Schocken: When it come to spreading anti-Semitic messages, the gentiles aren’t alone

When it come to spreading anti-Semitic messages, the gentiles aren’t alone.

An Israeli auto-anti-Semite proved this week that gentiles aren’t alone in blaming Jews for all the world’s troubles. “Hamas are freedom fighters” – unbelievable, but a Jewish-Israeli actually said this.

By: Anat Vidor, WIZO President

Photo credit: Oren Ben Hakoon

“Antisemitism is in our DNA, it’s ingrained in us, even I have to hold myself back sometimes,” said Curtis Sliwa, a New York City mayoral candidate, in a moment when he failed to hold back this week. “They’ll always hate you,” he concluded in four words, shutting down any chance of change. Sliwa said these things good-naturedly, like a friend explaining to a “Kan 11” reporter, and through him to all of us, what our eyes are too short-sighted to see – that everyone is ultimately a little “Archie Bunker,” searching their living room for the ethnic minority responsible for their troubles. But the one who rushed to prove Sliwa wrong was Haaretz publisher, Amos Schocken.

Amos Schocken, age 80, proved this week that not only gentiles carry the antisemitic gene – Jews can suffer from it too. Schocken probably doesn’t really hate Jews, and I’m sure in his own eyes he’s even an Israeli patriot, a Zionist, and a freedom fighter who only accidentally behaves like a terrorist accomplice. But his deranged mind produces statements that would make even the world’s greatest anti-Semites appear momentarily too extreme. Thus, at a conference organized by his newspaper in London, he read, in English, a prepared speech he had written, speaking of Israel’s “cruel apartheid policy” in the West Bank, and in the same breath called Hamas’s baby-killers and elderly-burners “Palestinian freedom fighters whom Israel calls terrorists.” Later in the speech, he called for sanctions against Israel, as long as it stubbornly refuses, for unexplained reasons, to implement his political worldview, at the end of which we’d all be murdered.

Schocken’s antisemitic slander and baseless accusations drew furious reactions across the board in Israel, and economic sanctions specifically against his newspaper, which caused him to “reconsider his words” and contort around explanations and verbal gymnastics that only robbed him of what little backbone he seemed to have. But Schocken shows Curtis Sliwa that 99.8% of the world’s population isn’t alone. With them are some “good Jews” who are willingly ready to supply raw material for antisemitism, in exchange for a bit of media attention and a “bag of sentiments” from the gentiles.

When Schocken speaks in London about Israeli “apartheid policy,” he aligns himself with her greatest haters, who seek to turn her into a pariah and outcast in the world’s eyes. When Schocken calls the murderous terrorists of October 7th “freedom fighters,” he shifts responsibility to the Jews, and just like the greatest anti-Semites, turns the victim into the culprit and the culprit into the victim. After Kristallnacht, the Jewish community in Germany was fined for the damages it caused Germany on that historic night – perhaps this is where Schocken drew inspiration to now call for international sanctions against Israel for trying to defend itself, a demand that to my ears sounds like treason.

Auto-anti-Semites are a known phenomenon. South African Jew Richard Goldstone was sent as a UN representative to create a distorted, malicious, and antisemitic report against Israel’s conduct in Operation Cast Lead. American Norman Finkelstein, known as one of the world’s greatest prosecutors of Israel, wrote after October 7th: “It warms every fiber of my soul – the sight of Gaza’s children smiling when their Jewish oppressors who believe in Jewish supremacy were finally humiliated.” And these are just two examples among many of Jewish children who grew up to be antisemitic adults.

Why does a person develop hatred toward their own people and identify with those who seek their destruction? That’s already related to mental health and the unresolved complexity of the human psyche. But whether the reason is genetic, political, economic, or psychiatric – antisemitism should be a punishable offense, and as long as we in Israel agree to contain antisemitism and protect it in the name of “freedom of expression” – we have no moral right to demand that world nations behave differently and fight antisemitism more forcefully than we are willing to adopt for ourselves.