“If they [Jews] all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of
going after them worldwide.”. Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbullah
commander
“I say this without fear: for those who believe in freedom and
dignity, we are all Hizbullah now.”. Norman Finkelstein, Jewish
anti-Zionist.
That any human being could proclaim his support for a movement whose
goal is to annihilate all the world’s Jews must be shocking to the
normal observer. That a Jew could take this position seems all the
more astounding.
Yet Norman Finkelstein, university professor and best-selling author,
is by no means unique among Jews in his allegiances. His mentor, Noam
Chomsky, has publicly embraced the murderous Sheikh Nasrallah. In
fact, during the recent war, Chomsky was among several Jewish
signatories to an open letter offering “solidarity and support” to the
“resistance” in Lebanon and Palestine. meaning Hizbullah and Hamas.
And these pledges of loyalty to genocidal fanatics have become quite
common among Jews who distinguish themselves by their hatred for Israel.
How is it possible for any Jew to support those who seek the destruction
of his fellow Jews? This is the question that intrigued Edward Alexander
and myself as we compiled our book The Jewish Divide Over Israel.
Our contributors. including Cynthia Ozick, Alvin Rosenfeld, Menachem
Kellner, Jacob Neusner and Efraim Karsh. were all too aware of the
tragic history of Jewish anti-Semitism. We knew, for example, that
Martin Luther’s program of terrorizing Jews originated with a Jewish
convert, Johannes Pfefferkorn; and that the myth of the Jewish world-
conspiracy, which culminated in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was
assiduously promoted by a Russian Jewish author, Jacob Brafmann.
We suspected that as the Pfefferkorns and the Brafmanns departed the
stage, the Finkelsteins and the Chomskys made their entrance.
Today, as in the past, the conduct of Jews who despise their own
people spans the full spectrum of political depravity. There are
anti-Zionist Jews who peddle vicious libels about Israel. There are
anti-Zionist Jews who compare the Jewish state with Nazi Germany.
There are anti-Zionist Jews who support the PLO, Hamas or Hizbullah.
There are anti-Zionist Jews who collaborate with anti-Semites and
Holocaust deniers. There are anti-Zionist Jews who defend suicide
bombings, anti-Zionist Jews who support the destruction of Israel,
and. incredibly. there are even anti-Zionist Jews who advocate
measures against other Jews that could plausibly be described as
genocidal.
It is tempting to dismiss these views as a fringe phenomenon. But
not all of our targets identify with the radical left. The liberal Jewish
“critique” of Zionism is exemplified by the historian Tony Judt.
According to Judt’s now notorious outburst in The New York Review
of Books, Israel’s ruling elite is “fascist” because it once considered
killing the terrorist murderer Yasir Arafat, and its scurity fence
(intended to forestall the entry of terrorists into a free country) bears
comparison with the Berlin Wall (designed to prevent the escape of
unarmed civilians from a communist dictatorship).
Worse still, Judt maintains, the nefarious Zionists have convinced America
to destabilize the Middle East for the sole benefit of Israel, thus
“alienating”
its hitherto devoted allies in Syria and Iran. Such is the Jewish stranglehold
on public opinion, says Judt, that Americans “censoriously rebuke” anyone
who speaks out, shamelessly charging the dissidents with anti-Semitism.
Fortunately for Judt, the international Zionist conspiracy was unable to
prevent the publication of his thoughtful disquisition on the role of Israeli
“fascists” in propelling America to war against the entire Middle East for the
purpose of defending a Hebrew-speaking version of communist East Germany.
Perhaps the most revealing aspect of Judt’s essay was his rationale for
abolishing the freest country in the Middle East. “Today,” he wrote, “non-
Israeli Jews feel themselves once again exposed to criticism and vulnerable
to attack for things they didn’t do,” and so Israel must disappear.
Thus the legitimacy of a Jewish state is determined by the attitudes of
anti-Semites: “Israel today is bad for the Jews.” Critics were not slow to
point out that the extinction of the Jewish state, along with its army,
might also turn out to be “bad for the Jews,” inasmuch as it would
endanger the lives of several million Israelis. To this rather important
objection, Judt gave a two-word response: “Things change.”
As this example suggests, one of the salient traits of today’s
anti-Zionists. especially the academics among them. is their
blatant intellectual dishonesty. British professor Jacqueline Rose,
in her book explaining why Israel should be wiped off the map,
concocts the claim that Herzl and Hitler were inspired by the same
Paris performance of Wagner’s music. Illan Pappe, a communist
historian at Haifa University, writes learned essays documenting a
fictitious Israeli massacre at the village of Tantura in 1948. Norman
Finkelstein has revived the old Soviet hoax that Israel was poised to
invade Syria before the 1967 war.
In these and countless other instances, the anti-Zionists are disciples
of Canadian philosopher Michael Neumann, author of The Case
Against Israel, who candidly informed a neo-Nazi website that he is
“not interested in the truth, or justice, or understanding,” unless it
serves the Palestinian cause.
Contempt for truth certainly characterizes another well-known anti-
Zionist trope, the belief that Israel is the reincarnation of the Third Reich.
Ever since the Israeli theologian Yeshayahu Leibowitz branded his
country “Judeo-Nazi,” the equation of the victims and the perpetrators
of the Holocaust has evolved into a malignant orthodoxy in opinion
pieces, editorial cartoons, effete dinner discussions and Jew-baiting
websites. The reason for its appeal – and for the popularity of alienated
Jews who espouse it. is transparent: anyone who convinces himself
that the horrors of Nazism have been reborn in its victims can invoke
the fate of the dead Jews to justify his hatred of living Jews. Anti-Zionists –
always quick to provide an alibi for anti-Semites. are well aware of that fact.
So it is that Noam Chomsky can compare Israel’s wars of self-defense
with “Hitler’s moves to bunt the Czech dagger pointed at the heart of
Germany Hitler’s conceptions have struck a responsive chord in
current Zionist commentary.”
And so it is that Norman Finkelstein can avow that Jewish supporters
of Israel are actually worse than the perpetrators of the Holocaust: “the
Germans,” he writes, “could point in extenuation to the severity of penalties
for speaking out against the crimes of state. What excuse do we have?”
Perhaps he aspires to compete with the late Israel Shahak. for years
a fixture on the PLO lecture circuit. who revealed to the world that
“there are Nazi-like tendencies in Judaism.”
But even these worthies would find it hard to outdo the London-based
Gilad Atzmon, who recently imparted this insight: “To regard Hitler as
the ultimate evil is nothing but surrendering to the Ziocentric discourse
[Israel’s] vulgar biblical barbarism on the verge of cannibalism is
wickedness with no comparison.” Atzmon is heavily promoted by
radical leftists on both sides of the Atlantic.
Although they lose no opportunity to equate their fellow Jews with
Nazis, anti-Zionists readily lend a helping hand to actual Nazis. At
one time the ne plus ultra of Jewish collaboration with anti-Semites
was the infamous Alfred Lilienthal, who insisted that the Diary of
Anne Frank was a fake. Then the baton passed to Noam Chomsky,
who explicitly praised Holocaust deniers, allowed them to publish his
books and essays, collaborated in their propaganda campaigns, and
defended his performance with the memorable observation that he saw
“no anti-Semitic implications in denial of the existence of gas chambers.”
Nowadays the committed neo-Nazi will find anti-Zionist Jews falling
over themselves to assist him. Paul Eisen, of the PLO front group
Deir Yassin Remembered, has openly defended Ernst Zundel, now on
trial in Germany for his neo-Nazi activities. Neve Gordon, the Israeli
professor who sued his critic Steven Plaut in a blatant attempt to
silence him, has not called in the lawyers to remove his own articles
from Zundel’s website. And the anti-Zionist journalist Shraga Elam
went to the trouble of writing to David Irving in order to share his belief
that “Hitler was no part of the project Auschwitz.”
One does not need the wisdom of Solomon to detect in the
aforementioned individuals acer tain lack of charity in the Jewish
direction. Even so, it is astonishing to discover the sheer virulence
of their opinions about their fellow Jews.
Noam Chomsky tells packed audiences that “Jews in the U.S. are
the most privileged and influential part of the population,” adding that
“privileged people want to make sure they have total control, not just
98% control.”
In Michael Lerner’s journal Tikkun, which advertises itself as the
guardian of the authentic Jewish conscience, we read of Jewish
“conspirators” who run America on behalf of “Jewish interests” –
evidence of the “industrial sized grain of truth” in the Protocols of
the Elders of Zion.
And even this does not go far enough for Norman Finkelstein, who
blames Holocaust compensation programs on “Jewish leaders carrying
on like caricatures straight from the pages of Der Stuermer.” Is it
surprising that Finkelstein’s books and essays are reproduced on
neo-Nazi websites all over the Internet, or that Holocaust deniers
celebrate him as “the Jewish David Irving”?
From collaboraton with anti-Semites and propagation of anti-Semitism,
it is only a short step to glorifying the murder of Jews. Many anti-
Zionists are happy to take that step. For Jacqueline Rose, suicide
bombing is “an act of passionate identification” that creates an
“unbearable intimacy shared in their final moments by the suicide
bomber and her or his victims.”
Safe in her London lecture theater, Rose does not tell us whether the
“intimacy” would be heightened if the jihadists were to succeed in
their periodic attempts to blow up an Israeli skyscraper.
Another left-wing British Jew, Mark Elf, draws a subtle distinction:
“To be rid of an Arab presence is to engage in ethnic cleansing. To
be rid of a Zionist presence is to be rid of those who would engage
in, or excuse, ethnic cleansing.” His comrades translate these
principles into action: Jewish members of the International
Solidarity Movement travel to Israel in order to facilitate “the armed
struggle” for the “liberation of Palestine” – a struggle whose
realities can be seen in the burning corpses and severed limbs of
their co-religionists.
Occasionally, the bloodlust of Jewish Israel-haters provokes unease:
Gilad Atzmon did raise eyebrows when he suggested that the burning
of synagogues was “a rational act.” But the effect is short-lived. I recall
no particular commotion when the prominent Israeli philosopher Adi
Ophir contemplated the bombing of his countrymen by NATO.
It must be noted, with all due caution, that some anti-Zionists appear
to harbor genocidal intentions toward their fellow Jews. Decades ago
Arie Bober, leader of the Israeli communist Matzpen party, boasted
of his support for an “Arab revolution” that would either split the
Jewish workers from Zionism or slaughter three million Israelis in
“another Holocaust.” Today we can detect similar ideas in the
writings of Norman Finkelstein, who has invoked the destruction of
Japanese cities in World War II as precedent for holding the Israeli
people “accountable for the crimes of the Israeli state”; he also
regards hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers, including pregnant
women and helpless invalids, as “legitimate targets for armed resistance.”
In conversation with a neo-Nazi website, Michael Neumann was equally
blunt: “If an effective strategy [for fighting Israel] means that some
truths about the Jews don’t come to light, I don’t care. If an effective
strategy means encouraging reasonable anti-Semitism, or reasonable
hostility to Jews, I also don’t care. If it means encouraging vicious,
racist anti-Semitism, or the destruction of the state of Israel, I still don’t
care.”
Recall that these are not the ravings of drunken skinheads in Germany
or jihadist preachers in Saudi Arabia, but of salaried professors teaching
at North American universities.
Sometimes the murderous impulses of Jewish radicals are quite
independent of Arab-Israeli disputes, however broadly defined.
According to Israel Shahak, even the proto-Hitlerian Chmielnicki
massacres in Eastern Europe are not beyond the bounds of
justification: after all, is it really fair that “an enslaved peasant
is transformed into a racist monster, if Jews profited from his state
of slavery and exploitation”?
Competing in his genocidal frenzy was the Israeli leftist Yigal
Tumarkin, a founder of Peace Now, who disclosed: “When I see the
black-coated haredim with the children they spawn, I can understand
the Holocaust.”
And if these outpourings seem to be the products of deranged minds,
let us not forget that even the impeccably liberal Tony Judt displays
a striking indifference to the practical consequences of his proposals
for the people of Israel. For Professor Judt, and for other advocates of
the “one-state solution,” it is perfectly acceptable to leave millions of
Jews helpless before the armies and suicide bombers of the Middle
East (“Things change”), just so long as faculty dinners and cocktail
parties are no longer spoiled by the latest controversy over Israeli
military tactics.
Such re the ideas exposed to the light of day in The Jewish Divide
Over Israel. Our book’s contributors. who range from left-wing
supporters of Peace Now to right-wing advocates of peace through
strength. are united around one principle: whatever their views on
the future of Israel, they maintain that the Jewish homeland no more
deserves to become a provisional country whose “right to exist” is
the subject of legitimate discussion than the Jewish people deserve
to be a pariah nation whose survival is conditional on the approval
of anti-Semites.
In repudiating the Israel-haters in our ranks, we affirm not only our
solidarity with embattled Israeli Jews, but also our own basic
self-respect.
Paul Bogdanor is co-editor, with Edward Alexander, of “The Jewish
Divide Over Israel: Accusers and Defenders” (Transaction, 2006).