64 Friday, March 12, 1982

THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS

Modern Day Haters Twist Zionist Ideal

Birth of Israel Makes Anti-Semitism Respectable'

By VICTOR BIENSTOCK

This year marks the centenary of the publication in
Berlin of a little pamphlet by a Russian Jewish doctor
which told the Jews of Europe that anti-Semitism would
exist as long as the Jews were a homeless, nationless people
who "must have a home if not country of our own" in order
t _ o be able to walk the earth as equals.
Fourteen years later, Theodor Herzl, unfamiliar with
Leon Pinsker's "Autoemancipation," promised in his own
"Der Judenstat" that "let us but begin (to build the Jewish
state) and anti-Semitism will at once die down in every
country, for this will be our treaty of peace with it."
In an essay published on the 10th anniversary of Pins-
ker's ,death, Ahad HaAm, the great exponent of cultural
Zionism, emphasized Pinsker's thesis: "There remains,
then, but one means of destroying anti-Semitism. We must
become again a real nation possessed of all these essential
attributes of nationality by which one nation is the equal of
another."
A century after Pinsker, nearly that many years
after Herzl's promise and more than three decades
after the establishment of a sovereigh Jewish state,
anti-Semitism remains with us, in its old form and in a
new guise as well — anti-Zionism which camouflages
the mindless irrationality of traditional anti-Semitism
under a veneer of political and humanitarian excuses.
Statesmen who would not dream of voting in the
United Nations to condemn the Jewish people_ found it
possible to vote for a resolution equating Zionism with
racism, thus putting Zionism and Zionists beyond the pale.
The Jewish state of Israel, which Zionists from Moses
Hess, Pinsker's predecessor, down through the years be-
lieved would be the answer to the "Jewish problem," has
not fulfilled their hope of eliminating the hatred and prej-
udices of two millenia although it has established Jewish
nationhood and given to the Jews themselves a pride of
peoplehood previously denied them. But in the anti-
Zionism created by the enemies of the Jewish state, those
who have been oppressed are the oppressors; those who
have been the victims become the persecutors.
The result is a "respectable anti-Semitism," a term
employed a decade ago by a prescient survivor of Nazi
torture and the concentration 'camps who was long re-
garded in Europe as the moral voice of the victims of the
Holocaust. Jean Amery is not known in this country to the
extent that he should be, although his major work, "At the
Mind's Limits," was published here in 1980 by the Indiana
University Press, two years after this brilliant, d _ espairing
critic and essayist committed suicide.
Amery, son of an Austrian Jew who died in World
War I, and a Catholic mother, had been reared as a
Catholic. His experiences at the hands of the Gestapo
and in the concentration camps impelled him to adopt
a Jewish identity and, in later years, to ponder and
write extensively o_ n the Jewish condition in a hostile
world.
An ardent Marxist, Amery early foresaw the betrayal
of the Jewish cause by his socialist comrades and fought
against it years before Kreisky, Brandt- and the Second
International put their seal of approval on Yasir Arafat and
the Palestine Liberation Organization. He realized that
Jewish statehood had not automatically spelled the death
of anti-Semitism but had, in fact, given rise to a new form of
the age-old disease, a "respectable" variant.
From the time of his release from the concentration
camp until 1967, Amery, who wrote only in German, re-
fused to be a participant in the German literary and cul-
tural scene. But he went back in 1967 to deliver a lecture on
the intellectuals and Auschwitz.
He went again in 1976, to Hamburg, to address a
Brotherhood Week celebration of the Society for
Christian-JewiSh Cooperation, to warn of the dangers of
"respectable anti-Semitism." His speech there was later
published as an essay, "Respectable Anti-Semitism." Prof.
Irving Howe has performed a great service by republishing
the essay in translation in the current issue of "Dissent."
"We are still far from a general hatred of the Jews
as an ethnic group and religious community," Amery
told the Brotherhood Week celebrants. "Only one
thing is already certain: there is a general uneasiness
regarding Jews. One is beginning to feel disturbing
reservations, especially= among people who only 10
years ago tried one's patience with their philo-Semitic
pretenses.

LEON PINSKER

THEODOR HERZL

"Anti-Semitism has a collective infrastructure that is
historically and psychologically deeply imbedded. If it is
again becoming a reality today, three decades after the
discovery of what was done by the Nazis, then this has to do
not only with time which silently and steadily erodes ethi-
cal indignation, but also, indeed probably first and
foremost,- with the situation in the Near East."
For this, Amery holds the younger generation largely
responsible, particularly the younger socialists who
romanticized the Palestinians and cast the Israelis in the
role of oppressors.
"It is very dismaying that before our incredulous eyes
young people, and particularly those who in the broadest
sense of the term regard themselves as socialists, are reviv-
ing the age-old phenomenon we had believed was long since
dead," he states. "We know if from the debate now in pro-
gress within the Socialist International which tradi-
tionally has been well-disposed toward the Jews and pro-
Israel. The young socialists to whom the Palestinians now
appear as the freedom fighters and the Israelis as the im-
perialist oppressors are insisting that the Second Interna-
tional disassociate itself from Israel."
Young people joining forces in an anti-Zionist
movement, Amery argues, made it easy for the
"bourgeoisie" and big business to become anti-Zionist
as well. "In this way," he notes, "anti-Semitism is be-
coming what it has not been and could not be since the
discovery of the Nazi horrors: respectable."
However, he adds, anti-Semitism would not have
gained this respectability if there were not a very deep tie
between every Jew and the state of Israel, not because of
"any sort of abstruse myths of blood and race. It is simply
that the existence of the Jewish state has taught all the
Jews of the world to walk with their head high once more."
Beyond that, he points out, if ever, somewhere in the world,
some "grim fool" might get the idea to expel the Jews, the
possibility of finding a shelter in Israel "binds every Jewto
the fate of this tiny polity in the Near East."

Sixty Jewish Youngsters
Open New Galilee Kibutz

Sixty young memebers
of Habonim and Nahal
recently opened a new
kibutz south of Maalot in
the Galilee. The young
man shown above wears
the name of the new
kitutz — Tuval —
emblazoned on his
T-shirt. Tuval is one of a
number of new Galilee
outposts.

Speaking also for himself as one with no family, com-
munal or religious ties with Israel, Amery' stresses that
"the Jews feel bound to the fortunes and mistortunes of
Israel, whether they are religious Jews or not, whether
they adhere to Zionism or reject it, whether they are newly
arrived in their host countries or deeply rooted there."
As for himself, never a member of the Jewish religious
community and raised as a Catholic, "to the extent I am
interested at all in the national existence and indepen-
dence of a country, it is Israel."
What, Amery asks bitterly, is to be expected "of a
public opinion that, from the far right to the far left, is
ready to condemn Israel in the name of national iden-
tities and the right to peoples' self-determination?
Nothing more than the recognition-of the fact that
much maligned Zionism is also a national liberati,
movement, that the Jews, too, the most martyred,
most tragic people in the world, have a right to their
national identity — in so far as they are searching for
one and have not already assimilated religiously and
ethnically to their host people."
But wherever there is power, he asserts, from the
White House to the Elysee Palace, to DOwning Street or the
Kremlin, "there is the readiness, paraphrasing the matter
more or less diplomatically, to 'defend the rights of the
Arabs' which can be quantified in petrodollars, and to sell
the rights of the Jews which is the eternal non-right of the
poor, for a few pieces of silver."
Only a. while ago, Amery reminds us, "it was natural to
support the Israelis' right to their sovereignty; and now one
suddenly catches oneself feeling that such a declaration has
become a real test of courage and that perhaps it will
become an offense tomorrow."
The Jew, says Amery, remains the victim of the world's
"indolence of the heart," the condition which plunged the
peasant of the Middle Ages, the proletarian of the heydey of
capitalism and the Jew of the Nazi era into unspeakable
misery.
"Today," he says, "everyone can observe how in-
dolent hearts accommodate themselves when the
world everywhere, be it the capitalist or the socialist-
one, is isolating the Israelis and the Jews who are one
with them and thereby abandoning them to the catas-
trophe that is already hanging over their heads like a
storm cloud."
"In no time," cries this disillusioned, anguished man,
"the Near East question will become a new Jewish ques-
tion. And we know from history how such a question is
answered. The disassociation from Israel and with it, from
every Jew, as cautious as it is clear, hardly surprises the
expert on indolent hearts. The millions of Jewish burnt
offerings . . . have been paid off. And now let these eternal
troublemakers be quiet."
Anti-Semitism in the guise of anti-Zionism declares
Amery "has become respectable." And "the respectable
anti-Zionist has an enviably clear conscience, a spirit as
calm as the sea . . . If occasionally he awakens from his
apathetic drowsing, he asks the ritual question: Is Israel
not an expansionist state, an imperialist outpost? Has not
Israel itself caused the trouble that is besetting it from all
sides with the 'immobility" of its policies? Does not the very
idea of Zionism bear in it the original sin of colonialism so
that every Jew who ,avows solidarity with this land be-
comes personally guilty?"
But anti-Semitism, even if it calls itself anti-Zionism,
is not respectable, Amery insists. "On the contrary, it is the
indelible stain that mars the honor of civilized humanity."
Amery's essay is threaded with appeals to the Left
to redefine itself within the context of the problem of
Israel — the Jewish problem — and to return to a
stand for human values.
"Does- the Left," he asks, "still regard nationalism as it
always has, as a political error born of obstinacy? Or
rather, does it find nationalism acceptable wherever,
under the sign of tyranny, it is directed against Jews, and
unjust as soon as the Jews, for their part and under consid-
erable pressure, fall reactively into its trap?"
How to deal with anti-Zionism is dealt with by Amery
quoting the "Germanist Hans Mayer, a man of thorough
Marxist Schooling." (Hans Mayer was Amery's ori&
name.)
"Whoever attacks Zionism but by no means wishes to
say anything against the Jews, is fooling himself or others,"
says Amery. "The state of Israel is a Jewish state. Whoever
wants to destroy it, openly or through policies that can
affect nothing else but such destruction, is practicing the
Jew-hatred of yesterday and time immemorial.
"How clearly this can be observed in the interplay
of foreign and domestic policies is shown by the inter-
nal policies of the currently anti-Zionist countries.
Internally they will regard their Jewish citizens as
virtual `Zionists' and treat them accordingly."
Anti-Semitism, age-old and "appearing in the cloak of
respectability and fashionable chic, goes beyond anything
that Christian-Jewish cooperation can solve," Amery con-
cludes. "It is a matter for the world and its history."