Making David into Goliath. Joshua Muravchik
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other rock musicians to boycott Israel on the grounds of “human rights” even while he has had no qualms about performing in Russia and China, and he has used a floating inflated pig emblazoned with a Star of David and some other symbols as a prop at concerts. From a very different walk of life, Karel De Gucht, a Belgian politician serving as the European commissioner for trade, told a radio audience that “the Jewish lobby” has a “grip . . . on American politics” and that “it is not easy to have, even with moderate Jews, a rational discussion about . . . the Middle East.” He, too, denied harboring any anti-Semitism and said he “did not mean . . . to cause offense.”25 It seems that while disparaging words and gestures are directed at Jews from various quarters, no one in today’s world is an anti-Semite.
While Buchanan is a man of the right, Galloway, Waters, and Atzmon are of the left, as is Sullivan today, although his ideological history has been a restless peregrination. Historically, anti-Semitism has most often been associated with the right, but today, rabid and obsessive hatred of Israel that reaches the borders of anti-Semitism and sometimes crosses them is mostly to be found on the left.
This is most evident in the BDS campaign, which is notable for its flagrant double standards. Although this campaign usually claims Palestinian human rights as its purpose, it has never addressed the universal mistreatment of Palestinians in Arab countries. Jordan has the best record, granting Palestinians citizenship and allowing them to practice professions like law and medicine from which they are barred in Lebanon, but even Jordan severely restricts the number of Palestinians allowed seats in its legislature. No such professional or political constraints exist in Israel. More broadly, Israel’s record on human rights is by all measures light years better than that of all of the states that surround it and most other states. The annual survey of Freedom House, highly respected by scholars and democratic governments for its rigor and objectivity, rates Israel 1.5 on its scale of freedom, on which 1 is the best possible score and 7 the worst. The median of the Arab countries is 5.5 and of the whole world, 3.5. Yet, neither the BDS movement itself, nor any of the churches, unions, or student governments that have voted to boycott or sanction Israel has ever done the same to any other state. This prompted Lawrence Summers, the former president of Harvard University, to say that this campaign is “anti-Semitic in effect if not in intent.”26
In respect not only to liberté but also the other two elements of the traditional principles of progressivism—égalité and fraternité—as well as such latter-day issues as environmentalism, Israel’s record ranks among the world’s best, while those of its enemies are among the worst. (I have documented this with careful details and statistics in Liberal Oasis: The Truth about Israel, the e-book companion to this volume.**) And yet in the dominant discourse of the contemporary left, all of this is trumped by the trope of the noble third world versus the malevolent West.
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The intensification of anti-Israel sentiment on the left also serves to generate a pool of Jewish denigrators of Israel whose ethnic background gives them added polemical leverage. Atzmon is one, and The Wandering Who sports an endorsement from another, Professor Richard Falk, urging “Jews . . . who care about real peace, as well as their own identity, [to] not only read, but reflect upon [it].” Falk, himself, crossed the line when he posted a cartoon on his blog, depicting a dog urinating on a representation of justice while wearing a garment marked “USA” and a skull cap with a Star of David. The website, Mondoweiss, perhaps the most ferociously anti-Israel American-based site (short of the lunatic fringe), whose editors as well as most writers are Jewish, offers itself as a kind of shield for anti-Semites. For example, it produced a story challenging the authenticity of genocidal remarks toward Jews by Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah even while the original words were available (in Arabic) on Nasrallah’s website. And when an anti-Israel mob besieged Paris’s de la Roquette synagogue, Mondoweiss ran a story claiming that the confrontation was initiated by the Jewish defenders, even though the French press and police reported the opposite. A more reputable example is the former New Republic editor Peter Beinart, who called for a boycott of goods from Jewish settlements in the West Bank, thus enlisting with reservations in the BDS movement as if oblivious to import of that campaign as well as to the memory that a boycott of Jewish businesses constituted the first salvo of the Holocaust.
Another consequence of the left-wing provenance of most Israel bashing and the anti-Semitism that sometimes accompanies it is the sharp rise of these phenomena on college and university campuses, where leftish opinion tends to dominate. In addition to a steady increase in BDS activity, recent school years have seen several incidents in which Jewish students have been harassed or even assaulted by anti-Israel demonstrators. In addition, in 2015 the student government at UCLA voted to reject a candidate of the school’s judicial body on the grounds that being Jewish would make her biased (although this was reversed out of embarrassment after it made a splash in the press).
A national survey of Jewish college students conducted by the Louis D. Brandeis Center and Trinity College in 2014 found that 54 percent said they had personally experienced or witnessed an anti-Semitic incident. The number is startlingly high, and since no prior studies exist for comparison, these data are hard to interpret. Perhaps anti-Semitism is spiking, but it may be that the current environment of extreme solicitousness toward racial and gender sensitivities prompts some Jewish students to take note of relatively minor slights that they might have ignored in a different era.
If so, they may be in for a surprise, for the prevailing atmosphere is less acutely reactive to anti-Semitism than insults to other identity groups. When a campaign at UCLA demanded that candidates for student government sign pledges not to take part in trips to Israel sponsored by pro-Israel organizations, the university chancellor registered his disapproval but insisted that the campaign “fall[s] squarely within the realm of free speech, and free speech is sacrosanct to any university campus.” Yet, within the year, when the David Horowitz Freedom Center put up dramatic posters linking the radical anti-Israel group Students for Justice in Palestine with Hamas and adding the hashtag, #JewHaters, the campus administration ordered them torn down. The posters were surely provocative, and the Horowitz center is not a student group, but either free speech is “sacrosanct” or it isn’t. If the pledge campaign had been aimed at a black or Latino or women’s or gay project, one wonders whether the sanctity of free speech would have seemed equally dispositive to the university administration.
In this respect, the university is only reflecting the outside political atmosphere, as emblemized by the president of the United States. Barack Obama has injected himself into controversies with a racial aspect, such as the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. and the shooting of Trayvon Martin; the president even enlisted the inflammatory militant, Al Sharpton, as his informal representative following the shooting of Michael Brown by a policeman in Ferguson, Missouri. Then, after the massacre of black worshippers by a white supremacist in South Carolina, Obama delivered a stirring funeral oration with a meditation on race. Obama apparently believed that these incidents touched on a transcendent issue for our country even though none involved the federal government.
Such a view is entirely understandable. What is hard to understand is how little moved the president seems to be by anti-Semitism. When French Muslim jihadists massacred editors of Charlie Hebdo and patrons at one of Paris’s main kosher markets in January 2015, singling out four Jews for death in the latter (and apparently one in the former, too), Obama displayed startling indifference. More than forty presidents and prime ministers joined a solidarity march of a million-plus Parisians, but Obama, who had nothing else listed on his schedule and whose presence would have been powerful, chose to stay home. Of course,