The weaponization of anti-Semitism

Of growing weight in the Palestine/Israel conflict is the political-Zionist recourse to the weapon of anti-Semitism. There is no doubt that anti-Semites are out there. The synagogue bombings and massacres are stark evidence of that. But in sixty-four years of engagement in the Israel/Palestine conflict I have met only one. Perhaps others were too well disguised for me to smell them out, but I don’t think so.

I have been the victim of this Israel-Zionist attack of anti-Semitism. Let me supply some context by way of an example. In 1968 and afterwards, I was part of a movement for the Canadianization of Canadian universities. My ideological premises were largely biblical. I also taught an introductory course on Judaism for which my chief text was Great Ages and Ideas of the Jewish People by Leo Schwarz and also History of the Jewish People by Cecil Roth. The cornerstone of their exposition was: A people and a history.

I wrote a letter to two Jewish colleagues (a sociologist and a political scientist) who were publically most opposed to our Canadianization efforts. In effect, I had said that if anyone understood the human value of people and history and culture it was the Jews who traditionally were a foil to the then intellectually fashionable Platonic universalism. So, I asked, why were they so hostile to our feeble efforts to ensure Canadian materials (e.g., history, sociology, and literature) were taught in Canadian universities and that Canadian expensively-trained PhD’s had a crack at the jobs presently going to foreign scholars through the “old boys” network (usually, in those days, they were ‘boys’).

I received no reply of either political objection or scholarly refutation. Instead, I found rumours circulating that I was an anti-Semite which would have the ancillary result of invalidating my efforts for Palestinian justice. The president of the university was approached and urged that I be fired as an anti-Semite. Fortunately, I had an utterly fearless and outspoken friend who went to the president with the warning that he bring a halt to this attack on me or that he (the friend) would be at The Globe and Mail the next morning to expose Carleton university professors defaming a colleague with anti-Semitic smears. It ended.

A further instance. I once found myself standing at the pissoir beside a then-prominent rabbi. During our exchange he challenged: Why are you so fixated on the Palestine issue when Canada has such a lamentable record of unjust colonial conduct toward its native population?” The implication conveyed was that I picked on Israel because I was an anti-Semite. I thought to myself: Does he not realize that by assimilating the expulsion of the Canadian indigenous population and usurpation of their lands by white settler colonialists to the Israeli expulsion of Palestinians from their ancestral home, he was recognizing a shared injustice?