The new antisemitism, which execrates Israel as the collective Jew among the nations, has attained such global reach that expressions of malice against the Jew-Zionist are now commonplace. Even to the more hardened among us, the virulence can still come as a shock, especially when the slurs emerge from a university or civic organization that once had claim to being a bulwark against hatred.
A small yet ugly example comes from the University at Buffalo. It begins as an article by a professor and self-professed peace activist. It spreads from there to neo-Nazi, conspiracy-theorist, terrorist and radical anti-capitalist web sites around the world. The upshot is the remarkable coincidence of interest across varied transnational fanaticisms in slanderous attacks on the Jew. [1] The further factor is the role of a peace group, or of some of its leaders, in fanning the flames of militant hatred.
The Background
The article in question was written by James Holstun and Irene Morrison. Holstun is a professor of English at the university and member of the board of directors of the Western New York Peace Center. Morrison describes herself as a recent college graduate and assistant to the director of the same peace group. The one against whom their tirade is ostensibly directed is Effie Eitam, an Israeli brigadier general and leader of a minor Israeli religious party, though as we shall see Eitam is actually meant as a personification of, or proxy for, Jewish/Zionist Evil.
In Israel, Eitam is considered a hero of several military engagements since 1973 including the rescue of Jewish hostages at Entebbe in Uganda. He is also known within the Israeli political spectrum for extreme viewpoints and a brusque, threatening manner. He has condoned the threat that, under total war against Israel, Israel would expel disloyal Israeli Arab citizens (or reduce some of their electoral rights) and West Bank Arabs.
Some of his threats appear in an interview in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in March 2002. It was the height of the “Second Intifada,” during which the Palestinian terrorist groups Al Aqsa, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and PLFP separately or jointly carried out repeated attacks against civilian targets. Targets just in that month included a yeshiva, two cafes, a restaurant, two hotels, three public buses, a supermarket, and a medical center. The tolls ranged from a few injuries in one instance to 30 deaths plus 140 injuries in Hamas’s massacre of Passover celebrants in a Netanya hotel.
Eitam states that his warning does not refer to the particular crisis going on while he was speaking. “The State of Israel will not force individuals to change their location. People who live in Judea and Samaria will live there and neither they nor their land nor their homes will be touched.” He, continues, however, that “if a total war is forced on us, a zero-sum war, the result could be that there will be a similar Sheikh Munis [a former Arab village, now a suburb of Tel Aviv] somewhere else, too. I want to emphasize: I would not want that to happen. I see that as a bad and bitter result. I am not winking and not hinting. On the contrary, I am proposing a regional solution to prevent that.”
He is reported to have made another threat during a funeral oration for a fallen Israeli soldier during the Hizbullah bombing of northern Israel in 2006. Israelis protecting their children in bomb shelters were disturbed to see broadcasts of some of the country’s Arab citizens publicly celebrating the bombings. Three Arab members of Israel’s parliament traveled to Damascus to express support for the attacks. Eitam warned that a fifth column was emerging in Israel and would have to be dealt with. Israel being a democratic country with a vibrant free press, Eitam was also roundly condemned in the press for implied threats against civilians. Eitam has denied having made some of the statements or said they were distorted.
Distortions and Slurs
Soon after Eitam spoke in Buffalo in November 2009, Holstun and Morrison published their article in the internet blog Electronic Intifada. For traditional pacifists, this might already seem an odd choice, as “intifada” refers to a violent movement that frequently targeted civilians. The Second Intifada took off at the very peak of Israel’s initiative to exchange land for peace in the year 2000. Seen by many Israelis as a catastrophic betrayal of the region’s highest hopes, the intifada crushed the possibilities for peace for a generation.
The tenor of the article comes through in the very first line: “Eitam was only following orders when he told his troops to beat Ayyad Aqel in 1988.” Aqel was one of a group of detainees brutally abused by four Israeli soldiers in Gaza that year. Some received bodily injuries which may or may not have included broken bones and one, perhaps two-there are conflicting reports-died. Four Israeli soldiers were court-martialed and sentenced under Israeli military law to terms of imprisonment.
The soldiers’ defense attorney alleged Effie Eitam had instigated the abuse. Holstun and Morrison accept the allegations against Eitam at face value. Relying on the Guardian, a paper well known for its anti-Israel bias, the authors further allege that at some time during Yitzhak Rabin’s administration, Prime Minister Rabin had use the phrase “break their bones” in reference to violent Palestinians. That supposedly gave official sanction for the abuse of detainees. It is with that background that we have to understand the article’s first sentence that Eitam was “only following orders.”
Weaving together biased reporting, the accusations of the advocate for one side in a court case, and innuendo about the Israeli prime minister-and ignoring their own evidence that Israel convicted the soldiers on the grounds that they had disobeyed orders-the authors climb to the high rung of contemporary Jew-baiting: accuse the Jew of being a Nazi.
The Jew-as-Nazi theme also drives the authors’ selections from the Haaretz interview. As part of a long give-and-take, Eitam is asked what the world would be without Jews. To someone who appreciates Jewish history, the question will be understood to allude to the hypothetical elimination of Israel in a second Holocaust.
Eitam answers “A dead world. Without Jews the world cannot live. A world without Jews is a world of robots without a soul. A dead world.” He goes on to suggest that Noah’s ark symbolizes Israel’s role in spiritually safeguarding the world and likens Israel to the world’s heart. Take or leave the mysticism (rare in Israeli public discourse, it readily places him at the country’s political fringe), Eitam does also bring out the more coherent idea that, if there is a repeat of the Holocaust, the world will have lost its soul.
Holstun and Morrison misrepresent the quote. They omit the question that Eitam is answering, cutting out the context. In the authors’ rewriting, Eitam believes that “Nations other than Israel are a ‘world of robots without souls.’” So it is that an obscure statement by a military man, made in a culture in which heated debate is common, then translated into English possibly by an unsympathetic Haaretz translator, then pulled out of context, with multiple clauses clipped down to a few words, can be presented as an exemplar of Zionist perfidy.
In so distorting the speaker, Holstun and Morrison perpetuate one of the most infamous antisemitic slurs. It is the one that has made its way through history from medieval deicide accusations, past czarist pogroms, through Nazi race hatred, into the present: the allegation that the Jew considers non-Jews to be subhuman and therefore has no compunction in killing them.
“I am saying,” Eitam continues in the Haaretz interview, “that the Israeli Arabs are in large measure the ticking bomb beneath the whole democratic Israeli order inside the [1967] Green Line…. Therefore, I say that the State of Israel today faces an existential threat that is characterized by being an elusive threat, and elusive threats by their nature resemble cancer. Cancer is a type of illness in which most of the people who die from it die because they were diagnosed too late. By the time you grasp the size of the threat, it is already too late to deal with it.” In context, he uses cancer as a metaphor for a slow-growing threat. Whatever Eitam’s other sins, he does not use the term as an ethnic insult.
Not so in Holstun and Morrison’s version: “Eitam called Palestinian citizens of Israel a ‘ticking bomb’ and a ‘cancer.’” The purpose here as before is transparent: to use Eitam to personify Israeli racist evil. So it is that propagandists turn history on its head. It is not the xenophobic Arab armies, seekers after a global Caliphate, and miscellaneous terror groups who want to exterminate the Jewish outpost in Middle East. It’s the Israeli who is the racist, the Jew who is the Nazi.
Anyone who has lived in Israel and has a smattering of Hebrew quickly discovers that this little country’s political speech tends to the hyperbolic. Israeli papers operate within a political hothouse. There are days on end when Israel operates on 24/7 crisis mode and even the most ordinary person’s thoughts turn on minute-by-minute news accounts of death and danger. An Israeli never escapes the knowledge that the worst is all too easily conceivable: that, sooner or later, once Israel’s enemies are sufficiently coordinated, and well enough equipped with missiles and troops and attackers who strap bombs under their clothes, they will give one more college try to exterminating the Jews.
An interpretation of Israeli political speech rarely has fidelity if it ignores that context. That being said, Eitam still comes across as a militant, one who is loose with words that others find threatening. There is also a paranoid, apocalyptic element to his thought. But, as the old saw goes, it is not paranoia if they are really out to get you.
Not that there is much point in giving this context. It would make sense to discuss modes of literary interpretation only if Holstun and Morrison had made a sincere attempt to characterize the man. But that is far from what their article does. It permutes and distorts a man’s words for one noxious purpose, to make them epitomize a whole society; it cobbles together a monster through which to personify a people. In the course of the article, Tzippi Livni, Yitzhak Rabin, and Israel itself are casually tarred with the same brush. And web pages around the world have understood the Holstun-Morrison article in just that racist way.
Slurs Spread through the Network
The website Desert Peace, which presents itself as part of the peace movement, is among the dozens that reproduced the article. One can get a sense of what the site is about through the other web pages it links to, including that of Carlos Latuff, the second place winner in the Iranian Holocaust Denial cartoon competition. In the Desert Peace version of Holstun-Morrison, the introductory title “The Thugs that Run Israel Today” overtly pushes the idea that Eitam-types run Israel. The subtitle articulates the blood libel already implicit in the article: “With rabbinical sanctions to kill every man, woman and child in Israel that is ‘not of the faith’, it’s no wonder that there are idiots that follow them.”
Typically for such blogs, there is room at the end for comments by readers. As anyone who has spent time trolling in internet sewers will anticipate, the commentators readily pick up and amplify ugly talk. Typical comments, often the sole comments, are replicated below. They are not cherry-picked, as readers who can stomach it can check for themselves. In Desert Peace, two commentators (presented here with the original punctuation) draw conclusions about Israelis or Jews:
- “Sometimes I wish that one of these pigs would die and come back to life. I’m sure they would have a whole lot to say to the rest of such pigs about the nice hot place they were in.”
- “devils in human form, i can not think of zionist jews of anything but!!”
Reprinting the same article, the pro-Saddam Hussein website Uruknet prompts these comments:
- “’Jews’ entered into the lands of the Canaan and began an ethnic cleansing program after leaving Egypt….Do these people even have an idea of their own rather than their racist ethnic cleansing / genocides ?? Answer ‘NO.’”
- “yiddish thuggery,” the next commentator insists, uses the Israeli flag “as a black magic protection symbol so that israeli can continue in its evil ways.”
In palestinian.ning.com the Holstun-Morrison article is given the preface “It is permitted to kill non-Jews, and even babies.” A follow-up article by Khalid Amayreh accuses rabbis of glorifying the murders of non-Jewish children and states that such views “according to Jewish religious law (halacha) are widely looked at as representing the mainstream not the exception in Israel.”
The one-time Soviet organ Pravda still exists and, as a cursory look reveals, now gives much prominence to Neo-Nazi op-eds. It, too, has posted the Holstun-Morrison piece on its English language forum. Of the two comments the article inspires, the first makes just a short statement about Jews and the second goes on at length:
- “These aren’t people, they are disgusting parasitic slime.”
- “They are the biggest liars on the face of this Earth,” begins the second, which has to be paraphrased to conserve space. They collaborated with the Nazis, it seems, to fight against the resistance, and then went to Germany to help them build weapons and, after helping the Nazis, 3.5 million of them had the temerity to claim they were actually victims of the Nazis, so they could get reparations. “My favourite is Simon Wiesenthal,” the commentator continues, “who told so many lies that it would take half a century to analyze them all. The fact is Simon was a gestapo agent…”
The version in Political Theatrics elicits notable comments on Jews. The “fiend” referred to in the second comment is Eitam:
- “It is time Israel repay those “reparations” they have been collecting since WWII.
After all, why should Israel be compensated for what they PRACTICE today?
The Nazis were only following the Jewish ‘Ethical Code’.” - “BTW, you noticed [t]his FIEND mentions only:”heads” NOT hearts! That’s because the Chosen Tribe of the Psycho Jehovah, have NO Heart OR SOUL! They are NOT Human – but SOul-less Noh-Humans!”
The New World Order Daily reprints the piece and labels Eitam a rabbi wanting to kill off Arabs. The site explains that “There is a worldwide conspiracy being orchestrated by an extremely powerful and influential group of genetically-related individuals (at least at the highest echelons) which include many of the world’s wealthiest people, top political leaders, and corporate elite, as well as members of the so-called Black Nobility of Europe…” They’re connected to the illuminati, we later learn. The italic is in the original.
A bizarre site called proxywhore.com also reproduces Holstun-Morrison article. Commentators conclude from it that Jews are plotting to rebuild the temple to make way for the Antichrist. And it is hardly surprising that Holstun and Morrison, leaders of a Buffalo peace group, are also featured by the Al Qassam Brigades, which describes itself as the armed wing of Hamas.
The Convergence of Fanaticisms
Eitam is no innocent in this story. I have not found enough to draw a conclusion on the allegations made against him about military abuses, but it is clear enough that he engages in threatening and offensive speech. His words will readily be seen as a threat by loyal Arab citizens of Israel and by the courageous minority of Palestinian nationalists (who must express their views anonymously for fear of retribution by violent compatriots) who admire Israel’s democratic institutions, want to build their own democratic state, and want to live in peace with their neighbor. It is a fundamental Jewish injunction that one must avoid lashon hara’a, evil language.
However, if any one profession does have an excuse for rough and ugly talk, it is the military man, especially during armed conflict, since intense emotion is inevitable, and threats and warnings may be part of the arsenal. Peace activists have no such excuse. When a military man’s speech is offensive, he may also lay claim to the benefit of the doubt, since speech is not his vocation. But literary scholars do have speech as their vocation.
In a broadcast speech in Damascus in 2005, the American Nazi David Duke gave his support to Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad, condemned Zionist occupation of America and said that “Judaism at its core – is a racist religion, a supremacist religion, and non-Jews are considered not even of human caliber.” It is in the nature of contemporary transnational fanaticism, as expressed by the article examined here, that self-described pacifist-progressives are spreading the same kind of libel.
For the Western New York Peace Center, this is far from being the only instance. In 2005, the group sponsored a talk on the Buffalo campus by Norman Finkelstein, a frequent trafficker in Jew-is-Nazi currency. He claimed that Jews had concocted 2000 books on the Holocaust after 1967 so as to justify the oppression of Palestinians; that authors including Elie Wiesel and Simon Wiesenthal did so, as one would expect of Jews, also to make money; and that Israelis were out to turn themselves into an Aryan race. The sponsors of this and other anti-Israel events in Buffalo are the same ones who put posters on their lawns declaring “Peace begins with me” and run summer camps in Buffalo to teach children how to become “peace makers.”
Through the small lens of this Buffalo peace group, we can see the emergence of a new 21st century type, a new man. He is the bizzarro pacifist-the intifada groupie-who foments militancy under the guise of pacifism and bigotry through multicultural clichés. Or he is the politicized academic operator whose literary theory serves as a veneer for visceral hatred.
[1]I expand on this theme in the article “Purifying the World: What the New Radical Ideology Stands For,” Orbis Winter 2010, pp. 61-86
Ernest Sternberg is a professor at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, and chairs the campus chapter of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and serves on the SPME Board of Directors.
