Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History
488
Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History
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| ISBN-13: | 9780520933453 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 06/02/2008 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 488 |
| Sales rank: | 210,418 |
| File size: | 30 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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CHAPTER 1
From Jesus Christ Superstar to The Passion of the Christ
THE LATEST PRODUCTION of Israel's apologists is the "new anti-Semitism." Just as Palestinians renewed their resistance to occupation and Israel escalated its brutal repression of the revolt, there was a vast proliferation of books, articles, conferences, and the like alleging that — in the words of Anti-Defamation League (ADL) national director Abraham Foxman — "we currently face as great a threat to the safety and security of the Jewish people as the one we faced in the 1930s — if not a greater one." As it happens, the allegation of a new anti-Semitism is neither new nor about anti-Semitism. Thirty years ago, ADL national leaders Arnold Forster and Benjamin R. Epstein published to great fanfare a study entitled The New Anti-Semitism, and less than a decade later ADL national leader Nathan Perlmutter (with his wife, Ruth Ann Perlmutter) put out The Real Anti-Semitism in America, alleging yet again that the United States was awash in a new anti-Semitism. The main purpose behind these periodic, meticulously orchestrated media extravaganzas is not to fight anti-Semitism but rather to exploit the historical suffering of Jews in order to immunize Israel against criticism. Each campaign to combat the "new anti-Semitism" has coincided with renewed international pressures on Israel to withdraw from occupied Arab territories in exchange for recognition from neighboring Arab states.
Forster and Epstein's The New Anti-Semitism came to serve as a template for subsequent productions. A few chapters of this book are given over to the anti-Semitic ravings of mostly marginal, right-wing extremists in the United States, while a larger space is devoted to deploring anti-Semitism in the African American community. To highlight the pervasiveness of this new anti-Semitism, mainstream institutions are also subject to random, more or less preposterous accusations — newspapers like the Washington Post and New York Times for being soft on anti-Semites, and the film industry for producing animated features like "X-rated Fritz the Cat ... which had a tasteless synagogue sequence, and The Crunch Bird, which used Jewish dialect and ethnic caricature for a vulgar joke and which won an Academy Award in 1972."
The periodic brouhahas over the new anti-Semitism show continuities even in fine details. A main item in Forster and Epstein's bill of indictment was Norman Jewison's just-released cinematic version of Jesus Christ Superstar. "From an anti-Semitic stage production he created an even more anti-Semitic film," they charged. The "anti-Semitic" stage production was cowritten by Andrew Lloyd Webber, who went on to create such scandalously anti-Semitic Broadway musicals as Cats (a coded allusion to Katz?), while Jewison had just produced and directed the screen adaptation of Fiddler on the Roof. Webber and Jewison are castigated for perpetuating the lie that "the Jews, collectively, killed Christ" and ignoring "the new, ecumenical interpretation of the Crucifixion," instead following "'the old, primitive formulation of the Passion play, the spirit of which was discarded by Vatican II.'" The biased rendering of the biblical protagonists is said to be irrefutable proof of the film's anti-Semitic thrust: "Superstar represented, after all, a very free adaptation of the New Testament story. ... The malevolent image of the street mobs of Jerusalem and of the priests was preserved intact and once again they were assigned major blame for the Crucifixion. At the same time, the authors of Superstar chose to whitewash the character of Pontius Pilate, exonerating Pilate of blame in the condemnation and trial of Jesus and thereby heightening the responsibility assigned to the Jewish priesthood." Fast forward to 2004. The assault on Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ struck identical notes, Frank Rich of the New York Times, for example, charging: "There is no question that it rewrites history by making Caiaphas and the other high priests the prime instigators of Jesus' death while softening Pontius Pilate, an infamous Roman thug, into a reluctant and somewhat conscience-stricken executioner."
Abraham Foxman was said to have been appalled at the potential anti-Semitic fallout of Gibson's film. But the primary target audience of Passion was exactly those Christian fundamentalists with whom ADL has been aligned for years. For instance, Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition frequently addressed ADL meetings. Why the selective indignation against Gibson? Apart from the obvious fact that, as "faithful supporters" of Israel, the Christian Coalition gets a partial pass, could it be that ADL's national director almost literally stole a page from an old book, seizing on Passion to whip up hysteria about the new anti-Semitism? Foxman, who fired the first salvos against Gibson's Passion and thereafter dominated this theater of war, is prominently listed on the acknowledgments page of Forster-Epstein's The New Anti-Semitism. The crisis of Passion was a win-win situation: if Gibson caved in, it would broadcast the message not to mess with Jews; and if he didn't, it would prove the omnipresence of anti-Semitism. Already before the film's release, Foxman was capitalizing on it for his accusations of anti-Semitism. The 2003 ADL "Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents" highlights: "In early 2003 Mel Gibson announced the making of his forthcoming film, 'The Passion of the Christ.' What followed was a nearly year-long controversy that elicited hateful anti-Semitic e-mails and letters to ADL and other Jewish organizations, as well as journalists, religious leaders and those who commented critically on the film" and "'the hate mail was an indication of the anti-Semitic feelings that were stirred as a result of the Jewish concerns about the film.'" Plainly, Foxman's confidence wasn't misplaced that journalists, ever on the lookout to expose yet new manifestations of anti-Semitism, would take the bait; and pundits and columnists, ever on the lookout for causes to champion but only if against a phantom enemy, would fearlessly lead the charge. Each of them — the New Republic's Leon Wieseltier, the New York Times's Frank Rich, Vanity Fair's Christopher Hitchens, the Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer — elbowed the next, vying for the title of chief slayer of the Gibson dragon. Even if one believes the worst accusations leveled against Passion by ADL — that it's every bit as anti-Semitic as Superstar — how much courage did it take to denounce Gibson in these publications, and for their audiences? Reversing cause and effect and feigning wounded innocence, Rich piously accused Gibson, not ADL and its media adjuncts, of firing the "opening volley" and "looking for a brawl." It was testament to the sheer idiocy of this "controversy" that the heart of it was Gibson's biblical scholarship. Before Passion, who ever thought that Gibson had even the clue of an idea in his head? The punditry was on a par with periodic learned disputations on the deeper meaning of Michael Jackson's latest lyrics.
The principal — indeed, the real — target of Forster and Epstein's New Anti-Semitism was criticism directed at Israel after the October 1973 war, when new pressures were exerted on Israel to withdraw from the Egyptian Sinai and to reach a diplomatic settlement with the Palestinians. This "hostility" against Israel, it was alleged, "is the heart of the new anti-Semitism." It was said to both spring from anti-Semitism and constitute its "ultimate" form: "The only answer that seems to fit is that Jews are tolerable, acceptable in their particularity, only as victims, and when their situation changes so that they are either no longer victims or appear not to be, the non-Jewish world finds this so hard to take that the effort is begun to render them victims anew" (their emphasis). The possibility that criticism of Israel might have sprung from Israel's intransigence — its refusal to withdraw despite Arab offers of peace — was too absurd even to consider. Apart from the usual bogies like the United Nations, the Soviet Union, and the Arab world, the alleged proof of a resurgent anti-Semitism was that even Israel's traditional allies in Western Europe and the United States were given to Jewhating outbursts. For example, in the United Kingdom fewer people agreed that "Israel should hold all or most of the territory it occupied in June 1967," and a British Guardian article reported that Israel was using "ignoble subterfuges" to confiscate Palestinian land. In Germany a Stern magazine article alleged that "terror and force were used by the Jews in the compulsory founding of their state in 1948." In Latin America the danger of a new anti-Semitism was particularly "worrisome" in Argentina, where a "left-wing spokesm[a]n" called for "a just peace [in the Middle East] based on the evacuation of all the occupied territories," and his supporters were "proclaiming 'the right of the Palestinians to self-determination.'"
In the United States the threat of a new anti-Semitism emanated, according to Forster and Epstein, from the "Radical Left," such as the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, the Stalinist American Communist Party, and the Maoist Progressive Labor Party — even if their combined constituency could have comfortably fit into a telephone booth. In addition, it was alleged that sectors of the religious and peace community had succumbed to the anti-Semitic temptation. For example, "the line had been crossed" when a liberal Protestant clergyman sermonized that "now oppressed become oppressors: Arabs are deported; Arabs are imprisoned without charge"; and when the National Council of Churches called for "the recognition of the right of Palestinian Arabs to a 'home acceptable to them which must now be a matter of negotiation.'" A publication of the American Friends Service Committee (Quakers) had also crossed the line when asserting "that Egypt and Israel were equally guilty for the outbreak of the June 1967 war" (which, if anything, demonstrates a bias in favor of Israel); that Israel should "as a first step commit itself to withdraw from all the occupied territory — a strictly Arab reading of the U.N. Security Council's resolution of November 22, 1967" (in fact, this reading of Resolution 242 was the consensus of the international community, including the United States); and that American Jews should — horror of anti-Semitic horrors — "reject simplistic military solutions, and ... encourage calm and deliberate examination of all the issues." The occasional public mention of an American Jewish lobby mobilizing support for Israel or, even more rare, of U.S. hypocrisy in the Israel-Arab conflict was likewise adduced by Forster and Epstein as prima facie evidence of anti-Semitism; for example, a Washington Post story claimed that "the influence of American Jews on American politics is quite disproportionate to their numbers in the electorate" and that "[t]hey lobby on Capitol Hill and often they have had direct access to the White House," and a CBS News commentary "accused the United States of a 'double standard' in regard to Middle East terror." In the face of this overwhelming accumulation of evidence, who, except a diehard Jew-hater, could doubt the lethal danger of a new anti-Semitism?
By the time Nathan and Ruth Ann Perlmutter published The Real Anti-Semitism (1982), American Jewish elites had gravitated yet further to the right end of the political spectrum. Accordingly, as compared to The New Anti-Semitism, the space in The Real Anti-Semitism given over to anti-Semitism on the right contracted, while that devoted to anti-Semitism on the left — a label that designated not the left but anyone to their left — expanded. For Forster and Epstein, the radical left "today represents a danger to world Jewry at least equal to the danger on the right." But for the Perlmutters, the danger emanating from the left loomed much larger, and, it bears repeating, not just the radical but even the moderate left, reaching well into the mainstream. "[W]e have not discussed the Right, not because it is not of concern to Jews," they explained at one point, "but rather because that danger is so well known by Jews." Yet the likelier reason for this relative silence on the right was that American Jewish elites had now aligned themselves with — indeed, more and more belonged to — the right, apart from its lunatic fringe. Domestically, as institutionalized anti-Semitism all but vanished and American Jews prospered, the bonds linking Jews to their erstwhile "natural" allies on the left and among other discriminated-against minorities eroded. American Jewish elites increasingly acted to preserve and protect their class, and even "white," privilege. Internationally, as Israel's political intransigence and brutal occupation alienated public opinion and its alignment with the right in the United States (as elsewhere) deepened, American Jewish elites found themselves increasingly at odds with the political center and in league with the right. The Perlmutters charted these developments with remarkable, if morally repugnant, candor.
Classical anti-Semitism of the type that targeted Jews simply for being Jewish, according to the Perlmutters, no longer posed a potent danger in the United States: "The Klansmen and the neo-Nazis are today no more than socially scrawny imitations of their once politically meaningful forebears, while uptown, the very fact of whispered anti-Semitism is testimony to its low estate." A new type of anti-Semitism, however, had replaced it. This "real" anti-Semitism was defined by the Perlmutters as any challenge inimical to Jewish interests. If not subjectively driven by animus toward Jews, it was nonetheless objectively harmful to them: "Essentially, this book's thesis is that today the interests of Jews are not so much threatened by their familiar nemesis, crude anti-Semitism, as by a-Semitic governmental policies, the proponents of which may be free of anti-Semitism and indeed may well — literally — count Jews among some of their best friends." Practically, this meant pinning the epithet "anti-Semitic" on domestic challenges to Jewish class privilege and political power as well as on global challenges to Israeli hegemony. American Jewish elites were, in effect and in plain sight, cynically appropriating "anti-Semitism" — a historical phenomenon replete with suffering and martyrdom, on the one hand, and hatred and genocide, on the other — as an ideological weapon to defend and facilitate ethnic aggrandizement. "Unchallenged and unchecked," real anti-Semitism, the Perlmutters warned, "can loose once again classical anti-Semitism." In fact the reverse comes closer to the truth: it is the mislabeling of legitimate challenges to Jewish privilege and power as anti-Semitism that breeds irrational resentment of Jews, more on which later.
Given that the domestic power of American Jewish elites was firmly entrenched, the club of anti-Semitism was mainly wielded to assail Israel's critics. Israel, according to the Perlmutters, was "indisputably the overriding concern of Jewry," "the issue central to our beings" — but only if it was a Sparta-like Israel in thrall to the United States. From the mid-1970s this Israel was coming under attack. When the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) joined the international consensus supporting a two-state settlement, pressures mounted on Israel to follow suit — or, in the Perlmutters' twisted logic, Israel had been "cornered in the public-relations cul de sac of 'peace.'" To head off this PLO "peace offensive" (Israeli strategic analyst Avner Yaniv's phrase), Israel invaded Lebanon in June 1982. The Perlmutters were at pains to acknowledge that, although nonetheless "murder's accomplices," Israel's critics were mostly not motivated by anti-Jewish animus. If they took exception to Israeli policy, it was on account of their being either misguided dupes of "trendy" Third World ideologies (like opposition to "racism," "sexism," and "imperialism") or grubby opportunists anxious about the price of Arab oil. One possibility the Perlmutters didn't entertain was that Israel might be in the wrong. Real anti-Semites didn't just include usual suspects like the National Council of Churches, which "called on Israel to include the PLO in its Middle East peace negotiations," and the United Nations, which "has become an arena for vicious assaults on Jewish interests" — such as supporting a two-state settlement. Rather, defined by the damage, however indirect, they might inflict on Israel, anti-Semites, in the Perlmutters' lexicon, was a catchall for, among others, those wanting to "scuttle the electoral college" in the name of democracy, which would diminish the clout of American Jews (concentrated in swing states) and concomitantly diminish Jewish influence over Middle East policy; those calling for peaceful resolution of conflicts and cuts in the military budget, on account of which "nowadays war is getting a bad name and peace too favorable a press" — plainly a disaster for Israel; those opposing nuclear power, which would increase "the West's dependency on OPEC oil and ... our economy's thralldom to recycling petrodollars"; and on and on. Scaling the peaks of absurdity, the Perlmutters suggest that "even the New York Times is guilty," if not of outright anti-Semitism then of ... Holocaust denial.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Beyond Chutzpah"
by .
Copyright © 2008 Norman G. Finkelstein.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Preface to the First Paperback EditionAcknowledgments
Introduction
PART ONE THE NOT-SO-NEW “NEW ANTI-SEMITISM”
1 From Jesus Christ Superstar to The Passion of the Christ
2 Israel: The “Jew among Nations”
3 Crying Wolf
PART TWO THE GREATEST TALE EVER SOLD
Introduction
4 Impurity of Arms
5 Three in the Back of the Head
6 Israel’s Abu Ghraib
7 Return of the Vandals
8 Blight unto the Nations
9 High Court Takes the Low Road
Conclusion
Postscript: Reconciling Irreconcilables:
How Israel’s High Court of Justice Proved
the Wall Was Legal
Appendix I: Of Crimes and Misdemeanors
Appendix II: History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict
Appendix III: Peace Process
Epilogue: Dershowitz v. Finkelstein: Who’s Right and Who’s Wrong,
by Frank J. Menetrez
Index