Anti-Semitism in Britain

George Orwell
Written February 1945

THERE are about 400,000 known Jews in Britain, and in addition some thousands or, at most, scores of thousands of Jewish refugees who have entered the country from 1934 onwards. The Jewish population is almost entirely concentrated in half a dozen big towns and is mostly employed in the food, clothing and furniture trades. A few of the big monopolies, such as the I.C.I., one or two leading newspapers and at least one big chain of department stores are Jewish-owned or partly Jewish-owned, but it would be very far from the truth to say that British business life is dominated by Jews. The Jews seem, on the contrary, to have failed to keep up with the modern tendency towards big amalgamations and to have remained fixed in those trades which are necessarily carried out on a small scale and by old-fashioned methods.

I start off with these background facts, which are already known to any well-informed person, in order to emphasise that there is no real Jewish “problem” in England. The Jews are not numerous or powerful enough, and it is only in what are loosely called “intellectual circles” that they have any noticeable influence. Yet it is generally admitted that anti-Semitism is on the increase, that it has been greatly exacerbated by the war, and that humane and enlightened people are not immune to it. It does not take violent forms (English people are almost invariably gentle and law-abiding), but it is ill-natured enough, and in favourable circumstances it could have political results. Here are some samples of anti-Semitic remarks that have been made to me during the past year or two:

Middle-aged office employee: “I generally come to work by bus. It takes longer, but I don’t care about using the Underground from Golders Green nowadays. There’s too many of the Chosen Race travelling on that line.”

Tobacconist (woman): “No, I’ve got no matches for you. I should try the lady down the street. She’s always got matches. One of the Chosen Race, you see.”

Young intellectual, Communist or near-Communist: “No, I do not like Jews. I’ve never made any secret of that. I can’t stick them. Mind you, I’m not anti-Semitic, of course.”

Middle-class woman: “Well, no one could call me anti-Semitic, but I do think the way these Jews behave is too absolutely stinking. The way they push their way to the head of queues, and so on. They’re so abominably selfish. I think they’re responsible for a lot of what happens to them.”

Milk roundsman: “A Jew don’t do no work, not the same as what an Englishman does. ’E’s too clever. We work with this ’ere” (flexes his biceps). “They work with that there” (taps his forehead).

Chartered accountant, intelligent, left-wing in an undirected way: “These bloody Yids are all pro-German. They’d change sides tomorrow if the Nazis got here. I see a lot of them in my business. They admire Hitler at the bottom of their hearts. They’ll always suck up to anyone who kicks them.”

Intelligent woman, on being offered a book dealing with anti-Semitism and German atrocities: “Don’t show it me, please don’t show it to me. It’ll only make me hate the Jews more than ever.”

I could fill pages with similar remarks, but these will do to go on with. Two facts emerge from them. One—which is very important and which I must return to in a moment—is that above a certain intellectual level people are ashamed of being anti-Semitic and are careful to draw a distinction between “anti-Semitism” and “disliking Jews”. The other is that anti-Semitism is an irrational thing. The Jews are accused of specific offences (for instance, bad behaviour in food queues) which the person speaking feels strongly about, but it is obvious that these accusations merely rationalise some deep-rooted prejudice. To attempt to counter them with facts and statistics is useless, and may sometimes be worse than useless. As the last of the above-quoted remarks shows, people can remain anti-Semitic, or at least anti-Jewish, while being fully aware that their outlook is indefensible. If you dislike somebody, you dislike him and there is an end of it: your feelings are not made any better by a recital of his virtues.

It so happens that the war has encouraged the growth of anti-Semitism and even, in the eyes of many ordinary people, given some justification for it. To begin with, the Jews are one people of whom it can be said with complete certainty that they will benefit by an Allied victory. Consequently the theory that “this is a Jewish war” has a certain plausibility, all the more so because the Jewish war effort seldom gets its fair share of recognition. The British Empire is a huge heterogeneous organisation held together largely by mutual consent, and it is often necessary to flatter the less reliable elements at the expense of the more loyal ones. To publicise the exploits of Jewish soldiers, or even to admit the existence of a considerable Jewish army in the Middle East, rouses hostility in South Africa, the Arab countries and elsewhere: it is easier to ignore the whole subject and allow the man in the street to go on thinking that Jews are exceptionally clever at dodging military service. Then again, Jews are to be found in exactly those trades which are bound to incur unpopularity with the civilian public in war-time. Jews are mostly concerned with selling food, clothes, furniture and tobacco—exactly the commodities of which there is a chronic shortage, with consequent overcharging, black-marketing and favouritism.

And again, the common charge that Jews behave in an exceptionally cowardly way during air raids was given a certain amount of colour by the big raids of 1940. As it happened, the Jewish quarter of Whitechapel was one of the first areas to be heavily blitzed, with the natural result that swarms of Jewish refugees distributed themselves all over London. If one judged merely from these war-time phenomena, it would be easy to imagine that anti-Semitism is a quasi-rational thing, founded on mistaken premises. And naturally the anti-Semite thinks of himself as a reasonable being. Whenever I have touched on this subject in a newspaper article, I have always had a considerable “come-back”, and invariably some of the letters are from well-balanced, middling people—doctors, for example—with no apparent economic grievance. These people always say (as Hitler says in Mein Kampf) that they started out with no anti-Jewish prejudice but were driven into their present position by mere observation of the facts. Yet one of the marks of anti-Semitism is an ability to believe stories that could not possibly be true. One could see a good example of this in the strange accident that occurred in London in 1942, when a crowd, frightened by a bomb-burst nearby, fled into the mouth of an Underground station, with the result that something over a hundred people were crushed to death. The very same day it was repeated all over London that “the Jews were responsible”. Clearly, if people will believe this kind of thing, one will not get much further by arguing with them. The only useful approach is to discover why they can swallow absurdities on one particular subject while remaining sane on others.

But now let me come back to that point I mentioned earlier—that there is widespread awareness of the prevalence of anti-Semitic feeling, and unwillingness to admit sharing it. Among educated people, anti-Semitism is held to be an unforgivable sin and in a quite different category from other kinds of racial prejudice. People will go to remarkable lengths to demonstrate that they are not anti-Semitic. Thus, in 1943 an intercession service on behalf of the Polish Jews was held in a synagogue in St John’s Wood. The local authorities declared themselves anxious to participate in it, and the service was attended by the mayor of the borough in his robes and chain, by representatives of all the churches, and by detachments of RAF, Home Guards, nurses, Boy Scouts and what not. On the surface it was a touching demonstration of solidarity with the suffering Jews. But it was essentially a conscious effort to behave decently by people whose subjective feelings must in many cases have been very different. That quarter of London is partly Jewish, anti-Semitism is rife there, and, as I well knew, some of the men sitting round me in the synagogue were tinged by it. Indeed, the commander of my own platoon of Home Guards, who had been especially keen beforehand that we should “make a good show” at the intercession service, was an ex-member of Mosley’s Blackshirts. While this division of feeling exists, tolerance of mass violence against Jews, or, what is more important, anti-Semitic legislation, are not possible in England. It is not at present possible, indeed, that anti-Semitism should become respectable. But this is less of an advantage than it might appear.

One effect of the persecutions in Germany has been to prevent anti-Semitism from being seriously studied. In England a brief inadequate survey was made by Mass Observation a year or two ago, but if there has been any other investigation of the subject, then its findings have been kept strictly secret. At the same time there has been conscious suppression, by all thoughtful people, of anything likely to wound Jewish susceptibilities. After 1934 the Jew joke disappeared as though by magic from postcards, periodicals and the music-hall stage, and to put an unsympathetic Jewish character into a novel or short story came to be regarded as anti-Semitism. On the Palestine issue, too, it was de rigueur among enlightened people to accept the Jewish case as proved and avoid examining the claims of the Arabs—a decision which might be correct on its own merits, but which was adopted primarily because the Jews were in trouble and it was felt that one must not criticise them. Thanks to Hitler, therefore, you had a situation in which the press was in effect censored in favour of the Jews while in private anti-Semitism was on the up-grade, even, to some extent, among sensitive and intelligent people.

This was particularly noticeable in 1940 at the time of the internment of the refugees. Naturally, every thinking person felt that it was his duty to protest against the wholesale locking-up of unfortunate foreigners who for the most part were only in England because they were opponents of Hitler. Privately, however, one heard very different sentiments expressed. A minority of the refugees behaved in an exceedingly tactless way, and the feeling against them necessarily had an anti-Semitic undercurrent, since they were largely Jews. A very eminent figure in the Labour Party—I won’t name him, but he is one of the most respected people in England—said to me quite violently: “We never asked these people to come to this country. If they choose to come here, let them take the consequences.” Yet this man would as a matter of course have associated himself with any kind of petition or manifesto against the internment of aliens. This feeling that anti-Semitism is something sinful and disgraceful, something that a civilised person does not suffer from, is unfavourable to a scientific approach, and indeed many people will admit that they are frightened of probing too deeply into the subject. They are frightened, that is to say, of discovering not only that anti-Semitism is spreading, but that they themselves are infected by it.

To see this in perspective one must look back a few decades, to the days when Hitler was an out-of-work house-painter whom nobody had heard of. One would then find that though anti-Semitism is sufficiently in evidence now, it is probably less prevalent in England than it was thirty years ago. It is true that anti-Semitism as a fully thought-out racial or religious doctrine has never flourished in England. There has never been much feeling against inter-marriage, or against Jews taking a prominent part in public life. Nevertheless, thirty years ago it was accepted more or less as a law of nature that a Jew was a figure of fun and—though superior in intelligence—slightly deficient in “character”. In theory a Jew suffered from no legal disabilities, but in effect he was debarred from certain professions. He would probably not have been accepted as an officer in the navy, for instance, nor in what is called a “smart” regiment in the army. A Jewish boy at a public school almost invariably had a bad time. He could, of course, live down his Jewishness if he was exceptionally charming or athletic, but it was an initial disability comparable to a stammer or a birthmark. Wealthy Jews tended to disguise themselves under aristocratic English or Scottish names, and to the average person it seemed quite natural that they should do this, just as it seems natural for a criminal to change his identity if possible. About twenty years ago, in Rangoon, I was getting into a taxi with a friend when a small ragged boy of fair complexion rushed up to us and began a complicated story about having arrived from Colombo on a ship and wanting money to get back. His manner and appearance were difficult to “place”, and I said to him:

“You speak very good English. What nationality are you?”

He answered eagerly in his chi-chi accent: “I am a Joo, sir!”

And I remember turning to my companion and saying, only partly in joke, “He admits it openly.” All the Jews I had known till then were people who were ashamed of being Jews, or at any rate preferred not to talk about their ancestry, and if forced to do so tended to use the word “Hebrew”.

The working-class attitude was no better. The Jew who grew up in Whitechapel took it for granted that he would be assaulted, or at least hooted at, if he ventured into one of the Christian slums nearby, and the “Jew joke” of the music halls and the comic papers was almost consistently ill-natured.1 There was also literary Jew-baiting, which in the hands of Belloc, Chesterton and their followers reached an almost continental level of scurrility. Non-Catholic writers were sometimes guilty of the same thing in a milder form. There has been a perceptible anti-Semitic strain in English literature from Chaucer onwards, and without even getting up from this table to consult a book I can think of passages which if written now would be stigmatised as anti-Semitism, in the works of Shakespeare, Smollett, Thackeray, Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley and various others. Offhand, the only English writers I can think of who, before the days of Hitler, made a definite effort to stick up for Jews are Dickens and Charles Reade.

And however little the average intellectual may have agreed with the opinions of Belloc and Chesterton, he did not acutely disapprove of them. Chesterton’s endless tirades against Jews, which he thrust into stories and essays upon the flimsiest pretexts, never got him into trouble—indeed Chesterton was one of the most generally respected figures in English literary life. Anyone who wrote in that strain now would bring down a storm of abuse upon himself, or more probably would find it impossible to get his writings published.

If, as I suggest, prejudice against Jews has always been pretty widespread in England, there is no reason to think that Hitler has genuinely diminished it. He has merely caused a sharp division between the politically conscious person who realises that this is not a time to throw stones at the Jews, and the unconscious person whose native anti-Semitism is increased by the nervous strain of the war. One can assume, therefore, that many people who would perish rather than admit to anti-Semitic feelings are secretly prone to them. I have already indicated that I believe anti-Semitism to be essentially a neurosis, but of course it has its rationalisations, which are sincerely believed in and are partly true. The rationalisation put forward by the common man is that the Jew is an exploiter. The partial justification for this is that the Jew, in England, is generally a small businessman—that is to say a person whose depredations are more obvious and intelligible than those of, say, a bank or an insurance company. Higher up the intellectual scale, anti-Semitism is rationalised by saying that the Jew is a person who spreads disaffection and weakens national morale.

Again there is some superficial justification for this. During the past twenty-five years the activities of what are called “intellectuals” have been largely mischievous. I do not think it an exaggeration to say that if the “intellectuals” had done their work a little more thoroughly, Britain would have surrendered in 1940. But the disaffected intelligentsia inevitably included a large number of Jews. With some plausibility it can be said that the Jews are the enemies of our native culture and our national morale. Carefully examined, the claim is seen to be nonsense, but there are always a few prominent individuals who can be cited in support of it. During the past few years there has been what amounts to a counter-attack against the rather shallow Leftism which was fashionable in the previous decade and which was exemplified by such organisations as the Left Book Club. This counter-attack (see for instance such books as Arnold Lutin’s The Good Gorilla or Evelyn Waugh’s Put Out More Flags) has an anti-Semitic strain, and it would probably be more marked if the subject were not so obviously dangerous. It so happens that for some decades past Britain has had no nationalist intelligentsia worth bothering about. But British nationalism, i.e. nationalism of an intellectual kind, may revive, and probably will revive if Britain comes out of the present war greatly weakened. In that case the kind of anti-Semitism which flourished among the anti-Dreyfusards in France, and which Chesterton and Belloc tried to import into this country, might get a foothold.

I have no hard-and-fast theory about the origins of anti-Semitism. The two current explanations, that it is due to economic causes, or on the other hand, that it is a legacy from the Middle Ages, seem to me unsatisfactory, though I admit that if one combines them they can be made to cover the facts. All I would say with confidence is that anti-Semitism is part of the larger problem of nationalism, which has not yet been seriously examined, and that the Jew is evidently a scapegoat, though for what he is a scapegoat we do not yet know. In this essay I have relied almost entirely on my own limited experience, and perhaps every one of my conclusions would be negatived by other observers. The fact is that there are almost no data on this subject. But for what they are worth I will summarise my opinions. Boiled down, they amount to this:

There is more anti-Semitism in England than we care to admit, and the war has accentuated it, but it is not certain that it is on the increase if one thinks in terms of decades rather than years.
It does not at present lead to open persecution, but it has the effect of making people callous to the sufferings of Jews in other countries.

It is at bottom quite irrational and will not yield to argument.

The persecutions in Germany have caused much concealment of anti-Semitic feeling and thus obscured the whole picture. The subject needs serious investigation.

Only the last point is worth expanding. To study any subject scientifically one needs a detached attitude, which is obviously harder when one’s own interests or emotions are involved. Plenty of people who are quite capable of being objective about sea urchins, say, or the square root of 2, become schizophrenic if they have to think about the sources of their own income. What vitiates nearly all that is written about anti-Semitism is the assumption in the writer’s mind that he himself is immune to it. “Since I know that anti-Semitism is irrational,” he argues, “it follows that I do not share it.” He thus fails to start his investigation in the one place where he could get hold of some reliable evidence—that is, in his own mind.

It seems to me a safe assumption that the disease loosely called nationalism is now almost universal. Anti-Semitism is only one manifestation of nationalism, and not everyone will have the disease in that particular form. A Jew, for example, would not be anti-Semitic: but then many Zionist Jews seem to me to be merely anti-Semites turned upside-down, just as many Indians and Negroes display the normal colour prejudices in an inverted form. The point is that something, some psychological vitamin, is lacking in modern civilisation, and as a result we are all more or less subject to this lunacy of believing that whole races or nations are mysteriously good or mysteriously evil. I defy any modern intellectual to look closely and honestly into his own mind without coming upon nationalistic loyalties and hatreds of one kind or another. It is the fact that he can feel the emotional tug of such things, and yet see them dispassionately for what they are, that gives him his status as an intellectual. It will be seen, therefore, that the starting point for any investigation of anti-Semitism should not be “Why does this obviously irrational belief appeal to other people?” but “Why does anti-Semitism appeal to me? What is there about it that I feel to be true?”

If one asks this question one at least discovers one’s own rationalisations, and it may be possible to find out what lies beneath them. anti-Semitism should be investigated—and I will not say by anti-Semites, but at any rate by people who know that they are not immune to that kind of emotion. When Hitler has disappeared a real enquiry into this subject will be possible, and it would probably be best to start not by debunking anti-Semitism, but by marshalling all the justifications for it that can be found, in one’s own mind or anybody else’s. In that way one might get some clues that would lead to its psychological roots. But that anti-Semitism will be definitively cured, without curing the larger disease of nationalism, I do not believe.

Tutor

By Leon Wieseltier

The New Republic

12.30.02

In the matter of Tom Paulin's opinions about Israel, why discuss their legitimacy when we can discuss their stupidity? Paulin is the distinguished poet who wrote in a poem called "Killed in Crossfire" in the London Observer on February 18, 2001, that

... another little Palestinian boy
In trainers jeans and a white teeshirt
Is gunned down by the Zionist SS
Whose initials we should
--but we don't--dumb goys
Clock in that weasel word
Crossfire.

and told Al-Ahram Weekly of Cairo in April that "I have never believed that Israel had the right to exist at all" and that the Jewish settlers in the occupied territories "should be shot dead. I think they are Nazis, racists, I feel nothing but hatred for them." When he was asked last winter to read his poetry at Harvard, these unlyrical exclamations returned to haunt the luft-menschen and -frauen who invited him, there was pressure to rescind the invitation, a controversy ensued, first principles were strewn all over Harvard Yard, the poet withdrew, and everybody was left with a sensation of victimhood, which is to say that a good time was had by all. I would not have disinvited the man and his problem. If hate speech should not be restricted, then it should not be restricted even when it is me that it hates. The American way must be to take offense so as to give offense, to suck it up and then go after the substance of it, so that none of the mistake and the insult is left morally or intellectually standing. It is not all that hard to humiliate a person who believes that Zionism is Nazism, to make him seem like a perfect idiot. To question Paulin's legitimacy, by contrast, makes him seem only like a hero, which no doubt confirms him in his own image of his lonely, valiant, dissenting, visiting-professor self.

The view that Zionism is Nazism--there is no other way to understand the phrase "Zionist SS"--is not different in kind from the view that the moon is cheese. It is not only spectacularly wrong, it is also spectacularly unintelligent. I will not offend myself (that would be self-hate speech!) by patiently explaining why the State of Israel is unlike the Third Reich, except to say that nothing that has befallen the Palestinians under Israel's control may responsibly be compared to what befell the Jews under Germany's control, and that a considerable number of the people who have toiled diligently to find peace and justice for the Palestinians, and a solution to this savage conflict, have been Israeli, some of them even Israeli prime ministers. There is no support for the Palestinian cause this side of decency that can justify the locution "Zionist SS." Paulin's expression does not reveal him to be quite the "reader of almost fanatical scrupulosity" that Edward Said has found him to be, at least as regards the "reading" of history and morality.

As for the reading of literary texts, in some of his critical writings Paulin has prided himself on his loathing for T.S. Eliot's anti-Semitism, carrying his prosecutorial enthusiasm beyond hermeneutical plausibility. (Paulin is one of the most remorseless politicizers of poetical interpretation now at large: He reads Emily Dickinson for her "critique of mercantile values.") In his new book of poems, The Invasion Handbook, he has Eliot entertaining himself in a wordgame with a notorious anti-Semite that mischievously anticipates a place "far away to the east" whose name is a "rhyme for Ritz/no not Biarritz." This is unfair even to Eliot; but its indignation on behalf of the Jews is forever vitiated by "Zionist SS."

As for the Jewish settlers, I will not dignify Paulin's bloodlust with my own objections to their worldview: Even if they are wrong, he can go to hell. There is an old radical tradition that blesses writers who demand that people who fall within a particular political definition be "shot dead," that discovers conscience in an appetite for murder. Is there a significant distinction between being shot dead and being blown to bits? If, instead of remarking that the settlers should be shot dead, Paulin had remarked that they should be blown to bits, then his jihadism would have been even more plain. Anyway he told the Egyptian weekly that "I can understand how suicide bombers feel." I wonder if Paulin believes that there will be room for progressive writers in Sheik Yassin's Palestine. Pity the poet who is disinvited from there.

When I say that Paulin's hate speech hates me, I do not wish to melodramatize. I wish to suggest that Paulin may suffer from, how shall I say, an acute sensitivity to Jews. I find evidence of this condition in that odd and phonily self-lacerating epithet "dumb goys." The epithet is only half right. You would have to be dumb to see the SS in Israeli crossfire, but you would not have to be non-Jewish. There are many Jews who make the foolish analogy, and there are many non-Jews who denounce it. Paulin's phrase suggests that in his unlovely view the debate about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is essentially a debate between Jews and "goys." (A fanatical scrupulosity would have written "goyim.") He reifies me. I will not be reified.

There is also anecdotal evidence for Paulin's imbalance in this regard. In 1999, Nadeem Ahmed, a graduate student at Hertford College, Oxford, who was pursuing a master's degree in medieval Arabic philosophy, was asked to take exams in Arabic, along with two other students. He took the exams and he failed. Then he sued the university for racial discrimination. As it happens, Ahmed's "moral tutor" at Hertford was Tom Paulin, who rose to his student's defense and concurred in his student's analysis that he had been persecuted. And, as it happens, Ahmed's instructor was a man called Friedrich Zimmermann. When the university's lawyer asked Paulin at the trial in March why he had not taken his complaint to Zimmermann, Paulin weirdly explained that "I had heard on the grapevine that he was a very difficult person," and also remarked that Zimmermann had arranged a sabbatical in Israel "to get out of the way." Get it? The Jew harmed the Muslim and escaped to Israel. The university's lawyer showed that the sabbatical was planned long before the trial was scheduled. But Paulin's sinister insinuation lingers. I have no idea whether Nadeem Ahmed's exam was graded properly by Friedrich Zimmermann. But I do know that piety about oppression sometimes breeds fantasy. When you invent victims, you invent victimizers.

Pretty demagogic, huh I mean my suggestion that Paulin may not be mentally pure in his treatment of this question. Sinister insinuations, indeed. But what did the dumb goy expect? I cannot help myself. I am a smart Jew. I write for an organ of international Zionism. I think that Israel has a right to exist. I do not care to understand how suicide bombers feel. I am the man who stands between a good world and a bad world, though I would never stand between Tom Paulin and Harvard.


LEON WIESELTIER is the literary editor of TNR.

Special Report: Double standards - Iraq, Israel and the UN; Iraq, Israel and the United Nations

The Economist

Oct 12, 2002

Israel ignores the United Nations and has weapons of mass destruction. So why all the fuss about Iraq?

SOON after invading Kuwait in 1990, Saddam Hussein realised that he had made a mistake. Contrary to his expectations, the world would not after all allow his land-grab to
stand. The United States was girding for war. He therefore began to cast around for a face-saving exit. One of the first ideas he came up with was "linkage". Why not trade a
withdrawal from Kuwait for Israel's withdrawal from the territories it had occupied in 1967?

Linkage got nowhere. But as the world debates the merits of another American-led war against Mr Hussein, the idea has returned in a new form. Israel has violated countless UN resolutions and amassed weapons of mass destruction, say those who oppose this war. Why then is Iraq singled out for yet more punishment while the Israelis get off scot-free?

This question is no longer being asked by Arabs alone. "No war against Iraq, Free Palestine" has become the slogan of anti-war demonstrators in Europe and America. The
two conflicts have become entwined in the public mind in a way that the West's politicians cannot ignore. When he sought last week to talk his sceptical Labour Party into supporting action against Iraq, Tony Blair, Britain's prime minister, got his biggest cheer for the bit of his speech that said UN resolutions should apply in Palestine as much
as Iraq.

To many of those disturbed by the contrast between the world's treatment of Israel and its treatment of Iraq, it is rights and wrongs, not details of law, that matter here. Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has endured for 35 years, against the will of the Palestinian inhabitants, who dearly want, and in the eyes of the world have long deserved, a state of their own. But whereas Israel is supported economically and diplomatically by America, America is the prime mover against Iraq. Simple justice, or so the argument goes, requires even-handed behaviour by the superpower in the two conflicts.

That may be so. But a quite distinct sort of claim is also made in the "double standards" debate. This holds that Israel stands in breach of Security Council resolutions in just the way Iraq does, and therefore deserves to be treated by the UN with equal severity. Not so.

What the law says:

The UN distinguishes between two sorts of Security Council resolution. Those passed under Chapter Six deal with the peaceful resolution of disputes and entitle the council to make non-binding recommendations. Those under Chapter Seven give the council broad powers to take action, including warlike action, to deal with "threats to the peace, breaches of the peace, or acts of aggression". Such resolutions, binding on all UN members, were rare during the cold war. But they were used against Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait. None of the resolutions relating to the Israeli-Arab conflict comes under Chapter Seven. By imposing sanctions--including military ones--against Iraq but not against Israel, the UN is merely acting in accordance with its own rules.

The distinctiveness of Chapter Seven resolutions, and the fact that none has been passed in relation to Israel, is acknowledged by Palestinian diplomats. It is, indeed, one of their main complaints. A Palestine Liberation Organisation report, entitled "Double Standards" and published at the end of September, pointed out that, over the years, the UN has upheld the Palestinians' right to statehood, condemned Israel's settlements and called for Israel to withdraw. But "no enforcement action or any other action to implement UN resolutions and international law has been ordered by the Security Council."

But what if, for the sake of argument, the main Security Council resolutions on the Arab-Israeli conflict had been Chapter Seven resolutions? The problem would then arise that Resolution 242 of 1967, passed after the six-day war and frequently cited in the double-standards argument, does not say what a lot of the people who quote it think it says (see box on next page). It does not instruct Israel to withdraw unilaterally from the territories occupied in 1967. It does not condemn Israel's conquest, for the good reason that most western powers at that time thought it the result of a justifiable pre-emptive war. It calls for a negotiated settlement, based on the principle of exchanging land for peace. This is a very different matter.

In the case of Iraq, the Security Council has instructed Mr Hussein to take various unilateral actions that he is perfectly capable of taking. Resolution 242 cannot be implemented unilaterally, even if Israel wanted to do so.

Why? First is the question of borders. Some of the diplomats who drafted Resolution 242 said afterwards that they intended to allow for some changes in the armistice lines that separated Israel and its Arab neighbours before the war of 1967. There has been a dreary argument for three decades over the meaning of the absence of a definite article (in the English text) before the phrase "territories occupied in the recent conflict". The Arabs maintain that the resolution requires a complete withdrawal from every inch. But even if this were so, the resolution cannot be implemented without arriving at a negotiated agreement.

For example, the resolution calls for a "just" settlement of the Palestinian refugee issue. Meaning what? The Palestinians say that a UN General Assembly resolution, 194 of 1948, gives all the Palestinian refugees of 1948 the right to return, or to get compensation. Israel, denying responsibility for their flight, says that the same resolution stipulates that these refugees had to be willing to "live at peace with their neighbours" and that the Palestinians, having rejected the UN-sanctioned partition of Palestine, were not prepared to live in peace with the new Jewish state. More than half a century later, the refugee population has grown from about 700,000 to at least 3.8m, making the return of all of them an impossibility, says Israel. It may be possible to negotiate a compromise on this issue, as Yasser Arafat and Ehud Barak attempted without success at Camp David in 2000. But there exists no Security Council blueprint to solve it.

Israel says that it has already implemented much of 242, and that it stands ready to implement the rest of it. It returned land to Egypt and Jordan in return for peace. Two years ago, when he was prime minister, Mr Barak offered the bulk of the Golan Heights in return for peace with Syria. All the agreements made between Israel and the Palestinians under the Oslo peace process were predicated on Resolution 242. Israel subsequently withdrew from the main Palestinian population centres (although it has returned to them since the intifada) pending negotiation of a final settlement. And though there are strong grounds to question his sincerity, Israel's new prime minister, Ariel Sharon, claims to accept George Bush's peace "vision", set out in June, of an Israeli withdrawal and a free Palestine based on the borders of 1967.

It is commonly asserted that Israel's occupation is "illegal". This is questionable. In March, for the first time ever, Kofi Annan, the UN's secretary-general, called Israel's occupation illegal, but it is no accident that he has not repeated this claim. In the view of Sir Adam Roberts, professor of international relations at the University of Oxford, it was a "serious mistake" to describe the occupation itself, as opposed to some of Israel's actions as an occupier, in this way. In a subsequent letter to the New York Times, Mr Annan's spokesman admitted as much. The secretary-general, he said, had not intended to refer to the legality of Israel's occupation of the territories during the war of 1967, only to breaches of its obligations as an occupying power.

This is where Israel has put itself squarely on the wrong side of the Security Council. Since 1967, the UN has rejected all Israel's attempts to change the legal and demographic status of the captured territories, by annexing Jerusalem, applying Israeli law to the Golan Heights and planting Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza (see box on next page). How can vigorous attempts to colonise the occupied territories be reconciled with Israel's claim to accept 242 and the principle of land for peace that underlies it?

They can't. The plain fact is that Israel, citing history ancient and modern (Jerusalem has had a Jewish majority since the 19th century), decided after conquering its Jordanian half in 1967 to make the city its eternal "unified" capital. The Labour governments of that period also began to dot the Jordan valley and Golan Heights with Jewish settlements, ostensibly in order to guard the new borders against a still hostile Arab world. After 1977, the Likud governments of Menahem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir set out frankly, for religious-ideological reasons, to make the occupied territories part of a Greater Israel, in defiance of the UN and of the logic of 242. Here Israel cannot plead innocence. All it can enter is a plea of mitigation.

Legal or not, the occupation has lasted a terribly long time. But this is not solely Israel's fault. In 1967, it was the Arabs who rejected Resolution 242. They certainly did not accept Israel's new post-war borders, but nor did they recognise its pre-war borders. They did not, in fact, acknowledge Israel's right to exist at all. This posture persisted for a dozen years after 1967, until Egypt alone made peace. The Palestinians, pledging still to "liberate" all Palestine and dissolve the Jewish state, waited longer. Not until the late 1980s, some 40 years after Israel's birth and 20 years after the 1967 war, did Mr Arafat's PLO indicate an interest in a two-state solution. Under the rules of "belligerent occupation", Israel should not have mucked about during those 20 years with the status of the captured lands. But it is not wholly surprising, given the continuing rejection and siege, that it did.

When the Palestinians decided that they were no longer bent on its extirpation, Israel responded. In 1993 it signed an agreement with the PLO under which the two sides undertook to implement Resolution 242 by negotiation, thus putting all the contentious issues--Jerusalem, the settlements and the refugees--on the bargaining table. Two years ago the talks failed, to be followed by a new Palestinian intifada and the election of the unyielding Mr Sharon. The Israelis claim that their agreement to negotiate the thorny issues with the Palestinians supersedes the relevant UN resolutions on settlements and the rest, a view which the Security Council might accept if the negotiations got back on track. In the meantime, the council's rulings on Jerusalem and the settlements stand.

The nuclear shadow:

Over the past two years, the intifada has given rise to a new batch of resolutions. Some rebuke the Israelis for using "excessive" force, others make specific demands. Resolution 1435, for example, calls on Israel to pull out of the Palestinian cities it has recently reoccupied and back to the positions it held before the violence started in September 2000. It has been ignored. But like most recent resolutions, this one cuts both ways. It makes demands of the Palestinians, too, which have also been ignored. In this case, the Palestinian Authority is instructed to cease all violence and incitement, and to bring "those responsible for terrorist acts" to justice.

In the long and intractable conflict over Palestine, both sides consider themselves victims. The Palestinians say that their national rights were usurped by an intruder; the Israelis that the Palestinians never accepted the Jewish right to self-determination. The UN's approach has been to recognise the complexity of these respective claims, lay down broad principles, and urge a negotiated peace. The case of Iraq could hardly be more different. That country is in conflict with the UN itself, having refused to comply with the clear instructions, under Chapter Seven, to give up its weapons of mass destruction.

What, though, about Israel's nukes? Does its status as an undeclared nuclear power put it on a par with Iraq, which has tried to become one? No. In 1981, Resolution 487 scolded Israel for sending its aircraft to destroy Iraq's Osiraq reactor, which Israel said was being used to manufacture a nuclear weapon, despite having been given a clean bill of health by inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency. Noting that Israel had not signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT), as Iraq had, the UN called on Israel to put its own nuclear facilities under the IAEA safeguards, as the NPT requires.

Two decades on, Israel has still not signed the NPT. This infuriates the treaty's supporters, who have been striving to make it "universal". But, as with any other treaty, governments are free not to sign. What they are not free to do is sign, receive the foreign (civilian) nuclear help to which signing entitles them, and then try to build a bomb secretly. This, it is now ruefully accepted, is what Iraq tried to do, and may still be trying to do. Israel is thought to possess a large nuclear arsenal, about which it is not being open and honest, and this is provoking to its neighbours. But it is not evidence of "double standards". Being a nuclear-armed power is not, by itself, a breach of international law.

(Copyright 2002 The Economist Newspaper Ltd. All rights reserved.)

If Bush is another Hitler, what words are left to describe Hitler?

BY BRET STEPHENS
WSJ Opinion Journal
Wednesday, June 23, 2004

According to Sidney Blumenthal, a onetime adviser to president Bill Clinton who now writes a column for Britain's Guardian newspaper, President Bush today runs "what is in effect a gulag," stretching "from prisons in Afghanistan to Iraq, from Guantanamo to secret CIA prisons around the world." Mr. Blumenthal says "there has been nothing like this system since the fall of the Soviet Union."

In another column, Mr. Blumenthal compares the April death toll for American soldiers in Iraq to the Eastern Front in the Second World War. Mr. Bush's "splendid little war," he writes, "has entered a Stalingrad-like phase of urban siege and house-to-house combat."

The factual bases for these claims are, first, that the U.S. holds some 10,000 "enemy combatants" prisoner; and second, that 122 U.S. soldiers were killed in action in April.

As I write, I have before me a copy of "The Black Book of Communism," which relates that on "1 January 1940 some 1,670,000 prisoners were being held in the 53 groups of corrective work camps and 425 collective work colonies. In addition, the prisons held 200,000 people awaiting trial or a transfer to camp. Finally, the NKVD komandatury were in charge of approximately 1.2 million 'specially displaced people.' "

As for Stalingrad, German deaths between Jan. 10 and Feb. 2, 1943, numbered 100,000, according to British historian John Keegan. And those were just the final agonizing days of a battle that had raged since the previous August.

Mr. Blumenthal is not alone. Al Gore last month accused Mr. Bush of creating "more anger and righteous indignation against us as Americans than any leader of our country in the 228 years of our existence as a nation." Every single column written by the New York Times' Paul Krugman is an anti-Bush screed; apparently, there isn't anything else worth writing about. A bumper sticker I saw the other day in Manhattan reads: "If you aren't outraged, you're not paying attention."

There are two explanations for all this. One is that Mr. Bush really is as bad as Sid, Al and Paul say: the dumbest, most feckless, most fanatical, most incompetent and most calamitous president the nation has ever known. A second is that Sid, Al and Paul are insane.

The best test of the first argument is the state of the nation Mr. Bush leads. In the first quarter of 2004, the U.S. economy grew by an annualized 4.4%. By contrast, the 12-nation eurozone grew by 1.3%--and that's their highest growth rate in three years. In the U.S., unemployment hovers around 5.6%. In the eurozone, it is 8.8%. In a recent column, Mr. Krugman wrote that the U.S. economic figures aren't quite as good as they seem. But even granting that, the Bush economy is manifestly healthy by historical and current international standards.

There is the situation in Iraq, where the U.S. has lost about 800 soldiers in action over the course of more than a year, as well as several thousand Iraqis. The fact that events have not gone well over the past two months is somehow taken as proof that they've gone disastrously. Yet in the run-up to the war, the German Foreign Ministry was issuing predictions of about two million Iraqi deaths, making the actual Iraqi death a very small percentage of that anticipated total. As for the American rate, the U.S. lost more than 6,000 soldiers in Vietnam in 1966, the year U.S. troop strength there was comparable to what it is now in Iraq. That's about nine times as many fatalities as the U.S. has so far sustained in Iraq.

There is the charge that, under Bush, the United States has qualified for most-hated-nation status. Maybe so. But it is not entirely clear why this should be so decisive in measuring the accomplishments or failures of the administration. President Reagan was also unpopular internationally back in his day. Nor is Israel an especially popular country. But that's no argument for Israel to measure itself according to what Jordanians or Egyptians think of it.

The point here is not that Mr. Bush has a flawless or even a good record or that his critics don't have their points. The point is that, at this stage in his presidency, Mr. Bush cannot credibly be described as some kind of world-historical disaster on a par with James Buchanan and Herbert Hoover, nor can he credibly be accused of the things of which he is accused.

This brings us to our second hypothesis, which is that his critics are insane.

This is an easier case to make. Mr. Blumenthal, for instance, is the man who described Bill Clinton's presidency as the most consequential, the most inspiring and the most moral of the 20th century, only possibly excepting FDR's. Mr. Krugman spent his first couple of years as a columnist writing tirades about how the U.S. economy was on the point of Argentina-style collapse.

What makes these arguments insane--I use the word advisedly--isn't that they don't contain some possible germ of truth. One can argue that Mr. Clinton was a reasonably good president. And one can argue that Bush economic policy has not been a success. But you have to be insane to argue that Mr. Clinton was FDR incarnate, and you have to be insane to argue Mr. Bush has brought the U.S. to its lowest economic point since 1932. This style of hyperbole is a symptom of madness, because it displays such palpable disconnect from observable reality.

If you have to go looking for outrage, the outrage probably isn't there. That which is truly outrageous tends to have the quality of obviousness.

So here is one aspect of this insanity: no sense of proportion. For Mr. Blumenthal, Fallujah isn't merely like Stalingrad. It may as well be Stalingrad, just as Guantanamo may as well be Lefertovo and Abu Ghraib may as well be Buchenwald, and Mr. Bush may as well be Hitler and Hoover combined, and Iraq may as well be Vietnam and Bill Clinton may as well be Franklin Roosevelt.

The absence of proportion stems, in turn, from a problem of perspective. If you have no idea where you stand in relation to certain objects, then an elephant may seem as small as a fly and a fly may seem as large as an elephant. Similarly, Mr. Blumenthal can compare the American detention infrastructure to the Gulag archipelago only if he has no concept of the actual size of things. And he can have no concept of the size of things because he neither knows enough about them nor where he stands in relation to them. What is the vantage point from which Mr. Blumenthal observes the world? It is one where Fallujah is "Stalingrad-like." How does one manage to see the world this way? By standing too close to Fallujah and too far from Stalingrad. By being consumed by the present. By losing not just the sense, but the possibility, of judgment.

Care for language is more than a concern for purity. When one describes President Bush as a fascist, what words remain for real fascists? When one describes Fallujah as Stalingrad-like, how can we express, in the words that remain to the language, what Stalingrad was like?

George Orwell wrote that the English language "becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts." In taking care with language, we take care of ourselves.

Bret Stephens is the former editor of the Jerusalem Post. He currently serves on the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal.

Will Hosni Mubarak bring Egypt into the community of democratic nations?

BY SAAD EDDIN IBRAHIM
WSJ Opinion Journal
Sunday, March 6, 2005

The surprise decision by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to propose a constitutional amendment, opening up the process of electing the president by direct competitive balloting, may well be a giant step for democracy in Egypt and the Arab World. Western readers used to pluralistic democracy may find it hard to understand what a potentially huge shift this will be in a country used to imposed military rulers for over 50 years. The most an Egyptian citizen could engage in this process was to show up on the day of a presidential referendum every six years, to say yes or no to the single name appearing on the ballot. This explains why someone like Mr. Mubarak always received over 90% from an indifferent voter turnout. Syrian and Iraqi strongmen did even better, no doubt because Saddam Hussein demanded names and addresses at the bottom of each ballot.

Many area specialists have long maintained that democratization in the Middle East will not get far until Egypt is fully engaged in the process. And Egypt could not truly set out on a path of democratization without first amending its constitution--to downsize the pharaonic powers of its president and set limits on his term in office. (Mr. Mubarak is already into his 24th year.) So the announcement is an important first step, one that the regime may assume it will be able to control to its own advantage, but which may not be that easy to contain once people begin to feel empowered. The genie is out of the bottle.

At any rate, it is not only Egypt that is now embarking on the road of democracy in this troubled region. Turkey at one end of the Middle East and Morocco at the other are already well on the way. The real groundswell this time seems to have come from the close timing and positive outcomes of recent elections in Iraq, Palestine and to a lesser degree Saudi Arabia. The unprecedented demonstrations against Syrian occupation of Lebanon following the assassination of its former prime minister show no signs of abating, and Egyptian opposition groups have staged increasingly bold marches and other forms of civil disobedience in the past few weeks. The catalyst for their anger was the arrest and detention of opposition leader Ayman Nour at the end of January. That heavy-handed act reinvigorated the homegrown Kifaya ("Enough") movement against further rule by the Mubarak regime. Suddenly the popular wisdom that Egyptians are passive and afraid to act did not seem to be holding up. An alliance of local, regional and international forces is joining forces against tyranny-as-usual on the banks of the Nile.

Only a month ago, Mr. Mubarak dismissed demands for constitutional reform as "futile." No matter what combination of events brought about his change of heart, the Mubarak initiative should be welcomed. It is a necessary--but insufficient--first step for overhauling the stagnant political system. Egyptians are already weary of token reforms à la Tunisia, where longstanding President Ben-Ali caricatured a constitutional amendment that made it look as if he was opening the door for competitive presidential elections, then staged a sham contest with a few hand-picked "opponents." In previous Tunisian referenda, Mr. Ben-Ali used to get 99% of the votes; with the new ploy he got 96%. It was a joke that made Tunisians cry.

We assume that President Mubarak is more serious. As a measure of sincerity, he needs to order the immediate release of the ailing opposition leader Ayman Nour, and take steps to terminate the 24-year-long state of emergency, which effectively prevents political campaigning to take place. We call on him to endorse term limits of no more than two successive five-year terms. Equally needed are confidence-building measures in a free political process that include open and equal access to the media, currently state-controlled. I announced that I would contest this upcoming presidential election as a way of opening debate on these needed reforms, but I would gladly go back to my role as a private citizen once guaranteed a free and open election this fall.

If seriously implemented, these steps will transform Mr. Mubarak's lasting legacy to his people. Along with events in Lebanon, Iraq and Palestine, it may well usher in an Arab Spring of freedom, so very long overdue.

Mr. Ibrahim, an Egyptian pro-democracy and peace activist, is a professor at the American University in Cairo, where he heads the Ibn Khaldun Center. A former political prisoner, he is currently at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, writing his prison memoirs.

A New White Arabism Would Help Generate Liberal Societies

By Chibli Mallat

Daily Star of Lebanon

Tuesday, March 08, 2005

In the past two years, the "Iraqi earthquake" (to quote Lebanese columnist Jihad al-Zein) occasioned by the collapse of the most dictatorial system in the Arab world is slowly confirming a new era in the region, where the forces of democracy are emerging as the dominant ideological model in each and every Arab country. With fits and starts the system is shaking, within Iraq itself, then in Palestine, now in Lebanon and Egypt.

The stakes following former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri's assassination go far beyond Lebanon and Syria, where they are bound to change the political scene. As underlined in Lebanon by such diverse writers as Samir Kassir, a strong voice against the Syrian leadership, and Talal Salman, the editor of the Beirut daily As-Safir, and echoed in a much-quoted column by Thomas Friedman in The New York Times, it is the whole Arab political system that is shaking to the core. The absence of a single Arab president or king at the funeral of Hariri, a man whom every Arab leader knew personally, is telling. While it may be superficially explained by the estrangement of Hariri from his nemesis, President Emile Lahoud, Arab leaders were mostly apprehensive about the question of their legitimacy: Would they risk going down with the Lebanese government and president if they showed up, like French President Jacques Chirac, on the side of an angry family?

For the past 20 years, so-called Arab civil society has been slowly denting the status quo. Initially, questions were defensive and focused on human rights, while participants in human rights gatherings were incapable of mustering the courage needed to name those leaders responsible for all kinds of violations, even the more egregious ones like Saddam Hussein. In part this was understandable, and the level of repression meted out against dissidents was uniquely high: Scores of dissenters were brutally assassinated, thrown in jail and tortured, while the usual "higher national interest" argument was put forward whereby Arab liberals saw their reform efforts condemned as giving sustenance to Israel. This trend was reinforced by the brutality of Israeli repression of Palestinian dissent and the inexorable shrinking of Palestinian land.

As time passed, however, the connection between brutality at home and the inability to stand up to anti-Israel rhetoric became increasingly apparent: From the condemnation of the Arab record in general, typified by the United Nations Development Program reports since 2002, particulars of repression were linked to people at the helm of power in every single Arab country. Local Arab democrats are still hesitant to accuse the emirs and kings in the Gulf, but the taboos have fallen in the Levant and North Africa: Tunisia's Zein al-Abidin bin Ali, Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, Lebanon's Emile Lahoud and Syria's Bashar Assad are being openly challenged, and the perceived weakness of the hard-liners in Israel, leading to the withdrawal from settlements in Gaza and the West Bank, will accelerate the trend of decoupling Arab domestic reform from the fig leaf of a united front against Israel.

The Arab nationalism that has prevailed since the Nasser revolution is increasingly being dubbed "black Arabism" by those of us who do not want to abandon a yearning for closer integration between societies separated by arguably artificial colonial borders. Black Arabism, in this perception, is characteristically fascist, and is epitomized by the former Baath system in Iraq and the present one in Syria. Against it we propose "White Arabism," which harks back to such figures as Saad Zaghlul in Egypt, Kamel Chadirchi in Iraq and Kamal Jumblatt in Lebanon. At the core of the message is the need for democratic, non-violent change at the top in the Middle East, with Arabism read as a liberal call that unifies people irrespective of their religion or sect: in Egypt Copts and Muslims; in Lebanon the various communities that form the country; in Iraq Shiites, Sunnis and non-Muslim sects.

The example of Iraq, where Arabism is not capable of giving Kurds their due of equal citizenship, is particularly telling of the more advanced thought needed to accommodate all citizens - hence the surge of the concept of federalism as a further trait of White Arabism. Only federalism can allow forms of Arab identity to be preserved while Kurds are treated as equal both on the individual level and as a collective community.

Perhaps the greatest challenge of White Arabism will be to review the Palestine-Israeli conflict in the light of new parameters, guided mostly by visions of federalism and where human rights are no longer regarded passively, but are, instead, seen as an offshoot of democracy. While the establishment of a Palestinian state appears inevitable in the short to medium term, White Arabism may have far more to offer both Jews and Arabs in Palestine and Israel.

Chibli Mallat is European Union Jean Monnet Law Professor at St. Joseph's University in Beirut. This commentary first appeared in bitterlemons-international.org, an online newsletter.