RUTHFULLY YOURS

In September, the New York Times published on its front page a lengthy and detailed story with the headline “Europe’s Anti-Semitism Comes Out of the Shadows.” The article contained no breaking news, no revelations, no surprising analyses, and no startling perspectives. Its statistics, anecdotes, and lamentations were sadly familiar not only to Jews but to all friends and allies of the Jewish state.

After all, we do not need the Times to tell us that the murder and assault of European Jews, the destruction of their property, the banning of their religious practices, and the demonization of their communities have become routine. “Synagogues,” said one man in the story, “are burning again in Germany in the night.”

What made the article noteworthy was its very existence. The resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe is a trend so noticeable, so flagrant, and so disturbing, that not even the mainstream media can miss it. “Anti-Semitism Row Shines Light on Fractured French Society,” reports CNN. “A ‘New Anti-Semitism’ Rising in France,” notes the Washington Post. “Anti-Semitism Flares in Europe amid Gaza War,” writes USA Today.

Missing from these earnest and well-intentioned pieces, however, was any acknowledgment of the role the media themselves have played in creating the conditions under which anti-Semitism flourishes. The media do not grasp, the media refuse to see, the relation between the biased and hostile coverage of Israel they produce every day and the anti-Semitism on which they report.

That relation should be apparent to any close reader of the “anti-Semitism is back” articles. They all have a similar structure. The problem is introduced: A pro-Nazi salute has become fashionable among soccer players; an anti-Semitic comedian is a sensation in France; protestors in European capitals chant “Death to Jews.” Explanations are offered: Muslim immigrants to Europe carry Jew-hatred in their luggage; Arab, Turkish, and African minorities, poor and alienated from mainstream European society, direct their anger not at French or German or British elites but at the Jewish people; and, inevitably, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is held responsible for the incitement of European publics.

Israel. Always Israel. Its self-defense inspires fury, terror, and resentment in a way that Muslim violence—global terrorism, the Syrian civil war, the Islamic State’s slaughter of heretics and apostates, Iran’s financing of sectarian bloodshed—does not. Israel is the totem, the representation of the Jewish people toward which inchoate rage is articulated and directed. Denunciation of Israel, of its government, of its policies, of its stubborn existence, acts as a sort of gateway drug. It is neither condoned nor castigated. On the contrary: Such ugliness is tacitly accepted, even encouraged, as an outlet for destructive energies.

But Israel’s most devoted critics have a habit of going beyond mere policy disputes. What starts as holding Israel to a standard that one would not think of applying to any other country (except possibly the United States) turns into a “rethinking” of the Zionist project, of Israel’s right to exist on its own terms, of the loyalties of diaspora Jews, of the historical reality of the Holocaust, of the role that the Jewish people, two-tenths of 1 percent of the world population, have played in whatever is going badly in one’s life today.

Zionism is not racism. But anti-Zionism is a precursor to, and a form of, anti-Semitism.

“Supporters of Hamas aren’t interested in this policy or that, these borders or those,” wrote Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in an October Wall Street Journal  essay. “They are committed as a matter of principle, stated in their charter, to the complete destruction of the Jewish state.” Hamas’s fellow travelers in politics and media are the enablers of that annihilationist ideology.

And as Europe and America and the world come to accept Hamas propaganda at face value, to adopt its account of the modern Middle East; as they become more comfortable slandering and demonizing Israel; as their elites tolerate or participate, knowingly or unknowingly, in single-minded attacks on Israel that until recently were confined to the political fringe, the easier it becomes for anti-Semitism to manifest itself. Anti-Semitism proliferates when it is defined down so as to exclude contempt for, abhorrence of, and attempts to delegitimize the Jewish state.

Consider the appearance in the New York Times of the article about European anti-Semitism. Here is a paper that during Israel’s recent war with Hamas published nothing but images, day after day, of ruined Palestinian buildings and mourning Palestinian children. Its Jerusalem bureau chief is infamous for her anti-Israel biases and misstatements of fact. Its editorial and op-ed pages are filled with one-sided and misleading attacks on the Israeli government and military. In the span of 48 hours in August, it published (1) an article on a Dutchman who rescued Jews during the Second World War but who, now at the age of 91, protested last summer’s Operation Protective Edge and returned to Israel a medal recognizing him as a righteous Gentile; and (2) an in-depth report on Israel’s supposed role in illegal organ-trafficking.

So devoted is the Times to reminding its readers every day of Israeli actions it judges to be inhumane that a Reform rabbi recently announced, in a very public way, that he was canceling his subscription. “My chronic irritation finally morphed into alienation and then to visceral disgust this summer,” wrote David Block, “after Hamas renewed its terrorist assaults upon Israel and the Times launched what can only be described as a campaign to delegitimize the Jewish state.” And yet, having contributed to such an atmosphere of hostility and reprobation, the Times then turned around and published its feature on anti-Semitism. Where do the editors think this animus came from? The sky?

I do not mean to single out the New York Times. Shifts in elite opinion and in the partisan composition of the media have made pro-Israel news outlets rare indeed. In 2012, the Democratic Party, the party to which the overwhelming majority of journalists belong, attempted to remove from its platform references to God and to Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Over the summer, as Israel defended itself against Hamas’s rockets, tunnels, kidnappings, and murders, influential liberals such as Ezra Klein, Jonathan Chait, and Roger Cohen self-righteously announced their disillusionment with the Jewish state, condemning its tactics and flouting their superior virtue.

State-owned media such as the Kremlin’s RT and Qatar’s Al Jazeera, despite low ratings, broadcast anti-Israel and anti-American distortions unimpeded, shaping journalistic attitudes through hires and marketing. Throw a dart, and it will land on a publication or media company whose feelings toward Israel are, in a word, bellicose. The Independent, the Guardian, the Economist, the BBC, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, Vox, NPR, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, Time, Newsweek, the Lancet—they all portray Israel as rapacious and the Palestinians as helpless victims of Jewish sadism. Their fixation on Israel becomes a fixation on Jews that creates a noxious climate of opinion, breeding conspiracy theories, accusations of dual loyalties, intimidation, even violence.

And when these fumes come “out of the shadows,” and make contact with an environment in which anti-Zionists and anti-Semites reside, the hazards, as we see in the Middle East and in Europe, are real. And they are deadly.