OPINION & EDITORIAL
Anti-semitism by another name
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Thursday, April 24, 2003
It is difficult in the small space provided in the pages of the Badger Herald to respond adequately to the atrocious inaccuracies and misrepresentations of a letter as troubling as the one of William Gartland from Monday, April 21, entitled “U.S. government an Israeli-policy beacon.” I will try to hit the most important points.
The title of this letter gives the first hint that the author plans to drum up an anti-Semitic trope that has been used for centuries: the idea that the Jews, despite their tiny numbers, are conspiring to run the world, and that in fact they hold huge amounts of power in their money-grubbing hands (admittedly, the money-grubbing part is not explicitly mentioned in Gartland’s piece).
In the leadup to the first Gulf War, Pat Buchanan, a known Holocaust denier and general anti-Semite, exclaimed that the only supporters of this war were “Israel and its amen corner in Congress.” At that time, his accusation met with great discord and angry rebuttals.
Today, however, a very different and very troubling political climate exists in which it has become far too acceptable to claim that Jews control the U.S. government and its policies toward Israel, the Palestinians, the Middle East and much of the world. The fact that the Badger Herald would choose to print an article that so flagrantly bears these classically anti-Semitic assertions is itself a disturbing reflection of today’s intellectual climate.
Often, instead of “the Jews,” the term “Zionists” or “Israelis” is used by current anti-Semites. But semantic variation cannot hide the implications of these remarks. Just as one of the distinctive traits of an older anti-Semitism was the treatment of “the Jews” as a homogeneous entity, so do current descriptions like those of Zionist or Israeli “power” treat their subject as a monolith. In general, racist ideology has long been characterized by generalizations about the group the racist describes. The obvious implication is that the people of the concerned group are “all the same,” born thinking and acting the same, and naturally and unchangeably that way.
So now, Gartland and others conveniently forget the hundreds of thousands of Zionists who opposed the War in Iraq, or who vocally disagree with much of President Bush’s current Middle East foreign policy. This is because such people don’t fit neatly into Gartland and others’ anti-Semitic generalizations.
First some refreshing facts to set the record straight about the politics and power of the Jews: Jews, more than any other demographic group with the exception of blacks, vote overwhelmingly for the Democratic Party in national elections. This has been the case for decades in this country, and in general large numbers of Jews have long taken active roles in liberal political movements across the Western World. So there are not so many Jewish conservatives to begin with.
During the countdown to the recent war in Iraq, numerous Jewish Hollywood celebrities took part in antiwar protests; many Jewish political leaders, such as Michael Berger, took leading roles in opposing the war. Carl Levin, a Jewish senator from Michigan, introduced unsuccessful legislation that would have severely curtailed the War Resolution that eventually passed the Senate. The late Paul Wellstone, another Jew, was perhaps the most vocal and constant critic of the War Resolution. Certainly, there were conservative American Jews of influence who supported this war. But they were a small minority.
Moreover, their influence was marginal. Not a single department head in President Bush’s cabinet is Jewish. Almost none of his closest advisors on military and defense matters are Jewish. Few American Jews have ever held cabinet posts. The most notable, Henry Kissinger, brokered cease-fire agreements between Israel and Egypt and Syria, respectively, that required months of talks and pressure on all parties that, at the very least, forced significant territorial compromises on the part of Israel.
In the current situation, the most likely result of the Iraq War for Israel will be the ratcheting up of American pressure to dismantle settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, something the Israeli leadership will not welcome. The entire Peace Process probably would never have begun absent tremendous American pressure on Israel in the window that flowed directly from the 1991 Gulf War. The American aid to Israel that Gartland makes sound so enormous costs exactly one tenth of a cent out of every $100,000 dollars paid by U.S. taxpayers. Jews do not run American foreign policy, and they never have.
Instead of reflecting any historical or contemporary reality, Gartland’s accusations about Zionists, describing American foreign policy makers as “lackeys of the State of Israel,” or citing the manner in which, during the 1960s, “Zionist control of the executive branch came back with a vengeance,” reflect the same anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jewish power that virulent German nationalists and others referred to when they discussed the “imminent threat” of the “Judaization” of Germany. Adolf Hitler himself described this phenomenon extensively in “Mein Kampf,” the most famous and catastrophically influential anti-Semitic diatribe ever written, and in many of his anti-Semitic speeches that helped motivate mass support for the German terror of the Holocaust.
Regardless of the benevolence of one’s intentions, as history proves, to make such false accusations is not simply inaccurate; it is extremely dangerous. This remains true today.
A rising tide of anti-Semitism in this country and across the globe has been palpable during the past two and a half years, made visible in cemetery burnings, synagogue bombings, campus graffiti, intimidation riots, television programming, press caricatures and more.
The historical examples cited by Gartland are so problematic that I am unsure of where to begin. In brief, his treatment of the general history of Zionism offers further and sad evidence of anti-Semitic undertones. For example, he refers to “the Zionist nightmare” that “hit the Arab world” after World War II. Clearly, Gartland has deep sympathy, rightly so, for the suffering of the Palestinian people.
Interestingly, he seems oblivious or indifferent to the suffering of the Jews at the moment when Israel was founded. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were in Displaced Persons camps across Europe. They were malnourished and subsisting under terrible living conditions. There were ongoing attacks on Jews even after the Holocaust in Poland that had killed thousands. Some DP camps were being run by former Nazis under Allied supervision.
Quite understandably, these Jews refused to return to anywhere near the killing fields of Europe. Neither the Western European countries nor the United States (despite its foreign policy allegedly being controlled by “the Jews”) were willing to accept Jews. Only the Zionists in Palestine wanted them. Apparently, Gartland’s love of humankind that finds its expression in his sympathy for the Palestinians conveniently ignores the plight of Europe’s Jews at this historical moment. Yet the very real desperation of this situation was instrumental in gathering worldwide support for the justice of the cause of a Jewish homeland.
Meanwhile, Gartland declines to mention that it was the Arab leadership, rather than that of the Zionists, that refused the Partition Plan that would have created a Palestinian state without forcing a single Palestinian to relocate from the Jewish state.
One can strongly condemn Israel’s current policies, those of America in the Middle East, or both, without being anti-Semitic. But one must do so responsibly. I am no apologist for Israeli policy, which I currently find deplorable in numerous cases, most notably that of the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and the excessive and often tragic measures being taken against Palestinian civilians on a daily basis.
I find the Bush administration’s foreign policy to be disgusting, in both its arrogant interventions and its neglectful silences. I constantly expend significant lungpower and ink to explain to friends of mine all that I believe makes the current U.S. and Israeli regimes so problematic. But the disturbing nature of American policy in the Middle East or Israeli policy toward the Palestinians does not change the fact that the Jews do not run America or the world, and that accusations to the contrary are extremely frightening, dangerous and irresponsible.
Ethan Katz (ebkatz@wisc.edu) is a UW-Madison history PhD student and an active member of the organization Kavanah: Progressive Jewish Voice.
