Anti-Semitic Norms and Terrorism. posted by Richard Seymour

Norman Geras has for some time scented the resurgence of something as dangerous as it is malodorous – “respectable” anti-Semitism . Given the near hysteria over this issue among a large number of Israeli apologists, one might be inclined to dismiss this as yet more paranoia. Yet, I think the weight of evidence – in Europe at least – is now such that it should be regarded as an immediate threat and danger. The latest report which puts increasing anti-Semitic attacks down to young white males in the main should put a check to the Islamophobic spin often put on this. Indeed, anti-Semitism being the European export that it is, we ought really to admit that we are not wrestling with a purely external threat with whom we have a pure antagonism, but rather an internal reality that is not as radically alien as we like to imagine. Anti-Semitism has an impeccable English pedigree, and John Bercow MP will tell you that the Tory party is still rank with aristocratic Jew hatred.


Norman Geras.

In Operation Shylock, Philip Roth’s alter-ego expounds a diasporism as anti-historical and ostensibly barmy as the Zionism it is supposed to replace. He has been in discussions with Lech Walesa and thinks it time for the Jews to return to Poland and anywhere else in Europe that can be called safe. His argument is quite simply that Israel is a more lethal place for Jews to live than modern, post-Cold War Europe. Maybe then. Maybe even now, but for how long? The return of the far right to the European mainstream has largely taken the form of immigrant bashing and Islamophobia. In France, it is related to the actions of the GIA (Armed Islamic Group), who have blown up the Paris Metro in many nightmarish attacks. In the Balkans it is the KLA who have mounted armed attacks, first on Serb forces, then on Serbian civilians (and Albanians accused of collaborating with them) and finally on Macedonian forces. In general, the demonisation of Islam that has been congruent with imperial adventures in the Middle East as well as attacks on migrants has created a noxious climate not far removed at all from that which allowed Jews to be almost extinguished. This is not the Crusades, but modern racism.

Anti-Semitism does have a life in the non-European world, particularly in the Middle East. Just how lethal this is depends on how successfully it attaches itself to other causes. There does exist, in fact, a cause tailor-made for anti-Semitism. That this cause is both just and in no way inherently anti-Semitic does not entitle us to look away from this awkward fact. It simply is the case that anyone with a hostility to Jews in the Arab world (and increasingly in Europe) but who wishes to evade responsibility for their views can easily dissemble behind the mask of anti-Zionism. Let me be clear on what I don’t mean by this. I do not mean that if someone equates Zionism with fascism that this is anti-semitic. I do not mean that if someone burns the Israeli flag with its Star of David or sprays the swastika on it that this means they are genocidal Jew haters. Those tedious liberal canards have long been barred from the Tomb. I mean simply that if you’re the type of person that thinks Jews control the media, or even the whole world through various props and pulleys, you could easily adumbrate some vague thesis about the “Jewish Lobby” in America, how Jewish people have unwarranted presence in Hollywood, how they are the most successful ethnic group of the 20th Century, and how their state, the Jewish State, is an oppressive monster of a creation. The rest could be left to a naïve or paranoid imagination.

The answer to this ought to be to insist on what is inconsistent about Israel with Judaism, just as it has become necessary to point out what Islam says about mutilating bodies, about jihad and about murder. Again, the caveat – I don’t mean that there isn’t any sense in which Islam is compatible with terrorism, or any sense in which Judaism is compatible with oppression and tyranny. Religious texts and ideologies just aren’t as hermetically sealed as to allow only one interpretation. Like most systems of law, they are indeterminate, open to endless argument and counter-argument. But one should simply point out that Judaism and Zionism are not co-substantial. Some Jewish traditions, (namely Hasidic Jews, but also certain secular leftist traditions) wholly reject Zionism and denounce Israeli aggression. So, decoupling the two ought to be the most obvious gesture, and it is not surprising that this is exactly what the antiwar movement and the Palestinian movement have simultaneously attempted to do.

Likewise with Islam and terrorism. Now, this leads us to another theme Norman Geras has been making much noise on, and that is what we consider the cause and source of terrorism. Geras rejects what he considers to be the easy moral logic of the mainstream Left which says that terrorism is caused by imperialism (I don’t know what he would have to say about the rather dubious argument from Greens like Dr Caroline Lucas MEP who connect terrorism with global poverty). These explanations, says Geras, invoke causality as a means of displacing blame. Not always, but in many cases such claims have the effect of placing the blood on our hands while washing theirs. They are only reacting. We are responsible. This argument, says Geras, denies Islamism – specifically the kind Osama bin Laden proselytises for – its own weight as an ideology, a history and a movement.

Possibly. But I would argue that this is true to the extent that it is a mirror image of the kind of explanation that says we are only reacting and they are wholly responsible. When radical writers like John Pilger and Seamus Milne discuss these terrorist attacks as being essentially rooted in an anti-imperialist struggle against the American empire, they really only reverse the demonology which says they are against democracy, hate freedom, envy our wealth etc. So, perhaps the answer is to cease pretending that there is a pure antagonism between the operations of Al Qaeda and those of the United States government. Not merely by repeating the well-known argument that, after all, the CIA built Al Qaeda in collaboration with the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), but fundamentally by noting that they need each other more than they dare admit. As Jacqueline Rose points out, both the American right and the Islamic ultra-right thrive on the prospect of annihilation. US imperialism being what it is, it has always been necessary to have an enemy – Russia, then drugs, then terrorism. Radical Islamism being what it is, it has always been necessary to have a struggle – against Russia, then the corrupt Arab regimes, then America.

And there is, as even Geras acknowledges, an important kernel of truth in the Pilgerite explanation. There are unlikely to be any attacks on the Vatican, or in Rio de Janeiro or Calgary for instance, by Al Qaeda associates. The pattern of attacks, just as much as the propaganda and video-taped discussions of bin Laden and Dr Ayman Al-Zawahiri, indeed describe an arc of resistance. Not “an arc of Muslim resistance” as Milne mis-calls it. To call this “Muslim resistance” is as foolish as to call Israeli atrocities “Jewish tyranny”. But there is obviously a perverted anti-imperialist dynamic involved in this movement. Bin Laden never fails to mention the atrocities of Russia in Chechnya, or of the US in Afghanistan or in Iraq, or of Israel in Palestine. The answer then is to properly articulate this anti-imperialist dynamic ourselves, to make it our case and our struggle, to invest it with the idiom of secular, democratic, radical resistance. This is no capitulation, for it is intended to deprive Al Qaeda and its associates of its life-blood as much as to stop the American Empire in its tracks. It is intended to re-occupy the territory so calamitously vacated by the Left of late, and force the Islamists back to their old business of hating socialists. The feeling is, or should be, mutual.