Benjamin Kerstein
Beersheva, Israel
August, 2004
A
loaded question, I realize. I am reticent to enter into this issue in depth,
since it always arouses violent passions on all sides, but I don't think
there's any sense in pretending it doesn't exist.
To get things out of the way: Yes, I do consider Chomsky an anti-Semite. This
inevitably raises the second question: How can Chomsky be considered an
anti-Semite when he's a Jew himself? Firstly, being Jewish has, unfortunately,
never precluded fealty to anti-Semitism. In fact, many of the most brutal
polemical assaults against Jews and Judaism have been accomplished at the hands
of their former co-religionists. The first time the Talmud was burned, in the
13th century, it was at the behest of a Jewish apostate to Christianity named
Nicholas Donin, who denounced the Talmud as heretical. To choose a more modern
example, the Bolshevik government in 1920s Russia organized its persecution of
Orthodox Judaism mainly through the services of the Jewish Bund; an anti-religious
socialist movement which had, ironically, played no small part in the February
Revolution which toppled the Czar. And, of course, there is the classic image
of Karl Marx, born a Jew and baptized only at the age of six, who could
nonetheless write
What is the Jew's foundation
in this world? Usury. What is his worldly god? Money...Money is the zealous one
God of Israel, beside which no other God may stand...The bill of exchange is
the Jew's real God...Only then could Jewry become universally dominant...The
social emancipation of Jewry is the emancipation of society from Jewry.
But then another question arises, why not simply term
Chomsky a self-hating Jew? The truth is, I dislike the term. It implies a
tragic pathos that absolves its object of an elementary moral responsibility.
It also implies an inner-directedness which I consider false and misleading.
Chomsky's attitudes towards the Jews are directed outwards, at the Jews as an
object, and not towards any outwardly "Jewish" qualities within
himself.
Is Chomsky, for lack of a better term, an Uncle Tom? Now, it is certainly true
that members of very small and oft-persecuted minorities often adopt highly
contemptuous attitudes towards their fellows in order to escape the burden of
an alienated identity; this is especially common in countries like the United
States, where the rate of assimilation is high and, thus, identification with
the dominant culture very strong. The United States, however, is not an anti-Semitic
country (though anti-Semitism does exist and is growing in certain circles)
and, while denial of one's Jewish identity, even at an unconcious level, is
widespread in American Jewry, the adoption of outright anti-Semitic attitudes
does not axiomatically follow.
This does lead us somewhere, however, and it is to the ideological nature of
the radical circles in which Chomsky serves as both guru and priest. Although
the broader society in which Chomsky lives is not anti-Semitic, the microcosmic
milieu in which he travels most certainly is. It would be, quite simply,
impossible for Chomsky to retain his credibility among his fellow ideologues
without adopting such attitudes. He walks, after all, in circles in which
Jewish revolt or revolution is strictly forbidden. In his chosen family,
Chomsky may dance at everyone's wedding but his own. We are dealing, after all,
with a culture which aggrandizes Fanon and brands Jabotinsky a fascist. Other
groups may assert their national identities and partake in the regenerative
qualities of revolt. Chomsky, however, must take his rebellion secondhand, and
thus is doubly alienated; both from his own identity, and from the identity of
those through whom he rebels vicariously. Chomsky cannot hate his own enemies,
but he can hate theirs, and when their enemies become the Jews, we see how this
monstrous dialectic reaches its end: with the advocate becoming the most
zealous of prosecutors. Witness the
following:
In the US when I was growing
up anti-Semitism was a severe problem. In the 1930’s depression when my father
finally had enough money to buy a second-hand car and could take the family on
a trip to the mountains, if we wanted to stop at a motel we had to check it
didn’t have a sign saying ‘Restricted’. ‘Restricted’ meant no Jews, so not for
us; of course no Blacks. Even when I got to Harvard 50 years ago you could cut
the anti-Semitism with a knife. There was almost no Jewish faculty. I think the
first Jewish maths professor was appointed while I was there in the early ‘50s.
One of the reasons MIT (where I now am) became a great university is because a
lot of people who went on to become academic stars couldn’t get jobs at
Harvard-so they came to the engineering school down the street. Just 30 years
ago (1960s) when my wife and I had young children, we decided to move to a
Boston suburb (we couldn’t afford the rents near Cambridge any longer). We
asked a real estate agent about one town we were interested in, he told us:
‘Well, you wouldn’t be happy there.’ Meaning they don’t allow Jews. It’s not
like sending people to concentration and termination camps but that’s
anti-Semitism. That was almost completely national.
This is all completely true, of course, and it is
surprising to see the emotion strung in between those words; it is clear that
Chomsky feels the sting of anti-Semitism, even today. It is fascinating to see,
however, where this leads him.
By now Jews in the US are the
most privileged and influential part of the population. You find occasional
instances of anti-Semitism but they are marginal.
With a disconcerting surety, he echoes the very thoughts
of the anti-Semites he has just denounced. Jews are not a privileged
and influential part of the population, they are the most privileged
and influential part of the population. And privilege is, of course, not
something achieved, but something bestowed. The Jews, in other words, are
neither persecuted nor marginalized, as he acknowledges, with some bitterness,
they once were; but rather favored sons of the society of which he just a
moment ago spoke so bitterly. And whither anti-Semitism?
Anti-Semitism is no longer a
problem, fortunately. It’s raised, but it’s raised because privileged people
want to make sure they have total control, not just 98% control. That’s why
anti-Semitism is becoming an issue. Not because of the threat of anti-Semitism;
they want to make sure there’s no critical look at the policies the US (and
they themselves) support in the Middle East. With regard to anti-Semitism, the
distinguished Israeli statesman Abba Eban pointed out the main task of Israeli
propaganda (they would call it exclamation, what’s called ‘propaganda’ when
others do it) is to make it clear to the world there’s no difference between
anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. By anti-Zionism he meant criticisms of the
current policies of the State of Israel. So there’s no difference between
criticism of policies of the State of Israel and anti-Semitism, because if he
can establish ‘that’ then he can undercut all criticism by invoking the Nazis
and that will silence people. We should bear it in mind when there’s talk in
the US about anti-Semitism.
Thus, not only does anti-Semitism not exist but, in an
extraordinary turn of the worm, it has become a tool in the hands of the
"privileged people" who desire, not mere control, but "total
control". And, at last, we begin to hear that old echo. That frenetic
compendium of secret conspiracy which first issued to us from the minutes of the
elders of Zion.
The Hebrew press is much more
open than the English language press, and there’s a very obvious reason: Hebrew
is a secret language, you only read it if you’re inside the tribe. Like most
cultures it’s a tribal culture. I don’t want to exaggerate, but the English
translations on the internet are very revealing and very interesting.
Thus, there is no anti-Semitism except as a means to
silence. There is no anti-Semitism except as a weapon of the propagandists and
the privileged against their critics. There is no anti-Semitism except to
further the ends of the tribe, with their secret language in which are couched
dark doings which, while one doesn't wish to exagerrate, are at least sinister
enough to be couched in this code which only the privileged may decipher.
Now, I don't wish to exagerrate either, but we should examine where this
process ends. Should French teenagers, for instance, beaten or stabbed in the
street, claim anti-Semitism as the cause; they are not aggrieved victims of racist
violence, but rather agents of the quest of the privileged to rule all.
American college students, at MIT lets say, who are greeted on Holocaust
Memorial Day by protestors equating Israel and Nazi Germany and complain that
such statements are anti-Semitic; are not stung by vicious, thoughtless, and
deliberately hurtful rhetoric, but rather brutal totalitarians attempting to
"silence" the innocent agents of justice and truth. Even the Israeli
father who considers the suicide bomber who eradicated his family, propelled by
the imam's admonition of "death to the Jews", to be anti-Semitic is
no more than a derelict apologist for American and Israeli atrocities.
There is, of course, something a little monstrous in all of this. On scales of
evil, perhaps, it is not the highest, but it is of a piece. Of a piece with the
political violence Chomsky aggrandizes and of a piece with his apocalyptic
dehumanization of all who fail his test of beleaugered sanctity. There are
those sanctified by Chomsky, there are holy innocents, even; but there is also
conspiracy, and, as Alain Finkielkraut has pointed out, anyone who talks of
conspiracy eventually ends up talking about the elders of Zion. Even, it seems,
Noam Chomsky.