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Poisoning the Well: The False Equation of Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism

by Irfan Khawaja

Mr. Khawaja is adjunct professor of philosophy at The College of New Jersey and Rutgers-Camden, and Executive Director of the Institute for the Secularisation of Islamic Society. The views he expresses here are his own.

In a recent review of Dennis Ross’s book The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace, the military historian Victor Davis Hanson writes:

The world is obsessed with the so-called occupied territories in Palestine, but not from any abstract principle of postbellum equity or worry over civilian deaths. Otherwise UN resolutions, European subsidies, and American envoys would have been focused on occupied Tibet or Lebanon, or the killing of tens of thousands of innocents in Rwanda and Darfur. So Palestine is not so much a moral issue as a political lightning rod that involves Arab oil, Arab global terrorism, Arab fundamentalist violence in and beyond the Middle East, and Arab anti-Semitism that finds resonance in Europe.

Hanson is one of the most prominent academics identified with the non-isolationist Right, and Policy Review is one of the premier journals of conservative thought in the United States. If a passage like Hanson’s finds its way into Policy Review, we can safely take it as representing more than an idiosyncratic twitch of a single author’s pen. What then is the significance of this particular twitch?

Taken at face value, the passage asserts the following remarkable propositions:

1. The West Bank and Gaza Strip are not occupied.

2. Those concerned with the rights of Palestinians do so from ulterior motives but lyingly assert that they do so from moral motives. Principal among these ulterior motives are greed and bigotry.

3. To prove their veracity, “the world” should focus (or should have focused) more attention than it has on Tibet, Lebanon, Rwanda and Darfur.

These claims are a textbook example of the fallacy of poisoning the well—the fallacy, in logic, of rebutting someone’s argument by adducing the ulterior motives he might have had for making it.

Well-poisoning is a ubiquitous feature of our misologistic culture, but Hanson’s commission of the fallacy differs from the run-of-the-mill variety by its subtle introduction of the issue of anti-Semitism. The claim here is not the truism that Arab anti-Semitism finds resonance in Europe, but that such interest as “the world” expresses in Palestine is merely a cover for its anti-Semitism.

This claim is a casual instance of a broader trend: the reflexive equation, by defenders of Israel, of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, itself part of the emerging literature on “the new anti-Semitism.” Focusing on the undeniable fact that many anti-Zionists are anti-Semites, and that anti-Zionism can easily be used as a disguise for anti-Semitism, writers in this genre simply insist over and over that no one can be an anti-Zionist without simultaneously being an anti-Semite.

For a breathtakingly ludicrous instance of the equation, consider Gabriel Schoenfeld’s 2003 book The Return of Antisemitism, endorsed by such luminaries as Elie Wiesel, Francis Fukuyama, Natan Sharansky, and Cynthia Ozick. The book, to be sure, contains some valuable information about the rise of anti-Semitism in the Arab/Muslim world and elsewhere, and amply documents the claim that anti-Zionism can be exploited for anti-Semitic purposes. But a book of this sort ought to do more than convey useful information. Anti-Semitism is, to say the least about it, a form of hasty generalization and conspiracy theorizing. Given this, we would expect a morally-credible critic not only to condemn these vices in anti-Semites, but to refrain from indulging in mirror-image versions of them.

To say that Schoenfeld “indulges” in these vices is perhaps the least that can be said of the section of the book which purports to discuss anti-Semitism among American intellectuals. Among the absurdities asserted here, we find the following twenty-five people accused of anti-Semitism in the space of sixteen pages (pp. 123-139).

Maureen Dowd, of The New York Times, (pp. 123-4);
Fred Donner, of the University of Chicago (p. 124);
Stanley Hoffman, of Harvard (p. 124);
Georgie Anne Geyer, a syndicated columnist (p. 124);
Joel Kovel, writing in Tikkun (p. 124);
Paul Buhle, writing in Tikkun (p. 124);
Jason Vest, writing in The Nation (p. 125);
Kathleen and Bill Christison, former CIA agents, writing in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (p. 125);
Edward Said, who was at Columbia University (p. 125);
Michael Lind, writing in the British magazine, Prospect (pp. 125-6);
Gary Hart, the former senator (p. 129);
Noam Chomsky, of MIT (p. 131);
Norman Finkelstein, of DePaul, who is also accused of Holocaust denial (p. 132);
Steven Rose, of the Open University (p. 133);
Uri Avnery, an Israeli journalist and activist (p. 133);
Ilan Pappe, of Haifa University (pp. 133-4);
Israel Shahak, who was at Hebrew University, Jerusalem (p. 134);
Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun, (p. 136);
Marc Ellis, of Baylor University, (p. 137);
Daniel Boyarin, of the University of California, Berkeley (p. 137);
Susannah Heschel, writing in Tikkun, (p. 137);
Cornel West, of Princeton (p. 139);
Archbishop Desmond Tutu (p. 139); and
Christopher Hitchens, of Vanity Fair and the Atlantic (p. 139).

What is the basis for these extraordinary claims? In some cases, Schoenfeld takes umbrage at questions about the power of “the Jewish lobby,” and construes the asking of such questions as evidence of anti-Semitism. In some cases, he thinks that a particular criticism of Israel is overwrought, and takes its being overwrought as evidence of anti-Semitism. In some cases the claim is that a Jewish author is self-hating, which becomes evidence of anti-Semitism. In some cases we are told that a person draws attention to his Jewish friends while criticizing Israel, which only proves that the person wishes to be insulated from charges of anti-Semitism—which proves, in advance of any actual accusation, that he must be an anti-Semite.

What is at work here is less a discernible principle than a robotic sort of cut-and-paste procedure: Come up with a list of people who a priori must be anti-Semites; then cast about for ‘evidence’ of this claim by finding sentences here or there to which you give an anti-Semitic interpretation regardless of the intention of the author or the context of the utterance. Where the evidence is simply too thin to support a straightforward accusation, insinuate that anti-Semitism is at work without actually making an assertion that it is. Repeat the process until you run out of people.

Stated baldly, Schoenfeld’s procedure is simply a travesty. But is there another way of describing it? It’s not merely that the evidence for Schoenfeld’s claims is “insufficient.” It’s that the evidence is so thin, and the claims so preposterous, that one wonders how the author worked up the nerve to offer them as a claim on our credence. But then, one begins to wonder how a Nobel Laureate, a famous political theorist, a famous refusenik, and an acclaimed writer could so blithely have lent their prestige to it. And then one remembers the Joan Peters affair, and one learns for the nth time that on this topic, anything goes.

One sees the same standards on display in a recent anthology of essays on the subject, Those Who Forget the Past: The Question of Anti-Semitism, edited by Ron Rosenbaum, a columnist for the New York Observer, and the author of Explaining Hitler (1999). Like Schoenfeld’s book, Rosenbaum’s boasts some undeniable virtues, with particularly insightful contributions by Harold Evans, Jonathan Freedland, Laurie Zoloth, Eli Muller, and Bernard Lewis.

But like Schoenfeld’s book, Rosenbaum’s is in many ways a showcase for the “anything goes” genre of rhetorical performance. In Part Two of the book, we get a reprise from Schoenfeld, whose essay summarizes the claims of his book. In Part Four we come upon an essay by Ruth R. Wisse of Harvard, intended to undermine the anti-Zionist/anti-Semite distinction. Having concluded that Arab anti-Semitism is worse than Nazi anti-Semitism, Wisse makes this comment:

In the light of this adoration [Arab ad`oration of mass murderers], it has become more and more difficult to maintain the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, with the latter defined as ‘merely’ a political-territorial objection to the state of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people. Rather, contemporary anti-Zionism has absorbed all the stereotypes and foundational texts of fascist and Soviet anti-Semitism and applied them to the Middle East. (pp. 191-2).

Consider the structure of this argument, insofar as it claims to be one. We start with the uncontroversial assertion that Arab suicide bombers are anti-Semites. From there we move to the legitimate (if vague) claim that their anti-Semitism is somehow connected to their anti-Zionism. The vagueness of the latter claim permits a quick slide to the colossal non-sequitur that all “contemporary” anti-Zionism is connected in some unspecified way to anti-Semitism (and murder). From that preposterous misinference it’s but a short leap to the insinuation that all anti-Zionism is really anti-Semitic murderousness in disguise. And so, quod erat demonstrandum, at least for purposes of the peanut gallery.

But step outside of the peanut gallery for a minute and ask yourself this question: How is a conceptual distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism erased by the malfeasances of anti-Semites and terrorists claiming to be anti-Zionists? In fact, how is a conceptual distinction erased by anyone’s malfeasances at all?

A few examples should drive this issue home. There is a conceptual distinction between just and unjust war; the distinction remains in tact when tyrants wage unjust wars in the name of justice. There is a distinction between a prison for convicted criminals and a concentration camp; the distinction remains in place when the proprietors of concentration camps describe their inmates as “criminals.” There is a distinction between a court of law and a lynch mob; the distinction remains one when a lynch mob accords itself the jurisdiction of a court of law. There is a distinction between science and pseudo-science; the distinction stays one when pseudo-scientists claim to be scientists. There is, for that matter, a distinction between truth and falsity. The distinction stays in place when people lie; it wouldn’t even be erased if everyone always lied. It doesn’t take very much conceptual sophistication to see that a legitimate concept can be hijacked by con men and criminals. Why should this recognition not extend to the case of anti-Zionism?

The Afterword to Rosenbaum’s book is a hysterical piece by Cynthia Ozick called “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!”—a title borrowed from an 1878 essay by George Eliot, itself (supposedly) a reference to the acronym for the Crusader slogan Hierosolyma est perdita (“ Jerusalem is destroyed”). (Despite Ozick’s claims to virtual omniscience on historical matters, I am not certain of the historical accuracy of this last claim about the Crusaders; I merely repeat it here from her essay.) The essay begins with a tendentious account of the history of Israel and Palestine from roughly 1920 until the present day, in which Ozick summarizes the entire anti-Zionist case by reducing it to an “eight-decades-long Arab assault on Jewish national aspiration and sovereignty” (p. 600). Having tossed off that proposition, Ozick’s move to this, her coup de grace:

This is the history that is ignored or denigrated or distorted or spitefully misrepresented. And because it is a history that has been assaulted and undermined by world-wide falsehoods in the mouths of pundits and journalists, in Europe and all over the Muslim world, the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism has finally and utterly collapsed. It is only sophistry, disingenuousness, and corrupted conscience that continue to insist on such a distinction. To fail to trace the pernicious consistencies of Arab political aims from 1920 until today, despite temporary pretensions otherwise, is to elevate intellectual negligence to a principle. (p. 605)

“Sophistry, disingenuousness and corruption”: quite a set of assertions from an author whose account of the relevant history has all of the factual heft of an overwrought tabloid editorial. But Ozick’s claims would constitute a series of non-sequiturs even in the hands of a historically-omniscient being. For like Wisse, she simply ignores the pertinent issue: how do “falsehoods in the mouths of pundits and journalists” erase a conceptual distinction? Since there is not a single sentence in Ozick’s essay that even purports to define “anti-Zionism” (or “anti-Semitism”), or bothers to address the anti-Zionist case, she has no way of addressing this simple question.

But suppose that the anti-Zionist case was false. To infer from its falsity to the moral corruption of its proponents is to assume that there is no honest way of being an anti-Zionist. Is it an instance of cogency, sincerity and moral probity to make such a claim without even trying to address the case?

As for the “pernicious consistencies of Arab political aims,” it’s enough to point out that (a) Arab political aims are not necessarily a guide to the nature of anti-Zionism, much less equivalent to it, (b) not all anti-Zionists are Arabs, (c) not all Arabs have the same political aims now, and (d) not all Arabs have had the same political aims since 1920. A person unwilling to deal explicitly with such obvious counter-examples to her thesis has no business accusing anyone else of “intellectual negligence.”

As with Hanson, many of the authors in Rosenbaum’s book accuse anti-Zionists of inconsistency: why do anti-Zionists focus so insistently on Israel, they ask, while ignoring so many other worthy targets? Shalom Lappin offers a typical example:

Critics of Israel who object to its identity as a Jewish state are, for the most part, not exercised by the fact that Iran and Saudia Arabia [sic] define themselves as Islamic states. They may reject their governments as theocratic and reactionary, but they do not regard these countries as illegitimate. They do not, in general, have problems with the religiously based partition of the Indian subcontinent between Pakistan and India, which took place at the same time as the creation of Israel…Most significantly, they have no difficulty whatsoever with Arab states that purport to be both secular and Arab. They see these states as natural political frameworks for the national groups that constitute their populations. The obvious question, then, is why they have such difficulty with a country that provides for the political independence of a Jewish population. (pp. 503-504).

It’s a fair point—where applicable. But how applicable is it? Lappin shows more awareness than most in qualifying his claims with the phrases “for the most part,” and “in general.” Fair enough. What, then, would he say to the exceptions whose existence he himself acknowledges? What would he say to an anti-Zionist who was exercised by the Islamic nature of Iran and Saudi Arabia, who did have problems with the religiously-based partition of India and Pakistan, and who has lots of “difficulty” with Arab states that purport to be founded on mythical conceptions of “Arab identity,” whether secular or religious?

Let me be more explicit. What would Lappin say to someone who loudly and explicitly asserted that Islamic states like Iran, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan should go out of existence as Islamic states—that they have no right to exist as Islamic states, that they are in the relevant respects much worse than Israel? In short, what would he say to an anti-Zionist whose anti-Zionism was rooted not in bigotry, but in a consistent commitment to secularism—not focused on Israel, but applicable to it? Like so many authors on this subject, Lappin seems not to have imagined this possibility, as though no motive for anti-Zionism could possibly exist but anti-Semitism.

Speaking of inconsistency, you would think that a book like Rosenbaum’s, intended to expose double-standards, would try not to instantiate them. But if you did, you’d be wrong. On the one hand, Rosenbaum is (justifiably) at pains to enjoin readers not to make excuses for anti-Semitism. On the other hand, he goes out of his way to excuse a well-known practitioner of a similar prejudice. Thus Rosenbaum proudly cites Oriana Fallaci in his Introduction, twice, as a brave critic of Arab/Muslim anti-Semitism (pp. lxiii, lxviii). Gabriel Schoenfeld does the same both in his contribution to Rosenbaum’s book (pp. 109-110), as well as in his own book (pp. 143-144). The journalist Christopher Caldwell, voluble on the subject of Muslim anti-Semitism, has written a brazenly incoherent defense of Fallaci for Commentary (“The Fallaci Affair,” Oct. 2002), and her praises have widely been sung in the right-leaning press (National Review, Frontpage Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard), by Charles Taylor of Salon, and by numerous pro-Israel organizations.

Pause for a moment to reflect on Fallaci’s mode of expression in her book The Rage and the Pride (2002). On p. 178, after a long passage in which she inveighs against “a hideousness defined ‘rap’” and (among other things) liberal attitudes toward “the crippled” and “gays” (her scare quotes in the latter case), we read this:

The fad or rather the farse [sic] that in Italy worships a Moroccan scribbler who pompously claims that the Western culture [sic] discovered Greek philosophy through the Arabs, that the Arab language is the Language of Science [sic] and the most important in the world, that Jean de La Fontaine [sic] did not write his “Fables” after Aesop, inspired by Aesop, but after reading certain Indian tables [sic] translated in French by an Arab guy Ibn al-Muqaffa.**

No, that isn’t a full sentence or even an intelligible one, but it comes with an explanatory gloss (p. 179):

**Author’s note. I am referring to the individual whom the UN Secretary, Kofi Annan, has generously honored with a prize which has something to do with peace. And who slanders me declaring that my dislike for Islam is due to the mortifications or letdowns I have had with Arab men. (In a sentimental and sexual sense, of course.) Well… [sic] To this individual I reply that, thank God, I never had any sentimental or sexual or friendly rapport with an Arab man. In my opinion there is something in his brothers of faith which repels the women of good taste.

Here is Fallaci on the same edifying subject in the NY Observer, the paper for which Rosenbaum writes as a columnist:

Do you know the only thing the Muslims and the Arabs have been teaching to me [sic]? The only one? To eat with the hands….The Arabs, the only thing they do well is how elegantly they touch the food. (George Gurely, “The Rage of Oriana Fallaci,” New York Observer, Jan. 26, 2003.)

Would it be anti-Semitic to write this way about Jews? Well, let’s try a thought-experiment. Suppose you saw the following in print from the pen of a writer with a Muslim-sounding name:

Thank God I’ve never touched or been friendly with a Jewess. In my opinion, there is something in her sisters of faith which repels the man of good taste….The Jews, the only thing they do well is how assiduously they save the money.

Would you regard the author as fundamentally opposed to bigotry? Would you give him unqualified praise for defending Muslims against anti-Muslim bias? Or would you file him under “the new anti-Semitism”? What we learn from Rosenbaum et. al is that if you do the same in the Arab/Muslim case, you have done nothing wrong. In fact, having done so, you’re entitled to assume the moral high ground on the subject of bigotry—because while everyone knows what “anti-Semitism” is, when it comes to Arabs, there isn’t even an accepted phrase to describe the bigotry in question. Nullum nomen, nullem nominandum: “where there is no name, there is nothing to be named.”

I’ve mentioned just a few examples here, but whatever its virtues (and there are some, as I’ve been at pains to suggest), the deficiencies I’ve described characterize the “new anti-Semitism” literature as a whole. For examples, consult Phyllis Chesler’s The New Anti-Semitism (pp. 4, 171-179, 182-185), Abraham Foxman’s Never Again: The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism (pp. 17-21), Alan Dershowitz’s The Case for Israel (p. 210), the writings of Bat Ye’or, as well as scattered essays in Rosenbaum’s anthology, Commentary, at WorldNet.Daily, or in your local Jewish paper. The modus operandi is more or less the same: First we are informed, accurately enough, of the existence of the new anti-Semitism. Then we are told that anti-Zionism is now ubiquitously used as a cover for that anti-Semitism. From there we skate imperceptibly to the equation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. And from there we are blackmailed into accepting the equation on pain of being accused of anti-Semitism.

Nor is blackmail the least of it. The sheer incoherence of the literature is simply staggering. What do you have to do to avoid the accusation of anti-Semitism? Well, one author says that you had better not identify Israel with “the Jews”—else you’re an anti-Semite. Another author says that you had better do so—else you’re an anti-Semite. One author says that only an anti-Semite would criticize Judaism as a religion. Another says that the fight against anti-Semitism obliges us to criticize Islam…as a religion. One author says that a single-minded concern for the plight of the Palestinians is a sure sign of anti-Semitism. The next author says that lack of single-minded concern for Israel is a sure sign of Jewish self-hatred. One author tells you that “the Jews” is a problematic locution because it collectivizes Jewish identity and responsibility. The next author tells you that the failure to collectivize Jewish identity is a sure sign of anti-Zionism—which is proof of anti-Semitism.

Which is the more plausible hypothesis: (a) that the distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism has “collapsed” or (b) that the term “anti-Semitism” is undergoing a process of hyper-inflation?

There is a sad irony here. In the Middle Ages, it was Jews who were accused by Christians of well-poisoning in the literal sense of that term:

When the Black Death swept through Europe in the middle of the fourteenth century, killing an estimated twenty-five million people, the rumor quickly spread that Jews were engaged in a conspiracy to infect all the Christians. Never mind that Jews were not immune from the ravages of the plague; they were tortured until they ‘confessed’ to crimes that they could not possibly have committed. In one such case, a man named Agimet was put on trial in Geneva on October 10, 1348. To spare himself further torment before his execution, Agimet was coerced to say that Rabbi Peyret of Chambery (near Geneva) had ordered him to poison the wells in Venice, Toulouse, and elsewhere. In the aftermath of Agimet’s ‘confession,’ the Jews of Strasbourg were burned alive on February 14, 1349. (P. 84 in Arthur Hertzberg and Aron Hirt-Manheimer, Jews: The Essence and Character of a People, [Harper Collins, 1998].)

So we seem to have gone from protecting Christendom by accusing Jews of poisoning literal wells to protecting the Jewish state by poisoning the discursive ones. The constant here seems to be false accusation in the name of a state, plus some connection with Jews.

I suppose we can be thankful for the progress we’ve made since 1349. And yet at some level I think those of us repeatedly on the receiving end of the “anti-Zionist =anti-Semite” slander are also entitled to a bit of displeasure. No one is going to burn us alive, true. But the slander of “anti-Semitism” associates us by implication with those who have burned others alive. I think we’re entitled to wonder why we should be obliged to accept this charge with equanimity (cf. Rosenbaum, pp. xxix-xxxii)—from people who seem to make it without trepidation.

The point is not that the charge of “anti-Semitism” should never be made: some people deserve it. Nor must it always be made with trepidation: some people obviously deserve it. Nor must anti-Zionists be thought immune to the charge: too many of them are guilty. Nor should Jews be permitted without challenge to exploit their Jewish “credentials” while pandering to Arab/Muslim anti-Semites: an Eric Alterman speaks only for himself, not for a political principle. But the equation of anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism is a farce that has gone on long enough, and it’s time that those who saw through the farce said so—at length, if necessary.