The Future of the Jews by Stuart E. Eizenstat

Author:Stuart E. Eizenstat [Eizenstat, Stuart E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-09-03T16:00:00+00:00

5

Israel and the New Challenge of Delegitimization

A Global Force of the twenty-first century with particular impact on the State of Israel and world Jewry is the rise of a new form of anti-Semitism. It simultaneously seeks to discredit and delegitimize Israel as a state for the Jewish people and targets Diaspora Jews as surrogates for Israel.

Anti-Semitism is a highly charged allegation and must be used with great care. Is there in fact a new form of anti-Semitism, more than sixty years after the Holocaust and the founding of the modern Jewish state? Historian Yehuda Bauer of Yad Vashem, in a speech at the Prague Holocaust Era Assets Conference in June 2009, argued that there was “no new anti-Semitism, only new propaganda of old anti-Semitism.”

I disagree. I believe the reality is far more complex. The anti-Semitism of the early part of this century is not the religion-based, stereotyped anti-Semitism of European history that led to degradation, violence, pogroms, and ultimately, together with the Nazi racial theories, the Holocaust. On the whole, the modern Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council has done an admirable job of fostering reconciliation with Jews and educating its communicants in a new way to relate to Judaism.

Anti-Semitism in the twenty-first century has three manifestations, only the first of which is a lingering traditional anti-Semitism, mainly visible on the right wing of European society and promptly repudiated by European leaders and institutions. There also is undoubtedly an underlying current of unreconstructed anti-Semitism in some parts of post-Holocaust Central and Eastern European anti-Semitism without significant numbers of Jews.

Muslim-based anti-Zionism arose in the twentieth century out of a rise of Arab nationalism and the total rejection of a Jewish state on what the Muslims considered Arab land. Violent attacks in Palestine began before the international community confirmed the creation of Israel at the United Nations in 1947, and escalated to open and repeated warfare by Arab states thereafter.

The refusal to accept the legitimacy of Israel has gradually receded among the Arab states at a formal level through peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, and then the 2002 Saudi peace initiative spread to Arab and Islamic organizations, from the twenty-two-nation Arab League to the fifty-six-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference (except Iran), as they hesitantly offered to recognize Israel under certain conditions. But at the same time, many of these states and some Palestinians have adopted strategies to undermine the legitimacy of a Jewish state, and worse, Iran and Islamic terrorist groups have pledged to destroy Israel and to target Jews outside Israel.

Of more recent vintage is a third kind, generally espoused by left-wing activists and academics primarily in the U.S. and Europe, who deny that they are anti- Semitic at all. They do not target Jews in the Diaspora but aim at ending the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. Where this crosses the line from legitimate criticism of Israeli policies, to which any nation is subject, to anti-Semitism is expressing the criticism in ways that undermine the legitimacy of a Jewish state of Israel.

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