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Arabs as objects of its abuse. But he is cynic enough, and propagandist
enough, to urge us to believe that an anti-Zionist is something different
from an anti-Semite. His arguments appear under an arresting headline:
"Drawing Distinctions."
It
is not distinctions that are being drawn, but
the opposite: a blurry veil. Try to look through the gauze, and you will
see cloudiness, cover-up, duplicity, malice. The term anti-Zionism - like
its predecessor, anti-Semitism - is born in mendacity.
We may wish, ourselves, to draw a distinction between sophisticated
mendacity and barbarous assault. But again, since the intent is the same,
the distinction is gossamer. The professorial or journalistic anti-Zionist -
sometimes his name is Edward Said, sometimes his name is Alexander
Cockburn - implies that history does not cling to Jews, that Jews, like
Lear on the heath, are unaccommodated by a civilization of rights, laws,
land, history. To what other people has the morally and politically dis–
eased phrase, "the right to exist," been applied? For the post–
Enlightenment Western anti-Zionist, Zionists are not the genuine Jewish
article. A Jew may merit narrow religious recognition; a Zionist is an
inauthentic Johnny-come-lately who must be uprooted, and never mind
that most Zionists are, as it happens, Jews.
How does this professorial view, with its polished lingo, distinguish
itself from the incantations of that now-famous university lecturer, Khalid
Muhammad? "The so-called Jew, I must say so-called Jew, because
you're not the true Jew, you are Johnny-come-lately Jew who just
crawled out of the caves of Europe just a little over four thousand years
ago. You're not from the original people," Khalid Muhammad declaims.
He, too, would grant Jews their rights, if only they were the genuine ar–
ticle. But they are not: "You are a European strain of people who
crawled around on your all fours in the caves and hills of Europe, eating
juniper roots and eating each other. ... You know nothing about
bathrooms and toilets and restrooms and sanitation systems. You did
your Number One and your Number Two, your pee-pee and your doo–
doo ... right in the caves and hills of Europe . You slept in your urina–
tion and your defecation, generation after generation, for two thousand
years.... You knocked your animals in the head with clubs and boul–
ders and bricks ... and all of you would just gum them and eat the fur,
the filth, and suck the blood from the raw meat, and you still eat your
meat raw, to this very day."
That the speaker stems from an historically victimized segment of the
American population should not surprise. The Dreyfus conspiracy was
conducted at the top of a society; so was the Wannsee conspiracy to
destroy every living Jew; the Zionism-is-racism canard was for a genera–
tion the unrevoked slogan of a political organization consisting of the
elite of all nations. But the more familiar anti-Jewish pogroms that
