Todd Gitlin. The beast returns

The beast returns
Todd Gitlin (Todd Gitlin)

Publication date: July 2, 2002

An email sent out last month by Lori Zolot, head of the Judaic Studies department at San Francisco State University, gave me chills.

“I can’t tell you what it’s like to walk across campus every day, past maps of the Middle East that do not include Israel, past posters of canned soup labeled with drops of blood and dead babies and the words “canned meat of Palestinian children killed in in accordance with Jewish rites and under American license," past a line of posters that scream that Zionism equals racism and Jews equal Nazis," she wrote then, and the details have only gotten more depressing since.

Zolot’s letter horrified me, but, alas, it did not come as a complete surprise to me. Eleven years ago, during the Gulf War, across the San Francisco Bay at Berkeley, a student leader in a classroom filled with anti-war faculty and students angrily shouted, “Hey you Jews, I know you all.” by name, I know where you live!”

None of those present moved from their place or said a word. What was it? Confusion? Fear? Or worse: the idea that it is inappropriate to discuss this issue, that it is not on the agenda, that the topic will cause inconvenience?

In another recent incident, two of my students at New York University loudly wondered whether, as they had heard, 4,000 Jews did not show up for work at the World Trade Center on 9/11. The students had no doubt that this blatantly ridiculous accusation was sufficiently convincing and could serve as the basis for a thorough investigation - and it did not even occur to them to look at the list of the dead.

Militant anti-Semitism is making a comeback. The worst of the crazy ideas from the violent Middle East have made their way to America, and not only that, but students are spreading the nonsense. Students! The community that we have long perceived as a source of intellectual dissent seems to have decided to abandon pretensions to morality.

The student movement is more than just a student movement. Students, whether they are progressive or not, are obliged to know, think and understand, they are obliged to study. The student movement must defend the highest moral principles; it has no right to blindly copy the stereotypes of its elders and compete with them in bitterness.

Therefore, progressives around the world should be concerned that San Francisco State University students are neither surprised nor outraged by the anti-Semitic nonsense they themselves spout. The very fact that the student movement - even a small part of it - has descended to the point of repeating the words of hatred spewed by someone else should seriously alarm those whose moral principles extend beyond mere nationalism - that is, in theory, each "left".

It's not hard to guess where the nonsense that San Francisco State University students mindlessly repeat comes from. In the bloody Middle East of Yasser Arafat and Ariel Sharon, in the polarizing Europe of Jean-Marie Le Pen, overt anti-Semitism is increasingly replacing reasonable criticism of Israel and its foreign policy.

Even as Laurie Zoloth's letter spread around the world, as several influential European newspapers viciously but justifiably criticized Israel's attempts to obstruct the investigation into the Israeli operation in Jenin, the famous Portuguese writer José Saramago called the Israeli invasion of Ramallah "a crime comparable to Auschwitz." .

Here is one long, rounded sentence in Saramagian style from his article published in the Madrid newspaper El Pais (and reprinted on May 24 by The Forward , translated by Paul Berman):

“Intoxicated by the messianic idea of ​​a Greater Israel, which will ultimately realize the expansionist dreams of the most implacable Zionism; infected with a monstrous, unshakable “certainty” that in this crazy, absurd world there is a chosen people of God and, therefore, any actions of extremist, pathologically selective racism are justified; Brought up and trained on the idea that whatever suffering has been, is being, or will be inflicted on anyone else, especially the Palestinians, will never be equal to what they suffered during the Holocaust, Jews endlessly pick at their wound to it never stopped bleeding so that it could not be healed, and they show it to the whole world like a banner.”

Pay special attention to the subject of this sentence, which appears so spectacularly at the very end: “Jews.” Not right-wing Jews, not militaristic Israelis, but “Jews.” All Jews are suddenly reduced to one caricatured image of some idol (should I add that it has a hooked nose?), and we are drawn into the abyss of meaningless, destructive iconography, the nightmares of which make every person who has even an iota of reason left to shudder.

German socialist August Bebel once called anti-Semitism “the socialism of fools.” What we are seeing now is the progressivism of fools. This is a relapse of everything that could cost the left its moral edge. And it’s scary that these very thoughts are thoughtlessly repeated by anti-Semitic students at San Francisco State University.

No, we have not come close to the “new Auschwitz”; to think so is to exaggerate the danger. This danger exists, and it is quite concrete, although the end of the world does not threaten us. Explosions in synagogues, including on the Tunisian island of Djerba, known for its religious tolerance, where a truck bomb was apparently organized by the terrorist organization al-Qaeda, cannot be called an ethereal nightmare. It really happened. It cannot be called an ethereal nightmare that hundreds of Palestinian civilians were killed as a result of Israeli raids on the West Bank. This also happened. The nightmare is that the second is used to justify the first.

In her letter, Lori Zolot wrote: “Let me remind you that our Judaic Studies department is just one of a number of similar academic centers in this country that, since its inception, have been dedicated to the cause of peace, justice and national diversity.”

But anti-Semitism has nothing to do with this. Like any other form of psychosis that afflicts the limited mind, anti-Semitism knows very well whom it hates.

This is not an isolated problem, not a petty feud. If you care about human rights, you cannot calmly, from above, watch as an entire people is systematically insulted - no matter how you feel about the foreign policy of Israel or any other country. The student movement, if it is to be worthy of its name, must face the ugly past that has long made anti-Semitism an acceptable form of racism - face it and break with it.

If the tireless struggle against it is not a “progressive” cause, then what does progressive humanity mean by progress?

MotherJones.com , June 17, 2002

Translation by Olga Yurchenko