A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad (review)

The structure of A Lethal Obsession loosely follows Wistrich's career, shifting focus from the antisemitism of the Left to the antisemitism of the Nazis, and, after some critique of the Western multiculturalist Left, culminating in what Wistrich sees, it seems, as the heir to all strands of anti-Jewish prejudice and ideology: the antisemitism of the Arab and Muslim world (especially in Iran). Many scholars would categorize the subject here as anti-Zionism rather than antisemitism, but Wistrich, with various academic caveats, seems to assert that there is little difference between antisemitism and of anti-Zionism. He finds that, among sections of the anti-Zionist Left, whether in Germany, France, Britain, "Eurabia" generally, or the United Nations, criticism and hostility to Israel over the last few decades have amounted to little more than antisemitism obscured by an "anti-Zionist masquerade."

Following this logic, Wistrich identifies many Jews who are anti-Zionist or severe critics of Israel as suffering from Jewish self-hatred—a condition whose existence he and some other scholars accept unproblematically. The late Tony Judt is included in this group, although with no explication of why this is so (p. 541). In his chapter "Multiculturalism and Its Discontents," Wistrich characterizes multiculturalism as liberal wishful thinking and warns that it may become "one of the first casualties of a resurgent militant Islam" (p. 599). Lethal Obsession devotes a chapter exclusively to Holocaust denial, although the subject also crops up repeatedly elsewhere.

A key argument of the work is that today's Arab and Muslim antisemitism descends directly from Nazi antisemitism. Wistrich's starting point is the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, a Palestinian nationalist leader who became an ally of Hitler. Wistrich sees Yasser Arafat as the Mufti's direct spiritual heir (p. 701), implying that, despite attempts at disguise, Palestinian "liberation" has been driven by the same eliminationist antisemitism that fueled Nazism. Wistrich makes the same sort of link regarding Ba'athist Arab nationalists, "Islamofascists," Hamas, Hezbollah, and their patron, Iran. There is a chapter on the "Muslim apocalypse," but the threat of Al-Qaeda takes a back seat to what the author sees as the biggest threat to Israel (and hence Jews) today: Ahmedinejad's millenarian Iran. Wistrich warns of a "nuclear Armageddon" if "resolute preventive action" is not taken soon against the "deadly strain of genocidal antisemitism" (p. 938) he has described.

This doom-laden augury might be more convincing if there were not certain deficiencies in reaching it. Perhaps it is inevitable, given the Manichean nature of his subject, but there are times when Wistrich seems to have adopted similar forms of thought. He implies that claims about the power of the "Jewish lobby" in America are an offshoot of the conspiracy theory rooted in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He singles out Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer (p. 554), but it is fairly clear that their criticism of the power of the Israel lobby in American foreign policy, whether accurate or not, is not based on that trope.

Wistrich also seemingly overlooks the different motivations and structure of antisemitism and some forms of anti-Zionism. If the exclusive target of hostility is Israel, then I perceive that we are dealing with anti-Zionism, not necessarily antisemitism per se. Wistrich points out that Arab and Muslim anti-Zionist discourse often conflates Zionists and Jews, which makes it anti-Jewish and hence antisemitic. Problematic in such an approach is that some Zionists, among whom Wistrich would seem to include himself, make a similar conflation, because Israel is for them the expression of the Jewish people's right to national self-determination. Israel and the Jewish nation are hence part of the same body—just as Muslim and Arab anti-Zionists suspect.

In my view, perhaps the largest problem in Wistrich's approach, as I read it, is that the role of Israel is not a causal factor...