Zionism Derangement Syndrome

A smoldering resentment, bordering on political paranoia, is palpable in sectors of Israel's Left these days. Everywhere, it seems, powerful enemies are conspiring to undermine the centers of cultural influence that leftists have long regarded as their own property, and as beyond criticism. Their response bears a resemblance to the left-wing American affliction that the columnist Charles Krauthammer memorably labeled "Bush Derangement Syndrome."


One recent challenge to Left hegemony is a proposed law now winding its way through the Knesset's legislative process. The bill, prompted in part by an independent report on certain Israeli pressure groups, including Peace Now and B'Tselem, would require political-advocacy organizations to reveal how much money they receive from foreign powers. On the face of it, this seems unexceptionable enough: in the U.S., the Foreign Agents Registration Act has long stipulated that persons paid to act in a political capacity by a foreign principal must declare their relationship; the proposed Israeli law, by contrast, would merely require the reporting of donations from foreign states and state-funded foundations.

Another challenge comes from a new grass-roots student effort called Im Tirtzu. The organization, which insists its political platform is centrist, has declared its intention of urging Diaspora Jewish donors to reconsider their support of Israeli universities whose humanities and social-science departments are bastions of anti-Zionist teachings and whose tenured faculty work to propel the boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign against the Jewish state. The group will also urge students to avoid academic departments that silence or intimidate those voicing Zionist convictions.

Finally, a meticulously documented and scathing 141-page report, "Post-Zionism in Academia," released by the Institute for Zionist Strategies, a conservative think tank, has found that nearly all social-science and humanities departments at Israeli universities are dominated by faculty advocating radical positions anathema to the country's mainstream. The situation is said to be particularly egregious at Tel Aviv and Ben-Gurion universities, where, according to the report, most curricular readings in sociology are "post-Zionist"—really anti-Zionist—in orientation.

To each of these initiatives, the Left's panicked response has been not to question or rebut facts and arguments but to cry outrage and to accuse the critics of engaging in attempted censorship and intimidation—in, to use the much-favored scare word, "McCarthyism." Thus, the New Israel Fund, borrowing in its own way from the late Wisconsin demagogue's playbook, has denounced Im Tirtzu as "ultra-nationalist" and "extremist"—and, in a final sign of the student organization's turpitude, as a recipient of money from evangelical Christians. The president of Ben-Gurion University has branded Im Tirtzu for engaging in a "witch hunt"; Haifa University's president has protested that it is the one politicizing academia; and Yossi Sarid, former chair of the Meretz party, has lambasted the group as a "gang of hoodlums." Says the president of Tel Aviv University, dismissively, "It's impossible to divide the world into Zionists and anti-Zionists."

The president might have been channeling the editors of Haaretz, the influential newspaper that has devoted the fullest coverage and highest dudgeon to the unfolding events. There is indeed a genuinely Zionist Left in Israel, though its strength is waning, but the paper's editors have veered unpredictably between supporting this tendency and voicing an empathically anti-Zionist line—thereby contributing to the definitional muddle seemingly endorsed by the president of Tel Aviv University. In its own heated blast at Im Tirtzu and the Institute for Zionist Strategies, Haaretz referred to their principals as "political commissars," to their work as "shameful," and to their aims as "spreading fear . . . and undermining freedom of expression." As for respecting the views of Israel's mainstream public, the paper wrinkled up its editorial nose at so patently "illegitimate [an] ethnocratic distinction."

What next? As the rather unhinged nature of these reactions suggest, Israel's Left is beginning to fear that its uncontested hold over major centers of the country's elite culture may be as vulnerable as its hold over political power has proved to be. One thing to watch will be the behavior of the remaining Zionists on the Left, and in particular whether, like Haaretz, they will wish to continue providing intellectual cover for a cadre of overtly anti-Zionist radicals. Another is the behavior of Diaspora donors, and in particular how much they really care that Israeli universities have been nurturing a political culture inhospitable to the Zionist enterprise.

As for those now challenging the Left's hegemony in academia and elsewhere, their own challenge will be how best to resurrect the Zionist ethos whose destruction they have accurately diagnosed and faithfully reported.

The Arab Peace Initiative

Among the things remaining unclear in the aftermath of the visit to Washington last week of Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is the next negotiating move of the Palestinians. President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority has warned that if his objectives in the "proximity talks" mediated by the U.S. are not achieved by mid-September, he will ask the Arab League to press harder with its 2002 Arab Peace Initiative. This document has become part of the verbiage of international declarations on the Arab-Israel conflict. According to the American envoy George Mitchell, it has also been incorporated into the Obama administration's peacemaking strategy. What is it?

The initiative was born after the September 11, 2001 attacks against the United States, carried out by Muslim terrorists fifteen of whom were citizens of Saudi Arabia. Recognizing that his kingdom's image as a viper's nest of Islamic fanaticism undermined its vital relationship with Washington, and in the midst of the Palestinians' murderous second intifada against Israel's civilian population, Crown Prince (now King) Abdullah invited New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman to Riyadh to present a peace plan. The plan was touted as offering Israel "full normalization" of relations with the Arab and Muslim world in exchange for an Israeli "full withdrawal" to the armistice boundaries in place from 1949 until the outset of the 1967 Six-Day War.

The following month, an already watered-down version of Abdullah's plan was officially adopted by an Arab League summit in Beirut. Its inauspicious unveiling took place on the day after the ghastly terrorist suicide-bombing of a Passover Seder in Israel's coastal town of Netanya. In a muted reaction to the plan, Jerusalem acknowledged that it did reverse the League's long-standing policy of "No peace, no negotiation, no recognition" set forth at its infamous August 1967 Khartoum summit.

Yet the plan did little else. Instead of offering the promised "full normalization," it vaguely held out a "full peace," presumably along the cold Egyptian model. It also referred to UN General Assembly Resolution 194, commonly understood to grant the 700,000 Arab refugees from the 1948 war, along with millions of their descendants, the right to "return" to a now-truncated Israel in what would amount to a demographic death-knell to the Jewish state. The initiative absolved the Arab countries of any responsibility for absorbing their Palestinian brethren. And by calling for a withdrawal from all territory captured by Israel in the Six-Day war, the initiative patently rejected Security Council Resolution 242, which since 1967 has been the sine qua non of all peacemaking efforts. Nor did the initiative make even a fleeting mention of the inalienable rights of the Jewish people to a national homeland. Finally, it was put forward as a non-negotiable, take-it-or-leave-it diktat.

In the eight years since the initiative was announced, the Palestinian polity has been torn asunder, with the comparatively less extreme Fatah running West Bank affairs and the rejectionist Hamas ruling the Gaza Strip. With the Palestinians thus fragmented and the Arab League frozen in intransigence by radical forces, can anything transform this dead-letter initiative into a linchpin for peace?

Egypt and Jordan broke with the Arab consensus to make their separate peace with Israel. No one expects that kind of courage out of Riyadh. But what if the Saudis were to announce that, from their point of view, the plan is an overture, i.e., not a diktat but a starting point for direct negotiations with Israel?

Meeting Anthony Julius

A London-based lawyer with the firm of Mishcon de Reya, Anthony Julius has the unusual distinction of being a solicitor-advocate—a barrister who can also appear in court. He was on the defense team in the suit filed against the historian Deborah Lipstadt by the Holocaut denier David Irving; he has participated in litigating many cases bearing on the interests of Israel; and he represented Princess Diana in the last years of her life. A first-rate scholar, he is also the author of T. S. Eliot: Anti-Semitism and Literary Form (1995), Idolizing Pictures: Idolatry, Iconoclasm, and Jewish Art (2001), and Transgressions: The Offenses of Art (2002).

Now comes Julius's magnum opus, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England, just released in the United States. This large, sweeping book is more than a solidly researched and highly readable history of English anti-Semitism; it is an attempt to chart the evolution of anti-Semitism itself, to explain what it is (and what it is not), and to demonstrate how to recognize and name it. Its early chapters—on religious and literary anti-Semitism in pre-modern England—set the stage for Julius's coverage of the modern era and especially of the present day, when the boundaries between hatred of Jews and detestation of the Jewish state have become thoroughly blurred. Indeed, it is the prevalence of anti-Zionism in today's England that motivated Julius to undertake this lucid, erudite, and compelling study.

Julius insists on fair-mindedness but makes no pretense to dispassion. Writing this book, he says, has been like swimming long-distance through a sewer. Out of the mire of his subject, he has produced a work of gripping force.

At whom is this book directed?

At the general reader; it was not written for a specifically academic audience. It is intended to be informative—and it may be useful against anti-Semites.

How long did it take to write Trials of the Diaspora?

About five years. At a quite early stage, it became clear to me that a purely narrative account of English anti-Semitism would be intolerable to read—one awful thing after another. Instead, I saw that the subject was best organized by reference to specific categories or themes, and that is largely how the book is organized.

When do you make time for writing in your busy career?

I divide my time among family, law work, and writing. That's it.

If there is a word that's ubiquitous in Trials, it's "tropes"—which you employ to refer to the relentless litany of overused anti-Semitic clichés.

Yes, the discourse of anti-Semitism—malicious lies about Jews, as distinct from violence against Jews—is best analyzed through its clichés.

The word trials in the title: where did the idea for that come from?

There is an aspect of life in the Diaspora that is best understood as an ordeal. Also, the word is partly in homage to Philip Roth, who wrote in Operation Shylock that "In the modern world, the Jew has perpetually been on trial."

You delineate various strains of anti-Semitism, ranging from snobbery and prejudice to racism and genocide. Then you characterize anti-Semitism as involving beliefs about Jews that are both false and hostile. Yet in the final analysis you seem to say that the phenomenon is a tangled bundle of irrational sentiments and that it has no overarching definition.

Yes. "Anti-Semitism" is best understood as comprising a group of related hatreds, some lethal, some not.

To some British Jews, the idea that their country is being Islamized, as suggested by Melanie Phillips in her book Londonistan, is bogus. But you seem to feel that anti-Semitism is wearing down a Jewish community grappling with rising violence and abuse.

Contemporary anti-Semitism demoralizes Anglo-Jewry. But it is to be set against aspects of Anglo-Jewish life—Limmud-type study gatherings, Jewish Book Week, kosher restaurants, and so on—that are enlivening and elevating.

You argue that modern English anti-Semitism is unique, that it has a distinctive "mentality."

Among anti-Semitisms, the English brand was innovative. The first medieval blood libel occurred in England, and so, in 1290, did the first nation-wide expulsion of the Jews. There's a heritage.

Apart from Gentile anti-Semitism and, today, anti-Zionism, there's the specifically Jewish variety of criticism of Israel. Why are you so incensed when Israel's Jewish critics in the UK begin their attacks with "As a Jew, I..."?

Criticisms are true or false, independent of the confessional or ethnic identity of the critic.

British Jewish opposition to the idea of a Jewish state predates the Balfour Declaration, as you remind your readers. What do today's anti-Zionists have in common with their predecessors?

Not much! The pre-Balfour Declaration anti-Zionist Jews were either working-class Jews, who preferred revolution at home, or middle-class Jews, who preferred assimilation. Contemporary anti-Zionist Jews are mostly drawn to anti-Zionism as a means of asserting a Jewish identity.

The Guardian newspaper, with its popular website, plays a vanguard role in disseminating the new anti-Zionism, yet many American Jews and even some Anglo-Israelis enjoy the Guardian from afar.

It's not hard to see why. The new anti-Zionism overstates and misrepresents the significance of the 120-year old contest between Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians, over the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan; it also melodramatizes the contest, assigning to one side all the vice, and to the other all the virtue. The Guardian provides a forum for the dissemination of this skewed perspective.

Contrary to the protestations of the anti-Israel crowd, no one seriously suggests that every criticism of Israeli policies is anti-Semitic. So when is the line crossed from legitimate criticism to something more sinister?

When the criticism draws on anti-Semitic language—for example, "Israel lobby," or "Jewish lobby"—or connects with longstanding anti-Semitic practices like boycotts.

Shouldn't vociferous de-legitimization, by Jews, of Israel's right to exist be inherently understood in psycho-political terms? Isn't it bizarre that some people's singular connection to Jewish life takes the form of anti-Zionism?

Yes, and yes.

But you seem to abjure the term "self-hatred," preferring to cast such opponents of Jewish self-determination as contributors to anti-Semitism.

Many individuals of Jewish origin are proud of their status as opponents of the Jewish state. They are not self-haters; they are self-admirers.

-- May 2010

Mainline Protestants and Israel

So enamored are today's mainline Protestant churches with the Palestinian Arab "narrative" that they seem to have altogether forgotten, or denied, their own prior history of support for Israel and Zionism. Indeed, some of them appear to be trying to derail the Zionist enterprise altogether.


The English Puritans who came to North America in the 17th century linked their fate in the New World to that of biblical Israel. By the early 19th century, the Presbyterian minister John McDonald was urging Christians to help the Jews of Old World Europe to return to Zion. Later in the 19th century, the Methodist preacher William Eugene Blackstone traveled far and wide to campaign for the same cause. Many Anglicans were similarly disposed. In Britain, Lord Balfour described himself as a "Zionist."

In March 1948, despite the persistence of anti-Semitism in the United States, fully half of Protestant Americans voiced support for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.


Today, the mainline denominations, which represent a dwindling yet still influential minority of American Christians, regularly take left-wing positions on matters of both theology and politics, and their attitude toward Israel has changed decisively. Theologically, most of today's Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and others no longer believe that the Bible is the word of God or should be interpreted as literally true. The theological basis for connecting the people of Israel to the land of Israel has consequently evaporated. Politically, the institutions of mainstream Christianity have embraced much of the Left's antipathy toward Jewish national self-determination and a view of the Arab-Israel conflict in the black-and-white terms of oppressors and victims.

The results are visible in such recent initiatives as a document being circulated by Methodists that calls for boycotting goods produced in the West Bank, or the vote of the UK's Anglican Communion in favor of economic divestment from Israel.

It is true that these denominations have objective interests in the Arab world, rooted in concern for the diminishing numbers of Palestinian Christians struggling to survive in an environment of increasingly ascendant Islamic extremism. But it is also true that church activists living or stationed in the Middle East wholeheartedly endorse Arab political sensibilities and lobby aggressively inside their institutions against the Zionist enterprise. Further skewing the picture, the Geneva-based World Council of Churches, an umbrella organization of mainline church bodies, propagates a version of the Israel-Arab conflict that is insidiously damaging to Israel's survival.

Given this stacked deck, it is easy to appreciate the relief of Jewish organizations when, at a recent meeting of the policymaking body of the Presbyterian Church, a plank defaming Israel as an "apartheid" state failed to pass. But, while condescending to endorse Israel's right to exist, the Presbyterians simultaneously approved "for study" the disingenuous Kairos document—"the Christian Palestinians' word to the world about what is happening in Palestine." This document labels the Jewish presence in Jerusalem and the West Bank as "aggression," "evil," and a "sin" that must be "resisted and removed." Violence is ostensibly abjured, but "peaceful resistance" and "boycotts" are legitimized. The Presbyterians have also obliquely called for withholding military aid from Israel in order to pressure it back to the armistice lines that ended the 1948-49 war.

This "Presbyterian answer" to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has left church leaders boasting that they may have "stumbled upon a way of building peace." In fact, what they have done is to place the Jewish state unjustly in the dock and to single it out for undeserved opprobrium—an act that might more properly be considered an occasion not for self-gratulation but for soul-searching. In light of it, the wholehearted support for the Zionist enterprise coming from the vibrant evangelical wing of American Protestantism is all the more heartwarming and, politically, indispensable.

-- april 2010

Britain & Israel

Prime Minister Gordon Brown went to Buckingham Palace yesterday to ask Queen Elizabeth to dissolve parliament on April 12. New elections will take place on May 6. At the moment, the Conservative party under David Cameron is leading Brown's Labor party in the polls; the Liberal Democrats, headed by Nick Clegg, are in a strong third position


The sun may have set on the British Empire, but the U.K. continues to exercise considerable influence in the international arena. Britain is a major force in the European Union and a permanent member of the UN Security Council; it plays a leading role in NATO and the 54-nation Commonwealth. It also remains a world financial center and, through the BBC, wields considerable "soft power" worldwide.
As for its relations with Israel, trade now stands at £2.3 billion annually. But politically the country has been an indifferent friend at best, funding a dozen advocacy organizations that press Jerusalem to soften its security policies.

What would a change in government mean for British-Israel relations? Probably not a great deal—all three parties are on record as favoring Israel's withdrawal to the 1949 Armistice lines. Still, significant differences are discernible in the parties' approach.

Labor: Brown has close personal ties to the Jewish community; his father, a Presbyterian minister, was chairman of the Church of Scotland's Israel Committee. Foreign Minister David Miliband is a non-practicing Jew who recently ordered an Israeli diplomat expelled in connection with Israel's alleged forging of British passports in the assassination of Hamas arms smuggler Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. Justice Secretary Jack Straw has refused to modify the country's Universal Jurisdiction law, invoked to threaten visiting Israeli officials with arrest on "war crimes" charges. The Labor party essentially accepted the Goldstone Report on the 2009 Gaza war. Last week, Britain merely abstained in the UN Human Rights Council vote demanding that Israel pay reparations to Gaza.

Several Labor back benchers are notorious Israel-bashers. Gerald Kaufman has compared IDF soldiers to Nazis; Martin Linton warned that Israel's "long tentacles" could warp the outcome of the coming elections. A group with the name Labor Friends of Israel has called on the government to pressure both Israelis and Palestinians "evenhandedly."

Liberal Democrats: Clegg has urged Britain to stop selling weapons to Israel. MP Paul Rowen is one of parliament's most ardent supporters of the Palestinian cause. And former MP Jenny Tonge, now in the House of Lords, declared it was worth investigating whether IDF aide workers in Haiti were actually harvesting organs for transplant. On the plus side of the ledger, the party recently authorized a support group to foster better relations with the Jewish community.

Conservatives: The tone of party pronouncements on Israel are notably sympathetic. William Hague, a former party leader and now Shadow Foreign Secretary, criticized Labor for not voting against the Goldstone Report. There are promises to modify the Universal Jurisdiction law.

Britain's Jewish community of 300,000 souls holds sway in perhaps a half-dozen of the country's 646 constituencies. While there are just four Muslim MPs, politicians are mindful that the overall Muslim population stands at 2.4 million. Most Jews will likely vote their economic and social interests, though a vocal minority can be expected to support the Tories purely because of Labor's shabby treatment of the Jewish state.

-- April 2010