NOTE ON BOOKS

The dispatch titled "The Uncomfortable Question of Anti-Semitism," sent out on Friday, May 21, 2004, only contained the first part -- and not the whole -- of Jonathan Rosen's essay, and should be read as such. (This was not made clear in the first version of the dispatch that I sent out.)

There is one further book I would like to recommend: "Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed - and How to Stop it" (Bonus Books), written by Rachel Ehrenfeld (a subscriber to this list), with an introduction by James Woolsey (former director of the CIA). Among other things, Ehrenfeld explains how the "charitable wings" of organizations like Hamas operate, and how Yasser Arafat became a billionaire.

 

IRISH MINISTER ALMOST TRIPLES THE NUMBER OF PALESTINIAN FATALITIES IN RAFAH INCIDENT

While not nearly as bad as the kind of lies told by large swathes of the Western media during Israel's incursion into Jenin two years ago [See my article, "Jeningrad," May 13, 2002, the National Review, www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-gross051302.asp], there was nevertheless much exaggeration and misinformation in regards to last week's Israeli incursion into Rafah -- not just by the media but also by politicians gullibly believing media reports.

For example, the Irish minister Brian Cowen, who currently speaks officially on behalf of the European Union, following Irish media reports, said "at least 23 people" were killed after an Israeli shell accidentally hit Palestinian demonstrators. As the Wall Street Journal says in the piece included in today's other dispatch, Mr. Cowen was so eager to bash Israel that he didn't even bother to check these media claims, let alone to mention that the death of civilians was an accident. (In fact it is almost certain that eight Palestinians died in that incident, for which Israel has repeatedly and profusely apologized; Some Palestinians claim ten persons died.)

 

BIASED, BUT BETTER THAN JENIN

Others got the figures wrong too, but not in the way that they did with Jenin.

For example, the Washington Post wrote: "Israeli Attack on Gaza Protest Kills at Least 12".

Reuters said: "Israeli Forces Fire on Crowd in Gaza, Killing 10."

Agence France Presse wrote: "10 Palestinians killed as Israeli army fires on protest against bloody raid."

Voice of America, a government-funded news outlet, which is not meant to be a left-wing Israel-bashing forum, ran the following headline on their website: "Israeli Forces Fire On Gaza Protesters, at Least 23 Dead."

The same day America killed between 42 and 45 people at a gathering in Iraq, which many Iraqis (and reporters for the Associated Press) say was a wedding celebration. Many news outlets, such as the New York Times-owned International Herald Tribune, barely reported on this the following day, since they devoted so much space to the accidental Israeli strike in Rafah in which eight Palestinians died. Almost no paper bothered mentioning that Israeli troops thought they were being shot at. (The New York Times was one of the very few that did, stating that " two young men with semiautomatic rifles [were seen] at the start of the route [of the march].")

The obsession with criticizing Israel in much of the rest of the world - even extended to a scathing article in the Property Section of the Sunday edition of the "Irish Independent" newspaper (titled "Israel plays the Millwall card while razing Rafah homes," Sunday May 23rd 2004) [Tom Gross adds: Millwall are a soccer team with the reputation for having some of the most violent followers in Europe.]

 

NAZI COMPARISONS FLY

The Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem took the unusual step of making a public statement criticizing a newspaper, after a cartoonist from the Austrian paper "Kleine Zeitung" (no doubt relying on vastly exaggerated news reports from Rafah) equated Israel with Nazi Germany. Yad Vashem said: "The caricature is a classic expression of the new antisemitism... which diminishes the Holocaust and distorts both today's reality as well as that of the Holocaust."

Of course the voices blood libeling Israel are to be found within the country too, including Arab members of the Knesset such as Taleb a-Sana, who said "What happened in Rafah proves that you don't have to be German to be a Nazi."

 

SOME KEY NEWSPAPERS LESS BIASED AGAINST ISRAEL THAN THEY PREVIOUSLY WERE

The Independent newspaper in London (responsible for whipping up hysterical lies against Israel over Jenin two years ago, and whose chief Middle East correspondent is the notorious Robert Fisk) has not repeated wildly inflated figures as they did in regard to Jenin in 2002.

Although they have run inflammatory stories against Israel this week (as usual), on this occasion they have also put Israel's side of the story, and run more reliable Palestinian accounts rather than entirely fictional ones of the kind concocted by Yasser Arafat's spokesman Saeb Erekat.

For example, in its story yesterday (by correspondent Donald Macintyre), the Independent gave both versions of the numbers of deaths in the Rafah incident: The Israeli army say eight people were killed; Officials at Rafah's main hospital have said 10 people were killed, said the Independent.

The Independent also writes that Israel says "the whole operation [over the last fortnight in Rafah] had claimed the lives of 41 militants and 12 civilians. Palestinian human rights groups, who put the total at more than 60 over the past fortnight [which includes the period in which 13 Israeli troops were killed in Gaza], claim that the proportion of civilians is significantly higher."

By contrast, reporting on the Jenin incursion of April 2002, the then correspondent for the Independent, Phil Reeves, began his dispatch: "A monstrous war crime that Israel has tried to cover up for a fortnight has finally been exposed [in Jenin]... The sweet and ghastly reek of rotting human bodies is everywhere, evidence that it is a human tomb. The people say there are hundreds of corpses, entombed beneath the dust."

Reeves spoke of "killing fields," an image more usually associated with Pol Pot's Cambodia. Reeves didn't bother to quote any Israeli source whatsoever in his story. In another report Reeves didn't even feel the need to quote Palestinian sources at all when he wrote about Israeli "atrocities committed in the Jenin refugee camp, where its army has killed and injured hundreds of Palestinians."

But with regard to Rafah in the past two weeks, the Independent gave the maximum number of houses (up to 56 homes) that Israel says were destroyed or partially damaged during the last week's operation to close down arms smuggling tunnels built in the basements of these house and the maximum number that anti-Israeli government like B'Tselem were destroyed or partially damaged (up to 67 homes.)

The Independent report contrasts with fantastical claims on BBC World Service Radio that hundreds of houses were destroyed.

 

ISRAEL NOT IN BREACH OF THE GENEVA CONVENTION

Contrary to a slew of media reports and statements made on the BBC and elsewhere, international law is on Israel's side. While Article 53 of the fourth Geneva Convention indeed prohibits the destruction of private property by an occupying power, as the Wall Street Journal points out, Israel's critics as well as the U.N. resolution fail to quote the text in its entirety. Article 53 says such actions are illegal, "except where such destruction is rendered absolutely necessary by military operations."

 

ISRAEL TO LIFT ARAFAT'S TRAVEL BAN IF HE AGREES TO HALT TERROR

The London-based Arabic language paper "Dar al-Hayat" reported yesterday that Israel is willing to allow Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat freedom of movement if he agrees to halt terror attacks by his Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.

According to "Dar al-Hayat," Israel conveyed this message to Arafat through Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, who met with Ariel Sharon and Shin Bat chief Meir Dagan on Monday, before meeting Arafat in Ramallah.

Arafat has been confined to his headquarters in the Ramallah since 2002, after he launched a wave of terror attacks on Israeli civilians.

 

PRICE OF PALESTINIAN BULLETS GOES UP

The price of smuggled bullets has increased sharply since Israel began cracking down on weapons-smuggling tunnels, reported Ha'aretz yesterday. A contraband AK-47 bullet, which cost just more than $1 before the start of the Intifada in September 2000 now goes for five times as much in Gaza. Israeli authorities monitor such inflation as a gauge of the army's success in uncovering tunnels in Rafah, which lies on Gaza's southern border with Egypt.

 

HA'ARETZ: TWO OF DEAD PALESTINIAN CHILDREN WERE DELIBERATELY KILLED BY PALESTINIAN GUNMEN

Amir Oren, the respected reporter for the liberal Israeli daily "Ha'aretz" wrote (21 May 2004) that the IDF has photographs of Palestinian terrorists deliberately killing two Palestinian children.

Maj. Gen. Dan Harel yesterday confirmed Amir Oren's report, but said the pictures will not yet be released to the media because information derived from the photographs would compromise security agents still on the ground.

[Tom Gross adds: This story may seem hard to believe, so alien is it to Western norms of behavior, but it is unlikely Ha'aretz - a newspaper often more critical of Israel than the Palestinians - would run this story unless they were sure it was true.]

The following is an excerpt from Oren's article:

Inside Track / Rafah is a nightmare.
By Amir Oren
Ha'aretz
May 21 2004

"... When the procession with armed men in its midst set out in the direction of the forces, [the commander of the Gaza Division, Brigadier General Shmuel] Zakaii tried to speak with the [Palestinian] community leaders in Rafah. The head of the Liaison and Coordination Administration, Colonel Poli Mordecai, phoned Nasser Saraj, the head of the [Palestinian] Civil Committee in the city. Had the Liaison and Coordination Administration sufficed, they would not have needed the tank commander. Saraj, a respected individual, formerly the director-general of the Ministry of Trade and Industry in the Palestinian Authority, listened to Colonel Mordecai's pleas, but took no steps to prevent the disaster.

"When men [wanted for help by Israel] obeyed calls over the loudspeakers to turn themselves in to the IDF authorities (and to the intelligence people who wanted to question them), they were confronted by members of the terror organizations, who opened fire on them and killed two children. A senior officer in Gaza reported yesterday that the IDF have in their possession pictures of this incident, of Palestinians killing their children. He expressed amazement as to why the army has refrained from publishing them."

[See also "IDF briefing on Rafah," below]

 

UN SOLDIERS HAVE SEX WITH AFRICAN RAPE VICTIMS, WHILE UN CONDEMNS ISRAEL

At the very time the UN was (again) condemning Israel, a few days ago, teenage rape victims fleeing war in the Democratic Republic of Congo were being sexually exploited by the United Nations peace-keeping troops sent to the stop their suffering (writes Britain's Independent newspaper.)

The Independent reported that mothers as young as 13 - the victims of multiple rape by militiamen - can only secure enough food to survive in the sprawling refugee camp by routinely sleeping with UN peace-keepers.

Testimony from girls and aid workers in the Internally Displaced People camp in Bunia, in the north-east corner of Congo, claims that every night teenage girls crawl through a wire fence to an adjoining UN compound to sell their bodies to Moroccan and Uruguayan soldiers. The trade, which according to one victim results in a banana or a cake to feed to her infant son, is taking place despite a pledge by the UN to adopt a "zero tolerance" attitude to cases of sexual misconduct by those representing the organization.

 

ENDEMIC CORRUPTION AT THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT

While continuing to criticize Israel, members of the European Parliament, might wish to engage in a little introspection. The New York Times revealed yesterday that the endemic corruption among many of the 732 European Parliament members, has reached new levels. Some MEPs are getting 150,000 Euro ($180,000) per annum tax free in benefits, in addition to their salaries. These include:

* Travel expenses. For example, a legislator from Finland can fly round trip to Brussels, where the Parliament meets, for about $240. But under Parliament rules, members are reimbursed at the highest economy price, meaning that a Finnish member receives about 10 times the cost of the trip.

* There are taxi allowances, free language lessons and daily expense stipends, even on days when no official business is conducted.

* There is no ban on relatives working as Parliament aides, and relatives of at least two dozen members do.

* Most benefits are tax free.

At the same time, turnout for Parliament elections is slumping, and many Europeans cannot identify their representative.

Meanwhile, instead of writing much about this, European newspapers yesterday and today continued to write instead about alleged financial irregularities of Ariel Sharon's son.

 

IDF BRIEFING ON RAFAH
May 24, 2004
[Text by IDF]

The following is a summary of the briefing held today by the GOC southern command, Maj. Gen. Dan Harel, regarding the operation in Rafah.

On Wednesday, May 12, 2004, an IDF force traveling along the Israeli- Egyptian border came under heavy gunfire and anti tank missiles launched from Rafah.

An APC carrying IDF soldiers exploded and as a result five soldiers were killed.

During the two days after this incident, rescue teams were operating in the area of the incident in order to locate the bodies' remains and to bring their friends for appropriate burial. During the whole operation the forces were under heavy fire from inside the houses. As a result of these guns fire, which came from 60-70 meters from the border and didn't stop for a single moment, another two IDF soldiers were killed.

On Monday, May 17, 2004, the IDF began with a comprehensive operation in the city of Rafah aimed at targeting the terrorists, wanted operatives and to locate and dismantle weapon smuggling tunnels. The target of the operation was to secure the neighborhoods along the Philadelphi road and to make sure that they are clean from terrorists and wanted operatives.

The Rafah area is one of the most crowded, the streets are narrow and the houses are adjacent to one another. Simultaneously to the operation, a great stress was given to the humanitarian assistance in the form of repair of water and electricity infrastructures, a free movement of ambulances and supply of basic needs for the Palestinian population.

Achievements of the operation:

• The securing of the ability for operational activity along the border.

• 40 armed terrorists were killed, more then 100 armed terrorists were injured.

• The locating and dismantling of three weapon smuggling tunnels.

• Comprehensive arrests of wanted Palestinians, among them number of detainees who are still in investigation.

Clarifying of the casualties among civilians:

As to our knowledge, 14 innocent residents were killed during the operation:

• 8 were killed while the forces tried to deter a demonstration- a tank shell ricochet fired at a structure nearby the demonstration hit them. Among those were killed one armed terrorist.

• A brother and sister- killed apparently on their house's roof. This incident is still under investigation.

• 2 youngsters, at the ages of 12 and 16, were killed by Palestinian terrorists while being called by the forced to come out of their house. The two were holding a white flag and were waving it and the terrorists shot them dead. IDF forces located the terrorists and killed them.

• A 13 years old boy and a 3 years old girl were killed in circumstances which are not yet known, perhaps from Israeli fire but also perhaps from Palestinian gunmen's fire.

Demolition of houses:

During the operation, damage caused to structures in the city of Rafah. The investigation of the operating forces shows that approximately 56 structures were destroyed.

In addition, damage caused to roads after bulldozers were use to detonate explosive devices to ensure safe passage of the APCs. It is important to note that three Americans were killed as a result of a roadside bomb which was activated at their vehicle.

• 20 structures were demolished around the uncovered tunnels, this in order to prevent terrorists from opening fire and activating explosive devices against the operating forces in the spot for the uncovering and detonating of the tunnels. Explosive devices were uncovered by the forces near the shafts of the tunnels which were uncovered.

• In the neighborhood of Tel- Sultan, IDF forces demolished the house of the terrorist who murdered Tali Hatuel and her four daughters at the shooting attack on the Kissufim rout. Additional six structures were demolished.

• 29 structures were demolished in the other neighborhoods in which the forces were operating.

The fact that the terrorists where shooting from inside populated houses created a problem. We demolished houses when they were used by terrorists to attack the operating forces. We also needed to pass through narrow streets in armored vehicles which caused additional damage.

Humanitarian aid during the operation:

It is important to stress that a large effort was made in the rehabilitation of the water and electricity infrastructures and also in the assurance of movement of ambulances (a senior representative of the Red Cross organization in the Gaza Strip noted that there was no delay of ambulances during the operation).

Our fighting is not directed against the residents of Rafah. Unfortunately, the residents encounter to a confrontation with the terrorists, and the terrorists are using the residents' houses for the terrorist activity, but no soldier or commander under my command hurt a resident intentionally.

FULL VERSIONS OF TWO OF THE ABOVE ARTICLES

A DOUBLE STANDARD ON GAZA

A Double Standard on Gaza
Editorial
Wall Street Journal
May 24, 2004

Once again the otherwise fractured "international community" has come together in one of those rare moments of unity, made possible only by the time-honored ritual of condemning whatever policy Israel is currently pursuing to protect its citizens from terrorism.

Last Wednesday, the United Nations Security Council criticized Israel's demolition of homes in Gaza but failed to condemn the Palestinian terror that brought about the offensive in the first place. The U.S. refused to lend its support to such an unbalanced resolution but didn't use its veto power to stop it.

The U.N.'s text must be considered a real showcase of even-handedness when compared to the statement by the Irish foreign minister who currently speaks for the European Union. Brian Cowen's comments came after an Israeli shell accidentally hit Palestinian demonstrators. Mr. Cowen was so eager to bash Israel that he didn't even bother to check Palestinian casualty claims. "Initial reports suggest that at least 23 people, many of them schoolchildren, were killed," he said. In reality, only eight Palestinians died. Mr. Cowen went on to accuse Israel of "reckless disregard for human life."

His words bear no resemblance to reality. Israel takes more care not to harm Palestinian civilians than the Palestinian Authority, let alone Hamas. In so doing, Israeli soldiers often risk their own lives, as the death of 13 ground troops earlier this month shows. If Israel really had such a "disregard" for Palestinians, it wouldn't send its young soldiers in harm's way but bomb terrorist positions safely from the air.

In contrast to that, the death of Palestinian civilians caught in the cross-fire appears to be part of the terrorists' strategy. The terrorists, who deliberately hide among the general population, know that every civilian death will be blamed on Israel, no matter what the circumstances and no matter whether the bullet actually came from an Israeli rifle.

Mr. Cowen even had the gall to liken the demonstrators' death to a Palestinian terrorist attack earlier this month, where members of Yasser Arafat's Al-Aqsa Martyr Brigades shot four children, aged 2 to 11, at point blank range before the eyes of their eight-months-pregnant mother before killing her too.

Neither these murders nor any other of the Palestinian terrorist attacks have ever prompted a single U.N. resolution. As a matter of fact, the U.N Security Council has yet to convene to even discuss Palestinian terrorism.

The Israeli operation in Gaza is designed to root out the arms smuggling in Rafah, which is at the border with Egypt. The whole area is honeycombed with tunnels that surface in private homes, built often with the open encouragement of the PA. Just recently, Arafat called on his people to "terrorize the enemy." The terrorists also use the private houses as hiding places to attack Israeli soldiers.

The problem wouldn't even exist if the PA fulfilled its obligation to fight terror instead of colluding with it. Also, the smugglers wouldn't have it so easy if Egypt, officially at peace with Israel, didn't turn a blind eye to this problem. Maybe it's time Washington asks Cairo to remind Americans why they are propping up President Hosni Mubarak's regime with almost $2 billion a year.

Contrary to popular opinion, international law is on Israel's side. Art. 53 of the fourth Geneva Convention indeed prohibits the destruction of private property by an occupying power. But Israel's critics as well as the U.N. resolution fail to quote the text in its entirety. Such actions are illegal, "except where such destruction is rendered absolutely necessary by military operations."

Preventing terrorists from firing at Israelis from these houses and putting an end to the smuggling of explosives and rockets appear to us to be "absolutely necessary" operations. Particularly as Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon seems determined to unilaterally withdraw from Gaza. It is the use of civilian structures by Palestinian terrorists for military attacks which violates international law.

Those really concerned for Palestinian welfare should speak these truths instead of criticizing Israel for trying to defend itself.

 

THE MEDIA WAR ISRAEL CANNOT WIN

Background / The media war Israel cannot win
By Bradley Burston
Ha'aretz
May 26, 2004

The longer a war lasts, the more ways there are to lose it.

The principle is not lost on the officials of the Foreign Ministry and the IDF spokesperson unit, Israel's front-line troops in the media war with the Arabs. From the standpoint of domestic morale as well as that of international diplomacy, the officials have long stressed that the media war is of critical importance to Israel's future.

Of late, some have suggested, it is also the war that Israel cannot win.

Even before the IDF launched its Rafah offensive last week, it was clear to many that the division-strength incursion would pose the most difficult challenge in years to the effort to argue Israel's case abroad.

Braced for broad condemnation from the Islamic world, Europe and the United Nations, as well as media outlets often critical of Israel, officials charged with the Jewish state's campaign of public relations - known by the prosaic Hebrew term "hasbara," ("explanation") - found themselves struggling from the outset to counter attacks based on statements by their own leaders.

Last week, on the eve of the IDF push called Operation Rainbow, a comment to the weekly cabinet meeting by Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon made headlines - and touched off condemnation of Israel - worldwide.

"Hundreds of houses have been marked for destruction," Ya'alon was quoted as saying, in a comment that resounded as ominous as it was unspecific. It was widely reported abroad as an indication of an imminent military design that would leave thousands of Palestinians homeless.

Already under strong pressure, Brigadier General Ruth Yaron, commander of the IDF Spokesman Unit, conceded early in the operation that although foreign journalists had shown understanding for Israel's bid to counter arms-smuggling tunnels dug under the Philadelphi security route marking the Egypt-Rafah border, the images of the operation were difficult to digest.

"The pictures are very difficult," she said. "War is something that photographs very badly. It looks very bad, and, in fact, it is very bad."

Foreign Ministry Director-General Yoav Biran said Israel's official spokesmen would continue to press its case of self-defense, but his words also bore a Sisyphean tone of failure foretold.

Responding to nearly immediate charges by Palestinians that Israeli forces were guilty of war crimes and, in Yasser Arafat's words, "planned massacres," Biran said:

"Every picture from Rafah is very difficult, of women, of children, outside of their homes, sitting amongst the contents of those homes, which were far from luxurious to begin with, especially when they are framed with Israeli tanks."

"As for the struggle in the visual sphere," Biran said, "I feel that we will not succeed."

Warning shot - from a helicopter gunship

Hours after Yaron and Biran spoke on Wednesday morning, conflicting, emotion-laden and dire reports broke of the bloody outcome of a protest march in Rafah's battle-torn Tel Sultan neighborhood.

Initial Palestinian witness accounts spoke of an Israeli helicopter gunship firing four missiles on marchers, many if not most of them children, with dozens feared dead.

The army spokesman unit, balancing the need for timely official comment with an authoritative, airtight explanation for what had happened, was formally silent for hours.

In the meantime, Israeli politicians raced to fill the breach, to the further horror of hasbara authorities. Deputy Public Security Minister Gideon Ezra said in nationally broadcast remarks, "If innocent people wish to avoid getting hurt, they should distance themselves from events of this sort."

Ezra said that armed Palestinians had hidden themselves among the demonstrators, and that the soldiers and their commanders were duty-bound to defend themselves when the march threatened troops in the area.

"We give the commanders - with all their responsibility - all of our support, and understand that when there is a life-and-death threat, we don't simply throw up our hands," he said.

At the same time, speaking from the Knesset floor in a frenzy of outrage, MK Ahmed Tibi from the Jewish-Arab Hadash party said: "This pilot, your beloved son, sent missiles from a helicopter in order to kill Palestinian children. His mother should be ashamed - her boy is a cold-blooded murderer. This pilot is a murderer. His commanding officer is a murderer. The commander of the air force is a murderer. The Southern Front commander is a murderer."

Tibi added that Ya'alon, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, the Israel Air Force and Southern Front commanders all belonged in the defendants' dock in a war crimes trial.

Said fellow Arab MK Taleb a-Sana, "What happened in Rafah proves that you don't have to be German to be a Nazi."

When an official announcement finally came, nearly four hours after the attack, the explanations by Ya'alon and Mofaz raised eyebrows anew as the military admitted, by implication, that its first resort in crowd control had been use of an attack helicopter.

Ya'alon said that while a helicopter had indeed launched a missile, it had fired at an open field as a "warning shot" to deter demonstrators from advancing on IDF forces.

An armored battalion officer then ordered a tank crew to carry out what was called deterrent fire as well - a procedure widely reported to have been barred in the IDF after shells inadvertently killed civilians in the West Bank towns of Jenin and Nablus two years before.

At least one of the tank shells missed its mark, exploding into the crowd. Amid vivid depictions of bodies being stored in produce refrigerators for lack of morgue space in dusty, poverty-bound Rafah, investigations later found that the tank fire had claimed eight dead.

"It's clear that the battle's lost," a Foreign Ministry official told Yedioth Ahronoth late last Wednesday. "No matter what we say, we've already been defeated in this battle for public opinion. This incident is simply impossible to explain."

Nearly a week later, IDF Gaza division commander Brigadier General Shmuel Zakai said Monday that the investigation into that incident has not yet been completed, but it appears as if the tank commander who fired a shell at the abandoned structure did not see the nearby demonstration.

"We did not use the tank shell in order to disperse the demonstration but rather to create a boom effect," Zakai said. "To the best of my professional judgement, the tank commander's decision was correct."

Monsters in the world's eyes

Complicating the hasbara effort were widely divergent reports over the number of Rafah homes destroyed during the operation. By the count of a military source Sunday, the number of demolished homes was between six and 10, with several more damaged in exchanges of fire with gunmen.

A United Nations source said Israel had leveled dozens of homes. A Palestinian official put the figure in the hundreds.

The coup de grace for Israel's hasbara campaign may have come this week, and as close to home as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's inner security cabinet.

Justice Minister Yosef Lapid, a Holocaust survivor who lost his father and grandmother to the Nazi extermination machine, touched off pandemonium in the cabinet when he spoke of his reaction to a photograph of an old woman in Rafah, searching on all fours through the rubble for her medication. Lapid told the ministers that the scene made him think of his grandmother.

Although he later flatly denied that he had intended to draw a parallel between the actions of the IDF and those of the Nazis, Lapid's response to the Rafah campaign had only begun.

In an Army Radio interview following the cabinet meeting, Lapid revealed that the army was considering the demolition of some 2,000 homes in Rafah, in order to broaden the Philadelphi corridor between Egypt and Gaza.

"The demolition of houses in Rafah must stop. It is not humane, not Jewish, and causes us grave damage in the world," declared Lapid, leader of the secular-centrist Shinui. A confidante of Sharon and a former journalist and social critic, Lapid has generally supported tough military policies in fighting the Palestinians.

Specifying the potential damage in the international community, Lapid said: "At the end of the day, they'll kick us out of the United Nations, try those responsible in the international court in The Hague, and no one will want to speak with us."

Military officials later confirmed for the first time that commanders are weighing plans which would level between 700 and 2,000 homes.

"We look like monsters in the eyes of the world," Lapid said in a separate national radio broadcast. "This makes me sick."

'Bad people have celebrations, too'

To be sure, official Israel's attitude toward world opinion has long been ambivalent at best. Founding prime minister David Ben-Gurion's dismissals of the relative importance of UN condemnations and international scorn ("It matters not what the goyim say, but what the Jews do") are the stuff of legend.

The Israeli national characteristic of "dugriut," unfiltered candor, also mitigates against the tenets of public relations, as did the once common practice of handing out key spokesman and emissary positions on a patronage basis, with recipients often unable to express themselves in foreign languages.

Yet another factor is the widely held suspicion that no matter what, the actions of Israelis will be judged more harshly than those taken by the forces of other nations.

If Israelis suspected a certain double standard in media coverage in the Tel Sultan march, evidence of a sort was not long in coming.

As world news attention remained riveted on the Rafah march, many newspapers relegated to below-the-fold or back pages an American air strike near Iraq's border with Syria, an incident that took place just hours after the Tel Sultan deaths.

Israeli spokesmen could only marvel at the muted reaction to the U.S. strike, which left more than 40 dead. Witnesses on the ground had said the victims were hit while sleeping after a wedding. U.S. forces said the rude structures hit were a safe house for foreign fighters.

In a statement that one Israeli commentator said would have provoked UN Security Council debate had it been made by the IDF, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, chief U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, said Saturday:

"There may have been some kind of celebration. Bad people have celebrations, too."

[Note by Tom Gross]

I attach a list of seven recommended new books, followed by three book reviews.

(In all seven cases, the writers or editors of these books are longtime subscribers to this email list, but even if they weren't, I would be happy to strongly recommend them.)

The first five books deal with anti-Semitism, the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, and in some cases media coverage. All these books have been published in recent weeks and in some respects make use of original material published on this email list. The other two books are new biographies of Yasser Arafat published last fall.

1. "Those Who Forget the Past: The Question of Anti-Semitism," edited by Ron Rosenbaum (Published today by Random House.) This book includes essays and reportage by Paul Berman, David Brooks, Bernard Lewis, David Mamet, Philip Roth, Amos Oz, Frank Rich, Simon Schama, Marie Brenner, Edward Said, Melanie Philips, Barbara Amiel, and some 35 others, including myself. (About half these contributors are subscribers to this email list.)

 

2. "Still Life With Bombers: Israel in the age of terrorism" by David Horovitz (Published by Knopf, New York.) David Horovitz is the editor of "The Jerusalem Report" and a regular commentator on CNN International and elsewhere. A positive review of this book will be appearing on Sunday in the New York Times Books section.

 

3. "The return of anti-Semitism" by Gabriel Schoenfeld. (Encounter Books). Gabe Schoenfeld is the senior editor of "Commentary magazine," one of the world's leading publications dealing with Middle East and other issues. Gabe has also written for the New York Times among other publications.

 

4. "Why Blame Israel? The Facts Behind the Headlines," by Neill Lochery (Icon Books, London April 2004). Neill Lochery is director of the Center for Israeli Studies at University College, London. This is an unusually fair and accurate account of the Israeli-Palestinian from someone who is neither Jew nor Arab.

 

5. "Israel: Life in the Shadow of Terror," edited by Shraga Simmons (published by Targum / Feldheim / Aish.com books). Shraga Simmons has written and edited extensively on Middle East affairs, particularly in regard to media coverage. This book includes a collection of about 75 pieces on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute by Elie Wiesel, Benjamin Netanyahu, Natan Sharansky, Yossi Klein Halevi, and others including a shortened version of my essay "Jeningrad."

 

6. "Yasir Arafat: A Political Biography," By Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin (Oxford University Press). Barry Rubin is director of GLORIA (the Global Research in International Affairs Center), in Israel, and is the author of numerous books. Judith Colp Rubin was correspondent in Israel for several American newspapers.

 

7. "Arafat's war," by Efraim Karsh (Grove Press). Efraim Karsh is a professor at King's College, London, and is currently a visiting professor at Harvard University.

 

THE UNCOMFORTABLE QUESTION OF ANTI-SEMITISM

The Uncomfortable Question of Anti-Semitism
By Jonathan Rosen

When I was growing up, my father would go to bed with a transistor radio set to an all-news station. Even without a radio, my father was attuned to the menace of history. A Jew born in Vienna in 1924, he fled his homeland in 1938; his parents were killed in the Holocaust. I sometimes imagined my father was listening for some repetition of past evils so that he could rectify old responses, but he may just have been expecting more bad news. In any event, the grumbling static from the bedroom depressed me, and I vowed to replace it with music more cheerfully in tune with America. These days, however, I find myself on my father's frequency. I have awakened to anti-Semitism.

I am not being chased down alleyways and called a Christ killer, I do not feel that prejudicial hiring practices will keep me out of a job, and I am not afraid that the police will come and take away my family. I am, in fact, more grateful than ever that my father found refuge in this country. But in recent weeks I have been reminded, in ways too plentiful to ignore, about the role Jews play in the fantasy life of the world. Jews were not the cause of World War II, but they were at the metaphysical center of that conflict nonetheless, since the Holocaust was part of Hitler's agenda and a key motivation of his campaign. Jews are not the cause of World War III, if that's what we are facing, but they have been placed at the center of it in mysterious and disturbing ways.

I was born in 1963, a generation removed and an ocean away from the destruction of European Jewry. My mother was born here, so there was always half the family that breathed in the easy air of postwar America. You don't have to read a lot of Freud to discover that the key to a healthy life is the ability to fend off reality to a certain extent. Deny reality too much, of course, and you're crazy; too little and you're merely miserable. My own private balancing act has involved acknowledging the fate of my murdered grandparents and trying to live a modern American life. I studied English literature in college and in graduate school, where I toyed with a dissertation on Milton, a Christian concerned with justifying the ways of God to man. I dropped out of graduate school to become a writer, but I always felt about my life in America what Milton says of Adam and Eve entering exile-the world was all before me.

Living in New York, pursuing my writing life, I had the world forever all before me. I chose within it-I married and had a child. For ten years I worked at a Jewish newspaper. But my sense of endless American possibility never left me-even working at a Jewish newspaper seemed a paradoxical assertion of American comfort. My father's refugee sense of the world was something that both informed me and that I worked to define myself against. I felt it was an act of mental health to recognize that his world was not my world and that his fears were the product of an experience alien to me. I was critical of the Holocaust Museum in Washington. I didn't want ancient European anti-Semitism enshrined on federal land. But now everything has come to American soil.

Recently, I read an interview with Sheik Muhammad Gemeaha-who was not only the representative in the United States of the prominent Cairo Center of Islamic Learning, al-Azhar University, but also imam of the Islamic Cultural Center of New York City. The sheik, who until recently lived in Manhattan on the Upper West Side, explained that "only the Jews" were capable of destroying the World Trade Center and added that "if it became known to the American people, they would have done to Jews what Hitler did." This sentiment will be familiar to anyone who has been watching the news or reading the papers. In Kuwait, there were reports that New York rabbis told their followers to take their money out of the stock market before September 11; in Egypt, the Mossad was blamed for the attack. It is easy talk to dismiss as madness, I suppose, but because so many millions of Muslims seem to believe it, and because airplanes actually did crash into the World Trade Center, words have a different weight and menace than they had before.

So does history, or rather the forces that shape history-particularly the history of the Jews. It would be wrong to say that everything changed on the eleventh of September for me. Like the man in the Hemingway novel who went bankrupt two ways-gradually and then suddenly-my awareness of things had also been growing slowly. My father's sister escaped in the 1930s from Vienna to Palestine-now, of course, called Israel-and I have a lot of family there. I grew up knowing that Israel, for all its vitality, was ringed with enemies; I knew how perilous and bleak life had become after the collapse of the Oslo peace process a year ago and how perilous and bleak it could be before that.

I knew, too, that works like "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," the Russian forgery about demonic Jewish power, have been imported into Arab society, like obsolete but deadly Soviet weapons. By grafting ancient Christian calumnies onto modern political grievances, Arab governments have transformed Israel into an outpost of malevolent world Jewry, viewing Israelis and Jews as interchangeable emblems of cosmic evil. So when the Syrian defense minister recently told a delegation from the British Royal College of Defense Studies that the destruction of the World Trade Center was part of a Jewish conspiracy, I wasn't really surprised.

I'd gotten a whiff of this back in early September, while following the United Nations conference on racism and discrimination in Durban, South Africa, where the Arab Lawyers Union distributed booklets at the conference containing anti-Semitic caricatures of Jews with fangs dripping blood-a mere sideshow to the isolation of Israel and the equating of Zionism with racism that ultimately led to the United States' withdrawal. Singling out Israel made of a modern nation an archetypal villain-Jews were the problem and the countries of the world were figuring out the solution. This was hardly new in the history of the United Nations, but there was something so naked about the resurrected Nazi propaganda and the anti-Semitism fueling the political denunciations that I felt kidnapped by history. The past had come calling.

I felt this in a different form reading coverage of Israel in European papers. Though public expressions of anti-Semitism are taboo in a post-Holocaust world, many Europeans, in writing about Israel, have felt free to conjure images of determined child killers and mass murderers. Earlier this year, the Spanish daily La Vanguardia published a cartoon depicting a large building labeled "Museum of the Jewish Holocaust" and behind it a building under construction labeled "Future Museum of the Palestinian Holocaust." The cartoon manages to demonize Jews and trivialize the Holocaust simultaneously. Tom Gross, an Israel-based journalist, recently pointed out to me that a BBC correspondent, Hilary Andersson, declared that to describe adequately the outrage of Israel's murder of Palestinian children one would have to reach back to Herod's slaughter of the innocents-alluding to Herod's attempt to kill Christ in the cradle by massacring Jewish babies. After leading an editor from The Guardian on a tour of the occupied territories, Gross was astonished at the resulting front-page editorial in that highly influential British paper declaring that the establishment of Israel has exacted such a high moral price that "the international community cannot support this cost indefinitely."

I understood that the editorial, speaking of the cost of the establishment of Israel-not of any particular policies-implied that Israel's very right to exist is somehow still at issue. (One cannot imagine something similar being formulated about, say, Russia, in response to its battle with Chechen rebels, however much The Guardian might have disagreed with that country's policies.) And this reminded me inevitably of the situation of the Jews in 1940s Europe, where simply to be was an unpardonable crime.

I had somehow believed that the Jewish Question, which so obsessed both Jews and anti-Semites in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, had been solved-most horribly by Hitler's "final solution," most hopefully by Zionism. But more and more I feel Jews being turned into a question mark once again. How is it, the world still asks-about Israel, about Jews, about me-that you are still here? I have always known that much of the world wanted Jews simply to disappear, but there are degrees of knowledge, and after September 11 my imagination seems more terribly able to imagine a world of rhetoric fulfilled.

There are five million Jews in Israel and eight million more Jews in the rest of the world. There are one billion Muslims. How has it happened that Israel and "world Jewry," along with the United States, is the enemy of so many of them? To be singled out inside a singled-out country is doubly disconcerting. There are a lot of reasons why modernizing, secularizing, globalizing America, whose every decision has universal impact, would disturb large swaths of the world; we are, after all, a superpower. Surely it is stranger that Jews, by their mere presence in the world, would unleash such hysteria.

And yet what I kept hearing in those first days in the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center is that it was our support of Israel that had somehow brought this devastation down on us. It was a kind of respectable variant of the belief that the Mossad had literally blown up the World Trade Center. It could of course be parried-after all, the turning point in Osama bin Laden's hatred of the United States came during the Gulf war, when American troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia. But it had a lingering effect; it was hard to avoid a certain feeling that there was something almost magical about Israel that made it toxic for friends and foes alike.

This feeling will not go away, if only because our support of that nation makes it harder to maintain our coalition. Israel has somehow become an obstacle to war and an obstacle to peace simultaneously.

Lately, of course, bin Laden has added treatment of Palestinians to his list of grievances, and this may revive the sense that Israel bears some measure of responsibility. Large lies can be constructed out of smaller truths. The occupation of the West Bank by Israel, though it grew out of a war Israel did not want, has been a nightmare for the Palestinians and a disaster for Israel morally, politically, and spiritually. It is a peculiar misery to feel this way and to feel, at the same time, that the situation has become a weapon in the war against Israel. Bin Laden would not want a Palestinian state on the West Bank, because he could not abide a Jewish state alongside it.

Neither could many of our allies in the Muslim world, who keep euphemistically suggesting that if only the "Mideast crisis" were resolved, terrorism would diminish. It has a plausible veneer-and indeed, it would be an extraordinary achievement if the Palestinians got a homeland and Israel got safe borders. But since most of the players in the Middle East do not accept the existence of Israel, since "solving the Mideast crisis" would for them entail a modern version of Hitler's final solution, the phrase takes on weird and even sinister overtones when it is blandly employed by well-intentioned governments calling for a speedy solution. And this Orwellian transformation of language is one of the most exasperating and disorienting aspects of the campaign against Israel. It has turned the word "peace" into a euphemism for war.

I grew up in a post-Holocaust world. For all the grim weight of that burden, and for all its echoing emptiness, there was a weird sort of safety in it too. After all, the worst thing had already happened-everything else was aftermath. In the wake of the Holocaust, American anti-Semitism dissipated, the church expunged old calumnies. The horror had been sufficient to shock even countries like the Soviet Union into supporting a newly declared Jewish state. Israel after 1967 was a powerful nation-besieged, but secure. American Jews were safe as houses.

I am not writing this essay to predict some inevitable calamity but to identify a change of mood. To say aloud that European anti-Semitism, which made the Holocaust possible, is still shaping the way Jews are perceived; Arab anti-Israel propaganda has joined hands with it and found a home in the embattled Muslim world. Something terrible has been born. What happened on September 11 is proof, as if we needed it, that people who threaten evil intend evil. This comes with the dawning awareness that weapons of mass destruction did not vanish with the Soviet Union; the knowledge that in fact they may pose a greater threat of actually being used in this century, if only in a limited fashion, is sinking in only now.

That a solution to one century's Jewish problem has become another century's Jewish problem is a cruel paradox. This tragedy has intensified to such a degree that friends, supporters of Israel, have wondered aloud to me if the time has come to acknowledge that the Israeli experiment has failed, that there is something in the enterprise itself that doomed it. This is the thinking of despair. I suppose one could wonder as much about America in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, since many American values will now be challenged and since, in fighting a war, you always become a little like your enemy, if only in accepting the need to kill. I grew up at a time when sex education was considered essential but what might be called war education, what a country must do to survive, was looked upon with a kind of prudish horror. I suppose that will now change. In any event, Israel has been at war for fifty years. Without that context, clear judgment is impossible, especially by those accustomed to the Holocaust notion that Jews in war are nothing but helpless victims-a standard that can make images to the contrary seem aberrant.

THE MODERN 'HEP! HEP! HEP!'

The Modern 'Hep! Hep! Hep!'
by Cynthia Ozick

We thought it was finished. The ovens are long cooled, the anti-vermin gas dissipated into purifying clouds, cleansed air, nightmarish fable. The cries of the naked, decades gone, are mute; the bullets splitting throats and breasts and skulls, the human waterfall of bodies tipping over into the wooded ravine at Babi Yar, are no more than tedious footnotes on aging paper. The deportation ledgers, with their scrupulous lists of names of the doomed, what are they now? Museum artifacts. The heaps of eyeglasses and children's shoes, the hills of human hair, lie disintegrating in their display cases, while only a little distance away the visitors' cafeteria bustles and buzzes: sandwiches, Cokes, the waiting tour buses.

We thought it was finished. In the middle of the twentieth century, and surely by the end of it, we thought it was finished, genuinely finished, the bloodlust finally slaked. We thought it was finished, that heads were hanging-the heads of the leaders and schemers on gallows, the heads of the bystanders and onlookers in shame. The Topf company, manufacturer of the ovens, went belatedly out of business, belatedly disgraced and shamed. Out of shame German publishers of Nazi materials concealed and falsified the past. Out of shame Paul de Man, lauded and eminent Yale intellectual, concealed his early Nazi lucubrations. Out of shame Mircea Eliade, lauded and eminent Chicago intellectual, concealed his membership in Romania's Nazi-linked Iron Guard. Out of shame memorials to the murdered rose up. Out of shame synagogues were rebuilt in the ruins of November 9, 1938, the night of fire and pogrom and the smashing of windows. Out of shame those who were hounded like prey and fled for their lives were invited back to their native villages and towns and cities, to be celebrated as successful escapees from the murderous houndings of their native villages and towns and cities. Shame is salubrious: it acknowledges inhumanity, it admits to complicity, it induces remorse. Naïvely, foolishly, stupidly, hopefully, a-historically, we thought that shame and remorse-world-wide shame, world-wide remorse-would endure. Naïvely, foolishly, stupidly, hopefully, a-historically, we thought that the cannibal hatred, once quenched, would not soon wake again.

It has awakened.

In "The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!"-an 1878 essay reflecting on the condition of the Jews-George Eliot noted that it would be "difficult to find a form of bad reasoning about [Jews] which had not been heard in conversation or been admitted to the dignity of print." She was writing in a period politically not unlike our own, Disraeli ascendant in England, Jews prominent in liberal parties both in Germany and France. Yet her title points to something far deadlier than mere "bad reasoning." Hep! was the cry of the Crusaders as they swept through Europe, annihilating one Jewish community after another; it stood for Hierosolyma est perdita (Jerusalem is destroyed), and was taken up again by anti-Jewish rioters in Germany in 1819. In this single raging syllable, past and future met, and in her blunt bold enunciation of it, George Eliot was joining bad reasoning-i.e., canard and vilification-to its consequences: violence and murder. The Jews, she wrote, have been "regarded and treated very much as beasts hunted for their skins," and the curse on them, the charge of deicide, was counted a justification for hindering them from pursuing agriculture and handicrafts; for marking them out as execrable figures by a peculiar dress; for torturing them . spitting at them and pelting them; for taking it certain that they killed and ate babies, poisoned the wells, and took pains to spread the plague; for putting it to them whether they would be baptised or burned, and not failing to burn and massacre them when they were obstinate; but also for suspecting them of disliking their baptism when they had got it, and then burning them in punishment of their insincerity; finally, for hounding them by tens on tens of thousands from their homes where they had found shelter for centuries, and inflicting on them the horrors of a new exile and a new dispersion. All this to avenge the Saviour of mankind, or else to compel these stiff-necked people to acknowledge a Master whose servants showed such beneficent effects of His teaching.

As an anti-Semitic yelp, Hep! is long out of fashion. In the eleventh century it was already a substitution and a metaphor: Jerusalem meant Jews, and "Jerusalem is destroyed" was, when knighthood was in flower, an incitement to pogrom. Today, the modern Hep! appears in the form of Zionism, Israel, Sharon. And the connection between vilification and the will to undermine and endanger Jewish lives is as vigorous as when the howl of Hep! was new. The French ambassador to Britain, his tongue unbuttoned in a London salon, hardly thinks to cry Hep!; instead, he speaks of "that shitty little country." European and British scholars and academicians, their Latin gone dry, will never cry Hep!; instead they call for the boycott of Israeli scholars and academicians.

Even Martin Luther (though his Latin was good enough) failed to cry Hep! Instead, he inquired:

What is to be done with this wicked, accursed race, which can no longer be tolerated? The Talmud and the rabbis teach that it is no sin to kill Christians, to break an oath to Christians, to rob and plunder them. The one and only aim of the Jews is to weaken Christianity. They have poisoned the springs, they have murdered Christian children for their blood for their rites. They are becoming too prosperous in Germany, and in consequence have become insolent. Then what is to be done? Their synagogues must be reduced to ashes, for the honor of God and of Christianity. Christians are to destroy the houses of Jews, and drive them all under one roof, or into a stable like gypsies. All prayer-books and copies of the Talmud are to be wrested from them by force, and their praying and even the use of God's name is to be forbidden to them under pain of death. Their rabbis are to be forbidden to teach. The authorities are to prohibit Jews from traveling, and to bar the roads against them. Their money must be taken from them. Able-bodied Jews and Jewesses are to be put to forced labor, and kept strictly employed with the flail, the axe, the spade. Christians are not to show any tender mercy to Jews. The emperor and the princes must be urged to expel them from the country without delay. If I had power over the Jews, I would assemble the best and most learned among them and, under penalty of having their tongues cut out, would force them to accept the Christian teaching that there is not one God, but three Gods. I say to you, the Jews do great evil in the land. If they could kill us all, they would gladly do so, aye, and often do it, especially those who profess to be physicians-they know all that is known about medicine in Germany; they can give poison to a man of which he will die in an hour, or in ten or twenty years; they thoroughly understand this art.

So much for sixteenth-century Hep!-a reprise, under the guise of Reformation, of 300 years of abusive Christian power. But it foreshadows twentieth-century Hep! as well: the flaming synagogues, the prohibitions, the expropriations, the looting, the forced labor, the phantasmagorical lies, the Stalinist doctors' plot, the bloodthirsty reversals of intent: "if they could kill us all, they would gladly do so."

Luther came late to these pious inspirations. Nearly all had their precedents in the Church he renounced; and even the medieval Church practiced mimicry. It was Pope Innocent III who implemented the yellow badge of ignominy (Hitler was no innovator, except as to gas chambers)-yet Innocent too was innocent of originality, since he took the idea from Prince Abu-Yusef Almansur, a Moroccan Muslim ruler of the thirteenth century. Post-Enlightenment France may be known for its merciless persecution of a guiltless Dreyfus, and for the anti-Jewish rioting it set off; and, more recently, for the gendarmes who arrested and deported the Jews of Paris with a zeal equal to that of the Germans. But Paris had seen anti-Jewish mobs before-for instance, in June of 1242, when twenty-four cartloads of Talmuds were set afire in a public square. And while elsewhere in France, and all through the Rhineland, the Crusaders were busy at their massacres, across the Channel the Archbishop of Canterbury was issuing a decree designed to prevent the Jews of England from having access to food.

All this, let it be noted, preceded the barbarities of the Inquisition: the scourgings, the burnings, the confiscations, the expulsions.

Any attempt to set down the record, early and late, of Christian violence against Jews can only be a kind of pointillism-an atrocity here, another there, and again another. The nineteenth-century historian Heinrich Graetz (as rationalist in temperament as Gibbon) summed up the predicament of Jews across the whole face of Europe:

If Jewish history were to follow chronicles, memorial books and martyrologies, its pages would be filled with bloodshed, it would consist of horrible exhibitions of corpses, and it would stand forth to make accusation against a doctrine which taught princes and nations to become common executioners and hangmen. For, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, the persecutions and massacres of the Jews increased with frightful rapidity and intensity, and only alternated with inhuman decrees issued by both Church and the state, the aim and purport of all of which were to humiliate the Jews, to brand them with calumny and to drive them to suicide .. The nations of Europe emulated one another in exercising their cruelty upon the Jews .. In Germany they were slain by thousands .. Every year martyrs fell, now in Weissenburg, Magdeburg, Arnstadt, now in Coblenz, Sinzig, Erfurt, and other places. In Sinzig all the members of the congregation were burnt alive on a Sabbath in their synagogue. There were German Christian families who boasted that they had burnt Jews, and in their pride assumed the name of Judenbrater (Jew-roaster).

And all this, let it again be noted, before the Shoah; before the Czarist pogroms and the Czarist fabrication of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion"; before the exclusions, arrests, and gulag brutalities of the Soviet Union; before the shooting of the Soviet Yiddish writers in the basement of Moscow's Lubyanka prison; before the rise of contemporary Islamist demonization of Jews; before the eight-decades-long Arab assault on Jewish national aspiration and sovereignty; before the Palestinian cult of suicide bombing. Anti-Semitism feeds on itself from continent to continent, from Iceland to Japan: it scarcely requires living Jews. Its source is commonly taken to be the two supersessionist Scriptures that derive from Judaism-in Christianity, the Jews' cry (in the Gospel of Matthew) of "His blood be on us and on our children," the fount of the venomous deicide curse; in Islam, the unwillingness of Jews to follow Mohammed in the furtherance of a latter-day faith which accused the Hebrew Bible of distorting the biblical narratives that appear, Islam claims, more authoritatively and genuinely in the Koran.

But anti-Semitism originated in neither Christianity nor Islam. Its earliest appearance burst out in Egypt, in the fourth century B.C.E., during the reign of Ptolemy II, when Manetho, an Egyptian priest, in a polemic directed against the biblical account in Genesis and Exodus, described a people who "came from Jerusalem" as the descendants of a mob of lepers. Against the Hebrew text, which records Joseph as a wise and visionary governor, Manetho charged that Joseph defiled the shrines and statues of the gods and set fire to villages and towns. Nor did Moses liberate the Hebrews and bring them, under divine guidance, out of Egypt, from slavery to freedom. These offspring of lepers, Manetho declared, were ignominiously expelled, having savagely despoiled the country for thirteen years. Such calumnies soon infiltrated Hellenic literature. The Greeks, detecting no plastic representation of the divine order, were quick to name the Jews atheists-lazy atheists, since once in seven days they refrained from labor. The Greek scholar Mnaseas of Patara recycled an Egyptian myth (traces of it later turned up in Plutarch) which asserted that the Temple in Jerusalem harbored the golden head of an ass, the sole object of the Jews' worship. Another version had the Jews praying before an image of Moses seated on an ass while displaying a book containing laws of hatred for all humanity.

Greek enmity was most acutely encapsulated in the canard spread by Apion, whose contribution to the history of anti-Semitism is the infamously enduring blood libel. In its earliest form a Greek, captured by Jews, is taken to the Temple, fattened, and then killed; his entrails are ritually eaten in conjunction with an oath of hatred toward Greeks. Christian mythology altered Greek to Christian, usually a child, whose blood was said to be drained at Passover for the purpose of being baked into matzah. From its Christian source, the blood libel leached into Muslim societies. It surfaced most recently in a Saudi newspaper, which fantasized Muslim blood in Purim cakes. Mustafa Tlas, the Syrian defense minister, is the author of The Matzah of Zion, which presents the 1841 Damascus blood libel as an established "Jewish ritual." And in a writing contest sponsored by the Palestinian Education Ministry, the winning entry, by a tenth-grader, described a Mother's Day gift an Israeli soldier brings to his mother: "a bottle of the blood of a Palestinian child he has murdered."

Current anti-Semitism, accelerating throughout advanced and sophisticated Europe-albeit under the rubric of anti-Zionism, and masked by the deceptive lingo of human rights-purports to eschew such primitivism. After all, Nazism and Stalinism are universally condemned; anti-Judaism is seen as obscurantist medievalism; the Vatican's theology of deicide was nullified four decades ago; Lutherans, at least in America, vigorously dissociate themselves from their founder's execrations; and whatever the vestiges of Europe's unregenerate (and often Holocaust-denying) Right may think, its vociferous Left would no more depart from deploring the Holocaust than it would be willing to be deprived of its zeal in calumniating the Jewish state. It is easy enough to shed a tear or two for the shed and slandered blood of the Jews of the past; no one will praise Torquemada, or honor Goebbels. But to stand up for truth-telling in the present, in a mythologizing atmosphere of pervasive defamation and fabrication, is not a job for cowards.

In the time of Goebbels, the Big Lie about the Jews was mainly confined to Germany alone; much of the rest of the world saw through it with honest clarity. In our time, the Big Lie (or Big Lies, there are so many) is disseminated everywhere, and not merely by the ignorant, but with malice aforethought by the intellectual classes, the governing elites, the most prestigious elements of the press in all the capitals of Europe, and by the university professors and the diplomats.

The contemporary Big Lie, of course, concerns the Jews of Israel: they are oppressors in the style of the Nazis; they ruthlessly pursue, and perpetuate, "occupation" solely for the sake of domination and humiliation; they purposefully kill Palestinian children; their military have committed massacres; their government "violates international law"; their nationhood and their sovereignty have no legitimacy; they are intruders and usurpers inhabiting an illicit "entity," and not a people entitled as other peoples are entitled; and so on and so on. Reviving both blood libel and deicide, respectable European journals publish political cartoons showing Prime Minister Sharon devouring Palestinian babies, and Israeli soldiers bayoneting the infant Jesus.

Yet the modern history of Jews in the Holy Land overwhelmingly refutes these scurrilities. It is the Arabs, not the Jews, who have been determined to dispose of a people's right to live in peace. Is there any point now-after so many politically willed erasures of fact by Palestinian Arabs, Muslim populations in general, and a mean-spirited European intelligentsia-to recapitulate the long record of Arab hostility that has prevailed since the demise of the Ottoman Empire? The Muslim Arab claim of hegemony (through divine fiat, possessive greed, contempt for pluralism, or all three) over an entire region of the globe accounts for the hundreds of Christian Arabs who have fled Bethlehem, Nablus, Ramallah, and all other places where Muslims dominate-a flight rarely reported. Unsurprisingly, the Christians who have not yet departed blame the Israelis for this displacement, not the Muslim extremists under whose threats of reprisal they live. As for the fate of Jews in the orbit of this self-declared Muslim imperium, the current roar of "resistance to occupation" is notoriously belied by the bloody Arab pogroms of 1920, 1921, 1929, 1936, and 1939, when there was no Jewish state at all, let alone any issue of "settlements." The 1929 attacks left Hebron, the site of an ancient and uninterrupted Jewish community, effectively Judenrein.

What use is there, in the face of brute political and cultural intransigence, to rehearse the events of 1948? In that year Arab rejection of an independent Palestinian state under the UN partition plan led to the invasion by five Arab armies intent on crushing nascent Jewish sovereignty; whole sections of Jerusalem were destroyed or overrun. Nineteen-forty-eight marked the second, though not the first or the last, Arab refusal of Palestinian statehood. The first came in 1937, when under the British Mandate the Peel Commission proposed partition and statehood for the Arabs of Palestine; the last, and most recent, occurred in 2000, when Arafat dismissed statehood in favor of a well-prepared and programmatic violence. (The flouting of the Road Map by Palestinian unwillingness to dismantle terror gangs will have counted as the Palestinians' fourth refusal of statehood; but the Road Map's callously criminalizing equation of civilian inhabitants of Jewish towns-settlements-with Palestinian murder of Jewish civilians is itself egregious.) After 1948, the Arab war against the Jews of Israel continued through the terror incursions of 1956, the Six-Day War of 1967, the Yom Kippur attacks of 1973, and the fomented violence of 1987, the so-called first intifada.

In short, for two-thirds of a century the Arabs have warred against a Jewish presence in "their" part of the world. The 1967 war in defense of Jewish lives (when affected Jews everywhere went into mourning, fearing catastrophe) culminated in Golda Meir's attempt to return, in exchange for peace, the territories which, in the spirit of partition, Israel had never sought to acquire, and had so unexpectedly conquered. The answer came at an Arab summit in Khartoum: no negotiations, no recognition, no peace. So much for the "crime" of occupation.

And though the Oslo accords of 1993 strove yet again for negotiations, most energetically under Ehud Barak, both the Palestinian leadership and the Palestinian public chose killing over compromise-this time with newly conceived atrocities through suicide bombings, always directed against civilians, in buses, cafés, restaurants, supermarkets, or wherever Israelis peacefully congregate.

This is the history that is ignored or denigrated or distorted or spitefully misrepresented. And because it is a history that has been assaulted and undermined by world-wide falsehoods in the mouths of pundits and journalists, in Europe and all over the Muslim world, the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism has finally and utterly collapsed. It is only sophistry, disingenuousness, and corrupted conscience that continue to insist on such a distinction. To fail to trace the pernicious consistencies of Arab political aims from 1920 until today, despite temporary pretensions otherwise, is to elevate intellectual negligence to a principle. To transmogrify self-defense into aggression is to invite an Orwellian horse-laugh. To identify occupation as Israel's primal sin-the most up-to-date Hep! of all-is to be blind to Arab actions and intentions before 1967, and to be equally blind to Israel's repeated commitments to negotiated compromise. On the Palestinian side, the desire to eradicate Jewish nationhood increases daily: it is as if 1948 has returned, replicated in the guise of fanatical young "martyrs" systematically indoctrinated in kindergartens and schools and camps-concerning whom it is cant to say, as many do, that they strap detonators to their loins because they are without hope. It is hope that inflames them.*

Perhaps the most bizarre display of international anti-Semitism was flaunted at Durban, during a UN conference ostensibly called to condemn "Racism, Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance." Plucked from the refuse heap, the old UN canard, "Zionism is racism," together with a determined Arab hijacking of the agenda, brought about the bitterest irony of all: a virulent hatred under the auspices of anti-hatred. At Durban the Jewish state was declared to have been conceived in infamy, Jewish representatives were threatened, and language was violated more savagely than at any time since the Nazi era. "Political language," said Orwell, "is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind." Yet the rant that emerged at Durban-those instantly recognizable snarls of anti-Semitism-hardly merited the term "political." It had the venerable sound of the mob: Hep! Hep! Hep!

Among the sophists and intellectuals, the tone is subtler. Here it is not Jewish lives that are put in jeopardy so much as it is Jewish sensibility and memory that are humbled and mocked. Pressing political analogies, however apt, are dismissed as "confused" or "odious." When history is invoked, it is said to be for purposes of coarse extortion: Israel is charged, for instance, with "using" the Holocaust as sympathetic coinage to be spent on victimizing others. In a New York Times Magazine piece called "How to Talk About Israel," Ian Buruma, alluding to Israel's 1981 demolishment of Iraq's nuclear installation, contends that "it might have been justified in many legitimate ways"-but he derides Menachem Begin's appeal to the memory of the one and a half million Jewish children who were annihilated by the applied technology of an earlier barbarous regime. Is the imagination's capacity to connect worthy of such scorn, or is this how human beings ought to think and feel? Saddam Hussein's nuclear bomb was plainly a present danger to living Israeli children; and conscious of the loss of so many children within the lifetime of a generation, Jewish memory declines to be untender. Nor is the denigration of tenderness a pretty trait in itself, or a sign of rational objectivity. "The politics of the Middle East may be murderous," Buruma comments, "but it is not helpful to see them as an existential battle between good and evil." This suggests a popular contemporary form of liberal zealotry, very nearly the mirror-image of religious fanaticism-a great wash of devotedly obstinate indifference to the moral realities of human behavior and motivation, a willed inability to distinguish one thing from another thing. A switchblade is not a butter knife; the difference between them is "existential." And "not helpful" is one of those doggedly bland (yet contemptuous) jargonlike therapeutic phrases that reveals a mind in need of a dose of Dostoyevsky. Or of Mark Twain, who understood the real nature of what he dubbed "evil joy."

I would not wish to equate, in any manner or degree, the disparagement of Jewish memory and sensibility with anti-Semitism, a term that must be reserved for deadlier intentions. Disparagement is that much lighter species of dismissal that is sometimes designated as "social anti-Semitism," and is essentially a type of snobbery. Snobbery falls well short of lethal hatred-but it conveys more than a touch of insolence, and insolence in a political context can begin to be worrisome. It vibrates at the outer margins of "that shitty little country"; it is, one might say, not helpful.

Judith Butler, identifying herself as a Jew in the London Review of Books, makes the claim that linking "Zionism with Jewishness . is adopting the very tactic favored by anti-Semites." A skilled sophist (one might dare to say solipsist), she tosses those who meticulously chart and expose anti-Semitism's disguises into the same bin as the anti-Semites themselves. Having accused Israel of the "dehumanization of Palestinians"; having acknowledged that she was a signatory to a petition opposing "the Israeli occupation, though in my mind it is not nearly strong enough: it did not call for the end of Zionism"; and having acknowledged also that (explicitly) as a Jew she seeks "to widen the rift between the state of Israel and the Jewish people," she writes:

It will not do to equate Jews with Zionists or Jewishness with Zionism .. It is one thing to oppose Israel in its current form and practices or, indeed, to have critical questions about Zionism itself, but it is quite another to oppose "Jews" or assume that all "Jews" have the same view; that they are all in favor of Israel, identified with Israel, or represented by Israel .. To say that all Jews hold a given view on Israel or are adequately represented by Israel, or, conversely, that the acts of Israel, the state, adequately stand for the acts of all Jews, is to conflate Jews with Israel and, thereby, to commit an anti-Semitic reduction of Jewishness.

One can surely agree with Butler that not all Jews are "in favor of Israel": she is a dazzling model of one who is not, and she cites, by name, a handful of "post-Zionists" in Israel proper, whom she praises. But her misunderstanding of anti-Semitism is profound; she theorizes rifts and demarcations, borders and dikes; she is sunk in self-deception. The "good" anti-Zionists, she believes, the ones who speak and write in splendidly cultivated English, will never do her or her fellow Jews any harm; they are not like the guttersnipe anti-Semites who behave so badly. It is true that she appears to have everything in common with those Western literary intellectuals (e.g., Tom Paulin and the late Edward Said) whose aspirations are indistinguishable from her own: that Israel "in its current form" ought to disappear. Or, as Paulin puts it, "I never believed that Israel had the right to exist at all." Tony Judt, a professor of European history, confirms this baleful view; writing in The New York Review of Books, he dismisses the Jewish state as-alone among the nations-"an anachronism."

Yet Butler's unspoken assumption is that consonance, or collusion, with those who would wish away the Jewish state will earn one a standing in the European, if not the global, anti-Zionist world club. To a degree she may be right: the congenial welcome she received in a prestigious British journal confirms it, and she is safe enough, for the nonce, in those rarefied places where, as George Eliot has it (with a word altered), it would be "difficult to find a form of bad reasoning about [Zionism] which had not been heard in conversation or been admitted to the dignity of print." In that company she is at home. There she is among friends.

But George Eliot's Zionist views are notorious; she is partial to Jewish national liberation. A moment, then, for the inventor of the pound of flesh. Here is Cinna, the poet, on his way to Caesar's funeral:

Citizen: As a friend or an enemy?

Cinna: As a friend.

Citizen: Your name, sir, truly.

Cinna: Truly, my name is Cinna.

Citizen: Tear him to pieces; he's a conspirator.

Cinna: I am Cinna the poet, I am Cinna the poet! I am not Cinna the conspirator!

Citizen: It is no matter, his name's Cinna .. Tear him, tear him! Come, brands, ho! firebrands! Burn all!

And here is Butler, the theorist, on her way to widen the rift between the state of Israel and the Jewish people:

-As a friend, or as a Zionist?

Butler: As an anti-Zionist Jew.

-Tear her to pieces, she's a Jew.

Butler: I am Butler the anti-Zionist, I am Butler the anti-Zionist! I am not Butler the Zionist!

What's in a name? Ah, the curse of mistaken identity. How many politically conforming Jews will suffer from it, even as they toil to distance themselves from the others, those benighted Jews who admit to being "in favor of Israel"? As for that nobly desired rift, one can rely on Hep! to close it. To comprehend this is to comprehend anti-Semitism at its root. And to assert, as Butler does, that in the heart of this understanding lurks "the very tactic favored by anti-Semites" is not merely sophistry; not merely illusion; but simple stupidity, of a kind only the most subtle intellectuals are capable of.

The melancholy encounter with anti-Semitism is not, after all, coequal with Jewish history; the history of oppression belongs to the culture of the oppressors. The long, long Jewish narrative is in reality a procession of ideas and ideals, of ethical legislation and ethical striving, of the study of books and the making of books. It is not a chronicle of victimhood, despite the centuries of travail, and despite the corruptions of the hour, when the vocabulary of human rights is too often turned ubiquitously on its head. So contaminated have the most treasured humanist words become, that when one happens on a mass of placards emblazoned with "peace," "justice," and the like, one can see almost at once what is afoot-a collection of so-called anti-globalization rioters declaiming defamation of Israel, or an anti-Zionist campus demonstration (not always peaceful), or any anti-Zionist herd of lockstep radicals, such as ANSWER, or the self-proclaimed International Parliament of Writers, or the International Solidarity Movement, which (in the name of human rights) shields terrorists. Or even persons who are distinguished and upright. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who marched at Selma, and who was impassioned in protesting the Vietnam war, appealed to his peace-and-justice colleagues to sign a declaration condemning the massacre of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Olympics. Too many refused.

It is long past time (pace Buruma, pace Butler) when the duplicitous "rift" between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism can be logically sustained. Whether in its secular or religious expression, Zionism is, in essence, the modern flowering of a vast series of diverse intellectual and pietistic movements, all of them steeped in the yearning for human dignity-symbolized by the Exodus from slavery-that has characterized Jewish civilization for millennia. Contempt and defamation from without have sometimes infiltrated the abject psyches of defeatist Jews, who then begin to judge themselves according to the prevailing canards. Such Jews certainly are not what is commonly called self-haters, since they are motivated by the preening self-love that congratulates itself on always "seeing the other side." Not self-haters, no; low moral cowards, rather, often trailing uplifting slogans.

Anti-Semitism is a foolish word; we appear to be stuck with it. "Semitism" has virtually no meaning. The Semites are a linguistic group encompassing Hebrew, Akkadian, Amharic, and Arabic. The argument one occasionally gets wind of-that Arabs, being Semites, cannot be charged with anti-Semitism, or that any objection to Arab political conduct is itself an instance of anti-Semitism-is nothing if not risible. Anti-Semitism (a term fabricated a century ago by a euphemistic German anti-Semite) signifies hatred of Jews, and hatred's easy corollary: a steady drive to weaken, to hurt, and to extirpate Jews.

Still, one must ask: why the Jews? A sad old joke pluckily confronts the enigma:

-The Jews and the bicyclists are at the bottom of all the world's ills.

-Why the bicyclists?

-Why the Jews?

-implying that blaming one set of irrelevancies is just as irrational as blaming the other. Ah, but it is never the bicyclists, and it is always the Jews. There are innumerable social, economic, and political speculations as to cause: scapegoatism; envy; exclusionary practices; the temptation of a demographic majority to subjugate a demographic minority; the attempt by corrupt rulers to deflect attention from the failings of their tyrannical regimes; and more. But any of these can burst out in any society against any people-so why always the Jews? A metaphysical explanation is proffered: the forceful popular resistance to what Jewish civilization represents-the standard of ethical monotheism and its demands on personal and social conscience. Or else it is proposed, in Freudian terms, that Christianity and Islam, each in its turn, sought to undo the parent religion, which was seen as an authoritative rival it was needful to surpass and displace.

This last notion, however, has no standing in contemporary Christianity. In nearly all Christian communities, there is remorse for the old theologically instigated crimes, and serious internal moral restitution, much of it of a very high order. But a salient fact remains, perhaps impolitic to note: relief has come through Christianity's having long been depleted of temporal power. Today's Islamists, by contrast, are supported and succored by states: Iran, Syria (and Lebanon, its vassal), Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Libya, Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt (which suppresses its domestic extremists, while its official press, film industry, and other institutions encourage anti-Zionist incitements). Iranian weapons flood into Gaza, whether by sea or through tunnels from Egypt. Saudi Arabia not long ago unashamedly broadcast a telethon to collect millions to be sent to Palestinian terror gangs; it continues today as Hamas's chief funder. And though Saddam Hussein is finally gone, it will not be forgotten that he honored and enriched the families of suicide bombers. (I observe a telltale omission: those who deny any linkage between Iraq and terror universally discount Saddam's lavish payments to Hamas and Islamic Jihad.)

The riddle of anti-Semitism-why always the Jews?-survives as an apparently eternal irritant. The German-Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, writing in 1916 (in italics) of "hatred of the Jews," remarked to a friend, "You know as well as I do that all its realistic arguments are only fashionable cloaks." The state of Israel is our era's fashionable cloak-mainly on the Left in the West, and centrally and endemically among the populations of the Muslim despotisms. But if one cannot account for the tenacity of anti-Semitism, one can readily identify it. It wears its chic disguises. It breeds on the tongues of liars. The lies may be noisy and primitive and preposterous, like the widespread Islamist charge (doggerelized by New Jersey's poet laureate) that a Jewish conspiracy leveled the Twin Towers. Or the lies may take the form of skilled patter in a respectable timbre, while retailing sleight-of-hand trickeries-such as the hallucinatory notion that the defensive measures of a perennially beleaguered people constitute colonization and victimization; or that the Jewish state is to blame for the aggressions committed against it. Lies shoot up from the rioters in Gaza and Ramallah. Insinuations ripple out of the high tables of Oxbridge. And steadily, whether from the street or the salon, one hears the enduring old cry: Hep! Hep! Hep!

*As I write, fresh news arrives-evidence of the fulfillment of one martyr's hope. An Israeli doctor and his twenty-year-old daughter have this day been blown up together in a café, where they had gone for a father-daughter talk on the eve of the young woman's marriage. She had been devoting her year of national service to the care of children with cancer; her ambition was to study medicine for the sake of such children. Her father was an eminent and remarkable physician, the tireless head of a hospital emergency room which tends the victims of terror attacks. He had just returned from the United States, where he was instructing American doctors in the life-saving emergency techniques he had pioneered. Father and daughter were buried on what was to have been the daughter's wedding day.

MARWAN BARGHOUTI CONVICTED ON TERROR CHARGES

The founder of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, Marwan Barghouti, was today convicted of three terror attacks in which 5 Israelis were killed, and of attempted murder, and conspiring to commit a crime. He was acquitted of 33 other terror attacks in which he was charged, due to the prosecution not having proved beyond a reasonable doubt that he directly planned the logistics of those attacks. The prosecution is now seeking five life-terms. Sentencing will take place next month.

Among the attacks for which Barghouti was found guilty:

March 2002: Three Israelis were murdered and 31 wounded in a machine attack on diners at a Tel Aviv restaurant.

January 2002: Terror attack on a gas station in Givat Zeev in which one Israeli was murdered. The attack was carried out at Barghouti's direct order, and Barghouti admitted his responsibility for this attack.

June 2001: A Greek monk (who was mistaken for an orthodox Jew) was murdered in a drive-by shooting in Ma'aleh Adumim.

Barghouti was also convicted of organizing an attempted car bombing at Jerusalem's Malcha mall. Barghouti was captured during what Israel called Operation Defensive Shield in Jenin and elsewhere in April 2002.

The judges ruled today that the prosecution had failed to prove beyond any doubt Barghouti's involvement in the infamous