Anti-Semitism?

If you are interested in this subject, the entire article (click on post title) is well-worth reading.

The New Anti-Anti-Semites.

Split Personality

by John B. Judis
Only at TNR Online
Post date: 02.08.07

s there a growing trend among American intellectuals (and former presidents) toward anti-Semitism? That is what a number of recent articles, essays, and speeches--the latest on "The Poisoning of America" from Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive director of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations at the Herzilya conference--would suggest. Some of these statements stop short of saying that Tony Judt, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, Tony Kushner, and Jimmy Carter (to name some of the best-known targets) are anti-Semites. Instead, they say that what they have written is anti-Semitic or encourages anti-Semitism. In The Wall Street Journal last year, Bret Stephens, a member of the editorial board, suggested that Walt and Mearsheimer's essay on the Israel lobby "may not be anti-Semitic in intent [but] may yet be anti-Semitic in effect."

What these charges are meant to do is to raise the warning flag of anti-Semitism over certain opinions, placing them beyond argument--in a realm consigned to social pathologies. Who would argue, for instance, over the "history" contained within The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? In "Progressive Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism," a paper published by the American Jewish Committee, Alvin H. Rosenfeld writes of the critics of Israel interviewed for Radicals, Rabbis and Peacemakers: Conversations with Jewish Critics of Israel, "[They are] not driven by anything remotely like reasoned historical analysis, but rather by a complex range of psychological as well as political motives that subvert reason and replace it with something akin to hysteria."

My intention in broaching this controversy is not to argue on behalf of Walt, Mearsheimer, or Judt. I think Walt and Mearsheimer do exaggerate the influence of the Israel lobby and define the lobby in such an inclusive way as to beg the question of its influence. I also don't share Judt's hopes for a secular democratic state on what is now Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. But I think that, in characterizing these views as anti-Semitic, or as contributing to anti-Semitism, Rosenfeld and other critics are attempting to suppress an important debate on American foreign policy toward Israel and the Middle East. And they have also fallen prey to a contradiction within their own thinking.

....

These controversies over anti-Semitism come, too, at a predictable and particularly unfortunate time in the discussion of U.S. foreign policy. The last time a similar brouhaha arose was in the 1970s, when Jewish peace organizations in the United States challenged Israel's occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. At the urging of the Israeli government, organizations like Breira were run out of town by their traditional, and more subservient, brethren. Partly as a result, the United States acquiesced in Israeli policies that, in the long run, have benefited neither the United States nor Israel. The same thing could happen again. A debate has already begun over U.S. policy toward Iran in which AIPAC and the Israeli government have expressed interest in the United States stopping at nothing to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Fears of a new Holocaust--made more plausible by the very real anti-Semitism of Iran's president--have been sounded. What policies are in the interest of the United States? And of Israel? These are difficult questions, but they are not made easier to answer when critics of Israel and of the Israel lobby in the United States are charged with anti-Semitism.

John B. Judis is a senior editor at The New Republic and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.