Brien claims that anti-Arabism is widespread in Israel.[49]
During the Arab riots in October 2000 events, Israelis counter-rioted in Nazareth and Tel Aviv, throwing stones at Arabs, destroying Arab property, and chanting "death to Arabs".[50] The Israeli political party Yisrael Beiteinu, whose platform includes the redrawing of Israel's borders so that 500,000 Israeli Arabs would be part of a future Palestinian State, won 15 seats in the 2009 Israeli elections, increasing its seats by 4 compared to the 2006 Israeli elections. This policy, also known as the Lieberman Plan, was described as "anti-Arab" by The Guardian.[51] Avigdor Lieberman, leader of Yisrael Beiteinu, was appointed Minister of Strategic Threats by Ehud Olmert. Arab MK Ahmad Tibi described Lieberman as "a very dangerous and sophisticated politician who has won his support through race hatred".[52] Tibi was refuted in Haaretz by Y. Ben-Meir[53] In 2004, Yehiel Hazan, a member of the Knesset, described the Arabs as worms: "You find them everywhere like worms, underground as well as above." [54][55] Rafael Eitan, former Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces, said that Palestinians who endanger cars on the road should be treated aggressively and their freedom of movement narrowed until they will be like "drugged cockroaches in a bottle". In 2004, then Deputy Defense Minister Ze'ev Boim asked "What is it about Islam as a whole and the Palestinians in particular? Is it some form of cultural deprivation? Is it some genetic defect? There is something that defies explanation in this continued murderousness."[56]
In Hebron, the slogans "Arabs to the crematoria" and "Arabs - sub-humans" were once spray-painted on a wall by an unknown, and anti-Arab graffiti has been spray-painted in Jerusalem.[57] Leftists noted that this graffiti remains for long periods of time compared to others, and painted swastikas beside the graffiti in order to hasten the city to take action.[58]
In the 1980s and 1990s "Geography books for the elementary and junior high schools stereotype Arabs negatively, as primitive, dirty, agitated, aggressive, and hostile to Jews … history books in the elementary schools hardly mention Arabs … history textbooks of the high schools, the majority of which cover the Arab-Jewish conflict, stereotype the Arabs negatively. Arabs are presented as intransigent and uncompromising."[59][60]
The Bedouin submitted a report to the United Nations that disputes the Israeli Government's official state report claiming that they are not treated as equal citizens and Bedouin towns are not provided the same level of services, land and water as Jewish towns of the same size are. The city of Be'er Sheva refused to recognize a Bedouin holy site despite a High Court recommendation.[61]
Israeli Arabs said they would draw up a list of grievances after the terrorist attack of Eden Natan-Zada. "This was a planned terror attack and we find it extremely difficult to treat it as an individual action," Abed Inbitawi, an Israeli-Arab spokesman, told The Jerusalem Post. "It marks a certain trend that reflects a growing tendency of fascism and racism in Israeli society generally as well as the establishment towards the minority Arab community," he said.[62]
Often Israeli-Arab soccer players face chants from the crowd when they play such as "no Arabs, no terrorism".[63]
Abbas Zakour, an Arab Member of the Knesset, was stabbed and lightly wounded by Russian immigrants who shouted anti-Arab chants. The attack was described as a "hate crime".[64]
In 2006, a research institute poll reported that 41% of Israelis support Arab-Israeli segregation, 40% believed "the state needs to support the emigration of Arab citizens", and 63% believed Arabs to be a "security and demographic threat" to Israel. the poll found that more than two thirds would not want to live in the same building as an Arab, 36% believed Arab culture to be inferior, and 18% felt hatred when they heard Arabic spoken.[51]
In 2007, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel reported that anti-Arab views had doubled, and anti-Arab racist incidents had increased by 26%.[65] The report quoted polls that suggested 50% of Jewish Israelis do not believe Arab citizens of Israel should have equal rights, 50% said they wanted the government to encourage Arab emigration from Israel, and 75% of Jewish youths said Arabs were less intelligent and less clean than Jews.
The Arab Association for Human Rights reported in 2008 that several parents removed their children from a daycare centre in Israel after they found out that a 16 month old boy was an Arab.[66]
The Mossawa Advocacy Center for Arab Citizens in Israel reported a tenfold increase in racist incidents against Arabs in 2008. Jerusalem reported the highest number of incidents. The report blamed Israeli leaders for the violence, saying "These attacks are not the hand of fate, but a direct result of incitement against the Arab citizens of this country by religious, public, and elected officials."[67]
In March 2009, following the Gaza War, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) drew criticism when several young soldiers had T-shirts printed up privately with slogans and caricatures that were deemed offensive to Palestinians.[68][69][69][70]
In March 2009, a series of Arab cultural events titled "Jerusalem, the capital of Arab culture", which were scheduled to be held in Jerusalem, Nazareth, and other parts of the country, was banned by Avi Dichter the Internal Security Minister of Israel. Nazareth Mayor Ramiz Jeraisi criticized the move as "anti-Arab." According to Dichter, the events were a violation of the interim agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.[71]
In June 2009, Haaretz reported on the phenomenon of Israeli Border Police forcing Palestinians to humiliate themselves on camera and then publishing the video on YouTube. Palestinians were made to sing songs with lyrics such as "Let every Arab mother know that the fate of her children is in the hands of the Company". [72]
In June 2009, Haaretz reported that Israel's Public Security Minister, Yitzhak Aharonovich, called an undercover police officer a "dirty Arab" whilst touring Tel Aviv. [73]
what annoys me about the antisemitic slur is that it has come to be attached to bigotry against jews only.
Just the way the language evolved, I guess. I guess if one is anti-semitic but against the arabs, they would just shove it in the anti-arab group. Most won't know or bother with other semetic language groups such as the Assyrians.
what annoys me about the antisemitic slur is that it has come to be attached to bigotry against jews only.
Just the way the language evolved, I guess. I guess if one is anti-semitic but against the arabs, they would just shove it in the anti-arab group. Most won't know or bother with other semetic language groups such as the Assyrians.
yeah i know but it has conveniently excluded the other major ethnic group in the region who is invariably seen as 'the enemy'.
hear my name
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
Sem·ite /ˈsɛmaɪt or, especially Brit., ˈsimaɪt/ Show Spelled[sem-ahyt or, especially Brit., see-mahyt] Show IPA
–noun
1. a member of any of various ancient and modern peoples originating in southwestern Asia, including the Akkadians, Canaanites, Phoenicians, Hebrews, and Arabs.
2. a Jew.
3. a member of any of the peoples descended from Shem, the eldest son of Noah.
Use semite in a Sentence
See images of semite
Search semite on the Web
Origin:
1870–75; < NL sēmīta < LL Sēm (< Gk Sḗm < Heb Shēm Shem) + -īta -ite1
— n
1. a member of the group of Caucasoid peoples who speak a Semitic language, including the Jews and Arabs as well as the ancient Babylonians, Assyrians, and Phoenicians
2. another word for a Jew
[C19: from New Latin sēmīta descendant of Shem, via Greek Sēm, from Hebrew Shem ]
Shemite or ( less commonly ) Shemite
— n
[C19: from New Latin sēmīta descendant of Shem, via Greek Sēm, from Hebrew Shem ]
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Approximate distribution of Semitic language around 1 A.D.The following is a list of ancient Semitic peoples.
Akkadians — migrated into Mesopotamia in the late 4th millennium BC and amalgamate with non-Semitic Mesopotamian (Sumerian) populations into the Assyrians and Babylonians of the Late Bronze Age.[4][5]
Eblaites — 23rd century BC
Aramaeans or Chaldea — 16th to 8th century BC[6] / Akhlames (Ahlamu) 14th century BC[7]
Ugarites, 14th to 12th centuries BC
Canaanite language speaking nations of the early Iron Age:
Amorites
Ammonites
Edomites
Hebrews/Israelites — founded the nation of Israel which later split into the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The remnants of these people became the Samaritans and Jews.
Moabites
Phoenicians — founded Mediterranean colonies including Carthage
Old South Arabian speaking peoples
Sabaeans of Yemen — 9th to 1st c. BC
Ethio-Semitic speaking peoples
Aksumites — 4th c. BC to 7th c. AD
Arabs, Old North Arabian speaking Bedouins
Gindibu's Arabs 9th c. BC
Lihyanites — 6th to 1st c. BC
Thamud people — 2nd to 5th c. AD
Ghassanids — 3rd to 7th c. AD
Nabataeans — adopted Arabic in the 4th century AD
[edit] Languages
Main article: Semitic languages
The Harvard Semitic Museum at Harvard UniversityThe modern linguistic meaning of "Semitic" is therefore derived from (though not identical to) Biblical usage. In a linguistic context the Semitic languages are a subgroup of the larger Afroasiatic language family (according to Joseph Greenberg's widely accepted classification) and include, among others: Akkadian, the ancient language of Babylon; Amharic, the official language of Ethiopia; Tigrinya, a language spoken in Eritrea and in northern Ethiopia; Arabic; Aramaic; Canaanite; Ge'ez, the ancient language of the Eritrean and Ethiopian Orthodox scriptures; Hebrew; Maltese; Phoenician or Punic; Syriac; and South Arabian, the ancient language of Sheba/Saba, which today includes Mehri, spoken by only tiny minorities on the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula.
Wildly successful as second languages far beyond their numbers of contemporary first-language speakers, a few Semitic languages today are the base of the sacred literature of some of the world's great religions, including Islam (Arabic), Judaism (Hebrew and Aramaic), and Orthodox Christianity (Aramaic and Ge'ez). Millions learn these as a second language (or an archaic version of their modern tongues): many Muslims learn to read and recite Classical Arabic, the language of the Qur'an, and many Jews all over the world outside of Israel with other first languages speak and study Hebrew, the language of the Torah, Midrash, and other Jewish scriptures.
It should be noted that Berber, Egyptian (including Coptic), Hausa, Somali, and many other related languages within the wider area of Northern Africa and the Middle East do not belong to the Semitic group, but to the larger Afroasiatic language family of which the Semitic languages are also a subgroup.[8] Other ancient and modern Middle Eastern languages — Azerbaijani, Kurdish, Persian, Gilaki, Turkish, ancient Sumerian, and Nubian — do not belong to the larger Afroasiatic language family.
For a complete list of Semitic languages arranged by subfamily, see list from SIL's Ethnologue.
[edit] Geography
Semitic peoples and their languages, in both modern and ancient historic times, have covered a broad area bridging Africa, Western Asia and the Arabian Peninsula. The earliest historic (written) evidences of them are found in the Fertile Crescent, an area encompassing the Babylonian and Assyrian civilizations along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, extending northwest into southern Asia Minor (modern Turkey) and the Levant along the eastern Mediterranean. Early traces of Semitic speakers are found, too, in South Arabian inscriptions in Yemen, Eritrea, Northern Ethiopia and later, in Roman times, in Nabataean inscriptions from Petra (modern Jordan) south into Arabia.
Later historical Semitic languages also spread into North Africa in two widely separated periods. The first expansion occurred with the ancient Phoenicians, along the southern Mediterranean Sea all the way to the Atlantic Ocean (colonies which included ancient Rome's nemesis Carthage). The second, a millennium later, was the expansion of the Muslim armies and Arabic in the 7th-8th centuries AD, which, at their height, controlled the Iberian Peninsula (until 1492) and Sicily. Arab Muslim expansion is also responsible for modern Arabic's presence from Mauritania, on the Atlantic coast of West Africa, to the Red Sea in the northeastern corner of Africa, and its reach south along the Nile River through traditionally non-Semitic territory, as far as the northern half of Sudan, where, as the national language, non-Arab Sudanese even farther south must learn it.
Modern Hebrew was reintroduced in the 20th century, and together with Arabic, is a national language in Israel. Western Aramaic dialects remain spoken in Malula near Damascus. Eastern Neo-Aramaic is spoken along the northern border of Syria and Iraq, Southeast-Turkey (Turabdin) and in far northwestern Iran. These speakers are often called Chaldean or Neo-Assyrian. Mandean is still spoken in parts of southern Iraq. Semitic languages and peoples are also found in the Horn of Africa, especially Eritrea and Ethiopia. Tigrinya, a North Ethiopic dialect, has around six million speakers in Eritrea and Tigray. In Eritrea, Tigre is the language of around 800,000 Muslims. Amharic is the national language of Ethiopia and is spoken by at least 10 million Ethiopian Orthodox Christians. Semitic languages today are also spoken in Malta (where an Italian-influenced language derived from Siculo-Arabic is spoken) and on the island of Socotra in the Indian Ocean between Yemen and Somalia, where a dying vestige of South Arabian is spoken in the form of Soqotri. The Maltese language is the only officially recognized Semitic language of the European Union.
[edit] Religion
In a religious context, the term 'Semitic' can refer to the religions associated with the speakers of these languages: thus Judaism, Christianity and Islam are often described as "Semitic religions" (irrespective of language family spoken by their adherents).
The term Abrahamic religions is more commonly used today. A truly comprehensive account of "Semitic" religions would include the Ancient Semitic religions (such as the religions of Adad, Hadad) that flourished in the Middle East before the Abrahamic religions.
[edit] Ethnicity and race
Further information: Caucasian race, Hamitic race, and Scientific racism
A stylised T and O map, depicting Asia as the home of the descendents of Shem (Sem). Africa is ascribed to Ham and Europe to JaphethIn Medieval Europe, all Asian peoples were thought of as descendants of Shem. By the nineteenth century, the term Semitic was confined to the ethnic groups who have historically spoken Semitic languages. These peoples were often considered to be a distinct race. However, some anti-Semitic racial theorists of the time argued that the Semitic peoples arose from the blurring of distinctions between previously separate races. This supposed process was referred to as Semiticization by the race-theorist Arthur de Gobineau. The notion that Semitic identity was a product of racial "confusion" was later taken up by the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg.[citation needed]
In contrast, some recent genetic studies found that analysis of the DNA of Semitic-speaking peoples suggests that they have some common ancestry. Though no significant common mitochondrial results have been yielded, Y-chromosomal links between Semitic-speaking Near-Eastern peoples like Arabs and Hebrews have proved fruitful, despite differences contributed from other groups (see Y-chromosomal Aaron). The studies attribute this correlation to a common Near Eastern origin, since Semitic-speaking Near Easterners from the Fertile Crescent (including Jews) were found to be more closely related to non-Semitic speaking Near Easterners (such as Iranians, Anatolians, and Caucasians) than to other Semitic-speakers (such as Gulf Arabs, Ethiopian Semites, and North African Arabs).[9][10]
Semiticization is a concept found in the writings of some racial theorists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.[1] The term was first used by Arthur de Gobineau to label the blurring of racial distinctions that, in his view, had occurred in the Middle-East. Gobineau had an essentialist model of race according to which there were three distinct racial groups: "black", "white" and "yellow" peoples, though he had no clear account of how this division arose. When these races mixed this caused "degeneration". Since the point at which these three supposed races met was in the middle-east, Gobineau argued that the process of mixing and diluting races occurred there, and that Semitic peoples embodied this "confused" racial identity.
This concept suited the interests of antisemites, since it provided a theoretical model to rationalise racialised antisemitism. Variations of the theory are to be found in the writings of many antisemites in the late nineteenth century. The Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg developed a variant of the theory in his writings, arguing that Jewish people were not a "real" race. According to Rosenberg, their evolution came about from the mixing of pre-existing races rather than from natural selection. The theory of Semiticization was typically associated with other longstanding racist fears about the dilution of racial difference, manifested in negative images of mulattos and other mixed groups.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Comments
By Mitchell Cohen (online)
I.
A DETERMINED offensive is underway. Its target is in the Middle East, and it is an old target: the legitimacy of Israel. Hezbollah and Hamas are not the protagonists, the contested terrains are not the Galilee and southern Lebanon or southern Israel and Gaza. The means are not military. The offensive comes from within parts of the liberal and left intelligentsia in the United States and Europe. It has nothing to do with this or that negotiation between Israelis and Palestinians, and it has nothing to do with any particular Israeli policy. After all, this or that Israeli policy may be chastised, rightly or wrongly, without denying the legitimacy of the Jewish state, just as you can criticize an Israeli policy—again, rightly or wrongly—without being an anti-Semite. You can oppose all Israeli settlements in the occupied territories (as I do) and you can also recognize that Benjamin Netanyahu, not just Yasir Arafat, was responsible for undermining the Oslo peace process without being an anti-Semite or anti-Zionist. You don’t have to be an anti-Semite or anti-Zionist to think that some American Jewish organizations pander to American or Israeli right-wingers.
The assault today is another matter. It is shaped largely by political attitudes and arguments that recall the worst of the twentieth-century left. It is time to get beyond them. But let me be clear: I am “left.” I still have no problem when someone describes me with the “s” word—socialist—although I don’t much care if you call me a social democrat, left-liberal, or some other proximate term. My “leftism” comes from a commitment to—and an ethos of—democratic humanism and social egalitarianism.
What I care about is the reinvention of the best values of the historical left—legacies of British Labour, of the Swedish Social Democrats, of Jean Jaurès and Léon Blum in France, of Eduard Bernstein and Willy Brandt in Germany, of what has always been the relatively small (alas!) tribe in the U.S. associated with names like Eugene V. Debs, Norman Thomas, Michael Harrington, and Irving Howe. It’s not so much a matter of political programs, let alone labels, as it is of political sensibility. I care about finding a new basis for that old amalgam of liberty, equality, and solidarity, a basis that makes sense for our “globalizing age.” But I also want a left that draws real, not gestural, conclusions from the catastrophes done in the name of the left in the 20th century.
There is a left that learns and there is a left that doesn’t learn. I want the left that learns to inform our Western societies (a difficult task in George W. Bush’s America) and to help find ideas that actually address poverty in what used to be called the third world—rather than romanticizing it.
After 1989, the left that doesn’t learn was in retreat. It was hushed up by the end of all those wretched communist regimes, by images broadcast worldwide of millions in the streets demanding liberation from dictatorships that legitimized themselves in left-wing terms. You know who I mean by the left that never learns: those folks who twist and turn until they can explain or ‘understand’ almost anything in order to keep their own presuppositions—or intellectual needs—intact. Once some of them were actual Leninist; now they more regularly share some of Leninism’s worst mental features—often in postmodern, postcolonial, or even militantly liberal guise. Sometimes they move about on the political spectrum, denouncing their former selves (while patting their moral backs). You can usually recognize them without too much difficulty: same voice, that of a prosecuting commissar, even if their tune sounds different. It’s a voice you can often hear as well in ex-communists turned neoconservative.
Their explanations, their “understandings,” often rewrite history or re-imagine what is in front of their eyes to suit their own starting point. Since their thinking usually moves along a mental closed circuit, it is also the end point. Sometimes it is an idea, sometimes a belief system (which they refuse to recognize in themselves), sometimes really a prejudice, and sometimes just ambition. Goblins were often part of the story for the older left that never learned, and so too is the case today. If things don’t work out as you know they must, some nefarious force must lurk. After all, the problem couldn’t possibly be your way of thinking, or your inability to see the world afresh, or that you got something very wrong in the past. No, it is much easier to announce that you, unlike anyone who could disagree with you, engage in ‘critical’ thinking. And if your critical thinking is criticized in any way, denounce your foe immediately for “McCarthyism.” Pretend that your denunciation is an argument about the original subject of dispute. That’s easier than answering any of the criticism.
Consider the collateral damage done by such cries of “McCarthyism” from professors with lifetime job security: their students will never understand the evils of McCarthyism. Consider how an understanding of the evils of McCarthyism is subverted when its characteristic techniques—innuendo, for example—are used by opinionated journalists in magazines with wide circulations. Take, for instance, the case of Adam Shatz, once literary editor of the Nation and now with the London Review of Books. He published an article half a year before the beginning of the Iraq war suggesting that people around Dissent were busy hunting for a “new enemy” following the end of the cold war, and that they found it in a combination of militant Arab nationalism and Saddam Hussein.
“Though rarely cited explicitly,” Shatz also explained, “Israel shapes and even defines the foreign policy views of a small but influential group of American liberals” (the Nation, September 23, 2002). In other words, these liberals composed the Israel lobby within the left, and they sought the American war in Iraq for the sake of the Jewish state. True, Shatz didn’t hold up a file and say, “I have a list of names of liberals who are really dual loyalists.” Instead he pointed to Paul Berman “and like-minded social democrats,” even though the overwhelming majority of Dissent’s editorial board including co-editor Michael Walzer was opposed to the war.
Shatz didn’t deign to engage any of Berman’s actual points. And those Berman advanced in the actual run-up to the Iraq invasion did not focus on Israel, but on liberalism, democracy, and totalitarianism. Arguments made by the author of the words you now read, who was a left hawk (and is now an unhappy one), likewise had nothing to do with Israel and were different—significantly so—from those made by Berman. Nothing that appeared in Dissent before or after Shatz’s article lends credence to his innuendos.
II.
HISTORY MAY not progress but sometimes it regurgitates. Over the last decade, a lot of the old junk has come back. The space for it opened for many reasons. They range from the sad failures of the social-democratic imagination in the era of globalization to the postmodern and postcolonial influence in universities to George W. Bush’s ascendancy with its many, many miserable consequences (not only in Iraq). The left that never learns often became the superego of the twentieth century’s left. Its attempt to play that same role in the twenty-first century needs to be frustrated.
Nothing exemplifies the return of old junk more than the ‘new’ anti-Semitism and the bad faith that often finds expression in the statement: “I am anti-Zionist but not anti-Semitic.” The fixation on Israel/Palestine within parts of the left, often to the exclusion of all other suffering on the globe, ought to leave any balanced observer wondering: What is going on here? This fixation needs demystification.
In theoretical terms, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are pretty easy to distinguish. Anti-Semitism is a form of race or national prejudice that crystallized in the nineteenth century. In part, it displaced or reinvented anti-Jewish religious prejudice (although centuries of religious prejudice easily wafted into racial and national bigotry). Its target was clearly Jews, not simply “Semites.” It also, for some, mixed matters up further by identifying Jews with capitalism. Sadly, this became a steady feature within parts of the left that would later, habitually, conflate Jews, capitalism, and Zionism. Oddly enough, that is also what Jewish neoconservatives have tried to do in recent decades.
Anti-Zionism means, theoretically, opposition to the project of a Jewish state in response to the rise of anti-Semitism. Let’s be blunt: there have been anti-Zionists who are not anti-Semites, just as there have been foes of affirmative action who are not racists. But the crucial question is prejudicial overlap, not intellectual niceties.
Remember the bad old days, when parts of the left provided theoretical justifications of things like “democratic dictatorship.” In fact, if you understood—especially if you bought into—all sorts of assumptions and especially Leninist definitions, the justification works. Any professor of political theory can construct it for you and it will make perfect theoretical sense. But if you lived in a “democratic dictatorship,” it was intellectual poison. It was also poison if you were committed to the best values of the left.
They are again at stake when we ask: To what extent does much anti-Zionism replicate the mental patterns of anti-Semitism? And to what extent do demagogic articulations of anti-Zionism enhance anti-Semitism? There is a curious thing about anti-Semitism, and it was captured in a remark by British novelist Iain Pears that ought to be quoted and re-quoted these days: “anti-Semitism is like alcoholism. You can go for 25 years without a drink, but if things go bad and you find yourself with a vodka in your hand, you can’t get rid of it.” (International Herald Tribune, August 11, 2003).
Much may be gleaned from the fact that the recent campaign by some British academic unions to boycott Israel was thwarted because it was found to violate anti-discrimination laws.
LAST YEAR, Denis MacShane, British Labour Parliament Member, chaired a committee of parliamentarians and ex-ministers that investigated rising anti-Semitism in Britain and beyond. “Hatred of Jews has reached new heights in Europe and many points south and east of the old continent,” he wrote recently in a very brave article in the Washington Post (September 4, 2007). He describes a wide array of incidents. “Militant anti-Jewish students fueled by Islamist or far-left hate” seek on campuses “to prevent Jewish students from expressing their opinions.” There is “an anti-Jewish discourse, a mood and tone whenever Jews are discussed, whether in the media, at universities, among the liberal media elite or at dinner parties of modish London. To express any support for Israel or any feeling for the right of a Jewish state to exist produces denunciation, even contempt.”
MacShane points out that this sort of behavior is distinct from specific disputes about this or that Israeli politician. Criticism, the investigatory committee “made clear,” was “not off-limits.” Rightly so; the same should be true with the policies and office- holders of every government on the globe. But MacSchane also warns that something else has been going on, that old demons are reawakening and that “the old anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism have morphed into something more dangerous.” The threat, he says eloquently, doesn’t only concern Jews or Israel, but “everything democrats have long fought for: the truth without fear, no matter one's religion or political beliefs.”
What is “truth without fear” when we speak of the relation between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism? Is it to be found in Tony Judt’s declaration to the New York Times that “the link between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is newly created”? (January 31, 2007). How a historian—or anyone else—could assert this is astonishing. Consider what it airbrushes out of the twentieth century—the anti-Semitic binge of Stalin’s later years, just for starters.
And surely Judt, who is based at New York University and is now taking what has turned into obsessive anti-Zionist campaigning to the École Normale Supérieure in Paris [1] recalls the arrests and assassinations of the leading Jewish cultural figures of Soviet Russia on the grounds that they were “Zionist agents of American imperialism.” Surely a historian of Europe like Judt—who was once a hard leftist but then rose to intellectual celebrity in the United States in the 1980s (that is, during the Reagan era) by attacking all French Marxists for not facing up to Stalinism—recalls the charges of “Zionist conspiracy” against Jewish communists who were victimized in the Czech purge trials in the early 1950s.
If he doesn’t recall them when he speaks to the New York Times, he might check them out in his own book Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. There he cites Stalin’s secret police chief, Lavrenti Beria, urging Czech Communists to investigate the “Zionist plot” among their comrades. Surely a historian of Europe, especially one who now refers to himself as an “old leftist,” recalls the campaign in 1967 and 1968 to cleanse Poland of “Zionist” fifth columnists (I suppose they were the Israel Lobby of the Polish Communist Party). If Judt doesn’t recall it when he talks to the New York Times, he might again look at his own book which cites Polish Communist chief Wladyslaw Gomulka’s conflation of his Jewish critics with Zionists. Since he is a historian of Europe and not the Middle East, perhaps Judt hasn’t noticed how “anti-Zionism” in broad swaths of the Muslim and Arab media has been suffused by anti-Jewish rhetoric for decades—rhetoric against “al-Yahud” not Ehud Olmert or Ehud Barak.
Remember how air-brushing was done in the bad old days? Trotsky (or someone else) would suddenly disappear from a photo. Lenin or Stalin and the cheering crowds would still be there. The resulting picture is not entirely false. Does all this make Judt an anti-Semite? The answer is simple: no. It does make his grasp of the history of anti-Semitism tendentious. And tendentious history can be put to all sorts of pernicious use.
Judt’s political judgment complements his historical perceptions, especially when it comes to a declared concern about Palestinian suffering. Recall his article in the New York Review of Books (October 23, 2003) advocating a binational state to replace Israel. A Jewish state, he explained, is an anachronism. But since then, Hamas, a political movement of religious fanatics, won the Palestinian elections, and later seized power—by force—in Gaza. Israel, in the meantime, had withdrawn entirely from Gaza and torn down all Jewish settlements there in summer 2005. Yet if you follow Judt’s logic, Israel should not have withdrawn but instead integrated Gaza into itself. Obviously this would have enabled a new, better life for Palestinians, perhaps even have prevented them from turning to Hamas. And it would have taken a first happy step toward saving Israel from its anachronistic status by affording Israelis, together with Palestinians, a domestic future of perpetual ethnic civil war—a feature of modern politics that farsighted historians, but perhaps not policymakers, who have to worry about real lives, will imagine is also an anachronism. Likewise, I suppose India can save itself from being an unfortunate anachronism by a reintegration with Pakistan.
A FEW YEARS ago I sought to outline commonalities between anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist discourses in a scholarly journal. It is worth reproducing. Here are major motifs that inform classical anti-Semitism:
1) Insinuations: Jews do not and cannot fit properly into our society. There is something foreign, not to mention sinister about them.
2) Complaints: They are so particularistic, those Jews, so preoccupied with their “own.” Why are they so clannish and anachronistic when we need a world of solidarity and love? Really, they make themselves into a “problem.” If the so-called “Jewish problem” is singular in some way, it is their own doing and usually covered up by special pleading.
3) Remonstrations: Those Jews, they always carp that they are victims. In fact, they have vast power, especially financial power. Their power is everywhere, even if it is not very visible. They exercise it manipulatively, behind the scenes. (But look, there are even a few of them, guilty-hearted perhaps, who will admit it all this to you).
4) Recriminations: Look at their misdeeds, all done while they cry that they are victims. These ranged through the ages from the murder of God to the ritual slaughter of children to selling military secrets to the enemy to war-profiteering, to being capitalists or middlemen or landlords or moneylenders exploiting the poor. And they always, oh-so-cleverly, mislead you.
Alter a few phrases, a word here and there, and we find motifs of anti-Zionism that are popular these days in parts of the left and parts of the Muslim and Arab worlds:
1) Insinuations: The Zionists are alien implants in the Mideast. They can never fit there. Western imperialism created the Zionist state.
2) Complaints: A Jewish state can never be democratic. Zionism is exclusivist. The very idea of a Jewish state is an anachronism.
3) Remonstrations: The Zionists carp that they are victims but in reality they have enormous power, especially financial. Their power is everywhere, but they make sure not to let it be too visible. They exercise it manipulatively, behind people’s backs, behind the scenes – why, just look at Zionist influence in Washington. Or rather, dominance of Washington. (And look, there are even a few Jews, guilty-hearted perhaps, who admit it).
4) Recriminations: Zionists are responsible for astonishing, endless dastardly deeds. And they cover them up with deceptions. These range from the imperialist aggression of 1967 to Ehud Barak’s claim that he offered a compromise to Palestinians back in 2000 to the Jenin “massacre” during the second Intifidah. [2]
No, anti-Zionism is not in principle anti-Semitism but it is time for thoughtful minds—especially on the left—to be disturbed by how much anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism share, how much the dominant species of anti-Zionism encourages anti-Semitism.
And so:
If you judge a Jewish state by standards that you apply to no one else; if your neck veins bulge when you denounce Zionists but you’ve done no more than cluck “well, yes, very bad about Darfur”;
if there is nothing Hamas can do that you won’t blame ‘in the final analysis’ on Israelis;
if your sneer at the Zionists doesn’t sound a whole lot different from American neoconservative sneers at leftists;
then you should not be surprised if you are criticized, fiercely so, by people who are serious about a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians and who won’t let you get away with a self-exonerating formula—“I am anti-Zionist but not anti-Semitic”—to prevent scrutiny. If you are anti-Zionist and not anti-Semitic, then don’t use the categories, allusions, and smug hiss that are all too familiar to any student of prejudice.
It is time for the left that learns, that grows, that reflects, that has historical not rhetorical perspective, and that wants a future based on its own best values to say loudly to the left that never learns: You hijacked “left” in the last century, but you won’t get away with it again whatever guise you don.
Lastly, I find it very hypocritical for people to be so overly emotional and sensitive about racism, genocide and similar, yet only it apply it to their own people while ignoring the same occurring to others.
Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. - Louis Brandeis
Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. - Louis Brandeis
The occupation is illegal under international law and the settlements constitute a flagrant breach of international humanitarian law under article 49 of the Geneva Convention. Under international law Israel is obliged to make a full and immediate withdrawal from territories it occupied during the June 1967 war. This is supported by the whole of the international community, excluding Israel and the U.S.
Israel's obligations under international law have nothing to do with Anti-Semitism. This is just an attempt by supporters of Israels land grab and ethnic cleansing to deflect attention from the real issues.
Anyone interested in the real motives behind these regular outcrys of anti-semitism should read the following if they want to see what the real issue is:
Land Grab: Israel's Settlement Policy in the West Bank
http://www.btselem.org/English/Publicat ... d_Grab.asp
And how do you classify those people who simply call for an end to the occupation, and for Israel to abide by international law?
How do you manage to classify these people as racists?
Five, I'm not sure why you feel that the motive is to discredit anyone that doesn't portray Israel positively. All the articles I've cited have been careful to note that there is legitimate criticism of Israel, and to differentiate that legitimate criticism from what they are talking about.
Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. - Louis Brandeis
How come you never mention racism targeting Palestinians?
by Greg Felton / August 19th, 2010
If the sign of a healthy, living organism is its ability to develop and mature in harmony with its surroundings, then Israel must be declared dead, or at least terminally moribund.
Its politicians, generals and armies of hasbarats regurgitate the same tired boilerplate to justify Israel’s strangulation of Palestine, and are still obsessed with sabotaging discussion of the Holocaust and the dispossession of Palestinians in 1947–1948 that led to the creation of the Zionist entity.
In 1997, I wrote a column called “Israel can’t hide from its history forever,” http://www.gregfelton.com/middle/1997_05_11.htm
and in the intervening 13 years Israel has shown no signs of moral or political growth, much less the ability to outrun its past. In fact, it is plumbing ever-greater depths of depravity to prevent the world from discussing why Israel continues to deprive Palestinians of the basic necessities of life, humiliate them, murder their children, and steal their land.
Like the grotesque picture of Dorian Gray locked away in the attic, Israel gets uglier with each act of cruelty, and no amount of canned hasbara or phony “anti-Semitism” conferences can make it look pretty. What Israel was and what it did in 1948 is being revealed in what Israel is and is now doing. The reason Israel can’t hide from its history is that it has stagnated and history has caught up with it.
The murderous excesses of Cast Lead and the piratical assault on the international aid flotilla have rightly appalled the civilized world, even alienating growing numbers of Jews and Jewish groups. Inside and outside Israel, Jews are taking the lead in condemning Israel’s brutality, and joining the Boycott Divestment Sanctions movement. The delicious irony now is the greatest existential threat to Israel comes not from Hamas, Hizbullah, Iran or the mythical “al-Qa‘ida,” but from Jews.
As welcome as this development is, it is rather slow in coming since Israel has been committing war crimes against Arabs over its entire history, and for the most part the world has let Israel get away with murder. Dr. Ilan Pappé, a Jewish professor at Tel Aviv university who fled to England after receiving death threats for his defence of Palestinians, said that although some Zionists are willing to criticize Israel’s post-1967 expansionism, the period 1882-1967 is still off limits.
As Israel persecutes these honourable Jews, especially academics like Drs. Pappé and Norman Finkelstein, the very concept of Israel as a “Jewish State” becomes exposed as a moral and political absurdity, and this invites further questioning of the image of Israel as the po’ l’il Jewish state as the perpetual victim of aggression.
As history catches up with Israel, its “self-defence” propaganda also becomes risible and disgusting. The most recent act of fraud involves the complicity of hasbarats at the BBC, whose show Panorama glorified the Israeli military and spread disinformation that the aid ship Mavi Marmara represented a military threat. The fact that this odious fraud comes out so long after the event destroys any pretense to credibility and betrays a pathetic desperation.
Similarly desperate is the president of Tel Aviv University’s craven decision to review the syllabi for several sociology courses. According to Ha’aretz, The Institute for Zionist Strategies (!?) alleged that a “post-Zionist” bias was creeping into the departments. The institute defines post-Zionism as “the pretense to undermine the foundations of the Zionist ethos and an affinity with the radical leftist stream,” but since Zionism has no ethos, and since “radical leftist stream” is gratuitous name-calling, this must be seen as yet another attempt to keep Israel’s real history hidden.
Hasbara is fundamentally non-cognitive because it is not meant to communicate meaningful information or relate to any specific event. Hasbara is analogous to a cant that is intoned by religious mystics. Hasbarats and government hasbaratchiks chant the same generic slogans, invoke the same generic stereotypes, and recite the same generic falsifications all in the name of buttressing a pseudo-reality of their own making. Hasbarats do not expect understanding; they demand belief, and so what they regurgitate for public consumption does not qualify as language in any meaningful sense of the word.
A good example of this is the thoroughly stupid behaviour of Israel’s president Shimon Peres during his recent visit to London. In an obvious response to British Prime Minister David Cameron’s July 27 equation of the experience of Palestinians in the blockaded Gaza Strip to that of a prison camp, Peres uttered this fusillade of folly:
“[The British] abstained in the [pro-Zionist] 1947 UN partition resolution… They maintained an arms embargo against us in the 1950s… They had a defense treaty with Jordan, they always worked against us…They think the Palestinians are the underdog… Even though this is irrational.” (Note that Peres makes no direct reference to Cameron’s comment.)
The definition of “irrational” is an Israeli president whinging about events 60 to 70 years old like a paranoid Don Quixote. What did he hope to accomplish? In the end, even Rabbi Dr. Jonathan Romain, spiritual leader of Maidenhead Synagogue, had to speak out against Peres’s stupidity: “It is a sweeping statement that is far too one-sided… The tolerance and pluralism here make Britain one of the best countries in the world in which to live.”
The more Israel fights the same war against the same invisible enemy, the more its history catches up to it. In my 1997 article I wrote that if myths are used to prop up ideologies and false histories, they will sooner or later tear a country apart. It seems I have been proven right.
Greg Felton is an investigative journalist specializing in the Middle East,
Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. - Louis Brandeis
Not all accusations, but most of them. It's pretty hard to take such accusations seriously when an anti-semitic incident is defined by the ADL as 'any occasion "perceived" to be anti-Semitic by the "Jewish community", and which include 'not just violent acts and incendiary speech but "conversations, discussions, or pronouncements made in public or private, which cross the line of acceptability," as well as "the mood and tone when Jews are discussed."
I've read 'Beyond Chutzpah', and it pretty conclusively demolishes these claims of a world-wide wave of anti-semitism and exposes them for what they are: a red herring, and an attempt to divert attention from Israel's ongoing crimes against the Palestinians.
Why not admit that antisemitism is real, and that sometimes arguments against Israel cross a very ugly line. We don't have to agree on how often that happens, but at least don't dismiss it out of hand. Keep an open mind and take each case as it comes.
but the original post said this....
Here, then, was a case not of "criticism of Israel" or "anti-Zionism," the usual sheets under which this sort of mentality hides...
that is using anti semitism as an excuse to silent dissent, to end debate.
its what many in this thread are saying could happen when you are so ready to throw the anti semitism label out, and they are absolutely right.
Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. - Louis Brandeis
Do you regard the following as an example of Anti-semitism? Because as far as I'm concerned there's nothing Anti-semitic, or even controversial, about this statement at all.
"Do not underestimate the Jewish lobby on Capitol Hill. This is the best organized lobby, you shouldn't underestimate the grip it has on American politics—no matter whether it's Republicans or Democrats.
There is indeed a belief—it's difficult to describe it otherwise—among most Jews that they are right. And it's not so much whether these are religious Jews or not. Lay Jews also share the same belief that they are right. So it is not easy to have, even with moderate Jews, a rational discussion about what is actually happening in the Middle East."
Edit: But then under the self-serving definition of anti-semitism as used by apologists of Israel, which defines anti-Semitism as 'any occasion "perceived" to be anti-Semitic by the "Jewish community" I suppose that any comment critical of Israel, or the Israel lobby in the U.S, can be described as antiSemitic. In fact, any comment that defends the rights of the Palestinians can be judged anti-Semitic, which is probably why the ADL regards the U.N as anti-Semitic, along with Amnesty international, and Human Rights Watch.
'...the Pew Research Center published the findings of it's latest international survey, conducted from late February to early March 2004 in the United States and eight other countries. "Despite concerns about rising anti-Semitism in Europe," it found, "there are no indications that anti-Jewish sentiment has increased over the past decade. Favourable ratings of Jews are actaully higher now in France, Germany and Russia than they were in 1991." Put simply, the claims of a rampant new anti-Semitism are a sham. A non-ideologically driven political agenda would rank animus directed at Muslims as the priority concern given that "Europeans hold much more negative views of Muslims than of Jews." But the hysteria over a new anti-Semitism hasn't anything to do with fighting bigotry - and everything to do with stifling criticism of Israel.'
if they consider amnesty international anti-semitic they are fucked.
AI frees political prisoners...and after having written letters to political prisoners in asia, and after having heard their responses, directly, i can say that that endeavor was just, it was positive, it was worthwhile, for everyone involved.
i've never read a more powerful piece of writing as that response to our letters after an individual was freed....
to attack amnesty international as anti semitic is absurd.
The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment
June 10, 2010
Peter Beinart
'...Not only does the organized American Jewish community mostly avoid public criticism of the Israeli government, it tries to prevent others from leveling such criticism as well. In recent years, American Jewish organizations have waged a campaign to discredit the world’s most respected international human rights groups. In 2006, Foxman called an Amnesty International report on Israeli killing of Lebanese civilians “bigoted, biased, and borderline anti-Semitic.” The Conference of Presidents has announced that “biased NGOs include Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Christian Aid, [and] Save the Children.” Last summer, an AIPAC spokesman declared that Human Rights Watch “has repeatedly demonstrated its anti-Israel bias.” When the Obama administration awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Mary Robinson, former UN high commissioner for human rights, the ADL and AIPAC both protested, citing the fact that she had presided over the 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa. (Early drafts of the conference report implicitly accused Israel of racism. Robinson helped expunge that defamatory charge, angering Syria and Iran.)
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International are not infallible. But when groups like AIPAC and the Presidents’ Conference avoid virtually all public criticism of Israeli actions—directing their outrage solely at Israel’s neighbors—they leave themselves in a poor position to charge bias. Moreover, while American Jewish groups claim that they are simply defending Israel from its foes, they are actually taking sides in a struggle within Israel between radically different Zionist visions. At the very moment the Anti-Defamation League claimed that Robinson harbored an “animus toward Israel,” an alliance of seven Israeli human rights groups publicly congratulated her on her award. Many of those groups, like B’Tselem, which monitors Israeli actions in the Occupied Territories, and the Israeli branch of Physicians for Human Rights, have been at least as critical of Israel’s actions in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank as have Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
All of which raises an uncomfortable question. If American Jewish groups claim that Israel’s overseas human rights critics are motivated by anti- Israeli, if not anti-Semitic, bias, what does that say about Israel’s domestic human rights critics? The implication is clear: they must be guilty of self-hatred, if not treason. American Jewish leaders don’t generally say that, of course, but their allies in the Netanyahu government do. Last summer, Israel’s vice prime minister, Moshe Ya’alon, called the anti-occupation group Peace Now a “virus.” This January, a right-wing group called Im Tirtzu accused Israeli human rights organizations of having fed information to the Goldstone Commission that investigated Israel’s Gaza war. A Knesset member from Netanyahu’s Likud promptly charged Naomi Chazan, head of the New Israel Fund, which supports some of those human rights groups, with treason, and a member of Lieberman’s party launched an investigation aimed at curbing foreign funding of Israeli NGOs.
To their credit, Foxman and other American Jewish leaders opposed the move, which might have impaired their own work. But they are reaping what they sowed. If you suggest that mainstream human rights criticism of Israel’s government is motivated by animus toward the state, or toward Jews in general, you give aid and comfort to those in Israel who make the same charges against the human rights critics in their midst...'
Talking of racism, why are illegal Jewish-only settlements still being built?
'The Israeli Declaration of Independence states that the State of Israel would ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex, and guaranteed freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture[48]. While formally equal according to Israeli law, Irish writer and politician Conor Cruise O'Brien claims that anti-Arabism is widespread in Israel.[49]
During the Arab riots in October 2000 events, Israelis counter-rioted in Nazareth and Tel Aviv, throwing stones at Arabs, destroying Arab property, and chanting "death to Arabs".[50] The Israeli political party Yisrael Beiteinu, whose platform includes the redrawing of Israel's borders so that 500,000 Israeli Arabs would be part of a future Palestinian State, won 15 seats in the 2009 Israeli elections, increasing its seats by 4 compared to the 2006 Israeli elections. This policy, also known as the Lieberman Plan, was described as "anti-Arab" by The Guardian.[51] Avigdor Lieberman, leader of Yisrael Beiteinu, was appointed Minister of Strategic Threats by Ehud Olmert. Arab MK Ahmad Tibi described Lieberman as "a very dangerous and sophisticated politician who has won his support through race hatred".[52] Tibi was refuted in Haaretz by Y. Ben-Meir[53] In 2004, Yehiel Hazan, a member of the Knesset, described the Arabs as worms: "You find them everywhere like worms, underground as well as above." [54][55] Rafael Eitan, former Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces, said that Palestinians who endanger cars on the road should be treated aggressively and their freedom of movement narrowed until they will be like "drugged cockroaches in a bottle". In 2004, then Deputy Defense Minister Ze'ev Boim asked "What is it about Islam as a whole and the Palestinians in particular? Is it some form of cultural deprivation? Is it some genetic defect? There is something that defies explanation in this continued murderousness."[56]
In Hebron, the slogans "Arabs to the crematoria" and "Arabs - sub-humans" were once spray-painted on a wall by an unknown, and anti-Arab graffiti has been spray-painted in Jerusalem.[57] Leftists noted that this graffiti remains for long periods of time compared to others, and painted swastikas beside the graffiti in order to hasten the city to take action.[58]
In the 1980s and 1990s "Geography books for the elementary and junior high schools stereotype Arabs negatively, as primitive, dirty, agitated, aggressive, and hostile to Jews … history books in the elementary schools hardly mention Arabs … history textbooks of the high schools, the majority of which cover the Arab-Jewish conflict, stereotype the Arabs negatively. Arabs are presented as intransigent and uncompromising."[59][60]
The Bedouin submitted a report to the United Nations that disputes the Israeli Government's official state report claiming that they are not treated as equal citizens and Bedouin towns are not provided the same level of services, land and water as Jewish towns of the same size are. The city of Be'er Sheva refused to recognize a Bedouin holy site despite a High Court recommendation.[61]
Israeli Arabs said they would draw up a list of grievances after the terrorist attack of Eden Natan-Zada. "This was a planned terror attack and we find it extremely difficult to treat it as an individual action," Abed Inbitawi, an Israeli-Arab spokesman, told The Jerusalem Post. "It marks a certain trend that reflects a growing tendency of fascism and racism in Israeli society generally as well as the establishment towards the minority Arab community," he said.[62]
Often Israeli-Arab soccer players face chants from the crowd when they play such as "no Arabs, no terrorism".[63]
Abbas Zakour, an Arab Member of the Knesset, was stabbed and lightly wounded by Russian immigrants who shouted anti-Arab chants. The attack was described as a "hate crime".[64]
In 2006, a research institute poll reported that 41% of Israelis support Arab-Israeli segregation, 40% believed "the state needs to support the emigration of Arab citizens", and 63% believed Arabs to be a "security and demographic threat" to Israel. the poll found that more than two thirds would not want to live in the same building as an Arab, 36% believed Arab culture to be inferior, and 18% felt hatred when they heard Arabic spoken.[51]
In 2007, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel reported that anti-Arab views had doubled, and anti-Arab racist incidents had increased by 26%.[65] The report quoted polls that suggested 50% of Jewish Israelis do not believe Arab citizens of Israel should have equal rights, 50% said they wanted the government to encourage Arab emigration from Israel, and 75% of Jewish youths said Arabs were less intelligent and less clean than Jews.
The Arab Association for Human Rights reported in 2008 that several parents removed their children from a daycare centre in Israel after they found out that a 16 month old boy was an Arab.[66]
The Mossawa Advocacy Center for Arab Citizens in Israel reported a tenfold increase in racist incidents against Arabs in 2008. Jerusalem reported the highest number of incidents. The report blamed Israeli leaders for the violence, saying "These attacks are not the hand of fate, but a direct result of incitement against the Arab citizens of this country by religious, public, and elected officials."[67]
In March 2009, following the Gaza War, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) drew criticism when several young soldiers had T-shirts printed up privately with slogans and caricatures that were deemed offensive to Palestinians.[68][69][69][70]
In March 2009, a series of Arab cultural events titled "Jerusalem, the capital of Arab culture", which were scheduled to be held in Jerusalem, Nazareth, and other parts of the country, was banned by Avi Dichter the Internal Security Minister of Israel. Nazareth Mayor Ramiz Jeraisi criticized the move as "anti-Arab." According to Dichter, the events were a violation of the interim agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.[71]
In June 2009, Haaretz reported on the phenomenon of Israeli Border Police forcing Palestinians to humiliate themselves on camera and then publishing the video on YouTube. Palestinians were made to sing songs with lyrics such as "Let every Arab mother know that the fate of her children is in the hands of the Company". [72]
In June 2009, Haaretz reported that Israel's Public Security Minister, Yitzhak Aharonovich, called an undercover police officer a "dirty Arab" whilst touring Tel Aviv. [73]
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
Just the way the language evolved, I guess. I guess if one is anti-semitic but against the arabs, they would just shove it in the anti-arab group. Most won't know or bother with other semetic language groups such as the Assyrians.
yeah i know but it has conveniently excluded the other major ethnic group in the region who is invariably seen as 'the enemy'.
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
–noun
1. a member of any of various ancient and modern peoples originating in southwestern Asia, including the Akkadians, Canaanites, Phoenicians, Hebrews, and Arabs.
2. a Jew.
3. a member of any of the peoples descended from Shem, the eldest son of Noah.
Use semite in a Sentence
See images of semite
Search semite on the Web
Origin:
1870–75; < NL sēmīta < LL Sēm (< Gk Sḗm < Heb Shēm Shem) + -īta -ite1
—Related forms
non-Semite, noun Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2010.
Cite This Source | Link To semite
World English Dictionary
Semite or ( less commonly ) Shemite (ˈsiːmaɪt)
— n
1. a member of the group of Caucasoid peoples who speak a Semitic language, including the Jews and Arabs as well as the ancient Babylonians, Assyrians, and Phoenicians
2. another word for a Jew
[C19: from New Latin sēmīta descendant of Shem, via Greek Sēm, from Hebrew Shem ]
Shemite or ( less commonly ) Shemite
— n
[C19: from New Latin sēmīta descendant of Shem, via Greek Sēm, from Hebrew Shem ]
Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009
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Word Origin & History
Semite
1847, "Jew, Arab, Assyrian, Aramæan," from Mod.L. Semita, from L.L. Sem "Shem," one of the three sons of Noah (Gen. x:21-30), regarded as the ancestor of the Semites (in the days when anthropology was still bound by the Bible), from Heb. Shem. Semitic (1813 of languages, 1826 of persons) is probably from Ger. semitisch (first used by Ger. historian August Schlözer, 1781), denoting the language group that includes Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, Assyrian, etc. In recent use often with the specific sense "Jewish," but not historically so limited. Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2010 Douglas Harper
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Cultural Dictionary
Semite [( sem -eyet)]
Someone who belongs to the Semitic peoples. The Semites are supposedly descended from the biblical Shem, the eldest son of Noah.
The American Heritage® New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition
Copyright © 2005 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Approximate distribution of Semitic language around 1 A.D.The following is a list of ancient Semitic peoples.
Akkadians — migrated into Mesopotamia in the late 4th millennium BC and amalgamate with non-Semitic Mesopotamian (Sumerian) populations into the Assyrians and Babylonians of the Late Bronze Age.[4][5]
Eblaites — 23rd century BC
Aramaeans or Chaldea — 16th to 8th century BC[6] / Akhlames (Ahlamu) 14th century BC[7]
Ugarites, 14th to 12th centuries BC
Canaanite language speaking nations of the early Iron Age:
Amorites
Ammonites
Edomites
Hebrews/Israelites — founded the nation of Israel which later split into the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The remnants of these people became the Samaritans and Jews.
Moabites
Phoenicians — founded Mediterranean colonies including Carthage
Old South Arabian speaking peoples
Sabaeans of Yemen — 9th to 1st c. BC
Ethio-Semitic speaking peoples
Aksumites — 4th c. BC to 7th c. AD
Arabs, Old North Arabian speaking Bedouins
Gindibu's Arabs 9th c. BC
Lihyanites — 6th to 1st c. BC
Thamud people — 2nd to 5th c. AD
Ghassanids — 3rd to 7th c. AD
Nabataeans — adopted Arabic in the 4th century AD
[edit] Languages
Main article: Semitic languages
The Harvard Semitic Museum at Harvard UniversityThe modern linguistic meaning of "Semitic" is therefore derived from (though not identical to) Biblical usage. In a linguistic context the Semitic languages are a subgroup of the larger Afroasiatic language family (according to Joseph Greenberg's widely accepted classification) and include, among others: Akkadian, the ancient language of Babylon; Amharic, the official language of Ethiopia; Tigrinya, a language spoken in Eritrea and in northern Ethiopia; Arabic; Aramaic; Canaanite; Ge'ez, the ancient language of the Eritrean and Ethiopian Orthodox scriptures; Hebrew; Maltese; Phoenician or Punic; Syriac; and South Arabian, the ancient language of Sheba/Saba, which today includes Mehri, spoken by only tiny minorities on the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula.
Wildly successful as second languages far beyond their numbers of contemporary first-language speakers, a few Semitic languages today are the base of the sacred literature of some of the world's great religions, including Islam (Arabic), Judaism (Hebrew and Aramaic), and Orthodox Christianity (Aramaic and Ge'ez). Millions learn these as a second language (or an archaic version of their modern tongues): many Muslims learn to read and recite Classical Arabic, the language of the Qur'an, and many Jews all over the world outside of Israel with other first languages speak and study Hebrew, the language of the Torah, Midrash, and other Jewish scriptures.
It should be noted that Berber, Egyptian (including Coptic), Hausa, Somali, and many other related languages within the wider area of Northern Africa and the Middle East do not belong to the Semitic group, but to the larger Afroasiatic language family of which the Semitic languages are also a subgroup.[8] Other ancient and modern Middle Eastern languages — Azerbaijani, Kurdish, Persian, Gilaki, Turkish, ancient Sumerian, and Nubian — do not belong to the larger Afroasiatic language family.
For a complete list of Semitic languages arranged by subfamily, see list from SIL's Ethnologue.
[edit] Geography
Semitic peoples and their languages, in both modern and ancient historic times, have covered a broad area bridging Africa, Western Asia and the Arabian Peninsula. The earliest historic (written) evidences of them are found in the Fertile Crescent, an area encompassing the Babylonian and Assyrian civilizations along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, extending northwest into southern Asia Minor (modern Turkey) and the Levant along the eastern Mediterranean. Early traces of Semitic speakers are found, too, in South Arabian inscriptions in Yemen, Eritrea, Northern Ethiopia and later, in Roman times, in Nabataean inscriptions from Petra (modern Jordan) south into Arabia.
Later historical Semitic languages also spread into North Africa in two widely separated periods. The first expansion occurred with the ancient Phoenicians, along the southern Mediterranean Sea all the way to the Atlantic Ocean (colonies which included ancient Rome's nemesis Carthage). The second, a millennium later, was the expansion of the Muslim armies and Arabic in the 7th-8th centuries AD, which, at their height, controlled the Iberian Peninsula (until 1492) and Sicily. Arab Muslim expansion is also responsible for modern Arabic's presence from Mauritania, on the Atlantic coast of West Africa, to the Red Sea in the northeastern corner of Africa, and its reach south along the Nile River through traditionally non-Semitic territory, as far as the northern half of Sudan, where, as the national language, non-Arab Sudanese even farther south must learn it.
Modern Hebrew was reintroduced in the 20th century, and together with Arabic, is a national language in Israel. Western Aramaic dialects remain spoken in Malula near Damascus. Eastern Neo-Aramaic is spoken along the northern border of Syria and Iraq, Southeast-Turkey (Turabdin) and in far northwestern Iran. These speakers are often called Chaldean or Neo-Assyrian. Mandean is still spoken in parts of southern Iraq. Semitic languages and peoples are also found in the Horn of Africa, especially Eritrea and Ethiopia. Tigrinya, a North Ethiopic dialect, has around six million speakers in Eritrea and Tigray. In Eritrea, Tigre is the language of around 800,000 Muslims. Amharic is the national language of Ethiopia and is spoken by at least 10 million Ethiopian Orthodox Christians. Semitic languages today are also spoken in Malta (where an Italian-influenced language derived from Siculo-Arabic is spoken) and on the island of Socotra in the Indian Ocean between Yemen and Somalia, where a dying vestige of South Arabian is spoken in the form of Soqotri. The Maltese language is the only officially recognized Semitic language of the European Union.
[edit] Religion
In a religious context, the term 'Semitic' can refer to the religions associated with the speakers of these languages: thus Judaism, Christianity and Islam are often described as "Semitic religions" (irrespective of language family spoken by their adherents).
The term Abrahamic religions is more commonly used today. A truly comprehensive account of "Semitic" religions would include the Ancient Semitic religions (such as the religions of Adad, Hadad) that flourished in the Middle East before the Abrahamic religions.
[edit] Ethnicity and race
Further information: Caucasian race, Hamitic race, and Scientific racism
A stylised T and O map, depicting Asia as the home of the descendents of Shem (Sem). Africa is ascribed to Ham and Europe to JaphethIn Medieval Europe, all Asian peoples were thought of as descendants of Shem. By the nineteenth century, the term Semitic was confined to the ethnic groups who have historically spoken Semitic languages. These peoples were often considered to be a distinct race. However, some anti-Semitic racial theorists of the time argued that the Semitic peoples arose from the blurring of distinctions between previously separate races. This supposed process was referred to as Semiticization by the race-theorist Arthur de Gobineau. The notion that Semitic identity was a product of racial "confusion" was later taken up by the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg.[citation needed]
In contrast, some recent genetic studies found that analysis of the DNA of Semitic-speaking peoples suggests that they have some common ancestry. Though no significant common mitochondrial results have been yielded, Y-chromosomal links between Semitic-speaking Near-Eastern peoples like Arabs and Hebrews have proved fruitful, despite differences contributed from other groups (see Y-chromosomal Aaron). The studies attribute this correlation to a common Near Eastern origin, since Semitic-speaking Near Easterners from the Fertile Crescent (including Jews) were found to be more closely related to non-Semitic speaking Near Easterners (such as Iranians, Anatolians, and Caucasians) than to other Semitic-speakers (such as Gulf Arabs, Ethiopian Semites, and North African Arabs).[9][10]
Semiticization is a concept found in the writings of some racial theorists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.[1] The term was first used by Arthur de Gobineau to label the blurring of racial distinctions that, in his view, had occurred in the Middle-East. Gobineau had an essentialist model of race according to which there were three distinct racial groups: "black", "white" and "yellow" peoples, though he had no clear account of how this division arose. When these races mixed this caused "degeneration". Since the point at which these three supposed races met was in the middle-east, Gobineau argued that the process of mixing and diluting races occurred there, and that Semitic peoples embodied this "confused" racial identity.
This concept suited the interests of antisemites, since it provided a theoretical model to rationalise racialised antisemitism. Variations of the theory are to be found in the writings of many antisemites in the late nineteenth century. The Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg developed a variant of the theory in his writings, arguing that Jewish people were not a "real" race. According to Rosenberg, their evolution came about from the mixing of pre-existing races rather than from natural selection. The theory of Semiticization was typically associated with other longstanding racist fears about the dilution of racial difference, manifested in negative images of mulattos and other mixed groups.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14