rejected by the overwhelming majority of Israelis and almost all of Israel’s supporters in the United States.
These diatribes prompted Sullivan’s former colleague at the New Republic, Leon Wieseltier, to offer this indictment: “the explanation that Sullivan adopts for almost everything that he does not like about America’s foreign policy . . . that it is all the result of the clandestine and cunningly organized power of a single and small ethnic group . . . has a provenance that should disgust all thinking people.”17 Jonathan Chait, a former colleague of both men, entered the fray, agreeing with Wieseltier’s characterization of Sullivan’s viewpoint but objecting to Wieseltier’s imputation of anti-Semitic motive: “just because an idea has a revolting provenance, it does not follow that everybody who subscribes to any version of it has the same motive.”18 And the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg seconded Chait on this point, although noting that Sullivan “disseminate[s] calumnies that can cause hatred of Jews” and adds that the role of AIPAC should be discussed “without prejudice; without the axiomatic assumption that American Jews who love Israel are disloyal to America; and without the Judeocentrism of the neo-Lindbergh set.”19 In other words, Chait and Goldberg agree that Sullivan indulges in fantastic and defamatory accusations against Jews, but they do not believe he hates Jews in his heart. Much the same was said about Buchanan in 1990 by people who had worked with him. It may all be true, but it strikes me as a distinction without a difference.
The British MP George Galloway is another who waxes indignant when accused of anti-Semitism. He calls Israel “a very ugly society”20 and says he “wish[es] for the destruction of that political state,”21 which he refers to as “this illegal, barbarous, savage state that calls itself Israel.”22 Galloway embraced Saddam Hussein in Baghdad in 1994, declaring “we are with you . . . until victory, until Jerusalem.”23 He also declared himself to have been so “enthralled” by Atzmon’s anti-Jewish book that he “read [his wife] a chapter . . . every night.”24 Yet, when a reporter for the Guardian tweeted that Galloway was an anti-Semite, he sued her under Britain’s notoriously vague libel laws in which even the truth of a statement is not an absolute defense.
Roger Waters (perhaps a friend of Atzmon’s since the latter, a professional musician, has sometimes played with Waters’s band, Pink Floyd) likewise denies being an anti-Semite. Yet he campaigns to persuade other rock musicians to boycott Israel on the grounds of “human rights” even while he has had no qualms about performing in Russia and China, and he has used a floating inflated pig emblazoned with a Star of David and some other symbols as a prop at concerts. From a very different walk of life, Karel De Gucht, a Belgian politician serving as the European commissioner for trade, told a radio audience that “the Jewish lobby” has a “grip . . . on American politics” and that “it is not easy to have, even with moderate Jews, a rational discussion about . . . the Middle East.” He, too, denied harboring any anti-Semitism and said he “did not mean . . . to cause offense.”25 It seems that while disparaging words and gestures are directed at Jews from various quarters, no one in today’s world is an anti-Semite.
While Buchanan is a man of the right, Galloway, Waters, and Atzmon are of the left, as is Sullivan today, although his ideological history has been a restless peregrination. Historically, anti-Semitism has most often been associated with the right, but today, rabid and obsessive hatred of Israel that reaches the borders of anti-Semitism and sometimes crosses them is mostly to be found on the left.
This is most evident in the BDS campaign, which is notable for its flagrant double standards. Although this campaign usually claims Palestinian human rights as its purpose, it has never addressed the universal mistreatment of Palestinians in Arab countries. Jordan has the best record, granting Palestinians citizenship and allowing them to practice professions like law and medicine from which they are barred in Lebanon, but even Jordan severely restricts the number of Palestinians allowed seats in its legislature. No such professional or political constraints exist in Israel. More broadly, Israel’s record on human rights is by all measures light years better than that of all of the states that surround it and most other states. The annual survey of Freedom House, highly respected by scholars and democratic governments for its rigor and objectivity, rates Israel 1.5 on its scale of freedom, on which 1 is the best possible score and 7 the worst. The median of the Arab countries is 5.5 and of the whole world, 3.5. Yet, neither the BDS movement itself, nor any of the churches, unions, or student governments that have voted to boycott or sanction Israel has ever done the same to any other state. This prompted Lawrence Summers, the former president of Harvard University, to say that this campaign is “anti-Semitic in effect if not in intent.”26
In respect not only to liberté but also the other two elements of the traditional principles of progressivism—égalité and fraternité—as well as such latter-day issues as environmentalism, Israel’s record ranks among the world’s best, while those of its enemies are among the worst. (I have documented this with careful details and statistics in Liberal Oasis: The Truth about Israel, the e-book companion to this volume.**) And yet in the dominant discourse of the contemporary left, all of this is trumped by the trope of the noble third world versus the malevolent West.
Available at http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00HS4EQGA/ref=s9_qpp_gw_p351_d18_i1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=desktop-1&pf_rd_r=18HT3FC4NWD859N4JP9Y&pf_rd_t=36701&pf_rd_p=2079475242&pf_rd_i=desktop and http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/liberal-oasis-joshua-muravchik/1118576613?ean=9781594037559.
The intensification of anti-Israel sentiment on the left also serves to generate a pool of Jewish denigrators of Israel whose ethnic background gives them added polemical leverage. Atzmon is one, and The Wandering Who sports an endorsement from another, Professor Richard Falk, urging “Jews . . . who care about real peace, as well as their own identity, [to] not only read, but reflect upon [it].” Falk, himself, crossed the line when he posted a cartoon on his blog, depicting a dog urinating on a representation of justice while wearing a garment marked “USA” and a skull cap with a Star of David. The website, Mondoweiss, perhaps the most ferociously anti-Israel American-based site (short of the lunatic fringe), whose editors as well as most writers are Jewish, offers itself as a kind of shield for anti-Semites. For example, it produced a story challenging the authenticity of genocidal remarks toward Jews by Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah even while the original words were available (in Arabic) on Nasrallah’s website. And when an anti-Israel mob besieged Paris’s de la Roquette synagogue, Mondoweiss ran a story claiming that the confrontation was initiated by the Jewish defenders, even though the French press and police reported the opposite. A more reputable example is the former New Republic editor Peter Beinart, who called for a boycott of goods from Jewish settlements in the West Bank, thus enlisting with reservations in the BDS movement as if oblivious to import of that campaign as well as to the memory that a boycott of Jewish businesses constituted the first salvo of the Holocaust.
Another consequence of the left-wing provenance of most Israel bashing and the anti-Semitism that sometimes accompanies it is the sharp rise of these phenomena on college and university campuses, where leftish opinion tends to dominate. In addition to a steady increase in BDS activity, recent school years have seen several incidents in which Jewish students have been harassed or even assaulted by anti-Israel demonstrators. In addition, in 2015 the student government at UCLA voted to reject a candidate of the school’s judicial body on the grounds that being Jewish would make her biased (although this was reversed out of embarrassment after it made a splash in the press).
A national survey of Jewish college students conducted by the Louis D. Brandeis Center and Trinity College in 2014 found
