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N. 44, December 2003
Israel, anti-semitism, and world peace
This past October, the European Union conducted one of its routine
surveys of what its citizens think of various political and social
issues. The results, in this particular case, generated an outcry by
many conservative politicians at the way the survey was conducted, and
even at the alleged motivations of carrying it out to begin with. The
problem? One of the statistics emerging from the EU survey is that 59%
of Europeans rank Israel as the number one threat to global peace.
Israeli politicians have immediately denounced the survey as an example
of anti-semitism, and many European leaders (mostly on the right of the
political spectrum) have joined the chorus of outrage. According to the
Italian newspaper La Repubblica, Nathan Sharansky, Minister for the
Hebraic communities of the Diaspora, has commented that political
criticisms of Israel are a thinly veiled form of anti-semitism, and
that “as in the past Jews were considered like the Devil, responsible
for the world’s evils, so today the ‘civilized’ world attributes the
world’s problems to the Jewish state, Israel.”
And yet, it is hard to see how the EU’s survey was “tendentious” and
slanted against Israel. One of the fifteen questions asked respondents
to rank a total of twelve nations in accordance to the perceived degree
of threat they pose to world peace. The list of nations inclunded not
only Israel, but Russia, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, the
United States, Pakistan, India, and the European Union itself. Israel
came out ahead of everybody (especially in the Netherlands, with a
whopping 70%), followed in decreasing order of perceived threat by
North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the United States.
Now, my own rankings would have been quite different. (If the reader
must know, I would have put Pakistan first, since it is a
non-democratic nuclear power; followed by North Korea and Iran, because
they are run by nutcases who could potentially develop nuclear weapons;
then would come the United States -- also run by a nutcase with nukes,
but at least it is a democracy; finally, to consider Afghanistan a
threat to world peace is, I think, simply not to understand what a
threat to world peace is.) Indeed, I don’t believe that Israel is
dangerous at the global level, although certainly it hasn’t helped the
middle east peace process of lately. Then again, the latter has stalled
largely because the United States insists in not behaving as an honest
broker: without US support, Israel would simply have to agree to
whatever peace plan would be put forth by an American administration or
the United Nations (and, I add, it would be about time, too).
What I think is interesting is the use of the “anti-semitism” charge on
the part of the Israeli government to shield its policy toward the
Palestinians from criticism, a policy that can only be defined as
fascist -- as in consisting of the application of brute force with
complete disregard to human rights or international law. Most Europeans
are not anti-semite, and they have repeatedly demonstrated so with
continuous aid to Israel for the past several decades, with countless
amends to the victims of the Holocaust, be that monetary in nature or
more generally through books, articles, plays, movies, and all sorts of
other recognitions of the horrors of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy.
And so it should have been. But it is a travesty to use the sympathy
generated by the Holocaust to render a government immune from
international criticism. Israel stands almost alone in the world
(except for the support of the United States) for good reasons to be
found in its own Holocaust-like behavior toward other religious or
ethnic minorities.
Another twist to the European-Israeli saga came in November, when
Gianfranco Fini, the head of the Italian neo-fascist party (Alleanza
Nazionale, National Alliance -- have you noticed how right-wing
extremists always play the patriotic card?) decided to visit Israel and
to publicly denounce Mussolini’s errors in supporting Hitler and
establishing “racial” laws in the 1930s. It was a rather gutsy thing to
do, even though it came with more than half a century delay. Well, that
got Alessandra Mussolini, the dictator’s granddaughter and a major
exponent of Alleanza Nazionale, enraged, accusing Fini of “betrayal” of
the party’s “ideals”; she immediately left Alleanza Nazionale and
established a “true” fascist party. It seems that an honest neo-fascist
can’t afford to have even a minimum of conscience these days... To
complicate things, of course, Fini was welcome in Israel by what is in
fact a fascist party of its own (with respect to its treatment of
Palestinians), which makes for an almost unbearable degree of irony in
the whole story.
The point is, however, rather simple. The Holocaust was, in fact, one
of the most horrific events in human history, and there is absolutely
no justification for it at all. On the other hand, it was done to
people and by people of another generation, and those of the current
one simply should no longer apologize for it (since they haven’t done
it) or use it as a shield to then feel free to commit human rights
abuses of their own.
Europeans are right to be critical of Israel, not because it actually
is a major threat to world peace, but because it is acting in an
increasingly despondent and despicable manner against largely
defenseless people. This is so close to what the Jews themselves
suffered at the hand of the Germans, that it is hard to conceive how
they don’t see the striking parallels and immediately stop what they
are doing. A tragedy like the Holocaust generates an enourmous amount
of human sympathy, but sympathy cannot (and should not) be infinite,
and the current Israeli government is simply squandering such capital
without gaining much for its people. Doesn’t anybody learn anything
from history? |
