Coastal
Post Online
January,
2004
The Real
Anti-Semites
By Lawrence DiStasi
Though it should not be necessary to say
it, history proves that there has been and continues to be virulent anti-Jewish
sentiment in our world, a sentiment which has led to an unparalleled catalogue
of horrors. Indeed, this history of European, mainly Christian animus towards
Jews is what gives the term "anti-Semitic" its heavy load of
opprobrium. Everyone knows what that animus has led to in our time. No one
wishes to be associated, either overtly or covertly, with it. Which is, of
course, why the term is used. To attack someone as "anti-Semitic" is
to instantly demonize, silence, and invalidate anything and everything that
person may say. As Alfred Lilienthal wrote nearly two decades ago when Norman
Podhoretz hurled the term at Gore Vidal for the latter's criticism of Israel: the mere interjection of the label
"anti-Semite" halts discussion, mutes doubt and crushes debate on
Middle East policy. In fact, nothing has accounted more for the success of
Zionism and Israelism in the Western world than the skillful attack on the soft
underbelly of world opinion--"Mr. Decent Man's" total repugnance
toward anti-Semitism.
Given the proven power of the term, one
would think that some of the keepers of informed opinion would examine it. Is
the term accurate? And even if it is, should it be flung, as it almost always
is these days, at those who criticize Israel, Israeli policies, and/or those
neocons in the US Government who have so zealously promoted war with Iraq and a
remaking of the Middle East? Sadly,
such questions are the first casualties of the term's employment, for so
overwhelming is the revulsion and fear it inspires that all consideration of
its validity ceases to be an option.
The term "Anti-Semitic" is considered
sufficient unto itself.
But is it? Consider what the epithet
actually says. It implies that the critic of Israel is really anti-Jewish,
someone deeply and emotionally and murderously (the Holocaust always lurks in
the background) prejudiced against all Jews. What this obscures is the
existence of several logical operations that are conflated into the one term:
to be critical of the state of Israel is of necessity to be anti-Semitic, which
is to be anti-Jewish, which is to want all Jews, including those in Israel, to
be wiped out. But as Lilienthal and others have pointed out again and again,
Israel is not synonymous with Judaism. Israel is a nation-state, the product of
a 19th century political movement known as Zionism, which took full advantage
of western political atonement for the Nazi extermination program during World
War II. By contrast, Judaism is a religion, the monotheistic religion of an
originally nomadic people who once inhabited a territory in the Middle East.
Since the majority of the people who live in this part of the world are said to
be Semitic, that is, related by the languages and cultures known as Semitic,
then it follows that Semites are the people, mainly Jews and Arabs, who live in
or derive from this area.
So far so good. Jews and Arabs are both
Semites. But what is not generally acknowledged or understood when
"anti-Semite" is used, is that fully ninety percent of the people
known as Semites are Arabs, which means that only ten percent are Jews. More
importantly, as Lilienthal pointed out years ago, even that ten percent are not
really Semitic at all. Most Jews today, he says, could never find Semitic
ancestors in the Holy Land, for the simple reason that ninety percent of the
world's Jews are descended from converts to Judaism, mostly the Khazars in what
is now the southern USSR. The Khazars accepted Judaism as their monotheistic
faith. They did not have the remotest connection with the Semites of the Holy
Land.
This is fundamental to the term's
legitimacy. If most Jews, including most Israelis, derive both culturally and
genetically from eastern Europe, which they do, then to be
"anti-Semitic" is actually to be prejudiced not primarily against
Jews, but against Arabs. That is, those who now, today, act or think in ways
that are literally "anti-Semitic" are mainly the European-derived
Israelis themselves. Or rather, those, and they are by no means unanimous, or
all living in Israel, who implement and support the Zionist policies of the
Israeli government.
Such an understanding of the word Semite,
and the way in which "anti-Semitism" has come to be employed raises
serious questions not only about the term's proper use today, but also about
the history obscured behind it. If the term "anti-Semitic" is
routinely used to close off debate about policies that are themselves literally
"directed against Semites" native to the place, what are we to
conclude about those policies? Why is it so forbidden to openly discuss them,
or the historic events and decisions that led to them? Why is criticism of
those policies and that history so quickly equated with the act that has come
to symbolize universal evil?
All one can infer is that a great many
people must have a great many terrible truths they want to keep hidden. One of which
concerns the real anti-Semitism, with its deadly consequences for actual
Semites, that reigns in our time.
copyright
© 2003 Lawrence
DiStasi
Lawrence DiStasi is the author of several
books, most recently Una Storia Segreta: The Secret History of Italian American
Evacuation and Internment During World War II (Heyday Books: 2001). He is a
board member of the Before Columbus Foundation, newsletter editor of the
American Italian Historical Association, Western Regional Chapter, and project
director of the traveling exhibit Una Storia Segreta: When Italian Americans
Were "Enemy Aliens."
Alfred Lilienthal, Washington Report on
Middle East Affairs, July 14, 1986, p. 11.
The term "neocons" refers to
neoconservatives like Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams, Richard
Feith and others in and out of the Bush Administration, who have been
criticized recently for advancing a US policy that seems designed by Israel,
and who have slashed back at their critics as "anti-Semitic."
Zionists have also taken advantage of
imperial strategies in the middle east, colluding with successive imperialist
powers, including the British and now the American, in order to advance their
unswerving intention for a complete takeover of Palestine (see note v, below).
This usually aligns Zionists with conservative policies and positions, such as
that of Ariel Sharon and the Likud party, and in opposition to the many Jewish
intellectuals, both American and Israeli, aligned more traditionally with the left.
Lilienthal, op cit.
For a brief but illuminating look at those
events by an Israeli scholar who has studied them, see Dr. Ilan Pappe, of Haifa
University, who, in "The '48 Nakba and the Zionist Quest for Its
Completion," Between the Lines, October 30, 2002, wrote: "Two means
were used in order to change the reality in Palestine, and impose the Zionist
interpretation on the local reality: the dispossession of the indigenous
population from the land and its re-populating with newcomers - i.e. settlement
and expulsion," and, "the only way to fulfill the dream of Zionism is
to empty the land of its indigenous population." The indigenous population
Pappe refers to, of course, is Palestinian and fully Semitic.