I am a bit puzzled over the vast outpouring of support for Palestine following October 7. Not that the Palestinians do not deserve the support of the international community. They do. Palestinians have been mistreated for centuries: Oppressed by the Turks, denied their just rights by the British during the Mandate; abandoned, for the most part, by their fellow Arabs; ignored, mostly, by the international community; ill-served by their own leaders; and repressed by Israelis since 1948.
To be sure, there has been lingering support for justice for Palestine for decades, especially as the brutality of the Israeli occupation has intensified and the numbers of Jewish settlers in the West Bank has grown by leaps and bounds. Demonstrating for Palestinian statehood has been popular on college campuses in recent years. Still, Palestine as a cause existed mostly on the margins of left-wing and progressive politics.
Until October 7, that is, when Palestine became a cause célèbre — not without good reason, of course, as the savagery of the Israeli response certainly deserves condemnation. Israeli responsibility for the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza is a blot on the nation. But while Israeli planes bombed Gaza immediately after the Hamas attack, Israel’s ground invasion of the enclave began later in October. Yet international support for Palestine erupted almost upon the news of the massacre of Israelis living near Gaza, which is odd considering the brutality of the Hamas attack.
The Palestinians are not the only people deserving international concern and support. China has detained more than one million Uyghurs — Muslims living in Xinjiang in northwestern China — in “re-education” camps and imprisoned hundreds of thousands. Yet not many people are demonstrating in front of Chinese embassies these days on behalf of the Uyghurs. Now, one might protest that China is an authoritarian regime not much moved by public opinion. True, but that argument implies that Israel has the trappings, at least, of democratic rule, a concession that undermines any equation of Israel with Nazi Germany, as many have done in the name of Palestinian justice. Other peoples are deserving as well. The Kurds are the largest ethnic group in the world without their own state.
So why Palestine? Especially, why now? There are, no doubt, many reasons and explanations, but foremost among them has to be centuries of antisemitism that leads many people with the best of intentions to treat Hamas as heroes and stigmatize Jews. Antisemitism is, as I have written before, the oldest hatred. Israel exists, after all, because centuries of European antisemitism resulted in the destruction of European Jewry.
Now, let me be clear. Not all condemnations of Israel are antisemitic. I hold no brief for Israel’s barbaric onslaught in Gaza. As a progressive Jew, I believe the occupied territories should not be open to Jewish settlement — which is illegal under international law — but should be part of a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians resulting in two states coexisting side-by-side or two peoples coexisting as equal partners in one binational state. I have written about the violence committed by settlers in the West Bank as they push Palestinians out of more and more land. And there are plenty of reasons to oppose the policies of the current right-wing Israeli government.
Similarly, not all condemnations of Zionism are antisemitic. It is intellectually legitimate and defensible to oppose Zionism on its own terms. Whatever utility Zionism may have had as an historic expression of the yearning of long-oppressed European Jews for a homeland, the movement is now a spent force. What began as a largely secular movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries has devolved into an intolerant religious and nationalist force. Historically, many Jews have opposed Zionism. The Orthodox believed that only the coming of the Messiah could result in the creation of a new Jewish state, and many left-wing, socialist and Marxist Jews in Europe before World War II favored creating a better world where they lived rather than in the Middle East.
And yet…. one cannot ignore antisemitism.
When I cite antisemitism in this context I am not talking about the violent Jew-hatred on the political right (though, to be sure, there are plenty of vociferous antisemites on the left these days, too). Rather, I am talking about something much more subtle, so subtle that those demonstrating on behalf of justice for Palestine may be oblivious to some of their own motivations. I say this recognizing that the motivations of pro-Palestinian protestors are mostly justifiable and in the service of a good cause. But part of their motives, which may be unconscious and certainly never expressed openly, is a lingering distrust of Jews. Ingrained in Western thought is the sense that Jews are different: Clannish, noisy and loud, kind of pushy, maybe a little too interested in money… all the traditional stereotypes. It is an antisemitism that would never lead to acts of violence against Jews nor overt discrimination, but it is often present.
Perhaps nomenclature is at issue here. Perhaps rather than employing the term antisemitism, it might be more helpful to refer to “anti-Judaism” in the sense used by David Nirenberg in his insightful book, published in 2013, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition. Nirenberg argues that anti-Judaism, with roots in the ancient pagan world, Egyptian, Roman, and Greek, is a complex of ideas at the center of Western, specifically Christian, thought by which people make sense of their world. The idea of Judaism — meaning that there were still people in the world who remained Jewish — challenged the notion of universalism at the heart of Christianity. At the same time, anti-Judaism was a useful tool to stimulate religious enthusiasm or quash heresy. For those of a more secular bent, “the Jewish problem” explained much that was wrong with society, for left-wing thinkers like Karl Marx in his attacks on property to right-wingers who blamed Jews for all the evils that plagued modern society. Not, of course, that anti-Judaism, or antisemitism for that matter, needed actual Jews to further the sentiment.
Regardless of terminology, the point remains that Jews, historically, have been the fulcrum by which people define themselves and their societies. Seen in this light, Jews easily become the “other.” This sense of the Jew as the “other” need not manifest itself either with violence or overt discriminatory practice. But it is continuing manifestation of what Nirenberg refers to in his subtitle as “the Western tradition.”
Most people of goodwill, and I include the vast majority of those sympathetic to the Palestinian cause in this category, do not openly hate Jews. But they are a product of the Western tradition, and in subtle psychological ways — of which they might not themselves be aware — they view the current conflict in Gaza through the prism of this history of antisemitism. And, so, when demonstrators shout “Palestine from the river to the sea,” they get to indulge antisemitism at no psychic or societal cost. It is antisemitism, as it were, for free.
Posted March 19, 2024
You profess to be confused as to the eruption of Jew-hate since Oct 7. And yet your post does not include the words "Muslim" or "Islam". Might you consider the religious nature of the conflict? Or the role that Islamism and the Muslim Brotherhood play? How about Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, the Houthis? What could "God Is Great, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse on the Jews, Victory to Islam" possibly mean?
Might you also consider the progressive Left -- that reveled in the "decolonization" of Oct. 7, rips down hostage posters, and screams "from the river to the sea". Perhaps progressives' baseless accusations of apartheid, genocide, colonization, and "white oppressors", might whip up hate on the Left?
I get it... it is much easier to condemn barbaric Israel than to reflect on the possibility that your progressive allies have abandoned you.
I agree that antisemites come out of the woodwork when the topic of Israel comes up. Some are conflating Zionism with Judaism or outright bashing Judaism as a Satanic cult, etc. I am not Jewish, but have been a target for racial hatred by people who assume that I am Jewish, including complete strangers, especially prior to the large scale migration of Blacks from Chicago-Gary to Minneapolis-St. Paul in the early 1980s. The big daily newspapers were fueling a panic among whites about the Black invasion. I think that put a damper on the antisemitism.
Ethnic cleansing was baked into the project to established a Jewish state, in my opinion. It began on a large scale in 1947-48. The mass migration of Jews from majority Muslim countries, including Arab Jews was not the result of a spontaneous eruption of antisemitism in the the Muslim world. It was encouraged by Israel and great power sponsors, including via transfer agreements and terrorist attacks. Avi Shlaim, who migrated from Iraq to Israel as a child discusses this transfer of Jews from majority Muslim countries in his book, "Three World's, Memoirs of an Arab Jew." I was shocked by the antipathy toward Jews expressed by Theodore Hertzl in his book about building a Jewish state and in some other writings. There was already an organized Zionist movement among Jews in Russia because of the persecution of Jews, the pograms. And there were Christian Zionists, who wanted to ship Jews to the holy land to hasten the second coming of Christ.