Dueling Definitions of Antisemitism
Consider two definitions of antisemitism. The first holds that antisemitism refers to hostility, prejudice, or discrimination against individual Jews. It can be manifested in various forms, including negative stereotypes, violence, and social exclusion. The second holds that antisemitism is hostility against the Jewish people. Are these two definitions the same thing, or are they different? What are their implications for understanding the relationship between anti-Israeli and antisemitic sentiment? Is one definition preferable to the other?
These are not merely academic questions. Students have been arrested and expelled from universities, faculty have been fired, university presidents have been forced to resign, and citizens have been denied due process as a result of the way antisemitism is defined. In this essay I will show why the first definition is to be preferred to the second.
Let’s first look at the second definition. Israel defines itself as a state of the Jewish people, and given this definition, to criticize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state is an attack on all Jewish people. It is hate speech, and hate speech is and should be a crime. Also, given this definition of antisemitism anyone—student, faculty, university president—who challenges Israel’s right to exist is guilty of hate speech, and is rightfully to be punished. In summary, given this definition anti-Zionism is antisemitism.
However, if you do not accept the second definition, but embrace the first, then rejecting Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state is not necessarily antisemitic. It is true that many antisemites do question Israel’s right to exist, and anti-Zionism is sometimes a stand-in for antisemitism; but this is not always the case. And it is also true that if the reason for denying Israel’s right to exist as a state is simply because a lot of Jews live there, then that is antisemitic. However, it is a mistake to define the one so that it must entail the other.
How to Choose a Definition
“‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master—that’s all.’”
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Alice is right. If you intend to use your words to communicate, then they can’t mean just anything that you want them to mean. Either anti-Israeli speech is the same as antisemitic speech, or it is not. Granted there may be a subtext when someone who says “down with Israel” also means “down with all Jews,” but this is not necessarily the case.
Take, for example, the Jew who, either for religious or moral reasons, objects to Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, as some do. Or imagine a person who simply does not believe that any democratic state could be religious, whether that state be Christian, Jewish, Moslem, or some other faith. Or consider the person who rejects Israel’s right to exist because she views it as an expansionist state. Or imagine the Palestinian who has Jewish friends but has seen the IDF wipe out her family or starve her children and has been a witness to the ethnic cleansing in Gaza, and thus objects to the idea of a Jewish state. There is nothing about these cases that necessarily implies antisemitism.
Antisemites Can Be Pro-Zionists
Ironically some of Israel’s strongest supporters have been antisemites. President Harry Truman, the first statesman to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, bragged that he never had a Jew in his house, calling them “very, very selfish” and unconcerned with the suffering of other displaced persons. Moreover, early Zionists saw antisemites as their ally, not just as their enemy. Whereas the latter wanted to expel Jews from one place, the former were ready to receive them in another—Palestine.
Prominent Jewish Voices Against Zionism
If anti-Zionism is by definition antisemitism then some of the most prominent Jewish voices have been antisemites. Some have objected because they believe that a Jewish state would harm the Jewish soul.
“Apart from practical considerations, my awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish State, with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power, no matter how modest. I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain.”
Albert Einstein
Others have believed that a Jewish state would lack legitimacy until it acknowledged its enormous debt to Arabs.
“There is only one solution for Israel, namely, the unilateral acknowledgement of the obligation of the State towards the Arabs—not to use it as a bargaining point, but to acknowledge the complete moral obligation of the Israeli State to its former inhabitants of Palestine’”
Erich Fromm
Still others have objected to the means needed to achieve the end.
“A Jewish Home in Palestine built up on bayonets and oppression [is] not worth having.”
Judah L. Magnes, first president of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem
Still others believe that redemption will only come when Jews face up to the crimes they have committed against the Arabs.
“Only an internal revolution can have the power to heal our people of their murderous sickness of causeless hatred. . . . Only then will the old and young in our land realize how great was our responsibility to those miserable Arab refugees in whose towns we have settled Jews who were brought here from afar; whose homes we have inherited, whose fields we now sow and harvest; the fruits of whose gardens, orchards, and vineyards we gather; and in whose cities that we robbed we put up houses of education, charity, and prayer, while we babble and rave about being the ‘People of the Book’ and the ‘light of the nations’”
Martin Buber
These voices first appeared after the Holocaust, when Jews were recovering from the most brutal, barbaric genocide in human history, but neither Jewish nor world opinion was ready to hear them. Things are now changing. It is time to reclaim these earlier Jewish voices, and to reject the right-wing militancy that claims to speak for the people of Israel—indeed for all Jews. Or, in Edward Said’s terms: it is time to finally recognize the rights of the victim’s victim.
Walter Feinberg is the C. D. Hardie emeritus professor of philosophy of education at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His latest book, Educating for Democracy, is published by Cambridge University Press.
363 total views, 4 views today