Slouching Toward Kristallnacht

When the Democratic national convention turned down viva voce a platform plank recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, then booed the chairman for declaring it passed, that was a hint. Another comes in a new CNN Poll. Asked whether Israel’s “Operation Pillar of Defense” (“Pillar of Cloud” in Hebrew), consisting of air strikes against Hamas rocket launch sites in the Gaza Strip, is justified, Americans respond thus:

Total: Yes 57%, No 25%

Republicans: Yes 74%, No 12%
Independents: Yes 59%, No 23%
Democrats: Yes 41%, No 36%

Conservatives: Yes 72%, No 15%
Moderates: Yes 53%, No 29%
Liberals: Yes 39%, No 33%

That a country whose civilians are being shelled indiscriminately by an avowed terrorist group can’t win the approval of a majority of Democrats or liberals is astounding. Would that happen if any other country were on the receiving end of, so far, over a thousand missiles? And would there be the same outcry against the defender for collateral damage when the attacker doesn’t care whom it hits? Or the same demand for granting a cease fire to a homicidal regime that repeatedly and flagrantly declares its lack of interest in peace with any neighbor, no matter where its borders are drawn, that has any kind of Jewish identity.

What’s at work here – antisemitism or oikophobia? It certainly could be significant that such a large proportion of liberals and Democrats lack sympathy for what happens to be the world’s only Jewish state. But perhaps the Judaism is incidental and the real offense is that Israel is America’s only reliable Middle Eastern ally.

Neither possibility is reassuring, particularly if, as some pundits believe, the last election foreshadows long-term liberal Democratic ascendancy. Dislike of Jews and revulsion from American power aren’t mutually exclusive impulses. One can reinforce the other. As evidence, consider a fervent, unbalanced speech by an early liberal opponent of the liberation of Iraq. Whom does he single out as “arm-chair, weekend warriors in this Administration [who] shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne”? Two Jews, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, the latter not even an Administration official but a member of an unpaid advisory board.

A decade later, the U.S. State Department, now reporting to the very man who lambasted the Wolfowitz-Perle cabal, refuses to condemn the Turkish prime minister’s characterization of Israel as a “terrorist state”.

Then there’s the term “neocon”, which has become an insult in the mouths of left wingers. It originated as a rebuke to old time liberals, many of them Jewish, who had moved to the right. Now it’s synonymous (to the Left; the Right uses it merely as descriptive) with especial villainy – and is still applied almost exclusively to Jews, despite the fact that the same views are commonplace among conservative foreign policy thinkers.

If conservatives had a derogatory name for a political tendency and used it to refer only to, say, Hispanics, one might suspect that something other than unvarnished ideology was involved.

Of course, liberal antisemitism isn’t Hitlerian. Those liberals who condemn Israel for defending itself would be appalled by death camps or Nuremberg laws. All that they want is what the antisemites of medieval Europe wanted: for Jews to cease being noticeably Jewish, except perhaps in a colorful cultural sense. Menorahs are fine (except when set up on government property, where they violate the sacred separation of religion and state). “Next year in Jerusalem”, earnestly believed, is not.

Given that the next generation of Jews, the children of Orthodox communities that don’t limit themselves to one-child families, will be more strongly and traditionally Jewish than the last, and also very likely more conservative politically, it doesn’t seem extremely far-fetched to anticipate that the melding of Jew-aversion (if not outright Jew-hatred) and anti-American sentiments will proceed apace. To what destination, I prefer not to contemplate.