Promoted by Steven D.
I can’t speak for anyone but myself, nor do I intend to, but with Israel engaged in what amounts to its first “hot war” in 20 years, I couldn’t help but “jump in” a little bit on the conversation.
To be more precise, I’d like to comment on the long-running debate about whether criticism of Israel and/or Israeli policies is (or is not) somehow inherently intertwined with anti-Semitism.
I’ve mentioned this before but just to re-cap – through a nearly accidental process, I once used to live in Israel, which was an odd place to be especially because my “ethnic” heritage is neither Jewish nor Arab and my religious heritage was neither Jewish nor Muslim. Nor is my heritage related to any kind of evangelical or messianic Christianity. To put it more simply – there aren’t exactly very many people in Israel who DO NOT have a religious and/or ethnic basis for being there. There aren’t even too many “unaffiliated” tourists and my goodness I actually found myself living there.
Throughout most of my public commentary, I have refrained from mentioning Israel and/or Israeli issues. This isn’t because of any lack of opinions on MY part, but rather because I always found that any discussion of Israel and/or Israeli issues always tended to bring on the more inflammatory comments and in the end nothing ever got discussed. Accusations and harsh words fly back and forth but at the end of the day nobody feels the tiniest bit MORE informed, only hurt/angered or more self-righteous. And frankly there are already a million excellent voices who can talk about Israel without needing my input.
And that’s still my policy today. What I wanted to focus on instead was to take a gander at HOW that got to be the situation in the first place.
REAL anti-Semitism, meaning hate-based acts and words against Judaism and the Jewish people, has been around for a long, long time, starting perhaps with the ancient Egyptians all the way up to and beyond the Nazi regime under Hitler. But what IS relatively recent is the opposite of anti-Semitism – the large scale support for and defense of Jews and Judaism by non-Jewish people. For the sake of ease, I’ll refer to this as “pro-Semitism” even though that’s as awful and clunky a descriptor as “anti-Semitism”.
To get to the heart of the matter, we need to take another look at World War 2. There’s a real disconnect between the way that conflict is perceived today in the United States and the way it is seen by the rest of the world, including in nations which were much involved in the fighting.
This is how World War 2 is seen today in the United States (in a few short sentences):
- Hitler was an evil man who beguiled the German people, using imagery and appealing to their pride (deeply wounded after losing World War One) to at first accept and then support the dictatorship of the Nazis, the most evil and tyrannical regime ever seen in the history of the world.
- Hitler then began expanding the Nazi Third Reich and the weak leaders of democratic Europe, especially Britain’s Chamberlain, tried to APPEASE Hitler and this strategy completely backfired. And everywhere that Hitler went, he rounded up the undesirables, especially Jews, and slaughtered them en masse in concentration camps.
- Hitler then nearly conquered Britain and all of the rest of Europe but was checked at the last moment thanks to the heroic intervention of the United States, whose military was supported by every single American citizen with vim and vigor.
That’s it. Oh yeah plus some other minor additions, such as Hitler made the same “foolish gamble” as Napoleon and invaded his former ally, Soviet Russia. And Russia was some kind of part-time ally of the United States until after the war when they treacherously turned against the west and thus began the Cold War.
If you’re an American, does that sound about right? It’s overly simplistic I know, but if you turn on the History Channel (or Biography, or the Military Channel or Discovery Times or the dozens of other historical/documentary channels) that’s roughly what you’ll see. Actually World War 2 has been further condensed for the less academically inclined and it goes like this:
Hitler was PURE EVIL and nearly conquered the world while simultaneously nearly wiping out the Jews. Then the mighty Americans fought him and it was a glorious and awesome war and then we (freedom loving Americans) won. Hip hip hooray!
What’s missing from this simplified American view is that NONE of the main motivation for the United States military (and American people) entering the war had anything to do with protecting Jews or outrage at how the Jews had been treated. To put it frankly, there was no pro-Semitism fervor either before the American military got involved in the fighting or afterwards. It was actually while I was living in Israel that I first learned of the story of the vessel St. Louis.
The fact that I had never learned of the St. Louis (and many other stories like it) illustrates how the PERCEPTION of World War 2 changed after it was over. Here’s how World War 2 and Hitler were seen before Pearl Harbor:
- Hitler is a strong and dashing leader but perhaps a little headstrong (TIME magazine’s man of the year!)
- Quarrels inside Europe are Europe’s problem and Americans have no business intervening
- Reports of concentration camps and atrocities against Jews (and others) are more hyperbole of the same kind that came out during the last war – overblown war rhetoric.
Then came Pearl Harbor, the “day of infamy” (before “preventitive war” was considered cool), and the United States became fervently anti-JAPANESE (never anti-German!) and pro-war. And then Hitler declared war on the United States and by gum the war was on after that. And yet even though the European theater of the war ended in Germany itself, the amount of vitriol and purely racist, maleficent glee was reserved strictly for the Japanese whereas the German people en masse were seen as semi-innocent victims of Nazi demagoguery and persuasive propaganda.
As the western Allies (although primarily it was the Soviets) began liberating concentration camps, the horror of what had been inflicted on the inmates became publicized. Although yes, some American units did find camps full of those emaciated, skeletal victims we’ve all seen, (apart from the surviving Jews themselves) it was actually the Soviets who spent more time “trumpeting” about the inhumanity of the Nazi Germans. After all, it was the Soviets who made Auschwitz a household name and the world took the Soviets’ figure of 4 million Jews killed there for more than 20 years (the figure has since been revised to a much more accurate but lower number, which in no way dismisses the horror of what happened).
Part of the reason why World War 2 has been “re-framed” is that ideologically, the United States had to do an about face. This is because, logically speaking, it was the Soviet Communists who most people felt threatened by and not the pro-capitalist, “brotherly” Germans. There’s an entire period of the United States, predominantely the 1930’s, where the nation had a difficult struggle between various aspects of socialism (including the rise of STRONG labor unions) and the laissez-faire capitalism of the “free market” Adam Smith, Robber Baron, the stock market “will lead the way” mentality. John Steinbeck’s seminal The Grapes of Wrath probably does the best job of illustrating both sides of that equation, and most people I think are familiar with the book and/or movie.
The re-framing of FDR has also tended to minimize just how adroitly he walked the line – between (pre-Pearl Harbor) strong anti-war sentiment and aiding Britain (and later the Soviet Union), and between satisfying the pro-socialists (New Deal) and the pro-capitalist lobby (the crushing of Upton Sinclair’s gubernatorial campaign). FDR was once nearly overthrown by the pro-capitalism lobby for his efforts and almost defeated at the polls for not being anti-war enough. Hard to believe but true.
In a blink of an eye after the war (in Europe) ended, the United States suddenly found its principle ally, Winston Churchill, out of office. While Britain managed to fend off a Nazi conquest of their homeland, most of its colonies began slipping out of their grasp, including India (and what was soon to be Pakistan) as well as a tiny sliver of land in the Middle East now known as Israel.
Starting about 50 years before World War 2, there arose a movement in Judaism that became known as Zionism. I think perhaps this is one of the most misunderstood words and adjectives today, but roughly speaking Zionism is a movement amongst most (but not all!) Jews to push for Jews to live inside the historical boundaries of Israel and to reinforce pride in their cultural and religious heritage.
During the war (WW2), as many Jews emigrated in desperation from Germany and most of mainland Europe, there was strong pressure to admit more (Jewish) refugees inside British-controlled Palestine. For a variety of reasons, the British severely restricted immigration to that territory and it wasn’t until 1948, when the British military was forced to beat a hasty retreat and an independent state was declared, that immigration restrictions were lifted.
Around the same time, as Britain and France, America’s two principle European allies, were severely weakened, the Soviet Union mutated from being a vital ally to an implacable foe. The Soviets and Allies divvied up not only Europe but Germany itself (and indeed even Germany’s capital) and it became apparent quite rapidly that the Soviet Union’s ambitions were grandiose indeed.
You can see how the perception of history has been altered in looking at how Stalin is portrayed in the United States today. Most of his atrocities committed before the end of WW2, the deathly labor camps, the concentration camps, the genocide, the persecution of Jews, Muslims and other minorities are all downplayed. Hitler’s regime might have statistically killed more Jews but there is no doubt whatsoever that more people of every description died under the iron fist of Stalin’s rule. It was Stalin who deported and enslaved entire nations of people, genocide under anyone’s definition, yet because this occurred primarily during the years when he was an American ally, these crimes are largely forgotten in the United States.
It’s quite an Orwellian, Eastasian/Eurasian moment when almost immediately after the war (in Europe) had ended, most of Germany (and most Germans) became a friendly, allied people while the former ally (Soviet Union) became the arch enemy. Not only that, but just 5 years after Berlin had fallen, the United States and the Soviets engaged in a proxy hot war in Korea that left an additional million people dead.
World War 2 not only took the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans but cost billions of dollars, not only in material for the American military but also billions in equipment sold (at vastly discounted rates) and donated to its allies. The invention and use of atomic weapons as well as a large-scale disruption of American society (rapid industrialization and the employment of women in the workforce) led to the need for a justification of America’s effort. Part (and only part!) of that justification became the demonization of Hitler and what his regime had done, especially against the Jews. It must be remembered that this was concomitant with the Soviet Union also doing the exact same thing.
I am not in any way minimizing or attempting to downplay the horror of what the Nazi regime did. What I am attempting to do instead is point out that the attitudes and priorities of the American people prior to involvement in the war and immediately thereafter had little or nothing to do with outrage against the way the Nazis were treating the Jews. Further proof of general American indifference was the lack of support (financial or military) by the American government for Israel during Israel’s war against most of its Arab neighbors after Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948.
The Korean War (1950-53), the first truly significant instance of using proxy forces as part of the “Cold War”, led to a series of foreign policy shifts in the United States. By the time Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956, the western European allies (especially Britain) were declining in international influence while the United States was increasingly able to project its power overseas. This relationship between Israel and the United States was further cemented by the fact that many of the Arab countries (partly fueled by nationalism and partly by post-colonial resentment against the British and French) were becoming allied with the Soviet Union, providing yet another “front” of the ongoing Cold War. It was about this point that the United States government truly became allied and sympathetic with Israel, a policy which has continued up until this day.
Again, the point here is not to downplay the atrocities committed against the Jews by the Nazi regime. The point here is that by the mid 1950’s, support for Israel and “pro-Semitism” became a mainstay of American culture for the first time. Israel’s (Jewish) population was largely comprised of victims of the previous enemy of the United States and Israel was an ally against the allies of the current enemy, the Soviet Union. In additional, Israel’s government was by and large democratic and since most of its leaders were of European descent, the country was run by “our kind of people”, people with lighter-hued skin, whose customs could be easily understood.
A more recent “plank” in the pro-Semitism platform is the rise of evangelical, messianic Christianity inside the United States, which wants the territory of Israel in friendly hands so that a variety of Biblical prophecies and/or conditions can be met (including bringing about the end of the world). This has resulted in the “religious right” of the United States taking an extreme pro-Semite view that allows for no criticism of Israel of any kind.
All of this has combined to form a situation where any criticism whatsoever of Israel is taboo and off limits for rational discourse. Furthermore, Jews, Judaism and the state of Israel have historically been attacked and harangued by people who use hate speech. Therefore Israel has become the epitome of a black/white issue where no shades of gray are permitted – you’re either completely for them or against them. Obviously people can find rational ways to discuss Israel’s faults and shortcomings (including Jewish Israeli citizens!) but the long epoch of equating any criticism to hateful (anti-Semite) motivations has rendered all debate about Israel illegitimate.
Ironically, good proof of this can be found where both sides of the issue are Jewish citizens of Israel. During Sharon’s last few conscious months in office, his government enforced a withdrawal of Jewish Israeli citizens from certain territories in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. As Jewish Israeli soldiers came to evict Jewish Israeli settlers, there were numerous incidents of the settlers shouting that the soldiers were “Nazis”. If Jewish Israeli soldiers obeying orders by democratically elected Jewish Israeli leaders are called “Nazis” and anti-Semites by Israeli Jewish citizens, how can any non-Jewish, non-Israeli critic of Israel escape such a label? How can any debate on rational, non-hateful grounds, take place? Right now, it can’t.
Back in the year 1616, an Italian polymath named Galileo Galilei was ordered by the Vatican not to “hold or defend” any heliocentric ideas because they were anathema to the Catholic Church. Galileo recanted and saved his skin, but all of the condemnations of the Popes and cardinals could not change the ultimate fact that some of Galileo’s astronomical observations were correct. Some 390 years later, we scorn the Vatican for banning free speech on that issue and yet I find the United States is in nearly the same position – wherein any speech not “Israelicentric” is considered blasphemous by a large segment of the (American) population. While ordinary citizens perhaps can express non-hateful criticism of Israel, it is by and large career suicide for any American politician to do so.
There are indeed many and numerous good reasons for American support for the state of Israel as it now exists. However the same can also be said about nations like Great Britain, Australia, Canada and France and yet non-hateful criticism and debate concerning America’s relationship with them is considered a healthy and normal. Even when irrational, semi-hateful speech against our allies is issued by American political leaders, this is by and large tolerated by the American people. Indeed there is a xenophobic element, particularly prevalent amongst the more rightwing members of the Americnan political spectrum, that thrives on insulting and debasing every single ally of the United States. Except for Israel.
Democracy and democratic principles require that free speech about important issues be conducted. The value of America’s relationship to Israel is not what I am calling into question, only the self-imposed censorship in mainstream thought that absolutely no critism of Israel can originate other than from anti-Semitism and hate. It is not only ridiculous but actually harmful to prevent such important discussions from taking place.
What happens in the Middle East affects the entire planet – and most definitely including the United States. Democratic discussion about Israel is absolutely relevant to move towards a future which is safer, more prosperous and more secure for everyone, including the Jewish citizens of Israel.
Peace