Hold the Left Accountable, By Fiamma Nirenstein

In 1967 I was a communist, like most Italian youngsters. Bored by my rebellious behavior my family sent me to Neot Mordechai, a kibbutz in Upper Galilee. I was quite satisfied there - the kibbutz used to give money every month to the Vietcong. When the Six Day War began I took children to the shelters; I dug trenches and learned some simple shooting and acts of self-defense. We continued working in the orchards, but were quick to identify the incoming enemy MiGs and outgoing IAF Mirages chasing one another in the skies over the Golan Heights.

When I went back to Italy some of my fellow students stared at me as if at somebody new, an enemy, a wicked person who would soon become an imperialist. My life was about to change. I didn't know it yet, because I simply thought Israel had rightly won a war after having been assaulted with an incredible number of harassments.

But I soon noticed that I had lost the innocence of the good Jew, of the very special Jewish friend, their Jew: I was now connected with the Jews of the State of Israel, and slowly I was put out of the dodecaphonic, psychoanalytic Bob Dylan, Woody Allen, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Philip Roth, Freud shtetl coterie of Jews that sanctified my Judaism in left-wing eyes.

I have tried for a long time to bring back that sanctification, and they tried to give it back to me, because we - the Left and the Jews - desperately needed each other. But today's anti-Semitism has overwhelmed any good intention.

Throughout the years, even people who, like me, signed petitions asking the IDF to withdraw from Lebanon, became "unconscious fascist(s)" as a reader of mine wrote me in a letter filled with insults. I've also been called a cruel and insensitive human rights denier who doesn't care about the lives of Palestinian children.

A very famous Israeli writer told me: "You really have become a right-winger."

What? Right-winger? Me? An old feminist human rights activist, even a communist when I was young? Only because I described the Arab-Israeli conflict as accurately as I could, and because I sometimes identified with a country continuously attacked by terror, I became a right-winger?

In the contemporary world of human rights, when you call a person a right-winger, it is the first step toward his or her delegitimization.

Jews born after the Holocaust learn a very clear message: Evil has come to Jews mostly from the Right - from the Church during a large part of its history, and certainly from Nazism and fascism. The Left blessed the Jews as the victim par excellence, always a great partner in the struggle for the rights of the weak against the wicked. In return for being coddled, Jews, even during the Soviet anti-Semitic persecutions, gave the Left moral support and invited it to cry with them at Holocaust memorials.

Today the game is clearly over. The Left has proved itself the real cradle of contemporary anti-Semitism.

When I speak about anti-Semitism, I'm not speaking of legitimate criticism of Israel but of pure anti-Semitism: criminalization, stereotypes, specific and generic lies that have fluctuated from lies about the Jews (conspiring, bloodthirsty, dominating the world) to lies about Israel (conspiring, ruthlessly violent). They started most widely after the beginning of the second intifada in September 2000, becoming more and more ferocious following operation Defensive Shield, when the IDF reentered Palestinian cities in response to terrorism.

The basic idea of anti-Semitism, today as always, is that Jews have a perverted soul that makes them unfit, as a morally inferior people, to be regular members of the human family.

Today this untermensch ideology has shifted to the Jewish state: a separate, unequal, basically evil stranger whose national existence is slowly but surely emptied and deprived of justification.

Now the traditional hook-nosed Jew bears a gun and kills Arab children with pleasure. On the front pages of European newspapers Ariel Sharon munches Palestinian children and little Jesuses in cradles are threatened by Israeli soldiers.

JEWS, AND the international community in general, have been caught unawares, and have failed to denounce the new trend of anti-Semitism. Nobody is scandalized when Israel is accused daily, without explanation, of excessive violence, atrocities, cruelty.

Why is Israel officially accused by the human rights commission in Geneva of violating human rights, while, China, Libya and Sudan have never ever been so accused? Why was everybody invited to join the war against Iraq except Israel, despite the fact that Saddam had always threatened Israel with complete destruction?

Israel is an unterstate - denied the basic rights of every other state to defend itself and to exist in honor and peace. People take anti-Jewish prejudices for granted. Everyone is free to think whatever they want. But we Jews must reserve our moral right to hold plain anti-Semites accountable, to say to them: When you lie or use prejudices and stereotypes about Israel and the Jews, you are an anti-Semite, and I'll fight you.

Denouncing the new anti-Semitism is psychologically terribly arduous for Israel and Diaspora Jews. It is even more difficult because between the Jews and the Left there is a divorce the latter does not want.

The Left wants to continue being considered the paladin of good Jews, because this gives it the moral authorization to then speak of Israeli "atrocities." So instead of requesting that Israel become an equal nation and Jews become equal citizens in the world, the Left prefers standing with Jews at Holocaust memorials cursing the old anti-Semitism while it accuses Israel, and therefore the Jews, of being racist killers.

But the contradiction has become even ontologically unbearable: How can you cry with the survivors over Jews killed by Nazi when the living Jews themselves are accused of being Nazis?

IF WE decide it is about time to fight, we must renounce liberal impostors. We have to say that the free press is a failure when it lies, and that it does lie. We have to say that all human rights are violated when a people is denied the right of self-defense, as it is denied to Israel.

Human rights are also violated when a nation is subjected to systematic defamation and made a legitimate target for terrorists. We have to stop accepting what we have accepted since the day the state was born - namely, that Israel be viewed as a different state in the international community.

Because Israel is the focal point of anti-Semitic attacks, our attention must be concentrated there. We must measure the moral character of the person we are speaking to on that basis: If you lie about Israel, if you cover it with bias, you are an anti-Semite. If you're prejudiced against Israel, you're against the Jews.

From now on you cannot use the "human rights passport" freely to employ false stereotypes. You must demonstrate what you assert: that the army ruthlessly storms poor Arab villages that have nothing to do with terrorism; that it shoots children on purpose; that it kills journalists with pleasure. You cannot? You called Jenin a slaughter? Then you are an anti-Semite, just like the old anti-Semites you pretend to hate. You have to convince me that you are not an anti-Semite, now that we know you do not condemn terrorism, that you have never said a word against the contemporary caricature of the hooked-nosed Jew with a bag of dollars in one hand and a machine-gun in the other.

Israel is in shock over the new anti-Semitism. All the theories that claimed classic anti-Semitism would abate with the creation of the State of Israel and that, in the long run, anti-Semitism would be extinguished have been destroyed. Israel has actually become the sum of all the evil.

The Palestinians are turned into Jesus, crucified; the war in Iraq or in Afghanistan waged by the US is part of the Jewish plan of domination. Jews all over the world are threatened, beaten, even killed to pay the price of Israel's existence.

The only way to face this threat is to fight fearlessly, on our own terrain, using all the weapons Israel possesses. Without shame, without fear or sense of guilt.

Israel has the chance to prove itself for what it really is: an outpost in the fight against terrorism and for democracy. That is no small thing.

But we Jews pose as victims and hide from this chance because using it puts us in conflict with our ancient sponsors and their legitimization. We have to realize that legitimization is in our own hands.

From a speech delivered at the YIVO center in New York. Nirenstein is a foreign correspondent for the Italian daily La Stampa.