Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Anti-Semitism and the Left that Doesn't Learn

di particolare interesse per tutti quelli che ritengono che i
rossobruni siano una invenzione dei lettori de Il Foglio. Quando la
critica ad Israele arriva a metterne in questione la legittimità, si
può (e si deve) parlare di antisemitismo. Ma è una linea che passano
in molti.
http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=972
Anti-Semitism and the Left that Doesn't Learn
By Mitchell Cohen
I.
A DETERMINED offensive is underway. Its target is in the Middle East,
and it is an old target: the legitimacy of Israel. Hezbollah and Hamas
are not the protagonists, the contested terrains are not the Galilee
and southern Lebanon or southern Israel and Gaza. The means are not
military. The offensive comes from within parts of the liberal and
left intelligentsia in the United States and Europe. It has nothing to
do with this or that negotiation between Israelis and Palestinians,
and it has nothing to do with any particular Israeli policy. After
all, this or that Israeli policy may be chastised, rightly or wrongly,
without denying the legitimacy of the Jewish state, just as you can
criticize an Israeli policy--again, rightly or wrongly--without being an
anti-Semite. You can oppose all Israeli settlements in the occupied
territories (as I do) and you can also recognize that Benjamin
Netanyahu, not just Yasir Arafat, was responsible for undermining the
Oslo peace process without being an anti-Semite or anti-Zionist. You
don't have to be an anti-Semite or anti-Zionist to think that some
American Jewish organizations pander to American or Israeli right-
wingers.
The assault today is another matter. It is shaped largely by political
attitudes and arguments that recall the worst of the twentieth-century
left. It is time to get beyond them. But let me be clear: I am "left."
I still have no problem when someone describes me with the "s" word--
socialist--although I don't much care if you call me a social democrat,
left-liberal, or some other proximate term. My "leftism" comes from a
commitment to--and an ethos of--democratic humanism and social
egalitarianism.
What I care about is the reinvention of the best values of the
historical left--legacies of British Labour, of the Swedish Social
Democrats, of Jean Jaurès and Léon Blum in France, of Eduard Bernstein
and Willy Brandt in Germany, of what has always been the relatively
small (alas!) tribe in the U.S. associated with names like Eugene V.
Debs, Norman Thomas, Michael Harrington, and Irving Howe. It's not so
much a matter of political programs, let alone labels, as it is of
political sensibility. I care about finding a new basis for that old
amalgam of liberty, equality, and solidarity, a basis that makes sense
for our "globalizing age." But I also want a left that draws real, not
gestural, conclusions from the catastrophes done in the name of the
left in the 20th century.
There is a left that learns and there is a left that doesn't learn. I
want the left that learns to inform our Western societies (a difficult
task in George W. Bush's America) and to help find ideas that actually
address poverty in what used to be called the third world--rather than
romanticizing it.
After 1989, the left that doesn't learn was in retreat. It was hushed
up by the end of all those wretched communist regimes, by images
broadcast worldwide of millions in the streets demanding liberation
from dictatorships that legitimized themselves in left-wing terms. You
know who I mean by the left that never learns: those folks who twist
and turn until they can explain or 'understand' almost anything in
order to keep their own presuppositions--or intellectual needs--intact.
Once some of them were actual Leninist; now they more regularly share
some of Leninism's worst mental features--often in postmodern,
postcolonial, or even militantly liberal guise. Sometimes they move
about on the political spectrum, denouncing their former selves (while
patting their moral backs). You can usually recognize them without too
much difficulty: same voice, that of a prosecuting commissar, even if
their tune sounds different. It's a voice you can often hear as well
in ex-communists turned neoconservative.
Their explanations, their "understandings," often rewrite history or
re-imagine what is in front of their eyes to suit their own starting
point. Since their thinking usually moves along a mental closed
circuit, it is also the end point. Sometimes it is an idea, sometimes
a belief system (which they refuse to recognize in themselves),
sometimes really a prejudice, and sometimes just ambition. Goblins
were often part of the story for the older left that never learned,
and so too is the case today. If things don't work out as you know
they must, some nefarious force must lurk. After all, the problem
couldn't possibly be your way of thinking, or your inability to see
the world afresh, or that you got something very wrong in the past.
No, it is much easier to announce that you, unlike anyone who could
disagree with you, engage in 'critical' thinking. And if your critical
thinking is criticized in any way, denounce your foe immediately for
"McCarthyism." Pretend that your denunciation is an argument about the
original subject of dispute. That's easier than answering any of the
criticism.
Consider the collateral damage done by such cries of "McCarthyism"
from professors with lifetime job security: their students will never
understand the evils of McCarthyism. Consider how an understanding of
the evils of McCarthyism is subverted when its characteristic
techniques--innuendo, for example--are used by opinionated journalists
in magazines with wide circulations. Take, for instance, the case of
Adam Shatz, once literary editor of the Nation and now with the London
Review of Books. He published an article half a year before the
beginning of the Iraq war suggesting that people around Dissent were
busy hunting for a "new enemy" following the end of the cold war, and
that they found it in a combination of militant Arab nationalism and
Saddam Hussein.
"Though rarely cited explicitly," Shatz also explained, "Israel shapes
and even defines the foreign policy views of a small but influential
group of American liberals" (the Nation, September 23, 2002). In other
words, these liberals composed the Israel lobby within the left, and
they sought the American war in Iraq for the sake of the Jewish state.
True, Shatz didn't hold up a file and say, "I have a list of names of
liberals who are really dual loyalists." Instead he pointed to Paul
Berman "and like-minded social democrats," even though the
overwhelming majority of Dissent's editorial board including co-editor
Michael Walzer was opposed to the war.
Shatz didn't deign to engage any of Berman's actual points. And those
Berman advanced in the actual run-up to the Iraq invasion did not
focus on Israel, but on liberalism, democracy, and totalitarianism.
Arguments made by the author of the words you now read, who was a left
hawk (and is now an unhappy one), likewise had nothing to do with
Israel and were different--significantly so--from those made by Berman.
Nothing that appeared in Dissent before or after Shatz's article lends
credence to his innuendos.
II.
HISTORY MAY not progress but sometimes it regurgitates. Over the last
decade, a lot of the old junk has come back. The space for it opened
for many reasons. They range from the sad failures of the social-
democratic imagination in the era of globalization to the postmodern
and postcolonial influence in universities to George W. Bush's
ascendancy with its many, many miserable consequences (not only in
Iraq). The left that never learns often became the superego of the
twentieth century's left. Its attempt to play that same role in the
twenty-first century needs to be frustrated.
Nothing exemplifies the return of old junk more than the 'new' anti-
Semitism and the bad faith that often finds expression in the
statement: "I am anti-Zionist but not anti-Semitic." The fixation on
Israel/Palestine within parts of the left, often to the exclusion of
all other suffering on the globe, ought to leave any balanced observer
wondering: What is going on here? This fixation needs demystification.
In theoretical terms, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are pretty easy
to distinguish. Anti-Semitism is a form of race or national prejudice
that crystallized in the nineteenth century. In part, it displaced or
reinvented anti-Jewish religious prejudice (although centuries of
religious prejudice easily wafted into racial and national bigotry).
Its target was clearly Jews, not simply "Semites." It also, for some,
mixed matters up further by identifying Jews with capitalism. Sadly,
this became a steady feature within parts of the left that would
later, habitually, conflate Jews, capitalism, and Zionism. Oddly
enough, that is also what Jewish neoconservatives have tried to do in
recent decades.
Anti-Zionism means, theoretically, opposition to the project of a
Jewish state in response to the rise of anti-Semitism. Let's be blunt:
there have been anti-Zionists who are not anti-Semites, just as there
have been foes of affirmative action who are not racists. But the
crucial question is prejudicial overlap, not intellectual niceties.
Remember the bad old days, when parts of the left provided theoretical
justifications of things like "democratic dictatorship." In fact, if
you understood--especially if you bought into--all sorts of assumptions
and especially Leninist definitions, the justification works. Any
professor of political theory can construct it for you and it will
make perfect theoretical sense. But if you lived in a "democratic
dictatorship," it was intellectual poison. It was also poison if you
were committed to the best values of the left.
They are again at stake when we ask: To what extent does much anti-
Zionism replicate the mental patterns of anti-Semitism? And to what
extent do demagogic articulations of anti-Zionism enhance anti-
Semitism? There is a curious thing about anti-Semitism, and it was
captured in a remark by British novelist Iain Pears that ought to be
quoted and re-quoted these days: "anti-Semitism is like alcoholism.
You can go for 25 years without a drink, but if things go bad and you
find yourself with a vodka in your hand, you can't get rid of
it." (International Herald Tribune, August 11, 2003).
Much may be gleaned from the fact that the recent campaign by some
British academic unions to boycott Israel was thwarted because it was
found to violate anti-discrimination laws.
LAST YEAR, Denis MacShane, British Labour Parliament Member, chaired a
committee of parliamentarians and ex-ministers that investigated
rising anti-Semitism in Britain and beyond. "Hatred of Jews has
reached new heights in Europe and many points south and east of the
old continent," he wrote recently in a very brave article in the
Washington Post (September 4, 2007). He describes a wide array of
incidents. "Militant anti-Jewish students fueled by Islamist or far-
left hate" seek on campuses "to prevent Jewish students from
expressing their opinions." There is "an anti-Jewish discourse, a mood
and tone whenever Jews are discussed, whether in the media, at
universities, among the liberal media elite or at dinner parties of
modish London. To express any support for Israel or any feeling for
the right of a Jewish state to exist produces denunciation, even
contempt."
MacShane points out that this sort of behavior is distinct from
specific disputes about this or that Israeli politician. Criticism,
the investigatory committee "made clear," was "not off-limits."
Rightly so; the same should be true with the policies and office-
holders of every government on the globe. But MacSchane also warns
that something else has been going on, that old demons are reawakening
and that "the old anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism have morphed into
something more dangerous." The threat, he says eloquently, doesn't
only concern Jews or Israel, but "everything democrats have long
fought for: the truth without fear, no matter one's religion or
political beliefs."
What is "truth without fear" when we speak of the relation between
anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism? Is it to be found in Tony Judt's
declaration to the New York Times that "the link between anti-Zionism
and anti-Semitism is newly created"? (January 31, 2007). How a
historian--or anyone else--could assert this is astonishing. Consider
what it airbrushes out of the twentieth century--the anti-Semitic binge
of Stalin's later years, just for starters.
And surely Judt, who is based at New York University and is now taking
what has turned into obsessive anti-Zionist campaigning to the École
Normale Supérieure in Paris [1]
NYU's Remarque Center, which defines its goal as "the study and
discussion of Europe, and to encourage and facilitate communication
between Americans and Europeans" is opening a center there and Judt,
its director, will, according to its website, inaugurate it not with
an address European or French politics or transatlantic relations but
rather: "Is Israel Still Good for the Jews?"
recalls the arrests and assassinations of the leading Jewish cultural
figures of Soviet Russia on the grounds that they were "Zionist agents
of American imperialism." Surely a historian of Europe like Judt--who
was once a hard leftist but then rose to intellectual celebrity in the
United States in the 1980s (that is, during the Reagan era) by
attacking all French Marxists for not facing up to Stalinism--recalls
the charges of "Zionist conspiracy" against Jewish communists who were
victimized in the Czech purge trials in the early 1950s.
If he doesn't recall them when he speaks to the New York Times, he
might check them out in his own book Postwar: A History of Europe
Since 1945. There he cites Stalin's secret police chief, Lavrenti
Beria, urging Czech Communists to investigate the "Zionist plot" among
their comrades. Surely a historian of Europe, especially one who now
refers to himself as an "old leftist," recalls the campaign in 1967
and 1968 to cleanse Poland of "Zionist" fifth columnists (I suppose
they were the Israel Lobby of the Polish Communist Party). If Judt
doesn't recall it when he talks to the New York Times, he might again
look at his own book which cites Polish Communist chief Wladyslaw
Gomulka's conflation of his Jewish critics with Zionists. Since he is
a historian of Europe and not the Middle East, perhaps Judt hasn't
noticed how "anti-Zionism" in broad swaths of the Muslim and Arab
media has been suffused by anti-Jewish rhetoric for decades--rhetoric
against "al-Yahud" not Ehud Olmert or Ehud Barak.
Remember how air-brushing was done in the bad old days? Trotsky (or
someone else) would suddenly disappear from a photo. Lenin or Stalin
and the cheering crowds would still be there. The resulting picture is
not entirely false. Does all this make Judt an anti-Semite? The answer
is simple: no. It does make his grasp of the history of anti-Semitism
tendentious. And tendentious history can be put to all sorts of
pernicious use.
Judt's political judgment complements his historical perceptions,
especially when it comes to a declared concern about Palestinian
suffering. Recall his article in the New York Review of Books (October
23, 2003) advocating a binational state to replace Israel. A Jewish
state, he explained, is an anachronism. But since then, Hamas, a
political movement of religious fanatics, won the Palestinian
elections, and later seized power--by force--in Gaza. Israel, in the
meantime, had withdrawn entirely from Gaza and torn down all Jewish
settlements there in summer 2005. Yet if you follow Judt's logic,
Israel should not have withdrawn but instead integrated Gaza into
itself. Obviously this would have enabled a new, better life for
Palestinians, perhaps even have prevented them from turning to Hamas.
And it would have taken a first happy step toward saving Israel from
its anachronistic status by affording Israelis, together with
Palestinians, a domestic future of perpetual ethnic civil war--a
feature of modern politics that farsighted historians, but perhaps not
policymakers, who have to worry about real lives, will imagine is also
an anachronism. Likewise, I suppose India can save itself from being
an unfortunate anachronism by a reintegration with Pakistan.
A FEW YEARS ago I sought to outline commonalities between anti-Semitic
and anti-Zionist discourses in a scholarly journal. It is worth
reproducing. Here are major motifs that inform classical anti-
Semitism:
1) Insinuations: Jews do not and cannot fit properly into our society.
There is something foreign, not to mention sinister about them.
2) Complaints: They are so particularistic, those Jews, so preoccupied
with their "own." Why are they so clannish and anachronistic when we
need a world of solidarity and love? Really, they make themselves into
a "problem." If the so-called "Jewish problem" is singular in some
way, it is their own doing and usually covered up by special pleading.
3) Remonstrations: Those Jews, they always carp that they are victims.
In fact, they have vast power, especially financial power. Their power
is everywhere, even if it is not very visible. They exercise it
manipulatively, behind the scenes. (But look, there are even a few of
them, guilty-hearted perhaps, who will admit it all this to you).
4) Recriminations: Look at their misdeeds, all done while they cry
that they are victims. These ranged through the ages from the murder
of God to the ritual slaughter of children to selling military secrets
to the enemy to war-profiteering, to being capitalists or middlemen or
landlords or moneylenders exploiting the poor. And they always, oh-so-
cleverly, mislead you.
Alter a few phrases, a word here and there, and we find motifs of anti-
Zionism that are popular these days in parts of the left and parts of
the Muslim and Arab worlds:
1) Insinuations: The Zionists are alien implants in the Mideast. They
can never fit there. Western imperialism created the Zionist state.
2) Complaints: A Jewish state can never be democratic. Zionism is
exclusivist. The very idea of a Jewish state is an anachronism.
3) Remonstrations: The Zionists carp that they are victims but in
reality they have enormous power, especially financial. Their power is
everywhere, but they make sure not to let it be too visible. They
exercise it manipulatively, behind people's backs, behind the scenes -
why, just look at Zionist influence in Washington. Or rather,
dominance of Washington. (And look, there are even a few Jews, guilty-
hearted perhaps, who admit it).
4) Recriminations: Zionists are responsible for astonishing, endless
dastardly deeds. And they cover them up with deceptions. These range
from the imperialist aggression of 1967 to Ehud Barak's claim that he
offered a compromise to Palestinians back in 2000 to the Jenin
"massacre" during the second Intifidah. [2]
These sketches of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, with just some
variation, were originally in Mitchell Cohen, "Auto-Emancipation and
Anti-Semitism: Homage to Bernard-Lazare," Jewish Social Studies (Fall
2003).
No, anti-Zionism is not in principle anti-Semitism but it is time for
thoughtful minds--especially on the left--to be disturbed by how much
anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism share, how much the dominant species of
anti-Zionism encourages anti-Semitism.
And so:
If you judge a Jewish state by standards that you apply to no one
else; if your neck veins bulge when you denounce Zionists but you've
done no more than cluck "well, yes, very bad about Darfur";
if there is nothing Hamas can do that you won't blame 'in the final
analysis' on Israelis;
if your sneer at the Zionists doesn't sound a whole lot different from
American neoconservative sneers at leftists;
then you should not be surprised if you are criticized, fiercely so,
by people who are serious about a just peace between Israelis and
Palestinians and who won't let you get away with a self-exonerating
formula--"I am anti-Zionist but not anti-Semitic"--to prevent scrutiny.
If you are anti-Zionist and not anti-Semitic, then don't use the
categories, allusions, and smug hiss that are all too familiar to any
student of prejudice.
It is time for the left that learns, that grows, that reflects, that
has historical not rhetorical perspective, and that wants a future
based on its own best values to say loudly to the left that never
learns: You hijacked "left" in the last century, but you won't get
away with it again whatever guise you don

 in molti.
E' vero.
Ma ci tengo a sottolineare che sergio non è tra questi.
Non so perché ci tenga a passare per antisemita. IMHO è solo un pornosomaro 
lappatore e cumdripper, colante di sbobbina nazi.
Tb
-- 
Libertà per i comunisti siriani in carcere: Fateh Jamus, 'Isam Dimashqi,
Basel Hurani, 'Abd al-Halim Rumieh, Ratib Sha'bu, and Doha 'Ashur
al-'Askari 
http://snipurl.com/1oqtm

 Ma ci tengo a sottolineare che sergio non è tra questi.
nemmeno Persio. E' solo un pirla.

 lappatore e cumdripper, colante di sbobbina nazi.
e chi riesce a pensare certi insulti è ridotto così male che può
sperare solo nell'eutanasia

 può (e si deve) parlare di antisemitismo.
no, NON SI DEVE mai parlare di antisemitismo in riferimento a Israele,
perchè Israele e gli ebrei non sono la stessa cosa, e quindi
l'antisionismo NON è e non sarà mai antisemitismo, e ripetere una
menzogna spudorata mille volte non cambierà il fatto che è una
menzogna.

 l'antisionismo NON è e non sarà mai antisemitismo,
certo. Non è antisemitismo sostenere che tutti i popoli hanno diritto
a uno Stato tranne gli ebrei.


e chi ha detto che tutti i popoli hanno diritto a uno stato, se in
quello stato nel momento in cui si proclama tale diritto i componenti
di quel popolo sono il 5% dei residenti nel territorio scelto per lo
stato? Io non mi sognerei mai di dire che la Svizzera deve essere
italiana perchè uno svizzero su 20 è di origini italiane....

 stato?
e questo legame tra terra e popolo è davvero di sinistra diciamolo

 a uno Stato tranne gli ebrei.
C'è da dire che l'idea per cui i popoli abbiano diritto ad avere uno stato è 
abbastanza discutibile. Sempre che si riesca a defiinire in base a quali 
criteri un gruppo di persone possa assurgere allo status di popolo.

 criteri un gruppo di persone possa assurgere allo status di popolo.
mah, io sarei a favore del fatto che gli ebrei decidono da soli se
sono o meno un popolo.

 sono o meno un popolo.
E poi l'ONU decide se hanno o meno diritto ad avere uno stato.