If you are anti-Israel, are you an anti-Semite?

We cannot escape the question, so we might as well face it head on: What is the connection -- if any -- between oppositon to Israel and anti-Semitism?

An opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald addressed that topic, and one of the oldest friends to this blog, Australia's "Nick Possum" (a.k.a Gavin Gatenby), took issue with the conclusions reached by those authors. I can't reprint here the SMH piece, but I can print Gatenby's interesting reply, which the newspaper decided not to publish. You should be able to discern the stance of the original editorialists.

It would be hard to beat Vic Alhadeff and Michael Gawenda as historical revisionists.

According to Alhadeff, since the Holocaust happened before the formal establishment of the Jewish state, Israel can't be the reason for modern anti-Semitism ('Anti-Semitism around long before modern Israel', Letters August 7). Jew-hatred has indeed been around for centuries, but Alhadeff conflates anti-Semitism with hostility to Israel and attempts to slip around the fact that the political Zionist movement, which led to the declaration of the state of Israel in 1948, began in the late 19th century.

The current problems in the Middle East can be dated from the Balfour Declaration of 1917, by which Britain committed itself to establishing a "Jewish national home" in Palestine. This led to a massive flood of Jewish migration to a tiny, mostly Arab, country with a population of less than a million who had never been consulted on Britain's decision. Nearly 400,000 Jews arrived before WWII and probably another 200,000 in the immediate aftermath of the war and before 1948. Compared to the locals, these people were highly-educated, well-financed, aggressively expansionist and backed by an untestable claim that God had given the place to them. After 1945 they proceeded to systematically expel the Arab inhabitants by military, often terrorist, means.

That invasion, and not the ancient Christian bigotry, is the reason for Arab and leftist hostility to Israel.

And contrary to Michael Gawenda's attempt to parse anti-Semitism into distinct secular and religious strands, a secular rationale for bigotry pre-dates the Protocols of The Elders of Zion by centuries, as anybody familiar with Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice knows ('Plain old Jew hatred little to do with faith', Comment August 7). Traditional Christian hostility has always underpinned this "secular" anti-Semitism. Without the biblical sanction, the Jews would be just another relatively successful and widespread ethnic minority. The persistent undercurrent of bigotry in traditionalist Christians like Mel Gibson became the rationale for the modern Zionist movement and its greatest weapon. It enabled the Zionists to persuade reluctant European Jews of the dubious idea that their only security lay in creating a specifically Jewish state by forcing the native Palestinians out of their homeland.

I'm not sure if I can fully agree with Gatenby here.

(To read the rest, click "Permalink" below)

First, I think it is possible to parse anti-Semitism into the religiously-motivated and the racially-based varieties. In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote contemptuously of converted Jews; as far as he was concerned, a "sprinkling of holy water" changed nothing. Traditionalist Catholics of the Mel Gibson variety -- I've met a couple -- would never countenance Hitler's attitude; they believe that a convert, of any origin, is a fellow Catholic, and there the matter ends. (As noted in an earlier post, Gibson has close Jewish friends and should not, in my opinion, be judged by the ravings of one mad night.)

I've read a great deal of the anti-Semitic literature produced during the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Religion plays a surprisingly small role in that vile stew. The anti-Semitism of a Boris Brasol or an Edouard Drumont differed from the anti-Semitism of a Martin Luther. (Drumont did much to inflame the Dreyfus affair, while Brasol, formerly of the Russian secret police, was the motivating force behind Henry Ford's notorious publication The International Jew.) The "Christ killer" canard played little role in the Protocols hoax or in the ravings often found in the pages of The Spotlight.

Religously-based anti-Semitism never disappeared, of course. It thrived in the American south, where Gerald L.K. Smith's Christ of the Ozarks still dominates part of the landscape, both literally and figuratively.

Here we encounter one of the oddities of history: America's Christian fundamentalists, who once mistrusted and despised Jews, have now become the greatest enablers of Israeli aggression. Many in the Middle East probably do not know that Israel would never have dared to drop bombs on Lebanon if a generation of American Christian preachers, reared on the works of Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye, had not proclaimed Israel's infallibility. The victims fleeing their bombed cities might be stunned to learn that Israel's loudest American apologists were once America's most notorious Jew-haters -- while the American leftists who decry IDF atrocities come from a tradition opposed to anti-Semitism. Many of these leftists are, in fact, Jewish.

I suspect that the church-goers in America's "Bible belt" have evinced such strange and hyperbolic attitudes toward Jews because those church folk rarely meet many Jews. Today's fundamentalist Christian usually learns about Judaism via evangelical religious literature, which, in recent years, has tended to portray the Jew as a Chosen Person, as a quasi-sanctified being not to be judged by normal human standards. Fifty years ago, a fundamentalist Christian would have sneeringly derided that same Jew as a Christ-killer. In both cases, the fundamentalist views the Jew as the Other -- as an exotic creature, forever alien and apart. Although the Jew may (in the fundamentalist's eyes) have ascended from the pit to the pedestal -- and may, a generation hence, head back to the pit -- he is never seen as an equal, as a fellow human being.

I grew up in Southern California, not the Bible belt. That's why I can't see the Jew as anything alien. I was raised by a Jewish stepfather. (Or so I thought; years later, I learned that he never married my mother. People fibbed about such things back then.) His mother -- a sweet, funny lady -- was the one relative I really liked. I've attended seders, had Jewish friends and Jewish bosses and a Jewish lover. Intermarriage was always pretty common in my circle; religious faith, of any sort, was not.

Both my Italian mother and Jewish stepfather taught me to regard Jews as neither devils nor angels. Jews are human beings. The preceding sentence provides all the explanation you will ever need to explain Israel's crimes. "Don't grouse to me about a man's race. It's enough to know that he is a man -- the news can't possible get worse." I may not have quoted Twain perfectly, but that's the gist of what he said, and it expresses my attitude.

Could I ever hate the people who gave us Gustav Mahler and Albert Einstein and Jack Kirby? The very notion is absurd. Nevertheless, I feel that the Palestinians and the Lebanese have suffered terrible and unjustifiable abuse.

How could I ever hate the German people -- the people who gave us Beethoven and Goethe and Caspar David Friedrich? The very notion is absurd. And yet one must despise all memory of the Third Reich.

How could I ever hate the Italian people -- the people who gave the world Leonardo and Galileo and Verdi? How could I hate the blood that flows in my own veins? The very notion is absurd. Yet one must despise the legacy of Mussolini.

How could I hate American culture -- the culture that gave us Jefferson and Steinbeck and Maxfield Parrish and Orson Welles and JFK and jazz and film and comic books and computers? The very notion is absurd. But one must loathe much in the American resume -- slavery, the slaughter of the Indians, the Vietnam war. Similarly, one must also abhor the current neocon drive to transform our beloved Republic into an empire.

Ultra-conservative pundits pretend that those who oppose Bush hate America.

Mussolini's propagandists pretended that opposition to Il Duce's rule sprang from anti-Italian prejudice.

Nazi propagandists pretended that those who opposed Hitler suffered from anti-German prejudice.

And there are many who pretend that anyone who opposes Israel does so out of anti-Semtism.

Bullshit. On all four counts.

What more need be said?