The Gentlemen Always Agree
Joel B. Levine MD
Anti-Semitism is the gift that never stops giving. All that changes is which cloak is placed around it to hide its true intent. Though only 2% of the population, Jews now account for over 60% of hate crimes and 78% of Jews say they experience ,but do not report, acts of bias. Yet, there are no ribbons, nor marches, no celebrity events. And, as for starting, JLM, not likely.
We have just experienced how an image can be transformative. George Floyd became a canvas onto which a number of societal conflicts and complexities could be painted. It was intolerable. But not all images have the same effect.
Last week, in Brooklyn, Orthodox Jews were chased by mobs down the street. In one, they were just beaten and in the other, in classic Brown Shirt fashion, they were forced to shout self-ridiculing anti-Semitic epithets. Powerful images but not treated as either symbolic or evidentiary. They were buried somewhere in the local news, before or after the soccer league scores or near the back pages. Not much new in that regard, as reports of the Holocaust, by Polish witnesses, never made it to the front pages of the New York Times. In these cases, in sight is soon out of mind.
In the past, anti-Semitism has been the chameleon prejudice. It could be publicly and proudly embraced or subtly insinuated into hiring and admission practices. It could be justified by religious doctrine or as a protection of a social or economic order. One consistent irony, amidst the bias, is that the Jewish populous predictably craved acceptance, contributing to their country or culture, and imagining their added value was either protection or established an immutable assimilation.
But Jew success was always a poison pill. Soon too rich, too powerful, too prevalent or, today, too” Zionist”. In reality, Jews always exist by the grace of someone. Their identity is relative and subject to whatever version of being a Jew will be tolerated. Jews, in Spain and Portugal, changed religion. In the US, they changed their names. It was always how much of a Jew you could safely be.
History is teacher, either for emulation or caution and Jews have been forced to become expert students of their own past. There are many “ 1619” projects for Jews to read. One is September 27–29, 1941, in Babi Yar, when 33, 771 Jews were murdered, in one place and at one time. Another was the Latvian Jewish community that numbered several hundred thousand and lived in harmony for 600 years. When the Nazi’s replaced the Soviet NKVD in 1941, within 6 months, barely two seasons, over 95% of the Jewry was murdered and the added cruelty of it, by Latvians. If six centuries cannot provide an anchor, you come to doubt the idea of a safe harbor.
Throughout Jewish history, anti-Semitism has been a “justifiable” argument and that is the magic of it. Whatever reason for it had that one kernel of “reasonableness” about it. Hating Jews was just necessary and in the service of the larger public good. One of the best was in the early 1930’s, when there were but 300,000 Jews in Germany, a very small fraction of population. But many were in commerce and the story of Georg Wertheim and the “ Warenhaeuser “ (Department Store) is rapturous.
This societal innovation was seminal and transformative to sales, access, marketing and profits. Wertheim flourished until he did not. First, it was the enmity of the Prussian artisan Guilds that resented the competition. Then it was the fledgling Nazi party who saw it as too invasive and foreign. Finally, when the inflation of the post war period really took hold, it was the most comfortable shoe of all offering up the rich Jew, apart, self protective and indifferent. Someone had to be at fault or complicit in creating difficult times. Jews always learn this the hard way that their momentary virtues are but vices waiting to be revealed.
Today, we have the perfect Anti-Semitic storm. Jews finally have a State but rather than it assuring their identity, it has allowed for a new and increasingly nihilistic anti-Jew perspective. First, is that as homeland for Jews, Israel is neither appropriate, by history, nor legitimate by its location and demographic. These are wonderfully elastic claims, ideas that can be fitted to events of almost any size or type. Better still, they allow for the best of lies to be spoken loudly and assuredly when others have the futile task of trying to explain a complicated and imperfect country. It is a rare moment for anti-Semitism, when Jews are most capable of serving as their own worst enemy.
Israel started as a refuge for European Jewry and became a landing spot for many disruptive people who act like social outcasts but now in a place that has to tolerate them. Israel is not just the home of the more “ rational” Jews but also a home for scoundrels as well. They are argumentative, legalistic and stubborn. All unattractive qualities until you understand that Israel is the last stop on a very old train, a train that has stopped at many terrible places.
There is only one question that needs to be answered about Israel. Is it to be a Jewish State or not? The “ is” was in its charter as but the tiny piece of a larger division of Trans-Jordan. But even at that moment of its birth, it was irrefutably seen as illegitimate.
No other country has faced this truly existential reality. It has been attacked many times and only to one avowed purpose, its demise. Its army’s doctrine is, therefore, simplicity itself; never fight on Israel soil, for if you do, the country is in dire jeopardy. This is a unique and terrible way to live. It is a country that is a PTSD summer camp. We fuss when the latte’s arrive cold.
Some years ago, however, a moment of absolute truth came to pass. Many Jews remember the horrific bus and café bombings of the Second Intifada. This radically changed public opinion in Israel. Even Rabin changed and his surviving wife carried out his decision to physically separate Israel from the West Bank. It was just too dangerous to do otherwise.
Netanyahu’s father, alive at the time, was a very prominent Jewish historian who concluded, sadly, that the Palestinians would never accept Israel. It was especially poignant, for him, as Palestinians are generally reviled within in the region, as too smart and too secular. Refugee camps for them still abound in Lebanon. Jews and Palestinians are so alike that moments of harmony would fleetingly appear and die away. Semitic kin but the issue was and remains the issue.
Then came Prime Minister Olmert who served from 2003 -2006. Olmert did the unthinkable. He offered the PLA essentially everything and, as he said, “ with no conditions”. Well over 95% of the West Bank land, internationalization of Jerusalem and the Holy Sites, dismantling of Jewish developments in Israeli areas under the Oslo agreement and even some refugee return. In a closed room, he pulled out a map and told Abbas, here is all you could ever wish. Take it but with only one concession. That Israel is a Jewish State, a final home. The term, Never Again, has its counterpart, in Never.
It will be surprising to some that learn that Palestinian maps and schoolbooks still show Palestine to the Sea. Hardly reassuring but explaining the young stone throwers in the West Bank. Other voices, more enlightened, argue for a One State solution wherein the Jews will become again a minority. Even after 70 years, Jews are to be rationalized away as the few amidst the many. Such a geometry has never served them well as you can never have too little of a good thing.
Few Americans know that for much of the mid -1800’s those who abhorred the moral repugnance of slavery were not supportive of race integration. Even the early Abolitionists thought this a bridge too far. Rather, the offered and natural solution was a return to a homeland, a recolonizing of Africa. In fact, Lincoln’s wife family, the Todd’s, was in a lawsuit, for a decade, over a mixed race child who was a potential heir. Lincoln as a lawyer was to defend the Todd’s but lost. The son, Alfred Russell, returned to Liberia and became President of the country. In the strangest of ironies, Black activists, today, seek a similar and singular protection in commonality.
Israel is hardly the home that most people would welcome. Imagine having missiles in the sky above you; imagine running to shelters, unimaginable everywhere but not there. Yet these events have become justifiable for many, a moral equivalent as if proper response to a similarly egregious deed. As I said, there is always a reason.
It is all tragic and complex but ask what we would do in a similar circumstance. It is unlikely that shelling El Paso from Mexico or New York from Quebec would be considered “ discussable”. One day, 9/11, gave us 20 years of war. It was seen as something intolerable and we castigated those who suggested that our Middle Eastern policy had fomented the conditions that led to it. Few got traction saying it was a just response to an unjust policy. There is little wonder that Israel feels that rules are written differently for them.
But, for those who have re-tweeted 17000 times, “ Hitler was right”, time is on your side. In reality, there are not many Jews in the world, e.g., 13 million amidst 7.2 billion people or about 0.2%. Israel and the US account for 81% with other countries at 3% or far less. There are 5.7 million Jews in the US and with Judaism at about 1.9% amongst religions. It is a formula as old as time. So few in number but never quite too few.
In 1947, a film, Gentleman’s Agreement, exposed graceful Anti-Semitism. A reporter changed his name, the wrong way, and posed as a Jew in the proper Society. He was turned away at hotels, turned down for jobs but with a smile. It was just the way it is. We are headed there again by telling that being Anti-Zionist is just and reasonable. Just enough truth in the flaws of Israel to think about it. Just enough Israeli mistakes. Just enough agreement.
