Antisemitism as a Specific Phenomenon - Journal for the Study of ...

2 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 1:1
collective memory, as could be seen in President Jacques Chirac’s 1995
volte-face in accepting “French responsibility for the crimes of Vichy.” A
negative response was retrenchment, denial–especially denial of the Holocaust–and
an exacerbation of latent anti-Jewish prejudice.
Thus has Western Europe sought solace for its two greatest crimes:
colonialism and the Holocaust. (Since 1982, the Western media has
employed Holocaust metaphors when Israel retaliates.) West Beirut = Warsaw
Ghetto, southern Lebanon = Sudetenland, Israeli “Luftwaffe,” and so
on. This was summed up by a caricaturist’s treatment of the photo of the
Warsaw Ghetto surrender, of the child, arms upraised, facing the Nazis’
guns. The cartoonist placed a keffiyeh on the Jewish child’s head and Stars
of David on the Nazis’ helmets.
Voilà, in two strokes, a subliminal role reversal: the Palestinian victim
“native” Judaized, the Israeli “settler colonialist” as the perpetrator Nazified.
By a simple relief mechanism, the citizens of the Nazi collaborator or
occupied countries could now sigh: “We were not so bad!”
In Eastern European countries where the Holocaust succeeded and
which are now largely “Judenrein,” antisemitism persists as a “phantom
pain syndrome” in which the body politic still seeks to scratch the amputated
limb. There are no Jews, but a platonic “antisemitism without Jews”
applies Judeophobic terms as atavistic cues to target such threatening phenomena
as Western values, human rights, and the pain of moving to the
market economy.
The so-called “new antisemitism” is characterized by the undulating
crests and troughs of anti-Jewish violent incidents as a function of Intifadainspired
Middle East blowback. Each crest, however, sets a new threshold
in defining the acceptability of targeting the Jewish citizen. Indeed, the perception
of Middle East causality renders the phenomenon as imported, thus
denaturalizing the victim.
Arab satellite television and Jihadist websites exhort diaspora Muslim
youth, particularly in Western Europe, to incitement against their Jewish
neighbors. Focusing on the most convenient and vulnerable scapegoat for
their own social alienation, they play out a “Palestinians and Jews” transplant
of the Intifada.
Each threshold is often accompanied by a numbing effect on the part
of the authorities and media. When the perpetrator becomes too dangerous
(e.g. through violent demonstrations, riots, or car arson), the victim can be
deemed the problem. Thus the demonization of the Jewish state can result
in the delegitimization of the Jew in Diaspora.
This numbing effect is evident in the diminishing reaction to
Ahmadinejad’s series of provocations as he probes Western reticence and