WHY ISRAEL DOES NOT SEEK ALLIANCES

Digging up a long-lost form of anti-Semitism (Mark Steyn, MacLean’s, August 8th, 2006)

"Stephen! Stephen! Stephen!"

The impatient cry was heard through all the narrow gloomy street, where the old richly-carved house-fronts bowed to meet one another and left for the eye's comfort only a bare glimpse of blue. It was, men said, the oldest street in Strelsau, even as the sign of the 'Silver Ship' was the oldest sign known to exist in the city. For when Aaron Lazarus the Jew came there, seventy years before, he had been the tenth man in unbroken line that took up the business; and now Stephen Nados, his apprentice and successor, was the eleventh. Old Lazarus had made a great business of it, and had spent his savings in buying up the better part of the street; but since Jews then might hold no property in Strelsau, he had taken all the deeds in the name of Stephen Nados; and when he came to die, being unable to carry his houses or his money with him, having no kindred, and caring not a straw for any man or woman alive save Stephen, he bade Stephen let the deeds be, and, with a last curse against the Christians (of whom Stephen was one, and a devout one), he kissed the young man, and turned his face to the wall and died. Therefore Stephen was a rich man, and had no need to carry on the business, though it never entered his mind to do anything else... [...]

You won't hear Yiddish in the stores these days. The Jews of Czernowitz are dead or fled, as they are from a thousand other cities across Europe. For centuries, the rap against the Yids was that they were sinister rootless cosmopolitan types unbound by allegiance to whichever polity they happened to be residing in. So, after the Second World War, the ones who were left became a more or less conventional nation state, and now they're hated for that. But all the hoo-ha about Holocaust denial (and granted, from President Ahmadinejad to Mel Gibson's dad, there's a lot of it about) has obscured the fact that the world has re-embraced, with little objection, an older form of anti-Semitism. Israel is, in effect, subject to a geopolitical version of the same conditions endured by Lazarus the Jew in Anthony Hope's Strelsau. The Zionist Entity is for the moment permitted to remain in business but, like Aaron Lazarus, it's not entitled to the enforceable property rights of every other nation state. No other country -- not Canada, not Slovenia, not Thailand -- would be expected to forego the traditional rights of nations subjected to kidnappings of its citizens, random rocket attacks into residential areas, and other infringements of its sovereignty.

This isn't about who's right and who's wrong: there are regional flare-ups all over the map -- Ivory Coast, Congo, Bosnia -- and, regardless of the rights and wrongs, for the most part the world just sits back and lets them get on with it. There are big population displacements -- as there were, contemporaneous to the founding of Israel, in Europe and the Indian subcontinent -- but one side wins and the dust settles. The energy expended by the world in denying this particular regional crisis the traditional settlement is unique and perverse, except insofar as by ensuring that the "Palestinian question" is never resolved one is also ensuring that Israel's sovereignty is also never really settled: it, too, is conditional -- and, to judge from recent columns in the Washington Post and the Times of London, it's increasingly seen that way in influential circles -- tolerated as a current leaseholder but, like Anthony Hope's Jew, it can never truly own the land. The Jews are once again rootless transients, though, in one of history's blacker jests, they're now bemoaned in the salons of London and Paris as an outrageous imposition of an alien European population on the Middle East. Which would have given Aaron Lazarus a laugh. The Jews spent millennia on the Continent without ever being accepted as European. But no sooner are the Continent's Jewry all but extinct than suddenly every Jew left on the planet is a European.

As with anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism defies a clear, objective definition. It must always be explored, pondered and reflected upon, but it is too protean to pin down in the sense of trying to state exactly where it stops and starts. The frequently-heard and increasingly tiresome argument about whether criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic or not almost always misses the point deftly made here by Mr. Steyn. The Arab world has done a stupendous job in persuading most of Europe and much of North America that the grand reconciliation between the West and the Islamic world hinges upon “settling” their dispute with Israel, and that such a resolution will keep us all safe and prosperous. As most of them don’t even bother to hide that they mean never recognizing Israel’s legitimacy and ultimately occupying or even destroying it, is it not a fair question to ask why such irrationality continuously falls on so many receptive ears?