The Meaning of  Criticism

1. “Critics of Israeli Policy” or Apologists for Ahmadinejad?

   A  2009 addition[i] to the ever-burgeoning genre of books instructing Israel on the most suitable method (one-state solution, no-state solution, final solution) of ceasing to exist was adorned by a blurb from Noam Chomsky: “Constance Hilliard raises very critical issues…and unless those who call themselves ‘supporters of Israel’ are willing to face these moral and geopolitical realities, they may in reality be supporters of Israel’s moral degeneration and ultimate destruction.” It is a commonplace that the moral passions are far more imperious and impatient than the self-seeking ones, and who could have a stronger sense of his moral rectitude than a man who has been an apologist for Pol Pot in Cambodia . a collaborator with neo-Nazi Holocaust-deniers in France, and  with antisemitism-deniers everywhere? “Antisemitism,” Chomsky  has declared, ” is  no longer a problem, fortunately. It’s raised, but it’s raised because privileged people want to make sure they have total control, not just 98 % control; That’s why anti-Semitism is becoming an issue…”[ii] Beautiful and touching words, but words by no means unusual in the parlance of those who deem Israel uniquely evil  and, with help from its “supporters,” responsible for the unredeemed state of mankind, perhaps even for global warming .  (Clare Short, a member of  Tony Blair’s cabinet until 2003, charged that Israel  is “much worse than the original apartheid state” because  it “undermines the international community’s reaction to global warming.”)

     Chomsky  is generally (and mistakenly) identified as “a critic of Israel.” But he is by no means the only beneficiary of the flagrantly euphemistic redefinition of “criticism” where Israel and its numerous enemies are concerned. Examples abound. A Vassar professor (writing in Judaism Magazine, no less) refers to Intifada II, in the course of which Palestinian Arab suicide bombers, pogromists, and lynch mobs slaughtered over a thousand people (most of them Israeli Jews) and wounded thousands more, as “a critique of Zionism.”[iii] A Panglossian writer in the Chronicle of Higher Education assures readers that “calls to destroy Israel, or to throw it into the Mediterranean Sea…are not evidence of hatred of Jews,” but merely “reflect a quarrel with the State of Israel.”[iv] Some critique, some quarrel! When questions were raised in November 2003 about the indecency of Harvard and Columbia honoring and playing host to  Oxford poetaster, blood libel subscriber, and London Review of Books regular Tom Paulin after he had urged that Jews living in Judea/Samaria “should be shot dead” and announced that he “never believed that Israel had the right to exist at all,” his apologists in Cambridge and Morningside Heights defended his right “to criticize Israeli policy.”[v] But the prize for redefinition of the term “criticism” where Israel and Jews are its object should probably go to the Swedish Chancellor of Justice  (Goran Lambertz)  who in 2006 ruled that repeated calls from the Grand Mosque of Stockholm to “Kill the Jews” by dispatching suicide bombers to Israel and other Jewish population centers were  not unlawful racial incitement to murder. Rather, ruled this Swedish Solomon, they “should be judged differently and therefore be regarded as permissible because, although highly critical of the Jews,  they were used by one side in an ongoing and far-reaching conflict where calls to arms and insults are part of the everyday climate in the rhetoric that surrounds it. “[vi]

       Just what, then, does “criticism” mean? The Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold defined criticism (by which term he did not mean merely literary criticism) as “the attempt to see the object as in itself it really is.” [vii] Writing in 1865, he believed he was still living in the shadow of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror, but also in the new age of science. He wanted criticism  to model itself on the disinterested observation of  science and not the fierce political partisanship that derived from  the Revolution: like science, criticism should espouse no party and no cause, except the cause of truth. Its proper aim is to see the object as it really is, not to destroy the object. Dickens, a few years earlier in Tale of Two Cities (1859) had encapsulated the murderous aspect  of French politicide by mocking its two favorite slogans: “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity—or Death” and (Chamfort’s version) “Sois Mon Frere, ou Je Te Tue.” (Be my brother, or I’ll kill you.)

    The “critics of Israel” who deny its “right to exist” and threaten it with destruction if it fails to dance to their tune may be  dishonest, despicable, consumed with blood-lust; but let us not deny them their triumph. In the war of ideas, they have beaten us at almost every turn; and by “us” I mean those for whom the foundation of Israel was one of the (few) redeeming acts of a blood-soaked and shameful century. A widely-publicized 2007 BBC  poll of 28,000 people in 27 countries shows Israel as “least-liked” country in the entire world, and,  among Europeans polled, most disliked in Germany; yes, in the very country where the Jews’ “right to live” was once a popular topic,  Israel-haters outpolled Israel-admirers by 77% to 10%. And still greater triumphs than those in the war for public opinion may yet await these “critics.” Their threats to Israel are not idle ones.  On their own, the Chomskys and Paulins and Norman Finkelsteins and Tony Judts and Alexander Cockburns cannot visit upon Israel the terrible fate  they think it deserves; but they know they have a powerful ally named Iran, under the leadership of someone bent not merely, like the “critics,” on politicide but on genocide; someone who daily promises to “remove Israel from the map” with nuclear weapons and watches with glee as the international noose tightens around Israel’s throat and the umbrellas go up in Europe and Washington.

2. Should Liberals be Exempt from Criticism?

   Linked, however absurdly, with the question of  whether “criticism” comprises not merely the effort to see an object as it really is but also the exhortation to destroy it, has, for several decades, been another question. Should  liberals or “progressives”  themselves be exempt from criticism when they “criticize” Israel (and its supporters) in a manner that draws heavily upon the centuries-old canards of antisemitism., flagrant and blatant calumnies, licentious equations, and the premise that the world’s only Jewish state is also the only state in the world guilty by its very existence.

   As long ago as 1950, in The Liberal Imagination, Lionel Trilling had called attention to what he called the “conformity of dissent’ among liberals, a conformity bolstered by the quaint premise that liberals should not only have the right to go their own way, but to do so without any questions ever being asked of them.  This premise, insofar as it pertained to the relentless assault on Israel by self-styled “progressives,” became the subject of  heated dispute in 2006 following publication of a booklet by Alvin Rosenfeld called “‘Progressive’ Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism.”[viii] It recounted the varied attempts by Jewish progressives (Rosenfeld studiously avoided the term “liberal”) to depict Israel as the epitome of apartheid, the one genuine inheritor of Nazism, evil incarnate. The booklet was widely and furiously attacked, by Jews and Gentiles, for trying to “silence critics of Israel by calling them antisemitic.” These critics (defamers might be a better word) were soon repeating, as if by rote, the charge that Rosenfeld was  trying to “silence” them by pointing out  the  licentious character of their equations between Israel and apartheid South Africa or Nazi Germany. But how  was his criticism  a threat to free speech or a strategy for closing down debate on the Middle East conflict? So pervasive was the bizarre notion that entering a debate is equivalent to trying to shut it down—Rosenfeld called it a “scam”—that I myself, offering to reply to a Jerusalem Post broadside against Rosenfeld by a Columbia University journalism professor named Freedman, was scolded by the Post’s opinion editor,  Elliot Jager, as follows: “Why would you want to argue in favor of censorship?”

     Bernard Harrison, whose study of the resurgence of antisemitism  is discussed elsewhere in this book, then took up the cudgels in a defense of Rosenfeld which he entitled “Israel, Anti-Semitism, and Free Speech.” He asks how, exactly, does the “forensic  sophism, the dialectical scam,” whereby people like John Judis, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer,  Jimmy Carter, Tony Judt,  and George Soros turn a debate about Israel into one about free speech work? In reply, he offers a classic definition: “One advances some ‘anti-Zionist’ thesis out of the ‘Nazi analogy’ box—some defamatory thesis, call it Td, which would be hard to make stick by normal processes of argument—while at the same time suggesting in an undertone that more people would be prepared to say ‘these things’ if they were not so afraid of the Israel Lobby. Up pops some Jew, preferably a distinguished one, right on schedule, to point out…that Td is defamatory and stinks of anti-Semitism. This gives the author of the proposition exactly what he was after in the first place: namely, empirical evidence that there is indeed a Jewish Conspiracy to suppress ‘the truth’ about Israel. The press raises a hue and cry and, like a pack of hounds diverted from the scent by a trailed sack of aniseed, hares off on this new tack. The debate is turned from one about Israel into one about free speech, and Td, the original bit of defamation that started it all, doesn’t have to be defended after all. Game, set, and match to the ‘anti-Zionist.'”[ix]

   Just how, asks Harrison, does the “silencing”, if it existed at all, of such (very audible) figures as George Soros, Jimmy Carter, and the Walt-Mearsheimer duo work?  Would the London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, CNN, BBC, and National Public Radio suddenly fold their hitherto welcoming arms to Israel’s manifold accusers? The question has only to be asked for the absurdity of its premise to be revealed. To put the absurdity in its proper perspective, let us conclude with a statement about being “silenced” by a writer who understand what that meant. In 1932 Isaac  Babel published his Red Cavalry stories to considerable acclaim; but he soon came under attack  by the Soviet literary bureaucracy and stopped writing. In 1934 he spoke at the first Soviet Writer’s Congress, where he announced that he was practicing a new literary genre, of which he proclaimed himself the master: “I am the master of the genre of silence.” In 1937 Babel was arrested; he died in a concentration camp  in 1939 or 1940. That is what it really means for a writer to be silenced.

Edward Alexander’s new Book, THE STATE OF THE JEWS: A Critical Appraisal (NJ, Transaction Publishers,), is scheduled to appear in May.