Undergirding the explicit legal and political norms of any society is a moral order that forbids certain behaviors, lionizes others, values different goals as more or less worthy, and guides how its members make sense of the world around them. It is through this moral framework that nations and individuals find meaning. And when it collapses, people—unable to endure life without meaning very long—quickly find new ways to fill the void.
The West is presently in the throes of a crisis of meaning. Among the substitute sources of meaning presently on offer, the one that asks least and returns most, the cheapest to acquire and the most versatile in its application, is anti-Zionism. It is an old instrument lately refitted, and what recommends it to a society that has lost its bearings is its efficacy: there is no disappointment it cannot be made to explain, no grievances it cannot organize, and no explanation it offers that requires either evidence or the labor of thought.
I understand this all too well because, in Egypt at the beginning of the present century, I observed up close what happens when this form of thinking succeeds. At that time, the Egyptian state had withdrawn from the economy it had long commanded and the cultivation of the land was reorganized toward European markets; Egyptian agriculture turned away from the staples that had fed the country and toward high-value fruits—strawberries, melons, citrus—that could be sold abroad for hard currency, with the consequence that a country that had once aspired to feed itself (and that, in ancient times, had fed much of the world around it) became dependent upon the granaries of others. This was a question of political economy of the most ordinary kind, the sort best evaluated in terms of price and yield, of comparative advantage and the distribution of risk. It was not, however, treated in those terms.
The intellectuals, experts, and pundits who took it up reasoned instead along a path whose every step bore the appearance of critical rigor. They concluded that the new pattern of land cultivation had not been chosen but imposed by the country’s dependence upon American aid; that dependence had been secured at the Camp David Accords; and Camp David was, in its essence, peace with Israel. The crate of strawberries being loaded on a ship bound for France was therefore disclosed to be not a crop but a tribute, a thing grown by Egyptian hands for the tables of foreigners at the silent dictation of the Zionists. No link in this chain was advanced as an argument or even a slogan; each was offered as a discovery: the revelation that resulted from looking at the hidden factors that lurk behind appearances. Those who advanced this absurd claim would have been affronted to hear their analysis described as prejudice; in their own minds they had rejected prejudice, looking beyond the obvious answers to follow the evidence toward a courageous conclusion.
The exposure of the strawberry plot exemplifies the mature form of anti-Zionism as a total social fact, a comprehensive meaning around which society organizes its thoughts, desires, and actions. When a stone is flung through the window of a store rumored, often falsely, to be Jewish owned, no one can deny that this is an anti-Semitic assault, even those who would say it was deserved. But when the perverse logic of anti-Zionism animates articles published in respectable press outlets, it presents itself as the mere exercise of reason. The prejudice fades into the background and can easily be denied. Eventually, the logic becomes a kind of mental reflex, and the argument no longer needs spelling out. Any problem, no matter how mundane, can be explained simply by pointing in the direction of Jerusalem. Of course the strawberry glut results from peace with Israel.
An American might be tempted to assume that only unfortunate peoples in faraway lands are susceptible to such absurdities, and that wealth, freedom, and a long history of self-government can be trusted to keep them out. This error is especially dangerous.
No nation can claim anti-Semitism as its particular property. It is not the residue of some specific form of ignorance. It can appeal to any society that has lost the meaning by which it had once lived and gone in search of another, and the conditions under which it flowers are not those of material poverty but of spiritual poverty. Neither education, nor freedom, nor technology can insulate against it. Indeed, the very conditions that have left America vulnerable are the products of its freedoms and its economic and technological advancement: the severing of attachments, the attenuating of traditional moral restraints, and the atomization of the individual. These conditions are perhaps not so different from those experienced by countries like Egypt during their rapid and chaotic entry into modernity in 20th century. But no one fortifies himself against a fate he is certain lies beneath him.
In America in the past few years, I can see the beginnings of what was familiar to me in Egypt. And as has been the case in many Arab countries, anti-Zionism is spreading most rapidly among those with the most expensive educations. The chains of anti-Zionist reasoning have begun to be assembled in two directions at once—from two moral starting points that imagine of themselves to be opposites but are building toward a common terminus.
On the one hand, the young who find they cannot afford a house, or cannot find the sort of meaningful employment they seek, and are increasingly pessimistic about the future, are being told that the United States is being bled on behalf of a foreign garrison, that it is fighting wars for the sake of a settler colony overseas, and that the same hand that withholds from them a home or a heath-insurance policy extends itself abroad to underwrite an occupation. The economic uncertainty and political dysfunction are real, and the explanation furnished for both lead, by way of anti-colonial claims to righteousness, to the Jewish state.
On the other hand, the man whose town has been hollowed by the departure of its former industries and whose sons can find no work but plenty of opioids is instructed that his nation has long been governed against itself by a rootless and cosmopolitan power whose true loyalties lie elsewhere, that its borders were opened and its industries exported and its endless wars undertaken at the behest of a people who are within the country but not of it. The first names the Zionist a colonizer and the second names the Jew a globalist; the first summons its adherents to stand with the oppressed and the second to reclaim the nation. From their opposed moralities the two arrive at a single villain, which each installs as the concealed author of the disappointment it laments.
The aspects of America that, for so long, have curbed anti-Semitic obsessions are still present—even if they have begun attenuating. Unlike in Egypt, it’s still usually necessary to make an argument in order to blame domestic problems on Israel; it’s not yet enough simply to say, “Zionist strawberries!” But if America reaches that point at which the logic of anti-Zionism can transmogrify the most banal of domestic problems into evidence of Israeli perfidy, without any need to justify the logical steps, then the game is up. When the cost of insulin, or the loneliness of young men, can be thrown at the feet of the Jews—and the proposition is taken as too self-evident to need explanation—then the argument will be lost, because there will remain no one who recalls that it was ever an argument.
What a society practicing this substitution forfeits in the end is more than a single issue. The fate of a single business may serve as an example. In the late 1990s, a British grocery chain, Sainsbury, persuaded that a vast and underserved market might be drawn into the modern age, entered Egypt at considerable initial investment, built a network of stores across the country, and employed thousands of its citizens at wages the older economy of the neighborhood vendor could not begin to match, while providing goods at far lower prices. Within two years, the company was gone, driven out by the rumor—not just false, but impervious to every piece of countervailing evidence—that it was a Jewish store remitting its profits to Israel. Its windows were stoned. From pulpits and newspapers, the message went out to a receptive public that that the stores were to be boycotted. Sainsbury withdrew at a loss of tens of millions, its capital destroyed, its workers laid off, the infrastructure of modern retail dismantled within months. The cost to the Egyptian economy was even greater than the cost to the corporation. While the elite and the mob like to think of themselves as at odds, they were in total agreement, even coordination, in this delusion.
Self-inflicted ruin is precisely what a society can expect once it has learned to settle its material questions by the reflexive accusation of Israel. In the end, it loses the faculty to reason through any sort of political or economic problems. Reality itself becomes secondary, because any fact—indeed, any operation of cause and effect—can be reinterpreted as a mask for the hidden agency of the Jews. Once it can no longer reason through and diagnose its problems, a society also loses both its will and its ability to address its problems. It cannot labor for any cause nor build anything.
The injury, in the final accounting, is suffered not by the accused but by the accuser, who in the very act of explaining his misfortune seals off the one road by which it might have been repaired. A country that has taught itself to blame Zionism for its strawberries may in due course lose the capacity to grow them.
