Those Who Forget the Past by Ron Rosenbaum Page B

in Pol Pot’s Cambodia. None of which has resulted in many on the Left questioning whether there might be some
connection
between Marxist ideology and the frequency of mass murder in Marxist regimes. Well, they’re not
really
Marxist regimes—they weren’t doing Marxism
right,
some will say. Or even if there were mass murders, they came from
good intentions,
utopian aspirations that somehow seemed to go awry—so it’s not like Hitler’s mass murder at all.
    Well, there are certainly differences. But the Heideggerian equanimity, the deafening silence, the lack of outrage of much of the Left about the mass murders and the gulags in Marxist regimes—during
and
after—has its most practical and disheartening effect in the way it has not succeeded in altering the longstanding
corollary
perception on the Left that the locus of greatest evil in recent history is the United States. Only by ignoring Marxist genocides can one come to this conclusion. 17
    U.S. allies, such as Israel, thus tend to be judged by the same a priori prejudice, as agents of intrinsically evil American imperialism. So anti-Zionism, along with the anti-Semitism it encourages or shades into, is, in some instances, a derivative of a kind of ahistorical, knee-jerk Left anti-Americanism which ignores Marxist genocides and still views the United States as
the
evil empire—and lacks the willingness to question judgments that proceed from that. Such as the Left judgment on Israel.
    I was particularly impressed by the analysis of the antiSemitism of the Left by Melanie Phillips in London’s
Spectator
. She suggests an even deeper, more provocative source of Left anti-Semitism, one elucidated by a Polish intellectual at a Jerusalem conference who argued: “The Left could not face the fact that they had totally misconstrued the Middle East because this would undermine their whole philosophy . . . founded on the premise that reason could reconcile all differences; all that was needed in Israel was an enlightened government for reason to prevail. The evidence that we are facing a phenomenon which is not susceptible to reason would destroy that world view.”
    Whether you agree or not with this take on the subject, it has become apparent to me that Reason, reasonableness, unreasonableness, and how they’re defined are central to the argument over what is mere anti-Zionism and what is antiSemitism. To many anti-Zionists, there can be no
reasonable
explanation for Israelis’ “unreasonableness”—their unwilling ness to trust the 300 million Muslims surrounding them— except for some unreasonable stiff-necked character apparently intrinsic to Jewish nature. Or a malign Jewish disposition to torment those who share their land. Thus anti-Zionism elides into anti-Semitism. To me the most pernicious implication of some anti-Zionists, the heart of anti-Zionist anti-Semitism, is in the implication that, somehow, malevolent Jews enjoy imposing an occupation with its attendant restrictions and suffering on Palestinians. Jews want to live in peace, but three wars in which Arab states tried to drive them into the sea, and a terror campaign by Palestinians who reject the idea of a Jewish state, have left Israelis with the tragic choice between self-defense and self-destruction. The root cause of Palestinian suffering has been the rejection by Arab and Palestinian leadership of the Jewish state’s right to exist at all.
    To many Israelis and many Jews, their people are asked to be “reasonable” under a definition of “reasonableness” that once again puts the existence of their state, of their people, in peril. This is why Amos Oz’s essay is so important. Important because, however brief, it appeared in a Left publication such as
The Nation
.
    It is, in fact, the shortest piece in this collection, but it says something very significant, from a very significant standpoint. Oz, the celebrated