Punch and counter punch at CounterPunch | Palestine |Axisoflogic.com

Editor's Commentary:
On the weekend, the website for alternative news magazine, CounterPunch, carried an article by Uri Avnery, which is reproduced below. Avnery is a well-known Israeli writer who is critical of Israel. He is a peace activist with Gush Shalom. Most important in this instance, he is also Jewish which should give him at least a measure of credibility when discussing Jewishness.

Yesterday, CounterPunch ran a rebuttal article by Alexander Reid Ross, also reproduced below. Other than the short biography included with his piece, I know nothing about Ross, including whether he might also be Jewish. [It gave me no confidence that I had to correct the spelling in every instance that he used Avnery's name - apparently, Ross believes it should be spelled Averny.]

Nevertheless, these two obviously have some differences regarding the issue of anti-Semitism. Rather than try to sort this out, we'll simply post the two opposing articles here and let anyone who is interested see which writer - if either - has this right.

- prh, Editor
Axis of Logic

Anti What? The Fallacy of Rising Anti-Semitism
by Uri Avnery

Anti-Semitism is on the rise. All over Europe it is raising its ugly head. Jews are in danger everywhere. They must make haste and come home to Israel before it is too late.

True? Untrue?

Nonsense.

Practically all the alarming incidents which have taken place in Europe recently – especially in Paris and Copenhagen – in which Jews were killed or attacked – had nothing to do with anti-Semitism.

All these outrages were conducted by young Muslims, mostly of Arab descent. They were part of the ongoing war between Israelis and Arabs that has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. They are not descended from the pogrom in Kishinev and not related to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

In theory, Arab anti-Semitism is an oxymoron, since Arabs are Semites. Indeed, Arabs may be more Semitic then Jews, because Jews have mingled for many centuries with Gentiles.

But, of course, the German publicist Wilhelm Marr, who probably invented the term Antisemitismus in 1880 (after inventing the term Semitismus seven years earlier) never met an Arab in his life. For him the only Semites were Jews, and his crusade was solely against them.

(Adolf Hitler, who took his racism seriously, applied it to all Semites. He could not stand Arabs either. Contrary to legend, he disliked the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who had fled to Germany. After meeting him once for a photo-opportunity arranged by the Nazi propaganda machine, he never agreed to meet him again.)

So why do young Muslims in Europe shoot Jews, after killing cartoonists who have insulted The Prophet?

Experts say that the basic reason is their profound hatred for their host countries, in which they feel (quite rightly) that they are despised, humiliated and discriminated against. In countries like France, Belgium, Denmark and many others, their violent rage needs an outlet.

But why the Jews?

There are at least two main reasons:

The first is local. French Muslims are mostly immigrants from North Africa. During the desperate struggle for Algerian independence, almost all the Algerian Jews sided with the colonialist regime against the local freedom fighters. When all Jews and many Arabs emigrated from Algeria to France, they brought their fight with them. Since they now live side by side in the crowded ghettos around Paris and elsewhere, their mutual hatred lives on and often leads to violence.

The second reason is the ongoing Arab-Zionist conflict, which started with the mass immigration of Jews to Arab Palestine, continued with the long list of wars and is now in full bloom. Practically every Arab in the world, and most Muslims are emotionally involved in the conflict.

But what have French Jews to do with that far-away conflict? Everything.

When Binyamin Netanyahu does not miss an opportunity to declare that he represents all the Jews in the world, he makes all the world’s Jews responsible for Israeli policies and actions.

When Jewish institutions in France, the US, and everywhere totally and uncritically identify with the policies and operations of Israel, such as the recent Gaza war, they turn themselves voluntarily into potential victims of revenge actions. The French Jewish leadership, CRIF, did so just now.

Neither of these reasons has anything to do with anti-Semitism.

Anti-semitism is an integral part of European culture.

Many theories have been put forward to explain this totally illogical phenomenon, which borders on a collective mental disease.

My own preferred theory is religious. All over Europe, and now also in the Americas, Christian children in their formative years hear the stories of the New Testament. They learn that a Jewish mob was shouting for the blood of Jesus, the gentle and mild preacher, while the Roman prefect, Pontius Pilatus, was desperately trying to save his life. The Roman is depicted as a humane, likeable person, while the Jews are seen as a vile, despicable mob.

This story cannot be true. Roman rulers all over the Empire used to crucify potential troublemakers. The behavior of the Jewish authorities in the story does not conform to Jewish law. But the New Testament story, written long after the death of Jesus (whose real Hebrew name was Jeshua), was aimed at the Roman audience the Christians were trying to convert, in hot competition with the Jewish missionaries.

Also, the early Christians were a small, persecuted sect in Jewish Jerusalem, and their grudge lives on to this very day.

The picture of the evil Jews crying out for the death of Jesus is unconsciously imprinted in the minds of the Christian multitudes and has inspired Jew-hatred in every new generation. The results were slaughter, mass-expulsions, inquisition, persecution in every form, pogroms, and finally the Holocaust.

There has never been anything like this in Muslim history.

The Prophet had some small wars with neighboring Jewish tribes, but the Koran contains strict instructions on how to deal with Jews and Christians, the People of the Book. They had to be treated fairly and were exempted from military duty in return for a poll tax. Throughout the ages there were some rare anti-Jewish (and anti-Christian) outbreaks here and there, but Jews in Muslim lands fared incomparably better than in Christian ones.

If this had not been so, there would have been no “Golden Age” of Muslim-Jewish cultural symbiosis in medieval Spain. It would have been impossible for the Muslim Ottoman empire to accept and absorb almost all the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from medieval Spain, driven out by their Catholic Majesties, Ferdinand and Isabella. The outstanding Jewish religious thinker, Moses Maimonides (the “Rambam”) could not have become the personal physician and adviser of the outstanding Muslim sultan, Salah-al-Din al-Ayubi (Saladin).

The present conflict started as a clash between two national movements, Jewish Zionism and secular Arab nationalism, and had only slight religious overtones. As my friends and I have warned many times, it is now turning into a religious conflict – a calamity with potentially grievous consequences.

Nothing to do with anti-Semitism.

So why does the entire Israeli propaganda machine, including all Israeli media, insist that Europe is experiencing a catastrophic rise of anti-Semitism? In order to call upon European Jews to come to Israel (in Zionist terminology: “make Aliya”).

For a Zionist true believer, every Jew’s arrival in Israel is an ideological victory. Never mind that once in Israel, new immigrants – especially from countries like Ethiopia and Ukraine – are neglected.

As I have frequently quoted: “Israelis like immigration but don’t like immigrants”.

In the wake of the recent events in Paris and Copenhagen, Binyamin Netanyahu has publicly called upon French and Danish Jews to pack up and come at once to Israel for their own safety. The prime ministers of both countries have furiously protested against these calls, which insinuate that they are unable or unwilling to protect their own citizens. I suppose that no leader likes a foreign politician to call upon his citizens to leave.

There is something grotesque in this call: as the late Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz remarked, Israel is the only place in the world where Jewish lives are in constant danger. With a war every few years and violent incidents almost every day, he had a point.

But in the wake of the dramatic events, many “French” Jews – originally from North Africa – may be induced to leave France. They may not all come to Israel. The US, French Canada and Australia offer tempting alternatives.

There are many good reasons for a Jew to come to Israel: a mild climate, the Hebrew language, living among fellow Jews, and what not. But running away from anti-Semites is not one of them.

Is there real anti-Semitism in Europe? I assume that there is.

In many European countries there are old and new super-nationalist groups, who try to attract the masses by hatred of the Other. Jews are the Others par excellence (along with Gypsies/Roma). An ethno-religious group dispersed in many countries, belonging and not belonging to their host countries, with foreign – and therefore sinister – beliefs and rituals. All the European nationalist movements which sprang up in the 19th and 20th centuries were more or less anti-Semitic.

Jews have always been, and still are, the ideal scapegoat for the European poor. It was the German (non-Jewish) socialist August Bebel who said that “anti-Semitism is the socialism of the stupid guys”.

With frequent economic slumps and a widening gap between the local poor and the multinational super-rich, the need for scapegoats is rising. But I do not believe that these marginal groups, even if some of them are not so marginal anymore, constitute a real anti-Semitic surge.

Be that as it may, the outrages in Paris and Copenhagen have nothing to do with anti-Semitism.

URI AVNERY is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He is a contributor to CounterPunch’s book The Politics of Anti-Semitism.

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A Response to Uri Avnery: The Fallacy of Anti-Semitism Rising
by Alexander Reid Ross

The benevolent writer Uri Avnery has informed us of a crucial fallacy in his latest polemic for CounterPunch entitled “The Fallacy of Rising Anti-Semitism.”

In this article, Avnery, whose credentials include founding Gush Shalom peace movement and authoring numerous well-regarded books, argues that the notion “Jews are in danger everywhere” is “nonsense.” Pointing to recent attacks in Paris and Copenhagen, Avnery insists that anti-Semitism is neither a motivation nor a concern.

“All these outrages were conducted by young Muslims,” he offers, “mostly of Arab descent. They were part of the ongoing war between Israelis and Arabs that has nothing to do with anti-Semitism.”

Why not anti-Semitism? Do some Arabs not hold anti-Semitic views? In Avnery’s considered, “Arab anti-Semitism is an oxymoron, since Arabs are Semites.” Avnery has certainly hit the nail on the head; the notions of Semitic and anti-Semitic, as he notes, came from Wilhelm Marr, and the label has always obstructed Arab integration into their own category. A poetic irony exists as Palestinians continue to be denied recognition on their own land.

Semantics aside, we can recognize a category of anti-Jewishness, perhaps specific to anti-Semitism (a kind of inter-anti-Semitic rivalry if we are to cling to perhaps atavistic terms), as a reason for which people carry out attacks. In my opinion we might as well keep anti-Semitism as a category; after all, are not the strictest Zionists in the US people like Glenn Beck who make both anti-Arab and anti-Jewish assertions? The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one that has always been engineered by the (former) colonial powers.

Here is where Avnery attacks the point: “Anti-semitism is an integral part of European culture.”

And it is, as he suggests, perhaps “a collective mental disease.” But the rationale he provides is tenuous; he claims it is religious. It is not. Anti-semitism stems from a colonial past and its implications in the present; it comes from the Catholic church’s lust for West Asian lands, the aristocracy of the ancien régime, and it’s desire to divorce itself from “dirty money”; and finally, the bourgeoisie’s drive to monopolize on the crumbling Ottoman Empire. For this reason, as Avnery perspicuously notes, “The present conflict started as a clash between two national movements, Jewish Zionism and secular Arab nationalism, and had only slight religious overtones.” We bear witness today to the same type of crusader-state conflicts that manifested for hundreds of years, and the animosity engendered within has material reasons far beyond ideology and religion, although both play roles.

Does that mean that it has “Nothing to do with anti-Semitism”? Quite the contrary.

In fact, if we look where Avnery does not—the United Kingdom—we will find that anti-Semitic incidents (anti-Jewish to be exact) have doubled in the last year alone, according to the Community Security Trust. Last year, CST recorded 1,168 anti-Semitic incidents—well over the 535 recorded in 2013. Match to that the increasingly popular far-right throughout Europe, and there is something to discern about the direction of violence, which flows against both Jews and Arabs, alike.

That vertiginous rise took place before Copenhagen and Paris. Avnery is absolutely correct to suggest that the rise has everything to do with the Israel-Palestine conflict—namely with the bombardment of Gaza, as CST points out. This so-called “2014 Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” also known as Operation Protective Edge, took place over seven weeks of bombardment, which claimed more than 2,000 Palestinian lives, a vast majority of whom were civilians. To top it off, as Nafeez Ahmed pointed out, it was about access to natural gas more than ancient hatred of an ethnic or religious manifestation sort.

It does enrage just to think of it, but there is no reason to suggest that this reality makes the increase of attacks a symptom of a conflict between Jews and Muslims. In actual fact, the rise of anti-Jewish attacks has taken place, due to a conflict between the North Atlantic, on one side, and Jews and Arabs on the other. As Avnery returns to the historical animus between white-skinned European nationalists and Jews, we should also return to the historical position of Israel today as a land grabbing country that both benefits from full support of the North Atlantic and provides convenient investment opportunities for North Atlantic capital, along with military hegemony to boot.

For this reason, whites perpetrated 44 percent of the anti-Semitic incidents in England, the lion’s share, while Arab or North African belligerence comprised a mere 10 percent. Surprisingly, South Asian offenders made up 37 percent, and only 8 percent were described as Black. According to the numbers, the “Arab-Israeli conflict,” as it metastasizes into Europe, is driven principally by whites, not by Jews or Arabs. I would argue that the same is true in the Levant.

So while I agree with Avnery that anti-Semitism is pure fallacy (after all, it is an oxymoron, as he claims), it seems to me that it is quantifiably on the rise in Europe. Of course, this rise is relative; 2009 and 2006 saw similarly high numbers of anti-Semitic attacks, and the reasons were the same—Israeli attacks in the Levant. At the same time, the connection between Arabs and Jews will always mean that oppression felt by the one will surely even out against the other. The conflagration of nationalism, which uses Islamophobia as its propellant, worsens the conflict between whites, Jews, and Arabs on all levels. Avnery may actually be entirely correct, and last year’s increase in mostly-white incidents of anti-Jewish attacks may dwindle once again, with one modest rejoinder: the fallacy of anti-Semitism and the conflicts it creates will continue to rise will continue to rise and fall with Israel’s genocidal wars.

Alexander Reid Ross is a contributing moderator of the Earth First! Newswire. He is the editor of Grabbing Back: Essays Against the Global Land Grab (AK Press 2014) and a contributor to Life During Wartime (AK Press 2013). His most recent book Against the Fascist Creep is forthcoming through AK Press.

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