Anti-What?
By Uri Avnery
February 20, 2015 "ICH"
- ANTI-SEMITISM is on the rise. All
over Europe it is raising its ugly head.
Jews are in danger everywhere. They must
make haste and come home to Israel before it
is too late.
True? Untrue?
Nonsense.
PRACTICALLY ALL the
alarming incidents which have taken place in
Europe recently – especially in Paris and
Copenhagen – in which Jews were killed or
attacked – had nothing to do with
anti-Semitism.
All these outrages were
conducted by young Muslims, mostly of Arab
descent. They were part of the ongoing war
between Israelis and Arabs that has nothing
to do with anti-Semitism. They are not
descended from the pogrom in Kishinev and
not related to the Protocols of the Elders
of Zion.
In theory, Arab
anti-Semitism is an oxymoron, since Arabs
are Semites. Indeed, Arabs may be more
Semitic then Jews, because Jews have mingled
for many centuries with Gentiles.
But, of course, the German
publicist Wilhelm Marr, who probably
invented the term Antisemitismus in 1880
(after inventing the term Semitismus seven
years earlier) never met an Arab in his
life. For him the only Semites were Jews,
and his crusade was solely against them.
(Adolf Hitler, who took
his racism seriously, applied it to all
Semites. He could not stand Arabs either.
Contrary to legend, he disliked the Grand
Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini,
who had fled to Germany. After meeting him
once for a photo-opportunity arranged by the
Nazi propaganda machine, he never agreed to
meet him again.)
SO WHY do young Muslims in
Europe shoot Jews, after killing cartoonists
who have insulted The Prophet?
Experts say that the basic
reason is their profound hatred for their
host countries, in which they feel (quite
rightly) that they are despised, humiliated
and discriminated against. In countries like
France, Belgium, Denmark and many others,
their violent rage needs an outlet.
But why the Jews?
There are at least two
main reasons:
The first is local. French
Muslims are mostly immigrants from North
Africa. During the desperate struggle for
Algerian independence, almost all the
Algerian Jews sided with the colonialist
regime against the local freedom fighters.
When all Jews and many Arabs emigrated from
Algeria to France, they brought their fight
with them. Since they now live side by side
in the crowded ghettos around Paris and
elsewhere, their mutual hatred lives on and
often leads to violence.
The second reason is the
ongoing Arab-Zionist conflict, which started
with the mass immigration of Jews to Arab
Palestine, continued with the long list of
wars and is now in full bloom. Practically
every Arab in the world, and most Muslims
are emotionally involved in the conflict.
But what have French Jews
to do with that far-away conflict?
Everything.
When Binyamin Netanyahu
does not miss an opportunity to declare that
he represents all the Jews in the world, he
makes all the world's Jews responsible for
Israeli policies and actions.
When Jewish institutions
in France, the US and everywhere totally and
uncritically identify with the policies and
operations of Israel, such as the recent
Gaza war, they turn themselves voluntarily
into potential victims of revenge actions.
The French Jewish leadership, CRIF, did so
just now.
Neither of these reasons
has anything to do with anti-Semitism.
ANTI-SEMITISM is an
integral part of European culture.
Many theories have been
put forward to explain this totally
illogical phenomenon, which borders on a
collective mental disease.
My own preferred theory is
religious. All over Europe, and now also in
the Americas, Christian children in their
formative years hear the stories of the New
Testament. They learn that a Jewish mob was
shouting for the blood of Jesus, the gentle
and mild preacher, while the Roman prefect,
Pontius Pilatus, was desperately trying to
save his life. The Roman is depicted as a
humane, likeable person, while the Jews are
seen as a vile, despicable mob.
This story cannot be true.
Roman rulers all over the Empire used to
crucify potential troublemakers. The
behavior of the Jewish authorities in the
story does not conform to Jewish law. But
the New Testament story, written long after
the death of Jesus (whose real Hebrew name
was Jeshua), was aimed at the Roman audience
the Christians were trying to convert, in
hot competition with the Jewish
missionaries.
Also, the early Christians
were a small, persecuted sect in Jewish
Jerusalem, and their grudge lives on to this
very day.
The picture of the evil
Jews crying out for the death of Jesus is
unconsciously imprinted in the minds of the
Christian multitudes and has inspired
Jew-hatred in every new generation. The
results were slaughter, mass-expulsions,
inquisition, persecution in every form,
pogroms, and finally the Holocaust.
THERE has never been
anything like this in Muslim history.
The Prophet had some small
wars with neighboring Jewish tribes, but the
Koran contains strict instructions on how to
deal with Jews and Christians, the People of
the Book. They had to be treated fairly and
were exempted from military duty in return
for a poll tax. Throughout the ages there
were some rare anti-Jewish (and
anti-Christian) outbreaks here and there,
but Jews in Muslim lands fared incomparably
better than in Christian ones.
If this had not been so,
there would have been no "Golden Age" of
Muslim-Jewish cultural symbiosis in medieval
Spain. It would have been impossible for the
Muslim Ottoman empire to accept and absorb
almost all the hundreds of thousands of
Jewish refugees from medieval Spain, driven
out by their Catholic Majesties, Ferdinand
and Isabella. The outstanding Jewish
religious thinker, Moses Maimonides (the
"Rambam") could not have become the personal
physician and adviser of the outstanding
Muslim sultan, Salah-al-Din al-Ayubi
(Saladin).
The present conflict
started as a clash between two national
movements, Jewish Zionism and secular Arab
nationalism, and had only slight religious
overtones. As my friends and I have warned
many times, it is now turning into a
religious conflict – a calamity with
potentially grievous consequences.
Nothing to do with
anti-Semitism.
SO WHY does the entire
Israeli propaganda machine, including all
Israeli media, insist that Europe is
experiencing a catastrophic rise of
anti-Semitism? In order to call upon
European Jews to come to Israel (in Zionist
terminology: "make Aliya").
For a Zionist true
believer, every Jew's arrival in Israel is
an ideological victory. Never mind that once
in Israel, new immigrants – especially from
countries like Ethiopia and Ukraine – are
neglected. As I have frequently quoted:
"Israelis like immigration but don't like
immigrants".
In the wake of the recent
events in Paris and Copenhagen, Binyamin
Netanyahu has publicly called upon French
and Danish Jews to pack up and come at once
to Israel for their own safety. The prime
ministers of both countries have furiously
protested against these calls, which
insinuate that they are unable or unwilling
to protect their own citizens. I suppose
that no leader likes a foreign politician to
call upon his citizens to leave.
There is something
grotesque in this call: as the late
Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz remarked,
Israel is the only place in the world where
Jewish lives are in constant danger. With a
war every few years and violent incidents
almost every day, he had a point.
But in the wake of the
dramatic events, many "French" Jews –
originally from North Africa – may be
induced to leave France. They may not all
come to Israel. The US, French Canada and
Australia offer tempting alternatives.
There are many good
reasons for a Jew to come to Israel: a mild
climate, the Hebrew language, living among
fellow Jews, and what not. But running away
from anti-Semites is not one of them.
IS THERE real
anti-Semitism in Europe? I assume that there
is.
In many European countries
there are old and new super-nationalist
groups, who try to attract the masses by
hatred of the Other. Jews are the Others par
excellence (along with Gypsies/Roma). An
ethno-religious group dispersed in many
countries, belonging and not belonging to
their host countries, with foreign - and
therefore sinister – beliefs and rituals.
All the European nationalist movements which
sprang up in the 19th and 20th centuries
were more or less anti-Semitic.
Jews have always been, and
still are, the ideal scapegoat for the
European poor. It was the German
(non-Jewish) socialist August Bebel who said
that "anti-Semitism is the socialism of the
stupid guys".
With frequent economic
slumps and a widening gap between the local
poor and the multinational super-rich, the
need for scapegoats is rising. But I do not
believe that these marginal groups, even if
some of them are not so marginal anymore,
constitute a real anti-Semitic surge.
Be that as it may, the
outrages in Paris and Copenhagen have
nothing to do with anti-Semitism.
Uri
Avnery is an Israeli author and activist.
www.avnery-news.co.il