Erika Dreifus

I grew up with the utmost respect for the United Nations as an organization. I don’t remember a Halloween when I didn’t tote a Unicef box along with my plastic pumpkin. When I was in elementary school, my mom and one of her friends met up in Manhattan, coming from our respective residences in Brooklyn and Staten Island (and bringing us kids along), and toured the building that houses it. The UN has also been the subject of some scholarly interest for me (though unpublished, my first-semester graduate seminar paper on France’s path to a permanent seat on the Security Council remains one of the best pieces of work I did on my way to a Ph.D. in history).

But the UN loses credibility in my eyes when I see how it treats Israel. The Jewish Week reminded me about that in this article published in the November 23 issue. The idea attributed to Daniel Carmon, Israel’s deputy permanent representative, that there has been “a considerable [improvement]” in the UN’s treatment of Israel from 20-30 years ago, does not, unfortunately, console me.

Not too long ago my father mused aloud that my “political” leanings mystify him. The gist of his commentary was this: Someone born to my parents and provided the education I’ve received (an education for which I’ve spent many years in the rather “liberal” enclave of Cambridge, Massachusetts) would be expected to display far greater affinity for left-leaning politics and proclivities.

But as Mitchell Cohen’s new Dissent essay notes, “There is a left that learns and there is a left that doesn’t learn.” Like Cohen, I laud the “best values of the historical left”; it is, in fact, my quite extraordinary education that allows me to share in particular Cohen’s enthusiasm for “the best values of the historical left,” among which he–and I–would count the legacies of Jean Jaurès and Léon Blum in France.

Unfortunately, there is a far more nefarious “left” at work today, one I find difficult to tolerate. Because, as Cohen notes in the opening lines to his article, “A determined offensive is underway. Its target is in the Middle East, and it is an old target: the legitimacy of Israel.” It is coming “from within parts of the liberal and left intelligentsia in the United States and Europe”–and that’s a determination coming from the self-identified “leftist” Cohen.

Among his other achievements in this article, Cohen does an admirable job showing the cracks in the perennial argument that goes something like this: just-because-I-am-anti-Zionist-doesn’t-mean-I-am-anti-Semitic. Cohen’s critique here is essential reading, and I can only hope that it will actually resonate with the people who need to understand it most. “If you are anti-Zionist and not anti-Semitic,” he concludes, “then don’t use the categories, allusions, and smug hiss that are all too familiar to any student of prejudice.”

Then, perhaps, the best elements of the left will triumph. And I, for one, will be able to resume wearing that particular label more easily.

I don’t even know how to introduce this. I see unfair treatment of Israel in print and online pretty much every day, and while it always saddens, angers, and frustrates me, I can’t possibly chronicle it all. But here you’ll find one recent example. Read the comments carefully, too.

Do read the article–that’s how you’ll understand that while I haven’t yet resolved my opinion about the actual issues initially presented, which in some ways are more complicated than usual (there’s an appearance of punitive action here that makes me especially uneasy), the comments following the piece in particular reveal how easily this kind of situation unravels/degenerates into anti-Israel/anti-Jewish attacks that cannot be ignored.

I’ll add that one commenter’s statement, that a right to speak “does not entail [a] duty to listen, much less [a] duty to provide…a free hall and microphone,” is an eloquent articulation of something I’ve been struggling to voice when I seek to counter the oft-cited cry of “Censorship!” whenever authors of anti-Israel books and essays aren’t welcomed by a particular audience or to a particular location.

And don’t get me started on the many hypocrisies and double standards at play here, too. At least, not in this post. Maybe another time. Because, unfortunately, there will be another time.