Goodbye to all that

Antisemitism today is a genuine problem. It is also an illusory problem. The distinction between the two is one of those contemporary issues that most divides Europe from the US. The overwhelming majority of Europeans abhors recent attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions and takes them very seriously. But it is generally recognised in Europe that these attacks are the product of local circumstances and are closely tied to contemporary political developments in Europe and the middle east. Thus the increase in anti-Jewish incidents in France or Belgium is correctly attributed to young men, frequently of Muslim or Arab background: the children or grandchildren of immigrants. This is a new and disconcerting challenge and it is far from clear how it should be addressed, beyond the provision of increased police protection. But it is not, as they say, "your grandfather's antisemitism."

As seen from the US, however, Europe—especially "old" or western Europe—is in the grip of recidivism: reverting to type, as it were. Rockwell Schnabel, the US ambassador to the EU, recently spoke of antisemitism in Europe "getting to a point where it is as bad as it was in the 1930s." George Will, a prominent columnist in the Washington Post, wrote in May 2002 that antisemitism among Europeans "has become the second—and final?—phase of the struggle for a 'final solution to the Jewish question.'" These are not isolated instances: among American elites as well as in the population at large, it is widely assumed that Europe, having learned nothing from its past, is once again awash in the old antisemitism.

The American view clearly reflects an exaggerated anxiety. The problem of antisemitism in Europe today is real, but it needs to be kept in proportion. According to America's Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which has worked harder than anyone to propagate the image of rampant European antisemitism, there were 22 significant antisemitic incidents in France in April 2002, and a further seven in Belgium; for the whole of that year the ADL catalogued 193 such incidents in France, varying from antisemitic graffiti on Jewish-owned shops in Marseille to Molotov cocktails thrown at synagogues in Paris, Lyon and elsewhere.



But the same ADL reported 60 antisemitic incidents on US college campuses alone in 1999. Measured by everything from graffiti to violent assaults, antisemitism has indeed been on the increase in some European countries in recent years; but then so it has in America too. The ADL recorded 1,606 antisemitic incidents in the US in 2000, up from 900 in 1986. Even if antisemitic aggression in France, Belgium, and elsewhere in Europe has been grievously underreported, there is no evidence to suggest it is more widespread in Europe than America.

As for expressions of antisemitic opinion, evidence from the EU's Eurobarometer polls, the French polling service Sofres and the ADL's own surveys all point in the same direction. There is today in many European countries, as in the US, a greater tolerance for mild verbal antisemitism than in the past, as well as a continuing propensity to believe long-standing stereotypes about Jews: that they have a disproportionate influence in economic life and so on. But the same polls confirm that young people all over Europe are much less tolerant of prejudice than their parents were. Among (non-Muslim) French youth, antisemitic sentiment is now negligible. An overwhelming majority of young people questioned in France in January 2002 believed that we should speak more, not less, of the Holocaust; and nearly nine out of ten of them agreed that attacks on synagogues were "scandalous." These figures are broadly comparable to results from surveys taken in the US.

The one thing on which European and American commentators can agree is that there is a link between hostility to Jews and events in the middle east. But they draw diametrically opposed conclusions as to the meaning of this link. It is increasingly clear to observers in France, for example, that assaults on Jews in working-class suburbs of big cities are typically driven by frustration and anger at the government of Israel; Jews and Jewish institutions are a convenient and vulnerable local surrogate. Moreover, the rhetorical armoury of traditional European antisemitism, such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Jews' supposed economic power and conspiratorial networks, even blood libels—has been pressed into service by the media in Damascus, Cairo and elsewhere. Thanks to satellite television, anti-Jewish images and myths can now spread with ease across the youthful Arab diaspora.

But whereas most Europeans believe that the problem originates in the middle east and must therefore be addressed there, the ADL and many American commentators believe that there is no longer any difference between being "against" Israel and "against" Jews. So in Europe, it is suggested, anti-Zionism and antisemitism have become synonymous. But that is palpably false. The highest level of pro-Palestinian sympathy in Europe today is recorded in Denmark, a country which also registers as one of the least antisemitic by the ADL's own criteria. Another country with a high and increasing level of support for the Arabs of Palestine is the Netherlands, yet the Dutch have the lowest antisemitic "quotient" in Europe, and in opinion polls they consistently describe themselves as "worried" about the possible rise of antisemitism.

In other words, some of the most widespread pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist views are to be found in countries that have long been—and still are—decidedly philosemitic. And there is quite a lot of evidence that Europeans are better than Americans at distinguishing criticism of Israel from dislike of Jews. Thus although Europeans are more likely to blame Israel than Palestinians for the present morass in the middle east, they do so only by a ratio of 27:20. Americans, by contrast, blame Palestinians rather than Israel by 42:17. At the very minimum, this suggests that European responses are considerably more balanced.

Europeans are also better placed to appreciate that old-style European antisemites were—and are—frequently quite sympathetic to Israel, and the worse Israel behaves, the fonder they become. Thus the French Front National leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, in an interview in the Israeli daily Ha'aretz in April 2002, said he understood Ariel Sharon's policies—comparable in his opinion to France's anti-terrorist practices in Algeria.

One source of American anxiety and confusion is the unstinting support given by the US to Israel ($3bn per annum and uncritical backing for all its actions), and the ensuing sentiment among many Americans that since mainstream criticism of Israel is close to impermissible, anti-Zionist opinions must be antisemitic in origin. Indeed, the gap separating Europeans from Americans on the question of Israel and the Palestinians is one of the biggest impediments to transatlantic understanding today.

This gulf is well illustrated in a recent essay by Omer Bartov, professor of European history at Brown University. In a discussion of contemporary antisemitism published last January in the New Republic, Bartov argued that just as the world failed to take Hitler at his word in the 1930s, so we are underestimating the revival of similarly virulent antisemitism whose consequences might prove comparably devastating. The message was that if anti-Zionism is a camouflage for antisemitism (and Bartov thinks it often is), then we should call it by its real name and combat it as such. In Europe it has become politically correct, Bartov says, to ignore, or play down, expressions of antisemitism, especially in the academic community. The time has come, he argues, to call a spade a spade.

Bartov does not make the mistake of tarring all criticism of Israel with the brush of antisemitism. But by relentlessly comparing contemporary anti-Zionism and the anti-Jewish rhetoric of the 1930s, he ends up conflating past and present. If we were wrong 70 years ago not to take Hitler's genocidal intentions seriously, he says, we are just as wrong to make allowances for Hamas, Mahathir Mohamad, renegade German politicians and novelists, misguided American academics and others.

In Bartov's account, people might well have good reasons to criticise the policies of the Israeli government (Bartov himself is no admirer of Ariel Sharon). But those are not the reasons behind the expression of such criticisms. It is the hatred of Jews—Jews in Israel, Jews in Europe, Jews everywhere and always—that accounts for the virulence of the critique. The trouble with this account of the matter is, as I suggested above, that it does indeed make the relevant link between the middle east and modern antisemitism, but inverts the causality.

It is the policies of Israeli governments, especially in the past two decades, that have provoked widespread anti-Jewish feelings in Europe and elsewhere. This may seem absurd but there is a certain tragic logic to it. Zionists have always insisted that there is no distinction between the Jewish people and the Jewish state. The latter offers a right of citizenship to Jews anywhere in the world. Israel is the state of (all) Jews. Its leaders purport to speak for Jews everywhere. They can hardly be surprised when their own behaviour provokes a backlash against… Jews.

Thus Israel itself has made a significant contribution to the resurgence of the antisemitism which Bartov and others describe. This is an outcome with which many Israeli politicians are far from unhappy: it retroactively justifies their own bad behaviour—and contributes to a rise in the number of European Jews leaving for Israel. At a time when Israelis are obsessed with the prospect of becoming a minority in their own enlarged territory, the inflow of Jews fleeing real or imagined persecution is an occasion for self-congratulation.

Bartov conceded a distinction between "softcore" and "hardcore" antisemitism. However, he still insists that there is a single slippery slope leading from "misguided" academics and intellectuals to pathological murderers. Historically this may be true. But today the implications of such a conflation of different levels of criticism and prejudice could lead to dangerous self-censorship. No doubt some of Israel's strongest critics do display antisemitic propensities. But that doesn't disqualify anti-Zionism as ipso facto antisemitic. If those of us who think Israel is behaving shamefully follow Bartov's reasoning, we will be constrained to silence for fear of being accused of complicity in antisemitism ourselves.

What, then, is to be done? Those of us who take seriously the problem of antisemitism - but who utterly reject the suggestion that we ourselves are in danger of sympathising with antisemitism under the guise of anti-Zionism — must begin by constructing and defending a firewall between the two. Israel's claim to speak for Jews everywhere is the chief reason that anti-Israel sentiments are transposed into Judeophobia. Jews and others need to learn to shed inhibitions and criticise Israel's policies and actions just as they would those of any other established state.

It is, of course, easier for Jews to distance themselves from Israel's illegal acts than it is for non-Jews—the latter are always vulnerable to moral blackmail by Zionists, especially in countries with antisemitic pasts. But we shall not be able to think straight about antisemitism until this firewall is in place. Once Germans, French and others can comfortably condemn Israel without an uneasy conscience, and can look their Muslim fellow-citizens in the face, it will be possible to deal with the real problem. For there is a problem—this is an arena in which legitimate responses shade too readily into familiar prejudices.

To take one notorious example: critics of the foreign policy of the Bush administration who claim that it is directed in many cases by men with close ties to Israel are not mistaken. Contemporary US foreign policy is in certain respects mortgaged to America's own client state, Israel. A number of very senior Bush appointees spent the 1990s advising politicians of the Israeli far right. But that does not mean that "Jewish interests" run the US government, as some European and many Arab commentators have inferred. To say that Israel and its lobbyists have an excessive and disastrous influence on the policies of the world's superpower is a statement of fact. But to say that "the Jews" control America for their own ends is to espouse antisemitism.

Moreover, the slippage between criticism of America and dislike for Jews long antedates the founding of the state of Israel. "Anti-Americanism" and antisemitism have been closely interwoven at least since the 1920s, when European intellectuals looked with nervous distaste across the Atlantic and saw a rootless, predatory, commercial society, the incarnation of cosmopolitan modernity, threatening the continuity and distinctiveness of their own national cultures. Many critics of America, in Germany, France or Russia, were all too quick to identify the shifting, unfamiliar contours of an Americanising world with the essential traits of a homeless Jewry.

Or to take an even more sensitive instance: the Shoah is often exploited in America and Israel to forbid any criticism of Israel. Indeed, the Holocaust of Europe's Jews is nowadays exploited thrice over: it gives American Jews in particular a unique retrospective "victim identity"; it allows Israel to trump any other nation's sufferings (and justify its own excesses) with the claim that the Jewish catastrophe was unique and incomparable; and (in contradiction to the first two) it is adduced as an all-purpose metaphor for evil — anywhere, everywhere and always — and taught to schoolchildren all over the US and Europe without reference to context or cause.

This modern instrumentalisation of the Holocaust for political advantage is ethically disreputable and politically imprudent. But to conclude that "the Jews" have made too much of what happened in Europe between 1933 and 1945, or that it is now time to move on: that edges us closer to antisemitism.

This brings us to a related and equally sensitive issue. Among European intellectuals and artists — in Germany for example—antisemitism occasionally surfaces in discussions of how to speak openly about the past. Why, people ask, after all these years should we not speak of the burning of Germany's cities, or even of the uncomfortable fact that life in Hitler's Germany—for many Germans—was far from unpleasant, at least until the last years of the second world war? Because of what Germany did to the Jews? But we have spoken of this for decades—the Federal Republic is one of the most philosemitic nations in the world; for how much longer must we (Germans) look over our shoulder? Will the Jews never just forgive us and let everyone move on? As this last question suggests, what begins as the search for historical honesty risks ending perilously close to resentment at "the Jews."

In former communist countries, one frequently encounters resentment and perplexity among well-informed people at the west's failure to understand the enormity of the crimes of communism. "Why won't you compare Nazism with communism?" they ask. There are a number of answers that one might offer, but the question is not unreasonable, especially when posed by communism's victims. And it must be addressed openly, lest the citizens of eastern Europe tell themselves what a number of intellectuals in Romania, Hungary and elsewhere have already openly suggested: that the reason why we in the west reject the comparison is that Nazism persecuted Jews above all, and it is Jews who set the international agenda for remorse, retribution and reparation. Once again, antisemitism emerges as the natural child of otherwise reasonable political preoccupations.

There is no simple answer to the dilemmas raised by such issues. Somehow we must juggle the need to speak honestly and openly about present politics and past sufferings without either imposing silences or legitimising the resurrection of prejudices. In my view it is incumbent upon Jews in particular to address these contested and disconcerting problems. Because Jewish critics of Israel are less vulnerable to moral blackmail from Israel's defenders, they should be in the forefront of public discussion of the middle east, in America and Europe alike.

Similarly, Jewish commentators need to take the lead in opening up difficult conversations about the past—and the present—in Europe. Public discussion, in Germany especially, is often trapped between politically correct evasions and resentful taboo-breaking; the majority's fear of offending Jewish sensibilities arouses a growing minority's desire to do just that. We can never normalise the European history of antisemitism, nor should we. But if the charge of antisemitism is suspended like Damocles's sword across the European public space—as it is today across much of America—we shall all fall silent. And between controversial debate and fearful silence, we are well advised to choose the former. Silence is always a mistake.