The issue has driven a deep wedge between those on the European -- and American -- lefts who see anti-Zionism as veiled anti-Semitism and those who most emphatically do not. In Germany, the issue has divided not just the mainstream and far left but the far left itself. Here, it is a small but vocal, ardently pro-Israel splinter group known as the "anti-Germans" that leads the charge against the pro-Palestinians in ATTAC.

ATTACs leaders acknowledge that the militant base has at times crossed the line of acceptable discourse. But they vehemently deny inciting racial violence and defend their right to sharply criticize an Israeli government seen increasingly in Europe as trampling democratic principles in putting down the Palestinian resistance. In Germany, especially, ATTAC has mounted a spirited defense against these critics, whom they see as using the potent cudgel of the Holocaust in an effort to silence their movement.

Peter Wahl, a veteran lefty on the ATTAC board in Germany, has led a thorough reexamination of the organization's principles and activities in response to the accusations. In an interview at the east Berlin offices of WEED (World Economy, Ecology and Development), a nongovernmental organization he founded in the early 1990s that formed the early backbone of ATTAC Deutschland, he is unequivocal that "anti-Semitism has no place in ATTAC." Says Wahl, a 50-something former member of the Communist and Green parties whose father was interned in a concentration camp: "If criticism of Israeli foreign policy is anti-Semitic, we have 200 million anti-Semites in Europe" -- a tongue-in-cheek reference to a controversial poll in which 59 percent of Europeans identified Israel as the greatest threat to world peace.

Some American Jewish leaders may indeed see things this way. The New York-based Anti-Defamation League released a new poll in Berlin on Monday, ahead of the OSCE conference, which showed that a third of Europeans harbor "some traditional anti-Jewish views." What's more, said Abraham Foxman, the ADL national director, who is a leading proponent of the idea of anti-Zionism as a "new anti-Semitism," 44 percent think European Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the countries in which they reside. Americans, by contrast, are thought to be far less susceptible to the anti-Semitic "virus." Yet the differences are not so marked: ADL's own surveys consistently show one in three Americans doubts the loyalty of Jews, while in a poll conducted in 2002, more Americans than Europeans agreed that "Jews are more willing to use shady practices to get what they want."

The finger-pointing gets even more dicey when it comes to distinguishing legitimate criticism of Israel from classic anti-Semitism. Foxman described the polls "bad news" as the fact that European attitudes toward Israel "have gotten progressively worse," citing poll results which showed that Europeans believe, by a two-to-one margin, that Israel is primarily at fault in the Middle East conflict. Yet the April 2004 figures also show a marked decline in anti-Semitic attitudes in Europe, compared with the traumatic spring of 2002. When asked whether this did not in fact suggest a delinkage of anti-Israeli opinion and anti-Semitism, Foxmans answer was far from convincing. "When you treat Israel as being undemocratic, contrary to civility -- and it is the only Jewish state in the world -- it does impact the level of anti-Semitism," he asserted. "I think there is a clear link."

Recent Stories