More and
more people project their disdain for the modern world on to ‘the Jew’
First, a health warning. For some time now it has been difficult to have
a grown-up discussion about anti-Semitism. In post-Second World War Europe,
this issue, perhaps more than any other, has provoked powerful memories and
emotions. The debate about what constitutes anti-Semitism, and where it is
being expressed, can be a moral minefield, and it can impact both positively
and negatively on European attitudes towards Jewish people. As a result, there
are frequently controversies about whether or not a certain statement or act is
anti-Semitic.
For example, in
early January an appeals court in Cologne, Germany, ruled that Henryk Broder, a
German-Jewish journalist, could describe the statements made by a fellow
Jew, Evelyn Hecht-Galinski, as anti-Semitic. ‘Even German courts are
beginning to understand that it is not enough to be Jewish in order not to be
anti-Semitic’, boasted Broder (1). This court case highlighted another
difficulty in understanding the nature of anti-Semitism today. In recent times,
how Jews are perceived has become closely bound up with the issue of Israel. So
Broder had denounced the Jewess Hecht-Galinski as anti-Semitic because she had
equated Israel’s policies with those of Nazi Germany. As far as Hecht-Galinski
was concerned, Broder’s claim that her criticism of Israel in such a fashion
was ‘anti-Semitic’ represented defamation against her character.
Disputes such as
this one should remind us that there is a powerful subjective and
interpretative element to how we characterise another individual’s words and
behaviour – and these acts of interpretation can be influenced by unstated
cultural and political assumptions. Today, there are at least four important
trends that complicate our understanding of how anti-Semitism works.
First of all, contemporary
Western culture continually encourages groups that perceive themselves as
victims to inflate the wrongs perpetuated against them. As a result, we are
always being told that racism is more prevalent than ever before, or that
homophobia and Islamophobia are rising, or that sexual discrimination is more
powerful than in the past. It is unthinkable today for advocacy groups to
concede that prejudice and discrimination against their members have decreased,
and that the status of their community or people has improved. Such groups are
acutely sensitive to how they are represented in the media, and to the language
in which they are discussed and described. And this identity-based sensitivity
is shared by Jewish organisations, too, which in recent decades have often been
all-too-willing to interpret what are in fact confused and ambiguous references
to their people as expressions of anti-Semitism.
Consequently, the
charge that a certain statement is ‘anti-Semitic’ should not be accepted at
face value. Statements and acts need to be analysed and interpreted in the
context in which they were made or carried out. It is particularly important to
resist the temptation to characterise speech or behaviour as anti-Semitic by
second-guessing its real meaning. An objective assessment demands analysis of
what was actually said, rather than speculation about its ‘true’ or ‘hidden’
meaning. Just as we already have the irrational concept of ‘unwitting racism’
in the UK, we may soon end up with charges of ‘unwitting anti-Semitism’ being
made against those individuals judged by other people’s interpretive wits to be
anti-Semitic.
The second
complication is that, in recent decades, the defenders of Zionism have
developed the unfortunate habit of labelling criticisms of Israel as a form of
anti-Semitism. The aim of these rhetorical attacks is to devalue the moral
standing of Israel’s critics, and thus avoid having to deal with their often
difficult, persuasive arguments. The cumulative impact of this very defensive
response to criticism of Israel is to undermine the moral weight of charges of
anti-Semitism. Those who are anti-Zionist are often able to accuse Israeli
politicians and their supporters of ‘hiding behind’ the charge of
anti-Semitism. Worse still, the pro-Israel movement’s propagandistic
association of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism has encouraged others to erode
the conceptual distinction between Zionism and Jews.
The third
complication comes with the sanctification of the Holocaust. In Europe, the
Holocaust has in recent years been institutionalised as a moral absolute. In
education, culture and public life, the Holocaust has been turned into a marker
of evil. Many countries in the European Union have instituted laws against
Holocaust denial. Sanctifying the Holocaust in this way has allowed European
officialdom to claim moral authority on matters of good and evil, right and
wrong, in relation to the present and the past.
Regrettably, the
elevation of the Holocaust in this way does little to help people make sense of
that terrible event. Instead, many Europeans experience the politicisation of
the Holocaust as a bureaucratic project, something that is distant from their
lives. One disturbing outcome of the politicisation of the Holocaust is that it
can become more difficult to know what people genuinely think about Jews; after
all, in circumstances where the official version of the Holocaust cannot be
questioned, and where you can even be punished for doing so, people are
unlikely to state baldly ‘I don’t like Jews’ or to express other overt
anti-Semitic sentiments. Nevertheless, officialdom’s manipulation of the memory
of the Holocaust as a way of gaining moral authority has had the predictable
effect of breeding cynicism towards this terrible event. Some Europeans feel
that ‘too much’ is made of the Holocaust these days, but they rarely state such
opinions openly.
The fourth complication
poses the greatest problem. Because in contemporary Europe there are many and
various obstacles to the expression of anti-Semitic sentiments in their
traditional form, prejudice towards Jews is now likely to be expressed indirectly,
through other issues. Although criticism of Israel can and should be
conceptually distinguished from prejudice towards Jewish people, in recent
years there has been a significant erosion of the distinction between these two
phenomena. As a result, some people have embraced the anti-Israeli cause as a
way of making a statement about their attitude towards Jews. As a sociologist,
I am well aware of the danger of attributing a sentiment to a statement that is
not explicitly stated – which is why this discussion needs to be handled with
care, and why such interpretative statements about today’s
anti-Israeli/anti-Semitic outlook need to be clearly justified.
New expressions of
anti-Semitism
There is
considerable evidence that in recent years anti-Semitism has acquired greater
visibility and force in Europe. Over the past decade, and especially since the
eruption of the conflict in Gaza, anti-Israeli sentiments have often mutated
into anti-Jewish ones. Recent events indicate that in Europe the traditional
distinction between anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish sentiment has become confusing
and blurred.
So recently,
during a demonstration against Israel’s actions in Gaza, the Dutch Socialist
Party MP Harry Van Bommel called for a new intifada against
Israel. Of course he has every right to express this political viewpoint.
However, he became an accomplice of anti-Semites when he chose to do nothing
upon hearing chants of ‘Hamas, Hamas, all Jews to the gas’ and similar
anti-Jewish slogans. Many people who should know better now keep quiet when
they hear slogans like ‘Kill the Jews’ or ‘Jews to the oven’ on anti-Israel
demonstrations. At a recent protest in London, such chants provoked little
reaction from individuals who otherwise regard themselves as progressive
anti-racists – and nor did they appear to be embarrassed by the sight of a man
dressed as a racist Jewish caricature, wearing a ‘Jew mask’ with a crooked nose
while pretending to eat bloodied babies.
Increasingly,
protesters are targeting Jews for being Jews. They have agitated for the
boycott and even harassment of certain shops, and in practice this has
translated into boycotting and harassing Jewish-owned shops, such as Marks
& Spencer (some of whose stores have been barricaded by anti-Israel
protesters) and Starbucks (a number of whose coffee shops have been attacked in
London and elsewhere). Giancarlo Desiderati, spokesman for the trade union Flaica-Cub,
has explicitly called for a boycott of Jewish businesses in Rome. A leaflet
issued by his union informed Romans that anything they purchase in Jewish-owned
shops will be ‘tainted by blood’.
Here, there is an
almost effortless conceptual leap from criticising Israel to targeting Jews.
Desiderati pointed out that his organisation had already called for a boycott
of Israeli goods before taking the logical next step of demanding a boycott of
Jewish shops. He said that his union was drawing up a list of Jewish shops,
‘though it might be better to publish a list of streets in which a majority of
the shops are Jewish and ask people to avoid those streets when shopping’ (2).
Anti-Semitism in
Europe is not simply a rhetorical pastime of Islamists or pro-Palestinian
protesters. In Britain, Jewish schoolchildren have been castigated for
belonging to a people with ‘blood on their hands’. Their elders sometimes face
intimidation and regularly report being subjected to verbal abuse. What is most
disturbing about these developments is the reluctance of European society to
acknowledge and confront acts of anti-Semitism. Take the riots that broke out
in Paris on 3 January. If you relied upon mainstream media reports, you would
never have known that groups of youngsters were shouting ‘death to the Jews’
while throwing stones at the police. In this instance, expressions of
anti-Semitism were not even properly reported, much less confronted and
challenged in public debate.
Probably the
saddest example of this accommodation to anti-Semitism comes from Denmark.
Historically, Denmark has been one of the most enlightened societies in Europe.
During the Second World War, it stood out as a country were the Nazis could
find virtually nobody willing to collaborate with their anti-Jewish policies.
It is sad, therefore, to read reports today about Danish school administrators
who recommend that Jewish children should not enrol in their schools. It began
last week, when Olav Nielsen, headmaster of Humlehave School in Odense,
publicly stated that he would ‘refuse to accept the wishes of Jewish parents’
who wanted to place children at his school, because it might create tension
amongst the Muslim children. Other headmasters echoed his refusal to school the
children of Jews, claiming that they were putting children’s safety first.
Whatever their intentions, these pedagogues were sending the powerful message
that, in the interests of ‘health and safety’, the ghettoisation of Jewish
children can be an acceptable and even sensible idea.
Anti-Semitism on
the left
One reason why
anti-Semitism has become more visible and forceful is because Muslim youth who
protest against Israel are relatively uninfluenced by European cosmopolitan
ethics that criminalise overt expressions of anti-Jewish sentiment. They are
therefore less inhibited than other protesters from explicitly attacking –
verbally and sometimes physically – Jews for being Jews. In their outlook,
Israel is Jewish and therefore all Jews are legitimate targets for their anger.
Their reluctance to make a distinction between Jewish people and Israel has
been a source of consternation for some liberal-minded Muslims. A recent letter
signed by a group of prominent British Muslims condemned the Gaza-related spate
of attacks on Jews and synagogues, arguing that ‘British Jews should not be
held responsible for the actions of the Israeli government’ (3). Such
statements, however, which publicly acknowledge the problem of conflating Jews
with Israeli government action, are rare these days.
One consequence of
the rise of overt anti-Semitism amongst some Muslim youth is that it has given
permission to others to express more traditional forms of European
anti-Semitism. Old anti-Semitic themes about Jews having too much power and
influence have become widespread in recent years. However, the most striking
development has been the absorption of anti-Semitic sentiments by Europeans who
politically identify themselves as left wing.
To be sure, the
distinction between left and right has become less and less clear in recent
years (4). But it is worth noting that, historically, anti-Semitism in Europe
was predominantly linked with right-wing, nationalist movements. And a
significant section of the European left played a key role in trying to counter
prejudice towards Jews.
Although
anti-Semitism continues to exist within sections of the right and far right,
over the past decade it has also gained support amongst the left. A study
titled Unfavourable Views of Jews And Muslims on the Increase in Europe,
published in September 2007, found that 34 per cent of respondents who
identified themselves as being on the political right and 28 per cent of those
who said they were on the left had a generally unfavourable view of Jews. Those
who were least likely to harbour such prejudices – 26 per cent – identified
themselves as being in the ‘political centre’ (5). The survey, carried out in
the spring of 2007, some time before the recent outburst of conflict in Gaza,
suggests that negative attitudes towards Jews predate Israel’s latest military
venture.
Those who are
active in left-wing politics are unlikely to hold coherent anti-Jewish
prejudices. Nonetheless, one disturbing development in recent years has been
the reluctance of left-wing anti-Israel protesters to challenge explicit
manifestations of anti-Semitism. This accommodation to prejudice is often
motivated by moral cowardice. Others try to justify their failure to challenge
anti-Semitism by arguing that criticising the prejudices held by some Muslim
youth will only let Israel off the hook. Some suggest that Israel’s behaviour
relieves Europeans of any moral obligation to empathise with Jews or Jewish
sensibilities. Such an outlook was unambiguously expressed by the Italian trade
unionist Desiderati, who said that ‘for 50 years we have been concerned for the
Jews because of what they suffered in the Holocaust, but now it is time be
concerned for the Palestinians, who are the Jews of today’ (6).
The most worrying
dynamic in Europe today is not the explicit vitriol directed against Jews by
radical Muslim groups or far-right parties, but the new culture of
accommodation to anti-Semitism. We can see the emergence of a slightly
embarrassed ‘see nothing, hear nothing’ attitude that shows far too much
‘understanding’ towards expressions of anti-Semitism. Typically, the response
to anti-Jewish prejudice is to argue that it is not anti-Semitic, just
anti-Israeli. Sometimes even politically correct adherents to the creeds of
diversity and anti-racism manage to switch off when it comes to confronting
anti-Jewish comments.
As a sociologist,
I am a member of the online European-Sociologist discussion group. Recently, an
anti-Israeli sociologist of Muslim extraction advised us to read an article by
the Jewish radical author Naomi Klein. Another Muslim colleague responded by
warning him against reading ‘clever Jewish authors’. He advised his
co-religionist that ‘true believers should not trust these snakes’. To her
credit, an American anti-Zionist sociologist objected to the depiction of
Jewish authors as ‘snakes’. But European sociologists were far too busy poring
over their latest training manual on diversity to express any objection to this
prejudice expressed in a public academic forum. This sums up the accommodation
of some so-called progressives to loathsome contemporary sentiments.
Does new
anti-Semitism have anything to do with Jews?
The most
interesting example of the rise of European anti-Semitism is Spain. Spain is
the only European country where negative views of Jews (held by 46 per cent of
respondents to a survey) appear to outweigh positive ones (37 per cent) (7).
According to a recent study, there has been a dramatic increase in
anti-Semitism in Spain over the past three years. Unfavourable views of Jews
have more than doubled from 21 per cent in 2005 to 46 per cent in 2008 (8).
It is difficult to
analyse fully this dramatic rise of anti-Semitic sentiment in Spain. It is
possible, of course, that the survey failed to capture the real feelings and
beliefs of its respondents, and thus might have overstated the prevalence of
negative emotions. Moreover, someone who expresses a negative attitude towards
Jews is not necessarily an anti-Semite: there is an important distinction to be
made between negative stereotypes of a people and a feeling of hatred towards
them. It is also likely that Spaniards, like young Muslims, are less inhibited
from acknowledging their attitudes than respondents to surveys in other,
perhaps more PC countries – and therefore the gap between Spaniards and other
Europeans on the issue of Jews may be narrower than these recent figures
suggest. However, other studies seem to have found a similar pattern of rising
anti-Semitic feeling in Spain.
One survey,
carried out by the Anti-Defamation League, found that 47 per cent of Spanish
respondents stated ‘probably true’ to at least three out of four anti-Semitic
stereotypes presented to them. More interesting still is a recent poll
commissioned by the Spanish Ministry of Education: it found that more than 50 per
cent of secondary school pupils would rather not sit next to a Jewish classmate
(9).
Since Spain has a
tiny Jewish population – fewer than 20,000 – it is unlikely that attitudes
towards this minority are based on any experience of interacting with them.
Rather, it appears that, in Spain, negative attitudes towards Jews are
influenced by ideas that these people have no real loyalty to the countries
they live in – in this instance, Spain – and also that they play a sometimes
destructive international role. In Spain, anti-Semitism is linked to the
prevailing mood of anti-Americanism. Many public figures blame Spain’s economic
crisis on America’s influence over the global financial system. This outlook
appears to be underpinned by a diffuse sense of frustration about our uncertain
world, where invisible forces can come to be personified in the image of the
caricatured Jew. This sentiment is inadvertently fostered by the Spanish
Socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, which is profoundly
hostile to Israel, and by the Spanish media’s frequent reluctance to
distinguish between Israel and Jewish people. Cartoons that are critical of
Israel in Spanish newspapers and magazines sometimes depict medieval
anti-Semitic caricatures. At a dinner party in late 2005, Zapatero let rip
against Israel. He was overheard saying: ‘Es que a veces hasta se entiende
que haya gente que puede justificar el holocausto.’ In English: ‘At times
one can even understand that there might be people who could justify the
Holocaust.’ (10)
Negative Spanish
attitudes towards Jewish people have little to do with Jews themselves, or with
any widespread support for the Palestinian people. Indeed, surveys indicate
that negative attitudes towards Jews rarely translate into positive attitudes
towards Muslims: 52 per cent of Spanish respondents indicated that they rate
Muslims unfavourably, too (11). So although Zapatero and some of his Socialist
colleagues sometimes walk around wearing Palestinian scarves, the public does
not share their enthusiasm for this political cause. Rather, it is a sense of
diffuse frustration, a feeling that we live in an uncertain and unpredictable
world, which underpins people’s incoherent hostility towards those apparent
beneficiaries of the global economy: caricatured Americans and Jews.
As in Spain, so
elsewhere in Europe there is considerable evidence that anti-Jewish sentiment
has been on the rise for some time, and that it is fuelled by cultural factors
that have little to do with events in Gaza. Over the past two decades, and
particularly since 2001, anti-Western feeling amongst European Muslims has
often been expressed through the language of anti-Semitism. Denunciations of
America are frequently accompanied by attacks on the alleged influence of the
Jewish Lobby. Such attitudes are gaining momentum in our new century. For
example, one survey carried out in 2002 suggested that 25 per cent of German
respondents took the view that ‘Jewish influence’ on American politics was one
important reason why the Bush administration invaded Iraq. The association of
Jews with business, finance and the media has encouraged contemporary
anti-consumerist and anti-modernist movements to regard the influence of ‘these
people’ with grave concern. Is it any surprise, then, that last year there was
an explosion of conspiracy theories on the internet that blamed Jewish bankers
for the current financial crisis?
Competing for the
authority of the Holocaust
The metamorphosis
of anti-Israel feeling into anti-Jewish feeling has been paralleled by a
growing tendency to detach the Holocaust from its historical context.
Increasingly, the Holocaust is discussed not as a specific historic incident in
which Jews were the victims, but as a recurring phenomenon – we now have many
‘holocausts’ – which crops up again and again in human history, from Auschwitz
to Bosnia to Darfur. This not only disassociates the Holocaust from its Jewish
victims; it also means that the Holocaust can be recycled as a moral
condemnation of Israel itself, and of the people associated with Israel.
For some time,
many critics of Israel have argued that its treatment of Palestinians is
comparable to the behaviour of the Nazis towards the Jews. For example, a
survey of Germans carried out in 2004 found that 68 per cent of respondents believed
that Israel is pursuing a war of extermination against the Palestinians, and 51
per cent said that what Israel has done to the Palestinians is not, in
principle, that different to what the Nazis did to the Jews (12).
Over the past five
years, the rhetorical strategy of associating Israel with Hitler’s Final
Solution has become more widespread. It is through Holocaust comparisons and
imagery that the critics of Zionism increasingly make sense of the conflict in
the Middle East. As a result, protesters against the current invasion of Gaza
frequently portray Israel as a twenty-first century Nazi war machine. From this
standpoint, the people of Gaza are facing a predicament similar to that
experienced by the inhabitants of the Jewish Ghettos of 1930s and 1940s Europe.
This point was forcefully made by the former mayor of London, Ken Livingstone,
who said the Israelis ‘will continue to create a Warsaw Ghetto in the Middle
East’.
Critics of Israel,
some unconsciously, others consciously, try to turn the symbolic authority of
the Holocaust against Israel. They frequently accuse the
Israeli government of acting like Nazis. Respectable media outlets in the West
now regularly claim that Israel is engaged in ‘ethnic cleansing’, ‘genocide’,
‘crimes against humanity’; some critics liken Theodor Herzl, the founding
father of Zionism, to Adolf Hitler. Israeli or Jewish complicity with the
Israeli government’s war crimes is said by some to be even more comprehensive
than the complicity of the German people with the crimes of the Nazis. Some
talk of the ‘Nazification’ of Israeli society, suggesting a role reversal,
whereby Jews become the twenty-first century equivalent of their former
oppressors.
The cumulative
impact of decoupling the Holocaust from its association with the Jewish
experience is to encourage a cynical, questioning attitude towards Jewish
victimhood; it inflames an interrogation of the status of Jews as the victims
of the Nazi experience. There is evidence that the association of Jewishness
with war crimes today is used to read history backwards, so that this people
comes to bearresponsibility for what happened during the Holocaust.
According to one interesting study of anti-Semitism in Europe, prejudices are
‘projected backwards to justify behaviour towards Jews in past conflicts’. The
study says that ‘in this context, anti-Semitic arguments today frequently serve
the purpose of rejecting guilt and responsibility for the persecutions of the
Jews [in the past]’ (13). This approach is most notable in societies that were
deeply implicated in the persecution of Jews during the Second World War;
according to various surveys, the idea that Jews were responsible for their own
persecution was supported by 30 per cent of respondents in Russia, 27 per cent
in the Ukraine, 35 per cent in Belarus, 31 per cent in Lithuania, and 17 per
cent in Germany in 2004 (14).
Contemporary
attitudes towards Jewish people are influenced by a continuous interaction
between the present and the past. The attempt by the enemies of Israel to
appropriate the symbolism of the Holocaust is underpinned by a realisation that
this tragedy can be wielded to win significant moral authority. At the same
time, the project of reinventing Israel as a latter-day Nazi war machine
implicitly incites the rewriting of the past. Allegations of contemporary
misdeeds carried out by Jews encourage scepticism about their past moral status
as victims of the Nazi experience. So, paradoxically, while contemporary
anti-Semitic attitudes have little to do with people’s interactions with
real-life Jews, it rebounds on Jews, and fosters a culture of scepticism
towards their role as the historic victims of Europe’s darkest hour.
(1) Jewish Israel critic
labelled anti-Semite, Jerusalem Post, 6 January 2009
(2) Outrage over proposals
to boycott Jewish shops, The Times, London, 8 January 2009
(3) Muslims urge end to anti-Semitism, BBC News, 16
January 2009
(4) On this point
see chapter 3 of Frank Furedi’s The Politics of Fear: Beyond Left and
Right, Continuum Press (London), 2006
(5) See The Pew
Global Attitudes Project,‘Unfavourable views of Jews and Muslims on the
increase in Europe’, The Pew Research Center, 17 September 2008
(6) Outrage over proposals
to boycott Jewish shops, The Times, London, 8 January 2009
(7) See The Pew
Global Attitudes Project,‘Unfavourable views of Jews and Muslims on the
increase in Europe’, The Pew Research Center, 17 September 2008
(8) See The Pew
Global Attitudes Project,‘Unfavourable views of Jews and Muslims on the
increase in Europe’, The Pew Research Center, 17 September 2008
(9) Exclusive: Antisemitism.
Old or New?, European Forum on Antisemitism, 4 January 2009
(10) Anti-Semitism and
Anti-Zionism: The Link, History News Network, 21 June 2006
(11) See The Pew
Global Attitudes Project,‘Unfavourable views of Jews and Muslims on the
increase in Europe’, The Pew Research Center, 17 September 2008
(12) Xenophobia on the Continent, The
National Interest, 30 0ctober 2008
(13) See
‘Anti-Semitic Attitudes in Europe: A Comparative Perspective’, by Werner
Bergman, Journal of Social Issues, Vol.64, no.2, p.378, 2008.
(14) See
‘Anti-Semitic Attitudes in Europe: A Comparative Perspective’, by Werner
Bergman, Journal of Social Issues, Vol.64, no.2, p.378, 2008.
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