The Impact of Anti-Semitism on the State of Israel

Abstract

H tUMAN beings have always tended to join together in groups. Each member of a group has an instinctive tendency to dislike members of other groups merely because they belong to other groups and not to his own group. Even when one group forms an alliance with another group, the motive is normally dislike or fear of other groups rather than mutual sympathy and attraction. This basic human tendency is liable to be intensified by ideologies which maintain the superiority of one or more groups over others: it can be kept under control by powerful Governments ruling over a number of varied groups and determined and able to maintain order among them. In essence, tension between Jew and Gentile is no different from that which prevails between rich and poor, black and white, orthodox and heretics, Lancashire and Yorkshire, Oxford and Cambridge. Its outward manifestations have, however, been shaped by historical developments such as the growth of mystical conceptions of the functions and natures of nations and the distribution of Jewish communities over a large number of different political units so that anti-Semitism today is no longer a prejudice against Jews but a proselytizing movement with international ramifications and an ideology which professes to provide solutions for a number of social, political, economic, and philosophical problems. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of this movement on the emotional climate of the inhabitants of the State of Israel. The Jewish population of the State of Israel originates largely from countries through which nationalist doctrines have spread during the last century and it has, therefore, been in a position to obtain a rather nearsighted view of the situation of minorities in nationalist countries. It has also preserved vivid and profound memories of centuries of discrimination and persecution prior to the rise of nationalism and one might go further and suggest that a conscious belief in a general and even inevitable hostility on the part of Gentiles towards Jews is the basis of Jewish nationalism and the main reason for the existence of the State of Israel. Yet the acceptance of hostility as a natural phenomenon by many Jews should not be allowed to obscure the acute difference between the antiJewish feeling of pre-nationalist epochs and that of the nationalist period. In both ancient and medieval times, whatever the extent of persecution, it had been possible for a Jew through adoption of the dominant faith to advance from the status of a second-class to that of a first-class human 0 I93