Two
phenomena: anti-Semitism and American class conflict. Is there any connection
between them? In a letter to this newspaper, the noted venture capitalist Tom
Perkins called attention to certain parallels, as he saw them, between Nazi
Germany's war against the Jews and American progressives’ war on the “one
percent.” For comparing two such historically disparate societies, Mr. Perkins
was promptly and heatedly denounced.
But is
there something to be said for his comparison—not of Germany and the United
States, of course, but of the politics at work in the two situations? The place
to begin is at the starting point: with the rise of anti-Semitism, modernity's
most successful and least understood political movement.
The
German political activist Wilhelm Marr, originally a man of the left, organized
a movement in the 1870s that charged Jews with using their skills “to conquer
Germany from within.” Distinguishing the movement that he called anti-Semitism
from earlier forms of anti-Judaism, Marr argued on professedly rational grounds
that Jews were taking unfair advantage of the emerging democratic order in
Europe, with its promise of individual rights and open competition, in order to
dominate the fields of finance, culture and social ideas. Though some of Marr’s
rhetoric and imagery was based on earlier stereotypes, he was right to insist
that anti-Semitism was a new response to new conditions, channeling grievance
and blame against highly visible beneficiaries of freedom and opportunity.
These
were some of its typical ploys: Are you unemployed? The Jews have your jobs. Is
your family mired in poverty? The Rothschilds have your money. Do you feel more
insecure in the city than you did on the land? The Jews are trapping you in
factories and charging you exorbitant rents.
Anti-Semitism
accused Jews of undermining Christian authority and corrupting the German legal
system, the arts and the press. Jews were said to be rabid internationalists
spreading Bolshevism—and ruthless capitalists exploiting for their own gain the
nation’s natural and human resources. To ambitious politicians seeking office,
to rulers of still largely illiterate populations, “the Jews” became a
convenient catchall explanation for deep-rooted and sometimes intractable
problems.
But
though the origins of modern anti-Semitism may be traced to Germany,
anti-Semitism itself remains sui generis and cannot be simply conflated with
either Germany or Hitler. True, the latter gained power on a platform of
anti-Semitism and then proceeded to put his Final Solution into effect, but the
modern organization of politics against the Jews is independent of Nazism—and
of fascism, since the Italian variant did not specifically target the Jews.
Features of anti-Semitism are present in other political movements, on the left
fully as much the right.
The
parallel that Tom Perkins drew in his letter was especially irksome to his
respondents on the left, many of whom are supporters of President Obama’s
sallies against Wall Street and the “one percent.” These critics might
profitably consult Robert Wistrich, today’s leading historian of anti-Semitism.
His From Ambivalence to Betrayal: The
Left, the Jews, and Israel (2012) documents the often profound
anti-Semitism that has affected socialists and leftists from Karl Marx to today’s
anti-Israel movement of boycott, divestment and sanctions. It was Marx who
said, “The bill of exchange is the Jew’s actual god,” putting a Jewish face on
capitalism and accusing both Judaism and capitalism of converting man and
nature into “alienable and saleable objects.”
Herein
lies one structural connection between a politics of blame directed
specifically at Jews and a politics of grievance directed against “the rich.”
The ranks of those harping on “unfairly” high earners include figures in
American political life at all levels who have been entrusted with the care of
our open society; in channeling blame for today’s deep-rooted and seemingly
intractable problems toward the beneficiaries of that society's competitive
freedoms, they are playing with fire.
I say
this not only, and not even primarily, because some of those beneficiaries
happen also to be Jews. So far, mainstream American politicians and supporters
of movements like Occupy Wall Street have confined their attacks to the
nameless “one percent,” and in any case it is doubtful that today any U.S.
politician would be electable on an explicitly anti-Jewish platform.
My
point is broader: Stoking class envy is a step in a familiar, dangerous and
highly incendiary process. Any ideology or movement, right or left, that is
organized negatively—against rather than for—enjoys an inherent advantage in
politics, mobilizing unappeasable energies that never have to default on their
announced goal of cleansing the body politic of its alleged poisons.
In this
respect, one might think of anti-Semitism as the purest and most murderous
example of an enduring political archetype: the negative campaign. That
campaign has its international as well as its domestic front. Modern
anti-Zionism, itself a patented invention of Soviet Communism and now the
lingua franca of the international left, uses Israel just as anti-Semitism uses
Jews, directing grievance and blame and eliminationist zeal against an entire
collectivity that has flourished on the world scene thanks to the blessings of
freedom and opportunity.
Herein
lies a deeper structural connection. On the global front today, the much larger
and more obvious beneficiary of those same blessings is the democratic
capitalist system of the United States, and the ultimate target of the ultimate
negative campaign is the American people. Anyone seeking to understand the
inner workings of such a campaign will find much food for thought in Mr.
Perkins’s parallel.
Hoping
to understand the current Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in human terms, I
made a visit last week to a Palestinian farmer named Hammadeh Kashkeesh, whom I
first met 32 years ago.
The
encounter reminded me of the pain that’s at the heart of this dispute, and how
hard it will be for any diplomatic settlement to resolve the bitterness on both
sides.
First,
try to imagine the landscape, and how it has changed in the years of Israeli
occupation. Halhul is an agricultural town in the rock-ribbed hills just south
of Bethlehem. When I first traveled this route in 1982 to spend two weeks with
Kashkeesh, to write a profile of his town, the hillsides were mostly barren.
Now, the landscape is dense with Israeli settlements, many of them built since
the Oslo Accord in 1993 that created the Palestinian Authority.
Kashkeesh
and his neighbors pride themselves on raising what they claim are the tastiest
grapes in the world. His access to his vines was obstructed more than a decade
ago when a special road was built for Israeli settlers who live nearby. He had
given up his precious grapes when I visited in 2003, but he’s now found a way
to tend them again. Some of his neighbors aren’t so lucky; their vines have
grown wild or died.
Kashkeesh,
67, worked for years as a stonecutter and then a farmer. He somehow managed to
send all of his seven children to high school or college.
The
indignity and bitterness that come with military occupation are deeply embedded
in Kashkeesh’s voice. In Halhul, the Palestinian Authority is in theory largely
responsible for security. But the Israeli military controls access and
intervenes when it sees a security threat. The night before my visit, Kashkeesh
said, the Israeli army arrested 10 people for throwing stones at soldiers.
There’s
no condoning rock-throwing, let alone terrorist violence. Such tactics have had
ruinous consequences for Palestinians, not least in undermining Israeli hope
that they ever could live in peace. Hearing the anger in Kashkeesh’s voice, and
seeing the sullen faces of young men gathered near his house, was a reminder
that Palestinians experience life as a series of daily humiliations. Life in
Halhul feels closed, embittered, confrontational.
When I
first visited the town, openly advocating a Palestinian state could get you
arrested. Villagers would hide a Palestinian flag disguised as embroidery, or a
map of Palestine on the back of a wall photo. Now, the U.S. is working with
Israeli and Palestinian negotiators on a “framework agreement” outlining terms
for peace accord.
But
Kashkeesh said he has nearly given up. He dislikes the Palestinian Authority
almost as much as the Israelis. “They are liars,” he says, whose corrupt
leaders build themselves fancy villas and operate “like a trading company.” He
also rejects Hamas, and says the Palestinian leadership overall has “destroyed
itself, by itself.”
As for
the peace negotiations, he asks how Palestinians will control their destiny in
the demilitarized state that Israel is demanding. “How can we have a sovereign
state if we don’t have control over the border with Jordan?” he wonders. If
Israel gains the recognition it wants as a Jewish state, he argues that
Christian and Muslim citizens of Israel will feel unwelcome. “Nobody will
believe in the agreement, which means there will be no peace.”
Thinking
sadly that Kashkeesh might be right in his skepticism – and that a real end of
this conflict may be impossible – I asked him to tell me again the story about
the boy and the swimming pool. Listen with me:
It was
1975. Kashkeesh was 29 and had recently been released from prison after serving
a six-year sentence for membership in the Fatah guerrilla group. He was working
at a resort in Arad when he saw an Israeli infant fall into the swimming pool.
The parents were elsewhere, and though Kashkeesh couldn’t swim, there was
nobody else to save the boy. So he jumped in the water and took the child in
his arms. When an Israeli investigator asked him why he had risked his life to
help a Jew, he answered that the boy was a human being.
He
tells that story now without much animation. As with millions of Israelis and
Palestinians, I suspect that his heart has been hardened by so many years of
pain and failure. Will the peace negotiations work amid so much mistrust and
anger? I don’t know, but this quest for peace is surely still worth the effort.
Unless
you are exceptionally coldblooded, it’s hard not to be disturbed by today’s
huge economic inequality. The gap between the rich and the poor is enormous,
wider than most Americans would (almost certainly) wish. But this incontestable
reality has made economic inequality a misleading intellectual fad, blamed for
many of our problems. Actually, the reverse is true: Economic inequality is
usually a consequence of our problems and not a cause.
For
starters, the poor are not poor because the rich are rich. The two conditions
are generally unrelated. Mostly, the rich got rich by running profitable small
businesses (car dealerships, builders), creating big enterprises (Google,
Microsoft), being at the top of lucrative occupations (bankers, lawyers,
doctors, actors, athletes), managing major companies or inheriting fortunes. By
contrast, the very poor often face circumstances that make their lives
desperate. In an interview with the New Yorker, President Obama recently put it
this way:
“[The]
‘pathologies’ that used to be attributed to the African-American community in
particular — single-parent households, and drug abuse, and men dropping out of
the labor force, and an underground economy — [are now seen] in larger numbers
in white working-class communities.”
Solutions
elude us. Though some low-income workers would benefit from a higher minimum
wage, most of the very poor would not. They’re not in the labor force; they
either can’t work — too young, old, disabled or unskilled — or won’t. Of the 46
million people below the government’s poverty line in 2012, only 6 percent had year-round full-time jobs. Among men 25 to 55 with a high school diploma or
less, the share with jobs fell from more than 90 percent in 1970 to less than
75 percent in 2010, reports Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution . For
African American men ages 20 to 24, less than half were working.
It’s
also not true that, as widely asserted, the wealthiest Americans (the notorious
top 1 percent) have captured all the gains in productivity and living standards
of recent decades. The Congressional Budget Office examined income trends for
the past three decades. It found sizable gains for all income groups.
True,
the top 1 percent outdid everyone. From 1980 to 2010, their inflation-adjusted
pretax incomes grew a spectacular 190 percent, almost a tripling. But for the
poorest fifth of Americans, pretax incomes for these years rose 44 percent.
Gains were 31 percent for the second poorest, 29 percent for the middle fifth,
38 percent for the next fifth and 83 percent for the richest fifth, including
the top 1 percent. Because our system redistributes income from top to bottom,
after-tax gains were larger: 53percent for the poorest
fifth; 41 percent for the second; 41 percent for the middle-fifth; 49 percent
for the fourth; and 90 percent for richest.
Finally,
widening economic inequality is sometimes mistakenly blamed for causing the Great Recession and the weak recovery. The argument, as outlined by two
economists at Washington University in St. Louis, goes like this: In the 1980s,
income growth for the bottom 95 percent of Americans slowed. People compensated
by borrowing more. All the extra debt led to a consumption boom that was
unsustainable. The housing bubble and crash followed. Now, weak income growth
of the bottom 95 percent “helps explain the slow recovery.”
Optimism
seemed justified. Beginning in the 1980s, inflation fell, reducing interest
rates. Lower interest rates raised stock prices and home values. People felt
wealthier and, on paper, they were. Buoyant consumer spending kept the economy
advancing and unemployment low. Recessions were mild and infrequent. Economists
called this the Great Moderation. Its complacency led directly to the Great
Recession. The boom and bust had little to do with economic inequality.
Americans
in the top 1 percent are convenient scapegoats. They don’t naturally command
much sympathy, and their rewards sometimes seem outsized or outlandish. When
most people are getting ahead, they don’t worry much about this economic
inequality. When progress stalls, they do. There’s a backlash and a tendency to
see less economic inequality as a solution to all manner of problems. We create
simplistic narratives and imagine that punishing the rich will miraculously
uplift the poor. This vents popular resentments, even as it encourages
self-deception.
Breakout Session: The Middle East Peace Process. Video. Munich Security
Conference, January 31, 2014. Livini-Erekat exchange starts at 50:55.
Erekat’s remarks/tirade on his historical narrative as a proud son of Jericho
with roots 5,500 years before Joshua ben Nun start at 58:35.
Erekat:
You
mentioned something about narratives. It is a narrative. I am the son of
Jericho. I am ten thousand years old. I celebrated last year the birth date of
my city. I am the proud son of the Natufians and the Canaanites. I’ve been there
5,500 years before Joshua ben Nun came and burned my hometown Jericho. I’m not
going to change my narrative. When you say accept Israel as a Jewish state it
means you’re asking me to change my narrative.
Saeb
Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator over the weekend again ruled out the
notion of Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state. Speaking at a
Munich conference, on a panel with his Israeli counterpart Tzipi Livni, Erekat
said the demand was unacceptable: “When you say ‘accept Israel as a Jewish
state’ you are asking me to change my narrative,” he claimed, asserting that
his ancestors lived in the region “5,500 years before Joshua Bin-Nun came and
burned my hometown Jericho.”
Joshua
lived about 3,300 years ago, so Erekat is claiming that his family was in the
region for nearly 9000 years. Is this
true? Not
even close. Erekat
was born in Abu Dis, near Jerusalem. I found an interview with another Erekat
who was born in Abu Dis, named Hussein Mohamed Erekat. He says that his family
actually comes from the Huwaitat region of the northwestern Arabian Peninsula. Indeed,
this article about the dialects and clans of Saudi Arabia confirms the
existence of the Erekat (sometimes spelled Areikat or Ariqat) families in
Huwaitat, and they are one of seven clans that ended up in Palestine. Is Saeb
a member of this clan? Yes, he is.
This
Facebook page of the Erekat family traces the Erekat family history, and this article confirms that the family came from the Huwaitat region, and it also
mentions prominent Erekats – including Saeb.
That
article also says that before Huwaitat, their ancestors emigrated from Medina. All of
the Erekats are related. Most of their most prominent members have held
positions in Jordan’s government or armed forces, but three PLO diplomats are
from the family, including Saeb, the US representative of the PLO Maen Rashid Areikat, and the PLO’s delegate to the Ukraine Khaled Erekat.
(Saeb
is also implying that he was born in Jericho, but he wasn’t.) Saeb
Erekat is, once again, lying. Just as we caught him lying many, many times
before. And
after all these years of documented lies, no one in the media has had the guts
to confront him. Because, you see, he may be a liar, but he is a moderate liar,
and therefore deserves everyone's uncritical support. And why
should Israel have a problem signing a peace agreement with liars? UPDATE:
Erekat actually said “I am the son proud of the Canaanites who were there 5,500
years before Joshua bin Nun burned down the town of Jericho.”
It is
one of the less appealing characteristics of Zionist bullies that they engage
blithely in stealing Palestinian land and resources in complete disregard for
international law and then use the fig leaf of charges of “anti-Semitism” to
deflect any criticism of their actions. (The Jewish Home Party, though
religious, characterizes itself as “Zionist.”) This distasteful ploy has
increasingly jumped the shark as simple human rights law has become
“anti-Semitic” insofar as the current rightwing Zionist enterprise violates
international norms, and yet its proponents maintain that criticizing Israel or
Zionism is not allowed. All this is not to mention that the United States gives
(underline gives) Israel billions of dollars a year in its taxpayers’ money, as
well as trade privileges worth further billions. It doesn’t do that for any
other country at that level. If Kerry is anti-Semitic now, what would he have
to do, make it trillions?
The
very attributes conservatives say make America special—religiosity, patriotism,
and mobility—are ones they’ve inadvertently undermined. Is it any wonder
millennials are less impressed with their country?
