THE ANTI-IMPERIALISM OF FOOLS

...And today...

...Comrades, the extremeness in these reactions is the problem...

...But even if the description were apt, we may note that it long ago ceased to apply...

...His purpose wasn't to defend the Jewish bankers, who were as bad as any banker...

...But," he adds, "you always have to put the issues in the broader context...

...Jackson forcefully condemns Israel for its South African trade—as all of us do here...

...It was the socialism of fools...

...They were forward-thinking and well-educated, these nineteenth-century anti-Semites...

...No one can be unaware of the special tension, the extra electricity, that enters discussion within these sectors when Israel is mentioned...

...The very word "anti-Semitism," as Lewis points out, expresses that fact...

...scientific basis for their hatred of Jews...

...Instead they embrace a modern, secular sort of hostility that is based on political theory, the last word in late twentiethcentury thought...

...And the other Western democratic allies—Japan, West Germany, and the like—are involved...

...Then Hitler was repudiated, and it was the Jews who were described as Hitler's heirs...

...And this potential for self-congratulation is precisely the mechanism by which the anti-Semite fails to recognize himself as someone in the grip of an obsession...

...Anti-Zionism in this country lacks the kind of influence that is reflected in notable political power...

...And the argument turns into nonsense...

...Traditionally, anti-Semites harbored a medieval religious hatred...

...The horror with which Israel is regarded extends even to certain sectors of the supposedly enlightened left...

...But it also figures into the bitterness with which anti-Zionists greet their critics...

...Nevertheless American anti-Zionism characteristically regards itself as lonely, isolated, surrounded by enemies, misunderstood, universally assailed, but fortu104 nately heroic and brave...

...They repudiated it...

...They coined the word "anti-Semitism" precisely to connote the racial, i.e...

...In truth he will never find any reason wanting...

...The traditional hatred of Jews in Europe was religious...

...I quote Bernard Lewis: "The intractability of the refugee problem [in Palestine] is a consequence, not a cause, of the political problem...

...But leaving that aside, the fact remains that mass displacement is a general characteristic of the modern situation, as we see in Africa, in Afghanistan, and in the fate of the Crimean Tartars...

...They repudiate it...

...Fifty years ago, sentiment among Arab nationalists leaned toward Hitler...

...Some distance behind are the smaller Western arms exporters: Norway, the Netherlands, Brazil, Israel, Sweden, Belgium, Switzerland and Spain...

...The most important remark about anti-Semitism made in the Marxist tradition is August Bebel's phrase, "Anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools...

...Yet disappointment in China has not led to unusual worldwide hostility...

...But it's not hard to go around the world finding instances of abominable treatment of minority populations—the Bulgarian treatment of Islamic Turks, the Berber practice in modern Mauritania of maintaining black slavery—which are grotesque, horrifying, and which to be sure we 102 oppose, but which somehow have not become objects of worldwide obloquy...

...Somehow we hear about the Israeli arms trade with much greater frequency than we hear about the odious Belgian and Brazilian arming of Guatemala...

...When that was abandoned, it was the Jews who were accused of racial hatred...

...It showed no understanding of how society actually functions...

...Around the world anti-imperialists confront stupendously complex foes and difficulties, and around the world are anti-imperialists who propose a stupendously simple social analysis...

...According to this law, what the anti-Semite felt yesterday, he accuses the object of his hatred of feeling today, thus always assuring himself of the modernity and progressiveness of his own ideas...

...Perhaps the hostility to Israel arises from its trade with South Africa...

...But it does not lack a social or intellectual base...

...This attitude is on one hand nothing but posturing and of no great importance...

...0...

...Does the hostility with which Israel is regarded stem from the fact that Israel is a white settler colony intruding itself into the Third World...

...Now that a good many Arabs have gone Marxist103 Leninist themselves, Israel is declared a seat of world reaction...

...WE SHOULD DEVOTE OURSELVES above all because, in the modern circumstance where Jews of the Middle East are no longer defenseless, the ultimate victims of the anti-Zionist passion have become the Palestinians...

...I will cite Jesse Jackson on this question, from the Journal of Palestine Studies...

...Many countries trade with South Africa...

...People with enlightened views today look on anti-Semitic racial hatred as backward and objectionable...

...The description is true...

...AntiSemitism in the workers' movement did contain, in its singling out of some capitalists, a sort of social analysis...

...Bebel was addressing the nineteenth-century workers' movement and its tendency to rail against Jewish bankers...

...So I'm not sure," says Jackson, "that it is healthy just to isolate Israel in that sense...

...Perhaps hostility to Israel arises from the fact, as is sometimes suggested, that we expected of the Jewish state a higher standard, something greater than grubby injustice and realpolitik...

...If you say, many countries deal in arms, the anti-Zionist will say, yes, but the Israeli arms trade is different...

...It's worth recalling what he meant...

...The broader context that he notes is that the United States plays a larger role in South Africa than does Israel...

...For the anti-Zionist deep beliefs—the belief that anti-Zionism is anti-imperialism, therefore is part of the world-historical movement of the oppressed, therefore has the force of historical inevitability...

...SARTRE DEFINED ANTI-SEMITISM as a passion which precedes the causes or provocations that are said to give it rise...

...Perhaps hostility to Israel arises from Israel's international arms trade—an ugly arms trade, nobody will deny, one that all of us condemn...

...They style themselves anti-Zionists precisely to connote the political, i.e...

...This passion is the conviction that the Jew is hateful in his essence, not just in particulars...

...But in what way does the nastiness of the dispute and the reprehensibility of the behavior differ from what we see in other disputes, for instance between Greece and Turkey, Iran and Iraq, India and Pakistan, China and Vietnam—all of these being controversies that, though bloody and horrendous, have failed to arouse global passions...

...A law of anti-Semitic history corresponds to this seemingly progressive aspect...

...But that is not the case...

...the belief that Israel is so revolting to gaze upon that finally all will turn against it and destroy it and therefore again Palestinian antiZionism will ultimately triumph...

...And this is, fundamentally, the reply given to any argument that Israel is merely ordinary...

...Israel's uniqueness can hardly lie in the fact that it has displaced people...

...For in the modern world, in parts of the modern left, let us acknowledge, even here, in certain of the enlightened realms of sophisticated New York, anti-Zionism has become the anti-imperialism of fools...

...We in the American left sometimes think of ourselves as lacking in power or influence...

...Perhaps hostility to Israel arises from the way it discriminates against Arab citizens within its borders and noncitizens in the occupied zones...

...Yes, but the Israeli trade is different...

...But it was a stupid analysis...

...When that was abandoned by sophisticated thinkers in the nineteenth century, it was the Jews who were accused of harboring a medieval religion...

...They would never have considered themselves retrograde or reactionary...

...When the Arab world was strictly reactionary, Israel was declared a force for Bolshevism...

...That is why the convinced anti-Semite cannot be converted by mere refutation of his specific beliefs...

...We should devote ourselves to this struggle because anti-Zionism has become a novel, seemingly progressive form of blindness, a modern mystification on a world scale...

...enlightened basis for their strong feelings...

...If the anti-Semite says, the Jews are avaricious, the levelheaded person—the democrat, Sartre calls him—will reply, but I know many Christians who are also avaricious...

...THE INTRACTABILITY OF THE PALESTINIAN refugee problem—perhaps that is the reason...

...The participants were Noam Chomsky, Ellen Willis of the Village Voice, and myself —P B. The Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis recently contributed to the New York Review of Books some comments on what he calls "The New AntiSemitism...

...We should struggle against anti-Zionism because, in allowing people within the ranks of our own American left to participate in the obsession, we ourselves have contributed to the cultivation of illusion and fantasy among the Palestinians...

...Stand up to denounce the perfidious policies of this small country, and partisans of the simple view will cheer everywhere with the characteristic ferocity, blithely unaware of how neatly they have fallen into the pattern noted ninety years ago by Bebel...

...Anti-Semites took up racism, thinking that racism was scientific...

...Let us take seriously, then, our own struggle against anti-Zionism...

...They would never in a million years consider themselves retrograde or reactionary...

...Their social analysis rails against one of the world's smallest countries...

...It is true that for decades the numbers of Arab refugees from Israel, and Jewish refugees from Arab countries, were roughly equivalent...

...Perhaps the hostility arises from the fact that Israel has displaced a large number of people...

...Is it because Israel has been engaged in a very nasty border dispute with its neighbors, which has gone on for a long time and in which its own actions have frequently been reprehensible...

...Thus at each stage of anti-Semitism's development, the anti-Semite can congratulate himself on the "progressive" aspect of his views...

...The ferocity has become so great that certain of the more passionate left-wing anti-Zionist intellectuals and groups have flung themselves into bizarre alliances with the extreme right...

...I have discussed his comments in the Voice and wish to expand and elaborate on those points here...

...We should devote ourselves because anti-Zionism has been harmful unfairly to the people of Israel, therefore has helped cause deformations of Israeli society that no one at a socialist meeting will wish to deny...

...And those enlightened thinkers who nonetheless persisted in strong feelings about Jews embraced instead a modern, secular sort of hostility based on racial theory, which was the last word in nineteenth-century science...

...We here, at this socialist conference, condemn this practice...

...But still they bear an inflamed and disproportionate hatred for the one among the world's many sinning states...

...In suggesting an explanation for this phenomenon, I wish to point out a peculiar quality that has long pertained to the hatred of Jews...

...But beginning in the nineteenth century, people with enlightened opinions saw religious bigotry as backward and objectionable...

...Anyone who has ever stood up to oppose the anti-Zionism of the left or the right can tell you that the reception is normally one of extreme derision, extreme sarcasm, and outrage...

...The sun shines, for all that it may surprise us, on anti-Semitism...

...Not to mention the traditional Arab treatment of Jews...

...But surely we did not expect from Israel more than was expected, by many people, of Communist China...

...We think of Jew-hating as a dark, reactionary thing cultivated by retrograde unenlightened people, a sentiment for dim intelligences in dark rooms...

...That the problem was not solved, like others elsewhere in our brutal century, by a combination of resettlement and some repatriation, was owing to an act of will on the part of the Palestinian leadership and of the Arab states...

...But Israel's exceptional status in having such an arms trade is difficult to see...

...They are forward-thinking and well-educated, these anti-Zionists...

...I quote from the North American Congress on Latin America's Report on the Americas, May-June 1985: The largest arms suppliers to the Third World are the "Big Six"—the US, the USSR, France, Italy, Great Britain and West Germany who between them account for 88 percent of all arms sales to the Third World...

...The refusal is absolute, as if Israel were loathsome beyond human tolerance, and as if this loathsomeness were evident to all observers...

...We must ask ourselves: why is it that Israel arouses, around the world, such ferocious hostility...

...There is perhaps a larger and more popular base for it on the extreme right...

...the belief that Israel is somehow different from all other countries and therefore should not be accepted as a fact like other facts—these beliefs, the core of anti-Zionism, have mesmerized the oppressed Palestinians into their tragic version of defeatism, defeatism as a maximalist position, defeatism that becomes more extreme with every new era of the struggle against Israel...

...But he saw that the workers who focused on Jews were pinning the troubles of the working class on a visible scapegoat, instead of on the economic system as a whole...

...The majority of the Jewish population in Israel is itself from the Third World, above all from North Africa, where it was, indeed, in many cases the original, pre-Arab population...

...And the antiSemite will respond: maybe so, but Jewish avarice is different...

...To describe Israel in that manner would be a cruel way to describe the fleeing remnant of European Jewry...

...Attitudes generated within our ranks have a way of filtering around the world...

...In fact, antiSemitism has characteristically taken a form that views itself and is viewed by some people as enlightened...

...AND TODAY, LET US ASK, how do the fierce opponents of Israel, the people who single Israel out for special venom, the anti-Zionists, regard themselves...

...If one reason for hatred is found wanting, he will jump to another...

...There is a base for it on the left, in the universities, in the journals of the left, in the movements that define themselves by Third World ideology...

...Israel's pariah status is such that even now its neighbors have with one exception refused to recognize it—a refusal that does not date from the formation of the PLO in 1964, but from the formation of Israel in 1948...