Hating Jews: when do anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism overlap?

Reason, Feb, 2004 by Cathy Young

And yet the fact is that critiques of Israel often do morph into more old-fashioned anti-Semitism, partly because of the equation of Israeli and item. Schoenfeld quotes the British writer Petronella Wyatt, who has written that conversation about the Middle East in educated British circles often abounds in such comments as, "Well, the Jews have been asking for it, and now, thank God, we can say what we think at last."A columnist for the London Observer has publicly declared that he refused to read pro-Israel letters signed with Jewish-sounding names.

There are also many instances of anti-Israel posters and cartoons employing shockingly anti-Semitic language and imagery, including the old "Christ Miler" label. A cartoon in the respectable Italian newspaper La Stampa showed an infant Jesus lying in front of an Israeli tank, the caption saying, "Don't tell me they want to kill me again."

Far more common is the ploy of equating the Israelis with the Nazis: posters depicting Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon with a swastika armband, comments about "the Zionist S.S.," comparisons of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians to the Holocaust. Calling Sharon a hard-liner or a warmonger is hardly anti-Semitic, contrary to what Schoenfeld seems to imply--but comparing the head of the Jewish state to Hitler, who sought to exterminate the Jews, is beyond obscenity.

As Schoenfeld points out, it is a mistake to think that "real" anti-Semitism has to involve a naked hostility to Jews simply for being Jews, whether based on religion or ethnicity. In the 19th and 20th centuries, anti-Semitism was often associated both with anti-capitalism (since the Jews were seen as the epitome of the money-grubbing bourgeoisie) and with anti-communism (since the Jews were seen as the vanguard of Bolsheviks and other radicals).

Today, all too often, extremist anti-Israeli rhetoric becomes a vehicle for the kind of bigotry that one might have hoped was extinct in the civilized world. Critics of Israeli policies have a special responsibility to condemn it.

Contributing Editor Cathy Young (CathyYoung2@cs.com) is a columnist for The Boston Globe and the author of Ceasefire! Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality (Free Press) and Growing Up in Moscow: Memories of a Soviet Girlhood (Tic-knor & Fields).