At a recent meeting of the Israeli Cabinet, Natan Sharansky, the minister in charge of relations with Jewish communities around the world, raised an alarm.
Anti-Semitism was surging abroad, he warned, raising the danger of “demonization and dehumanization of the state of Israel and the Jewish people” and “laying the groundwork for a disaster,” according to a Cabinet statement.
Sharansky’s comments, which followed the bombings of two synagogues in Istanbul in November, reflected growing concerns in Israel over what officials and experts say is a rise in anti-Semitic acts and speech that has paralleled the violent conflict with the Palestinians, now in its fourth year.
Those concerns have fueled discussion in Israel over whether the verbal and physical attacks, many of them in Western Europe, reflect rising outrage over Israeli policies toward the Palestinians or deep currents of anti-Semitism long repressed but now coming to the surface.
Sharansky, a former Soviet dissident, said in an interview he had clear guidelines to distinguish between anti-Semitic speech and criticism of Israeli policies. Comparisons of Israel to the Nazis, the denial of Israel’s legitimacy and the application of a double standard to Israel’s responses to terrorism as compared with other nations’ were all indications of anti-Semitic sentiment, he said.
“Demonizing the Jewish state in ways in which Jews were demonized in the past is for me a clear line where so-called legitimate criticism turns into absolutely the same type of attitude toward the Jewish state as toward the Jews,” Sharansky said.
But others say Israel can be too quick to accuse critics of its policies of being anti-Jewish.
“Israel has a tendency to put everything in one pot and to say that anyone who opposes Israeli policies is anti-Semitic,” said Tom Segev, a journalist and historian who has written about the Holocaust and Israel.
“This is convenient for us, because if it is anti-Semitic criticism, then it can’t possibly be justified and doesn’t deserve a response,” Segev said. “But not every criticism of what we are doing to the Palestinians is anti-Semitic. We are doing terrible things, and we do not take into account how our policies affect the Jews. Our policies in the occupied territories are creating great antagonism, and there are anti-Semites who exploit this.”
Study finds increase
A Tel Aviv University study found that there had been a significant increase in anti-Semitic acts worldwide in 2002 and at the beginning of last year, with a sharp rise in physical assaults on Jews or people thought to be Jewish.
Yuval Steinitz, chairman of parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, said such violence indicated more was at work than just opposition to Israeli actions in the conflict with the Palestinians.
“It’s not politically correct to be anti-Semitic, so people mask it by saying that they are criticizing Israel,” Steinitz said. “There’s a clear double standard here, when people criticize Israel’s right to self-defense and judge it differently. They deny the Jewish state the right that other nations have. Saying that Jews don’t have the right to defend themselves is a form of anti-Semitism and racism. There’s no other explanation for it.”
Other analysts argue that Israel’s self-definition as the Jewish state, and its use of Jewish symbols in its flag and emblem, create a link that can cut both ways.
“The difficulty is that if Israel claims that it represents the Jewish people, criticism of Israel can become criticism of the Jews,” said Moshe Zimmermann, a history professor at Hebrew University. “That is how the link was formed between traditional anti-Semitism and the Arab-Israeli conflict.
“When Israel claims that any criticism of its policies is anti-Semitic, then the other side no longer feels the need to distinguish between criticism of Israel and criticism of Jews in general.”
Sharansky acknowledged that Israel’s military response to the current Palestinian uprising “has made it more difficult to make our case.”
“No doubt that the fact that Israel has to respond to a wave of terrorism launched against it has made it easier for the anti-Semites to increase their campaign,” he said. “The government takes the Jews of the world into consideration, but it has to protect its citizens from being killed. That is our first obligation.”
Repressed feelings
Stuart Schoffman, a columnist for The Jerusalem Report magazine, said the current Palestinian uprising, known as the intifada, and Israel’s response had triggered reactions that exposed anti-Semitic currents submerged in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
“The intifada was an expedient lever to pry up the lid and break the taboo,” Schoffman said. “Terror and anti-Semitism serve each other. Terrorism is a way of provoking the state of Israel into types of behavior that can be interpreted and distorted to suit the purposes of anti-Semitism.”
One example, he said, was a prize-winning cartoon in the British newspaper the Independent that showed Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon devouring a Palestinian child.
“If you take Sharon, whose policies have caused collateral damage in which children have died, and turn him into a sadistic killer of children, you’ve gone over the line from harsh criticism of the state of Israel to something that feeds the fantasies of the anti-Semites,” Schoffman said.
The criticism has fostered a sense of siege in Israel, where the increasing attacks on Jews abroad are often interpreted as the latest manifestation of a long history of persecution, not as a response to Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians.
“They started a terror war. We have to respond, and the world is against us. It wants us to turn the other cheek,” Sharansky said. “Jews were different during thousands of years. Does it mean that we have to stop being different?”
