If Anti-Zionism Isn't Supposed to Be Anti-Semitism, Someone Should Probably Tell the Anti-Zionists
Across the vast majority of the globe, it's simply the case that even the most wide-eyed anti-Israel demagogues - no matter how often or how shamelessly they invoke centuries-old anti-Semitic myths - get to hide behind the excuse that they're 'only' being anti-Zionist. The old defensive position that "not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic" has become the default of "no criticism of Israel is anti-Semitism" (which is always followed by the smug addendum that "... and if you say that it is anti-Semitism, we'll say that you're trying to stifle legitimate criticism of Israel"). Under these rhetorical rules, we've seen a global emergence of anti-Semitism so absolute and violent that it has only one historical precedent, but let's ignore that. Instead, let's pretend that these disingenuous shows of bravado on American college campuses - where self-styled activists say something that is both anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic, and then when you point out the anti-Semitic part scream about how you're trying to stifle their anti-Zionist stance - were not the disingenuous cries for attention that they are. Let's pretend that all of the daily false accusations that sound so much like anti-Semitic canards - well poisoning, baby killing etc - were random mistakes, and that their similarity to anti-Semitic myths is a coincidence. In other words, let's assume that all of the really evil things that people say about Israel are true.
If that was the case, there would still be a glaring and very suspicious dynamic that the waves upon waves upon waves of activists who march angrily through the world would still have to explain: why Israel? Why, if the goal is to make the world a more livable place, is the gap between the attention that Israel gets from marchers and NGOs and the UN and foreign governments - why is the gap between the opposition to Israel and the gap to whoever the next target is so overwhelming? There is not another target on the planet that is within the same order of magnitude when it comes to global activity directed against it. It certainly can't be a matter of sheer numbers, because on any given month the IDF is objectively nowhere near as bad as tens of other armies:
In fact, through restraint, Israel was able to minimize the number of civilian casualties in Lebanon, despite Hizbullah’s best efforts to embed itself in population centers and to use civilians as human shields. The total number of innocent Muslim civilians killed by Israeli weapons during a month of ferocious defensive warfare was a fraction of the number of innocent Muslims killed by other Muslims during that same period in Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, Algeria, and other areas of Muslim-on-Muslim civil strife. Yet the deaths caused by Muslims received a fraction of the attention devoted to alleged Israeli "crimes."
This will not perturb standard anti-Israel activists too much. Without noticing that their jump from argument to argument is as much a jump from practiced psychological salve to practiced psychological salve, they'll intone that it's the type of attacks that Israel commits - targeting ambulances, for instance - that singles it out for special condemnation. Forget that many of these fantastic claims of turn out to false. We're being generous here and making the patently absurd assumption that in a climate of opposition as outright violent as anti-Israel activism, evidence will be evaluated rationally. So let's assume that all of the qualitatively awful attacks that Israel is accused of actually occur. That would still not explain the attention that Israel is given:
Sometime in the last two weeks, a Red Cross ambulance driver was murdered after having been kidnapped. Nobody knows when, because nobody really noticed, and nobody really cares—because he was a Sudanese, and he was killed in Darfur. The ambulance driver wasn’t an Arab killed by an Israeli. There’s absolutely no news value in another dead Sudanese. After all, there have already been some 200,000 Sudanese killed in the war—two hundred times the number of Lebanese killed—and nobody really cares. It hardly even makes the evening news. I could only find a dozen or so articles on Google News about it. I doubt Time Magazine will mention it at all. Dead Sudanese? Not sexy enough. Dead Arab killed by Israeli missiles?
At this point, your usual anti-Israel activist will launch into a frankly insufferable little diatribe about how human rights abuses everywhere need to be opposed in every case, and how Israel can't defend its crimes by pointing to the crimes of others. You need to wait for them to stop hyperventilating, and slowly explain: that's not the argument. The argument isn't that any Israeli crimes that were actually committed are any less criminal because other people committed crimes too. Anti-Israel activists would like that to be the argument, but it's not. The argument is that there's no way to rationally explain why there are a thousand times as many boycotts and petitions and resolutions and protests against Israel as there are of the next least-liked global country. If Israel was being targeted for what it does rather than who lives there, then we'd certainly expect that other countries that act in the same way would meet some of the same kind of opposition that Israel does. But that there is hysterical activity against Israel and almost total silence regarding the rest of the world proves that there's something else motivating at least a good deal of anti-Israel activity.
And even if literally zero of this analysis was compelling - if it turned out that all the anti-Israel focus was justified and all the anti-Israel accusations were true - there would still be an ugly strain in anti-Israel discourse that points to something very unseemly. One last time, let's assume that everything else about anti-Israel movements was either justified or innocent mistakes: the disproportionate time and scrutiny, the false accusations that happen to sound a lot like anti-Semitism, etc. If that was the case, then there would still be a glaring difference between public discourse about Israel and public discourse about other countries that commit war crimes. Only in Israel's case do you find - at the very highest levels of intellectual and political discussion - the suggestion that the country should be dissolved. In other cases, it's the leadership of the country that must be overthrown and brought to justice. Even in Serbia - which actually really did commit organized genocide - it was never suggested that the country itself should be destroyed. But when it comes to Israel, where nothing even close to that has ever been contemplated, we have newspapers and bloggers and politicians regularly 'conducting thought experiments' about how great it would be if the Jewish State didn't exist. When it comes to other countries, 'not letting them exist' is simply not on the spectrum of things it would occur to someone to suggest. But in Israel's case, the suggestion is now so routine that it barely registers anything but practiced faux outrage when it appears in this or that European newspaper. Only in the case of Israel do people try so hard to find evidence of crimes that they regularly make up fantastic lies, and only in the case of Israel do people suggest destroying the country as a remedy for even the most common mistakes.
If that was the case, there would still be a glaring and very suspicious dynamic that the waves upon waves upon waves of activists who march angrily through the world would still have to explain: why Israel? Why, if the goal is to make the world a more livable place, is the gap between the attention that Israel gets from marchers and NGOs and the UN and foreign governments - why is the gap between the opposition to Israel and the gap to whoever the next target is so overwhelming? There is not another target on the planet that is within the same order of magnitude when it comes to global activity directed against it. It certainly can't be a matter of sheer numbers, because on any given month the IDF is objectively nowhere near as bad as tens of other armies:
In fact, through restraint, Israel was able to minimize the number of civilian casualties in Lebanon, despite Hizbullah’s best efforts to embed itself in population centers and to use civilians as human shields. The total number of innocent Muslim civilians killed by Israeli weapons during a month of ferocious defensive warfare was a fraction of the number of innocent Muslims killed by other Muslims during that same period in Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, Algeria, and other areas of Muslim-on-Muslim civil strife. Yet the deaths caused by Muslims received a fraction of the attention devoted to alleged Israeli "crimes."
This will not perturb standard anti-Israel activists too much. Without noticing that their jump from argument to argument is as much a jump from practiced psychological salve to practiced psychological salve, they'll intone that it's the type of attacks that Israel commits - targeting ambulances, for instance - that singles it out for special condemnation. Forget that many of these fantastic claims of turn out to false. We're being generous here and making the patently absurd assumption that in a climate of opposition as outright violent as anti-Israel activism, evidence will be evaluated rationally. So let's assume that all of the qualitatively awful attacks that Israel is accused of actually occur. That would still not explain the attention that Israel is given:
Sometime in the last two weeks, a Red Cross ambulance driver was murdered after having been kidnapped. Nobody knows when, because nobody really noticed, and nobody really cares—because he was a Sudanese, and he was killed in Darfur. The ambulance driver wasn’t an Arab killed by an Israeli. There’s absolutely no news value in another dead Sudanese. After all, there have already been some 200,000 Sudanese killed in the war—two hundred times the number of Lebanese killed—and nobody really cares. It hardly even makes the evening news. I could only find a dozen or so articles on Google News about it. I doubt Time Magazine will mention it at all. Dead Sudanese? Not sexy enough. Dead Arab killed by Israeli missiles?
At this point, your usual anti-Israel activist will launch into a frankly insufferable little diatribe about how human rights abuses everywhere need to be opposed in every case, and how Israel can't defend its crimes by pointing to the crimes of others. You need to wait for them to stop hyperventilating, and slowly explain: that's not the argument. The argument isn't that any Israeli crimes that were actually committed are any less criminal because other people committed crimes too. Anti-Israel activists would like that to be the argument, but it's not. The argument is that there's no way to rationally explain why there are a thousand times as many boycotts and petitions and resolutions and protests against Israel as there are of the next least-liked global country. If Israel was being targeted for what it does rather than who lives there, then we'd certainly expect that other countries that act in the same way would meet some of the same kind of opposition that Israel does. But that there is hysterical activity against Israel and almost total silence regarding the rest of the world proves that there's something else motivating at least a good deal of anti-Israel activity.
And even if literally zero of this analysis was compelling - if it turned out that all the anti-Israel focus was justified and all the anti-Israel accusations were true - there would still be an ugly strain in anti-Israel discourse that points to something very unseemly. One last time, let's assume that everything else about anti-Israel movements was either justified or innocent mistakes: the disproportionate time and scrutiny, the false accusations that happen to sound a lot like anti-Semitism, etc. If that was the case, then there would still be a glaring difference between public discourse about Israel and public discourse about other countries that commit war crimes. Only in Israel's case do you find - at the very highest levels of intellectual and political discussion - the suggestion that the country should be dissolved. In other cases, it's the leadership of the country that must be overthrown and brought to justice. Even in Serbia - which actually really did commit organized genocide - it was never suggested that the country itself should be destroyed. But when it comes to Israel, where nothing even close to that has ever been contemplated, we have newspapers and bloggers and politicians regularly 'conducting thought experiments' about how great it would be if the Jewish State didn't exist. When it comes to other countries, 'not letting them exist' is simply not on the spectrum of things it would occur to someone to suggest. But in Israel's case, the suggestion is now so routine that it barely registers anything but practiced faux outrage when it appears in this or that European newspaper. Only in the case of Israel do people try so hard to find evidence of crimes that they regularly make up fantastic lies, and only in the case of Israel do people suggest destroying the country as a remedy for even the most common mistakes.
