By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
One of the worst things anyone can do is to compare the situation between Israelis and Palestinians today to the Holocaust, says Stuart Schoffman, Associate Editor of the Jerusalem Report and a speaking consultant for the Anti-Defamation League. He called his proclamation crucial in using history to explain anti-Semitism today.
Schoffman, who was in town for several speaking engagements for the ADL, gave a short history of anti-Semitism to a small audience and in an interview afterward. He began with the Exodus, which, he said, is considered by many Egyptians to be the first expulsion of the Hebrews, who were considered “a blight on Egypt.” He then jumped to the third century BCE—the point of intersection between ancient Egypt and ancient Greece, and when Jews were first singled out for holding onto their traditions—before approaching more modern times.
“To achieve understanding of what’s going on in Jewish life today it’s helpful to constantly go back to the sources of Jewish history,” Schoffman said.
Aside from his vast amount of reading on current events to give him insight into the analyses that are his bread and butter, Schoffman said he spends a good deal of time studying midrash and history to better understand people’s thought processes today. He also studies each week with his rabbi at the progressive Kol HaNeshamah congregation in Jerusalem.
“It has everything to do with mindset, mentality, with psychology, with what kind of psychological and emotional baggage people bring—often unconsciously—to where they are now sitting,” he said.
He cited a poll taken for an Italian newspaper a year ago that cited 46 percent of respondents considering Jews in their nation as “different.”
“What it is saying is that the notion of Italian Jew is not the same as Italian Italian,” Schoffman said. “That’s the fundamental difference between Europe and America, that Europe doesn’t have the hyphen the way America does.”
He noted that in some ways there are differences, which is not always a negative. “They are not going to go to church, and they are going to celebrate Pesach, and if that’s a lifestyle difference, so be it,” Schoffman said.
Though he said that surveys like this one might show the seeds of anti-Semitism, there should be a line drawn that distinguishes between dislike of Jews and dislike of a Jewish state—17 percent of the survey’s respondents said that Israel should no longer exist, but that number did not necessarily reflect a hatred of Jewish people.
But anti-Zionism is not exclusive to non-Jews. Before World War II, there was significant anti-Zionism among Jews themselves, which Schoffman cautioned is different from anti-Semitism.
“Anti-Zionism has a long and venerable history within Judaism,” he said. “It was seen as a way of separating Jews.”
The Holocaust changed that attitude, but a steady campaign that has increased from many different sides over the past four years has begun to shift it back. Schoffman said that efforts to undermine the morale of the Jewish State have been “an abject failure,” but at the same time the prestige Israel once enjoyed among many Jews has been lost.
So why has so much hatred for Israel—and to an increasing extent Jews in general—bubbled up over the past few years?
“A virus which is present all the time will be able to infect if your immune system is down,” said Schoffman, referring to anti-Semitism. “Nobody is at their best when dealing with terrorism. All the more so a nation that has lived on its image.”
For half a century, the Holocaust also gave the idea of anti-Semitism a bad name.
“A lid over Hitler’s bunker sealed the viruses,” said Schoffman, “and along comes the intifada that pries up that lid ever so slightly.”
Much of the current world opinion toward Israel can be traced to a conference that took place in South Africa in 2001, according to Schoffman. Several Arab groups circulated an anti-Israel document decrying the treatment of Palestinians, which was signed by approximately 6,000 non-governmental organizations.
“What happened in Durban in August 2001 became the hootenanny of anti-Semitism,” said Schoffman, who noted that groups without any interest or connection to Israel signed the document.
That the idea of Israel’s very existence has come into question over the course of the intifada is undeniable. Detractors can point to an incident at an Israeli checkpoint last December, when a Palestinian who was commanded to open his violin case during a routine check for explosives picked up his instrument and began to play.
While images of the violinist shocked many Israelis because of the similarity to Jewish musicians forced by Nazis to play at the entrance to the death camps, Schoffman said it was still unclear as to whether the soldiers actually forced him to do it.
“If that man had voluntarily picked up the violin to play, it would have been a brilliant move of civil disobedience,” he said. Israel was widely condemned for the incident, which, whether true or not, served to “undercut their moral authority.”
To shift course, both sides need to stop using historical precedent as claims for who has the higher ground, and therefore rights to the land.
“We have to find another way to restart the story to live side-by-side,” Schoffman said.
That may already be happening. With a cease-fire announced on the day of Schoffman’s talk and optimism beginning to run high, “we are now at the most promising moment we have been at in a long time,” he said. But that means no longer putting items off for later, and creating something that “will resemble an actual solution.”
“We get recognition, they get land. We get end of conflict, they get land,” he said. “What are you going to do? Any other scenario can be either hopelessly bloody or apocalyptic.
“Given the capacity for religiously fueled violence and extremism in Israel,” Schoffman said, “there’s no limit to what the imagination could conjure to torpedo this overnight.”