The Company They Keep: Antisemitism's Fellow Travellers

anthony julius  |  july 2008

Elder of Zion: An antisemitic cartoon published by the newspaper Al Ittihad in the United Arab Emirates, June 2002.

IN APRIL 2005, THREE Jewish members of the National Union of Students (NUS) executive in the United Kingdom resigned from their positions. One of them, Luciana Berger, the NUS "anti-racism convenor," explained her position to the union's conference:

"This year, a comment was made in a Student Union saying that burning down a synagogue is a rational act. When asked to comment, National Executive Committee members could not even bring themselves to condemn that statement. Over five months ago serious complaints were lodged about antisemitic comments made by an NEC member in a public meeting. There is yet to be any form of official response to these complaints. [...] While I accuse no one of antisemitism, this year NUS has been a bystander to Jew-hatred." [1]

The question arises, is it right to characterise as antisemitic those adverse stances towards Israel and the Zionist project that are derived from false facts, and / or are malicious, and / or are taken without regard to Jewish objections, and / or resonate with antisemitism's history and / or deploy antisemitic tropes? Mostly, the answer is "yes" - particularly when several of these features are combined. But in certain instances, the answer might be, "no" - or "not quite."

First, the affirmative answer might be a tactical mistake. It might be received as merely abusive - no more than a piece of name-calling. It often serves as a mere provocation, inviting the tedious riposte, "I am not an antisemite, indeed I deplore antisemitism, I am instead a partisan of the Palestinians, you are making a false accusation of antisemitism against me to squash my unanswerable case, etc." Why, then, take this step, one which almost always signals the end of any useful exchange of views, and instead inaugurates the trading of insults, the argument no longer being about the coherence of the stance, but instead about the respective moral character of its advocates and critics? [2]

Second, the affirmative answer might be premature. Antisemitic anti-Zionism is so much part of the zeitgeist, it is reasonable to assume that many of the people who draw upon its tropes do so without reflection. If they are open to correction when the provenance of their language is pointed out to them, they are not antisemites. Antisemites are obdurate in their Jew hatred. They display their antisemitism as much in their response to challenges to their discourse as in the discourse itself. They will respond, that is, with counter-accusations; there will no pause for self-interrogation. Further, these counter-accusations will tend to trade on the ugly characteristics typically attributed to Jews - the use of their power or money to silence truth-tellers, the exploitation of their historic suffering to gain present-day advantages, a ready resort to character-assassination or smear, and so on.

Finally, a "yes" risks lumping together two kinds of people. For the first kind, antisemitism determines their positions; they embrace Jew hatred; they acknowledge and welcome the antisemitism of others. For the second kind, antisemitism is not relevant to the positions that they take; they do not recoil from antisemitism when they encounter it; they are insensitive to the presence of antisemitism in their own positions or in the positions that they support. They may not be antisemites themselves, but they collude with antisemitism. They are often found defending antisemites - not guilty of the offence themselves, but quick to champion others who are guilty of it. The distinction I am drawing is between the culpable adoption of antisemitism and a culpable indifference towards it. Many "new anti-Zionists" bear this latter, lesser responsibility. They share space with antisemites, untroubled by the company that they keep; they comprise a species of "fellow traveller" ("bystander" does not quite do the vice justice), the kind of person ready to overlook or excuse everything that is vicious in the cause he supports, the protagonists he admires.

The Soviet analogy

The first fellow travellers were the early supporters of the Bolshevik revolution. [3] They were non-Party progressives who had, in Trotsky's phrase, "turned their eyes eastwards" [4] (though over time that came to include China - and then they turned westward, to Cuba). In the main, they were intellectuals. The term did not at first have pejoratives overtones; many progressives were happy to describe themselves as fellow travellers. [5] The fellow travellers of the Soviet Union ("FTSUs") share many traits with those new anti-Zionists who are also antisemitism's fellow travellers ("FTASs"). [6]

• "There, but not here" advocates FTSUs tended to find the one-party state acceptable "there," i.e., in Russia, but not here, i.e., in the West. In the received sentiment, it was a solution for them, not for us; we do not need, or even want, it for ourselves; we are different here. Similarly, FTASs tend to find violence against Jews acceptable in Israel, but not here. Indeed, not just acceptable, but justified.
• Terror-apologists To the FTSUs, the indiscriminate murder of the kulaks was a necessary harshness. Violence inflicted either in defence or in pursuit of the revolution, and repression in the name of worthy ends, was worthy of endorsement. Similarly, to the FTASs, the indiscriminate killings of Jews by Palestinian suicide bombers are taken to be necessary protests, appropriate retaliations.

Indeed, for some these acts of murder are not crimes, but sanctified acts of resistance. [7] They demand respect, not condemnation. We are invited to find a language free of condescension that will allow us to understand why in a world of rampant inequality and injustice people are driven to do things we hate. [8]

Antisemitic anti-Zionism is so much part of the zeitgeist, it is reasonable to assume that many of the people who draw upon its tropes do so without reflection

Suicide bombing is not an act of injustice, it is a response to injustice. Indeed, it is an involuntary response ("driven") - "when life is a living hell what's wrong with going to heaven in a ball of fire? ... The wonder is that there are not more such acts of self-immolation, not that they occur at all." [9] These FTASs reject the proposition that setting out to destroy random members of a culture one finds unacceptable is an indefensible project. [10]

And when the arguments are exhausted, even the most puerile, [11] there is always the straightforward lie to be given a respectful reception. Madeleine Bunting, for example, interviews Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, reporting his statement that Palestinian suicide bombing is targeted at combatants, merely pausing to note that this is "something his critics would strongly dispute." Qaradawi is then allowed to continue, "'Sometimes they kill a child or a woman. Provided they don't mean to, that's OK, but they shouldn't aim to kill them. In every war, mistakes are made and non-combatants get killed ...'"[12]

• Reality-deniers The FTSUs romanticised; they propagandized; they misled. They sent despatches from Russia intended to dispel hostile impressions; they colluded in "conducted tours," when shown only what Party-minders presented. Famines, mass deportations, show trials, slave labour camps, killings, - all were suppressed or excused.[13] Russia only wants peace, whereas the Western democracies are warmongers and imperialists. The FTASs perform similar services for Ahmadinejad,[14] Hezbollah and Hamas. They deny the reality of antisemitism in the West; they regard it as either invented to suppress criticism of Israel, or else a misnamed European Muslim indignation. They deny the reality of antisemitism in the Middle East; they regard it as no more than a polemical extravagance.
• Adulators of the West's enemies Consider, for example, the Dean of Canterbury, writing in 1942: "Stalin was calm, composed, simple. Not lacking in humour. Direct in speech, untouched by the slightest suspicion of pomposity. There was nothing cruel or dramatic ... about Stalin's face. Just steady purpose and a kindly geniality."[15] Similarly, provided that the leader's anti-Israel credentials are solid, anything else will be excused. There is even a certain sycophancy shown towards antisemitic tyrants and party leaders.
• Indifferent to oppositionist intellectuals David Caute writes, "Both the Western communists and the fellow-travelling intellectuals deepened the despair of the non-official Soviet intelligentsia during the years of persecution and terror. In their darkest hours they heard themselves condemned by their own kind, by foreigners who shared their own idealistic traditions and whose immunity from imprisonment or death was due solely to the accident of nationality."[16] Similarly, there is no championing of reformists in the Arab / Muslim world. On the contrary. Tariq Ali's attacks on the Iraqi intellectual Kanan Makiya (a "quisling", a "fraudster" and a "mountebank"), are typical, and recall, in their baroque vituperativeness, the Stalinist rhetoric of abuse. [17]
• Denunciators of "Red baiting," of "McCarthyism," of Islamophobia The characterisation of every criticism of the Soviet Union as "Red-baiting," and of supporters of the Soviet Union as "McCarthyism," resonates in the characterisation of every criticism of any Islamist position as "Islamophobia."

FTSUs were indifferent to Soviet antisemitism; FTASs are indifferent to contemporary antisemitic tropes mostly derived from the Soviet precedent. The connection between FTSUs and FTASs is thus more than merely analogical.

Similarly, there is no championing of reformists in the Arab/Muslim world

In the very year of its collapse, Soviet anti-Zionism was credibly considered the greatest threat to Israel and Jews generally.[18] The Soviet Union was the first non-Arab country after World War II to initiate a hate campaign against Jews. It was disguised as a campaign against "Zionists."[19] The current anti-Zionism consists of variations on themes introduced by the Soviet Union.[20] Though its Ministry of Information only began to use the term "anti-Zionist" systematically after the Six Day War,[21] it was used intermittently from as early as 1949. Soviet anti-Zionism comprised a combination of (a) Russian antisemitism (b) Bolshevik anti-Zionism, and (c) Soviet opposition to the Zionist project.

Russian antisemitism originated in Tsarist Russia but persisted in the Soviet period. [22] Antisemitism was part of Imperial Russian official policy, promoted both in government ministries and on the street [23] (as in the old slogan, "Beat the yids, and save Russia").[24] Soviet Russian policies reflected this popular and bureaucratic Jew-hatred.[25] The failed experiment in Soviet apartheid, [26] the "Jewish Autonomous Region" of Birobidzhan, was comparable in object and effect to the Russian Pale, in which millions of Jews had been confined. The Soviet Union demonstrated a Tsarist readiness to exploit antisemitism for political advantage - for example, its collusion during the immediate post-World War II period in the antisemitism of the states newly under its control (which made the burden of Soviet rule less oppressive, and by implication undid the Nazi equation of Jews with Communists). In the late 1940s and early 1950s and in the 1970s and 1980s, the official Soviet media deployed the most violent and abusive antisemitic images and language, continuous with the images and language deployed by the pre-1917 Black Hundreds (on occasion, the material was simply lifted from Black Hundreds pamphlets, with "Zionists" substituted for "Jews" in the text).[27] At times, this antisemitism was strong enough to devour the Soviet Union's own Bolshevik past. In the 1970s, for example, favourable references to Jews were deleted from reprints of standard Soviet classics and attacks on antisemitism by Lenin and Gorky were omitted from editions of their works. [28] Last, of course, there was Stalin's own antisemitism - at the end of his life, a "dangerous obsession."[29]

Bolshevik anti-Zionism treated Zionism as a reactionary political movement, putting nation before class and promoting Jewish separatism. Collective conflicts are either progressive or reactionary. Class struggle is progressive, because it will lead to a better society for all. The struggle between nations, by contrast, is reactionary. It is destructive and atavistic, and it brackets the oppressed and their oppressors in a false union. The Jews, insofar as they have any single, collective existence at all, must choose between national, pseudo-national (that is, Zionist), and class allegiances. They cannot be combined.[30] It is through proletarian, not Jewish, solidarity, that antisemitism is to be fought; commitment to Social Democracy can therefore be informed by Jewish self-interest. Zionists objectively act in the interests of the bourgeoisie; they divert the Jewish masses from the Revolution. Zionism misunderstands what it is that makes a nation. "Absolutely untenable scientifically," Lenin wrote, "the idea that the Jews form a separate nation is reactionary politically." [31] Zionism also misunderstands antisemitism. It is, Lenin mocked, a mere "Zionist fable" to regard antisemitism as "eternal." There is, he explained, a "link that undoubtedly exists between antisemitism and the interests of the bourgeois, and not of the working-class sections of the population [...] the social character of antisemitism ... is not changed by the fact that dozens or even hundreds of unorganised workers, nine-tenths of whom are still quite ignorant, take part in a pogrom."[32]

Zionism had to be fought in order to "make the revolution on the Jewish street."[33] This opposition to Zionism also derived from certain pre-Marxist positions on the rights of corporate and quasi-corporate bodies within the State.[34] There were, in addition, unprincipled attempts to exploit "popular" antisemitism for revolutionary ends.[35] The designation of antisemitism as counter-revolutionary was dropped soon after the Revolution, in the late 1920s.[36]

Soviet opposition to the Zionist project had both domestic and foreign policy aspects. There was both persecution of Russian Zionists and a hostile posture adopted towards the Zionist project and to the State of Israel. The first period of persecution ended in the mid- to late 1920s: in September 1924, 3000 Zionists were arrested in 150 localities, most were sentenced to between 3 to 10 years hard labour, while the remaining few Zionist groups were wound up in 1928. [37]

...[T]here was a radical, antisemitic position, in which Zionism was the acme of everything that was evil in the world

The Comintern was hostile towards Zionism. Britain was the Mandate power; the Balfour Declaration put the Jews under imperial protection; Zionism was thus taken to be a colonialist enterprise, an aspect of British imperial policy. This changed, briefly, after World War II, when Zionism was regarded as anti-colonialist, because of its adversarial stance towards Britain. Almost immediately after its founding, however, and for the duration of the USSR's own existence, the Soviet stance towards the Jewish State was antagonistic. During the Cold War, and even after it had ended, Israel was taken to be an instrument of US imperialism. The persecution of Russian Zionists started again in the 1970s (the "Refusenik" movement), but for at least two decades before then, "Zionist" was a routine term of abuse in official propaganda; at times, it went so far as to represent Zionism as one of the greatest threats to the world.[38] The international Zionist conspiracy was the new Nazi threat. "The Jewish State is not an end in itself but a means for securing global objectives." [39] Zionism seeks "[to] rule the entire world." [40]

The Soviet anti-Zionist committee, AKSO, which was set up in April 1983, probably in response to Israel's invasion of Lebanon, is exemplary of the complexity of Soviet antisemitic anti-Zionism. There were two positions within the organisation. There was a moderate position, one that concerned itself with the well-being of Soviet Jewry, addressed the emigration implications of family reunification programmes, and so on. It adopted the slogan "Neither antisemitism nor Zionism." Then there was a radical, antisemitic position, in which Zionism was the acme of everything that was evil in the world, and continuous with an infernal Jewish politics predating by many decades the actual foundation of Israel. The principal ideologist of this trend was Lev Korneev, who published extensively on antisemitic themes, including ritual murder. He put into circulation the story of a religious Israeli soldier who murders a pregnant Arab woman to win a 100 shekel bet - a story thereafter enlarged upon by many other Soviet writers. In general, the most extravagant allegations of Zionist-Nazi collaboration were made, and Israel was represented as nothing other than the successor to Nazism. [41] The post-1967 references in the Soviet press to Israel, Zionism and Judaism verged on paranoiac obsession.[42]

Tolerating antisemitism

It is characteristic of much contemporary hostility to Israel and the Zionist cause that its antisemitic aspects are (i) denied, (ii) downplayed, or even (iii) justified by anti-Zionist polemicists. The denial is often frivolously advanced, without any real thought being given to the possibility that antisemitism might taint the defended anti-Zionist position. Even when it is pondered, the denial is often derived from a misunderstanding of antisemitism, which is typically considered to come only from the right, to be State-sponsored, and to speak German. The massive presence of the Holocaust, that is, has occluded the pre-Nazi history of antisemitism - that is to say, what might be termed a hypermnesia in respect of the former has promoted an amnesia in respect of the latter.[43]

There are two kinds of denier.[44] The denier in good faith cannot see the antisemitism, while the bad faith denier will not acknowledge it. In either case, the complaint of antisemitism is taken to be just a ruse by Jews and other defenders of Israel. Tariq Ali's indignation is representative: "The campaign against the supposed new 'antisemitism' in Europe today is basically a cynical ploy on the part of the Israeli Government to seal off the Zionist state from any criticism of its regular and consistent brutality against the Palestinians."[45] Antisemitism is not a problem, not to be taken seriously, no longer a real threat.[46] The antisemitism of the Hamas Charter "has been repeatedly disavowed in recent years by Hamas leaders, specifically in relation to the anti-Jewish tropes."[47] And Israel is practically invulnerable. "To say that the Zionist state is threatened by any Arab country is pure demagogy."[48]

Once evacuated of historical meaning, "antisemitism" is then available to be turned against the Jews

Once evacuated of historical meaning, "antisemitism" is then available to be turned against the Jews. "Israeli racism [is] a virulent form of antisemitism;"[49] Israel's 2006 War in Lebanon was pursued by "politicians, generals and soldiers" who were "consumed with burning revulsion for all their non-Jewish Semite neighbours."[50] And then, this commonplace of anti-Zionist discourse: that to hold that Jews are one people apart, regardless of the countries in which they live and of which they are citizens, is itself antisemitic. Last, the Arab Muslim world cannot be antisemitic because Arabs themselves are Semitic - a piece of "semantic nonsense"[51] that is much deployed now.

A more elaborated denial of antisemitism was evident in the controversy in 2003 regarding a political cartoon. On 27 January, the British newspaper The Independent published a cartoon on its op-ed page showing Ariel Sharon, Israel's then Prime Minister, eating a Palestinian child. Helicopter gunships, circling above newly wrecked Palestinian homes, broadcast the message "Sharon ... Vote Sharon ... Vote." Sharon himself, as if responding to an objection, snarls: "What's wrong ... You never seen a politician kissing babies before?"

A complaint was made about the cartoon to the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) on behalf of the Israel Embassy and Mr Sharon himself. The PCC administers the voluntary system of self-regulation in the newspaper industry. It was argued that the cartoon was antisemitic and therefore breached clause 13 of the PCC Code. This is the clause that prohibits prejudicial or pejorative reference to a person's religion. Antisemitism tainted the cartoon because it introduced the blood libel into an attack on Sharon. The intention of the cartoonist was irrelevant. One can no more suppress allusion to the blood libel in an image of a Jew consuming a Gentile child, than one can suppress the echo of a voice sounding in a canyon. The cartoon was thus a prejudicial reference to Sharon's religion. It encouraged readers to think the worse of the Prime Minister by identifying him not just (say) as the architect of the invasion of Lebanon and the sponsor of the settlement movement, but as a Jew, and thus capable of murdering children for no better reason than that to do so would appeal to his fellow Jews. And what could be more "prejudicial" than to associate the Jewish leader of the Jewish State with the blood libel? The letter of complaint made the point that the blood libel was once again in wide circulation in the world, and that it was therefore imperative that it should not be given any foothold in Britain - and certainly not in a mainstream, national newspaper. If it did, other cartoons would follow.[52]

The editor of The Independent, Simon Kelner, responded by insisting that the cartoon was only about Sharon and not about Jews in general. He said that it was "hard-hitting comment," which justified the use of an appalling and gruesome image. He also said that it was not the cartoonist's intention to allude to the blood libel. The cartoon alluded solely to Goya's "Saturn Devouring his Children."[53] Were the PCC to uphold the complaint, it would compromise the newspaper's freedom of speech.

In a later exchange of letters, just before the PCC met to adjudicate on the complaint, the editor added a further defence of the cartoon. The child being eaten was not Palestinian, but Israeli, and represented the Israeli electorate. To this opportunistic misreading of the cartoon, one that was quite inconsistent with the other arguments advanced in its defence, the editor added the observation that he himself was a Jew and was therefore well-qualified to determine whether it was antisemitic, and in his judgment, it was not. "I am unashamed about publishing" the cartoon, he wrote. In the range of available responses, this was the most defiant, and the least rational. Peter Wilby's response in respect of a similarly provocative image (the New Statesman's "Kosher conspiracy"), though inadequate, had more to commend it: "The cover was not intended to be antisemitic; the New Statesman is vigorously opposed to racism in all its forms. But it used images and words in such a way as to create unwittingly the impression that the New Statesman was following an antisemitic tradition ..."[54]

The PCC rejected the complaint. In its initial, draft adjudication, it reasoned that there was a disagreement about whether the cartoon was antisemitic, and given this, that it should not itself seek to resolve the question. In any event, it added, both editor and cartoonist denied any antisemitic intent. The adjudication was then redrafted to correct the impression given by the draft that the mere existence of a disagreement as to the meaning of the cartoon had led the PCC to reject the complaint.[55] It did not, however, make any finding on the meaning of the cartoon. If the cartoon was acceptable to the editor and his colleagues on the newspaper, then it was acceptable to the PCC. This was an unseemly abdication of responsibility, inconsistent with the very reason for the PCC's existence.

The antisemitism of others, even when most apparent, tends to be overlooked or dismissed

The adjudication went on to note that "the Code does not cover complaints about alleged discrimination against groups of people" - a statement inconsistent with adjudications of comparable complaints.[56] A short while after the complaint was rejected, the cartoonist was awarded a prize.[57] He defended himself: "Do I believe, or was I trying to suggest, that Sharon actually eats babies? Of course not - one of the other benefits of the borrowed image was that it was sited squarely in the field of allegory. My cartoon was intended as a caricature of a specific person, Sharon, in the guise of a figure from classical myth who, I hoped, couldn't be farther from any Jewish stereotype."[58]

The antisemitism of others, even when most apparent, tends to be overlooked or dismissed. Consider, for example, the maverick Member of Parliament (MP) for the leftist-Islamist coalition Respect, George Galloway [59] - here, reporting a conversation with Michael Mansfield QC about legal representation for Saddam:

"He mentioned - because he thought the potential client might want to know - that the colleagues he had in mind were Jewish. I was sure that this would constitute no barrier. Whatever his other sins Saddam Hussein is a secular man who ruthlessly suppressed Islamic fundamentalism in his country. His Ba'ath party is a mixture of Arab nationalism and Stalinist authoritarianism. He hates Israel, no doubt, but in my experience, none of the Ba'ath leaders have displayed any hostility to Jews."[60]

Michel Aflaq founded the Ba'ath party in Damascus in 1940. Its motto was "One Arab nation with an eternal mission." It was strongly anti-Communist and it feared Moscow's influence. Even though Ba'athist party leaders changed their principles with a rapidity that would have done honour - as Elie Kedourie wrote - to a quick-change artist,[61] antisemitism was a staple of party doctrine from inception.[62] Aflaq translated into Arabic the writings of Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi theorist.[63] "We were racialists," wrote an early Ba'athist, "admiring Nazism, reading its book and the sources of its thought ... We were the first to think of translating Mein Kampf." [64]

Ba'athism is an ideology that draws on fascist ideas of war, leadership and blood, as well racial superiority - in this case, Arab.[65] The party was a product of what Fouad Ajami has termed the "Germanization" of Arab nationalist doctrine in the 1930s and 1940s.[66] The Ba'athist Iraqi regime was obsessed with "foreigners," among which Jews were regularly identified.[67] When the Ba'ath first came to power in Iraq, Kanan Makiya writes, they sought to legitimize themselves by initiating an antisemitic campaign - complete with public hangings - that became the prelude to a broader campaign of terror that finally touched every Iraqi.[68] In response to international criticism of the bogus "Zionist spy affair," Baghdad Radio declared, "We hanged spies, but the Jews crucified Christ."[69]

Thereafter Israel remained for more than 30 years a fixed object for attack, vilification, and demonization by the Iraqi media. There were defamations of the Talmud and the Torah, articles about (and publication of) the Protocols, pseudo-scholarly accounts of historic conspiracies between the Jews and the Persians, and Holocaust denial; cartoons represented Jews as snakes or crocodiles or insects, usually with the Star of David, often dressed in Nazi uniform Saddam's son, Udai, took the lead in many of these antisemitic campaigns.[70]

Ba'athism is an ideology that draws on fascist ideas of war, leadership and blood, as well racial superiority

But what of Saddam himself? Early on in his life, he came under the influence of his uncle, Khairallah Tulfah, a fervent admirer of Hitler and a participant in the pro-Nazi uprising in Baghdad, which the British Army crushed in 1941.[71] He later wrote a pamphlet entitled "Three whom God should not have created - Persians, Jews and Flies." Jews, he writes, are a "mixture of dirt and the leftovers of diverse people." This pamphlet was published in 1981, presumably with Saddam's authority.[72]

The 1975 Nuclear Co-operation Treaty between Iraq and France excluded "all persons of Jewish origin" from participating, whether in France or Iraq.[73] In 2000, the Iraqi Foreign Minister declared, "Long live Palestine, free from the sea to the [Jordan] river. Cursed be the lowly. May evil befall the Jewish usurpers of our holy Palestinian territory." [74] Galloway has spent much of his life engaged with Arab affairs. It is hard to imagine that he is ignorant of all of the above ("in my experience ..."), easier to imagine that he is unconcerned by it.

Let me turn now to the downplaying of, or indifference towards, antisemitism. Often, when the antisemitic aspect of a particular remark or political programme is pointed out, the response is dismissive, as if antisemitism itself is of no consequence. The implication is that the characterising of the remark or programme as antisemitic is to miss their "point." Parties who make these remarks, adopt these programmes, do not mean what they say when they use antisemitic language.[75] Hamas's Jew-hating desire to eradicate Israel, for example, is taken to be nothing more than a misconceived "maximalism," a regrettable "weakness" of Palestinian nationalism, one that indeed is to the disadvantage of the Palestinians rather than their enemies.[76] The appropriate tone in which to consider President Ahmadinejad's genocidal threats and his Holocaust Denial is one of wry understatement.[77] And so on.

As long as it does not have Hitler's name attached to it, murderous acts and even genocidal threats against Jews tend to be ignored or allowed to pass.[78] The ritualised murder of the journalist Daniel Pearl, for example tended to be represented in the Western media as anything other than the killing of a Jew for the crime of being Jewish.[79] Jewish participants at the 2001 Durban Conference noted with alarm the indifference of human rights activists to the antisemitism on display there. "Their almost uniform response," writes Ken Stern, "was either to encourage it or to let it pass without speaking out."[80]

As long as it does not have Hitler's name attached to it, murderous acts and even genocidal threats against Jews tend to be ignored or allowed to pass

In an article written for the London Review of Books during the Summer 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, Charles Glass compared Israel's occupation of Lebanon with the Nazi occupation of France, and observed that while Hezbollah relied on "the weapons of the weak," among which were "suicide bombers," it "used them intelligently." Glass also noted Hezbollah's "uncompromising political programme." [81]

A reader, Eugene Goodheart, wrote in with the comment that Nasrallah, the leader of the "Party of God" was "not simply a resistance fighter;" he was also "an antisemite with fantasies of genocide." Goodheart then cited antisemitic statements attributed to Nasrallah. Glass, Goodheart suggested, did not see to care about any of that. His "defence of Hizbullah" was thus "beyond the pale." Glass responded by suggesting that the statements attributed by Goodheart to Nasrallah were "in all likelihood fabrications." He did not, however, respond squarely to Goodheart's characterisation of Nasrallah. I wrote in to draw his attention, and the attention of the LRB's readers, to Amal Saad-Ghorayeb's Hizbullah: Politics and Religion (2002), which I suggested might be a reliable source for Nasrallah's, and Hezbollah's, antisemitism. Saad-Ghorayeb deals at length with the party's "anti-Judaism" (as she terms it), and quotes extensively from the writings and speeches of its leaders. I observed that the implication of Glass's letter was that Goodheart was wrong to describe Nasrallah, and by extension Hizbullah, as antisemitic. I invited Glass to confirm that that was indeed his position, and if it was, to comment on the material assembled by Saad-Ghorayeb.

Glass took some time to respond. He had taken the trouble, he explained, to check with Saad-Ghorayeb an antisemitic remark she attributed to Nasrallah in her book. She had confirmed to him, on further inquiry, he reported, that the footnoted reference for the remark was a "mistake," and "therefore, until someone discovers where and when Nasrallah uttered the words above, the case is unproved." As to the wider issue, he said that he was "agnostic on Nasrallah's alleged antisemitism" and as far as Hezbollah itself was concerned, "antisemitism was irrelevant to my original article, which concerned Hezbollah's role in Lebanese political life." In each instance, Glass ducked the question of antisemitism.

Now, there can be no sensible denying that Hezbollah is an antisemitic party.[82] Hezbollah, Saad-Ghorayeb writes, closely identifies Judaism with Zionism. It uses the terms "Jewish" and "Zionist" interchangeably. It refers to Israel as both "the Zionist entity" and "the Jewish entity." It regards Judaism as iniquitous. Zionism is a "Torah and Talmud" ideology. Israel's Jews, though ethnically diverse, are bound together "by their Talmud and Jewish fanaticism." The Jews are "racists." They see themselves as God's "chosen people." Baruch Goldstein's massacre of Palestinian worshippers at Hebron in February 1994 is typical of Jewish violence. The Jews have inflated the number of World War II Jewish dead. The existence of gas chambers has never been proven. There is a universal Jewish conspiracy against mankind.[83]

As for Israel, it "is utterly null and void, and it's a raping deviant, occupying, terrorist, cancerous entity that has no legitimacy or legality at all, and never will."[84] Qu'ranic tropes are incorporated into this broader antisemitic discourse. Hezbollah poster art draws on classic antisemitic tropes. In one poster, the Dome of the Rock is depicted cupped in the bony hand of a figure with a grotesquely hooked nose.[85] The Hezbollah's TV station, Al-Manar, broadcast the series, "Diaspora," which drew on the Protocols. On 13 December 2004, France banned the station on the grounds of its antisemitic content.[86] On 25 October 2006, Argentine prosecutors asked a judge to issue an arrest warrant against former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani and other Iranian officials for ordering the 1994 bombing of a Jewish cultural centre in Buenos Aires. It was Hezbollah, the prosecutors alleged, that then executed the terror-attack, killing 85 people and injuring more than 200 others.[87] Hezbollah is not merely a violent and openly antisemitic party; but when it turns its face towards Jews, it glowers, and it is always pleased to be able to raise its hand against them.[88]

Finally, and most problematically, there is the position of justification of antisemitism in particular contexts

Nasrallah's own antisemitism seems similarly beyond dispute. Remarks made during an interview broadcast on Al-Jazeera, 20 July 2006, might reasonably be taken to settle the question: "As a personal plan and wish, every one of us hopes and wishes to be martyred at the hands of those murderers of prophets and messengers [i.e., the Jews]. They are the most hostile people to the people who believe in the Koran..."[89] Nasrallah has also claimed that "Talmudic Zionists" are "determined" to destroy the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. He accords no respect to Jewish ties with Jerusalem. [90] Last, Hezbollah's antisemitism is far from "irrelevant" to Lebanese political life, not least because it influences the party's posture towards Israel. Glass's "agnosticism" is better described as indifference.

Finally, and most problematically, there is the position of justification of antisemitism in particular contexts. If it cannot be denied, or dismissed, then it will be justified. It is the fault of the Jews. The Jews bring suffering upon themselves. This suffering is perhaps a little arbitrary, and on occasion even excessive, but - essentially - it is merited. This was an old argument,[91] revived in the late 1960s in defence of African-American or "Black" antisemitism, which was said not to be rooted in the irrational Jew-hatred of the Christian Middle Ages but in the "concrete fact of oppression by Jews of Blacks in the ghetto." It was, it was claimed, "an earned antisemitism,"[92] at least in part.

The British journalist, Jonathan Cook, writing in 2003, distinguished the "modern phenomenon" of "Muslims retaliating against fellow Jewish citizens for Israel's military strategies against the Palestinians" from "traditional European antisemitism:"

"... in the "new Europe" extreme passions are being unleashed among Arab immigrant populations by the increasingly violent and brutal policies of Ariel Sharon in the occupied territories. Jews are a symbolic and easy target for such attacks. In other words, a microcosmic re-enactment of the Israel-Palestinian conflict is being played out by a few Arabs [...] These Muslims, however deluded, believe they are restoring an honour to an Arab or Islamic nation that they feel has been humiliated by Israel's violence and cruelty towards the Palestinians. They feel they represent the weak striking out at a group perceived as strong. The success of Zionist lobby groups in America and the international community's failure to compel Israel to respect and obey international law only reinforce the perception of Jewish strength in the face of Arab impotence."[93]

The weak cannot be racist - this is an established trope of anti-racist discourse.[94] Elsewhere, Cook offered an explanation of antisemitism that relates Jewish services to medieval aristocrats to Israel's services to today's United States. In each case, the justified anger of the general population against their rulers has been displaced onto the Jews.

"The reason why most Europeans believe Israel is the biggest threat to world peace -- and the figures will be at least as high among the Arab and Muslim nations -- is because today Israel is performing an almost identical role to that of European Jewry in previous centuries. The Middle East's dirty work is being done by Israel on behalf of our modern, global prince: the United States. [...] The danger, if the Zionists would face up to it, is that the US -- far from being a friend to Israel -- is as much its enemy as were the European princes of old to their Jewish communities. The path which America has set Israel on has already, if the polls are to be believed, turned it into the world's number one pariah state. We know where European antisemitism led: to the gas chambers of the Nazi death camps. Today all of us have a responsibility to speak out and tell Israelis that the United States is not a true friend." [95]

The weak cannot be racist - this is an established trope of anti-racist discourse

Cook argues that Israel has three reasons for promoting fears of antisemitism: to stifle all criticism of Israel; to deter Israeli Jews from leaving Israel; to incriminate Muslims and put Israel on the "right" side in the war against terror. The implication is that there is no antisemitism; the whole matter is a scare. Hence the all-party British parliamentary report into antisemitism in the UK was merely "preposterous."[96] Cook's piece is subtitled "How Israel is engineering the 'Clash of Civilizations.'"

There is some tension between the two positions - antisemitism exists, but it is the fault of the Jews; antisemitism doesn't exist, it is an illusion created by the Jews. In another piece, Cook attempts to reconcile these positions:

"... Israel [has] a product it desperately needs to sell (aliyah) that few Jews want to buy. The "new antisemitism" is Israel's marketing strategy at its most aggressive. But more worrying is evidence that, in the absence of "Jew hatred", Israel may be encouraging a climate of antisemitism to make its case to the diaspora more convincing. [...] The "new antisemitism", whether real or imagined, is the only sales pitch Israel has that still works (italics added)." [97]

The reconciliation fails. "Antisemitism" and "antisemitism justification" must be alternative explanations.

It is at best a mind-clouding compassion for Palestinian suffering; it is more often a deliberate stupidity, a refusal to learn, to understand - a reconnecting with antisemitic discourse in ignorance, willed if not feigned. The risk of antisemitism is not important to these fellow travellers. They write and say things that they should not. They do not care - or they care in the wrong way - about complaints of antisemitism, which are rarely ill-judged.

How Far Will They Travel?

"As regards a 'fellow-traveller,'" observed Trotsky, "the question always comes up - how far will he go?"[98] The question should be posed of FTASs. Some FTASs are willing to sit alongside antisemites in the interests of a wider cause. Many of the members of the Board of Advisers of "Deir Yassin Remembered," for example, appear content for its British director (as at February 2007), Paul Eisen, to write articles in support of Holocaust deniers.[99] Some FTASs are willing to use antisemitic tropes and when challenged, to bluff it out - Tam Dalyell, for example, [100] or Ted Honderich.[101] Some give a "free pass" to interviewees with a record of making antisemitic statements - Madeleine Bunting, for example, in her interview with Sheikh Qaradawi.[102] Some will pander to the antisemitic prejudices of their audience - George Galloway, for example, in interviews with Arabic media speaks of "the right wing Zionist press" and "the newspapers and news media which are controlled by Zionism," while to English broadcasters, the talk is merely of "the right wing media."[103]

David Caute thinks that the history of fellow travelling reached a "dead end" [104] with the disillusionment of the left about Cuba. He is wrong about this, I think. Indeed, even old-style fellow travelling persists - there is still irrational support for regimes perceived to be anti-American, still the denial or minimising of any non-American crimes (Cambodia, Serbia), still the mocking of the West's claims to superiority, still the promotion of an undifferentiated Western "guilt." Some FTSUs, indeed, have merely adopted these positions in support of political Islam.[105] But there is also something new, a fellow travelling with specifically antisemitic positions taken by Israel's most aggressive enemies. These fellow travellers find their political vocation in "judgment-passing" on Israel and its friends, and "excuse-making" for Israel's enemies [106]. This often leads to misjudgements and follies.