The anti-Semitism of the liberal left

Who would have believed that at the start of the 21st century, less than 60 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, anti-Semitism would be back in the headlines? Not long ago, French television broadcast a special program on the subject, and several new books about modern anti-Semitism have been published, including works by American jurist Alan Dershowitz, French Jewish philosopher Alain Finkielkraut and the American author Phyllis Chesler.

What all these people share in common is that they are liberal Jews fighting for human rights. Chesler even has bonafide credentials from the radical left in both America and Israel (she also demonstrated at the Western Wall for joint prayers of men and women). Nevertheless, each of the three was astounded to see that criticism of Israel wears a form of renewed hatred of Jews, and each was infuriated at the way attacks on the very existence of Israel has become fashionable among members of the liberal and intellectual left. These circles extend to intellectuals and civil rights advocates in Israel, in whose virtual world there is nothing but Zionist guilt.

These same authors were shocked at the proliferation of attacks against Jews, from the fact that enlightened public opinion is not rallying on their behalf, and by the articles in which the establishment of the Jewish state is regarded a historic error. In these terms, they remind one of the precursors and leaders of the Zionist movement - Moshe Hess, Herzl, Leo Pinsker and Max Nordau - assimilated Jews who one day wake up and are astounded to see how the society in which they have struck roots has become a Jew-hating society.

True, most terror attacks against Jews have been carried out by extremist Muslims, and true, Jews in the West do not face the sort of dangers they did in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Moreover, what is being written on occasion against Israel in Europe cannot even compete with what is being said by Israeli academics.

Nevertheless, one could have assumed that a centuries-old tradition of anti-Semitism would not vanish overnight, and that it would be directed against the Jewish state. Based on this tradition, the Jew is always different, other, and the suspicions that he provokes do not fade away even when he looks "like one of us."

The realization of this concept of "otherness," assigned in the Western culture to Jews and giving rise to the hatred of them, is wonderfully exemplified in James Joyce's "Ulysses." Leopold Bloom, who lives in Dublin in 1910, is the son of a Jewish father who converted to Christianity and a non-Jewish mother. He is married to an Irishwoman and his friends are Irish. An acquaintance makes the accusation that the Jews are robbing widows and orphans, and at one point threatens to kill him. Why kill Bloom, who is an Irishman through and through? However, Bloom is different. He serves his wife breakfast in bed - blatantly subversive behavior, unlike that of a real Irishman. In his genius, Joyce foresaw the fires of hatred that would consume Europe.

The traditional anti-Semitic right has an easy time identifying Israel with this other - the covetous, oppressive person who may look like an ordinary person, but is different. But it is not this right that the liberal Jewish writers are so shocked about. They are shocked by the betrayal of the intellectual and liberal left, just as Pinsker was shocked at the support of the revolutionary socialist movement Narodnaia Volia, in the pogroms in Russia in 1881.

How has the liberal lobby, that patron of human rights, come to single out Israel and remain apathetic to the distress of the Jews? The main answer is that in their eyes, the other is not the "soft Jew" a la Bloom, but the Palestinian who the Israelis, with the support of Jews in the Diaspora, are depriving of human rights. The other is no longer a Jew, but his Arab "victim." The conflict in the Middle East, also because of Israel's actions, is seen not as a war of survival of a small Jewish island, but through the prism of an Israeli tank stationed on a settlement in the Gaza Strip facing off against helpless Palestinians.