9/11, Western Intellectuals, and going beyond the New Anti-Semitism.

Phyllis Chesler’s recent book, The New Anti-Semitism: The Current Crisis and What We Must Do About It, opens dramatically: On 9/11, shortly after the second hijacked jetliner had hit the second of the World Trade Towers, Chesler went to her typewriter in her Brooklyn residence and wrote, “Now we are all Israelis.” The equation of Americans and Israelis was obvious: the ethnic nation state of Israel was being compared with the non-ethnic state, the United States. The thesis of Chesler’s book also finds a parallel in the United State’s global confrontation with terrorism: The New Anti-Semitism, like much of the hostility currently directed towards America’s war against terrorism, demands that the victim not fight back.

For those who endured the biased reporting on the Middle East from papers such as the British Guardian, Chesler’s accurate accounts of Israel Defense Force (IDF) activities in the territories and especially the Jenin “Massacre,” or the story of “Little Mohammed,” are a welcome relief. The Guardian, for instance, was one of the first papers to declare that the IDF had committed a massacre in Jenin. It also began running speculative stories on possible “war crimes.” However, perceptive readers of the Guardian will recall that it was simultaneously committed to denouncing the IDF for not permitting any information whatsoever from coming out of Jenin. At the time, this presented a dilemma for Israel’s zealous critics: were the Israelis to be blamed for concealing their massacres? Or for simply committing massacres? The Guardian opted for the latter, though without fully conceding the former. Swiftly, its accounts of Palestinian causalities (despite the IDF ostensibly preventing any information whatsoever from leaking out of the beleaguered camp) leaped from hundreds to over two hundred fifty, five hundred and beyond. When finally the Palestinian authority spoiled the party, declaring the number of dead to be 57, there was a momentary, and embarrassing pause in death toll speculation. Could both Israeli and Palestinian sides be claiming there was no massacre? Fortunately, Guardian reporter Brian Whitaker came to the rescue, reminding flustered readers that those conversant with the subtleties of the English Language knew that the Oxford English Dictionary defines “massacre” as the wanton destruction of property—in addition to human life. Massacres might hence be legitimately established by “house counts” as well as “body counts.” –And there were over 100 houses destroyed.

Chesler has carefully put together chronologies of events and, using information gathered from a variety of sources, debunked many of the myths surrounding alleged IDF atrocities during the recent Intifada. She presents a range of statistics to prove her case—for example, eighty percent of Israelis killed were non-combatants, of which forty percent were women and girls (in contrast, ninety-five percent of Palestinians killed were male). Best of all, she exposes the lie of the “Off Setting Penalties” style of reporting characteristic of most newpapers on the ongoing Middle East Tragedy. Chesler is not afraid of finding cause and effect between Palestinian suicide bombings and the IDF’s response. The usual technique of “blaming both sides equally,” she argues, is a way of avoiding holding those responsible for originating violence accountable. If the controversy between Israelis and Palestinians is about who engaged in the most egregious murder of innocents after the breakdown of the Oslo Accords, it is clear that the fault lies with the madmen of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Chesler does not write only of the situation in the Middle East. Jews in Europe and North America, she declares, are also experiencing an Intifada (this is the Arabic term the Palestinians use to describe their uprising). Chesler discusses the crude tactics of the Academic boycott of Israel and the thuggish behavior of campus hoodlums directed against those who have attempted to present an Israeli side to the ongoing crisis. She also discusses American and European societies’ refusal to even acknowledge these outrages as such. Chesler, as is the case throughout her book, documents her claims thoroughly.

Chesler’s most important argument, however, is aimed at western intellectuals. The New Anti-Semitism, she claims, is being perpetrated in the name of anti-racism and anti-colonialism. The New Anti-Semite cannot by definition be an Anti-Semite, she argues, because he or she ostensibly speaks on behalf of oppressed peoples. In fact, however, western intellectuals are leading the “Islamic Mob.” Chesler’s response is one of defiance: “I now find it necessary and sane to think tribally as well as internationally. . .to think not only with justice for all but also with the survival of American and of the Jewish people.” The breakdown of the language of third world liberation into a jargon legitimating violence is also a failure of politics. The framework where differences may be discussed and compromises arrived at no longer seems to work. The western intellectual has failed to distinguish between the voice of violence and the voice protesting violence.

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In the years leading up to 9/11, American intellectual life was obsessed with the idea of race. It was no longer politics or self-exploration or even sex that grabbed academics. Race was what required investigation: why do we still have it? how has it saved us (if we are oppressed) and how has it oppressed us (if we are its victims)?

Race was a convenient way of making complex questions simple. To the vexing questions of individual morality, one evaded them by including the actor within a given “race.” Races could be “good” and “bad.” They could be “victims” and “oppressors.” A given individual might make a wrong choice, but because of their “race,” this choice might be, through a mysterious alchemy, declared something else. It might become a “struggle for justice.” Or if it was a “right choice,” it might be dismissed as “taking advantage of previously acquired advantages.” In fact, race enabled entire nations to be “struggling for justice,” or to be “taking advantage of previously acquired advantages.” Instead of the tedious analysis required of scrutinizing individual facts and sifting through endless detail, the concept of race enabled entire peoples to be elevated to transcendence, or hurled down into the pits, all through the scratching of the solitary scribbler.

The drawback of using a term like “race” to understand the world was that it became impossible to think about the world in complex ways. Could a race be 65 percent “struggling for justice” and 35 percent “oppressor?” How about an individual? There were possibly ethical dilemmas: Could armed robbery be “transformed” into a “struggle for justice” through the invocation of the magic of race? What if the perpetrator of armed robbery’s motivation was only 25 percent “struggle for justice” and 75 percent simple violence? Race was a biological category—exceptions weren’t possible. A new term was invented in order to make the language of race a bit more intellectually respectable: “Ethnology.” Ethnology was a way of saying that groups—often racial—could still be “good” and “bad,” but it made it easier to defend obvious exceptions. Ethnicity still permitted a given group to be declared “good,” but if it contained a few bad apples, one didn’t have to claim that they were of a different race or species. Nevertheless, the bad apples might be redeemed as “struggling for justice.”

9/11 presented a great test case for American intellectual life. Here was an event of undeniable monstrosity. And yet it was difficult to make sense of it in terms of America’s racial categories. The hijackers were all “Arabs,” (whatever that meant) but their victims were of all races and religions—a remarkable amalgamation of American society. Ethnology enabled the Arabs to be grouped together. However what was one to make of the victims, who came from many races, religions and ethnic backgrounds? American intellectual life provided three categories one could use to make sense of the event: groups could be “good,” “bad,” or “bad apples.” These might be easily applied to the “Arabs” and any other ethnic group. But what to make of their victims?

The late Edward Said of Columbia University quickly appropriated the “bad apples” theory, saying the hijackers were deranged lunatics who had nothing in common with peaceful Islam. He declared it racist to think otherwise. He couldn’t resist, however, pointing out that 9/11 was what happens when “the Koran is not taught to Americans.” In this way those in the Towers became part of a “bad group.”

The classicist Mary Beard didn’t bother with the splitting of hairs required of “bad apples” approach. Writing in the London Review of Books a month after the attack, she called into question the integrity of those who would call America “civilized” in the first place. In fact, she asked, who are Americans to call the hijackers terrorists? Deftly sidestepping the “bad apples” complication introduced by Said, she found it easier to apply “good” to those “struggling for justice” (the hijackers) and “bad” (lackeys of Bush) presumably to those unwilling to listen to them. Denouncing the US attitude towards the rest of the world as “glib,” she declared that “World Bullies. . . will in the end Pay a Price.”

Neither Said nor Beard came close to realizing the shift that was occurring within American intellectual life, and increasingly, global culture. This was left to Hal Foster, the American art critic who, not far from ground zero, wrote shortly after the destruction of the Towers:

Frames are shifted. In my own little world as a critic of avant-garde art and design, I find the old romance of symbolic transgression suddenly looks different. . . . It is difficult to find a critical place, a political position. The jingoistic talk of most politicians is awful, but the anti-American posturing of some intellectuals is inadequate. For the first time many Americans have experienced extreme loss and grief, the daily bread of myriad people who resent this country so passionately. We must accept our responsibility for misery elsewhere, but we can't dissolve the responsibility for the deaths here.

The old, “totalizing” categories of race and ethnology and even national identity were too cumbersome to make sense of the monstrosity of 9/11. “Everyone is groping at narrative,” Foster wrote. The absolute refusal to consider Islam (or certain aspects of it) as contributing to 9/11 was as disingenuous as cavalierly absolving America entirely from its actions in the third world. What Foster was trying to convey was that lost in the simplistic intellectual posturing following 9/11 (x is “good”, y is “bad”), was the event itself. The event, Foster pointed out, should not be turned into a dog and pony show illustrating some ossified sociological or political theory. Using the simplistic and moralistic frames that race or ethnicity thinking creates obscured more than they revealed. And, at least, from walking distance of the rubble of the Trade Towers, the Event had a language of its own.

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In today’s still racially balkanized society, it is likely most readers of Chesler’s book will be Jewish—and presumably most will have views highly sympathetic towards Israel. Chesler’s language is extreme: “Jews are the world’s Niggers,” she writes several times. A substantial part of the book is composed of lengthy lists and summaries of massacres and atrocities committed against Jews throughout history. Much of this history is superficial and often when numbers of Jewish or Israeli deaths are indicated, you can count on Chesler to choose the higher figures. In fact there is very little that is new in Chesler’s book—and that which might be is not conveyed in a way that would convince someone not already convinced of Chesler’s beliefs.

What is disappointing about Chesler’s book is not its passion. One wishes there were more passion expressed by intellectuals about 9/11—instead of the usual scuttling about demonstrating how “9/11 represented” one mildewing theory or another. What is bothering is its unwillingness to attempt to convince readers other than those for whom the book is targeted of its—often very sensible– positions. “Am I only a paranoid Jew who sees Nazis everywhere. . .am I hysterically misinterpreting any criticism of Israel as an attack on all Jews everywhere?” With such an attitude there is hardly reason to bother to convince—and she doesn’t. One’s opponents are either anti-Semites or, given the welter of information Chesler provides, ignoramuses. Chesler’s book is not interested in dialog with its reader—it is a challenge and a blow.

The rise of racial and ethnic categories in American intellectual life was accompanied by a corresponding decline in the relevance of liberal politics. Politics, historically defined as the belief that compromise between competing interests is both valuable and possible–was necessarily marginalized in the eighties and nineties in favor of millenarian conceptions of race. Why compromise when what you believed in was simply and purely the truth? The current confusion in discussing Iraq reflects this recent vision. One constantly hears about the US “occupation” of Iraq, as if sovereignty has been somehow stripped from the Iraqi people. However a group of people is not sovereign simply be being a people—except in the recent “racialist” discourse about the world. A group of people is sovereign by virtue of having a democratic government which enables it to express itself. A group of people is sovereign by having access to express itself freely. Whatever one makes of the current US occupation of Iraq, it is clear that Iraqis are closer to political sovereignty now than they were before the US invasion.

In its endorsement of a certain “tribalism,” Chesler’s book looks backwards to the politically correct world pre-9/11 world. Despite her valuable service in bringing to the public’s attention anti-Semitic attacks on Jews in the Middle East, Europe and North America, her pessimistic vision reflects a disillusionment with liberalism and the possibility of constructive dialog. What is obvious about Palestinian society today is that it is in the grips of terror gangs who vigorously deny the possibility of precisely that. And yet, here and there, voices of reason emerge from beneath the rubble, speaking a language that is obvious to all willing to listen. Raja Shehadah, a Palestinian who has spoken courageously against the suicide madness, is but one. It is essential in the post-9/11 world that we realize clearly the consequences of not bringing about democracy and encouraging liberalism in unstable parts of the world; it is essential we not unwittingly entrench the dangerous and simplistic ideas of race and their derivatives by not listening to those who speak a common language of humanity, across imaginary ethnic and racial walls.

Endnotes

1. Ian Mayes, Guardian, May 18, 2002, actually addressed concerns that the Guardian staff was anti-Semitic. He took a survey of his staff and stunningly cited the response of one of his employees: "I am sure I will be the lone voice in criticizing [the] treatment of the conflict, but without exception my friends (and not all of them are supportive of Sharon) feel the paper is virulently anti-Israel (and anti-Semitic) and not one of them would consider buying it. My own family were loyal Guardian readers but stopped in the 1990s because of its relentless hostility towards Israel… [Now I] try very hard not to read articles about the conflict as they only succeed in disappointing me with their blatant anti-Israel sentiments and the plain inaccuracy of the reporting." Mayes spent the rest of the article trying to defend the Guardian.

2. I am aware of the Guardian’s disclaimer that they used the term massacre in quotations. See the Guardian, May 18, 2002.

3. On April 10, while operations in Jenin were still under way, Susan Goldenberg of the Guardian reported that a Palestinian Red Crescent official told her that he was 200 meters from the camp, yet had no idea what was going on inside. Later in the article she reported that information about what was happening was “sketchy” and that the only information coming of Jenin was a “trickle”. From this cache of sources, she opened her article thus: “The ferocious battle for Jenin camp - a square kilometer housing 16,000 people - last night entered the bloody lore of the Middle East: a fiasco for Israel, an immensely costly victory for the Palestinians, who reportedly suffered as many as 100 dead, with corpses rotting in the lanes of the camp for days.” Goldenberg acknowledges that Guardian reporters were finally able to enter Jenin on April 11, and (as the article is dated the 12th) presumably in the few hours she had a chance to scout around, was able to begin speculating that a “widespread pattern of human rights abuses was beginning to emerge” and “a widespread disregard for civilian casualties.”

4. Peter Beaumont on April 10 reported that up to 100 Palestinians had died. see the Guardian of the same day. Seamus Meulne, “Our Friends in Jenin”, in the Guardian, April 11. Meulne reports that many civilians were killed along with executions of prisoners. He concedes that Independent observers have been kept out. Beaumont, having the advantage of the IDF presumably allowing inspection in Jenin after the 11th, quickly bumped his body count to “more than 100, possibly twice that number, many of them civilians.” See the Guardian of the same day. Derek Brown mocked an IDF spokesman who said that when he had said “hundreds had died” he had really meant “hundreds of causalities”. Guardian, April 12, 2002.

5. Guardian, April 30

6. Ian Black, Guardian, April 17, 2002. Black acknowledged that the IDF still was blocking full access to Jenin.

7. Guardian, April 23

8. see Edward Alexander’s account of this as well in the Jerusalem Post of January 3, 2003.

9. Chesler, p. 202.

10. Chesler, p. 17.

11. Edward Said, London Review of Books, V. 23, No. 22; and Al-Ahram, Sept. 27, 2001.

12. Mary Beard, London Review of Books V. 23, No. 22.

13. Hal Foster, London Review of Books V. 23, No. 22.

14. Chesler, p. 78.

15. Chesler, p. 17.

16. Raja Shehadah, Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine (Penguin, 2003).