“Don’t mistake criticism of Israel for anti-Semitism,” two Jewish women pleaded in a Hartford newspaper a few weeks ago. Remember that cry. These two Jewish women were attacking Jewish community protests against a Middle Eastern studies program at Central Connecticut State University. Glistening with innocence, that battle cry will be increasingly uttered by those who unfairly attack Israel on the campuses and in the media.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with the statement itself: “Don’t mistake criticism of Israel for anti-Semitism.” Of course not. But prejudiced criticism is another matter. Prejudice is defined as an ill-informed and irrational doctrine of hostility. The telltale evidence of prejudice — whether against individuals, groups or states — lies in the use of negative and ill-informed stereotypes. And the double standard is at the heart of such stereotypes.
At the Connecticut Middle East studies program, Professor Norton Mezvinsky hectored the students about Israeli “terrorism,” without him or anyone else mentioning the Palestinian suicide murders that precipitated the Israeli reactions. It was said that Mezvinsky’s right to so one-sidedly regale his students was protected by “academic freedom and the First Amendment. But while any citizen is free to voice prejudice, the uncontested projection of such bigotry does not belong in the media or in the schools, which are influential and supposedly objective shapers of public opinion. As one observer noted, the professor had made “a dangerous divorce between academic freedom and intellectual honesty.”
Paul Berman, a liberal writer and frequent critic of Israel, recently expressed his alarm at tendencies among some public intellectuals to use such stereotypes and double standards, saying it “is fairly amazing how many otherwise serious writers have ended up choosing the same tiny set of images to apply to the Jewish state.” We see it on all sides: the automatic description of Israel’s actions in terms of “Holocaust” or “Nazism,” and the sloganeering against Israeli policymakers as “murderers” or “racists” by those who call the suicide bombers “martyrs.”
However, while one can make a distinction between criticism of Israel and prejudice against the Jewish state, the distinction between anti-Israel prejudice and anti-Semitism has become more difficult because of an unfortunate fog that has settled over many Jews.
“The world hates us and always will. What more do you need than the Holocaust?” That sentiment was recently made by a neighbor of Israeli writer Yossi Klein Halevi, and is mounting among world Jewry.
It is not new. “Judeophobia is hereditary and incurable,” wrote Leo Pinsker, the 19th-century Zionist. But Jew-hatred is not written into the genetic code. The Holocaust was the product of an old culture and some new circumstances. Other history, especially in America, demonstrates that anti-Semitism is terminable, though not terminated.
The idea that anti-Semitism is eternal and immune to any remedy confounds both experience and reason. It feeds an overdeveloped sense of victimization and a self-ghettoization, which is generally disabling, even in our continuing battle against anti-Semitism. Moreover, belief that an immutable and universal anti-Semitism lies at the heart of anti-Israelism could reduce Israel’s imperative to seek a constructive role in any possible peace process.
In terms of the current conflict, the absolute equation of anti-Semitism with anti-Israel prejudice obstructs our ability to fight prejudice against Israel. If, as Israeli writer Hillel Halkin recently wrote, “The new anti-Israelism is nothing but the old anti-Semitism in disguise,” then the only way to fight prejudice against Israel is to eliminate anti-Semitism. But if there is nothing we can do about an immutable anti-Semitism, there is nothing we can do about prejudice against Israel. Even if there is something we can do about anti-Semitism, equating it with anti-Israel prejudice doesn’t always help and it sometimes hurts.
We don’t know whether Mezvinsky — or the two Jewish women in Connecticut — are anti-Semites. They will surely deny it, but more important, it will probably be impossible to make that case against them to the public or to university administrators. That is also the case for some of the leftist pundits and public intellectuals whose vocal prejudice against Israel derives mainly from their ideology — that is, the Palestinians are Third World victims of the First World imperialist team of America and Israel. It is also the case for media editors who run articles of uncontested prejudice with the battle cry “Don’t mistake criticism of Israel for anti-Semitism.”
Prejudice against Israel can be identified by its stereotypes, double standards and related historical distortions — whether its purveyors are anti-Semitic or not. Such bigotry can be condemned for what it is. Prejudice against Israel should be established as a dangerous outrage on its own count, without necessarily basing the charge on an intuited anti-Semitism. That is a usually ineffective diversion we can no longer afford.