-Caveat Lector-
When vigilance undermines freedom of speech
By Mark Mazower
Published: April 3 2006 20:28
A recent analysis of the pro-Israel lobby in America has
generated considerable criticism and debate. In their article, published
last month in the London Review of Books, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt,
two highly respected scholars, argued that it is the lobbys success rather
than any special convergence of national interests that explains the extent
of American support for Israel. What is striking is less the substance of
their argument than the outraged reaction: to all intents and purposes,
discussing the US-Israel special relationship still remains taboo in the US
media mainstream.
While leading newspapers have remained silent, the response
elsewhere has been swift. Some critics have charged errors of fact. Others
have condemned the authors for taking lobbyists boasts at face value,
saying they exaggerate their strength, unity and impact. And as the authors
themselves predicted, the incendiary accusation of anti-semitism has been
lobbed their way too: the Anti-Defamation League, for example, has denounced
what it terms a classical [sic], conspiratorial anti-semitic analysis.
Whatever one thinks of the merits of the piece itself, it would seem all but
impossible to have a sensible public discussion in the US today about the
countrys relationship with Israel. The reasons for, and high costs of, this
problem warrant further consideration.
If fear of being tarred as an anti-semite and there is no more
toxic charge in American politics blocks the way, what anti-semitism
actually implies in todays America is increasingly unclear. Over the past
century, secularisation, wealth and prestige have bolstered the place of
American Jewry in national life. Polls suggest that seriously anti-semitic
views are now found only among a small minority of Americans. Yet, fear of
anti-semitism has not vanished. Where once it was suspected and often
found in the workplace and the domestic political arena, it is now
expressed in terms of sensitivity towards criticism of the Jewish state.
Often ambivalent about the methods of lobby groups such as the American
Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), American Jews generally share the
committees ultimate goal of maintaining a high level of US support for
Israel. As Earl Raab, the veteran commentator, has noted, there is a sense
that if America abandons Israel, it also may be in some way abandoning
American Jewry itself. In the process, the line between anti-semitism and
criticism of Israeli policy has become blurred. Defending what Bernard
Rosenblatt, the distinguished interwar Zionist, predicted would be the
Little America in the East is seen by many as synonymous with defending
Jews as a whole.
A striking illustration of this occurred in the run-up to the
2004 US presidential elections. At that time Congress passed the Global
Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, in spite of strong objections from the State
Department. The foreign service did not see why any one form of
discrimination should be singled out for official US concern. It was equally
troubled by the Acts language, which asserts that strong anti-Israel
sentiment or indeed Muslim opposition to developments in Israel and the
occupied territories should count as evidence of anti-semitic attitudes. At
one level, Congress was connecting with a diplomatic strategy of the Sharon
government that sought to highlight anti-semitism as a way of deflecting
criticism of its policies in the occupied territories. But behind the
lobbying lie deeper semantic shifts in mainstream American discourse. To be
a Zionist is unproblematic in political terms, but to declare oneself an
anti-Zionist is to become vulnerable to the charge of anti-semitism. I have
even heard a student impute the same bias to a professor for referring to
Palestine rather than Israel in a lecture on the eastern Mediterranean
under Roman rule: it was as though any reference to Palestine, especially
when not accompanied by a reference to Israel, was troubling.
Most sensible people of course recognise that opposition to
Israeli policies is quite different from anti-semitism. For those who think
they are linked, it has proved hard to fix the precise boundary between the
two. The Global Anti-Semitism Act talks about a line separating the latter
from objective criticism of Israel but does not spell out where this line
lies. Lawrence Summers, former president of Harvard University, castigated
profoundly anti-Israel views for being anti-semitic in their effect if
not their intent. Others refer to disproportionate criticism and
vilification. But none of these terms are self-evident in their application.
Because the costs of stepping over the line are high, the result is that
debate is put under surveillance and inhibited. I came to appreciate that
this may cause serious damage to life in the classroom and to pedagogy as a
whole when I served on a faculty committee looking into such matters last
year.
Intellectual discussion has thereby been constrained too. To
take an extreme but pertinent example: any comparison of Israel and the
Third Reich is generally denounced by the organisations that pronounce on
these issues. It is not hard to see why. Offensive to many Jewish survivors
of the camps, the comparison with the paradigmatic criminal state of the
modern world is often made as a means of ruling out the Israeli states
right to exist. Nevertheless, German and Jewish nationalists like many
others in the 20th century sought to nationalise land through a
combination of colonial settlement and conquest. It happens that the two
shaped many of their colonisation policies in reaction to the very same
historical experience the earlier German anti-Polish land campaigns of the
1890s. They differed substantially in how they saw this precedent, of
course, as in their policies and treatment of those already on the land. But
precisely because comparisons can bring out these differences, there seems
no reason to allow political correctness to trump scholarly enquiry.
Vigilance can be carried too far. Having denounced American
academics for supposedly making anti-semitic statements, the Anti-Defamation
League last year levelled a similar charge at faculty in the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem. There is something peculiarly Kafkaesque about the
idea of an American Jewish watchdog monitoring Israel for anti-semitism, yet
once the mechanism and mindset exist, this is where the logic of vigilance
leads: anti-semitism may be found anywhere. In fact, the intellectual
climate in Israel is tougher-minded than in the US and the authorities at
the Hebrew University simply took no notice. But brandishing the big stick
of anti-semitism against all and sundry helps no one: it lumps together
serious critique with crackpot ravings, does a signal disservice to those
who really suffered from it in the past and stifles a badly needed debate
within the US. There is no reason why the partnership between the US and
Israel should not be susceptible to the same kind of cost-benefit analysis
as any other area of policy. After all, no special relationship lasts
forever: ask the Brits.
The writer is professor of history at Columbia University and
author of Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430-1950
(Knopf)
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