The power of extremism
Hubert Humphrey, US Vice President under Lyndon B Johnson and a Democratic Presidential candidate in 1968, when he was narrowly defeated by Richard Nixon, once issued a statement on the power of extremism which has helped me to make sense of the dilemma now facing Israel.
According to Humphrey, “The language of the time, the rhetoric of extremes, had the awful consequences of forcing almost all of us into simplistic positions….To be heard, the rhetoric in response required claims to be just as simplistic.”
Humphrey’s point was that there was an imperative to meet extremism with extreme counter-claims, similarly expressed in oversimplified language. Nuanced debate was thus rendered impossible. There could be no middle ground in a clash where one or both parties believed that they were engaged in an apocalyptic struggle between good and evil.
The question which Jews have had to face throughout their history and which Israel is facing today is: how do we defend ourselves against accusations of wrongdoing, at the core of which is the belief that all Jews are intrinsically evil? Many Jews find the answer in the proclamation of Jewish virtues and a recital of Jewish contributions to the betterment of humanity, but this only seems to feed the green-eyed monster eating at the soul of the antisemite.
For more than two millennia, Jews have been portrayed as a race to be despised, undeserving of the rights accorded to other peoples. With the birth of Israel in 1948, antisemitism, far from waning, acquired fresh impetus. The vilification of the Jewish people merely transferred itself onto the new state.
Recently, the rhetoric of antisemitism has taken the form of a blanket condemnation of Israel. Extremist language has become normalized and violence, the end-product of extremism, constantly ambushes the Jews. Nothing is more effective in destroying the hope for a peaceful resolution of conflict than an explosion or a massacre.
Another feature of extremism is its tendency to drive a wedge between people formerly united in a common purpose. A rift has developed between those Jews prepared to stand by Israel in its existential struggle and the minority of Jews who have chosen to join forces with Israel’s diehard enemies. Whether motivated by idealism or malice, these anti-Israel Jews are welcomed by antisemites who have set their sights on the dismantling of the Jewish state.
An additional weapon has now been deployed in the campaign against Israel: an appeal to international law. Anti-Israel extremists press for the arrest and trial of Israel’s leaders, accusing them of war crimes, while the terrorist perpetrators of mass murder and atrocities against the Jews remain unchallenged and continue to rally support for their campaign.
It seems that everything that we Jews have done to secure peace and security for our people is attacked as evil, bad and wrong, leaving us little room to maneuver, except to respond with the simplistic counter-claim that our beliefs are noble and sound.
Hope for the future must lie, not in mutual excoriation by the warring parties, but in the patient mobilization of moderate viewpoints. Only by such means will the power of extremism be weakened. In the meantime, we must be prepared to ride out the storm.
