Anti-Semitism Isn’t Merely Another Kind of Hate People organize against the Jews as part of an ideological struggle. By Ruth Wisse
Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid startled the Conference Against Antisemitism in Jerusalem last month by redefining the term: “The anti-Semites weren’t only in the Budapest ghetto,” he said. They were also “the slave traders,” the Hutus who committed genocide in Rwanda, “those Muslims who have killed more than 20 million fellow Muslims in the past decade,” and “those who beat young LGBT people to death.”
It was, Mr. Lapid explained, a political appeal. “We need allies,” he said. “Anti-Semitism is racism, so let’s talk to all those who oppose racism. . . . Anti-Semitism is hatred of outsiders, so let’s recruit anyone who was ever an outsider and tell them—this is your fight too.”
Five days later, Ben & Jerry’s, a division of Unilever and a self-styled champion of progressive values, demonstrated Mr. Lapid’s naiveté by announcing that it will pull out of Israel because selling its ice cream in the “Occupied Palestinian Territory”—the loaded Arab term—was “inconsistent with our values.” The Arab League had launched the original pan-Arab boycott of Israel in 1945, defining any Jewish presence in Palestine as an occupation of Arab territory. That boycott would have done far greater damage had the U.S. not intervened to thwart it, which it did because Israel’s destruction was inconsistent with American values.
But America has changed. At the end of the 20th century, a home-grown boycott, divestment and sanctions movement became an American arm of the war against Israel, uniting a self-defined progressive coalition on the side of Arab-Muslim rejectionism. Anuradha Mittal, Ben & Jerry’s chairman and a supporter of BDS, is the initiator of today’s boycott of Israel, a country whose creation she once called a “catastrophe.” She knows that blaming Israel undermines its legitimacy, causing not only economic but political and diplomatic harm.
“Why, of all the gin joints in the world, did she have to walk in here?” Mr. Lapid might have asked why an American ice-cream company launched an unprovoked attack against the most progressive country in the Middle East.
There is something endearing in an Israeli leader’s refusal to see anything special in the war against his country. He loves the world and wants to be an unexceptional part of it. Zionists like him went to great trouble to recover their homeland so they would no longer be accused of encroaching on other peoples’ lands. Having thus brought Jews into line with other nations, he reasonably doesn’t want some all-purpose hatred singling them out.
When the boycott was announced, Mr. Lapid joined Prime Minister Naftali Bennett in denouncing this “disgraceful” action as “a capitulation to anti-Semitism and the BDS movement.” But does he know what he got wrong?
Anti-Semitism is a form of hatred, but it’s more than that. People organize against the Jews as part of an ideological struggle. Scapegoating Jews for the suffering of another people provides an explanation for its misery, an outlet for its anger, and a target for its aggression. From its founding in the 1870s to its current American intersectional variant, anti-Semitism has the unique power to build grievance coalitions between Marxists and Muslims, fascists and fundamentalists, atheists and believers, nationalists, internationalists, CEOs and academics.
Zionists who thought anti-Semitism was directed against them because of their dispersion were surprised to find it was even easier to blame them in their homeland. But a small people with a hugely magnified image proved the perfect foil for any anti-liberal cause. When Rep. Rashida Tlaib claims that people working “behind the curtain” to stop a “free Palestine” are “profiting” off Americans, she obviously isn’t talking about Tutsis or gays.
While Israelis have no choice but to repel those who attack them, some Americans and Jews prefer to ignore or justify the aggression. Progressives say: Who, us? We’re anti-fascist, so how can we be Jew-baiters? Ignorant or disingenuous, they ignore that the driving force of anti-Jewish politics since 1945 has been not fascism but the Arab-Muslim war against the Jewish state, supported by Marxist ideology.
This alliance, which in the 1920s and ’30s supported Arab attacks on the Jews in pre-state Palestine, solidified internationally in 1975 when the Soviet and Arab voting blocs passed the United Nations resolution defining Zionism as racism—a calumny that today has spread through the academy and the media and into Congress. More than hate, anti-Semitism deforms all those who organize politics against the Jews.
Ms. Wisse, a senior fellow at the Tikvah Fund and professor emerita of Yiddish literature and comparative literature at Harvard, is author of “Free as a Jew: A Personal Memoir of Self-Liberation.”
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