Blaming the Jews. Bernard Harrison
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socially marginal phenomenon in the Western world. For half a century after the end of World War II, the recollection of the Holocaust made it socially suicidal to express open hostility to Jews, even when deeply felt. Antisemitism became in those years the province of an obscure minority of nasty little people who spent their time circulating nasty little pamphlets read only in their immediate circle. Since 2001, commentators without number have recorded the growth of a climate of opinion, not merely in sections of the media widely regarded as pillars of left liberal respectability—the BBC, the New York Times, the New Statesman, the London Review of Books—but at innumerable middle-class dinner tables, within whose bounds it is no longer unacceptable to be rude about “the Jews.”
The tone of this new liberal-left open season on Israel and its Jewish supporters was caught early on, in 2001, by a remark attributed to the French ambassador to the United Kingdom. According to Tom Gross, writing close to the time in the National Review,10 the affair began when Barbara Amiel, a columnist in the London Daily Telegraph,
revealed that at a reception at her house, the ambassador of “a major EU country” told guests that the current troubles in the world were all because of “that shitty little country Israel.”
“Why,” he asked, “should the world be in danger of World War Three because of those people?”
Within 24 hours, the British Guardian newspaper identified the ambassador in question as Daniel Bernard, France’s man in London and one of President Chirac’s closest confidants. (While Bernard has not admitted using these exact words, he hasn’t clearly denied doing so either.)
Several conservative columnists in the United States (where are those who profess to be liberal?) have condemned the ambassador for his “crude anti-Semitic remarks.”
What has not been properly noted in the U.S. media is that in the British and French media, it is not the French ambassador or anti-Semites who are being condemned, as one would expect, but Barbara Amiel and “those people.” As for Israel, it seems to be open season.
A piece in the Independent, for example, by one of the paper’s regular columnists (titled “I’m fed up being called an anti-Semite,” by Deborah Orr, December 21, 2001) described Israel as “shitty” and “little” no fewer than four times.
“Anti-Semitism is disliking all Jews, anywhere, and anti-Zionism is just disliking the existence of Israel and opposing those who support it,” explains Orr. “This may be an academic rather than a practical distinction,” she continues, “and one which has no connection with holding the honest view that in my experience Israel is shitty and little.”
III
It seems clear that Tom Gross, in this report, is of one mind with those he mentions as condemning the “crude anti-Semitic remarks” of Daniel Bernard. But is it—as he records Deborah Orr as complaining—in fact antisemitic to “dislike the existence of Israel,” and if so, why?
The difficulty of answering these questions is elegantly and simply exposed in an article published in the “Magazine” section of the BBC Television News website for April 29, 2016. The article, titled “What’s the Difference between Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism,” begins, “The UK Labour Party has been at the centre of a row over anti-semitism, including its relationship to anti-Zionism. What do these two terms actually mean?” It then answers its own question by offering two definitions, heralded by bullet points intended, no doubt, to set the definitions off as sufficiently authoritative to be beyond further debate.
•Anti-Semitism is “hostility and prejudice directed against Jewish people” (OED).
•Zionism refers to the movement to create a Jewish state in the Middle East, roughly corresponding to the historical state of Israel, and thus support for the modern state of Israel. Anti-Zionism opposes that.
If one takes these definitions at face value, it becomes very difficult to see how a mere anti-Zionist could, in reason, be accused of antisemitism. According to the BBC’s definition, “anti-Semitism” is the name of an emotion, one of “hostility and prejudice” (that is to say, unreasoning dislike), directed against “Jewish people” per se. Anti-Zionism, on the other hand, is a (presumably reasoned) political position of opposition, not to “Jewish people” in general, but simply to the existence of the State of Israel. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the subsequent article is sympathetic to Ken Livingstone, Vicki Kirby, Gerry Downing, and others at that time recently expelled from the Labour Party, and generally skeptical concerning the validity of the accusations of antisemitism brought against them. The piece concludes with the following respectably anodyne verdict that echoes very much in line with the BBC’s standard editorial stance of sympathy for the Labour Party, and more generally for liberal opinion on Israel, in the face of right-wing accusations of Jew hatred: “Few would deny there are anti-Semites who call themselves anti-Zionists, or that it’s possible to criticise Israel without being a racist or a bigot. But agreement on how exactly the two relate appears elusive.”
In effect, this BBC guide to the dispute comes to much the same conclusion as the report by the Labour politician Shami (shortly afterward Baroness) Chakrabarti into antisemitism in the party: that while “hostility and prejudice against Jewish people” may be present in a minority of individual Labour members, such hostilities are not shared by the vast majority of Labour opponents of Israel.
IV
Is the anti-Zionism now popular in liberal-left circles across the Western world, then, actually antisemitic or not? If so, in what ways and to what extent? These are among the central questions that I propose to address in this book.
On the face of it, as we have just seen, much depends on what one takes antisemitism to consist in—on what phenomena one takes the word to cover. On the definition above, tagged “OED” (Oxford English Dictionary) by the BBC’s unnamed journalist, matters are simple enough: “antisemitism” is the name of an emotional state: of “hostility and prejudice” toward individual Jews considered as Jews. Reasoned political opposition toward the continued existence of a state is surely to be distinguished from unreasoning hostility toward individual Jews, even when the state in question happens to be a Jewish state. Hence, anti-Zionism cannot in the nature of things be considered antisemitic; QED.
But are matters as simple as that? I was at first unable to locate the definition that the BBC cites with the tag “OED” in any of the various shorter print editions of that dictionary accessible to me. The mystery was solved when it was pointed out to me11 that the BBC’s definition comes from the online version of the OED and is in fact the first definition that appears in the online entry. The definition given in the complete, and therefore presumably definitive, print version of the OED12 is rather different. It reads, in part (omitting examples of usage): “Anti-Semitism. Theory, action or practice directed against the Jews. Hence anti-Semite, one who is hostile or opposed to the Jews, anti-Semitic.”
According to this longer and more considered definition, antisemitism, though it may consist of individual hostility to Jews, can take other forms. In particular, it can take the form of practices, actions, or theories. These are all, as it happens, things characteristic of collective or political life. Political parties—and for that matter, citizens committed to a common liberal political or moral outlook—evidently can and do subscribe to theories, engage in practices, or put into effect actions—all of which, according to the full OED definition, may be (or may not be; it remains to be seen, case by case) antisemitic.
In light of the complete OED’s more considered definition, then, the simple retort to the BBC’s and Baroness Chakrabarti’s suggestion, that—in effect—antisemitism is one thing and anti-Zionism another, would seem to be that what the term antisemitism covers in everyday English is not one thing but rather a variety of things.
V
Of the OED’s triad—theory, action, practice—the most important is, plainly, theory. In politics, after all, theory, in the form of