Wednesday, February 1, 2006
There really is lots of meat in the Engage Journal. I finished reading Shalom Lappin's piece, The Rise of a New Anti-Semitism in the UK, this morning and heartily recommend it. It's tough to pull a single quote, but here's something:
The radical uniqueness of this stance becomes apparent when one considers that no parallel movements exist for dismantling other countries, even when these were created by territorial partition in response to religio-ethnic strife, as in the case of Pakistan and India (established at the same time as Israel), or through colonial conquest and ethnic cleansing, like Australia, Canada, the United States, and most Latin American countries. The fact that, in general, the damage done to the indigenous populations of these countries remains unaddressed has not undermined their international legitimacy, which is never brought into serious question.
Anti-Zionism is also widely used in the current debate as a means of criticising the overwhelming majority of Jews who support Israel’s existence, while avoiding direct reference to Jews as such. In this context “Zionist” has been emptied of its original historical and political content, and turned into a term of abuse that is used as a rough paraphrase of expressions like “racist” and “colonialist”.
In a more sinister vein, it is employed to suggest a powerful, quasi criminal political and financial lobby working from within the Jewish Community, in league with the Unites States, to promote Israeli and Jewish interests by controlling the press and pulling levers of international power. It is in this mode that current anti-Zionism blossoms into full blown anti-Semitism...
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Perhaps, with the help of Hollywood and other factors, we've grown accustomed to looking back upon the "old" anti-Semitism in simple, binary and categorical terms. But to risk stating the obvious, even that old anti-Semitism had its sundry origins, some highly significant aspects of which being germinations in the writings and idealist categories of Kant, Hegel and others. Suggested this several months ago here, but cannot recommend Michael Mack's German Idealism and the Jew : The Inner Anti-Semitism of Philosophy and German Jewish Responses highly enough for coming to a comprehension of some basic philosophical principles in this vein and embedded in the conceptions of high-Enlightenment ideality.
Perhaps too, in looking back with presumptive, 20/20 hindsight upon those forms of brutish, genocidal anti-Semitism, the result is a superficially "knowing" comprehension of what evil, anti-Semitism, etc. represent, without coming to terms with the antecedents which informed basic intellectual, cultural and broader social/political comprehensions. That's not to say we can know, positively and definitively, or can come to any full comprehension of those factors, only to emphasize that coming to terms with the current, evolving dynamics is not at all such a simple affair. Yes, all this risks having an air of "stating the obvious" or pseudo-profundity, but suffice to emphasize that what appears unlikely or perhaps even innocent and justified in its present incarnation, in part because it does not mirror Hitler's hatreds and forms, is not at all a very substantial indicator and could even help forward something of an illusion.
A recent set of approximate indicators, reflective of this potential, is the fact that in the cases of Bosnia, Rwanda and Sudan (in the south and more recently in the west), the world in general consciously turned its back upon what was occurring, at least so in terms of corrective action**. Contrast this salient, recent, historical fact with the facile or ready assignment of guilt upon Hitler's "good Germans," many and perhaps most of whom were not at all fully conscious of the more egregious genocide which was occurring within Germany's lebensraum-enhanced borders. (Yes, this can be long debated, e.g., degrees of knowledge and guilt assessments accorded the different stratas of that society.)
** perfectly valid debates concerning "the world's policeman" not withstanding, am not suggesting simple or reductionist thinking; only that conscious, real-world decisions were in fact made
2 new things at the Engage site:
i. Jon Pike's post that you linked to yesterday has been updated to include correspondence between Ed Beck of Sholars for Peace in the Middle East and Roger Bowen, General Secretary of AAUP:
http://www.engageonline.org.uk/blog/article.php?id=213
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ii. Dr. Pike's co-editor at Engage, David Hirsh, has a post about this matter as well, with some telling quotes from some of the invitees on the pro-boycott side:
http://www.engageonline.org.uk/blog/article.php?id=216
"e" thanks for those links. BTW, I think Sue Blackwell should sue Engage for posting this picture of her: http://www.engageonline.org.uk/blog/article.php?id=207
Holy sweet Lord!!
Michael B., I'm not sure I completely follow you (though I have added that book to my wish list along with the other 100 on there :). I think you're saying that, through a sort of sepia-toned retrospective view, we've been left with an awfully simplistic view of anti-semitism, when the fact is that it not only is, but always has come from a confluence of factors and manifests and manifested itself in many different, nuanced ways.
Re. Sue Blacwell. It's as though she's literally been disfigured by hate. Usually, the image of disfigurement is just meant as a metaphor (e.g., "so and so's argument is disfigured by x or y.") In Blackwell's case, though, it makes me wonder whether the Greeks (don't ask me which particular ones--I don't remember :-))might have been right to suggest connections between beauty and virtue..and ugliness and vice.
Their argument is okay but it implies that the Palestinians are the indigenous people, which they aren't. The ethnic cleansing was of Jews, by Christians and Muslims.
You think Sue should sue Engage for posting that picture? Believe me, she looks quite pretty on it, compared to the other photos of the meeting we got!
If by "pretty," you mean "looks similar to the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal," then yes, I would say she looks quite "pretty." Aside from that, I'd hate to see the other pictures you had. I lose enough sleep as it is.
Well, in part, though I now see I was attempting to say too much in too brief a space and ended up doing more ad hoc scribbling than lending clarity. Need to tackle this offline. Sorry about that.