21st-Dentury Hate
The Return of Anti-Semitism

To be against Israel is to be against the Jews.

BY Hillel Halkin

Tuesday, February 5, 2002 

"I have awakened to anti-Semitism these days," wrote the 
American Jewish author Jonathan Rosen in an article in the 
New York Times Magazine last November.

An odd statement for someone as well-versed as he in Jewish 
matters. What Jew, less than a lifetime after the Holocaust, 
should have to "awaken" to anti-Semitism? Where had Mr. Rosen 
been all these years? In 1990, according to a national survey, 
83% of American Jews felt anti-Semitism was a "serious problem" 
even in the United States, the most hospitable country in
history to a large Jewish minority. How could a writer and 
intellectual who would score in the top percentiles in any test 
of Jewish knowledge or identification--Mr. Rosen formerly served 
as the editor of the weekly Forward's Arts & Letters section, 
and has written widely on Jewish themes--have been near the 
bottom in worrying about the most perennial of threats to Jewish 
life?

But why pick on Mr. Rosen? I have awakened in the same bed. For 
the first time in my life, anti-Semitism scares me. And I know 
where I have been. I knew the history of anti-Semitism better
than most Jews. New manifestations of it did not fail to anger 
me. I simply believed, like Mr. Rosen, that historically it was, 
at long last, a spent force. Other well-informed observers had 
supplied the facts and figures to support this belief. In places 
that mattered, such as Europe and the United States, these 
figures showed that anti-Semitism had declined drastically
and steadily since World War II. In places where it had not, 
like Russia and the Arab world, there were, or soon would be, 
few Jews left. I would have agreed with Barry Rubin, a professor 
at the Hebrew University, who wrote in 1995:

The starting point for any honest discussion of anti-Semitism 
today is the phenomenon's unimportance. Never before, at least 
since the time Christianity seized power over the Roman Empire, 
has anti-Semitism been less significant than at present.

I doubt whether anyone would write those words today.

Admittedly, the evidence is circumstantial. I have seen no polls
indicating that anti-Semitism has risen sharply anywhere. I have 
simply reacted to the kinds of things that Mr. Rosen has:

An acquaintance from Paris saying that never does she remember 
Jews being talked about there with such open hostility as they 
are now. A friend back from Spain relating: "It's never happened 
to me before--I only had to say I was from Israel for all eyes 
to go cold." An article in the respected French left-wing weekly 
Le Nouvel Observateur reporting, straight-faced, a long-disproved 
slander to the effect that soldiers of the Israel Defense Force 
rape Palestinian women so that their families will then murder 
them to redeem the family honor. Another article by the respected 
British novelist A.N. Wilson in the London Evening Standard of 
Oct. 22, coming "reluctantly" to the conclusion that the state 
of Israel no longer has a right to exist.

A piece by Petronella Wyatt in the London Spectator, observing 
with dismay that "since September 11 anti-Semitism and its open 
expression has become respectable at London dinner tables." 
("Well," Wyatt recounts being told by a liberal member of the 
House of Lords, "the Jews have been asking for it, and now, 
thank God, we can say what we think at last.") A column by the
publisher of the German weekly Der Spiegel, comparing Ariel 
Sharon's attitude toward Palestinian Arabs to Hitler's attitude 
toward the Jews. A cartoon in the Dec. 7 International Herald 
Tribune, four days after 26 Israelis were killed by suicide 
bombers to whose recruiters Yasser Arafat had given carte blanche: 
perched atop a tank with a Jewish star, a bulging "Jewish" nose 
(which he does not have) on his cruelly contorted face, Ariel
Sharon points a cannon at the helpless chairman of the Palestinian
Authority and screams, "Prove you have the authority to obey us!" 
On the wall of Arafat's wrecked office is a map of Israel, Gaza, 
and the West Bank labeled "Palestine" and showing the 1947 United 
Nations partition borders. Palestinian refugees peer through a 
shell hole in the wall. The International Herald Trib!

All this is quite apart from the accumulating record of actual
anti-Semitic incidents in Western Europe, from the burning and 
defacing of synagogues to the molestation of Jewish schoolchildren. 
And it is apart, too, from the murderous lunacies about Israel 
circulating in the Arab and Muslim world, such as the widespread 
accusation that the Mossad engineered the September 11 attack 
on the United States and somehow got word to Jewish employees
in the World Trade Center not to report for work that day, or 
the 30-part series--produced by Arab Radio and Television, 
featuring a cast of 400, and aired during the second half of 
Ramadan this past year--which "dramatized" "The Protocols of 
the Elders of Zion." "For the first time," enthused a reporter 
in a leading Egyptian weekly, Arab viewers could see revealed
"the central line that still, to this very day, dominates Israel's 
policy, political aspirations, and racism."

Arab viewers were also recently treated, on Kuwaiti TV, to a 
popular political satire showing Mr. Sharon drinking the blood 
of Palestinian children. But of course, this may not have told 
them anything they did not know. The medieval charge that Jews 
drink the blood of Gentile children, or bake Passover bread 
with it, which has been raised periodically in the Arab world 
since the Damascus Affair of 1840, was already "proved" in 
"The Matzah of Zion," published in 1983 by the current Syrian 
minister of defense, Mustafa Tlas. It was seconded two years 
ago by the Egyptian mass circulation daily al-Ahram, which 
reported "many recorded cases of the bodies of [Palestinian] 
Arab children who had disappeared being found, torn to pieces,
without a single drop of blood. The most reasonable explanation 
is that the blood was taken to be kneaded into the dough of 
extremist Jews." "The past," as Mr. Rosen puts it, "has come 
calling."

For me, the alarm bell had already rung at September's grotesquely 
named "conference against racism" in Durban, South Africa, an 
event soon forgotten by the media in the wake of Sept. 11. 
But Durban is not so easily forgettable. It was not only the 
largest and best-publicized international anti-Semitic rally in 
history, it was the first to be attended by all the world's 
governments and major humanitarian organizations. Many of these
governments, to be sure, including all the European ones, 
formally opposed the anti-Semitic resolutions on the agenda, 
which accused Israel of genocide, ethnic cleansing, racism and 
apartheid. Yet none followed the lead of the United States in 
walking out when these resolutions were tabled, or publicly 
pilloried the many delegates who supported them.

The supporters themselves, of course, insisted they were not
anti-Semitic. They were merely anti-Israel and anti-Zionist. 
But one cannot be against Israel or Zionism, as opposed to 
this or that Israeli policy or Zionist position, without being 
anti-Semitic. Israel is the state of the Jews. Zionism is the 
belief that the Jews should have a state. To defame Israel
is to defame the Jews. To wish it never existed, or would cease 
to exist, is to wish to destroy the Jews.

This is not something that is as obvious to as many people as 
it should be. Yet only an anti-Semite can think the world would 
be better off without Israel, just as only a Francophobe can think 
the world would be better off without France. Only an anti-Semite 
can systematically accuse Israelis of what they are not guilty 
of, just as only an Anglophobe can make such accusations against 
the English. "Jewish" and "Israeli" are not synonymous?
No, they are not--but 40% of the world's Jews live in Israel. 
There are Jews who are anti-Zionist? Yes, there are--and there 
are Englishmen who revile England.

Even this is not putting it strongly enough. There are times when 
only an anti-Semite can accuse Israel of what it is guilty of.

Let us take the case, lately in the news again, of Sabra and 
Shatila. These were the Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut 
where, in September 1982, two months after the Israeli invasion 
of Lebanon, Christian Lebanese forces murdered hundreds of 
Palestinians, many of them women and children, while on a mission 
to flush out armed Palestinian militias and terrorists. Although
the exact degree of Israeli complicity in this action is unclear, 
there is no doubt--as determined by a special commission set up 
at the time by the Israeli government itself-- that the Israeli 
army permitted the Christian forces to enter the camps and 
operate freely there; there is also no doubt that the army should 
have known what these forces were doing and stopped them immediately. 
Construed most leniently, this was criminal negligence. Since the 
army's commander-in-chief at the time was then-defense minister
Ariel Sharon, can it be anti-Semitic to try him for war crimes, 
as a Belgian court, responding to litigation brought by the victims' 
families under a 1993 law, is now poised to do?

It can be and it is.

The reason is simple. Justice is prejudicial when not applied fairly 
and equally. In the case of Belgium's courts, this means they should 
indict, or be prepared to indict, criminal negligence in similar 
cases. One of these took place in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica 
in December 1995, when a Dutch NATO contingent, assigned to protect 
the town's Muslim inhabitants against Serbian attack, pulled out 
and left them at the mercy of the Serbs, who proceeded to massacre 
thousands of them. The Dutch had every reason to know that such 
a massacre would take place in their absence. Does anyone believe
that, were the families of these slaughtered Bosnians to appeal 
to Belgian justice, the latter would indict the Dutch officer in 
command of this contingent, or the U.N. and NATO officials who 
counseled him to withdraw?

Or a more recent example. This past December, as the Northern 
Alliance rolled up the Taliban in Afghanistan, large numbers of 
prisoners, especially those belonging to al Qaeda, were executed 
or permitted to die, some by being shipped long distances in 
sealed containers in which they suffocated. The Northern Alliance 
had American military advisers attached to it and was acting as 
an American proxy. Suppose a Belgian court were asked to indict
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Would the plaintiffs get 
past the courtroom door?

And this of course is not taking into account the many--the 
innumerable and unambiguous--war crimes committed around the 
world in the last two decades from Sudan to Indonesia and from 
Chechnya to the Congo. It is not taking into account repeated 
Palestinian atrocities against Israelis, many carried out at 
the express behest of Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser
Arafat. Though similar suits have been filed in Belgian courts 
against figures like Fidel Castro and Saddam Hussein, Belgian 
justice has so far agreed to consider indicting Israel alone.

This is anti-Semitism, even if the court's judges would be 
shocked  to be accused of it. It is anti-Semitism because, 
as Norman Podhoretz once wrote, "All criticisms of Israel based 
on a double standard, rooted as this is in the ancient traditions 
of anti-Semitic propaganda, deserve to be stigmatized as 
anti-Semitic." It is anti-Semitism even if those expressing it 
have never made a consciously anti-Semitic remark, or had a 
consciously anti-Semitic thought, in their lives.

Can one then be anti-Semitic without knowing it? Of course one 
can, just as one can be unconsciously antiblack or antigay or 
a misogynist. When prejudice is socially acceptable, we admit 
it, first of all, to ourselves. When it is taboo--as, with 
regard to Jews, it has been in Europe and America since the 
Holocaust--we often conceal it even from ourselves. The preferred
way of concealing anti-Semitism in our times is to judge Israel 
more harshly than other countries. This is why an expert on 
anti-Semitism like Jerome Chanes was begging the question when 
he said the 1990 data showed that the linkage in America between 
"anti-Israel attitudes" and "anti-Semitic beliefs" was "not 
especially strong." The pollsters might as well have asked a 
neurotic about the linkage between his obsessive symptoms and 
their repressed cause. If the neurotic could acknowledge the 
linkage, the cause would not be repressed.

Certainly, this is a truth that can be abused. Labeling any 
negative comment about Israel as prejudicial can be an easy way 
of fending off criticism, just as anti-Semites like to accuse 
Jews of doing. Israel should be no more above criticism than 
other countries. There is a danger, in defending it, of coming 
to resemble the stutterer in the joke who, turned down for a
broadcaster's job, tells a friend, "I kn-knew th-th-they'd 
n-never take a J-j-j-jew!"

That is why Podhoretz's observation is crucial. It is precisely 
the presence or absence of a double standard that determines 
whether an attitude toward Israel is biased or not.

Take, at random, the morning of Dec. 13, 2001, when I was 
working on this article. At 6:00, I switched on my television 
to the news on CNN. The day before, 10 Israeli civilians had 
been killed in a Hamas bus attack. The news began with an 
announcement that Israeli-Palestinian tensions had reached
"new heights." It continued with . . . a report from Gaza on 
Palestinian suffering and anger, and footage of a Palestinian 
crowd accompanying the coffins of four men killed by Israel. 
There was no mention that all four were shot while launching 
mortars at Israeli settlements. There was no mention of the 
10 Israelis. And yet, I cautioned myself, perhaps the Israeli
side of the story would be told later. Why be a Jewish 
stutterer?

I should have known better. At 3 p.m. a CNN interviewer was 
scolding an Israeli cabinet minister for not knowing that 
Palestinians were killing Jews because of "the illegal Israeli 
occupation of Arab land." (I have never seen CNN scold a 
Palestinian.) At 11 p.m. there were more scenes of the carnage
in Gaza, this time of the bombed musical instruments of Arafat's
military band--mangled trombones that were, presumably, every 
bit as bad as mangled bodies. (Of which, in this retaliatory 
raid deliberately conducted by Israel on an empty building, 
there were none.) The following morning, another interviewer 
handled an Israeli spokesman with aggressive sarcasm and 
listened with docile respect to a Palestinian one. The 
10 Israeli dead were by now ancient history.

This is not to say that CNN, or other international networks 
that behave similarly (the BBC has been worse), never give 
Israel a fair hearing. They sometimes do. But it is such 
incremental media bias that more than anything else has created 
a distorted picture of Israel in much of the world. It does not 
have to be dramatic. Week by week, month by month, it adds up.

Still, even if such bias is consistent, why insist that its only, 
or even its most likely, explanation is anti-Semitism? It could 
be a product of superior Palestinian public relations. It could 
reflect the instinctive sympathy of journalists for the perceived 
underdog in a conflict whose roots they do not understand. 
It could be a response to political or financial pressures that 
tilt more strongly to the Arabs. Why look for anti-Semites 
beneath every bed?

And why, especially, look for them when, like Jonathan Rosen, 
I have never been personally affected by anti-Semitism in any 
but the most trivial ways? In my 30 years of living in America 
before moving to Israel, I could count on one hand the number 
of anti-Semitic incidents I encountered, all in my New York 
childhood. Unlike the generation of my parents, who remembered
signs in New England in the 1930s that said, "No Jews or Dogs 
Allowed," my generation--the one before Mr. Rosen's--never 
experienced Jewishness as the slightest bar to anything. 
Joseph Lieberman, a prominent member of that generation, 
recently swept New England while coming within a few hundred
votes of the vice presidency in an election in which anti-Semitism 
never figured publicly at all.

Still, a large majority of American Jews, polled in 1990, thought
anti-Semitism was a serious problem. What were they responding 
to that Jews like Mr. Rosen and me were not? Was Earl Raab, 
a close student of the Jewish community for many decades, right 
in stating that "The large proportion of American Jews who say 
they worry about anti-Semitism . . . are really expressing a 
concern not so much about its currency as about its potential"?
And even if he was, why wait for Durban when one should have 
been just as alarmed by the potential of the horrendous 
"Zionism is racism" resolution passed by the U.N. General 
Assembly in 1975? Why have some Jewish intellectuals either 
paid no attention whatsoever to anti-Semitism or been less 
anxious about it than "ordinary" Jews, more sanguine about its
future, more inclined, like Mr. Raab, to the view that "if the 
cycle of anti-Semitic behavior and attitude continues to wind 
down, if the cultural reservoir of Judeophobia is unused long 
enough, there is no rational basis for believing that it 
will not virtually disappear"?

This is not, needless to say, a question that pertains to those 
Jewish writers and intellectuals who are themselves estranged 
from, or uninterested in, the concerns of the Jewish community, 
or who actually sympathize to a greater or lesser degree with 
the attacks on Israel. Rather, it needs to be asked about those 
who have a strong Jewish identity and the confidence that comes 
from it. Is it not curious that they, too, should have been, 
in Mr. Rosen's image, asleep?

And yet this is perhaps not as paradoxical as it seems. A strongly
identified Jew may be less concerned than other Jews with the 
non-Jew's opinion of him. Because he unreservedly likes being 
Jewish, it may not immediately occur to him that he could be 
disliked for it. He might even be the last to notice if he were, 
just as he might be the last to wonder what non-Jews say about 
him in his absence. He is like a fish in the center of a large 
school of fellow fish, oblivious of the tremors in the water 
that warn those on the periphery of the approach of sharks.

More than that: such a Jew--I am of course speaking also about
myself--may resent anti-Semitism less than he resents the idea 
of being defined by it. The old saw that Jews who have forgotten 
their Jewishness will always be reminded of it by the world 
irritates him not so much because of what it says about the 
world as because of what it says about the Jews. He does not
need to be reminded.

I remember the first time I read, as a college student, 
Jean-Paul Sartre's "Anti-Semite and Jew." A well-intentioned 
critique written shortly after World War II, it contains a 
classic formulation: "The Jew is one whom other men consider a 
Jew: that is the simple truth from which we must start. It is 
the anti-Semite who makes the Jew." Had Sartre called me a 
dirty kike, I could not have felt greater injury. He was 
telling me I was a nothing, an interior cavity, a blank page 
waiting to have "Jew" written on it by someone like himself. 
I would have liked to walk into Les Deux Magots, his Paris
cafè, and inform him that he had me to thank for being French, 
which he only was because I thought he was.

For the same reason, I refused to put the Holocaust at the center, 
or anywhere near the center, of my sense of being a Jew. The 
Holocaust was not a Jewish deed. It was a Gentile one, and I 
declined to be defined by what had been done to me rather than 
by what I had done. I would not have put it exactly as did 
Jonathan Rosen, who felt that it was "an act of mental health" 
to recognize that the world of his father, a Hitler refugee,
"was not my world and that his fears were the product of an 
experience alien to me." I had never thought of the Jewish 
experience in Europe that way. But not to identify with the 
annihilation of it was an act of mental health. One remembered 
one's catastrophes--with horror, with grief, with rage, and
with (yes) shame. One did not celebrate them or build more than 
the necessary minimum of monuments to them.

The Holocaust has made some Jews less, rather than more, able to 
see anti-Semitism around them. This is because, if the Nazis 
demonized the Jew, they also demonized the anti-Semite. 
In itself, anti-Semitism is not necessarily a lethal vice. 
But although it is more commonly characterized by the desire to 
exclude Jews than to kill them, and in this respect is not
very different from other ethnic prejudices, its culmination in 
the Holocaust has forever distinguished it from them. 
Historically, discrimination against Asians has been far worse 
in America than discrimination against Jews--yet because no one 
has ever proposed exterminating Asians, it does not seem, even 
in an age of political correctness, a moral enormity to be 
accused of prejudice against them.

The same cannot be said--to the Jewish mind at least--of 
anti-Semitism. It can no longer be genteel. And since it cannot 
be, there may be a reluctance to call it by its proper name. 
When Daniel Bernard, the French ambassador to England, recently 
referred to Israel at a London dinner party as "a sh---y little 
country" and then denied being anti-Semitic, there was a 
temptation to give him the benefit of the doubt by acquitting 
him, not of libel, but of complicity in murder.

As a Zionist, too, one may hesitate to interpret attacks on Israel 
as anti-Semitic. It was Zionism's proud claim, after all, that it 
would eliminate anti-Semitism by providing Jews with a homeland to 
escape to, since anti-Semitism could not exist without Jews. Today 
we know that it can exist without Jews, or at least without focusing 
on them--and precisely because there is a Jewish homeland to 
represent them. But admitting this is tantamount to admitting 
that Zionism has failed in a central objective. It is to acknowledge 
that, whatever merit there may have been in the claim that Israel 
would weaken anti-Semitism by fostering a more positive image of
the Jew, this has long been outweighed by the anti-Semitization of 
the image of Israel itself. For anyone believing that Zionism 
was the most farsighted of all Jewish responses to modernity, 
and the one best calculated to restore the Jews to the family of 
man, this is a bitter reality to accept. 

And the persistence of anti-Semitism after the Holocaust must 
be even more bitter for the committed Jewish secularist. 
Traditionally, Jews suffered from anti-Semitism; they were not 
bewildered by it. On the contrary, they understood not only 
that it existed but that it must exist; that hatred of them was 
hatred of the God who chose them; and that the Gentile who "in
every generation and generation rises up to destroy us" was 
acting a role in a conflict that would end only in the fullness 
of time. Anti-Semitism was sometimes devastating. It was never 
surprising or demoralizing.

But for the Jew unshielded by religious belief, the demoralization 
caused by the persistence of anti-Semitism is profound. There is 
simply no reasonable context to put it in. Once upon a time it 
could be viewed as the product of specific religious, social or 
economic circumstances, something that would vanish with the 
advent of Enlightenment, or Emancipation, or socialism, or
liberal democracy. But neither Enlightenment, nor Emancipation, 
nor socialism, nor liberal democracy has made good on that promise, 
though the last has done better than the others. Or it could be 
explained as the Jews' own fault, an incorrigible something in 
their character that alienated others in all times and places -- 
but the Jew who has not internalized this explanation by becoming 
an anti-Semite himself knows that, whatever his failings, these 
are on the whole no worse than those of others who are not held 
in contempt for them. Or it could be seen, in the words of one
writer, "as a symptom of a generalized disease of the Western 
mind"--but it is most rampant today in Islamic countries that 
do not possess the Western mind. Or it could be mystically 
accepted, in Anne Roiphe's words, as "a demonic force, loose in 
the world, that has chosen for its victim the Jewish people." 
Yet as Ms. Roiphe observes, this is to despair of understanding
it at all; it is to conclude that, if the moral nausea caused 
by the murder of six million Jews could not purge the world of 
anti-Semitism, nothing ever can or will.

Rather than admit that something is incomprehensible, people 
often tend to deny its existence, and intellectuals are more 
prone to this tendency than others. The 2 1/2 decades between 
"Zionism is racism" and Durban facilitated such a denial. 
They opened with the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, which
temporarily silenced virulent criticism of Israel. There 
followed the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, succeeded five years 
later by the first intifada; while leading to a fresh rhetorical 
assault on the Jewish state, these might have left one wondering 
whether Israel's own policies and actions were not the cause, 
to which a concerned world was at most overreacting. Next, in
1993, came Oslo and another lull. But the current vilification 
of Israel began to build again during the Oslo process itself, 
reaching new heights after it broke down, and especially since 
the summer of 2000 and Ehud Barak's tremendous concessions to 
the Palestinians.

That anti-Semitism has grown in direct proportion to Palestinian
violence against Israel; that it has systematically ignored this 
violence in order to concentrate exclusively on the evils of 
Israeli retaliation; that it has gotten worse even as the world 
has applauded, or passively accepted, an American attack in 
Afghanistan, many times more destructive of innocent lives than 
any Israeli reprisal, on terror groups closely allied with Israel's 
enemies--this defies all rationalization. It can open the eyes
even of sleepers.

One must not give an inch on this point. The new anti-Israelism 
is nothing but the old anti-Semitism in disguise.

I will be told that my own account belies this. If Israel's image 
in the world has improved or deteriorated in concert with the 
state of its relations with its Arab neighbors, surely the problem 
is not anti-Semitism but those relations. Improve them once 
more--stop occupying Palestinian land--and the problem will 
disappear.

I invoke the double standard. Who at London dinner parties makes 
nasty remarks about Hindus because India has militarily occupied 
Muslim Kashmir for half a century? What French diplomat calls 
China a "big, sh---y country" because of its occupation of Tibet? 
Besides, even if an Israeli-Palestinian idyll would blunt the 
critics, such an idyll cannot come to pass. A truce is conceivable, 
perhaps even a formal settlement based on Israeli withdrawal
from Palestinian territory conquered in 1967; a reconciliation,
untroubled by further Palestinian and Muslim demands, is not. 
As long as these demands exist ("But why doesn't Israel take 
back the families of the Palestinian refugees?" "But why doesn't 
it return the land it stole in 1948?" "But why must it be a 
Jewish state?") and can be met only by Israel's destruction,
anti-Semitism will go on hiding behind them.

One must keep a sense of proportion. Support for Israel continues 
to be strong in many places, particularly in the United States and 
in the Bush administration. Even in Europe, where sympathy for 
it is markedly lower, the country has held its own diplomatically. 
Polls show that Americans side 4-to-1 with Israel as against the 
Palestinian Authority; among Frenchmen the proportion is 4-to-3.

No doubt it is not anti-Semitism but Arab oil and political and
financial power, compared with which Israel's own resources are 
tiny, that account for many of Israel's international difficulties. 
Given that power, indeed, the remarkable thing is how well Israel 
has maintained its position. And, on balance, this position has 
been strengthened by Sept. 11 and its aftermath. Perhaps Barbara 
Amiel, the columnist in whose London home Ambassador Bernard 
committed his petit faux pas, was prescient when she wrote in an 
open letter to Petronella Wyatt:

Don't worry, Petronella. . . . Powerful as the truth may be, 
it needs a nudge from the 15,000-pound Daisy Cutter bombs once 
in a while. . . .All those people bad-mouthing the Jews and 
Israel will quiet down. You are looking at the tail end of the 
train, but the engine has already turned a corner and is going 
in the opposite direction. Nothing succeeds like success. 
America is driving this train, and the world will get on
board--though the last carriage may be those London dinner 
parties.

One certainly hopes so. But public opinion, at least when it 
comes to foreign policy, usually changes from the top down, 
and opinion at the top is less reassuring than opinion in the 
middle. In a Dec. 20 Pew Research Center survey of "opinion 
makers" in 24 countries, defined as "influential people in 
politics, media, business, culture, and government," 68% of 
European respondents and 35% of Americans thought "the United 
States has been too supportive of Israel." Only 45% of the 
American respondents thought the it hadn't.

These are worrisome figures. Support for Israel, which is 
difficult to justify on cold grounds of national interest, 
ultimately depends on broad public backing--and this is 
especially true of the United States, where such support 
entails not only large sums of money but also, more than ever
since Sept. 11, large perceived risks. The potential for 
slippage in the willingness to pay a price for this friendship, 
should Israel be seen as morally undeserving of it, is there. 
And at this juncture in history, the moral undermining of Israel 
is anti-Semitism's primary goal. Compared to it, such arcane 
pursuits as Holocaust denial are trivial. Only the isolation
of Israel to the point that it might one day have to stand alone 
against enemies stronger than it can possibly lead to another 
Jewish catastrophe.

Jewish leaders and friendly Jewish intellectuals have until now 
hesitated to raise the charge of anti-Semitism against persistently 
unfair criticism of Israel. They have not wanted to appear alarmist 
or whining. They have feared muddying the waters by stirring up 
an issue that seemed quiescent. With Earl Raab, they have 
questioned the idea that anti-Semitism is a "cultural reservoir 
so powerful that it cannot be emptied [but] lies there irreversibly, 
latent at best, like a reservoir not of water but of gasoline
waiting to burst into flame." They--I--have been wrong. Israel 
is only the match. Fighting the flames means knowing where they 
come from.

Mr. Halkin is an Israeli essayist and translator and a contributor 
to Commentary, in whose February issue this article appears.

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