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of the twentieth century, then we see that the Nazi legacy is by no
means exhausted.
Jews are certainly not the only victims, but they have been singled
out in a peculiar way, I believe, in modern conspiracy theories. They
have been consistently mythologized to a degree that no other group
has had to experience. It is the combination of a conspiratorial and even
apocalyptic view of politics (with so many mystical and irrational ele–
ments deeply imbedded in it) with a very calculated, demagogic, modern
mass politics, which helped anti-Semitism become extraordinarily virulent
in this century. The Jews were the lightning rod to explain to masses of
disoriented people the slaughter during the First World War, the humil–
iating defeat of Germany, the iniquities of capitalism, the ruthless triumph
of Communism in the Soviet Union, the demise of Christianity, the de–
cline of Islam, and an endless list of economic catastrophes, disasters and
tragedies which have been laid at the door of mysterious Jewish
conspirators. This is not the kind of anti-Semitism that you can easily
deal with at the level of rational argument, logic or education. It is not
subject to empirical proof or demonstration. As a British political
journalist once put it, this is "irrationality distilled to infinity." Against
that there are no simple answers.
If we come to the question of Zionism and Israel, which is one of
the issues on the agenda of this symposium, we have a very good illustra–
tion of the way anti-Semitism works on the contemporary scene, and
how it can adapt itself
to
a n('w set of circumstances. To a striking de–
gree, the international Jewish conspiracy that figured so powerfully in
the prewar period found a new source of life with the existence of the
State of Israel. For anti-Semites, the Jewish State was
not
a democratic
state fighting for its existence and survival in the Middle East,
not
the
product of a national liberation movement of the Jewish people,
not
an
effort to achieve a minimal basis for a sovereign Jewish existence, but
rather the geopolitical center of a sinister design to take over the world.
For many other, less paranoid, critics, it was at best the handmaiden and
instrument of the prime forces of evil in the world, beginning with
American imperialism. The little State of Israel in the short period of its
independent existence has become, in a unique way, the target of one of
the most extraordinary pieces of political mythology that we have seen
since the Second World War. Beginning with the notion that this tiny
state was a powerful enemy threatening the existence not only of the large
Arab world or of Islam as a whole or great entities like the Soviet
empire in its heyday, many of the attributes that were assigned to world
Jewry were simply transferred, with a slight change of vocabulary,
to
international Zionism and the Israeli conspiracy. This worked to great
