A Psychohistorical View of Anti-Semitism after September 11

September 11 produced the defense mechanism of “infantile regression.” Many people who experience a serious trauma will revert to an earlier stage of their psychological development. This is not a conscious process but an involuntary reaction of the psyche struggling to cope with a painful situation. People experiencing this regression are usually unaware of this dynamic.

Mature adults idolizing police and firefighters, as most of us did in childhood, is an example of this regression. Another instance is the desire for a strong father image to protect them from the threat of harm. For example, Rudy Giuliani, one of the most abrasive politicians in recent times, has been transformed into the Churchill of the 21^st century in the aftermath of the Islamists’ attack, largely for – in Woody Allen’s words – just “showing up.” In August of 2001, President Bush was still being chided for being an “unelected” intellectual lightweight, who regularly mangled the English language. The 43^rd President is now our “Great Helmsman,” with an 80 percent-plus approval rating in the polls.

The simple, and fairly obvious, fact is that neither the former mayor nor the current President has changed his spots. It is our perception of these men that has changed. It is our need for the “man on horseback” that affects our view of them. The vastly differing personalities of Bush and Giuliani underscore this basic psychological alchemy.

Another familiar facet of regression is “scapegoating.” Jews are well aware of this concept because their progenitors have been subject, for at least a millennium, to “blood libels” and the label of “Christ-killers.” Many scholars date “modern” anti-Semitism to the Crusades.

Over the past six months, I have catalogued a marked increase in pro-Palestinian articles in both the national and local print media. Most of these articles stem from long-term opponents of the State of Israel, i.e., the Roman Catholic Church, the mainline Protestant denominations, and much of what might be loosely called the political left. (Parenthetically, I would note that most of these people do not consider themselves as being anti-Semitic but do sometimes define themselves as anti-Zionist.)

The gross number of these published plaints has increased significantly since September 11 and the rhetoric has become much more strident. The leitmotif of the majority of these articles is that if only Israel would be reasonable, there would be peace in the Levant. The subtext, however, is au courant but rarely unarticulated: the U.S.’ pulling back from its support of Israel would reduce the likelihood of future terrorist attacks on the Homeland from Islamist fundamentalists. Not a single one of the articles that I have catalogued advocates any other changes in American conduct. I view this as “garden variety” scapegoating and, in my opinion, it is not only intellectually dishonest but, I would suggest, presumptively anti-Semitic. I shall expand on these latter assertions.

We have no credible statements about the motivation(s) for September 11 but we do have the self-report from its alleged mullah concerning the attack on the U.S.S. Cole during the latter months of the Clinton administration. In this missive, bin Laden voiced three basic plaints: the U.S. presence in Saudi Arabia, the continued U.N. sanctions against Iraq, and U.S. support for the State of Israel.

This raises a simple question: Why would someone seeking psychological security from further predations upon the Homeland only endorse the last item on the mullah’s agenda? Why not also call for withdrawal from Saudi Arabia? Why not also oppose the sanctions against Iraq? Why do these critics only address what they see as Israeli intransigence – and U.S. acquiescence in it – as the problem that the U.S. has with the militant Islamists? When pressed, many of these critics reply, “I am not anti-Semitic but I am anti-Zionist”

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as a rationale for their criticism.

This canard ranks with “some of my best friends are” and, I would suggest, was laid permanently to rest by Martin Luther King, Jr., in an article in the Saturday Review some six months before he died. King, who is now a national icon, wrote in 1967: “So know also this: anti-Zionism is inherently anti-Semitic, and ever will be so.” As the old proverb puts it, “Israel is a three-legged stove: It rests on the people, the book, and the land.” Dr. King recognized the truth of this aphorism and its rejection underlies many of the current articles criticizing actions of the State of Israel.

Even those critics who give lip-service to Israel’s “right to exist” – what arrogance in this phrase – generally favor a postage stamp-sized nation, something akin to the boundaries set in the U.N. partition in 1948. The militant Islamists and their supporters in the Moslem world do not favor Israel’s continued existence. Their manifest and oft-expressed goal is to “push Israel into the sea.”

This is not to say, of course, that every person or entity who criticizes Israel is anti-Semitic but they do make common cause with the anti-Semites. Consequently, I would label some of the political critics, for example, former California Governor Jerry Brown and ex-pundit Pat Buchanan, as presumptively anti-Semitic.

One of the great unanswered sociological questions is why have the Jews, a small, non-descript tribe – a people who could vanish without a trace on the steppes of Russia or on the Asian subcontinent – generated such hatred over so long a period of time? I hesitate to even hazard an answer to this question but suspect that it has something to do with the divine mandate.

Susan Sontag poses another related question in her forward to Leonard Tsypkin’s Summer in Baden-Baden. A Russian dissident who died in 1982 wrote the book but it was just recently published in the U.S. (and reviewed in The New York Times on March 3, 2002).

Both Tsypkin and Sontag meditate on the persona of Fydor Dostoyevsky, a gross anti-Semite even by 19^th-century Russian standards. They both ask, How can we love and revere a man who hates us from the very core of his being? Sontag ultimately concludes that if one loves literature, then one must love Dostoyevsky. Tsypkin ends his book with a pilgrimage – no other word will suffice – to Dostoyevsky’s home in St. Petersburg and an imagined deathbed scene that Sontag calls “Nvorthy of Tolstoy.” It is clear that Tsypkin, too, reveres this anti-Semite. Both Sontag and Tsypkin seem like battered spouses, people whose love for the oppresssor overrides the ordinary hedonistic calculus.

In a similar vein, I have concluded that part of the great wisdom of Bereshit is that one cannot curse creation – or any part of it – without cursing the creator. If my premise is true then the converse is also true.

For those who prefer a mythological gloss in this matter, I would commend Bemidbar wherein a Moabite king engages a pagan soothsayer to curse the Israelites (“A people that dwells apart, not reckoned among the nations.” Numbers 23:9) However, the plan goes disastrously array for both Balak, the king, and Baalam, the soothsayer. Louis Newman in The Hasidic Anthology (1987) puts this gloss on the story: “The secret of Israel’s survival is that it has gone its way, regardless of what other nations might think or say in praise or scorn.”

There has been no people in recorded history who have been more reviled and persecuted than the seed of Abraham and Sarah. Consequently, I would suggest that the latter-day critics of the State of Israel – lest they be mistaken for and/or numbered amongst the anti-Semites – have an affirmative duty to examine their position and set forth clearly why they are concerned with the Levant rather than, say, Bangladesh, Somalia, or Zaire. If they fail to do this, either as a matter of personal reflection or in print, then I have no trouble with labeling them as “fellow travelers” with Mohamed Atta (but not, of course, nearly so brave as the shaheed) and the network of Islamists.

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