A new anti-Semitism?

In a long book review in The Nation, Brian Klug writes about The Myth of the New Anti-Semitism. There are a number of features of his review that are open to criticism in my opinion, but I shall focus this comment on what strikes me as its main problem. Klug doesn't, on the face of it, mean to deny that there are grounds for worry. As he writes:

There is certainly reason to be concerned about a climate of hostility to Jews, including vicious physical attacks. On one Saturday this past November, for example, two synagogues in Istanbul were truck-bombed during Sabbath services, while an Orthodox Jewish school in a Paris suburb was largely destroyed by arson. Some researchers report a 60 percent worldwide increase in the number of assaults on Jews (or persons perceived to be Jewish) in 2002, compared with the previous year. At the same time, something is rotten in the state of public discourse. Anti-Jewish slogans and graphics have appeared on marches opposing the invasion of Iraq. Jewish conspiracy theories have been revived, such as the widely circulated "urban legend" that Jews were warned in advance to stay away from the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001. And recently, certain public figures on both the right and the left have made negative generalizations about Jews and "Jewish influence."

All of this seems clear enough. However, Klug wants to argue that it doesn't add up to convincing evidence of a new anti-Semitism - understood, this, as a new kind of anti-Semitism, rather than as a new growth, or outbreak, of the old anti-Semitism. And the remainder of the piece is then devoted to putting in question the claim for a new kind of anti-Semitism, the central organizing principle of which Klug defines as the linking of anti-Semitism to anti-Zionism.

The general method of his argument is to go through variations on the theme that anti-Zionist criticism, or feeling, isn't necessarily anti-Semitic, while allowing that though the one isn't necessarily the other it isn't necessarily not the other either. But overall the first kind of 'isn't necessarily' prevails. Thus:

There is a long and ignoble history of "Zionist" being used as a code word for "Jew"...

But:

[A]nti-Zionism is one thing, anti-Semitism another. They are separate. To say they are separate is not to say that they are never connected.

Again:

But the underlying hostility toward it [Israel] in the region is not hostility toward the state as Jewish but as a European interloper or as an American client or as a non-Arab and non-Muslim entity; moreover, as an oppressive occupying force. Some people see this disposition toward Israel as anti-imperialist or anticolonialist, others as chauvinist or xenophobic. But in and of itself, it is not anti-Semitic.

Which is not to deny that anti-Semitism enters the mix. But it is one ingredient in a complex situation, not the engine that drives anti-Zionism.

And also this:

In the Arab and Muslim world today... [t]he political conflict is what comes first and goes deep, while anti-Semitism is a secondary formation, a byproduct of aspirations and grievances that have nothing to do with a priori prejudice against Jews (although such prejudice was hardly absent from the Muslim world before the creation of Israel).

And this:

But the evidence suggests that the perpetrators of the anti-Jewish attacks in France were animated by political outrage, not bigotry.

Two things bother me about it all. One of them I have argued at some length before, so will just reformulate within the context of the present post. How does Brian Klug know? I mean, given that he keeps allowing that it may be but isn't necessarily, how does he know that, when, or how much, the 'isn't' rather than the 'may be' is at work? He never says. He just veers towards that side, his own acknowledgement of all the worrying developments notwithstanding.

More seriously disturbing, though, is his very careful picking at the question of whether this anti-Semitism is a new kind of anti-Semitism, rather than its being just a new anti-Semitism in the more straightforward sense of being a recrudescence of something which there had been reason to think, during some few decades after the Judeocide in Europe, had been all but marginalized. For as Roger Simon, who has also blogged this, has said, who cares? To me Klug's article has a strange, misdirected feel to it. A bit like a doctor going to great and pedantic lengths to explain to a patient that her worry that she might have contracted a certain terrible disease was needless (well, probably needless), while not taking any time to think about whether in fact she had a different terrible disease - of which she bore many symptoms.

(Thanks to Chris Bertram for drawing my attention to Klug's article.)