Western Anti-Semitism (Not Arabs) Poisoned Israel's Future
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| Western Anti-Semitism Poisoned Israel's Future |
The Arab-Israeli
conflict may be foremost in the minds of those committed to peace in the Middle
East. But to get at its roots, one must
come to an understanding of the role European and American anti-Semitism played
in setting the Jewish state up for eventual failure. It is understandable that modern historians
would place special emphasis on German Chancellor Adolph Hitler, given the sheer magnitude of his
genocidal proclivities, which led to the murder of six million Jews in the
Holocaust. However, this focus on the Nazis overlooks the
climate of anti-Semitism in the United States and European nations other than
Germany, which may have influenced Hitler to embark on his path of mass murder
against the Jews, believing there would be no repercussions from other Western
leaders. In fact, few European Jews
would have died in the Holocaust had the United States and Western Europe
opened their borders to those fleeing Nazi persecution on the eve of World War
II. Had the Holocaust not occurred, Zionism would have remained on the margins of
European Jewish thought and the number
of Jews trickling into Palestine would have remained minimal.
It is for this reason,
that we should perceive of the Arab-Israeli conflict, sparked by the partition
of Palestine and creation of the Jewish State of Israel in 1948, as a western problem. That is, it was imposed on
the Middle East by the colonialist mentality of the mid-twentieth century Western
nations.
The So-Called “Jewish Question”
The history of
anti-Semitism in the West is a long and sordid one. As Christianity swept across Europe from the
fourth century onwards, the message of
“brotherly love” was never too far removed from accusations that the Jews were
responsible for the killing of Jesus Christ.
European leaders considered the continued existence of a Jewish
community a perennial problem. The folk
traditions of Europe harbored superstitions, claiming that Jews possessed magical powers, acquired from
having made a pact with the devil. Local
rulers and church officials closed many professions to Jews, forcing them into
occupations considered to be socially tainted, such as money lending, tax and
rent collecting. During the Middle Ages,
full scale persecution of Jews erupted throughout Europe. It took many forms. “Blood libels” referred to false accusations
that Jews were murdering Christian children and drinking their blood in secret
religious rituals. In 1144, the Jewish
community of Norwich, England was accused of engaging in such ritual murder of
children, which eventually led to the expulsion of all Jews from Britain. Within
the next three centuries, the notion of “blood libel” spread throughout
Europe.
The Christian Crusades
were a series of military campaigns, which took place between the eleventh and
thirteen centuries, aimed at recapturing Jerusalem from Muslim control. As Christian warriors from Western Europe
made their way to the Holy Land, mobs of foot soldiers attacked Jewish
communities along the route, in Germany France and England. In the mid-fourteenth century, when the
bubonic plague swept through Europe, annihilating nearly half of its
population, mass hysteria arose among Christians, accusing Jews of poisoning the water wells and causing the
epidemic. In one incident, 900 Jews were
burnt alive in Strasbourg, France, a city not yet even affected by the plague. Many Jews fled to Poland, where they were
forced to live in walled ghettos.
Anti-Semitism followed
European emigrants to the United States in the 19th and 20th
centuries. The number of Jews allowed
into the country was highly restricted, and some were even lynched by racist
groups like the Ku Klux Klan for crimes they had not committed. Social
clubs refused to admit Jews as members, and colleges maintained quotas,
limiting the number of Jewish students who were allowed to attend. In 1939, the United States refused to allow
the MS St. Louis, carrying 900 German Jews fleeing the Nazis to land on
American soil. Coast Guard vessels followed the ship, making sure
passengers did not attempt to jump over-board and swim to the U.S. coast. Embarrassed, by these reports, Coast Guard
officials later declared that their mission was strictly one of
reconnaissance. Running low on fuel,
food and fresh water, the ship was forced to return to Hamburg, Germany, where
many of the passengers perished in the Holocaust.
When Nazi leader, Adolf
Hitler, spoke of the “Jewish Question,” on the eve of World War II, he was
referring to the longstanding prejudices against Jews throughout the West. The so-called “Final Solution to the Jewish Question,”
was a term used by the Nazis in making reference to the Holocaust. But Hitler was also engaging in his own caustic
brand of sarcasm, in that the nations of Europe and the U.S., who had denounced
him for being anti-Semitic, were themselves unwilling to take in Jewish
refugees.
Slamming Borders Shut
In 1935, the Nazi
regime passed the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jews of their German
citizenship. Over the course of the next
three years, Hitler signaled his intention of ridding Germany’s so-called
superior Aryan race, of its Jewish population.
In July of 1938, the U.S. and
other Western European nations convened a conference in Evian, France in order
to decide what to do about Jews struggling feverishly to get out of
Germany. Conference delegates expressed
sympathy for the plight of the Jews, but was unable to come up with any joint resolutions
that could remedy the refugee problem.
Watching the Americans
and Western Europeans mouth sympathetic platitudes, while slamming their
borders shut to Jewish refugees, provoked Adolf Hitler to remark in a 1939 speech:
“It is a shameful
spectacle to see how the whole democratic world is oozing sympathy for the poor
tormented Jewish people, but remains hard hearted and obdurate when it comes to
helping them, which is surely, in view of its attitude, an obvious duty.”[i]
A poll taken the
previous year had revealed that 68
percent of Americans were opposed to admitting large numbers of Jewish refugees
from Germany and Austria into the United States. A second poll taken in 1939, showed that 83
percent of the American public opposed a bill that would allow European Jewish
refugees to enter the country. Professor Theodore Hamerow of the University
of Wisconsin, offered a damning account of U.S. public attitudes during that
period in a book entitled: Why We
Watched: Europe, America and the Holocaust.
The attitudes of the U.S. public, was shaped by a belief that “Jews were
not real Americans.” Professor
Hamerow declared:
“Surveys of public
opinion show, moreover, that distrust of Jews actually increased during the war
years. Asked which national, religious,
or social groups in the United States were a threat to the country –Jews,
Negroes, Catholics, Germans, or Japanese—a plurality of respondents
consistently named the Jews, more even than the Germans.”[ii]
Anti-Semitic Zionism
While Anti-Semitism was
rampant in the U.S. before and during World War II, it declined precipitously
after the war. The polite reason offered by scholars to explain this
dramatic change in attitude suggests that Americans were so horrified in
learning of the Holocaust that they mended their Anti-Semitic
ways. It's a nice story, but there is no real evidence to back it
up. To the contrary, what we do know to be the case is
that Anti-Semitism in the U.S. declined precipitously once Americans embraced
Zionism, which meant sending Jewish refugees to Palestine rather than the U.S.
But surely support
for Zionism should be interpreted as support for Jews? Not quite.
Americans supported Jewish aspirations so long as most
Holocaust survivors were being shipped to a former British colony, populated by
resentful and riotous Arabs. In short, once American workers no
longer feared labor markets being flooded by better educated, Jewish refugees
with liberal political leanings, it was then and only then that Anti-Semitism
in American society declined.
A 1991 report issued
by Sheldon L. Richman of the CATO Institute, a libertarian think-tank based in
Washington, d.c., declared:
“In some cases,
support for Jewish admission to and statehood in Palestine. . . sidestepped the
sensitive issue of U.S. immigration quotas, which had kept European Jews out of
the United States since the 1920s and had left them at the mercy of the
Nazis. In other words, support for
Zionism may have been a convenient way for people who did not want Jews to come
to the United States to avoid appearing anti-Semitic. American classical
liberals and others, including the American Council for Judaism, opposed the
quotas, and it is probable that many of the refugees, given the option, would
have preferred to come to the United States.”[iii]
Holocaust Survivors Forced to Choose Palestine
Philip S. Bernstein, a rabbi from New York,
served as an advisor to the American army in Germany after World War II. In a meeting with President Harry Truman
after the war, Bernstein told the U.S. leader that ninety percent of Jewish
refugees languishing in displaced persons camps around Europe wanted to go to
Palestine. Bernstein later admitted
that he had lied in order to support the Zionists, a decision he had come to
regret. The American rabbi opined:
“By pressing for an
exodus of Jews from Europe; by insisting that Jewish DPs did not wish to go to
any other country outside Israel; by not participating in the negotiations on
behalf of the DPs; and by refraining from a campaign of their own - by all this
they (the Zionists) certainly did not help to open the gates of America for
Jews. In fact, they sacrificed the interests of living people - their brothers
and sisters who went through a world of pain - to the politics of their own
movement."
It may be true as
recent scholarly accounts suggest, that the Zionists inflated the numbers of
Jewish refugees in the European displaced persons camps, who wished to relocate
to war-torn Palestine. However, a
hard-boiled politician like American President Harry Truman was not so gullible as Zionists might have supposed. Rather, this ideology demanding that Jewish refugees be sent to Palestine relieved
Truman of moral responsibility for not having settled these displaced Jews in
America.
It is also not hard to
understand why survivors of the Holocaust would have preferred to emigrate to
the U.S. or Europe, since many of them were not religious Jews influenced by
Biblical teachings. However, they were
never given that option. What is hard to fathom is how western
governments could have rationalized sending these traumatized, war-weary Holocaust
survivors to a volatile Middle East, instead.
While repudiating the
anti-Semitic lunacy of the Nazis, the West hid its own anti-Jewish prejudices
under Zionism’s skirts. Professor Ilan Pappe explains:
“[In 1947] the U.N.
appointed a special body, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine
(UNSCOP_, to make the decision over Palestine and UNSCOP members were asked to
visit the camps of Holocaust survivors.
Many of these survivors wanted to emigrate to the United States, a wish
that undermined the Zionist claims that the fate of European Jewry was
connected to that of the Jewish community in Palestine. When UNSCOP representatives arrived at the
camps, they were unaware that backstage manipulations were limiting their
contacts solely to survivors who wished to emigrate to Palestine.”[iv]
Ernest Morris, a Jewish attorney and
friend of the late President Roosevelt, reported to the White House, after
visiting the Jewish refugee camps in Europe:
"What if Canada,
Australia, South America, England and the United States were all to open a door
to some migration? Even today [written in 1947] it is my judgement, and I have
been in Germany since the war, that only a minority of the Jewish DP’s
[displaced persons] would choose Palestine."[v]
Palestine not a Safe Haven
The Western world had
learned to its horror after World War II, that sixty-seven percent of world Jewry had perished in Nazi
gas chambers. And yet, the best these nations could offer the
Holocaust’s traumatized survivors was passage to a former British colony
in the Middle East, populated by enraged Arabs. The conflict between the
Jews and Arabs in Palestine had, after all, not exploded onto the world scene
in 1948. Throughout the early decades of the twentieth century, Zionist
efforts to resettle small groups of Jews in Palestine, had been met with
rioting and in some cases, open warfare
on the part of Arabs fearful of losing control of their homeland.
As far as many German Jews fleeing the
Holocaust, were concerned, Palestine represented just another war zone. Israeli professor Tom Segev described the
environment these Jewish refugees would have found themselves in, had they made
their way to Palestine. He wrote:
“In September 1940,
the Italians, at war with Britain, bombed downtown Tel Aviv, with over a
hundred casualties….As the German Army overran Europe and North Africa, it
appeared possible that it would conquer Palestine as well. In the summer of 1940, in the spring of 1941,
and again in the fall of 1942 the danger seemed imminent. . . Many people tried
to find a way out of the country, but it was not easy. . . Some…were taking no
chances; they carried cyanide capsules.”[vi]
Anti-Semitism in the White House
Richard Nixon served as U.S. president
from 1969 to 1974, and came to be known as one of Israel’s staunchest
supporters. However, recordings released
by the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, show him to have been a very
bigoted man. “The Jews are all over the government,” Nixon
complained to his chief of staff on one occasion. He insisted that Washington was full of Jews,
adding “most Jews are disloyal.”
Even, Abraham
Foxman, head of the Anti Defamation League,
a Jewish organization fighting anti-Semitism and discrimination in American
life, felt compelled to comment on the
Nixon tapes:
“Here is the irony,
here’s President Nixon, who came to the defense of Isrsael, who intervened time
and time again to protect Israel. He
understood that Israel is part of America’s national security interests and yet
he was bigoted against Jews, he was a bigot, he was an anti-Semite.”[vii]
Nevertheless, Foxman and others rationalized
the true meaning of Nixon’s anti-Semitic tirades. That is, they were unwilling to see that
support for Zionism was American politicians’ way of responding to their own
“Jewish Question,” which was how to limit the number of Jews entering the U.S.
The Jewish State’s Dilemma
Since Israel’s founding
in 1948, the Jewish State has fought seven wars, numerous armed
conflicts, endured suicide bombings and countless terrorist attacks from its
Arab enemies. Israel is being pressed by the combined weight of a physically
and emotionally exhausted Jewish
population in addition to demographic realities. The viability of Israel as a Jewish state is
now being called into question on account of the fact that the Arab birth rate
is higher than the Jewish one. In May
2009, Michael Oren, the Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. called the attention of
the American public to this issue, writing in Commentary Magazine:
"Even
if the minimalist interpretation is largely correct, it cannot alter a
situation in which Israeli Arabs currently constitute one-fifth of the country’s
population—one-quarter of the population under age 19—and in which the West
Bank now contains at least 2 million Arabs. Israel, the Jewish State, is
predicated on a decisive and stable Jewish majority of at least 70 percent. Any
lower than that and Israel will have to decide between being a Jewish state and a democratic state. If
it chooses democracy, then Israel as a Jewish state will cease to exist. If it
remains officially Jewish, then the state will face an unprecedented level of
international isolation, including sanctions, that might prove fatal"[viii]
The Jewish State is today even less of a safe
haven for the Jewish people than it was sixty years ago, when Israel fought its
war of independence. Given Iran’s
nuclear ambitions, and the fact that the democratization movement that ousted
Tunisia’s dictator, Ahmad ben Bella, may be sweeping through the rest of the
Arab world will in all likelihood strengthen the hand of the Palestinians, Israel
may be fast becoming the most dangerous place on earth for the Jewish
people.
Anti-Zionist Jews
While support for the Palestinian cause has
grown in the U.S. and Europe, support for Zionism among American Jews is on the
wane. Neo-conservative Jews who generally support
the Republican Party, maintain a solid support base for Israel. However, the same is not the case for
American Jewish liberals, who supported the election of democratic candidate,
Barack Obama for President in 2008. An
article written by Peter Beinart appeared in the June 10, 2010 issue of The New York Review of Books, entitled: “The Failure of the American Jewish
Establishment.” According to the
author, several prominent Jewish philanthropists had hired a pollster to help
them figure out why Jewish college students were not rebutting anti-Israel
criticism on their college campus. The
pollster, after meeting with college students, had little positive to
report. Instead he noted, according to
Beinart:
“Most of the [Jewish]
students. . . were liberals, broadly defined.
They had imbibed some of the defining values of American Jewish
political culture: a belief in open debate, a skepticism about military force,
a commitment to human rights. And in
their innocence, they did not realize that they were supposed to shed those
values when it came to Israel. The only
kind of Zionism they found attractive was a Zionism that recognized
Palestinians as deserving of dignity and capable of peace, and they were quite
willing to condemn an Israeli government that did not share those beliefs.”[ix]
Recent polls also show
a declining commitment of American Jews to Israel and Zionism. In fact, a 2009 survey showed that the majority of
American Jews would side with U.S. President Barack Obama over Israel, were differences
to surface in regard to peace initiatives.
The poll was conducted by J Street, a liberal Jewish lobbying group
opposed to the staunch Zionism of the pro-Israel lobby, AIPAC. By a 60 to 40 percent margin, the poll also
showed that:
“American Jews oppose
the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. . . and 69 percent of
Jews support the U.S. working with a unified Hamas-Palestinian Authority
government to achieve a peace agreement with Israel, even when informed that
the U.S. does not recognize Hamas because of its terrorism and refusal to
recognize Israel.”[x]
Liberals are not the only critics of
Zionism within the Jewish community. Several
orthodox Jewish communities, which are becoming more vocal in the U.S., preach an anti-Zionist form of Judaism. Hasidic groups such as Satmar Hasidim, and
others who belong to the
Central Rabbinical
Congress of the United States and Canada and in Israel to the Edah
HaChareidis. Other religious groups such as the Neturei Karta community and True Torah “Jews
Against Zionism” use Talmudic scriptures to warn of the potential dangers for
Jews who support Israel. They argue that
Judaism does not define a race or nationality, but rather a religion. Their doctrine cautions:
“We were given the
Holy Land by G-d in order to be able to study and practice the Torah without
disturbance and to attain levels of holiness difficult to attain outside of the
Holy Land. We abused the privilege and
we were expelled. That is exactly what
all Jews say in their prayers on every Jewish festival. We have been forsworn by G-d not to enter the
Holy Land as a body before the predestined time, ‘ not to rebel against the
nations’, to be loyal citizens, ‘not to do anything against the will of any
nation or its honour,’ not to seek
vengeance, discord, restitution or compensation, ‘not to leave exile ahead of
time.’ One the contrary, we have to be
humble and accept the yoke of exile. To
violate the oaths would result in “your flesh will be made prey as the deer and
the antelope in the forest,” and the redemption will be delayed. To violate the oaths is not only a sin, it is
a heresy because it is against the fundamentals of our Belief. Only through complete repentance will the
Almighty6 alone, without any human effort or intervention, redeem us from
exile. This will be after G-d will send
the prophet Elijah and Moshiach who will induce all Jews to complete repentance. At that time there will be universal peace.”[xi]
The Post-Zionist Alternative
The support beams holding up the Jewish state
have begun to splinter. AIPAC, the
American pro-Israel lobby is for the first time confronted with an alternative lobbying
group made up of liberal Jews, who believe that Jewish settlements in Arab
occupied territories should be dismantled and that any future peace talks
should consider including Hamas.
The Two State Solution,
which would allow for an independent Palestinian state alongside Jewish Israel,
is also crumbling. In January 2011, a
clandestine source leaked 1600 confidential documents to Al-Jazeera news
network. The secret dossiers, covering peace
negotiations over a ten year period between the Israelis and Palestinian
Authority, also revealed that talks which were supposed to be leading to the
implementation of the Two State Solution had gone nowhere. In fact, the legitimacy of the Palestinian
Authority has been undermined by some of these communications, which showed
that Palestinian negotiators had secretly agreed to accept all of the Jewish
settlements in the West Bank except one built illegally in occupied East
Jerusalem.
But what do these
developments presage for Israel’s future?
As Palestinians lose hope with the prospect of peace coming about
through the Two State Solution, there is growing interest in the notion of a
Post-Zionist, One State Solution. Michael
Tarazi, a Palestinian-American lawyer and one-state advocate has noted:
"Support
for one state is hardly a radical idea; it is simply the recognition of the
uncomfortable reality that Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories
already function as a single state. They share the same aquifers, the same
highway network, the same electricity grid and the same international
borders... The one-state solution... neither destroys the Jewish character of
the Holy Land nor negates the Jewish historical and religious attachment
(although it would destroy the superior status of Jews in that state). Rather,
it affirms that the Holy Land has an equal Christian and Muslim character. For
those who believe in equality, this is a good thing."[xii]
Sixty years ago, the
U.S. and Western Europe dumped nearly 900,000 Holocaust survivors into a
volatile Middle East. They did so by
hiding beneath Zionism’s skirts, pretending to love the Jewish people, all the
while refusing to allow refugees to settle in their own countries. The consequences in human casualties and
misery is incalculable as the Arab-Israeli conflict has continued in one form
or another from that time.
In order to initiate
the kinds of talks that will bring about the one state of Israel/Palestine, the
global community needs to start seeing this Arab-Israeli conflict in its proper
historical perspective. More
importantly, the moment has finally come for the West to do what it should have
done after World War II. That is, it
should open its borders to Israeli Jews, not just wealthy bankers and scientists. There will be many Jews, with little interest
in resettling outside Israel. But the environment
of perpetual warfare has drained many Israelis, emotionally, and
psychologically. It has increased
feelings of paranoia, isolation and foreboding. A certain
amount of Israeli stubbornness and militarism emanates from the understandable
fear, that they stand alone in the world.
History has shown that their so-called friends in the West, would not
come to their aid were the situation in Israel to deteriorate to the point of
people having to run for their lives.
This recalcitrance on the part of Israelis will only change, when the
U.S. and Western Europe confront the role their home-grown anti-Semitism played
in creating this tragic scenario. In
healing that wound, the West will finally be making way for the emergence of
the real Israel/Palestine, which is a place of peace and justice for all.
[i] Yad Vashem, the Holocaust
Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, “Extract from the Speech by Adolf
Hitler, January 30, 1939,” http://www1.yadvashem.org.il/about_holocaust/documents/part1/doc59.html
(Accessed January 2011).
[ii]
Hamerow, Why We Watched, xiv.
[iii] Senior Editor Sheldon L.
Richman, “Ancient History,” U.S. Conduct in the Middle East Since World War II
and the Folly of Intervention, Cato Policy Analysis no.159, CATO Institute,
August 16, 1991.
[vi] Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: the Israelis and the Holocaust, Hill &
Wang, Publishers, New York, 1994,
p.59.
[vii] Haaretz,
December 16, 2010. http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/adl-director-nixon-was-a-bigot-but-a-practical-supporter-of-israel-1.330956 (Accessed January 2011).
[viii]
Michael
Oren, “Seven Existential Threats,”Commentary Magazine, May 2009. http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/seven-existential-threats-15124.
Accessed January 2011 (Accessed January 2011).
[ix] Peter Beinart, “The Failure of
the American Jewish Establishment,” The New York Review of Books, June 10,
2010, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/jun/10/failure-american-jewish-establishment/
(Accessed
January 2011).
[x]
Eric Fingerhut, “New J
Street Poll” American Jews want U.S. engagement in peace process,” March 23,
2009,
http://blogs.jta.org/politics/article/2009/03/23/1003915/new-j-street-poll-american-jews-want-us-engagement-in-peace-process (Accessed January 2011).
[xi] Neturei Karta, “The Role of
Zionism in the Holocaust,” http://jewsnotzionists.org/holocaust-zionism.htm
(Accessed
January 2011).
[xii]
Michael Tarazi, "Equality
is Important". Two Peoples, One State. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/04/opinion/04tarazi.html. (Accessed January 2011).
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