Anti-Semitism’s Presentable Cousin

Columnist  speaks to Judea Pearl

A few months ago, UCLA Professor Judea Pearl suggested an interesting formula to fight racism on campus. Instead of regarding anti-Zionism as a flimsy cover for anti-Semitism, as we usually do, we should go further and view anti-Zionism itself as racist. "Framing anti-Zionism as racism is precisely the weapon that our students need for survival on campus," he argued on the pages of The Jewish Journal Of Greater Los Angeles.

Dr. Pearl, whose academic field is artificial intelligence, is the father of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter abducted and murdered by terrorists in Pakistan. It happened four years ago, almost to the day. Last night, I talked with the late foreign correspondent′s father on the phone.

Like his son, Dr. Pearl believes in dialogue. He runs the Daniel Pearl Foundation with the aim of carrying on his son′s legacy, defined as "using music and words to help people better understand one another." This may sound a bit like the credo of a bleeding-heart liberal, but only until one realizes that for Dr. Pearl "dialogue" isn′t a code word for displaying the white flag. For the UCLA scholar, "dialogue" means words of firm purpose, fighting words if necessary, not words as substitute for surrender...

"Anti-Zionism is racism" is more than a neat reversal of the infamous (and eventually rescinded) United Nations formula of "Zionism is racism." To quip that one opposes anti-Semitism because it may lead to anti-Zionism would merely be clever, akin to saying that Baptists oppose sex because it may lead to dancing. But Dr. Pearl is offering a thesis, not a bon mot. As he explains it,"Anti-Zionism earns its racist character from denying the Jewish people what it grants to other collectives (e.g. Spanish, Palestinians), namely, the right to nationhood and self-determination."

Dr. Pearl′s words ring familiar. They echo words I heard more than 60 years ago,inside a Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Budapest, during heated debates between my Zionist uncle and my non-Zionist father.

The year was 1944. Israel did not yet exist. European Jews were facing Hitler′s "final solution," that is, extermination. A homeland for Jews seemed like a lifeboat for people drowning at sea. Yet my father opposed Zionism. A liberal internationalist, he considered any form of nationalism a disease, including Jewish nationalism. This outraged my Zionist uncle.

"Explain to me why," he demanded. "Why isn′t it a disease for Frenchmen to live together in a country called France? Why isn′t it a disease for the Dutch to live together in a country called Holland? And if it′s not a disease for them,why is it a disease for Jews to live together in a country called Israel?"

My father, of course, considered nationalism a disease for the French and the Dutch no less than for the Jews -- or, if not exactly a disease, an outmoded form of social organization that would soon be as obsolete as the horse and buggy. He saw no reason for Jews to start building, through Zionism, a type of edifice for themselves that was about to be abandoned by everybody else.

As we now know, my father turned out to be wrong in this view, or at least premature. Nation-states are thriving in the 21st century -- and they′re also considered to be legitimate forms of social organizations for groups to aspire to, attain, or preserve.

All groups, that is, except the Jews, according to anti- or post-Zionists. Which is why Dr. Pearl has a point. Anti-Zionism, whatever it may have been 60 years ago, does have a racist tinge today. The current climate considers all national aspirations legitimate, except that of the Jews.

This being so, one is tempted to agree with Dr. Pearl that anti-Zionism is worse than anti-Semitism. First, it′s more dire in its potential consequences. "As a form of racism," Pearl writes, "it targets the most vulnerable part of the Jewish people, namely, the people of Israel, who rely on the sovereignty of their state for physical safety, national identity and personal dignity."

Next, anti-Zionism may have a greater chance of acculturation than anti-Semitism. "While people of conscience reject anti-Semitism, anti-Zionist rhetoric has become a mark of academic sophistication and social acceptance in Europe and in some U.S. campuses," Pearl observes.

Indeed, people who would feel traumatized if accused of anti-Semitism, might shrug off a charge of anti-Zionism, or even embrace it with pride.

UCLA′s professor of artificial intelligence offers his formula as anti-Zionism=racism. To me it seems to compute.