Blaming the Jews. Bernard Harrison
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openness with which it parades views that in the West tend, except in the relative anonymity of the street or social media, to be expressed only in ways designed to disguise their real nature. The above passage from Article 22 serves to illustrate, with bracing directness, the bulk of what we shall find in this book to be leading components of antisemitism considered not as a mere matter of personal contempt or dislike but as a body of pseudo-explanatory theory capable of directing the political outlook of believers.
First, it asserts the Jews to be the deliberate authors of evil on a world scale. In this case, it construes them as the unique and sole cause of every war and every revolution that has taken place since 1793. Second, it takes Jews to be conspiratorially organized in the pursuit of these appalling aims. It assumes there to exist, in other words, a coherent system of Jewish “control” extending across the whole world. Third, it asserts this system of control to be occult, wrapped in a degree of secrecy sufficient to render it in practice utterly inscrutable and hence inviolable, operating beneath or “behind” all the apparently (but only apparently) non-Jewish institutions, great and small, from the media to the United Nations to the Lions Club, that appear (but only appear) each to exercise an influence independent of the others over what happens in the world. This extraordinary web of Jewish influence is exercised through the mysterious power of money. This makes it terrifyingly opaque to any form of scrutiny available to non-Jews and thus to any form of control that might be exercised over Jewish power by non-Jewish political institutions. All of these (except, inexplicably, for those constituted by the antisemite and his friends) are anyway themselves totally under the control of the Jews. Fourth, the passage powerfully conveys the impression that the world would be to all intents and purposes perfect—no wars, no revolutions, the Islamic Caliphate that expired at the end of World War I still in existence—if only the Jews did not exist. That, together with the first three claims, strictly entails the remaining contention of this type of antisemitism: that the only viable way of restoring the world to that happy state is to remove, to eliminate, in the last analysis to exterminate the Jewish people in its entirety.
EUROPEAN ECHOES
The Hamas charter of 1988, echoing in detail as it does the main claims of prewar Nazi antisemitism, might seem so extreme in this respect as to justify the consoling belief that antisemitism—at least that kind of antisemitism—is essentially dead in Europe.
That would be a mistake. In 2003, the European Union (EU) commissioned Gallup to carry out a public opinion poll aimed at discovering what European citizens considered to be the main threat to world peace. The results were startling enough to cause concern around the world:
A Flash Eurobarometer survey carried out in October 2003 for the European Commission in the fifteen member states of the EU found that nearly 60 percent of European citizens believe Israel poses the biggest threat to world peace. Iran is considered the second biggest threat, North Korea the third and the United States the fourth. The survey was carried out by EOS Gallup Europe.
The European Commission survey asked the public in all 15 member states to look at a list of countries and say which they considered potential threats to peace. Israel was selected by a majority in almost all the EU member states, with 74% of Dutch citizens putting the country at the top of the list as a threat to peace and 69% of Austrian citizens. Italy is the only country where opinions are divided with 48% of respondents confirming that they perceive Israel as a threat to peace in the world and 46% of the opposite opinion.
In all member states, with the exception of Italy, the majority of citizens believe Israel presents a threat to peace in the world with “yes” results in the EU as a whole as 59%. Iran, North Korea and America were all selected by 53% as a threat. The survey also listed Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Pakistan, China and Russia as potential threats.5
What makes these results startling is the extent to which they reveal European opinion to be in accord, in certain important respects, with the outlook so ingenuously presented in Article 22 of the 1988 Hamas covenant. It is not clear from the terms of the Eurobarometer poll whether what was “deemed … a threat to world peace” was, in the minds of the assenting 59 percent, the policies of the government of Israel or the very existence of the State of Israel itself. Given the democratic cast of Israeli politics, however, that is perhaps a distinction without a difference.
Either way, to consider “Israel” the single most important threat to world peace is, necessarily, to consider it a very considerable force for evil in the world. While some Jews on the left share this view, a large number of Jews do not. It is in any case a commonly held view that most, if not all, Jews support Israel. It follows that it is a very short step from considering Israel to be the main threat to world peace to regarding Jews in general as supporters of evil—or at the very least, as people who place Jewish interests above the interests of humankind at large.
It follows that for those Europeans who view Israel as the chief threat to world peace, the general support for Israel manifested by a number of Western nations, with the United States at their head, cannot but seem intrinsically puzzling. The puzzle would be easily solved if one could regard the United States as acting in this respect not in the interests of its non-Jewish citizens but at the behest of an absurdly minuscule but nevertheless wealthy and entrenched Jewish lobby, conspiratorially active behind the scenes of conventional politics. And, indeed, suggestions of this kind have been, and still are, widely promoted by at least notionally respectable voices in the West.6 For those with any clear sense of the evils of war, and the importance of avoiding it, the conclusion to be drawn from these considerations can only be the one drawn by the authors of the Hamas covenant—and for that matter, as we noted in the introduction by a senior French diplomat—that the world would be a much better, because a much safer, place if only the Jews and their wretched national state did not exist. The eliminationist consequences of this conclusion are too volcanic in their implications to be explicitly stated or examined in the West—at present. Nevertheless, they hang in the air.
Setting the 2003 Eurobarometer poll and Article 22 of the 1988 Hamas charter alongside each other reveals a further characteristic of antisemitism, shared by all versions of it in all ages. The beliefs on which it rests and in which it trades are one and all delusive. Not only that, they are delusive in the more radical of two senses attaching to that term. Someone may be deluded in the sense that he or she believes something that might have been true but happens not to be true. Thus, I may deludedly believe that my glasses are at my bedside. And indeed they might well have been, although in fact they are on the kitchen table, where I have quite forgotten having left them earlier in the day. More seriously, someone may be deluded in the second of my two senses, in that he or she believes something that could not possibly be the case. This is the condition of those who believe the world to be flat or hollow, either possibility being inconsistent with elementary and exhaustively confirmed laws of physics. The philosopher J. L. Austin caught the distinction between the two types of delusion in a happy phrase when he spoke of its being “plain boring” to hear, from certain philosophers, “the constant repetition of things that are not true, and sometimes not even faintly sensible.”7 The beliefs cherished by antisemites, like those cherished by flat-earthers and hollow-earthers, fall characteristically into the second category—that of the not only false but also “not even faintly sensible.”
A case in point is that of the celebrated blood libel, the medieval belief that Jews, as a matter of religious duty, are constrained to abduct and kill gentile children in order to add their blood to the dough of the Passover matzo (accusations of this kind were brought in law as late as 1911).8 While an individual Jewish lunatic, or for that matter a gentile one, might do such a thing, it is not something that Jews might do as a matter of religious duty, for the simple reason that the consumption of blood, from any source and in any form, is expressly forbidden to observant Jews by the laws of kashruth (the dietary laws). Explaining the disappearance of a gentile child by suggesting that Jews might have killed the child in order to mix its blood with the Passover matzo is thus on a par with explaining the disappearance of a cow by suggesting that Hindus might have slaughtered it in order to make a religious offering of roast beef in the temple. These are not things that “might have happened, though thank goodness they have not.” The belief that either even