Books: Hatred of Jews

The late Robert Wistrich edited a collection of essays on antisemitism and anti-Zionism, but left too many questions unasked.

By GLENN C. ALTSCHULER
A man wearing a T-shirt with the message ‘Boycott Israel Apartheid’ holds a Palestinian flag during a protest event, in Paris in 2015 (photo credit: REUTERS)
A man wearing a T-shirt with the message ‘Boycott Israel Apartheid’ holds a Palestinian flag during a protest event, in Paris in 2015
(photo credit: REUTERS)
Reporting on a pro-Palestinian demonstration in Paris in July 2014, journalist Pascal Riché confessed that he had never heard so many expressions of antisemitism in so short a time.
“Israelis, the Israeli government, Zionists, Jews, everything is mixed up in a miserable heavy fog,” Riché wrote. “Who will clarify all that in these heads? It is urgent.”
That sense of urgency is reflected in Anti- Judaism, Antisemitism, and Delegitimizing Israel. Edited by Robert Wistrich, a professor of European and Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem until his death in 2015, the book contains 25 essays by journalists and academics about the surge in anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli rhetoric and violence around the world.
As they examine different aspects of this trend, the contributors acknowledge that “the perennial question remains: at what point does anti-Zionism become antisemitism?” In addressing this question, all of them arrive at the same conclusion: the Palestinian “liberation struggle for human rights, dignity and social justice,” they argue, has become “the principal vector” for those who want to dismantle the State of Israel, but also serves as a “deceptive mask” that, in essence, legitimizes a virulent and vile antisemitism that is directed at Diaspora Jews as well as Israelis.
In essays on France, Poland, Russia, Iran, Turkey and South Africa, contributors document the pervasiveness of antisemitism and Israelophobia among politicians, intellectuals and the general public and the fact that they often coincide in the same individuals and groups.
According to an Anti-Defamation League poll, for example, one billion people are “highly infected” by antisemitism. The poll indicates 63% of Poles, 48% of Germans and 38% of Italians believe Israel is conducting “a war of extermination” against Palestinians; 59% of Europeans rank the Jewish state first among nations as a threat to world peace.
The response of the governments in Western Europe to antisemitism, the contributors point out, has been tepid. The European Union nations withdrew their ambassadors from Tehran in 1989, in protest at the death threats against Salman Rushdie, and in 1997, when the regime in Iran was deemed responsible for the murder of four Kurds in a restaurant in Berlin, political scientist Matthias Küntzel points out, but contented themselves with a verbal condemnation of Holocaust-denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s call to “purge Israel from the pages of history” in 2005.
And the contributors remind us that the United Nations has been hostile to Israel for decades, branding Zionism as “racism” in 1975, and condemning the Jewish state (more than any other country) for abuses of human rights and the construction of settlements on “occupied” lands.
Unfortunately, in my view, the contributors lay out but do not sort out the massive evidence of antisemitism and hostility to Israel. They don’t adequately explain, for example, why hatred of Jews and the Jewish state has taken hold in so many countries. One wishes, for example, that other contributors assessed the claim of Efraim Sicher, who teaches at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, that the “new antisemitism” has been fed by a post-colonialist narrative that portrays Zionists as European Whites who seized land, imposed Western civilization on Muslims, and are now trapped “in a Samson complex, powerful but blind in Gaza, an endless and senseless struggle” with Palestinian Arabs, who are cast as the archetypal victims.
Moreover, the contributors do not identify points at which criticism of Israel does not constitute antisemitism. Indeed, their characterizations of those who do not share their views are often over-thetop.
Having turned against nationalism, Melanie Phillips, a British journalist and columnist with The Jerusalem Post, writes: “Europe more or less gave up on liberal democracy and reason itself.” Barack Obama, she adds, has threatened that Israel will be friendless if it “doesn’t cave in to the Palestinian Authority’s demands” and seems “determined to empower the enemies of the West.”
Desperate to be “pardoned and loved by Muslims,” asserts Bat Ye’or, founder of the World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries, European leaders “went as far as seeking to ‘Islamize’ Europe and collaborating with radical and terrorist movements.”
Although he claims to have no objections to a “vigorous discussion” of Israeli policies, Alvin Rosenfeld, a professor of English and Jewish Studies at Indiana University at Bloomington, maintains that those who opine within the terms of “the ubiquitous rubric ‘criticism of Israel’” are “typically less interested in critically examining particular Israeli policies than in questioning the very idea of a Jewish state and its right to a future.”
The “dialectical scam” at the core of their reasoning, Rosenfeld adds, exposes their “criticism” for what it is: “political bias, compounded by a touch of hysteria, masquerading as victimization.”
Agreeing with his fellow contributors that European leaders “preferred radical Islam to the aims of George W. Bush,” Guy Millière, a professor at the University of Paris, insists that Israel “could not have done more to be tolerated and accepted by the Muslim world, apart from ceasing to exist altogether”; the Jewish state “has no responsibility for the choices that led to the pro-Arab policies of Europe” or the US, and no responsibility for “the demonization of Israel.”
Anti-Judaism, Antisemitism, and Delegitimizing Israel will, no doubt, be greeted with enthusiasm by many Jews and supporters of Israel. Many others, however, including those who, like me, lament that unfair double standards are often applied to Israel, are likely to be disappointed by polemical essays that don’t help them unpack the difficult-to-unpack complexities of the relationship between antisemitic and anti-Israeli rhetoric and violence.
The writer is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin professor of American Studies at Cornell University.


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