ANTI-SEMITISM ON THE LEFT
Améry, Jean
The German-language cultural critic and essayist Jean Amery was born in Vienna on October 31, 1912, as Hans Mayer, the sole child of a Catholic mother and a Jewish father—who died as an...
...Wiseacres speak with relief of breaking a taboo, and have no inkling of the dark powers to which they are lending their voices...
...Internally, they will regard their Jewish citizens as virtual "Zionists" and treat them accordingly...
...Here, precisely at this point, a left returning to its true self would take up its great task—if it were able to rid itself of a vocabulary to which it is compulsively clinging, and able to rid itself of a few political myths...
...The problem of age-old anti-Semitism, appearing in the cloak of respectability and fashionable chic, goes far beyond anything that Christian-Jewish cooperation can solve...
...If it is again becoming a reality today, three decades 41 after the discovery of what was done by the Nazis, then this has to do not only with time, which silently and steadily erodes ethical indignation, but also, indeed probably first and foremost, with the situation in the Near East...
...That they be loyal citizens of Israel...
...The older ones among you may still have witnessed how, in the Third Reich, due to indolence of heart people quickly grew accustomed to their Jewish neighbor being fetched at night and deported...
...If these Soviet Jews were to attain full, and no longer insultingly restricted, Soviet citizenship, probably only a small percentage of them would want to emigrate to Israel— just as today there are but few American Jews who are pressing into that Mediterranean country described by Thomas Mann as "dusty and stony...
...And we can regard as characteristic of this change in public opinion (not too long ago still favorable to Israel) the behavior of the Christian religious bodies, and especially that of the Vatican...
...In 1935, the promulgation of the Nuremberg racist laws forced him to recognize his marginal Jewish identity as fully binding...
...All this is even worse than those uncanny dialectics that can be used to justify all and everything...
...The powerful and rich Arab nations need harbor no fears...
...in the United 47 States, they are at the center of the liberal movements...
...In my eyes the Jews are as little a chosen people as an accursed one...
...This kind of Realpolitik—in French one says "La Realpolitik" when speaking of vile opportunism—seeps, uncheckably and constantly, into the lifeblood of what is called public opinion, which, as we know from sociological studies, consists of nothing but opinions about opinions...
...Jews were present wherever fossilized structures were being broken up: in Germany, starting with the "Young Germany" movement to the treatises of the Frankfurt School...
...I can well imagine that a man of the stamp of a LeviStrauss, who is occupied with prehistoric societies and their structural myths, smiles gently and a bit scornfully at what are for him such microtemporal courses of events...
...And we can be sure of the understanding of the Jews outside Israel...
...In the most favorable instances they were tolerated, but they were never accepted...
...If I were cynical enough, I would quote the American mathematician and chansonnier Tom Lehrer, who already years ago on the occasion of an American "Brotherhood Week" sang: "And the Catholics hate the Protestants and the Protestants hate the Catholics and the Moslems hate the Hindus— and everybody hates the Jews...
...The respectable anti-Semite has an enviably clear conscience, a spirit as calm as the sea...
...Not just a few Nazi offspring of incorrigible parents or grandparents— but alleged socialists...
...The right would hardly respond to me anyhow...
...43 I'd like to see them just once in the face of threat from a new Hitler—Messrs...
...Finally: is the left prepared to acknowledge that even if so-called formal democracy can48 not attain realization as long as economic democracy does not complement it, that formal democracy still must have absolute priority, since economic democracy can be built only on its foundation...
...What is expected of the one group...
...There are, for example, such personalities as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, known everywhere to be lackeys of imperialism, who protested against the shameless UN and UNESCO decisions...
...All this, of course, has nothing to do with any sort of abstruse myths of blood and race...
...While it is possible in Israel for a politician who is a Communist and, at the same time, an Arab nationalist to become the mayor of a city, the few Jews who still live in Syria or Iraq or even in supposedly moderate Tunisia (where they may be no less indigenous than their Arab oppressors) eke out their existence amidst constant humiliation and threat...
...It evidently exists once again and, indeed, on an international scale...
...To be sure, there will be objections that Israel has nothing to do with the Jewish Problem in the broader sense...
...After being captured by the Gestapo and tortured, he was sent to Auschwitz in 1943...
...To lull himself into a false sense of security would be quite wrong...
...No one can deny, and I, too, cannot conceal it here that, in carrying out just rehabilitation, injustices toward Arabs have occurred...
...Those multinational corporations that in all Western democracies are ready to accede to the Arab boycott demands for the sake of business know this very well...
...The person who is speaking to you here was a witness...
...how they are discreetly silent when in Algeria not a single one of the Revolution's great chefs historiques any longer appears on the scene...
...you are barred from the civil service...
...Its special correspondent for the Near East, Michel Tatu, cited a photo volume published by the Egyptian government on the second anniversary of the October War...
...The left would then have to demand that the Jews be given a double freedom: the freedom to assimilate in their host countries under the aegis of the Enlightenment, and the freedom to emigrate to an Israel that even within the pre-1967 borders would have enough room to receive a flow of immigrants that most likely would not be particularly large...
...Surely, the Vatican later disassociated itself from this document that its representatives had, so inconceivably, countersigned...
...For even where it makes out to be genuinely pro-Israel, it inspires me with skepticism...
...Three years later, upon the German annexation of Austria, he fled to Belgium with his young Jewish bride...
...The fact is that the Arab nations— from the Saudi Arabian despot who is spreading the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the religiously possessed Qaddafi down to the "moderate," pro-Western Sadat and the selfstyled Marxist Habash—are all determined to wipe out the State of Israel, as a Herr Goring once wanted to wipe out the cities of England...
...Between this time and his suicide in 1978, he published a series of autobiographical-essayistic works, including studies on aging and suicide, and two novels...
...But crude anti-Semitism, aroused from the deepest layers of the collective unconscious and revitalized, would once again create a myth as a result of a historical chance constellation, the myth of the Wandering Jew, of Shylock...
...And to the degree that it talks, its vocabulary is distorted in the truest sense of the word...
...The Red Orchestra" was an intelligence network during World War II that provided information about German military events to the Soviet Union...
...Whoever wants to destroy it, openly or through policies that can effect nothing else but such destruction, is practicing the Jew-hatred of yesterday and time immemorial...
...for naturally there are a few self-hating Jews on call everywhere who are prepared to deny this solidarity, which applies to them, too, for the sake of some ideological phantasm or for reasons of both an illusory and a suicidal "objectivity...
...Only a few, almost shamefully trivial insights are needed in order to comprehend this...
...For it, Israel is an imperialist, cancerous growth and the Jews in general are accomplices of the permanent capitalist conspiracy...
...At this very moment, the process is in motion...
...With just a bit of imagination everyone can picture what would happen if Israel were destroyed...
...Only one thing is already certain: there is a general uneasiness regarding the Jews...
...Maxime Rodinson, Ernest Mandel, Eric Rouleau—all of them Jewish by birth, ideologically alienated, anti-Israel Jews...
...Of course, that isn't entirely true...
...The young Socialists, to whom the Palestinians now appear as the freedom fighters and the Israelis as the imperialist oppressors, are insisting that the Second International disassociate itself from Israel...
...fortunately so, even if we are perhaps not so far from it as optimists assume...
...in France, as members of the Popular Front, later as disciples of Sartre, and later still as structuralists...
...Again Jews would be forced to earn their living by dubious and illicit work, through obscure financial transactions...
...Aside from these special cases, who are more to be pitied than censured, the Jews feel bound to the fortunes and misfortunes of Israel, whether they are religious Jews or not, whether they adhere to Zionism or reject it, whether they are newly arrived in their host countries or deeply rooted there...
...They are nothing but the chance result of historical constellations that were unfavorable to them for two thousand years...
...Really no one...
...That once and for all they clearly acknowledge the fact of the Jewish national state...
...For it summarizes the factual situation better than the most sophisticated sociopsychological studies...
...But it is nonetheless true since, after all—contrary to a distorted tenet of Adorno's holding that the banal cannot be true—it is always true, for otherwise it could not have become a banality...
...It seems crucial to me that the left—which might possibly help to determine the future spirit and image of the Western world—stop pursuing this systematic anti-Zionism, which, for the Jews, and also in historical-objective terms, bears the repulsive features of traditional anti-Semitism...
...But they have no power...
...For the right, let us not forget, stands for order...
...And wherever and whenever we, who are in agreement, have the possibility, even in the most modest way, to intervene with our word in the historical proceedings that are once again being conducted against the Jews, we are obliged to make ourselves heard: morally, politically, polemically, and with the emotion that befits a good cause...
...I stem from an old Vorarlberg family...
...Please do not regard this appeal as an address to you personally...
...Wherever there is power—from the White House in Washington to the Palais d'Elysee, to Downing Street, or the Kremlin (where they have long ago suppressed the fact that it was mainly Jews who stamped the Motherland of the World's Workers out of the ground of old Russia)—there is the readiness, paraphrasing the matter more or less diplomatically, to defend the "right of the Arabs," which can be quantified in Petrodollars, and to sell the right of the Jews, which is the eternal nonright of the poor, for a few pieces of silver...
...Has not Israel itself caused the trouble that is besetting it from all sides with the "immobility" of its policies...
...The Arabs who inhabited Israeli territory within its borders prior to the Six Day War have a right not to be treated as second-class citizens...
...I am no specialist on Middle East questions and no better versed in the history of Zionism than any newspaper reader...
...And now let these eternal troublemakers be quiet...
...It was printed in the June 1976 issue (30:6) of the German journal Merkur...
...it desperately needs the good will of the Moslem world with its vast population and power...
...Nothing more than the recognition of the obvious fact that the much maligned Zionism is also a national liberation movement, that the Jews, too, the most martyred, most tragic people in the world, have a right to their national identity—in so far as they are searching for one and have not already assimilated religiously and ethnically to their host peoples...
...Translated from the German by SIDNEY and STELLA P. ROSENFELD 50...
...I have no relatives at all in Israel and soon I will see the country for the first time in my life...
...it is also the virtual shelter for all of the insulted and injured Jews of the earth...
...enough research has been done on the subject...
...One must make haste in order to "get in on a good deal," as they put it...
...Certainly, there is more than one righteous, conservative man—perhaps he is even a former National Socialist—who is earnest about his friendship for the Jews and the State of Israel...
...I never belonged to the Jewish religious community...
...He survived the next two years in concentration camps, including Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen, and was finally liberated by the British in 1945...
...if you continue to form parties you will be overstepping the law...
...The Fahrer, the U.S.S.R...
...Existentialist-positivist and stubborn atheist that I am, it doesn't occur to me to convert the Jewish fate into a metaphysical phenomenon...
...This member of the Academie Francaise would cease smiling only if there were a rude knock at his door and a harsh voice, no matter in what language, commanded him, the Jew, to open immediately and come along...
...In Israel every Jew must be trembling for his life, even if he is the bravest, and with him all of the Jews in every country of the earth.—Perhaps, though, only someone who was a witness to the murderous frenzy of the Third Reich knows and comprehends this...
...I was raised as a Catholic...
...Anti-Semitism has a collective infrastructure that is historically and psychologically deeply imbedded...
...And in a special reference to Jerusalem it stated: "The Islamic character of Jerusalem is a fact...
...I ask the left to consider all this...
...In a pacifled Near East region, the dreamers of a Greater Israel would disappear of their own, just as would the Diaspora Jewry—which is plagued by constant anxiety and thus reacts aggressively...
...crisis, inflation, unemployment, energy problems...
...Does the left still regard nationalism, as it always has, as a political error born of obstinacy...
...Entirely aside from its traditional, dormant anti-Semitism, this bourgeoisie has its special interests too, which now coincide most exactly and in a comforting way with the thoughtless anti-Semitism of the young, who 42 often have yet to see a Jew face to face...
...But since my words have a certain chance of reaching beyond our narrow circle of men and women who are in basic agreement with one another, I chose them as you have heard them...
...commanded and one obeyed...
...One cannot prevail against it...
...We are already witnessing how political groups that regard themselves as "leftist" don't waste a word when a despot and paranoid in Uganda commits abominable murders...
...One is beginning to feel disturbing reservations, especially among people who only ten years ago tried one's patience with their philo-Semitic pretenses...
...In lamentable fashion they would haunt the waiting rooms of Israeli consulates in order to secure the piece of paper that would save them, and they wouldn't give a damn about Marx's antiSemitic aberrations, which at the moment are still sacred texts to them...
...One thought one was dreaming: the nightmare of a joint Crescent-and-Cross crusade against Jewry...
...They are, as I just said, more the victims of chance than of necessity—and also of that indolence of the heart, which in the Middle Ages plunged the peasant and in the heyday of capitalism the proletarian into unspeakable misery...
...today it is France...
...All this does not mean that I am unaware of the errors of Israeli policies...
...Permit me now to open a parenthesis...
...Human sacrifices without end...
...All the young Socialists, Communists, Maoists, and Trotskyists have to do is imagine those in power telling them: "It isn't you we are combating, it is World Bolshevism...
...my cultural homeland once was Germany...
...It is with this outrageous and stupid antiSemitism, to the extent that it passes itself off merely as anti-Zionism, that young people are joining forces...
...I have already said on another occasion that in this entire conflict right opposes right...
...The sacrifice of the Jews is in the best tradition, a sanctified custom...
...One must concede, to be sure, that antiSemitism as such would perhaps not have gained this respectability if there were really not a very deep tie and, if you will excuse the worn-out word, existential bond between every Jew and the State of Israel...
...Don't laugh at the fact that this is the voice of a country that in October 1973 was saved in extremis by America's pressure on Israel...
...The wretch was led to his fall...
...But the Jews, and also the Israeli Jews, yes, especially they, are an element of creative disorder...
...With an indolent heart, people act as if they know nothing of the existential tie of Diaspora Jews to Israel...
...Nonetheless, the injustice done to the Palestinian Arabs can be redressed without creating a global conflict over the issue...
...These two and a hand44 ful of others...
...What is demanded of the others...
...Indolence of the heart: I choose to employ this old-fashioned formula...
...I know, in any case, that those of you who have gathered here to open Brotherhood Week, no matter where you stand politically, are of sincere good will...
...I am talking about very real, political, social, and psychological facts...
...If, occasionally, he awakens from his apathetic drowsing, he asks the ritual questions: Is Israel not an expansionist state, an imperialist outpost...
...That this was by no means so has been proven most irrefutably in an excellently documented book by Albert Memmi, a Tunisian Jew living in France, a man, moreover, who had always supported the Arabs when they were under French dominion in North Africa...
...Until 1964, when he agreed to deliver a radio address on the intellectual and Auschwitz, Amery had refused all literary activity in Germany...
...He also feels in agreement with historical developments, and this is conducive to his moral tranquillity...
...As we all know, a man of still greater stature—Henri Bergson—was forced to wear the Yellow Star of David before a kind death saved him from the very worst...
...Anti-Semitism, in the guise of anti-Zion46 ism, has become respectable...
...The State of Israel is a Jewish state...
...It is a matter for the world and its history...
...Anti-Semitism or anti-Judaism was always a matter of course for the Moslems...
...It hardly pays to discuss such questions...
...But in stating this, we must unfortunately take note of the fact that what is both base and stupid has triumphed more than once in the course of world history, and that there is no relying in the least on Professor Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel...
...Does the left still stand up for humanist values...
...Does it still believe that the concept of democracy embraces universal suffrage, freedom of speech, and the right of assembly—the droits de Phomme, which since the French Revolution, after all, have not exactly been unknown...
...And finally, what is expected of a public opinion that, from the far right to the far left, is ready to condemn Israel in the name of national identities and the right to peoples' self-determination...
...But one is used to such sacrifices, especially when Jews are concerned...
...Were it to withdraw from the Arabs its blind support and mechanical yesvote, the left could help solve the problem of Israel, as well as the Jewish Problem...
...The surviving Israelis, having once more become mythic Wandering Jews, would flee from the site of the prophet Mohammed and pour out into the world...
...It actually is the fascination with power that produced this change in the political climate...
...But I know, still deeper and more precisely, that Israel's errors are in ridiculous disproportion to the indifference of the others who are motivated entirely by Realpolitik, the Russians and the English, the French and the Germans, and tomorrow very likely the Americans—not to speak of the Arabs, who become incomprehensible when at the great feast of their nationhood (which I heartily grant them), they seem compelled to present the Jews as a burnt offering...
...Nonetheless, the Tripoli colloquium did not vanish from the collective consciousness...
...To what extent anti-Zionism makes use of the traditional anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish phantasms became clear to me recently while I was reading the French newspaper Le Monde, which I do daily...
...its text says literally: "In no army of the world are Jews desired .. . because for them money is always more important than principles...
...At this point, please permit me to quote the Germanist Hans Mayer, a man of thorough Marxist schooling...
...Now to the last question: Is the concept of justice still binding for the left...
...In the familiar argumentation of the friends of the Arab cause it is routinely pointed out that in the world of Islam, in contrast to the Chris45 tian world, the Jews had always lived together with the Arabs peacefully and by mutual consent...
...This must be expressly stated...
...It was delivered as an address on March 7, 1976 in Hamburg, at the opening session of the German Brotherhood Week, an interfaith event sponsored annually since 1951 by the Gesellschaft fur Christlich-Jddische Zusammenarbeit (Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation...
...After all, Israel's expansion was the result of the bellicose Arab fanaticism that already in 1948 promised the Jews nothing more than to "throw them into the sea...
...suffering will overtake him and, like once Pontius Pilate did, the world will wash its hands of him...
...That has not changed...
...But where are the brothers...
...If the left properly understands itself, it knows that it is a child of the Englightenment, of the Encyclopedists, the great French Revolution, the intellectual and poetic influence of Lessing, Heine, BOrne, Moses Mendelsohn, Feuerbach...
...A fleeting glance at history suffices for us to perceive this, if we are at all prepared for objective analyses...
...people have other worries...
...But it was, above all, At the Mind's Limits that founded his reputation as a moral spokesman for the victims of the Holocaust and set him on an unswerving course as a rebellious protester against the immorality of history, which already was witnessing the reemergence of anti-Semitism, not only on the right, but also among Amery's former allies of the left...
...I won't elaborate on its roots here...
...There is no need to insist that this sort of thing has nothing more in common with—unfortunately "normal"— territorial conflicts between sovereign states as, for example, the conflict between Algeria and Morocco...
...He himself was touched and squeezed, as in the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel, not to see whether he was fat enough but, rather, if he was lean enough to be slaughtered...
...But since I am not only a born pessimist but by temperament an enlightener and since, in addition, my home has been situated rather far to the left on the political map my whole life long, I don't wish to shrink from directing a few words to my friends from the leftist camp...
...In this way, anti-Semitism is becoming what it has not been and could not be since the discovery of the Nazi horrors: respectable...
...if the left sacrifices this concept as a barter for the fetish of revolution, it will destroy itself...
...Some Jews had thought that in the socialist societies they would be able to walk upright as a matter of course...
...And I add: danger, however, does not oppose danger of the same order...
...What good then is Brotherhood Week, for which we have gathered here...
...in the Café de Commerce in Dijon, or in some tiny town in Kent—and, naturally, all the more in every Arab bazaar...
...In no time, the Near East question will become a new Jewish question...
...Only few dare to stand by what yesterday was self-evident but now suddenly causes displeasure...
...This brings us back to the question of Israel and the Jews...
...For they would not even be acceptable as "guest workers," in times of crisis less than ever before...
...I appeal to your feelings, to the world's feelings, but above all, certainly, to your intelligence, when I stress: anti-Semitism, even if it calls itself anti-Zionism, is not respectable...
...It would be entirely wrong to grant an advance in trust to those circles that a few decades ago were financing Hitler...
...The disassociation from Israel and with it from every individual Jew, as cautious as it is clear, hardly surprises the expert on indolent hearts...
...No, the Jews and their historical existence are not a metaphysical phenomenon...
...and his motivation may have nothing to do with personal relief from guilt but rather with an insight into the facts...
...This person is not immobile, but a priori immobilized...
...It's "Brotherhood Week...
...Justice has been its raison d'ètre as long as it has existed...
...It is very dismaying that before our incredulous eyes young people, and particularly those who in the broadest sense of the term regard themselves as socialists, are reviving the age-old phenomenon we had believed was long since dead...
...For the Third International the question doesn't arise anyway...
...In the territory of Islamic rule the Jews were and always remained second-class citizens, and where they worked their way up, as in Moorish Spain, their situation was always precarious...
...It is unadulterated Streicher...
...For that is certainly also a solution, but one that always requires two groups of participants: the ones who are assimilating and the ones who are prepared for their absorption...
...Or, rather, does it find nationalism acceptable wherever, under the sign of tyranny, it is directed against Jews—and unjust as soon as the Jews, for their part and under unbearable pressure, fall reactively into its trap...
...Yes or no...
...Nobody wants to swim against the tide, something that everyone knows is quite strenuous...
...So much for what I have called the existential tie of all Jews to the State of Israel, and this has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with nationalistic or religious mysticism, which is always only mystification...
...And they are happy at the thought that they, too, for a change, are moving in the direction of the objective spirit—providing that they have ever heard of it...
...I say "every Jew," and immediately draw a line...
...For more is at stake for the Jews than just to walk upright...
...They are raised justifiably and demand an answer...
...But if the Jewish state were destroyed, which is the aim, admitted or not, of all Arab politics from the right to the far left, from the King of Saudi Arabia to George Habash, an irreversible injustice would occur...
...From the political officeholder to the cautious journalist down to the man holding forth on politics on the street corner— everyone looks about expectantly, as though wanting to ask: What and how much is actually permitted again...
...It is up to the left, today more than ever, to concur energetically with Jean-Paul Sartre, who said in an interview in the days of the October War: I know only that in this conflict 3 million people are up against 100 million...
...The Soviet Union and its vassal countries have done everything imaginable to cure them of their Marxism-Leninism...
...He was deported in 1940 to the Gurs internment camp in Southern France, but escaped and made his way back to Brussels—where he joined the Resistance movement...
...Israel's "immobility" can be explained when we consider the situation of someone who is standing with his back to the wall...
...The Palestinians, who did not exist as a nation when the first Zionist immigrants set foot on the soil of present-day Israel, but who in our time are in the phase of becoming a nation, have a right to a state of their own...
...Everyone knows them...
...Two millennia: that is a very tiny span of time in the unrecordable history of the human species...
...for the last 38 years I have been living in Belgium...
...Of course, we are still far from a general hatred of the Jews as an ethnic group and religious community...
...And again the world would behave as it did after 1933, when such underpopulated countries as Canada and Australia shut their doors to the Jews as though they were bearing germs of pestilence...
...He merely exchanged the prisons of the French fascist officers for those of the "socialist" Boumedienne...
...It is the total confusion of concepts, the definitive loss of moralpolitical standards...
...How clearly this can be observed in the interplay of foreign and domestic politics is shown by the internal policies of the currently anti-Zionist countries...
...The point is, however (and now I return to the subject that I have taken on here), that all this—I mean: the self-alienation of the left, the interests of international high finance and of the political powers, the maliciousness of the rulers, and the effusive exaltation of the subjected and dispossessed—all this has its effects on the world, in which, today as yesterday, the Jew will be burned...
...The creation of the State of Israel was an act of justice, as Gromyko, too, clearly proclaimed at the time in the name of the Soviet Union...
...I believe in all seriousness that the left must redefine itself within the context of the problem of Israel—that is, the Jewish Problem...
...And yet to the extent that I am interested at all in the national existence and independence of a community, it is Israel...
...It must be borne in mind, however, that the rights of the Palestinians—those who are now living within the area that became the State of Israel in 1948 and those who were driven from their homesteads by the wars (for which their fellow Arabs, after all, were not so entirely without blame)—the rights of these Palestinian Arabs in principle can be satisfied without insuperable difficulties...
...And their state...
...Certainly, it ought to be required that Israel and the Jews of the world contribute their share to the restoration of the full rights of the Palestinian Arabs...
...In February 1976, during an Islamic-Christian colloquium —convening, of all places, in Qaddafi's Tripoli—Vatican representatives, first with hesitation but in the end submissively, signed a general condemnation of Israel in which Zionism was once again stigmatized as racism...
...The German-language cultural critic and essayist Jean Amery was born in Vienna on October 31, 1912, as Hans Mayer, the sole child of a Catholic mother and a Jewish father—who died as an Austrian rifleman in World War I. He was raised in the provinces, but returned to Vienna for university study...
...how they do not protest when the absolute ruler of Libya enacts laws under which adulterous women are stoned...
...Obtusely, they do not want to recognize that this union of despair is not whimsical folly, but that it merely expresses the plain fact that the burnt child, the Jew, knows in the depths of his heart where, and where alone, is the aid station willing to tend his burns...
...Yet Israel—certainly no model state, but surely a polity that permits opposition, including antinational opposition—is in leftist mythology a "reactionary" land...
...In contrast to a traditionally obstinate right, the left has no title to the aforementioned indolence of the heart...
...Whoever has some insight and a bit of flair for recognizing the fluctuations of the forever fluctuating, will be inclined to assure these impatient people that, in fact, a good deal is not only permitted but called for...
...With a minimum of imagination, you need only place yourselves in this situation, and you will understand that with their anti-Zionist emotional fervor these leftists awaken aggressive Zionist reactions on the one hand and, on the other, those antiSemitic feelings that have been dragged along through the history of the Occident and the Orient for two millennia and are latently as present today as they ever were...
...The essay appears here with the kind permission of Mme...
...SIDNEY ROSENFELD q It is not a happy moment at which I appear before you to offer my thoughts on the Jewish Problem...
...And it is another incontrovertible fact that in the whole world there is no one who will sound the alarm before a new genocide is set into motion...
...These bourgeois are interested in business deals: in oil and other things...
...For them Israel and the Jewish fate are only a welcome argument against everything that dares to question the existing social order...
...Judaizing of the city is as much to be avoided as the division and internationalization of the Holy City...
...The Christian world is as little concerned with their fate as with that of the Soviet Jews, for whom not only the road to total assimilation is blocked but also the flight to a land that even under the most difficult economic conditions must appear to them as the "Promised" one...
...At the Mind's Limits [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980...
...Usurers are not fighters...
...One is not antiSemitic, but anti-Israel...
...The progeny of Heine and Borne, of Marx and Rosa Luxemburg, of Erich Milhsam and Gustav Landauer cannot, dare not be the ones to spread this respectable anti-Semitism...
...The word itself, both etymologically and politically, derives from the Latin colonusfarmer...
...Otherwise you would not have come...
...Les affaires sons les affaires...
...Rather listen further...
...For this there is no more evident example than the fate of Leopold Trepper, the leader of "the spy network, The Red Orchestra,"* who had been truly a totally convinced Marxist, and who in the end, driven from his Polish homeland, found refuge in Israel...
...Such is the will of "sound popular instinct" in Harlem (New York), at the regular beer round in some Ftirth or another...
...And their national dignity...
...We can be sure that the great majority of Israeli Jews, who are under such terrible pressure, are willing to seek reconciliation...
...This author writes in his noteworthy book Aussenseiter (Outsiders): Whoever attacks Zionism, but by no means wishes to say anything against the Jews, is fooling himself or others...
...For this rabid anti-Zionism will inevitably lead to anti-Semitism, and for every Jew, no matter where he lives and what political persuasion he adheres to, it is a mortal threat...
...On the contrary, it is the indelible stain that mars the honor of civilized humanity...
...Only a while ago it was natural to support the Israelis' right to their sovereignty...
...Stubbornly it terms "progressive" the tyrannic regimes of Syria and Iraq, where occasionally Communists, too, are thrown into jail...
...And, concerning the Middle East, it was, without a doubt, the Jewish settlers in Palestine, with their attempt to create a democratic socialist society, who awoke the Arab nations from their centurieslong, deep feudal slumber...
...But my scant knowledge suffices completely for making a few observations that must be just as obvious to common sense as to those experts who are not ideologically twisted...
...We know it from the debate now in progress within the Second International, which traditionally has been well-disposed toward the Jews and proIsrael...
...I admit my pessimism...
...It is political hocus-pocus...
...We have nothing against your stand on the left...
...Ben Bella...
...It is easy to reply to this objection, all too easy...
...And no one is opposing them with the necessary vigor...
...It went even beyond that: at a meeting between Catholic and Jewish theologians in Jerusalem, Rome assumed a position of an almost pro-Israel character...
...Jewish colonialism was not a colonialism of conquest...
...Think only of the Jews in the Soviet Union and other Eastern bloc countries, for whom an exit visa to Israel is the last hope of leading a life in dignity and decency...
...It is the most scandalous and, besides, the most stupid anti-Semitism...
...It is very simply that the existence of a Jewish state has taught all the Jews of the world to walk with their head high once more—a Jewish state whose inhabitants are not only merchants but also farmers, not only intellectuals but also professional soldiers, and not those "usurers" that the new Egypt is blathering about, despite all the empirical evidence, but rather, in their majority, craftsmen, industrial and agricultural proletarians...
...And we know from history how such a question is answered...
...When I speak of refuge, I am employing still another key word...
...The rest is of a purely technical nature and can therefore be overcome with some intelligence and good will...
...Thus he was already 54 years old when, two years later, he gained wide acclaim with the book that had resulted from the pivotal Auschwitz essay: Jenseits von Schilld and Suhne (1966...
...If ever somewhere in the world a grim fool should turn up whose iclie fixe it might be to expel the Jews, the possibility of finding the shelter in Israel that, in Hitler's time—thanks to British Mandate policies—was granted to relatively few Jews, binds every Jew to the fate of this tiny polity in the Near East...
...But the virtuality is what counts...
...I will merely state what many newspaper articles, especially in France, have made clear to me...
...Once more the public would be concerned with the very old "Jewish Question"—which, if we believe Sartre, never was that but rather always a question of anti-Semites...
...AntiZionism would be dead, all right...
...Yet, as a mouthpiece of the social class that the right represents and of the tradition that it upholds and the political heritage that it transmits, it cannot possibly attain that unbiased, humane attitude toward the Jews, which is the only acceptable one...
...Today everyone can observe how indolent hearts accommodate themselves when the world everywhere, be it the capitalist or the socialist one, is isolating the Israelis and the Jews who are one with them and thereby abandoning them to the catastrophe that is already hovering over their heads like a storm cloud...
...The essay translated here was originally titled "Der ehrbare Antisemitismus" ("Respectable AntiSemitism...
...It has no title to 49 self-mystification or to an absurd mythology of revolution, no title to that eccentric German idealism that Thomas Mann once characterized by saying, "If it did not sound so presumptuous, one would have to say that the Nazis committed their crimes out of unworldly idealism...
...And already I hear the objections, and the questions: "And the Arabs...
...The journalist adds that this is a relatively moderate attack, that in the "more hawkish" Arab countries, Syria, Iraq, Algeria, one hears a still quite different tone...
...Even today they are not actually homeless, but they possess two states: Jordan, where they constitute the majority of the population, and Lebanon, where in alliance with Syria they are imposing their will...
...The millions of Jewish burnt offerings—oh, perhaps there were really "only" five million or even four, and not six million—have been paid off...
...The left holds its tongue...
...Does not the very idea of Zionism bear in it the original sin of colonialism, so that every Jew who avows solidarity with this land becomes personally guilty...
...and now one suddenly catches oneself feeling that such a declaration has become a real test of courage and that, perhaps, it will become an offense tomorrow...
...your public gatherings will be outlawed...
...However: you are forbidden to be teachers...
...All this, however, would have a twofold result, of which we must urgently be forewarned even now, for time is running out: this twofold result is the total damnation of a human community, and also the self-destruction of what yesterday was still the left...
...On the contrary, the bourgeoisie, whether German, French, or Belgian, breathes a sigh of relief that for once it can march along in the same step with the young generation, which it otherwise regards as a nuisance and whose antiauthoritarian outbursts get on its nerves...
...I gladly offer my own person as a not entirely untypical example...
...No United Nations refugee committee then would be able to invest the Jews with normal civil rights...
...I expressly say: Israel is a virtual hope...
...Nor does the Vatican's later pro-Israel position disavow what a Moslem participant in Tripoli had assured Western journalists in a private conversation: "The Vatican is isolated," the man had said...
...for although it may have been led astray it is by nature generous...
...I am not exaggerating...
...The left, and with a gesture of sharp rejection, must refuse to allow this anti-Semitism, now shabbily disguised as anti-Zionism, to become respectable again...
...I repeat: in the Near East conflict one right opposes another...
...All this is terribly banal...
...Israel is not only the country in which the Jew no longer permits his enemy to stamp him with a self-image, as Sartre understood it...
Vol. 29 • January 1982 • No. 1
