If I Am Not for Myself...The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews

Liberalism for and against the Jews

Jews are associated with liberalism the way the French are with wine: it is considered native to their region. […] As I use it, liberalism is a belief in rationality and a rational approach to political questions; in freedom for the individual within a constitutional, participatory democracy; in cultural pluralism within an open society; and in the rule of law. Liberals believe in progress and in the progressive improvement of human society. […] Underlying all these liberal positions is an attitude of hopefulness regarding human nature. […]

As this broad definition suggests, the attachment of modern Jews to liberalism seems virtually axiomatic, since it was the precondition for their emancipation. When autocratic monarchies began to give way to constitutional participatory government, it was the spirit of liberalism that championed rights of citizenship. Those who fought on behalf of the Jews did not necessarily do so out of love or understanding, but because the Jews were the most prominent targets of discrimination in a still less-than-perfect society. […]

Many European Jews placed their hopes in these ideas of progress. They naturally hoped that this enlightened view of human nature would finally give them a chance to prove their merit and to disprove the misconceptions that held sway in the minds of their fellow citizens. In seeking acceptance, such Jews could only hope to find allies among the liberals who believed in tolerance and individual rights, since the conservatives who opposed these views upheld a way of life that had made a virtue out of persecuting them.

Moreover, some of the energy of liberalism seemed to emerge straight out of Jewish teachings. Freedom is a cardinal virtue of the Jewish way of life, reconfirmed every year in the reenactment of the Exodus at Passover and in the celebration of Succoth, when Jews live in roofless huts as a reminder of the existential conditions of desert travel. Jewish tradition kept alive the meaning of liberty by connecting the Exodus story with the imperative of kindness to strangers. The moral impulse of liberalism also seemed derived from the Hebrew prophets. They had demanded individual accountability of their monarchs, awakened compassion for the downtrodden, and with what seemed to be defiance of the priests and of tradition had championed the spirit of the law over its mechanical observance. […]

[…] Suppose that liberalism cannot protect the Jews? Instead of the improvement of European society that liberals anticipated, suppose there had occurred a severe deterioration in the condition of the Jews, culminating in their mass destruction, and that this deterioration had occurred among the very people who had promoted all the ideas of rational progress? […]

[…] American Jews will probably continue to identify with liberalism in even greater numbers not because they are irrational—but precisely because they think they are acting in their political self-interest.

The so-called aberrant theory of Jewish liberalism omits the single most important determining factor of Jewish political experience, namely the effectiveness and virulence at any given moment of anti-Jewish politics; not “racism,” “discrimination,” or any other such general intolerance but the political attempt to stigmatize the Jews as the cause of regional or international malaise. To overlook anti-Semitism in assessing the political behavior of Jews is like overlooking race in assessing the behavior of black Americans. […] What appears to be the odd pattern of well-educated, relatively wealthy, and rapidly assimilating Jews voting against their economic and social interests is in reality the pattern of acculturated Jews trying to escape the political trap they feel closing around them. […]

[…] Jews are the only American minority whose members do not as a matter of course support the land of their people, and some of whose members join in the political effort against it. The banner under which they manifest this aberrant political activity is liberalism, or the Left. […]

But the Arab offensive against the Jewish state cramps this freedom and sets Jews unwillingly apart from their fellow Americans. Unlike the military assaults against Israel that left the reputation of American Jews intact, or associated them with innocent victims, the propaganda war against Zionism brushes them with the moral taint of illegitimacy. The relation of an Italian to Italy or an Irishman to Ireland is not called into question; no one challenges Italy’s sovereignty, and even in the aftermath of IRA bombings, the British do not call Irish nationalism “racist,” or otherwise provoke Irish Americans into vilifying their homeland. Where there is no accusation of collective guilt, there is no need for members of the group to protest their innocence. But in singling out the Jews as the only people not entitled to a land, Arabs accuse Jewish supporters of Israel for the crime of national affiliation. […]

The proliferation of Jewish nondenominational charities such as the Jewish Fund for Justice, and other public avowals of kindliness and liberalism, are similar attempts by Jews to counteract the Arab claim of Jewish immorality. The Jewish will to goodness may be a wonderful thing, but not when it comes at the expense of defending the Jews as a people. […]

[…]Liberalism became a “tradition” among American Jews because they were seeking in its promise of tolerance and brotherhood an end to their exceptional fate at the hands of anti-Semites. […] In liberalism, they sought individual refuge from the hatred that pursued them collectively as Jews. Thus Israel was popular among liberals for twenty-five years when it appeared to put an end to anti-Semitism. Its liberal popularity began to decline the minute the Arabs resuscitated ideological anti-Semitism in the 1970s, made it the axis of an Arab–Communist alliance, and notified the world that they felt thoroughly justified in destroying Israel, and indeed expected help from the international community in achieving their ends. […]

[…] Having once embraced Israel as the solution to anti-Semitism, they now join in attacking it as the provocation of anti-Semitism, the only thing that can threaten their peace of mind. They rededicate themselves to liberalism, in the hope that its view of political nature will actually prevail, and in order to camouflage what would otherwise appear a cowardly defection from their people, for the second time in this century. […]

[…] Israel has also become “fatal” for liberals, for it denies their belief in a world of brotherhood, rationality, and negotiable solutions. The defense of Israel against the Arabs, as against earlier anti-Semites, would require of liberals the kind of sustained exertion in the realm of ideas and political action that Israelis have had to manifest in the military defense of their country. […]

[…] We know why Arab governments mounted a campaign of defamation against Israel: because they wanted to justify in the language of morality the crime they intend to commit, sooner or later, through force of arms. The more interesting question is how and why anti-Semitism continues to achieve its goals in a world that is thought to be governed by “victorious” liberal principles.

The Twentieth Century’s Most Durable Ideology

Contrary to liberal expectations, anti-Semitism has proved to be the most durable ideology of the twentieth century. […] Whereas Communism and Fascism spent their powers and came to an inglorious end, anti-Semitism arrived at the center of world politics with the United Nations as its pulpit. […]

Why is the success of anti-Semitism so rarely credited? After all, between 1939 and 1945 seven-tenths of Europe’s Jews were destroyed; their property and goods were taken over by the Germans and resident nationals; and the millenial European-Jewish culture embodied in hundreds of vibrant communities was practically erased. In almost every European city where Jews once lived, the Jewish graveyards, when still standing, are much more populous than the local Jewish communities. And the global Jewish population, once estimated at 17 million, is after fifty years still about 4 million short of replacement level.

Yet despite the unparalleled success of anti-Semitism, few university departments of political science, sociology, history, or philosophy bother to analyze the single European political ideal of the past century that nearly realized its ends. Nor despite all the talk about the Holocaust and the erection of so many memorials and museums to commemorate the event is very much attention paid to the political idea that brought it about. […]

Materially, anti-Semitism targets only the Jew, but it cannot be curbed without the intervention of Gentiles—who invented it. Its defeat requires, on the part of both victims and onlookers, a temporary sacrifice of the liberal optimism upon which the whole of democratic society is founded. The stronger anti-Semitism grows, the more it forces a choice between defense of the Jews on the one hand and faith in the essential moderating reasonableness of human nature on the other. Small wonder that given the requirements for its containment, insufficient political support was mustered for the Jews in Europe. And this reluctance to defend the Jews had no small role in giving anti-Semites the confidence to persevere in their efforts. […]

The Ultimate Test of Liberalism

[…] Because blame of the Jews will emerge as one of the few common elements of the Left and the Right, because blame of the Jews exacts almost no political price, and because blame of the Jews is so much easier than standing up to the aggression against them, more and more people will be tempted to abandon the Jews to their fate, or to respond that they “do not know” which side is in the right. […]

For all that has changed in world affairs, the fate of Jews in the last half of the twentieth century depends on the Arabs to the same degree that the fate of Jews in the 1930s depended on the Germans, and it remains to be seen how the other nations will react to the outrage of anti-Jewish politics this time around. The unimaginable has already happened many times over—as when the president of the United Nations General Assembly, a Saudi Arabian, walked out of the Assembly, which he was expected to chair impartially, because as an Arab he refused to be present during the speech of the representative of Israel! By sitting calmly through it all, representatives of the democratic nations gave Arabs the signal in the precise language of diplomacy that the Jews may be as expendable to the family of nations as the Arabs consider them to be. No other nation would have been shown the same contempt.

Despite the indignity of their political situation, Jews cannot be excused from facing it, for only if they stand up to Arab enmity can they claim to be maintaining human rights. Jews will never prove themselves moral by seeking refuge from their struggle behind the banner of liberalism. But liberalism assuredly will be judged by whether it can protect the Jews.