At the same time, as someone who feels that my own perspective really has been shaped by Israeli policy rather than the mob, I want to suggest that there is another force in play here, part of the legacy of Zionism and philosemitism rather than just a revolt against both.
Here let me quote the Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur, arguing with Yglesias and making points that are, I think, mostly true:
My point of disagreement with Matt is that these massive failures of the Israeli government are nevertheless woefully insufficient to explain the unique scale, duration and frenzy of the anti-Israel campaign. It’s simply unprecedented.
Even if you assume the absolute worst of Israel — literal genocide and the worst government imaginable — it wouldn’t be enough to explain it, for the simple reason that worse wars with much higher civilian death tolls carried out by allies of the West using Western weapons and pushed by much worse governments bent on carrying out actual genocides (cue the tiresome mob) never drew a tenth or a thousandth of this response.
… There something else at play here. Something unique to this conflict and the role it plays in Western and Muslim-world psychologies. Is it really a coincidence — asking for some friends — that this totally unique response happens to be landing on the Jews?
As I said, it’s not a coincidence because the rise of anti-Zionism and antisemitism are overdetermined forces. But it’s also not a coincidence because Americans have a fundamentally different relationship to Jews, Judaism, Zionism and Israel than to any of the “much worse governments” that Gur is referring to — Saudi Arabia and its war in Yemen is his prime example, but one could make a much longer list of authoritarian states whose war crimes pass without sufficient notice.
I say this as child of the 1990s, educated at the peak of World War II- and Holocaust-memorializing in American culture. What I was taught, what many Americans were taught, is that the story of the Jews, the history of antisemitism, the enormity of the Shoah and the foundation of Israel together form one of the central dramatic streams in Western history, with the Jewish experience in America linked to both the European and Israeli aspects of the story. This was not some incidental idea at the margins of my education; it was a central cultural teaching, as palpable in my high school English class as at the Academy Awards or the Holocaust Memorial Museum in D.C.
There was no equivalent teaching for any of the authoritarian nations with whom the United States enjoyed alliances of strategic convenience. Nobody taught me in depth about the Saudi experience or Pakistani history, nobody treated debates within Islamic or African civilization as central to Western or American history, nobody asked me to care deeply about peace processes in East Africa or Southeast Asia. There was sometimes interest in those areas, attempts to extend the locus of American concern to Burma or Darfur, but basically those stories were understood to be outside our own, whereas the story of the Jews and the story of Israel were fundamentally inside.
So part of the answer to Gur’s question — why do Westerners freak out in a unique way about Israel policy? — is connected to identification, not hostility, and to the feeling that Israel is part of our zone of identity and responsibility in a way that the Saudi monarchy is not.
