Marxist-Leninism did it.
These times, following but also before the Oct. 7th, 2023 massacre of Israelis in southern Israel, show the worst anti-Semitism since when the German guards left the concentration camps because of the approaching Soviets, Americans and Brits, which was in early 1945, when I was four years old, born and being bred in New York City because my mother and a sister had left Poland for America in May, 1939 and so were not exterminated as were her other brothers and sisters and brethren. I want to untangle the various forms of anti-Semitism and particularly the version of it currently in vogue, never mind that anti-Semitism is a persistent matter some 2500 years old.
What might be called “Christian anti-Semitism” is grounded in the idea that Jews killed Chtist, and the New Testament text suggests they were implicated but when my wife was a little girl and accused of killing Christ, she reasonably offered that she had never met the man, and so wasn’t responsible, which should have ended the matter but didn’t. It took Vatican II, in the early Sixties, to regard Jews, like all other believers, as people who had been religiously enlightened and so Jews were no longer in the anomalous situation of those left over after their religious work was done and so should have converted or otherwise disappeared. Social anti-Semitism is a different species, often found in England in the Nineteenth Century. These anti-Semites did not want to eliminate Jews, just finding them reprehensible for being so uncouth, so money grubbing, but Jews soon enough assimilated into society as people who climbed into money and position and good manners without losing their ethnic identities, and so different from the peasant folk of numerous nations who blended into European nation states, except to dress up in native costumes by way of nostalgia or became wards of the state, like Australian Aborigines or American Indians. Jews were both in the modern world and still distinctive in accent and rituals and a sense of commonality. So social anti-Semitism lasted or persisted while the other than religious or ethnic affiliations had or have disappeared, and that happened for Jews in the United States by, let us say, the 1950’s or 1960’s, simply regarded as white.
A third kind of anti-Semitism is Darwinian in that ethnic groups are thought to be in competition while others think that the key issues for conflict are matters of class and culture. German intellectuals were able to elaborate race as the basis for the war behind all wars and regard Jews as a nonproductive parasitic race to be eliminated so it would not stain the gene pool. That view was discredited by the triumph of the Allies in World War II but surfaces itself, for example, in Charlottesville, Virginia where marchers said they would not be replaced, which meant whites replaced by Blacks at the urging of malicious minded Jews. Mind you, it was an intellectual movement rather than a social upheaval which inspired anti-Semitism.
Another ideology, Marxist-Leninism, is what inspires contemporary anti-Semitism, even though their adherents do not regard themselves as ant-Semitic, only anti-Zionist, and which are really just the folklore of an ideology in that people have not consulted the basic texts, but where the ideas burble up, so successful has been that ideology however much Marxist-Leninism is defunct as a social movement or a national ideology, those Communist regimes replaced by old fashioned authoritarian regimes like China and Russia. Lenin argued that imperialism was the result of capitalism. That meant that the European states expanded their control over the rest of the world so as to exploit the mineral deposits and the human resources of the local peoples so as to gain extreme economic advantage. That idea is extended to Israel, which is a western outpost that exploits its local Arab peoples by appropriating their lands and enclosing them in bare subsistence conditions so that the Israelis can flourish. The Israelis are the conquerors and the Arabs are their subjects. The Jewish angle plays its part because Marx, in his “A World Without Jews”, said that the Jews were the epitome of capitalism, engaged in that domination of the working class and according to Lenin, the subservient ones who are the peoples of the undeveloped nations, and so would be overthrown when capitalism was overthrown. That means that Hamas is on the right side however are its atrocities on Oct. 7th, because the exploited and virtually incarcerated Palestinians need to get some relief from their oppression, and so get rid of their Israeli oppressors. As the Harvard statement on Oct. 9th put it, they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence…Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum. For the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open air prison…The apartheid regime is the only one to blame.” Jewish friends I know sympathize with the Palestinian cause on the grounds that those Palestinians are suffering because a Western country has been imposed upon them. Apartheid was an invention of originally European whites. Never mind the merits or the morals of Oct. 7th. The rich, which are the Israelis, must be exploiting the poor, who are the Palestinians.
I would expect that Harvard students were learned enough to consider other than Marxist Leninism explanations for war other than what seems the inevitable warfare between the poor and the rich. One explanation is the political science approach which looks at the dynamics of the nation state. The European nations engaged in Eighteenth and Nineteenth century colonialism not to exploit foreign resources. In fact, the European nations, with the exception of Belgium, spent more money conquering and maintaining colonial control than they made from their conquests, as those sums were added up by Barrington Moorte, Jr. in his 1972 study “Reflections on the Causes of Human Misery”. Rather, colonialism was a patriotic enterprise, out to glorify the various homelands, whatever its costs and, later on, to get the support of the new voters who would be won over by an imperialist regime. This effort was similar to what occurred in the Space Race where the USSR and the United States vied for symbolic dominance by racing to the Moon, three being no economic advantages to doing so, but seemingly worth the expense. Israel was created as a Western ideal, to normalize Jewish status by having its own nation, a nation state for its own people like France or Germany. The Palestinians were an afterthought or a nuisance, arrivals into geographical Palestine at about the same time from the Sinai Peninsula just when the Zionists, in the earlier Twentieth Century, were also entering geographical Palestine, though the Jews had remain There has been continuous sporadic violence and atrocities on both sides since the 1920’s. So the Israel-Palestine conflict is long and deep, divided by ethnicity and also by Israel inventing a European nation, a hospital, a university and a symphony orchestra created decades before Israel was recognized as a state.ed in continuous settlement in that region, even if sparsely, for three thousand years. Who has prior claim to that territory or is that an irrelevant point, as is the declaration by Arafat, after the ‘67 war, that the Palestinians were an independent people rather than just Arabs living in that area and so should be treated as a nation?
Another theory to explain the animosity between the Israelis and the Palestinians is offered by Samuel Huntington, the political scientist in vogue in the 1970’s, who argued that warfare was a result of the conflict of civilizations, a Conservative idea rejected by Liberals because wars were necessary and that the side to win was the one of the more advanced civilization. That made sense in that Germany under Hitlerism had regressed in the early Twentieth Century, from becoming an advanced nation to a particularly retrograde one, but the idea of comparing nations on their progressivism is not appealing to those who do not want to regard as backward the African nations that had not gone beyond paganism and tribalism or the Arab nation that did not create states until a generation after the First World War but were, as Ibn Khaldun said in the Fourteenth Century, just a larger and larger coagulation of family and kinship ties rather than an independent entity known as the nation state which, for some reason, developed in Europe after the fall of Rome. Moreover, like Russia, Arab and sub-Saharan people never underwent the Renaissance or the Reformation or the Enlightenment, industrialism and other forms of modernization brought to the Arab and sub-Saharan world by Europeans. By those lights, the Arab nations are Johnny-come-lately, emerging in recent years as states out to develop their economic well being and diversify their economic base beyond oil production, and so more akin to the Israelis than to the Palestinians, whose aim is to erase Israel rather than to become prosperous.
Many Black congresspeople support a ceasefire in Gaza even though that would allow HJamas to regroup and therefore be minimally scathed for its Oct. 7th attack and then allow Hamas to prepare for the next attack on Israel, maybe because Palestinians have darker skin than do Israelis and so are inevitably considered the oppressed. These congresspeople do not consider themselves as anti-Semites, just opposed to Zionism. The current call for a ceasefire is based on only humanitarian grounds. It is disproportionate to kill so many Gaza civilians even if the Oct. 7th events are regrettable. I wonder what proportionality means. I prefer a different standard that applies to Gaza, which is “necessity”. Hamas wants to eliminate the Jews in the Near East. That is different from shifting Alsace Lorraine from French to German domination and that back again. It is more like the threat of Germany to Great Britain, whose institutions of democracy and civil liberties would have been destroyed if Hitler took London. How many Germans had to be killed to secure the British way of life? Is Hamas making an idle threat? Its own charter says otherwise and wisdom suggests that if people threaten genocide, believe they mean it. How disproportionate was the use of atomic bombs over Japan? It saved a hundred thousand dead American soldiers if it had been necessary to invade Japan. The idea of proportionality is just an excuse to protect the aggressive force.
Jews, as a rule, prefer to suppress pogroms and other atrocities addressed to them on the ground that the aggressors will calm down rather than get even more agitated. Polish Jews at the onset of World War II asked what the Germans could do. It was not credible to think they would kill all the Jews and so compromises had to be made. American Jews prefer to be judged individually rather than on their category, on the quality of their individual characters rather than their race. African Americans, to the contrary, act collectively to point out the injustices inflicted upon them, microaggressions treated as part of the deep river of animosity against them, rather than an annoyance that will pass over time. The difference between Jews and Blacks goes very deep. Quotas were a way to keep Jews out while quotas were a way to let Blacks in. A colleague of mine told the President of our college not to engage in the harmless pastime of culling a list of Jewish faculty members so as to send greetings on the High Holidays. Jews are sensitive to lists of Jews collected even for trivial or well meaning reasons.
And so American and other Jews are embarrassed and scandalized that Jews in the form of Israelis become the focus of their own distress, not just now but ever since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Better to have been assimilated into Reform Judaism, which as a religion appealing to universal principles, and so not needing a homeland. Worry about India or Kenya or Ukraine, not the plight of Jews. What is remarkable about Israelis is that they consider themselves a first class nation with all the prerogatives of nationhood, which includes vigorous self defense even if others might prefer Israelis to just accept that every once in a while they will be massacred, that their lot. The question is whether the rest of the world recognizes only that second class nationhood. And so Biden is caught in the dilemma of most recent American Presidents: to defend Israel to do what it must, but nicely, until domestic political pressures force the American President to cease and desist Israel's wars against its enemies. It is only a question of time.
Cut to the chase. What is to be done with the Palestinians, assuming that the United States will allow Israel to rid Gaza of Hamas? As Jefferson said, individuals have rights, but nations have only explanations for why they go to war to make a nation independent. Palestinians have the right as individuals to live and prosper. Having a nation is not a right but an accommodation as a result of a war or to be rid of as a pest. I think the idea of a two state solution is to be revived if for no other reason that Israel’s eternal vigilance can occasionally lapse and so have atrocities inflicted on it. Moreover, the Arab nations don't want the Palestinians and the Palestinians want to stay on their land. A compromise would be Clinton’s 2000 offer that Arafat rejected: a contiguous West Bank, outlier Israeli settlers vacating their land, and tunnels connecting the West Bank to Gaza, all under the Palestinian Authority, but Palestine having no army or airport, while religious Israelis giving up their claim to Judea and Samaria. A bitter dose for both sides but managable.