would be easily solved if one could regard the United States as acting in this respect not in the interests of its non-Jewish citizens but at the behest of an absurdly minuscule but nevertheless wealthy and entrenched Jewish lobby, conspiratorially active behind the scenes of conventional politics. And, indeed, suggestions of this kind have been, and still are, widely promoted by at least notionally respectable voices in the West.6 For those with any clear sense of the evils of war, and the importance of avoiding it, the conclusion to be drawn from these considerations can only be the one drawn by the authors of the Hamas covenant—and for that matter, as we noted in the introduction by a senior French diplomat—that the world would be a much better, because a much safer, place if only the Jews and their wretched national state did not exist. The eliminationist consequences of this conclusion are too volcanic in their implications to be explicitly stated or examined in the West—at present. Nevertheless, they hang in the air.
Setting the 2003 Eurobarometer poll and Article 22 of the 1988 Hamas charter alongside each other reveals a further characteristic of antisemitism, shared by all versions of it in all ages. The beliefs on which it rests and in which it trades are one and all delusive. Not only that, they are delusive in the more radical of two senses attaching to that term. Someone may be deluded in the sense that he or she believes something that might have been true but happens not to be true. Thus, I may deludedly believe that my glasses are at my bedside. And indeed they might well have been, although in fact they are on the kitchen table, where I have quite forgotten having left them earlier in the day. More seriously, someone may be deluded in the second of my two senses, in that he or she believes something that could not possibly be the case. This is the condition of those who believe the world to be flat or hollow, either possibility being inconsistent with elementary and exhaustively confirmed laws of physics. The philosopher J. L. Austin caught the distinction between the two types of delusion in a happy phrase when he spoke of its being “plain boring” to hear, from certain philosophers, “the constant repetition of things that are not true, and sometimes not even faintly sensible.”7 The beliefs cherished by antisemites, like those cherished by flat-earthers and hollow-earthers, fall characteristically into the second category—that of the not only false but also “not even faintly sensible.”
A case in point is that of the celebrated blood libel, the medieval belief that Jews, as a matter of religious duty, are constrained to abduct and kill gentile children in order to add their blood to the dough of the Passover matzo (accusations of this kind were brought in law as late as 1911).8 While an individual Jewish lunatic, or for that matter a gentile one, might do such a thing, it is not something that Jews might do as a matter of religious duty, for the simple reason that the consumption of blood, from any source and in any form, is expressly forbidden to observant Jews by the laws of kashruth (the dietary laws). Explaining the disappearance of a gentile child by suggesting that Jews might have killed the child in order to mix its blood with the Passover matzo is thus on a par with explaining the disappearance of a cow by suggesting that Hindus might have slaughtered it in order to make a religious offering of roast beef in the temple. These are not things that “might have happened, though thank goodness they have not.” The belief that either even might have occurred is a delusion in the second of the above two senses: a mere confusion of thought, a maggot of the mind.
The same is true of the central contention of Article 22 of the Hamas charter, that the Jews control every apparently non-Jewish institution in the world, from the United Nations to the Rotary Club, and do so in the service of an organized pursuit of world domination. One might argue against these concerns that the Jews, of all people, given their general character, hardly seem best placed to conduct a world conspiracy of the kind envisaged. For one thing, such a project would require, on the part of those conducting it, an unusual degree of willingness to subordinate rationally grounded dissent to the demands of political unity, and such willingness is not something that, with the best will in the world, one readily associates with Jews. “Argument is the life of Judaism,” say the rabbis, to which the Jewish man in the street notoriously responds, spreading his hands, “Two Jews, three opinions.” But to argue in that way would be tacitly to grant to the authors of Article 22 that if they are deluded, it is only in the first sense: to grant, in other words that it remains a real possibility, though one happily unrealized on grounds of incapacity, that the Jews might be in secret control of the world. But why should anyone grant the reality of such a possibility when plainly it savors of lunacy! The Jews are, indeed, not in control of the world but that they are not is not a mere consequence of their not being up to the job. Rather, it is a consequence of the evident fact that nobody, no nation, no state, no movement—not the United States, not international socialism, nor anybody else—could conceivably be up to such a job. Humanity is manifestly too diverse, economically, politically, socially, and ideologically, for any unified control of it to be feasible. In even envisaging such a possibility, we, like the authors of Article 22, have strayed into cloud cuckoo land.
What about the famous Eurobarometer poll that created such a stir in the world press in 2003? Might the majorities that fingered Israel as the greatest threat to peace in the world have been, and be, then and now, right about that?
One needs for a start to ask what the vague phrase “threat to peace in the world” is supposed to mean. Are we talking about peace in the Middle East, or are we speculating about World War III?
Let us begin with peace in the region. In fact, the Middle East has been convulsed by an endless series of wars since 1948. Some of these have involved Israel, but these, as I will argue in chapters 7 and 8, have been brief, minor, and from Israel’s standpoint, overwhelmingly defensive in character. The others, all very much more enduring and far more serious both in terms of loss of life and destruction of property and infrastructure—from the Iran-Iraq War of 1980, which lasted eight years and devastated both countries, to the more recent but equally enduring and even more destructive wars in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen—have arisen entirely out of conflict between the major Muslim regional powers, motivated in part by rival territorial claims and in part by the religious conflict between Sunni and Shi‘a Islam, and having in either case virtually nothing to do with Israel.
Israel, in short, has hardly shown itself in practice to constitute even a major, let alone the major, threat to peace in the region. And this is hardly to be wondered at, given that the main object of the State of Israel since its foundation has been to provide a safe space within stable frontiers for Jews (not to mention several other groups recently subject to abuse of quasi-genocidal proportions under neighboring regimes) to inhabit in freedom from persecution. This has been manifest in the readiness of Israel to exchange land for peace—by the withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula after the 1967 war, in the unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip under Ariel Sharon, and in the readiness of Israeli politicians to engage in repeated negotiations aiming at the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank. A state with as its main aim security within any borders capable of securing an agreed and enforceable peace can hardly be said intelligibly to “threaten peace” with its neighbors—unless of course its neighbors would wish, if they could, to destroy it. The latter condition certainly holds true in Israel’s case; however, that can scarcely justify blaming Israel for any resulting breaches of the peace.
Leaving aside war and peace in the region, then, are there any grounds for crediting the existence of a Jewish state in Israel with the potential to set off World War III?
Serious debate on that question has mainly concerned Israel’s nuclear options. Israel is widely believed to have possessed an effective nuclear deterrent since just before the 1967 war. Israeli government policy, however, has always been to neither confirm nor deny that it possesses nuclear weapons, although it does affirm that it will never be the first to use them. The most serious and widely believed book on the issue is Avner Cohen’s 1998 Israel and the Bomb.9 Cohen, who has written widely on a range of moral and political issues concerning nuclear deterrence and proliferation, argues against
