ROBERT
S. WISTRICH
123
sense of self-satisfied innocence among those enemies of Israel who
claim only to be against imperialism, racism, oppression, etc. That
this anti-Zionism is nothing but an alibi is apparent when one looks
at the indiscriminate terrorist attacks against Jewish synagogues and
other targets in Paris, Brussels, Antwerp, Vienna, Milan, Rome,
and other European cities-a murderous violence against defense–
less Jews unprecedented since World War II. This terrorist nihilism
threatens the very fabric of the Western democracies more than it
does Israel itself and is the inevitable price that the West will con–
tinue to pay as long as it pursues its politics of appeasement of the
Arab world.
It
seems to me that, in fighting such forms of anti–
Zionism (which is a life-and-death interest for the democracies as
well as for Israel and the Diaspora), not enough has been done to
expose the fact that terrorism is a
universal
threat for which Israel
merely serves as a convenient pretext. The fashionable anti-Zionism
currently trumpeted by the Western media, which subliminally legit–
imizes terrorism, is in effect no less of a destabilizing, antidemo–
cratic, and corrupting factor than was the anti-Semitism-for-export
of the Third Reich in the 1930s and 1940s.
In
the long term the only
beneficiaries of this vicious campaign can be the enemies of the
West-the Soviet Union, the Islamic fundamentalists, and the radi–
cal forces of the Arab and Third worlds .
Apart from the issue of terrorism and the struggle for world
opinion, there is no doubt that the Holocaust, more than any other
past event, has become a political card, though one that in recent
years has begun to rebound against Israel and Diaspora Jewry.
From the standpoint of Israel's enemies and of anti-Semites every–
where, the mass murder of European Jewry and the backlash of
sympathy it created after 1945 has always constituted an intense irri–
tant to their objectives, conferring a kind of maddening immunity
from criticism or attack on the objects of their hatred. For Israel's
own leaders it provided, if not the
raison d'etre
of the Jewish state, at
least a major argument in favor of Zionism and a source of support
(much of it admittedly guilt ridden) from Western Christians. For
Jews all over the world, the Holocaust's message was also
essentially a pro-Zionist one. Never again must the Jewish people
be defenseless, never again must it rely solely on the goodwill or
"toleration" of non-Jews, never again should Jews take lightly the
verbal rhetoric of anti-Semitism-the avowed intent to destroy them
as a nation.
