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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
When Western leaders met in Berlin this week to confront an ugly upsurge in European anti-Semitism, they pointed fingers not just at neo-Nazis and militant Muslims -- but also at the European left.
Apr 30, 2004 | Two springs ago, the streets and Web sites of Europe erupted in a paroxysm of anti-Israeli rage summed up by one word: "Jenin." Across the continent, leftists organized to protest the deadly Israeli raid on the Palestinian refugee camp. One leaflet showed Uncle Sam with a hooked Jewish nose dangling the globe on a string. Another urged a trade boycott on Israeli settlements in the occupied territories. There were dark mutterings of an "East Coast" Jewish lobby and tracts describing suicide bombings as the "independence movements of oppressed minorities" on the Net. Demonstrations contained banners equating the Star of David with a swastika.
By the following spring, when America invaded Iraq, the European left had mobilized the largest antiwar protests in memory. In Paris, Berlin, London and elsewhere, millions marched in a massive rejection of the Bush administration's policy. There were unionists and socialists, communists and peaceniks and greens -- and in their ranks, like little unexploded mines, neo-Nazis in Palestinian kaffiyehs and radical Muslims who chanted "Death to Jews" and decked their kids out as suicide bombers. Some marches ended in fisticuffs: In Strasbourg, France, extremists trying to attack a synagogue were forcibly restrained. But at others, demonstrators reacted to the blatantly anti-Semitic rhetoric belatedly, if at all.
It is spring once again, and the European left is being called to account. When ministers from the 55 members of the Organization for Co-operation and Security in Europe met in Berlin this week to craft a response to an ugly outbreak of anti-Semitic violence, they did not just ask for a better monitoring of, and harsher sanctions against, expressions of neo-Nazi and radical Islamic hate. They also demanded that the loose and ungainly coalition of anti-globalization, pro-Palestinian and antiwar activists, chief among them the international group ATTAC, look long and hard in the mirror.
Since last fall, the critiques have multiplied -- and not just from the right. Some of the loudest denunciations have come from within the left's own ranks, primarily mainstream greens and trade unionists. The accusation is clear and harsh: A rising tide of anti-Jewish bigotry is sweeping Europe, for which the extreme left -- with its drumbeat of vilification of the Jewish state -- is at least partly to blame. ATTAC particularly, and its affiliated groups, which denounce Israeli policy in Palestine and reject the American occupation of Iraq, are accused of inciting a "new" anti-Semitism that updates and exploits classic anti-Semitic clichés. In one noteworthy outpouring of vitriol from the Hoover Institute, an author went so far as to depict violent Muslim youth torching French synagogues as the "'shock troops' for their more privileged comrades au centre ville."
Werner Bergmann of Berlin's Technical University, a leading researcher on anti-Semitism, summarized the issue more soberly in a widely circulated but unpublished report for the European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia. He discussed "anti-Semitic tendencies in certain left-wing groups, particularly in anti-globalization milieus, which cross the line between legitimate critique of Israeli politics to instrumentalization of anti-Semitic stereotypes in the fight against an 'imperialistic, capitalistic occupier.'"
At a conference this January that examined the question whether anti-Zionism is necessarily anti-Semitism, Germany's Green foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, publicly took his erstwhile comrades to task. "I can smell it," said Fischer, a one-time pro-Palestinian radical turned establishment politician. "It's a very particular way of referring to America, and to Israel."
