BRATTLEBORO — As a Jew, I have long been a proponent of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And so, in the wake of the violence in Gaza, I have watched in horror as the cycle of war continues, with no end in sight. At the same time, I am deeply distressed to watch the imagery of the Holocaust become an ever-more-virulent weapon against the Jews who survived it.
For the past several years, I have seen Israel likened to the Third Reich and accused of waging a genocidal war against the Palestinians. In the past few weeks, however, such accusations have become more numerous, more vicious, and more irrational. In New York, protesters carried signs reading "Israel: The Fourth Reich," and “Stop the Nazi Genocide in Gaza." In Chicago, the signs read "Palestinian Holocaust in Gaza Now." In Washington, a rally featured a figure of Ehud Olmert wearing a swastika and holding a dead baby.
Nor are such spectacles limited to the U.S. In London, protesters called for an end to “the final solution” in Palestine. London Mayor Ken Livingstone said that the Israelis are creating “a Warsaw Ghetto in the Middle East.” Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez opined, ”The Holocaust, that is what is happening right now in Gaza." And in a particularly vicious turn, pictures of an Israeli flag with a swastika inside the Star of David appear at rallies and on the Internet with alarming frequency.
I do not believe that every criticism of Israeli government policy is veiled anti-Semitism. Nor do I believe that anti-Zionism is always anti-Semitism by another name. But the characterization of Israelis as Nazis and the contention that the violence in Gaza is a form of genocide have led me to the conclusion that the line between criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism has finally been crossed.
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Consider the demonization of Zionism in the term “ZioNazism.”
Zionism, according to this rendering, is a racist, criminal ideology. And yet, Zionism is simply Jewish nationalism. It was conceived not by ultra-Orthodox settlers (who comprise a small minority of the Israeli population), but by idealistic, secular Jews fleeing the pogroms of Eastern Europe to seek refuge in the ancient Jewish homeland. The tragedy of the past 60 years is that Zionism has come into direct conflict with Arab nationalism.
And yet, the same people who argue against Jewish nationalism have very little to say against Arab nationalism - or against any other form of nationalism, for that matter. As Brendan O'Neill writes in The Politics of Anti-Zionism: “There is a striking double standard at work here. Again and again, Zionism, a nationalist ideology, is treated as being infinitely worse than all other forms of nationalist ideology. Yet if the anti-Zionist standard were applied universally, and all nationalistic, border-conscious projects were defined as 'racist,' then every country in Europe could be denounced as 'evil,' 'apartheid,' 'Nazi-esque'.”
Moreover, while the bloodshed in Gaza is horrific and must be dealt with on its own terms, it doesn't come remotely close to genocide - unless one seeks to empty the word of its meaning altogether. Meanwhile, true purveyors of genocide, like the Rwandan Hutus or the Janjaweed in the Sudan, have yet to be likened to Nazis. The term "Nazi," it would seem, is reserved for Jews.
The injustice becomes even more pronounced when one considers that the Israeli government does not have a policy of extermination against the Palestinian people. Given the enormous firepower of the Israeli military, if genocide were the aim, it would long since have been accomplished.
Instead, the number of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories currently stands at more than five million, nearly equal to the number of Jews in Israel. Are people in the Occupied Territories living in a state of abject poverty? Yes. Do they share the fate of the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto? No.
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And yet, the very people whose stated purpose is genocide remain immune from these invidious comparisons.
If anyone has any doubts that the mission of Hamas is to commit genocide against the five million Jews who live in the state of Israel, a simple Web search for the text of the Hamas charter should dispel such doubts once and for all. In that document, the language of anti-Zionism is indistinguishable from the enduring anti-Semitic canard that Jews are greedy, bloodthirsty, rootless members of a secret cabal that must be destroyed.
Osama Hamdan, the Hamas representative in Lebanon, said of Israel in a 2007 interview: “[The] final goal of the resistance is to wipe this entity off the face of the earth. This goal necessitates the development of the resistance until the entity has been destroyed.” Destroying Israel is not simply about ending the Jewish nature of the state. Nor is it about an orderly transfer of Jews from Israel to whatever countries might be found to take them in. It is about ending the lives of nearly half of the world's Jews. It is, indeed, about nothing less than genocide.
Given the distorted views of the conflict that find their way into mainstream newspapers, it should not be surprising that anti-Israel sentiment is steadily morphing into outright anti-Semitism. In a demonstration against the violence in Gaza, for example, the Dutch Socialist Party MP Harry Van Bommel called for a new intifada against Israel. He was silent when protesters responded by chanting, “Hamas, Hamas, all Jews to the gas.”
As Frank Furedi writes in After Gaza: What's Behind 21st Century Anti-Semitism: “Many people who should know better now keep quiet when they hear slogans like 'Kill the Jews' or 'Jews to the oven' at anti-Israel demonstrations. At a recent protest in London, such chants provoked little reaction from individuals who otherwise regard themselves as progressive anti-racists - nor did they appear to be embarrassed by the sight of a man dressed as a racist Jewish caricature, wearing a 'Jew mask' with a crooked nose while pretending to eat bloodied babies.”
In an equally chilling turn of events, Giancarlo Desiderati, a spokesman for the trade union Flaica-Cub, has begun agitating for a boycott of Jewish businesses in Rome. In a statement redolent with medieval blood libels, his union leaflets allege that anything purchased in a Jewish-owned store is “tainted by blood.”
Frank Furedi again comments: “Here, there is an almost effortless conceptual leap from criticising Israel to targeting Jews. Desiderati pointed out that his organisation had already called for a boycott of Israeli goods before taking the logical next step of demanding a boycott of Jewish shops. He said that his union was drawing up a list of Jewish shops, 'though it might be better to publish a list of streets in which a majority of the shops are Jewish and ask people to avoid those streets when shopping.'”
The anti-Semitism of this kind of activity is so clear that it leaves little room for comment.
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When we employ slogans to solve complex problems, when we divide the world into evil conquerors and innocent victims, when we forget that most people on any side of a conflict simply want to wake up in the morning and go about their lives - it is then that we have started down the wrong road and that we must turn back.
Employing Holocaust imagery to represent Jews as the Nazis of today has potentially devastating consequences for all parties to the conflict. All violence begins with words that demonize. Let us tread carefully as we seek solutions to the tragedy that daily unfolds before us. On both sides of the line that separates two beleaguered peoples, there are millions of precious lives at stake.