Risk and Extortion LXXIX: Autobiographical Intermezzo

What Anti-Semtism meant in the 1970s

With the semantic expansion of anti-Semitism abandoning its historical consistency and now embracing every possible “critique of Israel”, the accusation of being anti-Semitic has lost most of its potency and has become the equivalent of any expression that does not collude with the interests of the Israeli government and/or state. This is a shame, because a critique of anti-Semitism, including its metabolized form, i.e. Zionism, is still worthwhile pursuing.

My first encounter with Holocaust Remembrance Education was in the 1970s, both in primary school and at home. My parents were mildly-Calvinist Protestants and so I had to attend protestant schools that believed that the biblical stories could teach us kids a lot about the world. So we were inculcated with specifically protestant interpretations of biblical stories that were often also geographically and historically contextualized with references to the Zionism, the Promised Land and the established of the state of Israel. We were told that the return of the Jews to the Promised Land may have some eschatological relevance, as it could be interpreted in through the lens of the book of Revelations (Apocalypse).

We were also taught about the Second World War and Dutch television often aired documentaries about the war, the occupation as well as the persecution of Jews. My parents were both born before the war. My mother was two years old and lived in Rotterdam, when the city was bombed by the Germans. She had to feel on foot. Her family went through the hunger winter of 1944/45. One of her brothers nearly died of dysentery, her other brother had escaped from a labour camp in France and fought alongside Dutch and French resistance fighters on the road to return to his homeland. My father was born in the countryside and had experienced less of the famine, but his parents had both accommodated refugees and German soldiers (not at the same time). These experiences as small children had shaped not only their lives but mine as well. “The war” was one of the most consistent references that shaped everyday life in our family.

We were also taught about hatred of Jews. It was never difficult to understand what hatred of Jews means, just as it was never difficult to understand what hatred of people on the basis of racial or ethnic characteristics meant. Anti-Semitism was not a mystery. It was very concrete; it was a practice of hatred. This hatred was strange as why would you hate people that you do not know because of their racial or ethnic or religious or national identity? Such hatred has to be taught, inculcated, and the first step of inculcation is to argue that your own experiences are deceptive. Thus, it starts with Plato’s Cave. It starts with the idea that you are not what you think you are and others are not what you think they are. hatred starts with suspicion and neurosis.

The conditions of sowing suspicion and neurosis, however, are perfectly aligned with the ideals of the Enlightenment. The idea that one knows nothing unless one has been educated also applies to watching “the news” and being informed aboput “the world”. Just as the teachers in school talked to us as if we were at risk of succumbing to anti-Semitism, so did news programms about the conflicts in the middle East emphasize that Israel is the victim that is courgaeously defending itself against the Arabs that surround them, because the latter are inherently evil.

Just as our schools, Dutch media were always extremely pro-Israel. We were taught to be happy for the Jewish people that they had found a safe place to live. And that the violence was necessary to keep them safe. We never understood why the Netherlands were not a safe place for them to live. Had the Nazis not been defeated? Had we not been promised that this would never again happen? The Netherlands were not surrounded by evil, hostile Arab nations. It started to look as if those who screamed their support for Israel the loudest, were also the happiest that the Jews did not live among us.

During this time, there was a severe civil war in Lebanon with “right-wing” Christians being backed by the West fighting “left-wing Muslims” that were backed by the Soviet Block. We were taught to support the Right-Wing-Christians, but somehow Right Wing and Christian did not seem to fit so well anymore. The late 1970s were also the time where the welfare state was being demolished. For a working class family such as ours, life was not cheap. We could never afford to go on holiday, our meals consisted mostly of potatoes and vegetables. At most, we had meat twice a week. We wore mostly hand me down clothes. Somehow the word “right-wing” did not sound that great anymore because of its anti-social connotations. Right wing parties such as the Christian Democrats and the Liberals wanted to dismantle welfare provisions and embrace deregulation and marketization.

As a young teenager, the war in Lebanon was merely a reminder that the cold war was still alive and well until, between 15 and 17 September 1982, the news broke that these right-wing “Christian” militia had performed a massacre among Palestinian refugees in Sabra and Shatila, with the help of the IDF. The Israeli government at that time was led by Menaghem Begin, who was the successor of Vladimir Jabotonsiki as leader of the Herut party before it merged into Likud. Behin had ordered the Israeli invasion of South Lebanon that bore the title:  Operation Peace for Galilee” (with hindsight, this too was part of the attempt to establish a Greater Israel). The Israeli minister of Defence who bore responsibility for the IDF supporting the “Christian” militia to carry out their genocidal attack was Ariel Sharon, who resigned a year later (while remaining in government).  Ironically, after Begin also resigned, the new prime minister of Israel was the former terrorist Yitzhak Shamir.

In the Dutch media some voices could be heard that condemned these attacks but also the Israeli complicity in it. The controversial background of Shamir was not exposed but it was stated that he was more of an extremist than Begin. Thus, when in December 1987, the first intifada started in Gaza as a civil uprising against the Israeli military occupation, there was already a significant cohort in Dutch political culture that had a more critical view on the conduct of the state of Israel in occupied territories. The images of unarmed Palestinian kids throwing rocks at heavily armed Israeli soldiers and armoured vehicles became the iconic image of global resilience and courage, which of course also strongly resonated with the anti-Apartheid struggles in South Africa.

Zionism was now finally uncovered as the evil ideology that legitimated the inhumane treatment of Palestinians. Given the fact at that time, the dominant modality of Zionism was quite moderate compared to the one that currently rules Israel, it is quite logical, that Israel critique was more of a left-wing issue than a mainstream one. Interestingly, western governments were generally more critical of Israel then than they are today. Ronald Reagan, for example, is famously alleged to have stopped the murdering of Palestinian protesters by Israeli forces with one phone call.

Nothing that has happened after the failed Oslo Agreement – which is a lot easier to explain now we know Bill Clinton definitely is on the Epstein List – has changed the perception that Zionism inside as well as outside of Israel is radicalizing. We are now into the third and fourth generations of life under a Zionist state and it is clear that the sickness of this ideology of metabolized racist hate has not only spread but has become more violent, more aggressive more obvious. Radical Zionism has become mainstream. Openly calling for the genocide of Palestinians and celebrating war crimes is perfectly acceptable within Israel. This is also explains how shocked many Israelis are, when they travel abroad and find out that their celebratory hate is not accepted. Macabbi Tel Aviv “fans” were chased out of Amsterdam by taxi drivers because of their violent provocations. Israeli school kids were being thrown off a flight for being aggressive and racist, and Israeli tourists are often declared unwelcome in ports and restaurants, as people refuse to normalize genocide. What may shock Israelis most is that many ordinary Europeans identify with Palestinians rather than with the white, European Israelis. This shock is only explicable when contextualized with the inherent racism of Zionism.

Israeli politicians have more experience with differentiating between what is said in Hebrew and what is said in English. However, extremists are poor diplomats and the more extremism dominates Israeli politics the less diplomatic it becomes. We have now arrived at the situation that the only people supporting Israel are those who are deeply corrupted by either cynical opportunism (which could of course have been induced by extortion or bribery) or by racist ideology. There is no moral platform to defend genocide and most of those who claim there still is, can probably only do so because they do not realize the full consequences of what they advocate. They seem unable to look beyond self-righteousness of retribution against the audacity that someone refuse to accept them as superior. As their mouths open wider to scream louder as they succumb to tantrums, their ugliness only increases as their lack of dignity is being exposed.

We Europeans may never experience justice in our lifetimes.  We Europeans have allowed kakistocracy to fester as we were blinded by the lies of individualism and its very strange conception of happiness. We Europeans rewarded anti-Semitism as part of our ethno-national identities in the 19^th century. We Europeans have rejected international solidarity and justice for all because if others can be exploited instead if us, we benefit. We Europeans have bought into the metabolized anti-Semitism of Zionism and have given these violent, militant forces and terrorists everything they had wanted and more. We Europeans have allowed the Nakba to continue for almost 80 years. We Europeans are now discovering that we are next. We Europeans are becoming Palestinians.