On social media recently, a Canadian woman who took issue with one of our posts suggested: “Please read some literature from outside your close circles. Take a wider view. World peace depends on it.”
It was, on its face, a relatively innocuous remark. Whether you subscribe to the view that Israel is solely to blame for the conflict or whether you have a more nuanced, intelligent perspective, the author most certainly did not appreciate the depths of civilizational prejudice she was reenacting.
By no quantifiable or empirical measure could the Israeli-Palestinian conflict come anywhere close to being one of the world's most significant clashes — and it certainly is not the fulcrum upon which "world peace" depends.
And yet, this individual, who clearly identifies as an open-minded, progressive humanitarian (she literally calls herself “loving kindness” for heaven’s sake), subscribes, whether consciously or unconsciously, to the idea that this minor conflict is the tinderbox of global conflagration, the cosmic civilizational battle whose resolution would bring about utopian peace, perhaps some sort of heaven on earth.
For two millennia, Western civilization has viewed world events as disproportionately impacted by Jews, in one form or another. This was, in large part, because early Christian Europe needed to create a somewhat unified identity and chose an oppositional character that self-imagined the new Christian world as the opposite of the Jewish civilization that it supposed it was superseding. (We highly recommend David Nirenberg’s depressing and compendious monograph Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition.)
While there were, and are, voices and schools of thought that ascribe to Jews disproportionately positive traits ("clever," "industrious," "resilient" – though these are very often two-sided coins) far more common has been the projection of any negative human characteristic onto the empty vessel of an individual Jew or Jews collectively.
What the author of the tweet may not understand is that, by adhering to a belief that "world peace depends" on the Jewish state of Israel acceding to whatever demands the world makes of it, she reenacts an ancient presumption that world events pivot on what Jews do and do not do.
If she genuinely cared about world peace, her attentions would be better directed toward the actions of Russia, China, Iran, or scores of flashpoints around the world that are greater in scope and casualties — sometimes by orders of magnitude — than the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.
The fact that this minor conflict absorbs a vast (and obviously massively disproportionate) share of the world's attention, including a near-unanimous obsession by the members of the United Nations General Assembly, suggests that this author is not an outlier but in fact an exemplar of how prejudices, which are by definition almost always unconscious, play a role in how the world approaches Israel.
She has extrapolated this conflict to be the focal point not only for those seeking peace between Jews and Muslims in that tiny sliver of land, but literally the magic key to global harmony.
The idea, when expressed this way, is, of course, ludicrous. And yet it is uttered in one way or another daily by people, many with the best intentions, who have ingested the 2000-year-old certainty that the fate of the world depends in some cosmic way on the existence and behaviour – and, ultimately, triumph over – Jewish people (or, now, the Jewish state).
Such people will, no doubt, recoil at the idea that they are behaving in ways that exhibit reflexive bigotry, particularly manifestations founded in a Christianity that they themselves may have discarded, but whose inherent antisemitism and anti-Judaism has been successfully passed down, almost as if by genetic inheritance, to today's generations.
These are also likely to be the people chanting "anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism," even as they acknowledge and seek reconciliation for the past injustices inflicted on African-Americans, native North Americans and others whose intergenerational trauma is acknowledged and respected. For the sins of our ancestors, progressive people have dedicated ourselves to improving the world today and making amends for the injustices of the past. When it comes to Jews, however, we are little better than our ancestors of the 1930s or the 1300s. We do not seek reconciliation. We do not respect Jewish intergenerational trauma – on the contrary, we rub the memory of the Holocaust in their wounds and dismiss legitimate concerns as evidence of a “persecution complex.” We behave toward Jews differently than we behave toward any other group of people.
Despite all our modernity and right-thinking, when it comes to Jews, we somehow fall right back into ancient tropes that see idealistic goals like world peace and human perfection as dependent on the defeat of the Jews – in this case, embodied by the Jewish state.
It reflects a deeply prejudiced problem – so deep, in fact, that it is almost literally in our Western DNA – that seeks out one single, simple scapegoat representing the primary barrier to an ideal world. And, surprise … their gaze falls on that oldest object of scapegoating and hatred: Jews.
It is, further, an alarming reality that, in the 21st century, it is not (primarily) those who overtly seek the destruction of Jews who are reenacting this ancient tableau, but people who give themselves misleading online personas like “loving kindness” and, with self-congratulatory righteousness, claim to advocate “world peace.”
Comments