The Warped Mirror: Anti-Semitism and the 'zeitgeist'

When a Hamas representative said back in April that his group hoped Barack Obama would win the American presidential elections, he certainly contributed considerably to the image of Obama as a militant that was recently satirized in a rather controversial New Yorker cover. While Hamas has long since changed its opinion about Obama, it turns out that the group still comes up with statements that can inspire caricaturists: how the recent claim by a Hamas spokesman that "Obama wants to go to the White House through Tel Aviv" looks when it is drawn by caricaturists is illustrated by a sample of published caricatures from the Arab media compiled by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).

The ADL has protested the "direct or borderline anti-Semitism" evident in cartoons that portray "the presumptive US presidential candidates as lackeys of the Jews and Israel." It is obviously not just Hamas that likes to suspect "Jewish power" at work everywhere. But while exaggerating the power of Jews is rightly considered as a marker of anti-Semitism, the controversy triggered by the publication of Mearsheimer's and Walt's book on "The Israel Lobby" has illustrated how difficult it is to diagnose when a legitimate political debate veers into anti-Semitic territory.

In an excellent review of "The Israel Lobby", Walter Russell Mead has argued that it is "a book that anti-Semites will love, but it is not necessarily an anti-Semitic book." Mead acknowledges that Mearsheimer and Walt "do what anti-Semites have always done: they overstate the power of Jews [. . .] the picture they paint calls up some of the ugliest stereotypes in anti-Semitic discourse. The Zionist octopus they conjure - stirring up the Iraq war, manipulating both US political parties, shaping the media, punishing the courageous minority of professors and politicians who dare to tell the truth - is depressingly familiar." However, in Mead's assessment, these anti-Semitic stereotypes are not invoked intentionally, but are rather a result of the book's flawed analysis: "Mearsheimer and Walt have come honestly to a mistaken understanding of the relationship between pro-Israel political activity and US policy and strategic interests. It is no crime to be wrong, and being wrong about Jews does not necessarily make someone an anti-Semite."

As I have argued in a previous blog post,  if one accepts Mead's defense of Mearsheimer and Walt against charges of anti-Semitism, one would have to conclude that there is such a thing as "acceptable" anti-Semitism which can be excused as the unintentional by-product of a faulty analysis, resulting in an "honestly" mistaken understanding that amounts to nothing more than "being wrong about Jews". While Mead has a point when he implies that it must be possible to be "wrong about Jews", historically Jews have always paid a huge price when others were "wrong" about them.

The question when accusations of anti-Semitism are justified is also tackled in a recently published essay by Anthony Julius, who is working on a book about English anti-Semitism. Julius argues that "Antisemitic anti-Zionism is so much part of the zeitgeist, it is reasonable to assume that many of the people who draw upon its tropes do so without reflection. If they are open to correction when the provenance of their language is pointed out to them, they are not antisemites. Antisemites are obdurate in their Jew hatred."

Another take on the same subject was offered recently by the German journalist and satirist Henryk Broder, who spoke last month at a public hearing on anti-Semitism held by the German parliament. Broder argued that the anti-Semitism popular among neo-Nazis is "ugly, but politically irrelevant"; instead, he warned, that there is a "new phenomenon: an anti-Semitism without anti-Semites":

The modern anti-Semite does not believe in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But instead he fantasizes about an 'Israel lobby' that is supposed to control American foreign policy like a tail that wags the dog. [...] The modern anti-Semite finds ordinary anti-Semitism disgraceful. He has no problem, however, embracing anti-Zionism and is grateful for the opportunity to express his resentment in a politically correct form. For anti-Zionism is a sort of resentment just like classical anti-Semitism was. The anti-Zionist has the same attitude toward Israel as the anti-Semite has to Jews. He is not bothered by what Israel does or does not do, but rather by the fact that Israel exists."

The fact that Israel exists, let alone that it has a right to exist as a Jewish state, is still something that is by no means truly accepted in the Middle East - and the fact that this lack of acceptance is sometimes denied in the West arguably illustrates that Anthony Julius has a point when he talks about a "zeitgeist" that encourages a fusion of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. The question that remains, however, is why anti-Zionism should be considered as somehow more respectable than anti-Semitism: after all, anti-Zionism singles out the Jews as a people who should not have sought self-determination.

The standard argument that Jewish self-determination as expressed by Zionism came at the expense of another people, the Palestinians, lacks substance, because the Palestinians could have established a state of their own at the very same time the Zionists proclaimed their state. Feeling sympathy with the reasons why the Palestinians chose not to seize this opportunity is one thing, using this sympathy to undermine or deny Israel's right to exist is quite another.

Barack Obama has made it perfectly clear that one can accept the idea of a secure Jewish state as a fundamentally just idea even if one doesn't agree with every action of the state of Israel - as he put it in an interesting interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in May:

It's a government and it has politicians, and as a politician myself I am deeply mindful that we are imperfect creatures and don't always act with justice uppermost on our minds. But the fundamental premise of Israel and the need to preserve a Jewish state that is secure is, I think, a just idea and one that should be supported here in the United States and around the world."

It's a rather telling reflection of the "zeitgeist" that Obama's views on Israel have considerably dampened enthusiasm for him not only in the Arab world, but even in some circles in Europe.