Unplugged Mike

Radical Left Antisemitism

Tomorrow I am to participate in a discussion on why the Left hates Israel.

Here is my analysis:

Of course, it is not the whole Left that hates Israel. The left-wing of this country can not be said to hate Israel. People who support Israel's right to exist but believe Israel was correct to withdraw from Gaza and should withdraw from the West Bank can not be said to hate Israel. In the minds of many on the hard right who have adopted Israel as a pet cause, and are always looking to demonize someone, those who fail to silence any criticism tend to labelled negatively as either anti-Israel, and by some whackjobs, as antisemitic. I have been clear in the past on what I consider antisemitism and have been vocal in this space on the many instances of it around the world, particularly in Europe.

I have also written on the radical left (and it is really the radical left, not the "Left" that we are talking about) tendency to guiltily accuse supporters of Israel of accusing them of antisemitism when no such accusations have been levelled.

It is a major myth that antisemitism on the radical left in the West, the brand found on college campuses and amongst pinkish activists, is anything new. Benjamin Epstein and Arnold Forster, two ADL leaders of the last generation, wrote about it in the early 1970s in their book, "The New Anti-Semitism", which made Phyllis Chesler's recent book of the same title somewhat passe. Epstein and Arnold's book included chapters that could have been written yesterday: "The Radical Left", "The Media and the Arts", "Arabs and pro-Arabs", and only one chapter given over to "The Radical Right".

I agree somewhat with those who see the new antisemitism partly as a post-Communist search for meaning; though I would say that the leaders of those on the radical left responsible do not see themselves as "post-Communist". These are the International Action Center types who pine for the USSR. They are the unreconstructed radical left. They have long seen Zionism in its early 20th century form as a competitor to Communism and like good Stalinists, have treated it with the appropriate venom. A typical text is the volume of Marxist essays, "Antizionism and Antisemitism", published not long before the fall of the Soviet Union in 1987. In its introduction, Daniel Rubin, the editor of the volume refers to Soviet persecution of Jews as a "lie". In includes such comical sentences as this: "[Jewish-Americans] are unaware that socialism long ago eliminated all governmental and organized expression of anti-Semitism and all other forms of national oppression and that anti-Semitism is a crime in the Soviet Union." If antisemitism is the socialism of fools, sentences like these would certainly inspire the sentiments of those zealots on the hard-right, who promote the unfair converse of that statement: socialism is the antisemitism of fools.

And yet, one thing about Rubin is notable: his firm support for the two-state solution. He calls for a Palestinian homeland alongside Israel, not in place of it, even as he and his co-authors criticize Zionism as a form of chauvinistic nationalism that exists because of imperialism and pulls the wool over the eyes of the Jewish masses.

Today's radical left is not so accommodating. They by and large appear to prefer one state and a full right of return for Palestinian refugees, long Arab code for a reversal of 1948, ie, a reversal of Israel's founding. People seem to have little capacity for critical thought. They adopt the ideologies of others nowadays. It is not enough to want a Palestinian homeland, no, they must out-Palestinian the Palestinians and call for the right of return, demonize the Jews, and make utterly unfortunate comments about how it is not their place to criticize tactics like suicide bombings.

The other major difference is the proliferation of deceptive language. The radical left, always tending toward the self-delusional as we see from Rubin's fanciful account of Soviet treatment of Jews, have convinced themselves that as long as they call it anti-Zionism, it can't possibly antisemitic. This allows them to say the most outrageous things about Israel, its history, its people, and the 90 percent or so of the world's Jews who support its existence. The internet has allowed them to become more organized and to read more about some of bad things Israeli soldiers have done in the territories, with little context. They have less shame, less of a impetus to educate themselves about the entire picture, and in the post-Communist world of US superpower, an impetus to see Israel, a close US ally with too many people with white faces (forget Israel's nearly unparalleled racial and religious diversity), as an evil.

My response to all of this is the following:

1. The age of the problem suggests that it is not anything to be very worried about. These are not, by and large, grassroots movements. The people running them have always been more interested in running their mouths than in getting anything done. That's why they have accomplished nothing in more than three decades of the same thing.

2. We have to do a better job in the Jewish community of reaching left-leaning college students to keep them out of radical left clutches. Expanding Birthright Israel is a good idea. Disseminating literature is a good idea. Sending speakers from the Israeli mainstream is a good idea.

3. We have to do a better job of getting the same mainstream Israelis in the rooms of the progressive churches, and other large organizations who have the ability to move anti-Zionism from the fringe to left-wing mainstream.

posted by Michael Brenner @ 8:16 PM 3 comments

Munich

Steven Spielberg's "Munich" has been called his "by far the toughest film of the director's career and the most anguished". A lot of people probably believe this. I don't know. I think Schindler's List was probably much tougher and much more anguished. It is a sad sign of the times that a movie about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would be considered more anguishing to make than a movie about the Holocaust.

I am not surprised Manohla Dargis, who is not a big Spielberg fan, wrote this. Those who find Spielberg a virtuoso filmmaker but purveyor of cheap, crowd-pleasing emotional thrills (not my assessment) doubtless find Tony Kushner, Munich's screenwriter and a reliable radical, a welcome influence. Kushner, the author of the great Angels in America, is no slouch.

Neither are on the top of their game here. Spielberg's great energy comes through unevenly here; his movie is an overlong graphic collection of assassinations. It is a mystery as to why Mr. Spielberg has not been criticized for cheap emotional thrills in a bizarre closing sequence where a sex scene is mixed with the murder of Israeli athletes or gratuitousness for the manner in which he depicts the killing of a female rogue Dutch assassin. Sex serves as both a foil and a corollary for the killing in this movie, an idea that is rather banal by now but oddly offensive here.

Kushner's script is transparently calibrated to promote his own personal political viewpoint. Anyone familiar with Mr. Kushner's stance on the conflict will recognize this. Mr. Kushner's theme, so simple and unoriginal but so well-regarded in Hollywood, is that violence begets violence, and that terrorists (Mr. Kushner would doubtless prefer "alleged guerrillas" or some other derivative that removes the linguistic violence of the word "terrorist") should be brought to trial rather than targetted for death.

It's a cinematic op-ed piece, not especially well-argued, ignorant of the complexity of the issues, and perhaps worst of all, ignorant of the facts, based as it is on a book with a discredited source. That makes it an arrogant op-ed piece, with Mr. Spielberg and Mr. Kushner (and I believe Mr. Kushner is more responsible than Mr. Spielberg) ignoring the actual parties and forcing their interpretation on the conflict.

Every director and writer who chooses to make a movie about a subject like this ought to watch Gillo Pontecorvo's "Battle of Algiers" and learn its lessons. They are:

1. Keep your own political views at bay and stick to the facts. If you really believe in them, they should stand on their own. And if you're wrong, you're wrong. Pontecorvo's political outlook was, if anything, to the left of Kushner.

2. No big ideological speeches. Munich's script doesn't trust its audience to draw its own conclusions, so it has its characters tell them to the audience. Avner, the lead character, asks Ephraim, the Mossad head who recruits Avner to lead a team who will assassinate Palestinians implicated by the Mossad as terrorists, why the terrorists could not be brought to justice rather than killed. (The question is a serious one in this context, though not serious in today's West bank context.) But in a story where the accepted truth is that the Israelis who participated in the revenge killings showed little ambiguity about what they did, it is all the more unfortunate that Mr. Kushner chose to have them wear their emotions on their sleeves. Pontecorvo's French general was in a similar position to Avner. He was a hero of the French resistance from the World War II. He was honest about what was necessary to get the job done and said so. And by his saying so, Pontecorvo presented his argument without skirting the facts. He didn't have to invent lines about civilizations compromising with their own values, as Kushner has Golda Meir tell her security cabinet.

It's not surprising that Kushner doesn't trust his audience to understand him without these literary indulgences of his.

Kushner and Spielberg fail to heed these lessons, and as a result, Munich is a failure.

A couple of notes:

Many Arabs are unhappy with Spielberg for presenting the Israelis as conflicted men while presenting the Palestinians as fairly irredentist, most distinctly in a scene where a PLO member speaks to Avner about not resting until Israel is once again in Arab hands. In other words, one side is humanized and the other isn't. This is a strange criticism, given the movie's clear effort to present the targets as fathers with young charming daughters, intellectuals, poets, friendly guys who will offer you a cigarette, and so on. Taken with Kushner's effort to remind the audience that the evidence on these men was limited and certainly not public, it seems as though the criticism is hardly justified.

Irina has a different take. She argues that the lesson is that a guy doesn't have to wear a military uniform in order to kill people; he can be a poet who kills, an intellectual who kills. Scholarship and artistry is no barrier against evil. I doubt this was Kushner's intent given his politics, much as he would not hesitate to deliver such a lesson about American and Israeli civilian politicians. It is, nonetheless, a useful lesson to draw from this movie, particularly for those who think of Sheikh Yassin as a harmless paraplegic clergyman.

posted by Michael Brenner @ 9:12 PM 1 comments