Take 3

I am stunned, stunned, by how reasonable and intelligent commenters here have been, even though I ventured into that discussion. Perhaps because everyone is coming at the issue from roughly the same place - a belief that Israel has the right to exist, that there also needs to be a Palestinian state - everyone, myself included, seems willing to change their mind on specifics when presented with new arguments.

Myself, I'm not entirely sure where I stand on all the specifics right now, after a series of mini-shifts, but shifts all the same, in my position. But I might also add that I initially posted about this in a way that intentionally somewhat overshot the mark on the confidence I have in my conclusions on the matter. Not so much to provoke-as-shock as to jolt us out of our usual ways of thinking about the issue and thus reframe the discussion.

That discussion, typically, is, as we might all remember, about whether it is anti-Semitic to criticize Israel, whether this or that criticism of Israel does or does not count as such. We have all heard variants of this enough times, so I will not rehash how it generally goes down. My point, though, is how it generally does not go down: the identity of the person doing the criticizing is virtually always ignored, such that someone living in Jerusalem and some douche on his couch in London who's read three blog posts on the topic and is now highly informed are on equal footing.

When, however else you're looking at it, whether you're a David or a Britta, the fact is, if you are a Palestinian, you did not get to shuffle through a binder of trendy causes and pick your own. Sure, you get to decide how much of the blame you want to place on Israel vs. your own leadership or that of neighboring states, and whether you're going to blanket-condemn all Jews, just Israelis, or just the Israeli leadership. You get to take a stance on violence. But you don't opt in or out of the Palestinian cause. Meanwhile, those who are not Palestinians do have that option, so we can, in some cases, read significance into their choice to opt in. Whereas this can never be done wrt Palestinians themselves. And a good bit of what can make some "criticism of Israel" anti-Semitic is precisely that disproportionate level of interest.

Now, the counterargument I'd anticipate here is, if Palestinians' complaints are legitimate, this is Truth, and the more voices backing them up, the better. The problem is - as is the case for the Israeli side as well, and to any side in any conflict - Palestinians' complaints are a mix of legitimate outrage and rhetorical (and indeed behavioral) excess. The role of the outside advocate is to provide calm(er) support. Anti-Semites, however, are coming at the conflict already feeling as though they personally have been exploited by The Jews, and it is this, not anything that's going on at any checkpoints, that fuels their rage.

Our priorities, I think, should be a) finding a solution to the conflict itself (which, granted, will not come from WWPD), and b) figuring out how to deal with the continued existence of anti-Semitism-proper, which is to say, of Jew-hatred based not on a real-life Jewish-state enemy, but on an idea of and obsession with The Jew (and here, WWPD might be of service). My sense, then, is and was that one possible way to make it socially acceptable to call out anti-Semitism masquerading as anti-Zionism - to, for example, Google someone who's posting online about the plight of the Palestinians and see whether that really is their concern, or, say, to do a close reading of The Israel Lobby, one that will, I promise, reveal that Jews, and not just American Israel policy, are the authors' concern - is to remove the stigma of actually being a Palestinian who's angry at Israel, and shift that stigma onto the anti-Semites among the Palestinians' allies. To do this is to suspend a bit of disbelief, to turn a blind eye, etc., when, to use Micha's example, blood libel is invoked. It's not, I'll concede, necessarily to declare that these are not anti-Semitic behaviors, whatever their root cause. I mean, who knows. It could be that my thought experiment here would be a more productive way of dealing with (b) than with (a).