Tuesday, February 27, 2024
From Ian:
Seth Mandel: Everyone Knows What You Mean When You Say ‘Zionist’
Seth Mandel: Everyone Knows What You Mean When You Say ‘Zionist’
The point of the Harvard task force is to take people on campus who have the desire and the credibility to fight anti-Semitism and force them into quicksand committees where their criticism will remain internal in perpetuity. Harvard seeks to silence and co-opt its critics. Pay close attention to whether other elite schools do any better.Lipstadt: Jewish conspiracy myths are an attack on the very nature of democracy
One reason these institutions feel comfortable operating in such bald bad faith is that much of the media follows suit and speaks euphemistically, very much including the New York Times. For example, when explaining what got Claudine Gay into trouble in December, the Times writes: “On Dec. 5, she testified before a congressional committee and gave legalistic answers when asked whether Harvard would punish students who called for the genocide of Jews.”
She “gave legalistic answers,” you see. What actually happened is that she excepted calling for the mass murder of Jews from the rules against harassment and would not say that Israel had a right to exist as a Jewish state. (She deleted the word “Jewish” from the formulation, in fact—an act that made very clear where she stood on both questions.)
The Times also describes some of the social exclusion Jewish students are feeling at Harvard: “Some Jewish students say they have given up their kipas, or skullcaps, for baseball hats. They say they now keep their Zionist beliefs to themselves in classrooms and residence halls.”
Gotta be careful not to show your Zionist kippas and your Zionist phylacteries while making your Zionist blessings and reading your Zionist Talmud or lighting your Friday night Zionist candles.
Yesterday, University of California, Santa Barbara, student president Tessa Veksler showed the many signs around campus aimed at “Zionists.” The formulation was generally some version of “Zionists not allowed” or “Zionists not welcome.” That “Zionists not welcome” message was also found somewhere else: carved into a door next to a mezuzah. In case the graffiti wasn’t clear enough, the scribbler drew an arrow pointing from the message to the mezuzah.
No one is just finding out that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. Everyone already knew that. But many people were content to lie about this fact and claim ignorance. There is no real debate about what people mean when they say “Zionists.” There is only the low-rent kabuki theater that passes itself off as debate at various U.S. colleges and in the pages of the New York Times. Similarly, administrators at Harvard are not failing; they are succeeding wildly at what they believe to be their jobs. And that’s why competent members of their task forces keep resigning.
Speaking about her work as an antisemitism envoy she joked: ‘Business is booming, I work in a growth industry but I must be one of the only people praying for a recession.’Noah Feldman: The New Antisemitism
But then she got serious. Calling antisemitism ‘a conspiracy myth’ rather than theory ‘as sometimes theories turn out to be true’ she said that she had spent the last few weeks speaking to world leaders – including UK politicians – to warn them to open their eyes to the danger not just to Jewish communities but to the fabric of society.
‘We are dealing with a multi-layered hatred with a multi layered impact,’ she said. ‘It is a threat to democracy; anyone who accepts the conspiracy myths that Jews control the media and the government has essentially given up on democracy.
‘And then there are the bad actors who use antisemitism as a means of making democracies look like failed states. In the beginning of 1960, in West Germany, newly rebuilt synagogues had swastikas painted on the outside and Jewish cemeteries were desecrated; people were sure it was done by Nazis and there was a valid question raised in the West – are the Nazis back? It made some question whether Germany could be a reliable partner for peace.
‘We found out many years later that this was engineered by the KGB and it was because they wanted to make Germany look liked a failed state. Antisemitism is a way of stirring up the pot. Of course, no one can create something that isn’t there but it can be built up so that it becomes a threat to democracy. And from there it becomes a threat to national stability.
‘There is so much active disinformation and it doesn’t have to work for it to be successful. In mid-October Hamas declared a ‘day of rage’ and many schools were closed and parents kept their children home from school – and I am not being critical of them for this – but although nothing happened it was a complete success for them because we were threatened.’
Israel’s stated war aims are to hold Hamas accountable for the Oct. 7 attack on Israel and to get back its citizens who are still being held captive. These aims are lawful in themselves.
The means Israel has used are subject to legitimate criticism for killing too many civilians as collateral damage. But Israel’s military campaign has been conducted pursuant to Israel’s interpretation of the international laws of war. There is no single, definitive international-law answer to the question of how much collateral damage renders a strike disproportionate to its concrete military objective. Israel’s approach resembles campaigns fought by the U.S. and its coalition partners in Iraq in Afghanistan, and by the international coalition in the battle against ISIS for control of Mosul. Even if the numbers of civilian deaths from the air seem to be higher, it is important to recognize that Israel is also confronting miles of tunnels intentionally connected to civilian facilities by Hamas.
To be clear: as a matter of human worth, a child who dies at the hands of a genocidal murderer is no different from one who dies as collateral damage in a lawful attack. The child is equally innocent, and the parents’ sorrow equally profound. As a matter of international law, however, the difference is decisive. During the Hamas attack, terrorists intentionally murdered children and raped women. Its charter calls for the destruction of the Jewish state. Yet the accusation of genocide is being made against Israel.
These relevant facts matter for putting the genocide charge into the context of potential antisemitism. Neither South Africa nor other states have brought a genocide case against China for its conduct in Tibet or Xinjiang, or against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. There is something specifically noteworthy about leveling the charge at the Jewish state—something intertwined with the new narrative of the Jews as archetypal oppressors rather than archetypal victims. Call it the genocide sleight of hand: if the Jews are depicted as genocidal—if Israel becomes the very archetype of a genocidal state—then Jews are much less likely to be conceived as a historically oppressed people engaged in self-defense.
The new narrative of Jews as oppressors is, in the end, far too close for comfort to the antisemitic tradition of singling out Jews as uniquely deserving of condemnation and punishment, whether in its old religious form or its Nazi iteration. Like those earlier forms of antisemitism, the new kind is not ultimately about the Jews, but about the human impulse to point the finger at someone who can be made to carry the weight of our social ills. Oppression is real. Power can be exercised without justice. Israel should not be immune from criticism when it acts wrongfully. Yet the horrific history and undefeated resilience of antisemitism mean that modes of rhetorical attack on Israel and on Jews should be subject to careful scrutiny.
Just because antisemitism is a cyclical, recurring phenomenon does not mean that it is inevitable nor that it cannot be ameliorated. Like any form of irrational hate, antisemitism can in principle be overcome. The best way to start climbing out of the abyss of antisemitism is to self-examine our impulses, our stories about power and injustice, and our beliefs.
