Yesterday I discussed A. B. Yehoshua's thesis, set out in An Attempt to Identify the Root Cause of Antisemitism, delineating the psychological underpinnings of anti-Semitism as related to Jewish identity emerging from a "common mental construction." Certain implications flow from such an understanding, including the fact that being Jewish, for many Jews, is a choice. As such, intermarriage rates approaching 50% are understandable, considering the difficulties historical and present, that are exacted on the Jew. A second implication is that along with all the other, well know reasons for anti-Semitism, especially the Jews ideal position as universal scapegoat, the fluidity of Jewish identity threatens those with poorly defined identities (or defects in their "ego boundaries") and feeds into pre-exiting paranoid and quasi-paranoid mental states and structures.
A major potential flaw in Yehoshua's thesis relates to the state of Israel. If it is the constructed nature of Jewish identity that facilitates its use by anti-Semites, then the establishment of a fixed location with defined borders should decrease the Jews propensity to be appropriated by the anti-Semite. For forty years after the horrors of the holocaust shamed much of the world into making overt anti-Semitism an anathema, this thesis held. However, the last 20-30 years have seen an upsurge in anti-Semitism almost identical to the structured anti-Semitism of the Nazis, within the Muslim and Arab world and enabled by large swaths of the international Left. Interestingly, the recent return of overt anti-Semitism coincides with Israel's victory in war and resultant diffusion of her borders. (Correlation does not imply causation; Arab anti-Semitism has multiple other roots, including the threat Israel poses to the supremacy of Islam in both religious and ucltural terms.) Yehoshua also suggests that even with the existence of Israel and the ingathering of so many Jews to that tiny nation, Jewish identity remains deeply connected to a diaspora:
I have not the slightest doubt that the re-grouping of part of the Jewish people in Israel has considerably and blessedly restricted the degree of virtuality and imagination that constitute the classic Jewish identity. The basic elements of nationalism--territory, language, and a real and actual framework of communal life--despite their youth from a historical perspective, are already present and actual in the Jewish state, and there is no need to activate the imagination in order to create them. However, Israel is still deeply bound to the Jews of the exile. And even if its real existence allows the Jews to moderate the imaginative aspects of their identity, the cultural dynamics of the post-modern world have the opposite effect and allow them to broaden the space of their indeterminateness. This is also the case with Israel itself, which since the Six Day War has blurred its borders and dragged itself into a deeply symbiotic and ill-defined relationship with the Palestinian people and, through this, with the greater Arab and Muslim world--a complete regression from the first important achievements of delineating the borders of Jewish national identity at the founding of the state. Thus, we have returned to the old and dangerous Jewish patterns, fostering the virtuality and indeterminateness to which deranged enemies are so dangerously attracted
Indeed, accompanying the reasonable political criticism (justified or not) leveled against the policies of the Israeli government, the sort of criticism based more or less on accepted political and moral criteria, we find the residue of venom, fantasy, and imagination that is reminiscent of classic antisemitism. This new mix, with its sediment of traditional Jew-hatred, is creating a wave of antagonism capable of legitimizing ruin and destruction.
The world's largest population of diaspora Jews resides in America and this is where the discussion of the connection between anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism starts.
Over the last 30 years, most specifically dating from the Iranian Islamist revolution, America and Israel, Americans and Jews have been increasingly conflated in the eyes of the Arab world and the international Left. The Khomeiniists explicitly linked America as the "Great Satan" to Israel as the "Little Satan" and pledged itself to destroy both. Anti-Americanism/anti-Semitism was at the core of the Khomeiniist revolution. Traditionally anti-Semitic populations, such as the Palestinians, adopted such a fused anti-Semitism/anti-Americanism with great fervor; post-9/11, the Palestinians were among the few who openly celebrated the attack on America.
In Pity the Poor Anti-Semite, I described the deep seated feelings of failure, insecurity, and inadequacy that fuel the anti-Semite's rage:
Here is the crucial point for those who imagine that a tiny group of people, barely 60 years out of an almost successful genocide, left with nothing more than the clothes on their backs, comprising approximately .05% of the world's population, who came to the desert in Palestine and built a modern technological nation, would have the time and interest to simultaneously devote themselves to oppressing the Muslim world, with almost 100 times their population and oceans of oil:
The anti-Semite necessarily defines himself as monumentally inferior to the Jew.
This resides in the core of the anti-Semite and renders him permanently damaged and weakened. Only the aid of a being much greater than themselves, Allah, can save them from disaster. Short of such divine intervention, they are doomed to remain defeated. The Muslim nations of the world do not see it as within their abilities to compete in a world of high technology, higher education, competitive open economies; no, they look to nuclear weapons, only available to them by virtue of their Allah given oil money rather than by the sweat of their own brows, to bring them relief from the often imagined depredations of the now conflated Jewish/American demi-Gods. [Emphasis in the original]
The conflation and confusion so often expressed by the anti-Semite/anti-American finds expression in fantasies of nefarious Jews in control of American foreign policy or international banking.
(Interestingly, some domestic opponents of the Iraq War point to Dick Cheney as the arch-villain architect of the war, controlling George Bush with his Svengali-like powers. At the same time, they frequently talk of the "neocon" cabal, using barely disguised anti-Semitic tropes, as the force behind the invasion and overthrow of Saddam Hussein. While several of the most notable neocons are Jewish, only the most disturbed can imagine that Dick Cheney is under the control of a secret Jewish cabal; perhaps Cheney has been invaded by the Jewish identity that so frightens the anti-Semite?]
Along with all the usual sources of anti-Americanism, it is worth wondering if Yehoshua's thesis can inform our understanding of contemporary anti-Americanism. If Jewish-ness is a "common mental construction" of longstanding duration, with a rich history and an ongoing diaspora, American-ness shares many of the same traits, some directly and some as a mirror image.
To begin with, America was established overtly, partially, as an homage to the Old Testament Jews. The archtypical story of the Jews, held in bondage in Egypt for 400 years and then brought to freedom by the hand of the almighty was a powerful formative myth for the American rebels willing to risk "our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor." There was strong support for establishing Hebrew as our national language. The connection between American Christians and Judaism was strong from the start, and has remained strong despite times of stress. Israel's most consistent friends in America are evangelical, Zionist Christians.
Beyond our origins, America is the quintessential "common mental construction." America is an idea and anyone can become an American. Part of the world wide resistance to American power is to our cultural "soft" power, the widespread fear that American values, whether political freedom, gender equality, or sexual openness will invade traditional cultures. The French have their own peculiar terror that our language will invade and take over their's, in marked contradistinction to the American omnivorous approach to foreign languages which enrich our language on a daily basis.
America is also a mirror image to Judaism; America is the "reverse diaspora", collecting incipient Americans from around the world and bringing them here to hatch into newly born Americans.
With the American identity being so fluid and our boundaries so indistinct (since the American idea invades through the "ether" and Americans are constantly being created within foreign populations), American-ness no less than Jewish-ness can provide the nidus for paranoid fantasies and delusions. When combined with the often brilliant successes of the American and Jewish ways (along with the tremendous overlap within the Judeo-Christian culture) it is no wonder that the modern scourge of anti-Americanism has become fused with the ancient scourge of anti-Semitism in a new anti-AmeriSemiticism.
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