At home in the United States, if some locally dominant ethnic group violently protested against Jews being allowed to live on property amounting to 2 percent of “the neighborhood,” all these supposed defenders of Israel would know exactly whom they were dealing with and how to respond. But in the case of the Palestinians, we are to accept as their natural right their claims to be squeamish about living anywhere near Jews.
But without the presence of the Jews, there is no evidence that the Palestinians would particularly want these territories for a nation. When they were held under Jordanian and Egyptian rule between 1948 and 1967, after all, there was no significant move to create a Palestinian state, but there was a continuing migration toward the peace and prosperity that the Jews were creating. Hostility toward Jews stems not from any alleged legal violations or untoward violence, but from their exceptional virtues. This is the essence of anti-Semitism.
The Israel test forces a remorseless realism. It disallows all the bumper-sticker contradictions of pacifistic bellicosity. Either the world, principally the United States, supports Israel, or Israel, one way or another, will be destroyed. There are no other realistic choices. And if Israel is destroyed, capitalist Europe will likely die as well, and America, as the protected home of productive and creative capitalism spurred by Jews, will be in jeopardy.
Winston Churchill proclaimed the essential situation in a speech in Parliament in 1939 responding to efforts to withdraw British support for a Jewish state. Describing “the magnificent work which the Jewish colonists have done,” he said: “They have made the desert bloom… started a score of thriving industries… founded a great city on the barren shore… harnessed the Jordan and spread its electricity throughout the land… So far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied till their population has increased more than even all world Jewry could lift up the Jewish population. Now we are asked to decree that all this is to stop and all this is to come to an end. We are now asked to submit — and this is what rankles most with me — to an agitation which is fed with foreign money and ceaselessly inflamed by Nazi and by Fascist propaganda.”
That says it all, for the ages. Eighty years later nothing much has changed.
CHAPTER TWO
Tale of the Bell Curve
The Israel test begins with anti-Semitism, which remains a global plague as persistent and metastatic and multifarious, and as baffling in its etiology, as cancer.
The most compelling book on anti-Semitism that I have encountered is Why The Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism by Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin. I read the first edition when it was published in 1983 and later the new edition in 2003. It is lucidly written, intelligent, fervent, and historically sophisticated. It conveys the earnest, wise, and often ironical voice of its Los Angeles talk-radio-star coauthor, Prager. Although suffused with indignation and a tragic sense of life, it is clear-eyed and dispassionate on the critical issues. What’s not to like?
Prager and Telushkin emphasize that anti-Semitism is “unique:” it cannot be comprehended as a form of racism, neurosis, anti-nationalism, envy, ethnic hostility, religious bigotry, or resentment of success. They contend that “modern attempts to dejudaize Jew-hatred, to attribute it to economic, social, and political factors and universalize it into merely another instance of bigotry are as opposed to the facts of Jewish history as they are to the historical Jewish understanding of anti-Semitism…”
Prager and Telushkin recount many chilling and telling tales of anti-Semitic horror reaching far back into history, long before the modern forms of Jew-hatred emerged from current economic and political conditions. They also demonstrate that anti-Semitism has reached into the most refined centers of culture and the most learned redoubts of academic intellect — pantheons such as Harvard and the Council on Foreign Relations, both old haunts of mine — where any other form of racism would be socially leprous and outré. The authors tout the universality of anti-Semitism, its persistence, its protean irrepressibility, its grisly shapes, its ghastly violence, its frequent respectability, its secular animus, and its religious fanaticism as evidence for its monstrous and inexorable uniqueness.
“Anti-Semites have not hated Jews,” they write, “because Jews are affluent — poor Jews have always been as hated; or strong — weak Jews have simply invited anti-Semitic bullies; or because Jews may have unpleasant personalities — genocide is not personality generated; or because ruling classes focus worker discontent onto Jews — precapitalist and noncapitalist societies, such as the former Soviet Union, other Communist states, and various third world countries, have been considerably more anti-Semitic than capitalist societies… ”
They conclude: “Anti-Semites have hated Jews because Jews are Jewish…” — essentially for the Jewish belief in their chosenness, in their own national identity, and in the universal reach of their monotheistic God and the moral law associated with the God of the Old Testament. Moreover, to salt the wound of anti-Semitic humiliation, practicing Jews enjoy the best revenge. They live well, leading “demonstrably higher-quality lives” than others who do not adhere to Jewish moral and religious tenets. According Prager and Telushkin, it is these specific characteristics of religious Jews that cause anti-Semitism, rather than the widespread human sins of racism, envy, nationalism, and ethnic hostility that inhere in all other examples of bigotry.
Opening the book is a quotation from the National Conference of Catholic Bishops that sums up the Prager-Telushkin view: “It was Judaism that brought the concept of a God-given universal moral law into the world…. The Jew carries the burden of God in history [and] for this has never been forgiven.”
Jewish ethical monotheism is a basic gift and goad alike to gentiles and Jews who have accepted a relativist morality and philosophy that condones sexual immorality, abortion, and other convenient forms of hedonism. Ethical monotheism is a cherished contribution to humankind and a resented standard of unattainable righteousness. By evoking faith in the meaning and regularity of the cosmos, it is crucial to Jewish science and business and indeed to all human achievement. As Prager and Telushkin finally contend, it may be the solution to the problem of anti-Semitism. But it is not, as they also contend, its cause.
The world tolerates all sorts and conditions of religious observance, from the Amish to Jehovah’s Witnesses, from the Mormons to the Scientologists, and on and on. Many of these faiths include apocalyptic prophecies of the incineration of all their enemies and the survival of a chosen remnant. Some of these faiths evoke scorn, some laughter, most indifference.
Benzion Netanyahu, the historian father of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has demonstrated in an awesome 500,000-word tome, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain, that the most vicious anti-Jewish acts of mass destruction and devastation not only preceded the emergence of Christianity but also represented a reaction against the secular power achieved by Jews. He vividly describes the ineffably horrific persecution in Alexandria that was conducted by Hellenistic Egyptians in 3 8 A.D. It was described contemporaneously by the Jewish historian Philo of Alexandria thusly: “the most merciless of all their persecutors in some instances burnt whole families, husbands with their wives, and infant children with their parents, in the middle of the city, sparing neither age nor youth, nor the innocent helplessness of infants.” Some men, he says, were dragged to death, while “those who did these things, mimicked the sufferers, like people employed in the representation of theatrical farces.” Other Jews were crucified. Netanyahu concludes: “We agree with that clear-sighted scholar who said, unreservedly, in plain language: ‘Anti-Semitism was born in Egypt.’” His book shows that motivating the Inquisition in Spain was not hostility to Jewish religion but rage against the superior effectiveness and ascendancy of Jews outperforming established clerics as Christians. “New Christians,” mostly Jewish, were taking over the Spanish church by being more learned, eloquent, devout, resourceful, and charismatic than Christian leaders. As Netanyahu writes, “The struggle against the Jews was essentially motivated by social and economic, rather than religious considerations…”