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Canary in the Coal Mine, or You Could Be Next
After the last attacks on Israel by Hamas, the canards began to escalate against Israelis once more: they stole the land, they abuse the Palestinians—well, the list goes on. In recent months there has also been discussion on this site about whether anti-Semitic attacks in this country are increasing or not, whether the concern was being exaggerated or should be seriously addressed.
I’ve decided to take a different approach to the “Jewish question.” From my perspective, there are three types of attacks on Jews that have a great deal to teach us and serve as a warning: (1) the relevance of the merging of anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist thought in these times; (2) the subtlety of criticisms of Jews, and how Jews are adding credence to these statements, (3) the lessons that need to be learned from the current situation by Jews and non-Jews alike.
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So many of the arguments denying that anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are the same are misleading, are lies, or are trying to use current politics to attack both mindsets. I would prefer to use long-standing tropes that try to justify attacking Israel with lies and deceptions as a means to separate out the two ideas.
First, those who deny the connection say that Jews invaded Israel and essentially kicked out the Palestinians. Anyone who has studied Jewish history knows these statements are not true. The Jews have lived in that part of the world for thousands of years, and although their population decreased, they were continuously resident. The Jews repeatedly made efforts to engage the Arabs in the region, but they refused.
Second, People think that Israelis believe that criticism about them is anti-Semitic. The problem arises when the media either ignores the actions of non-Israelis in the country or distorts the information about Israel.
Third, Israel is an apartheid state. This is an illegitimate claim. The term “apartheid” was used to describe South Africa: apartheid dictated where South Africans, on the basis of their race, could live and work, the type of education they could receive, and whether they could vote. None of these restrictions apply to Arabs in Israel. Arabs can live in Israel, have full access to schools (although more needs to be done to improve education for Arabs), live in mixed Israeli and Arab communities, and the Arabs can vote.
Israel has been condemned by the United Nations more than any other nation in the world. When one considers the atrocities and repression committed all over the globe just in recent years, one only needs to look at Syria, Rwanda, Cuba, Myanmar, South Sudan, Congo and Darfur. Let’s not forget China.
There are many other claims about the legitimacy of Israel, and as long as arguments of legitimacy are used as a cudgel, the legitimacy of the anti-Zionist argument becomes moot. It is part and parcel of the anti-Semitic rhetoric
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The reason I became convinced of the merging of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism was that a definition of the former is precisely the same for the latter. Bret Stephens (whether you like him as a Conservative or not), in a panel discussion with Bari Weiss (see below), defined anti-Semitism not just as racist (technically, Judaism is not a race), but in this way:
It is a conspiracy theory which holds that Jews are imposters and swindlers. If you look at the 19th century, they were considered to be imposters: they were ‘trying to be’ Germans and French, and they were ‘stealing the wealth’ of those countries”; anti-Zionism is the same.
Contemplate that definition for a moment. The definition held true in Europe, and it holds true today in Israel—and might be emerging in our own country.
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It’s helpful to remember that many bigotries against Jews were encoded in law in European countries; gradually some restrictions were removed, and Jews appeared to assimilate successfully in almost every country where they lived. But the assimilation was misleading. Jews were repeatedly expelled from countries. Just under the surface, and sometimes even blatantly, Jewish hatred reared its ugly head. Some opportunities were considered unwise to pursue by both Jews and non-Jews, whether in commerce or government; Jews were concerned about being perceived as seeking to live above their station and to rekindle the hatred toward the Jewish community. And then we endeavored to survive the wreckage and destruction of World War II.
Today, only a few people unashamedly publicly attack the Jew. We see these attacks by our own government representatives. Some people are wise enough to do it in the absence of Jewish company. There may be enough people in this country who would speak out against anti-Semitic remarks. The people who are the most tolerant of anti-Semitic rhetoric: the Jews themselves. They have lulled themselves into a sense of safety and wellbeing; after all, it’s not like they wear strange clothes or mumble in Yiddish around their friends. Anti-Semitic jokes can be brushed off or ignored. Jews take off time for the same holidays as everyone else; they eat the same foods as their secular friends. In effect, they are barely Jewish. So when they find themselves in the position of having to defend Jews, or worse yet, Israel, they put on their Progressive hats so they can blend into the crowd. They take pride in the fact that they are no different than anyone else, and as Jews have done through the centuries, they fight for the underdog—the other. One has to ask in all seriousness, who is the underdog in Israel, and how is that defined?
* * * *
So, where do I find myself in this discussion? If it’s possible, I’m more zealous than ever in my support for Jews all over the world, and especially for the state of Israel. I’m not going to make apologies for my stance. I am critical of Israel when it does foolish things, but I will attack the lies, too, like these:
Palestinian land (despite the fact that Israel vacated the territory from which it was subsequently attacked) and wanton violence against Palestinian civilians, particularly children (despite the fact that Israel regularly warned its targets to vacate buildings before targeting them) — can’t help but make me think of ancient libels about Jewish greed and bloodlust.
—or vociferously:
For example, when you hear that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, which it of course manifestly is not, you are abusing that word and trafficking in a classic anti-Semitic trope, suggesting that the Jewish people have a particular kind of bloodlust. Or if you say that Israel or Israeli leaders have hypnotized the world to get them to do their bidding, that again, goes back to an old anti-Semitic trope.
* * * *
If you’re not Jewish, why should you be concerned? Because in this country, it isn’t the Jews who have a bloodlust; it is the Progressive party. And it is against anyone who doesn’t adopt their program and its propaganda. I’m suggesting that the Jews are not the only ones in the sights of Jew-haters; they are just the canary in the coal mine. If you’re Christian, a gun owner, a Conservative, a cop or former military, get ready.
You could be next.
The one-hour panel on The Mainstreaming of Anti-Semitism: How Should We Respond, particularly the first nine minutes
.
Published in Foreign Policy
The vast majority of these people who disappeared between 1947 and 1948 were Arabs who joined forces with the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, to fight against the Jews. They were not allowed to re-enter the country after the war. Do you feel this was unjust?
And what is wrong with Jewish immigration? It is entirely peaceful. I’m not even sure what your point is dwelling on this so much. Besides, the surrounding Arab countries forcibly kicked out almost their entire Jewish populations after the 1948 war. Where did you expect 750,000 Jewish refugees to go?
I take exception to your assertion that the Palestinians were “kicked out.” They left on their own accord to take up arms against Israel. You seem to be trying to show that pure demographic numbers can demonstrate nefarious actions by Israel. However, numbers by themselves are meaningless without giving the reasons why those numbers have changed.
The most glaringly obvious example of the canary in the coal mine is World War II. The canaries were the retarded and disabled people of Germany – the most vulnerable segment of the population that would be missed the least. The Jews were second in line. Following the Jews came (the order of which I am uncertain) Gypsies, non-Jewish Poles, Homosexuals, Serbs, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Russian prisoners. The Nazis only got through a small portion of the “inferior races” in the four years they had to operate, but Hitler had a particular dislike for Slavs, and surely would have carried out an even more massive extermination if he could have conquered Russia. Blacks would have eventually been on the list, but the Krauts were too busy dealing with Europe, the Russkies, and the Yankees.
The point may be that Jews weren’t really “special” they were just higher on the list.
They were still pretty high on the list. Hitler spent many years denouncing them and persecuting them before the “final solution.” He went out of his way to find them in the surrounding countries.
IIRC, in 2019 Andrew Nagorski published a book about 1941, The Year Germany Lost the War. His premise is solid and he defends it well: Hitler made three huge unforced errors, gambles that eventually cost him everything: attacking the USSR on June 22, expecting to have conquered it before winter set in; declaring war on the USA in accordance with a Nazi treaty with Japan, laughably legalistic on the part of someone who’d already broken countless deals; and opening the third war front, the internal one of stepping up full scale warfare against Europe’s Jews. Of course Nagorski doesn’t ignore the human and moral outrage of what happened; but he’s coldly accurate in assessing what a strategic mistake it was to tie up troops, police, and truck and rail transportation all across the occupied zone, moving millions of prisoners at the moment he should have been moving millions of troops. That’s blind obsession; obsession with the Jews. So far as we know, Hitler never considered his other targets for extermination as being potential world manipulators like, well, you-know-who.
From wiki:
That’s quite disputed, for example by Ilan Pappe in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. From a review in The Guardian:
So there’s that.
The Geneva Conventions would say that refusing to allow refugees to return to their homes is not only unjust but a war crime. The ICRC helpfully summarises:
You folks were busy last night while I slept! So here are my responses and observations:
No, @zafar, I don’t think you are an anti-Semite. I think you are the exception who proves the rule. Let me explain my conclusion. First, you have always been polite in our discussions; if anyone has been rude, it’s been me. But I also decided a long time ago that I would limit my debates with you because, although your arguments are cogent and data-based, we work from completely different approaches and sources for the questions. As you know, I usually ask that we end a particular discussion, and you always politely comply. More often than not, we don’t reach agreement, but we are always thoughtful in our debates.
Another reason is because you have proven over and over that you respect me as a person. You have always been supportive in those times where I’ve had posts reflecting personal struggles or celebrations. You often comment and “like” things I’ve written. In other words, I believe we have a trusting relationship, and I think we have both worked hard to earn it. You didn’t even cross my mind when I wrote my post. I can see why you took it personally and I’m sorry.
So for those of you who debate Zafar, be advised that he is smart and backs up his arguments. You are welcome to debate him on this thread, but I will bow out. (I’m not feeling well today, so that is partly my excuse.) As always, I will closely follow the thread.
It’s always been confusing to me when you say technically being Jewish is not a race. I can see that in some respects, as many who were not born Jewish, but convert, the same as Muslim, Christian, etc. But for the sake of understanding, it does become revealed in DNA tests if someone is of Jewish heritage, and I think it is considered a race to be checked off on applications where they ask that question. In the Bible (Old Testament), the land of Israel is given to the Jews by God – it’s spelled out. There is more there than just a religious practice, but includes a lineage, and when the Jews were scattered across the world (as the Bible also states), Israel still belonged to the Jews. God made a covenant with Abraham, and even the space is mapped out in cubits. A covenant is a concrete promise that cannot be broken, and who wants to argue with God?
The world came together in 1947 and declared that the Jews should have their homeland. Why did they pick Israel and not Cypress, or somewhere in Argentina? Because the archeological history and documented recordings going back four thousand years points specifically to Israel. It seems a non-argument. Susan is right when she says that many (presidents and leaders) have come and gone offering to work it out with the Palestinians, but nothing was ever good enough. They came close, but Arafat always walked away. Because they don’t want peace and have stated so.
On another note – a question to Susan: Why are so many Jews not politically in support of their heritage and homeland, but tend to be very liberal and non-practicing? It seems the same for Christians who are very liberal and non-practicing – it seems to lead eventually down a rabbit hole. You may have worldly success, but its hollow and opens you up to all kinds of trouble.
Jews have been very successful and I think it is because of all they have suffered, and they believe that through service, the world will leave them alone, which it never does. God states in many parts of the Bible that Israel is the apple of His eye, His chosen people. That in no way implies that they are above others, but it is through the Jews that He has communicated – His manual for mankind and although we have free will, if we choose wrongly, there are consequences. It is a burden on the Jews, but they are the mirror to the world. As a Christian, we believe God chose to become human through the Jewish lineage and reveal Himself again.
As @unsk said, “first they came for the Jews”……is the whole nutshell and the world is burning while we fiddle.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment, FSC. I think you are confusing ethnicity with race. Jews are all over the world, of every race, so they don’t necessarily have race in common. I think part of the confusion comes from the way we have distorted the meaning of race in recent years.
A couple of things. First, Jews have almost always been politically active to help the underdog. Although it’s not necessarily true, the Democrats have supposedly spoken for the underdog. With the inroads of Progressivism and FDR, then the Great Society–well, that’s the direction they went. Meanwhile, many Jews (including me) didn’t connect with the spirit part of Judaism, and found the rules oppressive. And I think with that went the appreciation of morality and ethics. Plus the increase in intermarriage and the desire to assimilate. You’ll find that many–not all–Orthodox Jews are Conservative, because they see the link between their faith and everyday life.
There are Jews who are returning to Orthodoxy–I’ve certainly started to practice more in a very limited way–but without a sincere commitment to faith and G-d, it’s tough. Thanks for asking.
Good points – yes, on different forms they specify race/ethnicity – that would be different. I can’t recall where else that would apply? We know that without a sincere commitment to faith and God, it opens the door to so much – not in a good way. Men’s hearts have grown cold.
Yes, in the case of Spain, it was first the crypto-Saturday people and then the crypto-Friday people. Both Jews and Muslims tend to focus on the ones who were expelled from the Iberian peninsula and kept, or regained, their connections to their ancestral religions. Particularly in remote areas of Spain, the presence of people of Converso (converted descendants of Jews) families who transmitted some knowledge of Jewish origins and vestigial practices; a full Jewish communal life was not possible under the Inquisition. I would be very surprised if the same were not true for those of Morisco descent.
That said, history suggests that a large number of the conversions were successful and led, a few generations later, to normative Catholic practice. Don’t forget that many of the pagan, Zoroastrian, and Jewish inhabitants of the Mediterranean basin converted to Christianity, and that many of their descendants then converted to Islam. In addition to more civilized missionary activity, both Christianity and Islam for many years used a carrot and sword approach to proselytization.
The population data is more complicated than that, due in part to the difficulty of correlating modern datasets with Ottoman and Mandatory borders.
That aside, it’s pretty fair to say that there was a substantial population exchange between the Muslim world and Israel beginning in 1948. Of that 1.1 million Jewish immigrants a majority were from the Arab world; they left substantial assets behind as they fled for their lives.
In a New Republic article covering that and two other Ilan Pappe works, historian Benny Morris led off like this:
Morris provides a number of detailed examples. After laying out evidence for them he draws his conclusions. Such as:
Morris also calls Pappe out for failing to utilize available primary sources. And:
In a New Republic article covering that and two other Ilan Pappe works, historian Benny Morris led off like this:
Morris provides a number of detailed examples. After laying out evidence for them he draws his conclusions. Such as:
Morris also calls Pappe out for failing to utilize available primary sources. And:
I’m not very familiar with details of the Arab exodus from Israel during the 1948 war enough to comment on Pappe’s writings, though Ontheleftcoast provided a rebuttal. I do know that the Arabs that stayed in Israel were treated as equal Israeli citizens, in fact more equal, because they are exempted from the mandatory 2-year military service that all Jewish Israelis are subject to.
That may be so in the Geneva Convention, but I think they are talking about refugees, not actual military combatants. It is contended by Israel that the Arabs who left, did so to join the armies of the countries trying to destroy Israel, with the promise of great spoils in victory. If they were allowed back into Israel I would think they could be charged as traitors, who would be executed by most countries. We have recent examples in the U.S. Scores of Americans have been captured abroad while fighting with terrorist forces against the U.S. The most famous one was probably John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban. He was released a couple years ago after serving 17 years of a twenty-year sentence.
Deleted
Dang.
Okay.
Right-wing disinformation in the guise of satire
courtesy of The Babylon Bee
Oh I thought it was something new. :-)
@susanquinn – that’s one of the nicest things that anyone has said to me. Thank you, and I will endeavour to live up to it.
About Ilan Pappe, perhaps.
About ethnic cleansing in Palestine? He also thinks it took place, though he doesn’t disapprove.
Baruch Kimmerling, of Hebrew University, has written a piece on Morris, from which:
Additionally:
The Palestinians that remained in Israel lived under martial law until 1966 – almost 20 years.
From Baruch Kemmerling’s article:
That may be so in the Geneva Convention, but I think they are talking about refugees, not actual military combatants.
Maybe they didn’t all actually come back as soldiers, but if that was their intent when they left, which part is more important?
(Original Caption) Large bundles of personal possessions are carried on the head of Arab women and children begin a three mile hike through no man’s land to the Arab lines in Tulkarim. They were brought by truck to this point from a non combat Arab village near Haifa. Safe conduct was provided by the International Red Cross during this movement which took place after the current truce went into effect.
I cannot possibly exaggerate how much I like this post. Well done.
That may be so in the Geneva Convention, but I think they are talking about refugees, not actual military combatants.
Well, certainly not all Arabs who fled Israel in 1948 were military combatants. Many were simply family members of such combatants and probably many just wanted to get the heck out of there. The attacking Arab countries promised the Israeli Arabs that if they fled, they would be rewarded with the spoils of war after the Jews were either driven our or exterminated.
Given that the general Arab cultural position then (and in some cases now) was the genocidal extermination of the Jewish population, it would have been quite impossible for Israel to weed out the Arabs who left for traitorous reasons as opposed to the ones who left for more benign reasons. They would had to have vetted a number of Arabs that was greater than Israel’s own population at the time. They literally couldn’t have functioned as a country with such a task, not to mentioned they would probably have been slaughtered in short order by the returning Arab masses.
Geneva convention rules may be fine for most situations, but this one would have destroyed Israel before they could finish singing “Hatikvah.”
Apparently that’s not true. Hasbara.
???
How do you know the general Arab cultural position then or now?
Are you saying that Israel could not be created as a Jewish and Democratic State without ethnic cleansing of the Arabs?
That’s basically admitting that Israel couldn’t be created without committing war crimes.
Maybe that’s a problem with rather loose and expansive definitions of “war crimes.” If expelling people who would do you harm is a “war crime” then the definition needs improvement.