Steve Apfel was once an economist and the founder and director of the School of Management Accounting. Now he writes full time. A veteran authority on anti-Zionism, his 2012 book, ‘Hadrian’s Echo: the why and wherefores of Israel’s Critics’ was acclaimed by top Middle East scholars. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007PIVM6G
A Jewish American, the story goes, asked an Israeli how many Palestinian Arab prisoners the IDF had raped. None that he knew of, he said. “You IDF soldiers don’t rape Palestinians because Israelis are too racist and disgusted by them to even touch them." (There was actually a prize winning paper - read the entire article - written in 2007 for Hebrew U. claiming that IDF soldiers do not rape Arab women because they are racist, ed.)
It’s a reminder that the anti-Zionist brand of hatred is implacable.
Except that in Hadrian’s day there were no Zionists to hate, things were no different. Jews there were, and they too could never satisfy the Emperor of Rome. Once a member of the tribe passed the Imperial train and saluted him. “You a Jew dare to greet the Emperor! You shall pay with your life."Later another Jew passed the train and, warned by example, did not acknowledge the tyrant. “You a Jew dare to pass the Emperor without a greeting. You shall forfeit your life." To bewildered courtiers he explained: “I hate the Jews. Whatever they do I find intolerable."
He was honest - today’s anti-Israel mobs are anything but. For one thing they confuse Zionists with Jews. That go-to source Wikipedia, tries to differentiate the two. Antisemites must tick three boxes: hostility to Jews; prejudice towards them; discriminatory against them. So far so good - no one quarrels with the obvious. But introduce Israel into the argument and everyone quarrels.
The bugbear is obvious. Jewish people and the Jewish state don’t have one identity. It is this which seems to permit Jew-hating to be unhooked from Israel-hating. And introduces a pig in the poke: Jewish haters. The identity split clarifies why cocksure Stefanie Dox of Jewish Voice for Peace can stoop to declare a fatwa on the Jewish state. Over and above this, the split between Zionists and Jews accounts for Israel advocacy taking a beating.
So long as anti-Israel Jews can monetise and martyr their “speaking out as Jews in solidarity with a free Palestine" so long will antisemites exploit those dandy human shields. Long after the wars on Israel’s borders and beyond are fought and archived, the other war - on legitimacy - will drag on.
The chameleon is not a better adaptor than Israel-haters. Grappling with their ridicule is akin to handling a slithery fish.
- “Whenever Israel comes under international pressure to resolve the conflict its apologists cry that the world is awash in antisemitism." (Norman Finkelstein. ‘Beyond Chutzpah")
- “The government of Israel is placed on a pedestal, and to criticise it is to be immediately dubbed anti-Semitic." (Archbishop the late Desmond Tutu)
If the Jerusalem Post gets confused what hope is there? “When anti-Israel and often antisemitic demonstrations roiled US campuses, Iran’s leader expressed support for them." It would help had the reporter divulged how to differentiate one type from the other, because it seems impossible. And that’s without Jewish-antagonism.
That diseased mind is nothing new. In 1936 Labour Zionist leader Berl Katznelson pondered if there was another nation so emotionally twisted that everything their own people did was despicable, while they supported murder and rape committed by their existential enemies. He worried that Jewish children who come to Palestine would “catch the virus of self-hate."
Do anti-Israel Jews know they act as doormats. Normal antisemites can hardly get by without them - or better Holocaust survivors. Today Amnesty-UK is promoting one who marches in anti-Israel protests and calls Israel’s war on Gaza, ‘genocide.
Kapos (real name) makes Amnesty’s double case. As a Holocaust survivor he knows genocide when he sees it. Second, as a survivor of genocide his moral credentials are impregnable. What Amnesty tweeted about Kapos was a tribute more fitting for a saint’s beatification than for a demented old coot.
“Right now, Holocaust survivor Stephen Kapos is at the Nakba Day demonstration in London. The 88-year-old has attended almost every demonstration in the last two year’s protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Stephen stands and sits with family and members of his group the ‘Holocaust Survivors & Descendants Against the Genocide in Gaza’.
"He told us: "Today, we commemorate not only the 1948 violent displacement and dispossession of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs during the creation of the State of Israel, but the unlawful occupation of Palestinian land and the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Justice for the Palestinians must be demanded and fought for by peoples of the world to force their own governments to act to end Israel's genocide, occupation and apartheid. That is why these marches have been attacked so much - it is the threat we pose to injustice. And the symbol of solidarity and hope we represent."
Observe that the 99% of survivors who are pro-Israel are thrown off the frame. Worse, the “good" one exposes others as Zionists who love it when Palestinian Arabs get killed. Amnesty adores old Kapos, as a puppet and prop.
There are many benefits in letting Jews curse Israel.
- Jewish testimony gives credibility to the most outrageous libel.
- A Jew protects antisemites from the charge of hate speech.
- There’s the sheer delight in watching Jew turn upon Jew.
- It acts like a slow-release valve to confound and demoralise a whole Diaspora community.
Oct 7 brought them out in full regalia. A South African communist, Ronnie Kasrils reacted with glee. “They swept on them, and they killed them, and damned good! I was so pleased." Said Norman Finkelstein: “It warms every fibre of my soul. If we honor the Jews who revolted in the Warsaw Ghetto-then moral consistency commands that we honor the heroic resistance in Gaza. I, for one, will never begrudge - on the contrary, Gaza’s smiling children as their arrogant Jewish supremacist oppressors have, finally, been humbled."
Admittedly Jewish feminist, queer philosopher and gender scholar, Judith Butler found Oct 7 “anguishing and terrible." Yet she understood it as “armed resistance," not terrorism and definitely not antisemitism.
It took a non-Jewish French playwright to unlock the psychology. In a thin but seminal book released during the Holocaust, ‘Anti-Semite and Jew’ Jean-Paul Sartre laid its bedrock bare.
“The anti-Semite has murderous instincts but has found a means of sating them. His thunderous diatribes at the ‘Yids’ are really capital executions.. He is a murderer who represses and censures his tendency to murder without being able to hold it back, yet dares to kill only in effigy."
What that means is that in human instinct an Oxford don is no different to the Hamas hang gliders who invaded Nova Festival. The former is a closet Jew killer while the latter enact the killer instinct. Alan Dershowitz, visibly shocked, asked, “Why do so many progressives support the rape and murder" of Israeli families? Now it should be clear. .
Psychoanalysis confirms that antisemitism is not an opinion but a personality. What is known is that there’s a ‘Jewish inferiority complex’. This is caused by the Jew being persuaded by antisemites to be their victim of propaganda. This is how Jean-Paul Sartre describes such a personality:
“He has allowed himself to be poisoned by the stereotype of Jews, and he lives in fear that his acts will correspond to this stereotype. He then over-adjusts, to be distinguished radically from acts catalogued as Jewish. If he does not do more than everybody else - much more - he is guilty, a dirty Jew."
Guilt and overcompensation go together. If the prevailing culture is anti-Israel, the Jewish hater feels compelled to be extremely anti-Israel. Emotions gather strength from antisemitic feeling which redoubles on itself. The Jew hates other Jews but even more, he hates the Jew in himself. Sartre explains it thus: “He plays at not being a Jew. But while he forces himself by his conduct to deny the traits ascribed to him, he feels that he can see the traits in others, and they return to him indirectly." In short he develops into a double antisemite.
All of this must not be confused with clinical illness. Political and moral corruption are not psychiatric diagnoses. Nevertheless deception is part of the game.
Israeli Ambassador to the US Yechiel Leiter picked out Obama’s old favorite, the J Street organization about its devious way. At a National Task Force to Combat Antisemitism in Washington, he accused it of undermining Israel while presenting itself as pro-Israel. Leiter said that,
“The worst thing about J Street is (it being) duplicitous. How can you be pro-Israel and advocate for an arms embargo on a state that’s fighting a seven-front war against Iranian proxies?"
The rabid antisemitism of our day is intrinsically fascist. Bertrand Russell, himself no Jew-lover, might as well have been reflecting on it when he explains how fascism is spread:
"First, they fascinate the fools. Then, they muzzle the intelligent."
Sent to Arutz Sheva by the author. Originally posted in the American Spectator