Some more Middle East rantings

So yesterday some murderous psycho walked into a Seattle Jewish center and killed one person and shot another five, including a pregnant women. CNN reported he was an American of Palestinian descent. This was the Seattle PI’s headline, “I am a Muslim American, angry at Israel.” The shooting is rightfully being treated as a hate crime. Here’s some of the PI story:

On the eve of the Jewish Sabbath, a 31-year-old man claiming he was upset about "what was going on in Israel" opened fire at the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle building, killing one person and wounding five women, one of them pregnant.

Three of the women were in critical condition Friday night with gunshot wounds to the stomach.

The gunman, brandishing a large-caliber semi-automatic pistol, forced his way through the security door at the federation, on Third Avenue downtown, after an employee had punched in her security code.

"He said, 'I am a Muslim American, angry at Israel,' before opening fire on everyone," said Marla Meislin-Dietrich, a database coordinator for the center. "He was randomly shooting at everyone."

While there’s little doubt that this guy’s actions were prompted by abstract outrage rather than an actual policy, it still illustrates the danger in equating Jewish people everywhere with the state of Israel—the single biggest, but not the only, purveyor of this irresponsibility. Here’s Howard Dean at it, and notice who’s reporting it. (Apropos, Peter Beinart had a pretty good editorial about the Democrats' pandering in trying to get to the right of Bush in the Washington Post yesterday.)

US Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean called Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki an "anti-Semite" on Wednesday for failing to denounce Hizbullah for its attacks against Israel.

"The Iraqi prime minister is an anti-Semite," the Democratic leader told a gathering of business leaders in Florida. "We don't need to spend 200 and 300 and $500 billion bringing democracy to Iraq to turn it over to people who believe that Israel doesn't have a right to defend itself and who refuse to condemn Hizbullah."

You know if our biggest problem in Iraq was that its prime minister turned out to be an anti-Semite, that whole adventure wouldn’t have been so much of a mess. When people start labeling criticism of Israel, or worse lack of criticism for its enemies, as anti-Semitism not only does it annul any chance for a real debate about the region, but it also puts Jews in danger of attacks from fanatics, like the maniac in Seattle. Tony Judt touches on this point, and many others, in this brilliant essay in Hareetz, which comes via Bitch Ph.D.

In short: Israel, in the world's eyes, is a normal state, but one behaving in abnormal ways. It is in control of its fate, but the victims are someone else. It is strong, very strong, but its behavior is making everyone else vulnerable. And so, shorn of all other justifications for its behavior, Israel and its supporters today fall back with increasing shrillness upon the oldest claim of all: Israel is a Jewish state and that is why people criticize it. This - the charge that criticism of Israel is implicitly anti-Semitic - is regarded in Israel and the United States as Israel's trump card. If it has been played more insistently and aggressively in recent years, that is because it is now the only card left.

The habit of tarring any foreign criticism with the brush of anti-Semitism is deeply engrained in Israeli political instincts: Ariel Sharon used it with characteristic excess but he was only the latest in a long line of Israeli leaders to exploit the claim. David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir did no different. But Jews outside of Israel pay a high price for this tactic. Not only does it inhibit their own criticisms of Israel for fear of appearing to associate with bad company, but it encourages others to look upon Jews everywhere as de facto collaborators in Israel's misbehavior. When Israel breaks international law in the occupied territories, when Israel publicly humiliates the subject populations whose land it has seized - but then responds to its critics with loud cries of "anti-Semitism" - it is in effect saying that these acts are not Israeli acts, they are Jewish acts: The occupation is not an Israeli occupation, it is a Jewish occupation, and if you don't like these things it is because you don't like Jews.

In many parts of the world this is in danger of becoming a self-fulfilling assertion: Israel's reckless behavior and insistent identification of all criticism with anti-Semitism is now the leading source of anti-Jewish sentiment in Western Europe and much of Asia. But the traditional corollary - if anti-Jewish feeling is linked to dislike of Israel then right-thinking people should rush to Israel's defense - no longer applies. Instead, the ironies of the Zionist dream have come full circle: For tens of millions of people in the world today, Israel is indeed the state of all the Jews. And thus, reasonably enough, many observers believe that one way to take the sting out of rising anti-Semitism in the suburbs of Paris or the streets of Jakarta would be for Israel to give the Palestinians back their land.

The reality is that Israel’s political culture, just like America’s after 9/11, is one that thrives on the fear of its citizens and a cult of victimhood. After all, the more Jews that are attacked abroad, the better Israel’s raison d’être starts to look.