Blaming the Jews. Bernard Harrison
offers to its supporters and disseminators some political or cultural advantage sufficiently important to offset its essential absurdity. We need at the very least to ask ourselves, as we shall do in chapters 4 and 5, what that role might be: to attempt at least, that is, to understand political antisemitism in terms of what one might term its cultural functions. We need also to ask why such an extraordinary and grandiose tissue of delusions should have attached itself in the first place to, of all people, the Jews: a small, immensely useful but demonstrably disorganized and largely powerless tribe. In the same vein, we need to ask ourselves why and how a system of manifestly delusive beliefs should have come to influence over many centuries the minds of a long list of major European intellectuals, from Voltaire to George Bernard Shaw, and from Luther to T. S. Eliot. That last question is really too vast for a book of this nature. Preliminary sketches toward an answer will be found, however, in chapters 4, 5, 10, and 11–13.
In conclusion, several further consequences of distinguishing clearly between social and political antisemitism deserve our attention.
Earlier in the chapter, in “Problems of Intention,” we noted that to define antisemitism reasonably enough as unwarranted hostility to Jews because they are Jews creates problems when it comes to identifying acts or discourse as antisemitic. It does so because, as we observed there, it seems to make the issue of whether what someone says or does is antisemitic dependent on that person’s intentions or motives in saying or doing it: that is, upon questions concerning whose truth or falsity the speaker or actor himself may be said to have the determining voice. What we need to note at this point is that while this remains true of social antisemitism, where what is ultimately at stake is the existence of personal feelings of animosity, it is not true of political antisemitism. In the latter case, what makes someone an antisemite is not his or her feelings or private inward disposition toward Jews but public participation in a cultural formation involving the originating or diffusing of material in the form of slogans, pamphlets, posters, demonstrations, newspaper articles, and so on, the antisemitic character of which is readily discernible from its content. What made Julius Streicher’s newspaper Der Stürmer antisemitic and its editor an antisemite, that is to say, is not the character of Streicher’s consciousness or his feelings toward Jews but the evident manner in which the content of the paper served to recapitulate, embroider, and reinforce the familiar tropes and doctrines of political antisemitism.
This means in turn, as we shall see in the chapters 6–9, that drawing a clear distinction between social and political antisemitism becomes crucial when it comes to determining whether opposition to Israel is to be construed as legitimate political criticism or antisemitic defamation. In dealing with the forest of vexed questions that arise at that point, the best guide available to date is perhaps Natan Sharansky’s 3-D Test29 for distinguishing between mere criticism of Israel and antisemitism. This was originally floated by Sharansky in a short piece in the Jerusalem Post30 but has since become extremely influential. According to Sharansky, antisemitic hostility toward Israel is distinguished by the employment of three techniques: demonization, double standards, and delegitimization.
The increasing frequency of occurrence of all three techniques, since the late 1960s, in public debate concerning Israel in the West, is undeniable. The reasons why this should be so are unclear, given their relative absence from critical debate concerning other nations—China, North Korea, Iran, Syria, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, say—whose political condition might, on the face of it, be expected to provoke, if anything, more stringent kinds of political critique from a left-wing standpoint than Israel.
I suggest that both the relative absence of Sharansky’s three Ds from other debates and their relative frequency in debate concerning Israel are explicable as a consequence of the gradual penetration of that debate by a revived version of political antisemitism. “Demonization”—the attribution to Israel of a level of political savagery, contempt for human rights, and so forth, in excess of that of which any other nation on earth can supposedly be accused—revives in a new but still wholly chimerical form the ancient belief in the Jewish community’s absolute commitment to evil. Double standards are a necessary accessory to any attempt to advance the vision of Israel as a “demonic” nation, because that claim cannot, as we shall see in chapters 6–9, rationally survive any serious comparison between Israel’s record with regard to respect for human rights, the rule of law, the rules of war, and so forth, and that of a multitude of other nations. “Delegitimization,” finally, is merely a new manifestation of the conviction, built into the quasi-logical internal structure of political antisemitism in the ways we have examined, that the only way to get rid of the putative threat constituted by the Jewish collectivity is altogether to remove that collectivity’s capacity to interfere in human affairs, either by the destruction of its members or, failing that, by the destruction of any organized polity it may have succeeded in establishing.
THE HALIMI CASE: A SECOND LOOK
As Kenneth Marcus notes, the French legal and political authorities, when they found themselves confronted with the torture and death of Ilan Halimi, went to considerable lengths to deny that Halimi had been the victim of an antisemitic attack. Instead, they preferred the theory that he had simply been the victim of an attempted kidnapping that went wrong. It was only when one of the attackers confessed that Halimi had been treated in a certain way “because he was a Jew” that the latter interpretation was widely held to have collapsed.
This way of reevaluating the crime presupposes, as Marcus points out, that antisemitism consists of the antisemite’s possession of a certain kind of inward mental disposition toward Jews: consists of something, that is to say, very easy for the antisemite to disguise and ascribable with anything approaching certainty only on the basis of an avowal by the antisemite himself. But as we have seen, this is only true for social antisemitism. Political antisemitism is an ideology with a cultural and therefore collective presence. It is a group phenomenon rather than an individual one.
It is relevant to the Halimi murder, therefore, that the attack was carried out by a group. The perpetrators pretended at first to have been interested in money, rather than in the fact that Halimi was a Jew. In the case of a mugging by an individual mugger, where what was clearly at stake was the victim’s watch or wallet or iPhone, the fact that the victim happened to be wearing a kippah would not necessarily make the attack an antisemitic one. One would need to have become familiar, over an extended period, with the character and conversation of that particular mugger before one could say with any certainty whether the presence of the kippah had played any part in leading the mugger to choose that victim rather than another.
The fact that we are dealing, in the case of Les Barbares, with a concerted group action, blocks the transfer of that reasoning. There must, in their case, have been some motive to which the whole of the group subscribed and that must have been discussed among them. By employing the usual methods of comparing the independent stories of different group members with one another and with what actually took place, the truth of matters of this kind is rather easier to come at than the truth about what took place in the mind of an individual mugger in the split second of choosing a victim (was it, say, the kippah or the Rolex that weighed heaviest in the scale of that momentary decision?).
Fofana, the group’s leader, admitted from the outset that Halimi had been targeted because he was Jewish. He claimed, however, that the object had been to demand ransom for him “from his synagogue.” But if money had been the object, was that object not defeated by the torture and still more