Posted:
Can you be critical of Israel and not be anti-Semitic? Duh!
On Faith, the joint venture of the Newsweek/Washington Post, asked its panelists to reply to this
simplistic question: "Can you be critical of Israel and not be anti-Semitic? Can you be critical of Israel and be a faithful Jew?"
It is an easy one to answer, if one chooses to follow the exact wording of the question: Yes, it is possible. Is there anyone around thinking you can't criticize Israel without being anti-Semitic? I couldn't find such view among the 22 panelists featured in On Faith, hence concluding it was a dumb question. If everyone agrees, what's the point of asking?
Being the paranoid Jewish-Israeli that I am, I didn't like this question anyway. Asking such a question is based on a wrong, biased premise according to which there are, indeed, people who believe that you can't be a good Jew if you criticize Israel. This premise is not only wrong, but is ironically playing to the hands of those who both criticize Israel and are anti-Semitic. Some of the panelists challenged the phrasing of the question. "The question is whether one can deny Israel the right to exist,"
wrote Arnold Eisen, chancellor-elect of the Jewish Theological Seminary. He could have suggested more provocative alternatives. For example: Can you hide anti-Semitism behind the excuse of being merely critical of Israel? Or: Can you stay socially acceptable by masquerading your anti-Semitism as criticism of Israel?
Since I like the idea of On Faith (the actual content is often somewhat disappointing, but I'm sure it will get better), I dived in anyway. Most of the short articles were reasonable if predictably so - "If there is another place on this planet where we are required to be more spiritually sensitive and achingly careful than Israel and Palestine, I don?t know where it is,"
wrote reverend William Tully - but in some cases the reading was worth the trouble.
Sulayman Nyang of Howard University was the one elaborating on the actual motivation for which the question was raised: Jimmy Carter's book and the Alvin Rosenfeld article (read my blogs on these two issues:
Is Carter an anti-Semite?,
On anti-Semitism, anti-anti-Semitism and anti-anti-anti-Semitism). However, most of the other panelists chose to ignore the core reason for the relevance of the question, even if they do touch on it in their own way ("It is certainly possible to be critical of Israel and not be anti-Semitic. But it may not be possible to be critical of Israel and not be accused of anti-Semitism," John Dominic of DePaul University
manipulatively suggests)."