THE END OF ANTISEMITISM

We Are All Semites Now

In the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, what single word has completely dominated the headlines of the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Fox, and the rest of the media and has even led to the censure of a member of Congress?

If your answer is “antisemitism”, you win the jackpot.

The word “Semite” was first used around 1791 as a way of identifying languages like Hebrew. In 1860, the Austrian Jewish scholar Moritz Steinschneider introduced the term “antisemitische vorurteile” (meaning antisemitic prejudices) while countering the argument of French philosopher Ernest Renan that the Semitic race is inferior to the Aryan race. The term was then made common in 1879 when German publicist and agitator Wilhelm Marr published his pamphlet “The Way to Victory of Germanism Over Judaism” in which he used the term “anti -semitismus”. The pamphlet became quite popular and the term has now lived on for almost one hundred and fifty years, gaining great staying power, of course, from the Nazi holocaust of World War II and the subsequent founding of the state of Israel as a specifically Jewish state. While most states encompass a variety of ethnicities, races, and religions, it is important to understand that Israel was founded by European Zionists for the express purpose of creating a state that would gather Jews from around the world in the ancient homeland of the Jews in Palestine.

Before the founding in 1948, the United States was the great place of refuge for the Jews of Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Between 1880 and 1925, nearly thee million Jews immigrated to the United States from eastern Europe. This was before there was any Israel and at a time when the Zionist Organization of Europe was struggling to get a few thousand Eastern European Jews into Palestine first under Turkish control and then after WWI under British government control as the result of a League of Nations mandate for control over the territory by London pending its evolution into a full blown independent state.

HOW IT BEGAN

To understand what is happening today, it is important to know what happened in British mandated Palestine and even before that. It was in 1897 that the Zionist Organization was formed by Theodore Herzl with the objective of returning Europe’s Jews to the Promised Land of Palestine which most, but not all, Jews had left or been driven out of by the Romans 1800 years before. The plan and its operations were simple. In 1900 there were about 50,000 Jews, 60,000 Christians, and 500,000 Arab Palestinians living in the region. The Zionist plan was to use funds provided by rich European Jews like the Rothschilds of London and Paris to buy land in Palestine (typically from absentee landlords) and to pay travel expenses for European Jews who would elect to move to Palestine to work on the land that would be provided by the funding Jewish organizations. While the Zionists did not specifically seek to displace large numbers of Arab Palestinian workers and, indeed, even tried not to, inevitably increasing displacement took place. A popular slogan of the time ran like this: “a people without land for a land without people.” It seemed the perfect answer for the alienated Jews of Europe. Sadly, it wasn’t true. There were, in fact, a significant number of people in Palestine (which was ruled by the Ottoman Empire) at the time. Indeed, at the time there were about 50,000 Jews, 60,000 Christians, and 450,000 Muslim Arabs in Palestine. Nor did the Jewish immigrants intend to learn the local language or otherwise fit themselves into the local scene. Rather they proceeded to rediscover and reinvent the ancient Hebrew language while holding themselves apart from the locals. Nor did the Zionist Organization consider trying to find some glue. Its aim was to recreate the ancient Promised Land for Jews. It desperately wished that the native, Islamic Palestinians would just disappear.

THE BALFOUR DECLARATION

In 1917, WWI was not going well for the British who were hoping the Americans would get to Europe quicker than was happening. Downing Street and Parliament seemed to think that Jews were rich and influential in America (as many such as Lord Walter Rothschild were in Britain) and that by seeming to offer them some bait London could speed the arrival of the American doughboys in France. The Balfour declaration written as a letter from Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to the rich and influential Rothschild committed London to support the opening in Palestine of a homeland for the Jews. Whether this had any effect on the doughboy timetable is questionable, but it had a dramatic effect on Jews in Europe and on subsequent events in Palestine.

In keeping with the spirit of the Balfour Declaration, London in the 1920s took major steps to facilitate and increase Jewish immigration to Palestine. It worked in the sense that the numbers of Jewish immigrants rose dramatically, but so also did Palestinian resistance to the immigration. Eventually in 1936 there was a total Arab-Palestinian revolt that forced the British to declare martial law and send in troops in 1937. The number of new immigrants was also reduced and then, of course, WWII intervened. Initially, it dramatically reduced the immigration, but, of course, the holocaust in Europe eventually resulted in a great post war wave of immigrants with Palestine still under British mandate and Britain caught between its old Balfour declaration and the survivors of the holocaust on the one hand and increasingly frightened and hostile Palestinians on the other.

THINGS BEGIN TO GET SERIOUS

The Zionists had created the Haganah in 1920 to be an official Jewish armed force aimed at resisting Palestinian opposition to Jewish settlements and defending Jews from bullying and attack. In 1931, the Irgun was formed as an unofficial armed force aimed at expelling the British and seizing all of Palestine and turning it into an independent Jewish state with no representation of the Arab Palestinian inhabitants who still constituted a big majority of the territory’s population. Later still in 1940, the Stern Gang was formed as perhaps an even more violence oriented group aimed at driving the British out and bringing more Jews in to create a new Jewish state that would drive the Arab Palestinians out. It is important to understand that the Irgun and the Stern Gang had no time or use for Palestinian Arabs. They wanted the long time inhabitants gone to make room for more Jews from Europe and elsewhere around the world. The idea of Arabian Palestinians and European Jews living together never crossed their minds. Indeed, the Zionist leaders David Ben- Gurion and Chaim Weizmann told the Zionist Congress that partition would be a first step toward “possession of the land as a whole.”

In the immediate aftermath of WWII, Palestine remained under British mandate as it was inundated with Jewish refugees from the Nazi holocaust being transported by the Zionist Organization and seeking new land to be acquired from the from the indigenous Palestinians. Some Zionists, especially the Irgun, began an effort to drive the British out and to take complete control of all of Palestine. In July, 1946 the Irgun blew up the King David hotel which then served as the headquarters for the British governing forces. This was by way of telling the Brits it was time for them to go and turn all of Palestine over to the Zionists.

Indeed, the Brits themselves were anxious to get out. Under the terms of the League of Nations A Class mandates, the mandated territory was to become an independent state upon termination of the mandate. By the end of WWII, this had occurred in all mandated territories except Palestine. It is important to grasp the implications here. The British mandate was set to end on May 15, 1948. In principle, at that point, all of Palestine including Jews, Arab Palestinians, and others would become an independent state. However, the League of Nations itself lapsed in 1946 creating a quandary about what to do with Palestine, especially after the Brits announced in February 1947 that they had no intention of staying in Palestine a day after the established end date. It was to deal with this that the UN Special Committee On Palestine (UNSCOP) was created to recommend a plan and status for Palestine after the termination of the British mandate.

ZIONISTS MANEUVER THE UN

The Zionist Jewish Agency pressed for representation on the committee and for exclusion of both Britain and the Arab countries. It achieved both objectives. The Arab states were convinced that statehood had been subverted and that transition from the League of Nations to UNSCOP was questionable under the law. They wished to have the issue brought before the International Court and refused to cooperate with UNSCOP. After three months of investigation and consideration, the committee made its report in August, 1947. It recommended that Palestine be partitioned into two states, one Jewish and one Arab/Palestinian with an economic union between the two while Jerusalem would become a separate International City.

At this point, about two thirds of the entire population of Palestine were Arab Palestinians and one third Jews. The proposed division allotted 43 percent of the land to the Arabs and 56 percent to the Jews. This imbalance was in part due to the fact that UNSCOP (without inquiring about the wishes or rights of the native Palestinians) was anticipating further Jewish immigration from those displaced by the war in Europe. This anticipation, of course, was generated by the Zionist Organization with its presence on the committee. The Arabs did not see it as their responsibility to make up for the sins of the Europeans at a potentially high cost for Arab Palestinians. The Arabs requested representation on the ad hoc UN committees deliberating the UNSCOP proposal but were excluded from the ad hoc committee reviewing the proposed boundaries. Subcommittee 2 which had been established to review the boundary allocations called for the issue to be placed before the International Court, but this was never advanced by the full committee.

Passage of the final UNSCOP resolution required a two thirds majority of the valid votes of the then 57 member United Nations. After filibustering by the Zionist delegation, the vote was postponed for three days. According to multiple sources, had the vote been taken on the appointed day it would not have delivered the necessary two thirds majority. The filibustering provided more time for arm twisting and political maneuvering. U.S. President Truman noted later that he had never before seen such blatant political horse trading along with pressure brought on the White House by wealthy and politically influential Jewish Americans. The final vote came on November 29, 1947 and amounted to the necessary two thirds majority. Essentially, the Arabs had been politically out-maneuvered and outspent by the Zionists and their European and American supporters. Tellingly, no votes were taken among the actual residents of Palestine. Interestingly, the Jewish side was split. The Irgun and like minded Zionists continued to demand the whole of Palestine for Jews and urged the expulsion of the Palestinian Arabs who were a large majority of the population. The Zionist Organization on the other hand, saw this resolution not necessarily as final, but as a starting point to achieve a Zionist state from whose base further expansion could be proceed down the road.

The UN had from the end of November until May 15, 1948 to resolve issues and differences, but did nothing. It should have been clear that fundamental governance issues had really not been resolved. With the Arabs rejecting the whole plan, could the Zionists just move ahead and declare their own state, and if so, who was going to govern the Arabs who were a large majority of the total population of Palestine? Would the Zionists have the right and the authority to declare their own independent state in the face of strong Arab opposition both within and outside of Palestine?

WHO ARE SEMITES

That, of course, is what they did and the rest is history - but a very sad and now threatening history . In thinking about how now to respond to this history, it is important to address the question of antisemitism. To the vast majority of people in America and around the world, it means an irrational, deep hatred of Jews and anything Jewish. But that ignores the fact that Arabs are also Semites. Linguistically, Semite refers to anyone who speaks a language like Hebrew, Arabic, or Amharic. The word derives from Shem, the son of Noah who fathered Abraham who in turn fathered both the Arabs through his son Ishmael by Hagar the handmaiden of his wife Sarah and the Jews through his son Isaac by wife Sarah.

Yes, Arabs are Semites along with the Jews. So antisemitic can mean anti-Arab just as much as it can mean anti-Jew. In fact, what has been going on in Israel/Palestine for the past hundred and thirty odd years is Semite against Semite. This has become strikingly clear just in the last few days as the U.S. Congresswoman with Arabic heritage, Rashida Tlaib has been censured by the U.S. House of Representatives for being antisemitic in some of her recent comments on the war in Gaza and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The ignorant U.S. congresspeople don’t know that Tlaib cannot be antisemitic because she is semitic herself.

Tlaib represents a perspective only recently and only infrequently visible in the United States and indeed in the world outside the Middle East. I came to understand this several years ago when my wife and I made a tourist trip around Israel and Jordan. Along a stretch of the Dead Sea we came to a check point at which many autos were stopped for inspection. Our car, however, was waved through without stopping. I asked our guide what was going on. She explained that our license plate was an Israeli plate and thus no need to stop. The other cars all had Israel/Palestinian plates which required them to stop. The West Bank of Palestine is supposed to be under Palestinian governance, but that is in fact not really the case. As former Israeli Prime Minister Ben Gurion said, he did not blame the Palestinians for being upset. He understood that the Jews had preempted much of the space and the wealth and that the Palestinians might be justified in their complaints. Indeed, even as we now watch Israel destroy Gaza, we are mostly unaware that on the nominally Palestinian controlled West Bank over 100 Palestinians have been killed in the past month by Israeli settlers establishing what are often illegal new settlements at the expense of the Palestinians.

The cry of antisemitism has been loud in America over the past month as the Anti Defamation League has collected and publicized statements and actions deemed anti-Israel and/or anti-Jewish and published screaming headlines showing that antisemitism is up three or four hundred percent. But this derives in large part from a new phenomenon just beginning to make itself felt. Not only are there more Arab Semites like Tlaib in America now, but the antisemitism punch has been so over-used that it is losing its power. Surely there is more behind the growing concern about genocide and the total decimation of the Gaza of one set of Semites than just pure unreasoning hatred of another set of Semites.

ISRAEL AND SINGAPORE

For a number of years I was an official advisor to the Israeli Ministry of the Economy and thus spent a lot of time in Israel with its government, business, academic, and journalistic leaders. For one project, I was asked to compare the economies of Singapore and Israel to determine why the World Economic Forum always ranked Israel far below Singapore on its competitive economies scale. It turned out to be an interesting and revealing study that showed many weaknesses of Israel linked to the conflict between the Semites.

Like Israel, Singapore has a diverse population. The majority of people are of Chinese extraction but there are large minorities of Malays and Indians. The country has five official languages but English is the main working language. Key questions are those of the integration of the society and how the state interacts with it. In Singapore, all government funded housing projects must reflect the ethnic makeup of Singapore. That is to say that they should be about two thirds Chinese, fifteen to twenty percent Malay, and ten to fifteen percent Indian. Similarly, attendance at public schools reflects essentially the same pattern. All male citizens of all ethnicities must do military service and the officer corps also replicates the national ethnic pattern. Public services like health care are essentially equal in all branches of the society as is infrastructure. There is little crime, perhaps because people believe they can get rich honestly.

This is very far from the picture in Israel where Arabs and Jews mostly do not live in the same neighborhoods, where Arab Palestinians are barred from serving in the Israeli army, where the official state language is Hebrew (Arabic is an official language but not the state language), and where schools, infrastructure, and public services vary greatly by community. In short, Israel is a much more divided and segregated community than Singapore and that is without counting in the West Bank and Gaza which are officially not part of Israel, but in which Jewish settlements continue to expand and Palestinian citizens are subject to check points, theft of property, and being killed from time to time by Jewish settlers. Again, Semite on Semite crime you might say.

In short, one can speak of Singaporeans as having a high degree of homogeneity despite the significant ethnic differences. Whereas Israel has little societal homogeneity even though the ethnicity of the Arabs and Jews is virtually identical.

IDENTITY

This leads me to a small but perhaps telling personal experience. As a new freshman at Swarthmore College in 1959, I was sitting in the Student Union having coffee and a muffin. There were four other students at another table. One of them stood up, walked to my table and asked if I were all Jewish or part Jewish. I disappointed him by explaining that as far as I knew, despite my Jewish sounding name, I was not Jewish at all. He explained that he and his friends were trying to determine how many Jews there were in the freshman class.

Think about that for a moment. Mind you, these were all students whose families had been in America for at least two generations. My family originated in East Prussia which is now Poland. But neither I nor any of the other Pollocks I knew would have been counting how many possible new pollocks there were in the freshman class. Nor I daresay would others of German, English, Dutch, or French origin been doing so either. For Jews, the Jewish identity (which is not at all a racial identity) is extremely important. One can tell stupid Pollock jokes all day and everyone including the Pollocks will laugh. Not so with Jews and stupid Jew jokes. In fact, as far as I know there are no stupid Jew jokes. Maybe because there actually are no stupid Jews.

Indeed, it was precisely to halt such things and any evil that might spring from them that the “antisemitic” weapon was invented and wielded. It has been quite effective in preventing harassment of Jews and assuring that they get fair treatment despite being an ethnic and religious minority. But it can be and has been used as a weapon to silence honest and constructive criticism and particularly to override resistance to Israel’s own antisemitic actions and policies toward the Palestinian Arabs, their Semitic brothers.

The combination of a younger and more ethnically diverse generation of Americans, an enormous and even inhumane overreaction by Israel to the Gaza situation, and the withering of America’s international credibility and support in response to President Biden’s total “stand with Israel” policy and apparent inability or unwillingness to counter or contradict Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu in any way are inexorably changing the game. It is increasingly unfeasible to shut critics up by leveling the “antisemitic” charge, especially since the Arab Palestinians are Semites just like the Israelis.

AMERICA’S INTEREST

America is now being internationally isolated by being apparently totally glued to Israel at a moment when Russia and China are maneuvering to restructure the global balance of power against the United States and its long time democratic allies. Netanyahu’s Israel is now de facto the best ally the Russians and Chinese have in trying to achieve this goal.

That 1400 Israelis were brutally killed by Hamas on October 7 is an evil tragedy for which Hamas must pay a heavy price. But it does not justify killing thousands of (10,000 at current count) completely defenseless and mostly innocent Gazan Palestinian Arabs. America must be the voice of reason and the source of succor and patient justice that does not simply generate greater hatred and longer term conflict. Indeed, America must now aim to save the great virtues of Israel from the anti-Palestinian instincts of people like Netanyahu who represent the dark side of the force.