Disproportionate

Last week Eva Peek wrote in NRC newspaper that she was disappointed by how little we have collectively learned from the Shoah. Nearly eighty years of commemorations and reflection on complicity and the ease with which the extermination of Jews could take place at the time, have not led to “a widely supported, refined knowledge of anti-Semitic stereotypes”. She is  disappointed, because that’s what she had hoped for.

I must say, I don’t completely agree with Peek. I am not disappointed with what I come across in national newspapers and news channels (so I am emphatically not talking about social media). Good journalists could stop at comparing the number of victims of Palestinian violence (around 1,600, including fallen soldiers) with the number of victims of Israeli bombs (more than 10,000), and then zoom in on the imbalance. That certainly happens, but there is also a remarkable amount of attention for the destructive impact of centuries of exclusion and persecution, culminating in the attempt at total destruction. The traumatization that has been built up over generations and has grown almost into a genetic predisposition, in its ugly depth, also represents an imbalance that we have to deal with. Not only Jews, but also, or especially, those (Western) societies that have fueled the traumas for centuries. The apparently felt need – at least in the better journalistic circles – to mention this can explain why a relatively large number of fairly in-depth articles have been published in the past month about (the history of) anti-Semitism, as well as nuanced interviews about Jewish fears and traumas that appear to pop up life-size from nothing these days.

By comparison: in 1940 I would not have wanted to vouch for the ‘better journalistic circles’ in terms of views on Jews, certainly not for the confessional part of those circles. Jewish stereotypes were accepted at face value, even by the ‘right-minded’ people of the time. It seems that decades of commemorations are now providing a broader perspective here. On the other hand, classic anti-Semitism is rapidly spreading to other parts of the world, partly due to current events.

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Two kinds of poison

Two kinds of poison bother me: CO2 in the air worldwide, and the anti-Semitism in the soil, traditionally the European-Russian soil but now steadily spreading to the Middle East and North Africa. The two poisons cause equal desperation, and I often don't know what to focus on. Around Dutch Liberation-day at May 4 of this year, confronted for the umpteenth time with the fathomless and inky abysses of the extermination camps, I wondered why actually I’m so concerned about the climate and a possible physical end of humanity. After all, wasn't humanity already morally bankrupt eighty years ago? Nevertheless, I wholeheartedly supported the occupation of the highway A12 and other disruptive actions by Extinction Rebellion (XR). Protesting against climate-threatening poison is always a good thing anyway, I thought.

At the moment the other poison concerns me more, mainly because of the speed and ease with which it is released. Our Dutch and European soil must be saturated to the brim with it, otherwise the eagerness with which anti-Israeli aggression flared up shortly after Hamas’ sadistic mass murder of Israeli civilians cannot be explained. As early as October 9, it was reported in one of the TV-shows that the mass murder was serious, but “that the Jews did ask for it to some extent.” On October 11, before the devastating Israeli bombings, the Palestinian flag was projected on the Rotterdam Eurotower by a department of XR. The obvious phase of understanding or compassion for Jewish Dutch people was virtually skipped, and (according to the Dutch paper NRC) “the switch was made immediately to a particularly aggressive form of solidarity with the Palestinians – often resulting in unadulterated anti-Semitism.” Katya Tolstoy, the outgoing National Theologian, says: “Because of the war in Gaza I feel a wave of anti-Semitism here, I know that from the Soviet Union.”

I knew that poison is in our soil – how could it be otherwise after hundreds of years of initially Christian-inspired and then secular anti-Semitic ideas? That is sunken socio-cultural heritage, so to speak. But that it is so flammable, in such large concentrations and so close to the surface, that scares me. And I also find it shocking that Extinction Rebellion is not the hygienic organization I thought it to be. Instead of fighting the anti-Semitic poison as it fights CO2, XR subsidizes its spread. Now that it appears that XR is just as blind to the social poison as the oil industry is to the greenhouse gas, the movement has become redundant for me. I think I know where my attention will be focused for the time being: on the anti-Semitic poison, that is, on the question of how the mechanism works by which one group can be blamed for literally everything, including the greenhouse gas.

By the way, I am of the opinion that the A12 should remain occupied. And the West Bank should not.

For another account of unconcerned anti-Semitism, see also Ironic. 

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