Anti-Semitism and looking realistically at Middle East policy
Tankwoman just made a thoughtful post about how accusations of anti-Semitism are sometimes made against Americans who criticize aspects of Israeli policy or, especially, challenge American policies in the Middle East that coincide with those of hardline rightwingers.
Of course there is an Israeli lobby in America - its leading working group is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). It calls itself "America's Pro-Israel Lobby," and it attempts to influence U.S. legislation and policy.
Several national Jewish organizations lobby from time to time. Big deal - why is anyone pretending this non-news requires falling on the floor and howling? Because of this weird deformity of debate.
In the United States, we do not have full-throated, full-throttle debate about Israel. In Israel, they have it as matter of course, but the truth is that the accusation of anti-Semitism is far too often raised in this country against anyone who criticizes the government of Israel.
I've posted here at various times about the role of such policies and the need for the US to push Israel to make a realistic settlement of the Palestinian statehood issue and to stop and reverse the settlement policy on occupied territories. I've also criticized Old Right isolationist arguments about Israel and its influence in the US that lend themselves to anti-Semitic interpreatation - some of them more readily than others.
But with the invasion of Iraq, the United States became part of the neighborhood for now in the Middle East in a way that we've never been before. And we have to look realistically at the role the Israeli-Palestinian conflict plays in Western relations to the Islamic world.
And, yes, as Tankwoman mentioned, we're dealing with irrational feelings driven by religious beliefs on many of these questions. Ultra-Orthodox Jews, American fundamentalist "Christian Zionists" and "Twelver Shi'a" Muslims all have their own views of how God plans to use Jerusalem and the holy land in the Apocalypse that will culminate the destiny of the world. The fact that those three religious trends have very incompatable views of what that destiny will be complicates things further.
Karen Armstrong has pointed out the particular challenge that questions of holy land and holy cities presents. If an issue is a political arrangement, particular territorial boundary lines, or distribution of wealth, deals can be made based on mutally beneficial agreements. But if what is in dispute is land that God has designated for the special use of Our Side, and also designated for the special but incompabale use of the Other Side and also That Other Side, too, then making a deal becomes much more difficult. Because you're not just making practical arrangements; you're risking selling out Almighty God himself. It tends to raise the emotional stakes. (To put it mildly.)
Anti-Semitism is a real problem, and a persistent one. One of the more dubious contributions of Western Christian civilization to that of the Arab world has been the export of European anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. And real anti-Semitism is far from unknown in the United States. For instance, the FOXists' whining about the alleged "war on Christmas", and the whining has been especially notable the last couple of years, is basically a recycled stock anti-Semitic accusation.
Certainly, anyone who wants to understand German history at more than the most superficial level has to get some understanding of how political anti-Semitism worked in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. This is a good Web site on one of the most notorious anti-Semitic "classics", The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. That particular document was serialized in the 1920s for Americans by the Dearborn Independent, a paper owned by Henry Ford, the only American to be praised by name in Adolf Hitler's book Mein Kampf. http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/index.php?ModuleId=10007058 See also U.S. museum exhibit focuses on anti-Semitic 'Protocols' Ha'aretz/AP 04/23/06 http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/708042.html
Karl Barth, one of the most important Christian theologians ever, argued that anti-Semitism and the Holocaust are central theological issues for Christians. Issues which require the role that attitudes toward Judaism and its practitioners have played in Christian history.
Ironically, the "Christian Zionist" viewpoint, which tends to agree with AIPAC and rightwing Isrealis on foreign policy issues including the West Bank settlements, is a fundamentally anti-Semitic theory in itself. The "premillenial dispensationalists" who are so prominent among the Christian Zionistas support those policies because they hope to hasten the day when they think that God will arrange for most of the Jews of the world to be slaughtered. After which the rest of them will convert to Christianity, i.e., stop being Jews. In my mind, any worldview that winds up at the notion that it's the will of God that most Jews in the world will be killed off violently is fundamentally anti-Semitic, whether it's "pro-Israel" or not.
And since this type of support-Israel-so-the-Jews-can-be-wiped-out outlook now forms the hardcore bases for Bush's Middle East policies, and seems to have a major effect on Bush's own personal understanding of events there, we have to discuss not only policy toward Israel but the religious assumptions that feed into them. For the Republicans, this is part of the risk of getting what you pray for. After complaining for decades that the Democrats had "taken God out of the public square", the fundamentalists have succeeded in making the Republican Party effectively into a Christian religious party. And that means it's just not possible any more to discuss such a central issue as US policy in the Middle East without also directly addressing some of the religious assumptions involved.
