* Ahad Ha’am, founder spirit of the Lovers of Zion, told a meeting in Russia in 1902 that “there is now among us a party [i.e the Bund] which would raise this jargon [Yiddish] to the dignity of a national language” when it could never be but “an external and temporary medium of discourse.”
* In 1917 Jews thronged to the Bolsheviks and were numerous in the Cheka and its successors. Anti-Bolshevism leaned heavily on anti-semitism, as did Stalin’s anti-Trotskyism. In the Great Purge of 1937–38, most of the Jewish Bolsheviks and the remaining Bundists were wiped out.
2
The War Against Analogy
An’ here I sit so patiently Waiting to find out what price You have to pay to get out of Going through all these things twice.
Bob Dylan, “Stuck Inside
of Mobile with the
Memphis Blues Again”
“One should never judge a book by its cover, but in the case of former President Jimmy Carter’s latest work, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, we should make an exception,” declared Anti-Defamation League national director Abraham Foxman in 2006. “All one really needs to know about this biased account is found in the title.”1
As Carter discovered, coupling the word “apartheid” with Israel is a quick route to getting branded an anti-semite. The campaign of vilification mounted against Carter—familiar to supporters of Palestinian rights but extraordinary in that its target was a Nobel Peace Prize winner and former President—confirmed how determined the Israel lobby is to rule this analogy out of bounds. The Central Conference of American Rabbis, the largest organization of rabbis in the US, declared that “use of the term ‘apartheid’ to describe conditions in the West Bank serves only to demonize and de-legitimize Israel in the eyes of the world.” (For good measure it also accused Carter of “attempted rehabilitation of such terrorist groups as Hezbollah and Hamas.”)2 Eager to distance the Democrats from Carter’s critique of Israel, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced: “It is wrong to suggest that the Jewish people would support a government in Israel or anywhere else that institutionalizes ethnically based oppression.” Pelosi seems to believe not only that all Jews support Israel but that Jews by nature are always politically correct, uniquely shielded from the fractures and vagaries of history. If the generalization she had made had been a negative one, the racist nature of her logic would have been obvious and would have been condemned. But since she flattered the Jews, and backed Israel, the Anti-Defamation League wasn’t interested.
The more I travel and read, the more analogies I discover, and at the same time the warier I become of all analogies. For an analogy to do its job, there have to be clear distinctions between those features that are and those that are not analogous. One has to examine context and proportion. History does not repeat itself exactly, but it is full of echoes, some revealing, some misleading.
Attacks on what has been dubbed “the new anti-semitism” (an anti-semitism associated with the European left in particular) have focused on the use of what are deemed to be inappropriate analogies, which are interpreted as inherently anti-semitic. Curiously, this argument is usually linked to the further charge that critics of Israel reveal their true, anti-semitic bias when they “single out” Israel.
The European Union Monitoring Committee on Racism and Xenophobia has published a “working definition” of anti-semitism which declares that “anti-semitism manifests itself” in “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” as well as “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour.”3 Former Israeli minister Natan Sharansky defined “the new anti-semitism” by applying what he calls the “3D test”: “demonization” (comparing Israelis to Nazis), “double standards” (measuring Israel by different yardsticks than are applied to other countries), and “delegitimization” (denying the Jewish right to a state). Berlin Technical University’s Center for Research on Anti-semitism characterized the new anti-semitism as a critique of Israel in which the Jewish state is “negatively distinct” from all others. Irwin Cotler, the Canadian Justice Minister, claimed that acceptable criticism of Israel ends and anti-semitism begins when critics deny the Jewish people’s right to self-determination, when they “Nazify” Israel, or when they “single out Israel for discriminatory treatment in the international arena.”
To single something out unfairly is to deny its analogous status: for example, Israel’s crimes in relation to crimes committed by other regimes. This “double standard” is said to be a telltale sign of anti-semitism or, in the case of Jews, self-hatred.
Now I strongly agree that there must be a single standard when it comes to human rights and dignity, crimes of war, violence, occupation, and discrimination. Here I’m with the Prophet Amos, to whom the Lord showed “the plumb line” against which all, including Israel, were to be measured. However, in working out where the plumb line falls, determining that single standard of human justice, it is necessary to engage in the process of analogy. And on this the Zionists place a priori restrictions.
Israel demands exemptions: on refugees’ right to return or compensation, on seizure and settlement of land acquired by military conquest, on torture and assassinations, on the indiscriminate use of violence in densely populated areas, on nuclear proliferation. These exemptions are embodied in hundreds of US vetoes on Israel’s behalf at the Security Council. So who is really doing the “singling out”?
Of course, Israel is not the only offender in today’s world. The US and Britain are both guilty of unspeakable crimes in Iraq; Burma, Sudan, Zimbabwe, and far too many other states are committing crimes that need “singling out.” But if no protest against a particular crime is to be admitted unless all crimes are equally and presumably simultaneously protested against, then there will be no protest at all, against any crimes. This is an acute form of moral relativism masquerading as its opposite. The upshot is to minimize or relativize Israel’s crimes and to attempt to delegitimize those who would judge Israel by universal standards of human decency.
Anti-Zionists, of course, do reject the idea that there should be a Jewish state in Palestine. In doing so it’s said that we are “singling out” Jews by denying their right to the statehood that others enjoy. Here the Zionists move from objecting to inappropriate analogies to insisting on analogous status with other national groups. A rejection of that particular analogy, and the preference for other analogies—other readings of history—is ruled anti-semitic, either in motive or effect.
“Why should Jews be the only people denied the right to national self-determination?” The historical selectivity lies with the accusers. There can be no doubt that very large numbers of Tibetans, Western Saharans, Kurds, Kashmiris, Chechens, Tamils in Sri Lanka, Mizos, Nagas and Assamese in India, Aceh in Indonesia, Pushtoon, Baloch, and Sindhis in Pakistan, Ibo people in Nigeria, not to mention Palestinians, believe their right to self-determination is being actively denied, not merely in theory but in practice.
By all the usually accepted definitions—language, culture, territorial contiguity and widespread national consciousness—the Kurds have long qualified as a nation, but none of the great powers has ever recognized Kurdish national aspirations. As a key backer of Turkey, the US helped suppress Kurdish revolt, and only discovered the cruelties inflicted by Saddam on the Kurds of Iraq when it became useful to do so. The subsequent suborning of the Kurdish leaders in Iraq by the occupation has, in turn, made it clear that even in such a relatively clear case, national self-determination throws up awkward questions, not least in regard to cities with mixed populations, like Kirkuk. Even just