I fear I may be questioned before God about my silence in the face of blatant oppression. Israel claims to be the only democracy in the Middle East, yet it engages in some of the same tactics that the world has condemned when carried out by others in the region.
Military police confronting protestors who demand basic human rights, enforcing curfews through physical violence, and demolishing entire neighborhoods in search of a few men. The Palestinian people have been oppressed for nearly years — starting with the Ottomon Empire in the early s, before the British, the Jordanians, and finally, since the late 20th century, the Israelis.
When we consider the traumatic history of the Jewish people, and the horrors of the Holocaust, we must also consider the collective transgenerational trauma of the Palestinians. And yet, we hear so much about the violent tactics some Palestinian groups engage in. Those are the headlines the news media writes. I wish the world would also see the non-violent approaches the Palestinian people have taken.
Refusing to pay taxes on property and businesses, advocating that all shops close their doors at noon to honor a national commercial strike, a campaign to boycott Israeli products, and advocacy to disregard their identity cards as a means of demonstration.
As a Black man, I can only imagine the smoldering anger that might have spilled over into the streets if the bus boycotts, sit-ins, marches and freedom rides had not activated public policies that would bring some social relief — albeit limited — to African Americans.
Every sovereign land has a right to defend itself. But it was wrongheaded. Because it has nothing to do with hatred as such. The term that today has become synonymous with Jew-hatred was coined by Wilhelm Marr, a 19th-century German nationalist who penned treatises against the rising wave of liberalization and democracy sweeping the continent.
It was a powerful and sophisticated misdirection of conservative anxieties about larger processes in German society toward a minority that could not fight back.
A single explanation answered a multitude of dissatisfactions. It was a perfect trap. Stoked to the point of violence, the public assailed the Jews, but the violence could never find satisfaction in them because they were not, in fact, the source of the malaise.
Fatal in the long run, but seductive in the here and now, anti-Semitism was a form of political prestidigitation, pointing away from the actual bid for power toward its alleged usurpers. Jews are a uniquely convenient target for such political sleight of hand, Wisse told The Times of Israel.
In a sense, the Jews were handy. Jews became stand-ins for the fears and anxieties of competing political camps in a fast-changing world, first in Europe and later in the Arab and Muslim worlds. They became a vocabulary for distracting populations from their troubled leaderships.
To European conservatives of the 19th century, Jews were the unwanted liberalizers or communist agitators. In hindsight, it might astonish us that Zionism could ever have believed the solution lay in changing the Jew. Antisemitism, then and now, was simply too useful to be abandoned just because the Jews of the eastern hemisphere had reorganized themselves into a nation-state. In Soviet discourse, Jewish peoplehood was a very specific sort of threat: a retreat from the progressive project toward the old nationalisms that communism and more to the point, Soviet imperialism sought to eradicate.
The USSR invested a great deal of effort in erasing Jewish distinctiveness, systematically persecuting and killing off the Jewish cultural elite and outlawing the study of Hebrew. It was in Soviet ideology and its response to Jewish nonconformity that antisemitism became anti-Zionist — Israel was the epitome of the distinctiveness they sought to uproot. The Soviet intertwining of antisemitism and anti-Zionism swept through the Arab world to become a dominant paradigm of Arab politics for generations.
They could have organized in against any other thing. It was a marvelous time for the Arabs. All their imperial overlords had been involved in this devastating war.
Britain was crawling home. So suddenly the whole Arab world was free. So the handiest thing was to organize [their politics] against the emergence of the State of Israel. They used opposition to Israel as a unifying element among all these disparate and politically dysfunctional countries and leaderships. What explains the linkage on the progressive left in recent years between occasional American police delegations to Israel and US police violence and militarization?
The existence of exchange programs between police departments around the world is seen as evidence enough to claim that without the nefarious influence of Israel, America would have been spared its most recent racial bloodletting and pain. The upshot is clear, and the point must be said plainly in a discourse prone to politicization.
The same is true about Jews. Those forms of prejudice have been faced by many others throughout human history. The antisemitism being debated in Israel over the past two weeks is something else, something apparently unique to Jews: It is the role Jews are forced to play in the political imaginations of non-Jews as the incarnation of and explanation for their deepest fears and most vexing social ills.
It is not the idea that Israel is doing wrong, but the idea that Israel, in some deep order of global affairs, is what is wrong with the world.
At this point, most Haaretz readers have lost their cool. The man fills the space around him. He is more intriguing than any current Israeli politician, even now, seemingly in the winter of his career. It is easier to comprehend the blind admiration toward him than the elemental hatred he inspires.
On the most crucial topic for Israel — its turning into an a partheid state — his policies were no worse than those of his predecessors, or his successors. His harm to democracy, if there was one, is harm to a semblance of democracy, with a military dictatorship in its backyard. So why do they hate him so much? And why do they have so much hate for anyone daring to say a word in his favor too?
Ziffer, the host , found something that might serve as a partial explanation in the archive. Even in the most turbulent of times — not just politics. He chose this environment.
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