Solidarity forever, and without apology
Mel Gibson may need a lot of things: a psychiatrist, an AA sponsor, a lawyer, and a damn good publicist. But the Telegraph newspaper in England decided he needed one more thing: a mind reader. That’s the role columnist Andrew O’Hagan played when he wrote about the anti-Semitic tirade a drunk Gibson delivered on the Pacific Coast Highway.
O’Hagan focused in on Gibson’s now infamous remark about the “F—-ing Jews. They started all the wars in the world.”
“Dangerously worded as it was,” opines O’Hagan, “Gibson’s drunken comment was, it could reasonably be argued, a statement against the arrogance of the Israeli military…. Isn’t it that which is making America call for his head?”
(You see, Gibson is no anti-Semite — he was merely sharing his views on the Middle East. I know that happens to me — after my third or fourth drink, my anger about the whole Tamil Tiger thing just bubbles to the surface.)
But O’Hagan is not done. He sees the brouhaha over Gibson’s remarks as “something much darker and more troubling, not about him — he’s just a fool — but about the society which needs to produce a scapegoat in him”:
In the present Middle East crisis — and since the horror of 9/11 overall — it has become pretty impossible to make any remarks about Jews or against Israel which are not immediately seen to be either monstrously anti-Semitic, or indicative of supporting terrorism. The thought-police are out in force in almost every publication in America, and to suggest that the Israeli lobby has an undue weight on American foreign policy — as two writers did recently in the London Review of Books — can cause a storm of protest, much of it insinuating that the authors or the publications concerned hate Jews.
O’Hagan’s is a brilliant rhetorical move really — to first recast a clearly anti-Semitic statement as a comment on Israel, and then to grant Gibson a sort of immunity because he was really commenting on Israel.
I never heard of O’Hagan before this, and probably won’t read him again. His argument, however, has become a trope among Israel’s critics — or at least those critics who take umbrage when you call them anti-Semites (unlike say, Iran’s president, who’s happy to be labeled anti-Israel and anti-Semitic).
For example, the two writers O’Hagan refers to are Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, who wrote a working paper on the “Israel lobby” for the Kennedy School of Government. “Anyone who criticizes Israel’s actions,” they wrote, “or argues that pro-Israel groups have significant influence over U.S. Middle Eastern policy — an influence AIPAC celebrates — stands a good chance of being labeled an anti-Semite.”
And you have even a better chance, as Walt and Mearsheimer found out, if in criticizing America’s Mideast policy and the pro-Israel lobby you trot out the kinds of arguments and language beloved of conspiracy theorists. Their paper was pernicious not because it differed with Washington or AIPAC on the Mideast, but because it suggested that the main and perhaps only reason America stands behind Israel is that a monolithic pro-Israel lobby has cowed and bamboozled the press and the powers that be. Forget shared democratic values, Judeo-Christian affinity, and the fact that Muslim fascists have managed to twist their religion into a shorthand for terrorism. No, in W&M’s estimation, if not for AIPAC, Middle America would demand that Sheik Nasrallah speak before a joint session of Congress.
And if Israel’s supporters smell the whiff of anti-Semitism among too many of Israel’s critics, it’s because, well, they smell the whiff of anti-Semitism among too many of Israel’s critics. Two Connecticut professors have even found forensic evidence of the link. In a paper that appears in the August issue of the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Edward H. Kaplan of Yale and Charles A. Small of Southern Connecticut State University state baldly that “Anti-Israel Sentiment Predicts Anti-Semitism in Europe.” The two crunched data from the Anti-Defamation League’s 2004 survey of European attitudes toward Jews and Israel and found that more than half of those who tended to agree with anti-Semitic canards also expressed intense dislike for Israel. As Kaplan explained in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, if all of those attending an anti-Israel rally say they are not anti-Semitic, “more than half of them are lying.”
But if we Jews are going to ask others to appreciate the distinctions between — and melding of — anti-Israel and anti-Semitic behavior, we need to extend the same intellectual courtesy. We can’t declare our affinity to Israel in fund-raising campaigns, street rallies, and newspaper op-eds, and then cry “anti-Semite” when an opponent of Israel’s policies lodges a protest at a Jewish federation or a synagogue that hangs the Israeli flag. We can’t declare our solidarity with Israel without assuming the responsibility of what such a position entails.
Most of us know anti-Semitism when we see it, especially when those who purport to be criticizing Israel fall back on themes and images used by anti-Semites for millennia: global conspiracies, blood libels, financial chicanery, deicide. And physical attacks on Jews and our property are no less painful and obscene if they fail to meet a dictionary definition of “anti-Semitism.”
But the current conflict — defined by an enemy whose followers know no boundaries of nationality or decency — presents a new sort of challenge. On Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert called the conflict “a war that is fought for all the Jews” and told leaders of North America’s federations that “we rely on you to share some of the burden of this war.”
Part of that burden is standing strong for Israel, knowing full well that there are those who will hate us for it and will wish us harm. It’s a burden we should embrace with honor, and without apology.
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