miscellany

HS

In Britain, efforts to keep Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn out of power over accusations of antisemitism have had the alarming effect of conflating criticism of Israel or anti-Zionism with hatred of Jewish people. You have described these tactics as a disgrace, and said they insult the memory of Holocaust victims. I’d like you to comment on how erroneous charges of antisemitism ultimately hurt Jews, and why expanded definitions of the term (which, for example, consider certain advocacy for Palestinian rights as anti-Jewish bigotry) can be problematic.

NC

The classic statement of this position is by the distinguished Israeli statesman Abba Eban, highly regarded particularly in England as a British gentleman (Cambridge graduate, cultivated accent, etc.). In 1973, when he was Israeli foreign minister, Eban wrote an interesting article in a leading liberal Jewish journal [Congress Bi-Weekly] in which he explained that “One of the chief tasks of any dialogue with the Gentile world is to prove that the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all. Anti-Zionism is merely the new anti-Semitism.”

That defines the task very explicitly. Here “anti-Zionism” means criticism of policies of the State of Israel. He made that quite clear by adding: “Let there be no mistake: the new left is the author and the progenitor of the new anti-Semitism.”

The New Left in fact was overwhelmingly Zionist, but beginning to be mildly critical of some of the policies of the occupation and illegal settlement over which Eban was presiding. Eban also identified two arch-criminals: I.F. Stone and me, “whose basic complex is one of guilt about Jewish survival” and therefore are beyond the range of rational discussion. His wild accusations about the “New Left,” worth reading, are equally ludicrous — as he certainly knew, being literate.

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