Anti-Semitism has a long history in the West and is deservedly a subject that has been written about in countless books, some scholarly and some not. Here’s a link to an Amazon search. I haven’t delved into the subject beyond what one picks up through casual reading and via osmosis, though I did read James Carroll’s book “Constantine’s Sword” some years back, which is a history of anti-Semitism in the Catholic Church. And of course Catholics aren’t the only ones. Every Protestant knows or should know that Martin Luther started out seemingly sympathetic to Jews, thinking their rejection of Christ understandable given “papist” mistreatment, and ended up ranting against them when they continued to refuse to become Christians, to the point where his admiring biographer Roland Bainton wrote that it would have been better if he had died sooner, before he could write that dreck.
And of course the resurgence of European anti-Semitism is in part what sparked the Zionist movement. After WWII the Western world became belatedly ashamed of its anti-Semitic past. Anti-Semitism was no longer acceptable. There was a movement to stamp it out.
What happened next is interesting. What started as a laudable attempt to make up for past bigotry morphed into an excuse for supporting a new type of bigotry. In order to atone for anti-Semitism, some started to give their unconditional blessing to Zionism. The Presbyterian booklet on Zionism called Zionism Unsettled has a few pages on how this worked out among Christians. With liberal Christians it was guilt over anti-Semitism. With evangelical Christians it was more the influence of dispensationalism–the belief that the rebirth of Israel was a signpost on the road to the Second Coming. With liberals in general, it was guilt.
Palestinians were the scapegoat for Western sins. In order to atone for Western crimes one had to pretend the Palestinians didn’t matter, or didn’t exist, or brought it on themselves (see, as an example, James Michener’s historical novel “The Source”) or at best should be satisfied with whatever scraps the Israelis chose to toss their way. With many, Jews and non-Jews alike, it seems to have become an article of faith that Zionism was an inherently noble idea, and anyone who argued for Palestinian rights had to be an anti-Semite. Palestinians were an embarrassment, so they had to be portrayed as bigots or at best, as Arabs who could be moved into other Arab countries. As if one could displace a million Americans from their homes because there are plenty of other places where people speak English.
That was a short and potted history, but we need more. How did this happen? How did it become acceptable for liberals to brand the struggle for Palestinian rights a form of Jew hatred? How did a movement against bigotry become, in some cases, a movement in favor of a different form of bigotry? How did anti-Arab racism manage to masquerade, in instances, as a crusade against bigotry, and then penetrate into popular culture?
I don’t think this is a flimsy topic. To a large degree these attitudes have helped determine US policy towards Israel and the Palestinians, as well as the terms in which it is discussed in the press and by our politicians.
But there is ample scope here for PhD dissertations and scholarly volumes and popular histories. So all you historians of ideas, sociologists, scholars of religion, and political scientists–get to work.
Where do you live in the United States? The US displaces people from their homes constantly through the use of: incentives, tax policy, development policy and that failing outright eminent domain. There is probably no year in the last 100 where 10k plus people aren’t being eminent domained out of their homes. There is probably no year in the last 100 where 1m plus people aren’t being displaced through softer means.
Yes you can move Americans to other places. Happens all the time. Look at the bridges, highways, dams, housing development projects in your local neighborhood. Where do you think they came from, the infrastructure fairy?
Because when Israel was being debated as an actual entity 100 years ago the people who were mostly opposed hated Jews. The strong opposition to early Zionism (not the people who thought it was silly but the people who thought it immoral) mostly were associated Arabist movements or the Arian Christ movement. The Arabist movement in the 1930s was openly anti-Semetic, with strong pro-Axis leanings. The Arian Christ movement was central to the whole ideology of the Axis.
After Israel was founded most of the people in the west who were pro-Palestinian didn’t care one whit about the Palestinians they wanted better relations with oil producing countries. They understood fully that the fall of Israel was the premeditated murder of millions of Jews and were OK with that since it would lead to less headaches in getting oil contracts for American and British companies.
Sensible people viewed that as Jew hatred because it was. What you really want to argue is that backing Palestinian support today is not the same as the people who were advocates 60-120 years ago and they genuinely do have a human rights agenda. Their problem is explaining
1) the disproportionate level of focus
2) completely unhinged rhetoric associated with the anti-Zionist movement
3) why the solution they advocate for Israel is totally unlike the solutions they advocate for other historical mass migrations
Being unable to offer any plausible explanations for 1-3 people still conclude its probably more about Jews than Palestinians.
Related to this is a discussion with Michael Ratner, President Emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in New York and Chair of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights in Berlin, on The Real News.
“From a Zionist Youth to Outspoken Critic of a Jewish State”
http://tinyurl.com/n6jowh3
”But there is ample scope here for PhD dissertations and scholarly volumes and popular histories. So all you historians of ideas, sociologists, scholars of religion, and political scientists–get to work.”>>>>
Oh please gawd, no more volumes on this!
Everyone who is making their living/name/career on religion and anti Semitism please go find a different job.
The world needs a break from this eternal, never ending, never settled, never to be settled, constantly morphing into evermore theories, revisions and desperate revelations by desperate authors desperate for their next new idea on it all book.
The subject I promise you is worn out to death. Anything said on it that makes actual sense has been said, if not noticed by the world.
It can only get crazier from here.
Well, maybe everything sensible has been said. My memory of the early years, late 50s and early 60s, is that the Jewish need to stand tall and to be assertive, even to conquer, received a great deal of sympathy in a western world which was comforting itself with the idea that it had, whatever else it had got wrong, conquered the Nazis. Hostage has recently mentioned the idea, attributed to Mandela at one time, that South African liberation would not be complete without Palestinian liberation. The same memories make me think that many in the West thought that our conquest of the Nazis would not be complete until Jewish people – never, ever treated fairly and latterly the Nazis’ principal victims – could share fully in the experience not just of liberation bestowed by others, but of conquest owed to their own strong right arm. It was the time when existentialism was popular and you could say that there is a dark version of existentialism in which only conquerors are free. And this joined up with the dark theology in which the Holocaust (a very theological term) was the sacrifice which God had accepted for the restoration of the Kingdom. Marxism, the other radical and in some senses popular force of the time, had always been linked with the idea of Jewish liberation and was seen by some (including the young Chomsky, maybe) as an essential step towards world socialism: liberation first for Jewish, then for all, people and peoples.
OK, I’ll be *that guy*.
“And of course the resurgence of European anti-Semitism is in part what sparked the Zionist movement. After WWII the Western world became belatedly ashamed of its anti-Semitic past. Anti-Semitism was no longer acceptable. There was a movement to stamp it out.”
“What started as a laudable attempt to make up for past bigotry morphed into an excuse for supporting a new type of bigotry. In order to atone for anti-Semitism, some started to give their unconditional blessing to Zionism. ”
It is frankly very deeply offensive to read this because there is literally not a single mention of the Holocaust. One oblique reference to the systematic, state-sponsored genocide of a people. Without mentioning the Holocaust, you’re ignoring a fundamental and huge part of the creation of Israel and the ultimate expression of anti-Semitic activity.
The raison d’être of Zionism, creation of Israel, and the massive population migration there (through the Fifth Aliyah and the post-war displacement) are inexorably tied to the notion that so long as they were stateless, Jews were forever doomed to oppression. That statelessness and the powerless that comes with it is precisely why people (myself included) support the creation of a Palestinian state today.
I’d like to know why you didn’t mention this.