Despite an international commitment to fight anti-Semitism, a recent report released by the U.S. State Department has suggested that anti-Jewish sentiments across the globe are still on the rise.
"More than 60 years after the Holocaust," the report says, "anti-Semitism is not just a fact of history; it is a current event."
The 94-page report, entitled "Contemporary Global Anti-Semitism," which is meant to shape policies to combat anti-Semitism, names anti-Semitic incidents in Europe and America - which include terrorism, physical attacks, abuse, property damage and cemetery desecration - as well as "anti-Semitic discourse," such as conspiracy theories and Holocaust denial.
A particularly striking point is what the report calls "new anti-Semitism," as opposed to "traditional anti-Semitism." "The distinguishing feature of the new anti-Semitism," it says, "is criticism of Zionism or Israeli policy that, whether intentionally or unintentionally, has the effect of promoting prejudice against all Jews by demonizing Israel and Israelis and attributing Israel's perceived faults to its Jewish character."
In other words, it suggests that it is peoples' growing knowledge of the Zionist state's actions, often in defiance of international law, that triggers anti-Semitic sentiments. It proposes to cure anti-Semitism by stopping to criticize the controversial policy of the Israeli state towards Palestinians, a policy that Israel's leading revisionist historian, Professor Ilan Pappe, the son of Nazi Holocaust survivors, calls "ethnic cleansing."
Alan Hart shares the report's concern about the rise of anti-Semitism, and is committed to "prevent the monster of anti-Semitism from going on the rampage again."
The former global foreign correspondent for ITN and the BBC's Panorama program was probably the only journalist to have enjoyed access to, and friendship with former Palestine Liberation Organization leader, Yasser Arafat, and former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir." It enabled him to contemplate this conflict from behind the scenes. Because of these relationships, he found himself, at the end of 1979, involved in an unofficial U.N. mission in a bid to become a middleman between Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat.
But Hart has a new solution to fight anti-Semitism: He suggests curing the problem at its root. For him, it is political Zionism that, as well as affecting Palestinians, has harmed Judaism. Because of its "arrogance of power and self-righteousness," political Zionism has triggered "the re-awakening of the sleeping giant of classical anti-Semitism."
He believes that "after the obscenity of the Nazi Holocaust, and because of it, this giant would have gone back to sleep, probably remained asleep, and might even have died in its sleep, if Zionism had not been allowed by the major powers to have its way."
Hart is not alone in declaring Israel's policy harmful to Jews.
A century ago, before the Zionist state even came into being, Ahad Ha'Am, a leader of spiritual Zionism (the concept that looks at Jerusalem as a spiritual center for Jews, and that values Jewish culture and history), predicted that Jewish nationalism (political Zionism) would require its founders to abandon moral principles.
He warned early Jewish settlers against the 'great error' of "treating the fellahin with contempt." But rather than covering up Zionism's failure to abide by international conventions, Hart believes that a sustainable solution against anti-Semitism would be clearing nations to the fact that Judaism and political Zionism are by no means synonyms. His latest book, "Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews," conveys this message.
"Like Christianity and Islam," he explains, "Judaism has at its core a set of moral values and ethical principles. To the extent that they look to Jerusalem as the center of their religion, all religious Jews could [and most do] regard themselves as spiritual Zionists. But political Zionism is something else. It is a sectarian, colonialist ideology which created a state for some Jews in the Arab heartland mainly by terrorism and ethnic cleansing. By so doing, it made a mockery of Judaism's moral values and ethical principles."
Knowing this difference explains two things, Hart believes: "One is why it is perfectly possible to be passionately anti-Zionist [opposed to Zionism's colonial enterprise] without being anti-Semitic. The other is why it is wrong to blame all Jews for the crimes of the relative few – hardest core political Zionists in Israel, which is a Zionist not a Jewish state."
And there is more to it: Because many Jews who oppose Israel's policy are reluctant of offending Israel for fear of promoting anti-Semitism, thus digging their own graves, informing the gentile world about this key difference means paving the way for Jews to speak out without fear for themselves.
What Hart suggests is a new "covenant, not between Jews and their God, but between Jews and the gentiles, where Jews would commit themselves against Zionism while gentiles would commit themselves against anti-Semitism." Through his latest book, the gentile Hart has made his first contribution to the covenant. But it needs to be followed up.