Buruma:
NEW
YORK – Israel’s current government and its supporters in the West are quick to
denounce criticism of Israeli policies as anti-Semitism. This can be inaccurate
and self-serving, but it is not always wrong.
Israel’s
defenders are right to point out that public opinion in Europe, and to a much
lesser extent in the United States, tends to be much more critical of Israeli
atrocities in Gaza than about bloodier violence committed by Muslims against
Muslims in other parts of the Middle East.
This
can be explained by the fact that Israel is supported by Western governments
and generously subsidized by American taxpayers. There is not much that public
outrage can do about the behavior of Iranian mullahs or Syrian thugs. But
Israel is “one of us.”
To be
sure, excessive zeal in denouncing Israel, and cheap comparisons between
Israeli violence and Nazi mass murder, betray a dubious urge to throw off the
burdens of guilt. After decades of feeling obliged to drop the collective
European head in shame for what was done to the Jews, people can finally say
with an element of glee that Jews can be murderers, too. But, though unseemly,
this is not necessarily anti-Semitic.
Anti-Zionism
takes a nasty turn to anti-Semitism when it conflates Jews with Israelis – for
example, when the British Liberal Democratic politician David Ward criticized
“the Jews” for inflicting horrors on the Palestinians. And, while one can be skeptical
about Zionism as a historical project, to deny Israel’s right to exist is hard
to distinguish from anti-Semitism.
The
most sinister form of anti-Zionism is to be found among leftists who see Israel
and the US as the planet’s twin evils. Those who see dark American forces
behind all that is wrong with the world, from financial crashes to the violence
in Ukraine, are prone to detect the malign hand of Israeli or even Jewish
lobbies in every US policy.
The
link between corrupting Jewish influence and the US was originally a right-wing
trope. Jews were supposedly rootless, clannish, and omnipotent, with no loyalty
to any nation. The immigrant society of the US was seen as rootless by
definition. In the view of early-twentieth-century right-wing European
nationalists, Anglo-American capitalism, controlled by Jews, undermined the
sacred ties of blood and soil.
This
worldview also blamed the Jews for Bolshevism, which might seem like a
contradiction, but is not. Bolshevism, like capitalism, was internationalist,
at least in theory. (Joseph Stalin was actually a Soviet nationalist who also
denounced Jews as rootless cosmopolitans.)
The
dangers of zealous anti-Semitic attacks on Israel are obvious. If Israel was
not just a fearful nation oppressing the Palestinian people, but the source of
all evil, any form of violence, however destructive of self and others, could
be justified. If the Israel Defense Forces were the modern equivalent of the
Nazis, it should be smashed with maximum force. If all Jews were responsible
for the oppression of Arabs, attacks on Jews in Europe, or anywhere else,
should be condoned, if not actively encouraged.
The
number of people in the West who really hold such beliefs is, I believe, small.
Such people exist in universities. They write blogs. They march together in
demonstrations with some indisputably anti-Semitic Islamist militants. But they
are far from the mainstream.
Remarkably,
some of Israel’s most ardent admirers are now to be found on the right – and
even the far right. Quite a few are members of political parties with a
profoundly anti-Semitic provenance, such as Austria’s Freedom Party, whose
early members included former Nazis. The Freedom Party leader, along with such
luminaries of the populist right as Filip Dewinter, the Flemish nationalist
leader, and the Dutch demagogue Geert Wilders, have visited the West Bank and
voiced their support for Israeli settlements.
This
can be explained partly by antagonism against Islam. Right-wing populists in
Europe regard Islam as the greatest threat to the West. So, naturally, they
applaud the Israeli government for using harsh measures to keep the Arabs down.
As Wilders put it, the Israelis “are fighting our fight. If Jerusalem falls,
Amsterdam and New York will be next.”
But the
main reason for this new solidarity between Western right-wing populists and
the state of Israel might lie deeper than shared antipathy toward Islam. No
state is static, and Israel has changed a great deal since the heroic decades
after its founding in 1948.
In the
early years, Israel was admired by Western leftists for being a progressive
state, run by Polish and Russian socialists. Today’s Israeli leaders, however,
in their rhetoric and behavior, often sound more like the old European
anti-Semites. Israeli Jews are now firmly rooted in their own national soil.
But the ruling ideology is no longer socialism; it is a form of ethnic
nationalism, with a great deal of military swagger. No wonder, then, that
Israel’s current admirers have a distinctly illiberal cast.
They
reflect current mainstream opinion more than leftist anti-Zionists do. The
world is increasingly fragmenting, with fearful people embracing smaller,
defensive identities: Scottish, Catalan, Flemish, Sunni, Shia, Kurdish, and so
on. The idealistic internationalism of the early postwar years is collapsing
fast. Tribal feelings – national, ethnic, and religious – are filling the
vacuum. And, most ironic of all, Israel, a nation-state built by a people
despised for their cosmopolitanism, has become a prime symbol of this
disturbing trend.
