It would be fair to say that the recent demonstrations in cities around the world during which Israel was likened to Nazi Germany, and Israeli soldiers to Nazi storm troopers, created a not insignificant amount of angst and dismay among an appreciable number of Jews. But as this is hardly a new phenomenon, the real surprise lies in why so many Jews continue to be surprised.
It was back in 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon after one provocation too many by the PLO, which had set up a murderous mini-state in a country that had been affectionately known as the Paris of the Middle East, that the Nazi analogies began flying in full force.
But playing the Nazi card goes back even before Lebanon, to a period when the Palestinians barely existed on the world’s radar screen and Israel was widely perceived as an underdog surrounded by much larger nations determined to eradicate it.
On July 7, 1967, just a month after Israel’s celebrated victory in the Six-Day war, The New York Times published a letter to the editor which made the equation that in later years would become all too familiar.
“All persons who seek to view the Middle East problem with honesty and objectivity will stand aghast at Israel’s onslaught, the most violent, ruthless (and successful) aggression since Hitler’s blitzkrieg across Western Europe in the summer of 1940, aiming not at victory but at annihilation,” wrote Dr. Henry P. Van Dusen, a former president of Union Theological Seminary, the academic centerpiece of liberal Protestantism in America.
Van Dusen was ahead of his time, but 15 years later, with the Palestinian narrative already having become received truth among the left-wing faithful, the locusts were loosed within days of Israel’s incursion into Lebanon.
“Incident by incident, atrocity by atrocity, Americans are coming to see the Israeli government as pounding the Star of David into a swastika,” wrote the columnist Nicholas von Hoffman.
“In their zeal to ensure that the Jewish people never suffer another Holocaust, Israel’s leaders are imitating Hitler,” wrote the late pundit Carl Rowan.
The writer Pete Hamill conveniently cited an unnamed “Israeli friend” who supposedly said of Israel, “Forgive me, but all I can think of is the Nazis.”
The bestselling British novelist John le Carre (England’s literary circles have long been incubators of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiment) lamented in the Boston Globe that “It is the most savage irony that [Menachem] Begin and his generals cannot see how close they are to inflicting upon another people the disgraceful criteria once inflicted upon themselves.”
Author/commentator William Pfaff also looked eastward and beheld the Fourth Reich rising in Jerusalem, suggesting that “Hitler’s work goes on” and speculating that Hitler may “find rest in Hell” with “the knowledge that the Jews themselves, in Israel, have finally accepted his own way of looking at things.”
(Pfaff, now 85, hasn’t lost a step in his stomp-Israel shuffle, writing in August, at the end of Operation Protective Edge, that “It now is time to terminate the Israeli-American alliance,” adding for good measure a fairly ominous warning to American Jews that when the end of that alliance does come, it “may turn these allies into enemies, igniting in the United States an unforgiving anger at America’s exploitation, and against those responsible for the exploitation.”)
The late Alfred Friendly, formerly a managing editor of the Washington Post, was in a fine frenzy, stopping short of using the word “Nazi” but raising the specter of Israeli fascism just the same: “[Israel’s] slaughters are on a par with Trujillo’s Dominican Republic or Papa Doc’s Haiti. Still absent are the jackboots, the shoulder boards, and the bemedalled chests, but one can see them, figuratively, on the minister of defense.
Liberal columnists weren’t the only media types to take the sledgehammer to Israel. In Double Vision, his 1985 study of anti-Israel media bias, Zev Chafets made the point that editorial cartoonists were particularly vicious and inclined toward the Nazi imagery favored by so many pundits.
“Artist Steve Benson,” wrote Chafets, “showed goose-stepping Israeli storm-troopers guarding a death camp labeled BEIRUT; Tony Auth depicted the ghost of a Jewish inmate of Auschwitz looking at a bombed-out site in Lebanon and, in horrified recognition, saying, ‘Oh, my God.’ The Louisville Courier-Journal ran a picture of Begin looking into a hole where Lebanon had been, captioned ‘A final solution to the PLO problem,’ and the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner carried a Bill Schorr cartoon in which Begin said, ‘For every problem, there is a final solution.’
“The Indianapolis Star carried one cartoon by Oliphant of a wrecked city with a sign saying WARSAW GHETTO crossed out and the words WEST BEIRUT substituted and another with Israeli soldiers saying, ‘We are only obeying orders.’ The Arizona Republic ran a picture of Begin wearing a badge saying NEVER AGAIN, and an Arab standing next to him wearing a button saying UNTIL NOW.
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In the aftermath of the 1982 Lebanon war, an outraged Norman Podhoretz took to the pages of Commentary, the intellectual journal he edited so ably for 35 years, to write a lengthy, impassioned riposte to the tidal wave of anti-Israel invective washing over the media landscape.
“The war in Lebanon,” he declared, “has triggered an explosion of invective against Israel that in its fury and its reach was unprecedented in the public discourse of this country.”
Podhoretz of course had no way of knowing that in the decades to come the intemperate anti-Israel rhetoric and the inexcusable Nazi analogies would only grow more frequent and reckless, particularly whenever Israel engaged in any type of military action, no matter how defensive, retaliatory, or restrained.
Concerning those who had taken to likening Israelis to Nazis, Podhoretz wrote:
From such people one is tempted to turn away in disgust. Yet difficult as it may be to entertain, even for as long as it takes to refute it, the loathsome idea that Israel is to the Palestinians as the Nazis were to the Jews, the world evidently still needs to be reminded of the differences.To begin with, then, the Nazis set out to murder every Jew on the face of the earth, and wherever they had the power to do so, they systematically pursued this objective. Is this what the Israelis have tried to do to the Palestinians? If so, they have gone about it in a most peculiar way.
In Germany under the Nazis, the Jews were first stripped of their civil and political rights and then sent to concentration camps where virtually all of them were put to death. [Since 1948], by contrast, Palestinian Arabs living in the state of Israel have enjoyed Israeli citizenship and along with it a degree of civil and political liberty, not to mention prosperity, unknown to Arabs living in any country under Arab sovereignty.
[Since 1967], moreover…Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza have been in the power of Israel under military occupation. Have squads of gunmen been dispatched to shoot them down in the fashion of the Einsatzgruppen who murdered…Jews in those parts of the Soviet Union occupied by the Nazis? Have the West Bank Palestinians been rounded up and deported to concentration camps in preparation for being gassed, as happened to some three million Jews living in other countries occupied by Nazi Germany?
The Nazis in less than six years managed to kill more than five million Jews in occupied territory. How many Palestinian Arabs have been killed by the Israelis [since 1967]?…. [H]as a single civilian been killed as a matter of policy? Again, the fact is that the Palestinians living even under Israeli military occupation, and even since the recent political offensive against PLO influence on the West Bank, have enjoyed a greater degree of civil and political liberty than any of their brother Arabs living anywhere else except in Israel as Israeli citizens.
It is or ought to be obvious, then, that any comparison between the way Israel has treated the Palestinians and the way the Nazis dealt with the Jews is from a rational perspective, let alone morally, disproportionate to a monstrous degree. Anyone who makes such a comparison cannot possibly be responding to the facts of the case and must be driven by some other impulse.
Noting that many of Israel’s most vituperative critics were just as vociferous in their insistence that anti-Semitism played no part in their views (well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?), Podhoretz quoted the British historian Conor Cruise O’Brien’s suggestion that a different term was called for since “the people in question are…extravagantly philo-Semitic these days, in their feelings for the Arabic-speaking branch of the Semitic linguistic family.”
O’Brien nominated “anti-Jewism” as an alternative: “If [when Israel comes up for discussion] your interlocutor can’t keep Hitler out of the conversation…feverishly turning Jews into Nazis and Arabs into Jews – why then, I think, you may well be talking to an anti-Jewist.”
While conceding that not all criticism of Israel stemmed from anti-Semitism, Podhoretz contended that those most likely to subject Israel to relentless and one-sided hectoring could be found with increasing frequency in one particular grouping – that of the political left, with the level of animosity rising exponentially the farther left one moved along the spectrum.
Generally, he wrote, “the more committed to appeasement of the Soviet Union a given party is, and the more it opposes ‘military solutions to political problems,’ the more hostile it will be to Israel. Thus the West European governments…are far less friendly to Israel than is the American government. And within the United States itself, the people who are most sympathetic to the European point of view on the issue of the Soviet threat are among those least friendly to Israel.”
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The prescience of those words may be easier appreciated from our vantage point some thirty-two years later than when they were originally written, as they uncannily outline the trajectory in recent decades of the American political divide in terms of U.S. Middle East policy.
Start with the media (significantly more influential and far-reaching today than in the early 1980s, when 24-hour cable news was in its infancy and the Internet was still years away): Liberal pundits and news outlets are far less likely to be supportive of Israel than their conservative counterparts.
The evidence is overwhelming. Whereas conservatives, with the exception of some relatively marginal paleoconservatives writing for a handful of mostly obscure web and print outlets, tend to be strongly supportive of Israel and highly skeptical of Arab intentions, just about the reverse is true among liberals and leftists.
The most staunchly pro-Israel newspapers, magazines, websites, and cable channels – The Wall Street Journal, New York Post, National Review, The Weekly Standard, Commentary, FrontPageMag.com, The American Spectator, Fox News, and others too numerous to mention here – are virtually all on the right side of the political divide.
In striking contrast, media outlets characterized by ambivalent or hostile positions on Israel – The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Nation, The American Prospect, Harper’s, MSNBC, CNN, Salon, Daily Kos – are almost all found on the liberal-left end of the spectrum.
And it’s not just liberal writers and editors who look at Israel with a jaundiced eye: a disconcerting number of readers who post comments on even the most mainstream liberal websites refer to Israel in terms so demeaning they could have been lifted from neo-Nazi and Islamist sources. Meanwhile, Palestinians are portrayed as eternal victims of cruel and imperialistic Israeli policies.
In terms of columnists and commentators, any list of the most consistent and unflinching supporters of Israel would include, for starters, George Will, Cal Thomas, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Jonathan Tobin, Ralph Peters, John Podhoretz, Jonah Goldberg, Michael Medved, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, David Horowitz, Rich Lowry, and Jay Nordlinger – none of whom can be described as liberal (though a much younger Krauthammer was a speechwriter for 1984 Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale).
There are, of course, liberal pundits who on a good day are at least somewhat supportive of Israel, but as is the case with, say, Thomas Friedman, that support almost always comes with at least a caveat and criticism or two and the plaintive wish that Israel would act with more “understanding” and “restraint.”
The American public is divided along the same lines. For years now, polls have shown conservatives to be considerably more supportive of Israel than liberals. Likewise, Americans who identify themselves as Republicans are much more likely than self-described Democrats to side with Israel against its Arab enemies.
It should come as no shock that Americans least inclined to support Israel also tended to blame American policy for the 9/11 terrorist attacks – and since 9/11 have been skeptical at best about the dangers posed by Islamist terror and more apt to condemn what they see as U.S. overreaction to Muslim extremists than they are to denounce the actions of the extremists.
Just as a good many of their political forebears thirty and forty years ago feared American leaders who were determined to stand up to the Soviet Union more than they feared the Soviets, liberals and leftists during the George W. Bush years would mockingly refer to the “so-called war on terror” and have been dismayed beyond measure that President Obama retained a number of Bush administration intelligence and national security initiatives.
Norman Podhoretz called his 1982 essay “J’Accuse,” borrowing the title from Emile Zola’s famous 1898 broadside in defense of the French army captain Alfred Dreyfus, who was serving a life sentence for treason (he would be released from prison in 1899 and officially exonerated in 1906 thanks to the efforts of supporters like Zola).
Zola, wrote Podhoretz, “charged that the persecutors of Dreyfus were using anti-Semitism as a screen for their reactionary political designs.”
Podhoretz then delivered his own J’Accuse:
“I charge here that the anti-Semitic attacks on Israel…are also a cover. They are a cover for a loss of American nerve. They are a cover for acquiescence in terrorism. They are a cover for the appeasement of totalitarianism.
“And I accuse all those who have joined in these attacks not merely of anti-Semitism but of the broader sin of faithlessness to the interests of the United States and indeed to the values of Western civilization as a whole.”
