Since some Jews have a religious objection to the State of Israel because the Messiah has not yet appeared, it is clear that Zionism is separate from Judaism. One can be for the one yet against the other.
Equally, the Israeli Druze are committed Zionists despite not being Jewish. Indeed, a Druze was briefly the acting head of state of Israel. It remains to be seen whether the Druze of the Golan Heights will go the same way. However, it is notable that when the Assad regime appeared to be crumbling, some people from the area did accept Israeli citizenship. More generally, changes in the complexion of sectarian politics in the region could lead to other minorities- perhaps even the Christians- accepting Zionism as their best defense against persecution.
Beinart in not concerned with the nature of either the Judaic Faith or the nature of the Zionist movement. His focus is on
a new official definition of antisemitism. That definition, produced by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in 2016, includes among its “contemporary examples” of antisemitism “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination”.The reason this statement is useful is because it allows countries to use the law to prevent boycotts of Israel by virtue-signalling Academic bodies or Local Authorities which have been captured by the loony left.
In other words, anti-Zionism is Jew hatred.Not quite. However, a nuisance- that created by the lunatic fringe clamoring for sanctions against Israel- can be curbed by the judicious use of this definition.
In so doing, Macron joined Germany, Britain, the United States and roughly 30 other governments. And like them, he made a tragic mistake.Nonsense! The thing is a nuisance and should be curbed. So should the Yellow Vests and the Extinction Marchers and the football hooligans and so on.
Anti-Zionism is not inherently antisemitic – and claiming it is uses Jewish suffering to erase the Palestinian experience.Shitting in the street is not inherently anti-social. Perhaps the street will never again be traversed by a human soul and thus your deposit of feces upon it will cause nobody any disgust or annoyance. However, with regard to thoroughfares in populated areas, open defecation is a nuisance and should be curbed. To do is not to say that the suffering of passersby is being used to erase the reveries of street shitters. Rather, a public nuisance is being curbed. Take a dump on your boss's desk like a normal person. Nobody wants to watch you squeeze out a turd in front of Starbucks.
Failure to see that anti-Zionism is a nuisance created by wasteful competition in the field of virtue-signalling causes Beinart to engage in a wholly futile analysis of a philosophical type.
He writes-
The argument that anti-Zionism is inherently antisemitic rests on three pillars. The first is that opposing Zionism is antisemitic because it denies to Jews what every other people enjoys: a state of its own.Antisemitism- like other forms of bigotry and hate speech- was a nuisance and thus was curbed by the Law. Anti-Zionism is a similar nuisance. That is why it must be curbed. An easy way to do so is by extending the definition of anti-Semitism to include anti-Zionism.
The Jews established a State of their own which functions well and which can defend itself. They have proven themselves to be a people able to enjoy a state of their own. There is no point arguing the toss about this at this late hour. Such arguments are a nuisance simply.
The Kurds don’t have their own state. Neither do the Basques, Catalans, Scots, Kashmiris, Tibetans, Abkhazians, Ossetians, Lombards, Igbo, Oromo, Uyghurs, Tamils and Québécois, nor dozens of other peoples who have created nationalist movements to seek self-determination but failed to achieve it.So, these are peoples who have not shown that they are able to establish and enjoy a state of their own. Beinart is comparing apples to oranges.
The fact is, Governments have and will crack down on Kashmiris or Tibetans if they make too much of a nuisance of themselves and thus damage diplomatic and trading links with rapidly growing economies.
Yet barely anyone suggests that opposing a Kurdish or Catalan state makes you an anti-Kurdish or anti-Catalan bigot.If the claim is made that the Kurds or the Catalans are incapable of running a state of their own, then bigotry may be involved. Saying they are better off not running their own state may also shade into bigotry if it is clear that Kurds and Catalans possess a sufficiently cohesive Civil Society backed by adequate economic resources and geopolitical safeguards to make a go of nationhood .
In the case of the Palestinians, what can we say? Suppose the 'Black September' uprising has succeeded and Jordan had become a PLO state. The fact is, if the Palestinians had continued to train guerillas of various types then, after the fall of the USSR, sooner or later, it would have been bombed to kingdom come.
Currently, Palestinian self-determination means internecine conflicts which are proxy wars for other players in the region. Who can say that Palestinian territory might not incubate the next Al Qaeeda or Taleban? During the Black September uprising, Pakistani pilots flying Saudi owned American planes bombed the shit out of Palestinian refugee camps. That was then. Now Russia and the US and the Brits and almost everybody else bombs the shit out of Syria. Palestinian self-determination may mean that instead of Israeli bombs, they have to dodge American and Russian and Turkish and Saudi bombs while busily killing each other.
It is widely recognised that states based on ethnic nationalism – states created to represent and protect one particular ethnic group – are not the only legitimate way to ensure public order and individual freedom.It is also widely recognised that Israel is the best state in its region when it comes to 'ensuring public order and individual freedom'- at least, for those with a right of abode and acceptable views and behavior.
Sometimes it is better to foster civic nationalism, a nationalism built around borders rather than heritage: to make Spanish identity more inclusive of Catalans or Iraqi identity more inclusive of Kurds, rather than carving those multiethnic states up.Why not say 'sometimes it is better to foster niceness so everybody is nice to everybody else, and lovely unicorns descend from sugar candy rainbows with pots of gold and nice toys with which we can all play'?
Nobody was 'fostering civic nationalism' for the Jews subject to pogroms in Tzarist Russia or under the Third Reich. Why mention the topic?
Civil Society needs the protection of a cohesive, rules based, polity to get off the ground. It won't magically appear if only we all wish upon a star.
Argument number two is a variation on this theme. Maybe it is not bigoted to oppose a people’s quest for statehood. But it is bigoted to take away that statehood once achieved.Yeah right! Like we have the power to take away statehood from Israel! Relatively stupid young Saudis could create a lot of havoc on 9/11. We really want to wait around to see what smart Sabras will do if we fuck with them? Pull the other one.
"It is one thing to argue, in the moot court of historical what-ifs, that Israel should not have come into being,” argued New York Times columnist Bret Stephens earlier this month. However, “Israel is now the home of nearly 9 million citizens, with an identity that is as distinctively and proudly Israeli as the Dutch are Dutch or the Danes Danish. Anti-Zionism proposes nothing less than the elimination of that identity and the political dispossession of those who cherish it.”Bigotry is stupid. It is extremely stupid to think that we can make everybody be nice to everybody else and create 'civic nationalism' such that lovely unicorns descend from rainbows made out of candy to give pots of gold to kids so as to wean them away from the practice of knifing each other up the North End Road.
But it is not bigoted to try to turn a state based on ethnic nationalism into one based on civic nationalism, in which no ethnic group enjoys special privileges.
We may not like how they do things in China or Pakistan or even North Korea. But we have to rub along with them somehow coz them guys got nukes.
In the 19th century, Afrikaners created several countries designed to fulfil their quest for national self-determination, among them the Transvaal and the Orange Free State.The Boers were beaten on the battlefield. Their women and children were rounded up and put in concentration camps with high mortality rates. They surrendered because the alternative was annihilation.
Then, in 1909, those two Afrikaner states merged with two states dominated by English-speaking white people to become the Union of South Africa (later the Republic of South Africa), which offered a kind of national self-determination to white South Africans.Yup! Smuts played the 'Yellow Peril' card and thus outsmarted Lord Milner. By getting rid of the Chinese, Smuts showed the mine owners who was boss. Gandhi, poor simpleton, played into Smuts' hands. Unlike the Chinese, the Indians in South Africa were British subjects. The Brits would have to pay for their passage back to India and then do something to ensure they didn't starve to death. Later on Idi Amin tried the same trick on the Brits. But, the idiot followed through- expelling the Asians rather than using them as a bargaining chip. Amin liked Asians. He did them a favor by forcing the Brits to accept them. They thrived in the UK and are now a 'model minority'.
The problem, of course, was that the versions of self-determination upheld by the Transvaal, the Orange Free State and apartheid South Africa excluded millions of black people living within their borders.Smuts wanted to go the Brazilian route. Have apartheid but call it something else the way the Portuguese had been doing. The Boers, with typical stupidity, rejected Smuts' path and- like Ian Smith's Rhodesia- slit their own throats albeit in ever slower slow-motion.
This changed in 1994. By ending apartheid, South Africa replaced an Afrikaner ethnic nationalism and a white racial nationalism with a civic nationalism that encompassed people of all ethnicities and races. It inaugurated a constitution that guaranteed “the right of the South African people as a whole to self-determination”.Why no mention of Rhodesia, which became Zimbabwe? Still, it's nice the author thinks Whites are safe in South Africa coz off all them lovely unicorns prancing around fostering 'civic nationalism'.
That wasn’t bigotry, but its opposite.
I don’t consider Israel an apartheid state. But its ethnic nationalism excludes many of the people under its control. Stephens notes that Israel contains almost 9 million citizens. What he doesn’t mention is that Israel also contains close to 5 million non-citizens: Palestinians who live under Israeli control in the West Bank and Gaza (yes, Israel still controls Gaza) without basic rights in the state that dominates their lives.Palestinians were the majority in the Kingdom of Jordan. Because of 'Black September', their refugee camps were bombed by Pakistani pilots flying Saudi planes. However, Jordan remains the only Arab country to try to fully integrate Palestinians. That ended badly. Nowhere in the MENA do Palestinians enjoy the same rights as citizens. Frequently, they have been expelled en masse. Arafat made his fortune in Kuwait. But he picked the wrong side in the first Gulf War. So his people were thrown out of Kuwait. The 2006 al-Askari mosque bombing caused Shias militias to attack Palestinian refugees in Iraq. The Obama administration, to its great credit, took in about a 1000 of these displaced people. Since then the prospects of the remainder have dimmed.
Kuwait and Lebanon realized it wasn't a good thing to grant citizenship to too many Palestinians. Both have found it expedient to expel Palestinians though they are almost always model citizens and diligent workers.
Just recently, the Saudis decided not to give Hajj visas to Palestinians using temporary Jordanian travel documents. They insist on Palestinian Authority documents. But this means East Jerusalem Arabs are at risk of losing their residency rights and being expelled by the Israelis.
There is some speculation that all this has to do with Trump's 'deal of the century' which will involve the House of Saud displacing the Hashemites as the custodians of Islam's third holiest site. In return, the Palestinian diaspora foregoes 'right of return' and accepts some sort of second class status from the host country in return for travel documents.
The horrible thing is that a debauched real-estate moghul may pull off what a Carter or an Obama could not and a corrupt deal will restore peace to 'the Holy Land'.
One reason Israel doesn’t give these Palestinians citizenship is because, as a Jewish state designed to protect and represent Jews, it wants to retain a Jewish majority, and giving 5 million Palestinians the vote would imperil that.Same reason as the Kuwaitis, Saudis and so on. The oil rich emirates don't give citizenship to people of other ethnicities born and brought up in their countries. They take active measures to disenfranchise and expel members of indigenous minorities. Israel conforms to the norms of the region in this respect.
They live in a state whose national anthem speaks of the “Jewish soul”, whose flag features a Star of David and which, by tradition, excludes Israel’s Palestinian parties from its governing coalitions. A commission created in 2003 by the Israeli government itself described Israel’s “handling of the Arab sector” as “discriminatory”.So what? The Saudi national anthem speaks of the country as 'the pride of the Muslims'. Plenty of flags of Islamic countries feature Islamic symbols. Those that have Parliaments may have minority representatives who, however, must vote with the ruling party. Seldom are such minorities not treated in a discriminatory fashion. However, this is true of minorities in many countries. Perhaps the author thinks African American males have it easy. The statistics, however, tell a different story.
So long as Israel remains a Jewish state, no Palestinian citizen can credibly tell her son or daughter that they can become prime minister of the country in which they live. In these ways, Israel’s form of ethnic nationalism – Zionism – denies equality to the non-Jews who live under Israeli control.No Bermudan person can credibly tell her son or daughter that they can become the May-bot even if they have their brains surgically removed. In this way, Britain's form of ethnic nationalism denies equality to the non-Brits who live under British control in its overseas possessions. Indeed, many such people have no right of abode in the 'mother country'.
My preferred solution would be for the West Bank and Gaza to become a Palestinian state, thus giving Palestinians in those territories citizenship in an ethnically nationalist (though hopefully democratic) country of their own.Your preferred solution may lead to enormous internecine bloodshed. At this time, the Hamas-Fatah peace deal is a dead letter. Hamas is refusing to hand over the weapons caches of various terrorist groups.
As for hoping a unified Palestinian Authority would be democratic- why stop there? Why not hope it will be supercalifragilisticexpialidocious?
I’d also try to make Israel’s ethnic nationalism more inclusive by, among other things, adding a stanza to Israel’s national anthem that acknowledges the aspirations of its Palestinian citizens.Why not add a stanza to its national anthem which would have the magical property of giving everybody the power of levitation and their own personal Genie able to grant them three wishes a day? I'm sure Palestinians would prefer that.
But, in a post-Holocaust world where antisemitism remains frighteningly prevalent, I want Israel to remain a state with a special obligation to protect Jews.Quite right. An ordinary obligation just wouldn't cut the mustard. It must be a very special obligation indeed and it should go to a very special school where its special needs are met.
But is inherently cretinous.
To seek to replace Israel’s ethnic nationalism with civic nationalism, however, is not inherently bigoted.
Last year, three Palestinian members of the Knesset introduced a bill to turn Israel from a Jewish state into a “state for all its citizens”. As one of those Knesset members, Jamal Zahalka, explained, “We do not deny Israel or its right to exist as a home for Jews. We are simply saying that we want to base the existence of the state not on the preference of Jews, but on the basics of equality … The state should exist in the framework of equality, and not in the framework of preference and superiority.”The state should grant minorities the power of levitation. Then we could hover over the majority in the streets and micturate upon their upturned faces.
One might object that it is hypocritical for Palestinians to try to repeal Jewish statehood inside Israel’s original boundaries while promoting Palestinian statehood in the West Bank and Gaza.The Palestinians want their land back. No hypocrisy is involved. The thing is perfectly natural and understandable. There may be Jewish Israelis who'd like to get back the property they owned in Iraq. It isn't going to happen.
One might also ask whether Zahalka’s vision of Jewish and Palestinian equality in a post-Zionist state is naive given that powerful Palestinian movements such as Hamas want not equality but Islamic domination. These are reasonable criticisms. But are Zahalka and his colleagues – who face structural discrimination in a Jewish state – antisemites because they want to replace Zionism with a civic nationalism that promises equality to people of all ethnic and religious groups? Of course not.Is Zahalka's vision viable? Of course not. That is the only relevant test when it comes to practical politics.
There is, finally, a third argument for why anti-Zionism equals antisemitism. It is that, as a practical matter, the two animosities simply go together. “Of course it’s theoretically possible to distinguish anti-Zionism from antisemitism, just as it’s theoretically possible to distinguish segregationism from racism,” writes Stephens. Just as virtually all segregationists are also racists, he suggests, virtually all anti-Zionists are also antisemites. You rarely find one without the other.The Common Law evolved on the basis of 'legal fictions' of just this type. Currently wasteful competition between virtue-signalling shitheads is causing a nuisance which can be curbed by equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism.
But that claim is empirically false. In the real world, anti-Zionism and antisemitism don’t always go together. It is easy to find antisemitism among people who, far from opposing Zionism, enthusiastically embrace it.Balfour had offered Uganda to Theodor Herzl two years previously. He expressed sympathy for the persecuted Jews but passed the Aliens Act because of public outcry against some supposed economic burden such Jews might impose on the native population. Balfour was not an anti-semite. A respected historian writes-
Before Israel’s creation, some of the world leaders who most ardently promoted Jewish statehood did so because they did not want Jews in their own countries. Before declaring, as foreign secretary in 1917, that Britain “view[s] with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”, Arthur Balfour supported the 1905 Aliens Act, which restricted Jewish immigration to the United Kingdom.
Chaim Weizmann relates that when he talked with Balfour on 12 December 1914 and explained ‘the Jewish tragedy’ in Europe, the British statesman was ‘most deeply moved – to the point of tears.’12 Balfour’s niece, Blanche Dugdale, wrote: ‘Near the end of his days he said to me that on the whole he felt that what he had been able to do for the Jews had been the thing he looked back upon as the most worth his doing.’13 Towards the end of his life, Egremont tells us, Balfour ‘came to relish his role as protector of the Jews, even writing to golf clubs in the Home Counties in an attempt to remove their ban on Jewish membership.’14 This affectionate regard was reciprocated at his death. ‘Telegrams from Jewish communities and expressions of regret were sent from all of the World.Prior to 1905, Britain had no bar on immigration. However, its transition to Social Democracy meant that the working class could force the Government to introduce curbs on the entry of poor unskilled workers who would drive down wages. One result was that Labour became willing to pay into a National Insurance scheme because they themselves- not immigrants- would benefit. Thenceforth, the struggle began to get the Rich to shoulder more and more of the burden of providing a Social Minimum.
The fact that Balfour restricted immigration does not mean he wanted to rid Britain of its own Jews. Beinart is planting a suggestio falsi that Balfour was a Zionist because he wanted British Jews to go away.
And two years after his famous declaration, Balfour said Zionism would “mitigate the age-long miseries created for western civilisation by the presence in its midst of a Body [the Jews] which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or to absorb”.To whom did he say it? Was it to cabinet colleagues like Rufus Isaacs or Montague? Or was it to Henry Ford? No. The answer is he said it in his introduction to a book by a Zionist named Nahum Sokolow. The man was a politician and politicians tell people what they want to hear.
In the 1930s, the Polish government adopted a similar tack. Its ruling party, which excluded Jews, trained Zionist fighters on Polish military bases. Why? Because it wanted Polish Jews to emigrate. And a Jewish state would give them somewhere to go.Jabotinsky wanted Jews to flourish wherever they lived while also flourishing in Palestine. Economic conditions in Poland, from 1935 onward did cause the Polish government to show it was opening a viable route of emigration while turning a blind eye to increasingly atrocious treatment meted out to Jews. However, the Poles weren't ready to ally with Hitler, or break with Britain (which sponsoring Zionism would have involved) and thus can't be said to have endorsed either the 'Madagascar solution' (which even an idiot could see was a euphemism for extermination) or the maximalist Zionist one. Indeed, the latter were looking to Mussolini who dreamed of 'Mare Nostrum' and was believed, at that time, to one day be able to cow England.
You find echoes of this antisemitic Zionism among some rightwing American Christians who are far friendlier to the Jews of Israel than the Jews of the US. In 1980, Jerry Falwell, a close ally of Israel’s then prime minister, Menachem Begin, quipped that Jews “can make more money accidentally than you can on purpose”.Evangelists don't like American Jews coz they be all liberal and probably go down on each other and shit. They do like Israel coz like there's this prophesy in the Bible which says that the presence of Jews in the Holy Land is a precondition for the Rapture. That's also the reason one shouldn't convert every last one of them. Some must remain unbaptized for the Magic to work.
Israel’s current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in 2005 said, “we have no greater friend in the whole world than Pat Robertson” – the same Pat Robertson who later called former US air force judge Mikey Weinstein a “little Jewish radical” for promoting religious freedom in the American military.Religious freedom exists in the American military. Moreover, the Courts uphold the separation of Church and State. Weinstein is campaigning against proselytization and harassment. Sometimes he may cross the line but if he does the Court throws out his case.
Netanyahu is a politician. According to him, everybody is his best friend- when they are useful to him. As for Robertson, does Beinart really believe he wants Jews to leave America? All he was objecting to was the US Air-force making 'so help me God' an optional part of its oath. But it was the Humanist Association, not Weinstein, who had been the moving force there.
After being criticised by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in 2010 for calling George Soros a “puppet master” who “wants to bring America to her knees” and “reap obscene profits off us”, Glenn Beck travelled to Jerusalem to hold a pro-Israel rally.Soros is a billionaire hedge fund manager. 2010 was not a year in which ordinary people thought highly of such people. On the other hand, since 9/11, Israel's stock has shot up. We had been attacked by its enemies and we were bombing the most rabid of its avowed foes.
More recently, Donald Trump – who told the Republican Jewish Coalition in 2015: “You’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money” – invited Dallas pastor Robert Jeffress, who has said Jews are going to hell for not accepting Jesus, to lead a prayer at the ceremony inaugurating the American embassy in Jerusalem.Jeffress was expressing Christian dogma. Trump wants Evangelical votes. He knows smart Jews won't vote for him coz smart peeps like voting for good looking, charismatic, people who make an effort to sound smart.
In 2017, Richard Spencer, who leads crowds in Nazi salutes, called himself a “white Zionist” who sees Israel as a model for the white homeland he wants in the US.Which is hilarious coz a lot of Jews are Brown or even Black.
Some of the European leaders who traffic most blatantly in antisemitism – Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Heinz-Christian Strache of Austria’s far-right Freedom party and Beatrix von Storch of the Alternative for Germany, which promotes nostalgia for the Third Reich – publicly champion Zionism too.They also publicly champion not shitting in the street. Why? Coz the thing is a nuisance. However insane you are, you've got to say no to mass public defecation. Otherwise you might slip on a turd as you are exiting the rally and crack open your skull which will then fill up with the turds of passing defecators.
If antisemitism exists without anti-Zionism, anti-Zionism also clearly exists without antisemitism. Consider the Satmar, the largest Hasidic sect in the world. In 2017, 20,000 Satmar men – a larger crowd than attended that year’s American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference – filled the Barclays Center in Brooklyn for a rally aimed at showing, in the words of one organiser: “We feel very strongly that there should not be and could not be a State of Israel before the Messiah comes.”Thankfully, they aren't leaching off Israel's own Social Security budget. So, good luck to them.
Last year, Satmar Rebbe Aaron Teitelbaum told thousands of followers: “We’ll continue to fight God’s war against Zionism and all its aspects.” Say what you want about Rebbe Teitelbaum and the Satmar, but they’re not antisemites.Nor do their opinions change anything on the ground.
Neither is Avrum Burg. Burg, the former speaker of the Knesset, in 2018 declared that settlement growth in the West Bank had rendered the two-state solution impossible. Thus, he argued, Israelis must “depart from the Zionist paradigm, and move into a more inclusive paradigm. Israel must belong to all of its residents, including Arabs, not to the Jews alone.”Burg was born a Zionist and remained a Zionist so long as he remained in the Knesset. He resigned in 2004 and quit public life. He became a business man. But, his career has been chequered, to say the least.
Whatever his motives, he has moved to the Far Left and is currently a member of an Arab party which attracts no more than 10,000 Jewish votes.
No doubt the man has had his share of disappointments. Still, he does seem somewhat erratic in his statements. At one point he was saying Israelis should try to get a second passport just in case the worst happened. At another he was saying Israel should be not 'a Jewish state' but a "State of the Jews." Presumably, this was because when the bad guys come to blow up Israel they'll be looking for 'a Jewish state'. Finding only a 'State of the Jews' they'll get confused and scratch their heads and then go home with their bombs unexploded.
Other Jewish Israeli progressives, including the former deputy mayor of Jerusalem Meron Benvenisti, the Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy and the activists of the Federation Movement, have followed a similar path.Into oblivion. The Left has been utterly decimated.
Can one question their proposals? Of course. Are they antisemites? Of course not.Are they utterly deluded? Of course.
To be sure, some anti-Zionists really are antisemites: David Duke, Louis Farrakhan and the authors of the 1988 Hamas Covenant certainly qualify. So do the thugs from France’s yellow vest movement who called Finkielkraut a “dirty Zionist shit”.Which is unusual coz thugs are normally so polite and well spoken.
In some precincts, there’s a growing and reprehensible tendency to use the fact that many Jews are Zionists (or simply assumed to be Zionists) to bar them from progressive spaces. People who care about the moral health of the American left will be fighting this prejudice for years to come.Mental health matters but, alas!, it is too late to hope for that. Why shouldn't American leftists scratch each other's eyes out while uttering 'take that you honky/nigger/chinky/beaner/faggot/breeder/dick/cunt' like the rest of us do after the Thanksgiving Turkey? Why does the Left want to be so goddam holier than thou? As Nietszche said, 'those who cast out demons enter into the swine themselves'.
But while anti-Zionist antisemitism is likely to be on the rise, so is Zionist antisemitism.& anti-anti-Zionist antisemitism and Zionist anti-antisemitism and so on an so forth.
And, in the US, at least, it is not clear that anti-Zionists are any more likely to harbour antisemitic attitudes than people who support the Jewish state.Stuff like this is never clear, till the shit hits the fan.
In 2016, the ADL gauged antisemitism by asking Americans whether they agreed with statements such as “Jews have too much power” and “Jews don’t care what happens to anyone but their own kind”. It found that antisemitism was highest among the elderly and poorly educated, saying: “The most well educated Americans are remarkably free of prejudicial views, while less educated Americans are more likely to hold antisemitic views. Age is also a strong predictor of antisemitic propensities. Younger Americans – under 39 – are also remarkably free of prejudicial views.”But younger Americans become older Americans and what counted as education ceases to do so.
In 2018, however, when the Pew Research Center surveyed Americans’ attitudes about Israel, it discovered the reverse pattern: Americans over the age of 65 – the very cohort that expressed the most antisemitism – also expressed the most sympathy for Israel. By contrast, Americans under 30, who according to the ADL harboured the least antisemitism, were least sympathetic to Israel.What does this tell us? People who have been around longer know Israel aint gonna disappear. It is something one grows used to- like Thai food or Pilates and having to get up three times in the night to pee.
It was the same with education. Americans who possessed a high school degree or less – the most antisemitic educational cohort – were the most pro-Israel. Americans with “postgraduate degrees” – the least antisemitic – were the least pro-Israel.
As statistical evidence goes, this is hardly airtight. But it confirms what anyone who listens to progressive and conservative political commentary can grasp: younger progressives are highly universalistic.Or pretend they are so as to come across as well educated and open minded and fit for promotion.
They’re suspicious of any form of nationalism that seems exclusive.Coz they're advertising their autonomy and adaptability. This makes sense when you are bucking for promotion and still think your future is open. As time goes by, you accept your essential fragility and see the bigger picture.
That universalism makes them suspicious of both Zionism and the white Christian nationalism that in the US sometimes shades into antisemitism.The thing they should be suspicious about is their own prospects. They think they are going to rise. The vast majority of them will end up on the scrap-heap.
By contrast, some older Trump supporters, who fear a homogenising globalism, admire Israel for preserving Jewish identity while yearning to preserve America’s Christian identity in ways that exclude Jews.America's Christian identity does not exclude Jews. On the contrary, it is essentially imaginative and inspirational. Jews in the Entertainment industry have contributed greatly to it and not in any hypocritical or huckstering spirit. It's like Marc Cohn answer to Muriel Wilkins's question in 'Walking in Memphis'- ' Tell me are you a Christian, child?' and I said, 'Ma'am, I am tonight!'
If antisemitism and anti-Zionism are both conceptually different and, in practice, often espoused by different people, why are politicians such as Macron responding to rising antisemitism by calling anti-Zionism a form of bigotry?Because the thing has become a public nuisance similar to shitting on the street or the Yellow Vests or Extinction Marchers running riot. Enough is enough.
Because, in many countries, that’s what communal Jewish leaders want them to do.Communal Jewish leaders want the same thing other community leaders want- more policemen on the streets, more frequent garbage collection and so on. They also want public nuisances to be curbed. So do all sensible people. The Imam of the local mosque doesn't want a bunch of nutters using the place as a recruiting ground for their brand of hooliganism. He wants his people to get a good education and good jobs and live in good houses on streets that are safe to walk down.
It is an understandable impulse: let the people threatened by antisemitism define antisemitism.That's how the Law works. It is the injured party who files the complaint and specifies the nature of the offence.
There was a time when men thought women shouldn't get to define sexual harassment coz we knew our own behavior was not above reproach when of strong drink taken. Now, we get it. There is a premeditated, highly calculated, method to the thing women are complaining about. They don't want to jail every last drunken idiot or gormless loser who misinterprets a friendly smile.
When your wife or g.f says 'that guy is a creep'- pay attention. She knows the signs- you don't. Take a baseball bat to him if he comes anywhere near your daughter.
The problem is that, in many countries, Jewish leaders serve both as defenders of local Jewish interests and defenders of the Israeli government. And the Israeli government wants to define anti-Zionism as bigotry because doing so helps Israel kill the two-state solution with impunity.The two-state solution was killed by the Hamas-Fatah Civil War of 2007. There has been no reconciliation despite the 2017 agreement because Hamas won't turn over terrorist arms caches. Why pretend that some silly people making a nuisance of themselves in some big cities in Western countries have any power or influence?
Consider what happened to the 'Free Tibet' movement. The Dalai Lama got the Nobel and met every US President since H.W Bush. But China has pushed back and he is now persona non grata.
Similarly there was once a visa ban in the US and Europe on Narendra Modi. Then it simply disappeared without the Indian Govt. having to lift a finger.
It wasn't that long ago that there was a furore regarding the Saudi Crown Prince and the Kashoggi murder. Did it have any effect whatsoever?
Israel benefits from both anti-semitism and anti-Zionism because it causes wealthy, well educated, Jews- like those of France- to make Aliyah. However, the French Government isn't utterly stupid. After 2015, it took vigorous steps to stem the outflow. That's one of the reasons Macron equates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. The thing curbs an expensive nuisance.
For years, Barack Obama and John Kerry warned that if Israel continued the settlement growth in the West Bank that made a Palestinian state impossible, Palestinians would stop demanding a Palestinian state alongside Israel and instead demand one state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, neither Jewish nor Palestinian, that replaces Israel.In 2014 Obama admitted that US foreign policy consisted of doing stupid shit. Forget 'the audacity of hope', his new policy was 'don't do stupid shit'. He spent 8 years warning Israel about settlements and the vanishing prospect of a 2 state solution. But he couldn't make Hamas & Fatah play nice. To be frank, he could do nothing positive in the region. Obama's achievement in Israel was to boost US aid while settlements increased by more than had happened under Bush. Netanyahu gets to stay out of prison because he had the prescience to completely ignore Obama.
It is tragic that this wonderful man was condemned to just go through the motions doing stupid shit because that's all any American can do in a region which has many-too-many minds of its own and a long tradition of seeing through windy rhetoric.
What would really twist the knife would be if Trump pulls off his 'deal of the century'.
They may declare them lizard people from the Planet X for all the good it will do. The fact is the PLO embraced terrorism. If calling them assassins had no effect, how will calling them bigots harm them? What's next? Accusations that Palestinians leave the toilet seat up? Will that deal a death blow to the two state solution?
Defining anti-Zionism as antisemitism reduces that threat. It means that if Palestinians and their supporters respond to the demise of the two-state solution by demanding one equal state, some of the world’s most powerful governments will declare them bigots.
The Palestinian Civil War began in 2007. Had it ended when Obama was in office, then Netanyahu would have had a credible interlocutor for a two state swindle and thus US pressure could have been applied to some purpose.
Which leaves Israel free to entrench its own version of one state, which denies millions of Palestinians basic rights. Silencing Palestinians isn’t a particularly effective way to fight rising antisemitism, much of which comes from people who like neither Palestinians nor Jews. But, just as important, it undermines the moral basis of that fight.Here I agree with Beinart. The moral basis of a fight is what determines the outcome. Why are Governments all over the world wasting so much money on military equipment? They should hire moral philosophers or associate professors of journalism or some failed Israeli politicians accused of financial impropriety to provide non underminable foundations for the moral basis of any fight the country might get into.
Antisemitism isn’t wrong because it is wrong to denigrate and dehumanise Jews.No. That's why it is wrong. Jews are nice.
Antisemitism is wrong because it is wrong to denigrate and dehumanise anyone.Fuck off! It is not wrong to denigrate murderous scumbags and dehumanize the shit out of them by incarcerating or executing them.
Which means, ultimately, that any effort to fight antisemitism that contributes to the denigration and dehumanisation of Palestinians is no fight against antisemitism at all.So kids, what have we learned today? Any effort to fight antisemitism that contributes to the denigration and dehumanization of Nazi scum- like that Eichmann bloke Hannah's Aunt wrote about- is no fight against antisemitism at all. However, stiff measures of that sort do cause antisemites to keep shtum and not go attack the local synagogue for fear of getting arrested and doing a stretch of porridge.
Palestinians are nice people. They are very smart and the win win solution is for them to participate in the Knowledge Economy of the region. However, they have to play nice with each other. That means competitive denunciations of Israel have to end. The thing is a nuisance. Consider the fate of my own Iyer Liberation Front which is at war with the Iyerland Liberation Front. We have a common goal- viz reclaiming sovereignty over Ireland- the ancestral home of the Iyers-which will mean that we will be able to write novels as good as wot James Joyce did, or plays like wot Oscar Wilde wrote, or poems as sorrowfully sublime as those of Yeats.
However, the Iyer Liberation Front demands the right of prima nocta for all Iyers who are me, whereas the Iyerland Liberation Front specifically excludes homosexual marriages. The moral basis of the Iyer Liberation Front appears stronger because it does not discriminate against gays. However, it is the Iyerland Liberation Front which has the better trained and more dedicated corps of suicide bombers. Well, a fart is a sort of stink bomb and the last time there was a peace conference between the two groups, the one I let out while arguing the Iyerland position was so utterly evil I fainted away.
Dunno why I just told you that. I'm normally a very modest and self-effacing person. Still, now you know, could you kindly contact Beinart for me? You see I am the victim of a lot anti-Iyer prejudice from my relatives- especially the posh ones wot live in Hampstead. They say 'If you really think you are the next James Joyce why don't you fuck off to Ireland then?' They don't understand that, like Joyce, my art thrives in exile. Admittedly, my never having visited Dublin does somewhat impede my literary reconstruction of it. Still, seeing as a wholesale ignorance of the Middle East has never stopped anyone spouting nonsense about what Israel should or shouldn't do, I don't see why my own claim to a stellar position in Irish (as they ignorantly misspell 'Iyerish') Literature has a sound moral basis.
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