Anti-Jewish
rhetoric and the perception that Arabs are anti-Semitic is a blight on
the contemporary Arab world, and poison for the Palestinian national
movement. Palestinians must arrive at an agreement with Israel, and
therefore have little hope of success if they are seen to proceed from
an attitude of hatred.
That stipulated, the recent report on global anti-Semitism issued by
the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) – an international Jewish
non-government
organisation
– is simultaneously illuminating and potentially misleading. Its
findings are hardly surprising: it says there are high levels of
anti-Semitism globally, and particularly among Palestinians and, to a
lesser extent, other Arabs.
The methodology is revealing. The ADL pollsters asked a series of
questions regarding Jewish power, conduct, international influence, and
loyalty to Israel. In most countries, that’s probably a reasonable
barometer of anti-Jewish sentiment, because it may indicate irrational
suspicion of Jews and fear or exaggeration of their supposed influence.
However, for Palestinians who have lived under Israeli occupation
since 1967 with no end in sight, such questions can’t and don’t mean the
same thing as they do to populations in which Jews are a minority.
It’s
absurd to ask Palestinians in the occupied territories about Jewish
power, loyalty to Israel, influence in the United States, or placing
their own ethnic interests first. After all, few Palestinians can
remember a time when Israel did not control virtually every aspect of
their lives, entirely in the interests of the Israeli military and
Jewish settlers. Jewish settlers are privileged by the Israeli state at
the expense of Palestinians in a manner that has no present-day
analogue.
What answers could one rationally expect? The ripple effects of the
occupation naturally flow throughout the Arab world. There is an
additional wrinkle: in the Arab world the word “Jew” connotes “Israeli”,
which in turn connotes the Israeli military or government.
It’s unlikely that most Palestinians being asked these questions
would imagine ordinary Jewish people and families going about their
daily business.
This is not to suggest the numbers are wrong or
that there isn’t a dreadful, central problem for the Palestinians and
Arabs to overcome. Until they do, the Palestinian ability to achieve
their national goals will be badly hamstrung.
The ADL survey is potentially misleading in at least two other ways.
It
did not, of course, measure Jewish or Israeli attitudes towards Arabs
and Muslims, which are likely to be similarly negative if the existing
survey results are any guide. Further, in many countries anti-Semitism
is part of a broader constellation of chauvinism and xenophobia. In the
West in particular, Jews and Muslims tend to be hated by precisely the
same people in precisely the same way.
In France, other European states, and even the United States, the
correlation between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia is instantaneously
obvious both in its manifest and latent rhetorical content and in the
perpetration of hate crimes directed against both communities by the
same gangs of racists. Hatred of Muslims by others globally is unlikely
to be significantly less of a problem than anti-Semitism.
Nonetheless, as Islamists have increasingly adopted classic European
anti-Semitic tropes, there’s no question that anti-Semitism has been
spreading among Arabs and Muslims. Some Arab-left nationalists, too,
spread this poison. While they don’t have much of a political
constituency, they continue to define much of the political correctness
in the Arab world, with Islamists often mimicking their fundamental
worldview.
All data suggest that hatred of Arabs and Muslims is also growing
among Jewish Israelis and their allies around the world. What we are
looking at, then, is not a
decontextualised problem or a cause of the conflict. It is undeniably a consequence of the conflict.
The Zionist movement was not formed because European Jews hated
Palestinians or Arabs. The Palestinian and Arab resistance to Zionism
was not based on anti-Semitism, but
anticolonialism, and their reaction would’ve been the same had the colonists been from Japan or Bolivia.
The most dangerous confusion surrounding the hatred between Arabs and Jews that has
arisen
over the past century is that it is a cause of the conflict and not an
effect. Indeed, supporters of Israel, especially when they want to try
to
rationalise
or justify the occupation, invariably speak in terms of a “culture of
hate” or “terrorism” among Palestinians and other Arabs, of a refusal to
accept the very concept of a Jewish state merely because of deeply
ingrained anti-Semitism.
This gesture, which is the substitution of an effect
for
a cause, is, in fact, a familiar technique of classical rhetoric, a
narrative device familiar from an ancient Greek form of metonymy known
as
metalepsis.
During the second
intifada,
at a debate at Harvard Business School, law professor Alan Dershowitz
raised the “culture of hate” canard, trying to explain why there was a
conflict without acknowledging the central, defining reality of the
occupation. I pointed out that he was cynically substituting what was
manifestly a predictable and inevitable effect of such a bitter and
prolonged conflict for one of its causes.
“I guess I’m a
metalepsist, then,” he quipped. I assured him that he was actually just an ordinary sophist.
Because
hatred between Jews and Arabs is a direct consequence of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the occupation – and not anything
deeply seated in Jewish or Arab culture or religious beliefs – the key
to ending this hate is, of course, ending the occupation and the
conflict.
Hussein Ibish is a senior fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine and blogs at www. ibishblog.com. On Twitter: @ibishblog.Hussein Ibish, PhD
Senior Fellow
American Task Force on Palestine
http://www.americantaskforce.org/Twitter: @ibishblog
Blog:
http://www.ibishblog.com/
