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To Argue for the Abolition of the Jewish Homeland Flirts with Anti-Semitism

(New York Times) Roger Cohen - There's nothing anti-Semitic about sympathy for the Palestinian cause or support of Palestinian statehood. But where anti-Zionism crosses into anti-Semitism should be obvious: dehumanizing or demonizing Jews and propagating the myth of their sinister omnipotence; accusing Jews of double loyalties as a means to suggest their national belonging is of lesser worth; denying the Jewish people's right to self-determination; blaming through conflation all Jews for the policies of the Israeli government; pursuing the systematic "Nazification" of Israel; turning Zionism into a synonym of racism. The denial of the millennial Jewish link to the Holy Land and the dismissal of the legal basis for the modern Jewish state in UN Resolution 181 of 1947 (Arab armies went to war against its Palestinian-Jewish territorial compromise and lost) as a means to argue for the abolition of the Jewish homeland and portray it as an immoral, colonial exercise in theft often flirts with anti-Semitism. It is at its most egregious when it issues from Europeans who seem to have forgotten where the Holocaust was perpetrated. Once in the gas chambers was enough for the Jews. The fundamental link between European anti-Semitism and the decision of Jews to embrace Zionism in the conviction that only a Jewish homeland could keep them safe is something contemporary European theorists of a demonic Israel prefer to forget.
2019-03-01 00:00:00
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