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Anti-Semitism Isn't Merely Another Kind of Hate
(Wall Street Journal) Ruth Wisse - The Arab League launched the original pan-Arab boycott of Israel in 1945, defining any Jewish presence in Palestine as an occupation of Arab territory. The U.S. intervened to thwart the boycott because Israel's destruction was inconsistent with American values. But America has changed. At the end of the 20th century, a home-grown boycott, divestment and sanctions movement became an American arm of the war against Israel, uniting a self-defined progressive coalition on the side of Arab-Muslim rejectionism. Anti-Semitism is more than just a form of hatred; people organize against the Jews as part of an ideological struggle. Zionists who thought anti-Semitism was directed against them because of their dispersion were surprised to find it was even easier to blame them in their homeland. Since 1945, the driving force of anti-Jewish politics has been the Arab-Muslim war against the Jewish state, supported by Marxist ideology. The writer is professor emerita of Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard.