By George Will
Saturday, June 11, 2016
London — Of the
fighting faiths that flourished during the ideologically drunk 20th century,
anti-Semitism has been uniquely durable. It survives by mutating, even
migrating across the political spectrum from the Right to the Left. Although
most frequently found in European semi-fascist parties, anti-Semitism is
growing in the fetid petri dish of American academia, and is staining Britain’s
Labour party.
In 2014, before Naseem “Naz” Shah became a Labour member
of Parliament, she shared a graphic on her Facebook page suggesting that all
Israelis should be “relocated” to the United States. She seemed to endorse the
idea that the “transportation cost” would be less than “three years of defense
spending.” When this was recently publicized, “Red Ken” Livingstone, former
Labour mayor of London, offered on the BBC what he considered a defense of her
as not anti-Semitic because “a real anti-Semite doesn’t just hate the Jews in
Israel.” Besides, Livingstone said, Hitler was a Zionist (for supposedly
considering sending Europe’s Jews to Palestine) “before he went mad.” As mayor,
Livingstone praised as a “progressive voice” an Egyptian cleric who called the
Holocaust “divine punishment.”
Labour’s leader, Jeremy Corbyn, says he wants to cleanse
Labour of such thinking. But Corbyn hopes to host at the House of Commons a
Palestinian sheikh who calls Jews “bacteria” and “monkeys” and has been accused
of repeating the “blood libel” that Jews make matzo using the blood of gentile
children.
Leftist anti-Semites invariably say they hate not Jews
but Zionism, and hence not a people but a nation. Israel was, however, created
as a haven for an endangered people. Jonathan Sacks, former chief rabbi of the
United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, refutes the canard that
“hating Israel is not the same as hating Jews” by saying: “Criticism of Israel
is not necessarily anti-Semitic or anti-Zionist.” When Sacks asks his audiences
if Britain’s government can be criticized, everyone says yes. But when they are
asked, “Do you believe Britain should not exist?,” no one says yes. Then Sacks
tells his audiences: “Now you know the difference.”
“It is very easy to hate,” says Sacks. “It is very
difficult to justify hate.” Anti-Semitism’s permutations adapt it to changing
needs for justification. In the Middle Ages, he says, Jews were hated for their
religion. In the 19th and 20th centuries, they were hated for their race. Now
they are hated for their nation. “The new anti-Semitism can always say it is not
the old anti-Semitism.”
But it is. It remains, Sacks says, “essentially
eliminationist.” It disguises its genocidal viciousness, insisting that it
seeks the destruction not of a people but only of the state formed as a haven
for this people that has had a uniquely hazardous history. The international
“Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” movement, supported by many American
academics, aims not just to pressure Israel to change policies, as South Africa
was pressured to abandon apartheid, but rather to delegitimize Israel’s
existence as a nation.
Sacks says that when bad things happen to a healthy
society, it asks: What did we do wrong? A fraying, insecure society asks: Who
did this to us? Sacks notes that although Jews were never more than 2 percent
of Germany’s population, this did not protect them from becoming the
explanation for Germany’s discontents.
In a conversation with a supposedly “moderate” British
Muslim leader, Sacks asked, “Does Israel have a right to exist within any
borders whatever?” The leader replied: “Your own prophets said that because of
your sins you have forfeited your right to your land.” To which Sacks responded
mildly: “But that was 2,700 years ago and surely the Jews have served their
sentence.”
After World War II, Western nations strove to develop
what Sacks calls “a cultural immune system” against anti-Semitism with
Holocaust education and other measures. The immune system is not weakening in
Britain, other than among Muslim immigrants and leftists eager to meld their
radicalism with radical Islam.
Labour’s leader before Corbyn, Edward Miliband, who led
the party in the 2015 general election, is Jewish, as was the Conservative party’s
greatest 19th-century leader (Benjamin Disraeli). Former Conservative prime
minister Harold Macmillan, who was educated at Eton, noted, perhaps
regretfully, certainly indelicately, that Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinet included
more “old Estonians than old Etonians.” This was not anti-Semitism, just a jest
too fine to forgo.
Seven decades after the Holocaust, some European nations
have, remarkably, anti-Semitism without Jews and Christian anti-Semitism
without Christianity. Britain just has a few leftists eager to mend their
threadbare socialism with something borrowed from National Socialism.
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