How Moral Distinctions Get Obliterated

I. How Should the World Treat the Good Citizens of Nations That Have Gone Bad?

We Americans who care about what our nation is supposed to be, and who recognize how ugly our nation has become in the eyes of the world, are deeply embarrassed. (Embarrassed enough that people talk — maybe seriously — about declaring themselves to be Canadians, if asked their nationality while traveling in Europe, in the nations who used to be our best friends.) But those Europeans also know that a great many of us utterly reject how our nation has conducted itself under its current President– as has demeaned and threatened Canada as our “51st state,” has threatened to seize by force territory belonging to our dear NATO ally Denmark, has bombed boats near Venezuela in violation of law, and now has launched launching a bizarrely reckless as well as illegal war that has cost everybody on the planet a good deal. Polls show that Europeans have lost much of their trust in America under Trump, and many regard his presidency with alarm. They will probably never trust this country again to the extent we used to be trusted. How can you trust a nation that could make so catastrophic a mistake as to make a man like this the most powerful man in the world? But they do not treat anti-Trump Americans as pariahs, despite the terrible damage our nation has inflicted on itself and the rest of the world. They distinguish between our political breakdown and the great, decent, and creative nation we’ve always been and still are. American artists continue to be welcomed around the world. But not so even those Israeli artists who passionately oppose the fascistic, war-mongering government that has been calling the shots in their country, especially in the wake of Hamas’s atrocious October 7 attack, to which the Israeli government has responded so vengefully. Israel is like the United States in that it has become an evil and destructive force on the world stage. Netanyahu, along with his coalition that includes formerly un-includable fascist extremists, has made some terrible decisions. But Israel is also like the United States in containing a large segment of the population yearning to bring down its rulers and lead their nation in a better direction. A lot of Israelis are like the millions of Americans who attended “No Kings!” rallies to express their yearning for America to acquire the kind of leadership that can begin repairing what the current ruling power has broken. And among those Israelis are artists who have criticized the ugly path their nation’s rulers have followed. But it seems that some elements of the Western cultural world—which are willing to distinguish between our ugly President and the Americans who oppose him—are not equally willing to distinguish between rulers whose choices they condemn and those Israelis who are struggling to lead their nation back toward something better. Recent articles [e.g. Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid withdraws from Marseille festival after boycott controversy and Opinion | Some Leftists Are Boycotting This Film. Everyone Should Watch It. – The New York Times] have described a disturbing pattern in the cultural world. Israeli artists who have been among the strongest critics of the present ruling power in their country are being subjected to campaigns of ostracism and exclusion. Israeli creatives passionately opposed to the evil being done in their nation’s name are increasingly being treated as though they themselves embody that evil. Why would there be that difference? We make a hero over Navalyi, though he is a Russian and Russia — under Putin’s dictatorship — has acted as an evil/destructive power. The Europeans would not tar Bruce Springsteen with Trump’s crimes. Why are these artists, who oppose the ugly force (the worst part of Israel) that has made their country an international pariah being also — themselves — treated as pariahs? Is it because Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians has been far from exemplary for a long time? Certainly there is much to condemn. But the history suggests that both peoples have contributed substantially to the tragedy that has unfolded. So why do some elements of the Western cultural world treat the story as though all the wrongdoing belongs on one side? (And we see other peoples suffering oppression as bad or worse — Myanmar’s treatment of the Rohingya, or China’s treatment of the Uyghurs — without those oppressor nations being the objects of anything like the same degree of antagonism.) Is it because much of the world denies Israel’s right to exist? But why would that be, when Israel can legitimately claim to be the only nation created by a collective decision of the world community, which voted to partition that land into two small states, one Jewish and one Palestinian? The Israeli conduct may be ugly now, but one would expect fair-minded people to combine their legitimate condemnation of Israeli policy with some compassion for the repeated traumas that have shaped the Israeli response to the continuous threats to which their nation has been subjected. So why are these Israeli artists not treated like Navalny or Springsteen — whose nations have also gone bad, and who have also shown commitment to turning their countries onto a more righteous path? One is left with the sense that involved in the case of Israel is some kind of hatred powerful enough to obliterate essential moral distinctions.

        II. Why the Jews?

When it comes to Western criticism of Israel, over the years there has been a controversy over the question: is this criticism of a nation because of its conduct, or is this criticism of a nation because it is the world’s only Jewish state? Those on the Israeli side are often eager to dismiss criticisms of Israel as anti-Semitic, while those on the anti-Israel side insist that their objections have nothing to do with it being a Jewish nation. But what we have just explored suggests that both are right. Much criticism of Israel plainly has nothing anti-Semitic about it. Yet when even Israelis passionately opposed to their country’s ugly conduct are treated as though they themselves embody that evil, one is forced to conclude that something more than ordinary moral condemnation is involved. When people — regarding the citizens of the world’s only “Jewish state” — refuse to distinguish between “good Israelis” and “bad Israelis,” it seems reasonable to infer that anti-Semitism has obliterated the crucial moral distinction. There’s an old joke that raises the question of anti-Semitism in a most charming way.

World War I has just ended—and badly for Germany. An old Jew is walking along a road when he encounters an angry German soldier. “Tell me, Jew! Who is responsible for Germany’s defeat in the Great War?” “Why, the Jews, of course,” the old Jew replied. “And the bicycle riders.” The German is bewildered. “The bicycle riders? Why the bicycle riders?” The old Jew shrugged. “Why the Jews?”

As for that question — “Why the Jews?” — I believe the most important part of the answer lies in the way many social orders, and many of the people brought up on those social orders, feel about DIFFERENCE For centuries, the people who most consistently and conspicuously stood out as DIFFERENT – across the history of Western Civilization — were the Jews. And that history provides abundant evidence of the spread of anti-Semitism. Europeans massacred Jews on their way to the Crusades. England expelled the Jews from their nation in 1215 (?), and in a cultural cataclysm Spain kicked out the Jews in 1492. Many are the other chapters of that story even before the Holocaust of extermination during the Nazi rule in Germany in the 20^th century. This persistently DIFFERENT people, having no country of their own, were seeking to survive as minorities in a European civilization that — from the Dark Ages up until the liberal democracies of very recent times – was organized to enforce conformity. In the West, until the rise of Protestantism in the Reformation, there was ONE CHURCH, and to deviate from its doctrines put one’s life at risk. Heresy was a capital offense. (And when Protestantism gained a foothold in Europe, the result was a century of religious wars between the two forms of Christianity—between the Catholics and the Protestants.) For a set of reasons – social cohesion, precarious identities, the nature of the ruling powers — DIFFERENCE in European societies was experienced as threatening. And what is threatening evokes hatred. We can see such hatreds spreading in a whole variety of directions among some of our own nation’s subcultures: people who hate groups with a different skin color, who hate immigrants, who hate Muslims, who hate others who vote for a different political party, who hate Asians, who hate people with a different sexual orientation. And of course, who hate the Jews. But the Jews are a special historical case because of their extraordinary persistence in remaining DIFFERENT for century after century. There’s an irony here: the reason the Jews became the objects of a singularly deep and enduring hatred is because the Jews pulled off an extraordinary – perhaps unique – achievement: they survived as a distinct people, despite having no country of their own, and despite the world’s long-proven ability to destroy the cultures of the weak. While perhaps thousands of distinct cultures have been crushed, transformed, absorbed by the dominant cultural and political powers under whose aegis they fell, the Jews developed a cultural recipe for endurance. Against all odds. (I won’t go into that “recipe” here, but many of the laws and commandments that observant Jews follow – dietary, dress, group-membership, etc. – have the effect of assuring that the Jews will remain a people apart. And not only apart, but quite visibly not the same as the surrounding dominant people.) A millennia of being different is not the same as a few generations of being different. A group that eventually blends into the dominant culture might be hated at first, by those who feel threatened by difference. But when the difference gets eroded in the course of time, that group ceases to be the object of hatred. (When the Irish came in large numbers to the United States in the 1840s, nativist sentiment — “Irish Need Not Apply” — was abundant. But nowadays, just about everyone in America tries to wear green on St. Patrick’s Day.) But with the Jews, it was different—and the difference made a difference. Instead of the hatred eroding, the cultural deposits of hatred can accumulate. (Over the centuries, Jews become depicted as having horns (even Michelangelo’s Moses has horns) — to dramatize their connection with the Devil. The myth arises that Jews abduct and kill Christian children around Passover because they need that blood to make their unleavened bread. The culture becomes receptive to threatening stories like the forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, to reinforce the paranoid fear that this people-who-are-different are threatening to take over the world.) So anti-Semitism, according to this theory, is the price of the Jews’ unique achievement—cultural survival against all odds. The price was their becoming unique in the extraordinary accumulation, over the centuries, of imagery portraying the Jew as an object of fear and hatred. (So powerfully and deeply could these images be driven into the cultural imagination that even when the Jews assimilated and ceased to be so DIFFERENT—as in Germany in the generations leading up to the Nazi era—the old hatreds persisted, and the assimilation even seemed threatening.) That price was inevitable—but only in societies like pre-modern Europe where conformity was required because difference was experienced as threatening. Wherever conformity was enforced, a people—like the Jews—who refused to relinquish their distinct cultural identity was bound to become the object of hatred. This hypothesis exemplifies how “Brokenness begets brokenness.” The first brokenness is the insistence by a social order, and of the people shaped by that order, that everyone must conform. It is a form of brokenness – at the psychological level – when people experience DIFFERENT as a threat, as something to be subjugated or eliminated. It is a form of brokenness when a social order insists on squelching the personhood of the people who live within its boundaries. People get burned for heresy, because it is not a human right to believe what one believes. People get enslaved – and later are oppressed in different ways — for being of a different race. What would be whole is if everyone were free to blossom into whatever was in them to be. FREE TO BE YOU AND ME. But broken cultures often produce broken people who need for everyone to be like them. Anti-semitism arises from those kinds of brokenness. And the cure for it is what decent, democratic nations have been trying to do for generations. But that cure takes time and, as we’ve lately seen in the United States, even racist forces that had been pushed back toward the recesses of our culture can burst forth again—yet another deep river that doesn’t disappear just because a society — for a while — enforces norms that tell it to stay hidden.

III. The Deeper Problem

It is unlikely that there will ever be another phenomenon exactly like anti-Semitism. That required centuries of brewing in pre-modern societies with a specific group that maintained their own identity intact in an extraordinary way. But the deeper problem, of which anti-Semitism was a special case, seems likely to remain an enduring pathology of civilization, so long as there are many people who feel threatened by people different from themselves. For some people, it seems that any difference will suffice. Do you cross yourself with two fingers or three? Do you favor Stalin or Trotsky? Do you favor more moderate politicians or more extreme? (Freud wrote about “the narcissism of minor differences.”) This is not just an inevitable part of human nature. We can infer that from the fact that a great many people do not feel hostile toward others just because they are different– in religion, in race, in nationality. Some indeed celebrate human diversity. If humankind is to free itself from the destructive effects of this kind of hatred, the solution will lie not in the elimination of human variety – not if any difference will do — but in healing whatever it is in individuals and societies that experiences difference as threatening.