Before the New Antisemitism: Arab Critics of Zionism and American Jewish Politics, 1917-1974

Abstract

Before the New Antisemitism:Arab Critics of Zionism and American Jewish Politics, 1917-1974 Geoffery P. Levin1 (bio) On June 5, 1937, WNYC radio aired a town-hall event organized in New York by an Arab American group, the Arab National League (ANL). It opened with ANL President Dr. Fuad Shatara reading a cable from the Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, congratulating the guest of honor, poet Ameen Rihani, and continued with several speeches critical of Zionism.2 Almost immediately, the ANL and WNYC came under attack by New York City Alderman Samson Inselbuch, who charged them with spreading antisemitism.3 WNYC and the ANL, however, soon found defense from the highest echelons of American Jewish leadership—B'nai B'rith Vice President Louis Fabricant, American Jewish Committee (AJC) official Sol Stroock, Orthodox leader Rabbi Herbert Goldstein, the National Council of Jewish Women, and most notably, Rabbi Stephen Wise. Defending WNYC, Wise, a leading Zionist who headed the American Jewish Congress (AJCongress) and the World Jewish Congress (WJC), wrote that "absurdly enough, it has been charged with anti-Semitism—as if Arabs and Jews alike were not Semites."4 The episode says much about American Jewish perceptions of Arabs, anti-Zionism, and antisemitism. It reveals that the trend of viewing Arab opposition to Zionism as antisemitic has a long history in the United States, predating Israel's creation. Yet it also shows that America's most prominent Jewish organizations did not perceive early Arab critics of Zionism as inherently antisemitic. On the contrary, American Jewish [End Page 103] leaders vigorously pushed back against labeling Arab critics of Zionism as antisemites, a characterization which Wise, arguably the most influential American Zionist of the era, considered absurd. The response of American Jewish groups to the 1937 controversy may come as a surprise given that in recent decades, some of these same organizations have argued that anti-Zionism is inherently antisemitic and at times have specifically emphasized "Arab" and "Muslim" forms of antisemitism.5 In seeking to understand the origins of this rhetoric, scholars have focused on the emergence of the term "the new anti-Semitism" in the 1970s. Daniel Schroeter writes that in the aftermath of the 1967 war, advocates for Israel "alarmed at what they saw as growing sympathy for the Arabs and Palestinians began to use the term 'new anti-Semitism,' which they understood as antisemitism either expressed or disguised as anti-Zionism." Central to the "new anti-Semitism," Schroeter continues, "was Arab hostility to Israel and the Jews ('Arab anti-Semitism'), as well as Western support for the Arabs and Palestinians."6 The 1974 book The New Anti-Semitism by Anti-Defamation League (ADL) leaders Arnold Forster and Benjamin Epstein gave a name to the concept.7 "Islamic anti-Semitism" soon became part of the "new anti-Semitism" discourse as Islamism ascended in Middle Eastern politics.8 Some began portraying Muslims' opposition to Zionism as part of a long history of anti-Jewish feelings within Islam dating back to the medieval era, drawing from what Mark Cohen has termed the "neo-lachrymose conception of Jewish-Arab history," a revisionist narrative that emphasized the mistreatment of Jews in Islamic lands. According to Cohen and Schroeter, this "neo-lachrymose conception" had been developed in part to rebut [End Page 104] Arab advocates' claims that Zionism had ruined an otherwise idyllic history of Jewish-Muslim relations.9 Yet while the 1970s marked the creation of the term "the new anti-Semitism," the first crucial shift in American Jewish discourse on the connection between Arabs, anti-Zionism, and antisemitism came much earlier, not long after the WNYC controversy. Throughout the interwar period (1918-1941), American Jewish organizations generally downplayed Arab discontent with Jews and Zionism, preferring not to categorize it as antisemitism. But even when these same organizations began vocally condemning Arab anti-Zionist advocates in the 1940s and 1950s, they did so without characterizing their anti-Zionism as inherently antisemitic. Instead, these Jewish groups called attention to collaboration between Arab anti-Zionists and non-Arab domestic antisemitic groups, critiquing Arab advocates not for their Middle East agenda but for their alleged threat to Jews in the United States. Only after...