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Tom Friedman’s latest essay focuses on the question of Israel’s loosing ‘acceptance’. Mr. Friedman’s attempt to impresses his readership with his world travels. And the almost hand-wringing white washing, of the Genocide practiced Netanyahu, aided by American arms and material, and crucial votes in the UN.

I’ve spent the past few days traveling from New Delhi to Dubai and Amman, and I have an urgent message to deliver to President Biden and the Israeli people: I am seeing the increasingly rapid erosion of Israel’s standing among friendly nations — a level of acceptance and legitimacy that was painstakingly built up over decades. And if Biden is not careful, America’s global standing will plummet right along with Israel’s.

I don’t think Israelis or the Biden administration fully appreciate the rage that is bubbling up around the world, fueled by social media and TV footage, over the deaths of so many thousands of Palestinian civilians, particularly children, with U.S.-supplied weapons in Israel’s war in Gaza. Hamas has much to answer for in triggering this human tragedy, but Israel and the U.S. are seen as driving events now and getting most of the blame.

That such anger is boiling over in the Arab world is obvious, but I heard it over and over again in conversations in India during the past week — from friends, business leaders, an official and journalists both young and old. That is even more telling because the Hindu-dominated government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the only major power in the global south that has supported Israel and consistently blamed Hamas for inviting the massive Israeli retaliation and the deaths of an estimated 30,000 people, according to Gazan health officials, the majority of them civilians.

That many civilian deaths in a relatively short war would be problematic in any context. But when so many civilians die in a retaliatory invasion that was launched by an Israeli government without any political horizon for the morning after — and then, when the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, finally offers a morning-after plan that essentially says to the world that Israel now intends to occupy both the West Bank and Gaza indefinitely — it is no surprise that Israel’s friends will edge away and the Biden team will start to look hapless.

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There is no ‘War in Gaza’: ‘That many civilian deaths in a relatively short war would be problematic in any context’ is the equivocating apologetics of a partisan: as if he were not neck deep in crude Zionist apologetics. But a Genocide and the forced famine against Palestinians: Israel blocking convoys of trucks with food, water, medical supplies, has eluded Friedman. ‘The Storied West’ is sinking in the muck and mire of a Zionism, that has metastasized into a recrudescence of Nazism!

Historical background offered by Anthony Quinton in his review of Paul Lawrence Rose’s book ‘Revolutionary Antisemitism In Germany From Kant to Wagner.’

Princeton University Press, 389 pp., $29.95

Idealists Against the Jews

Anthony Quinton

November 7, 1991 issue

The suggestion of the title of Paul Rose’s imposing book that Kant, the patron saint of liberal humanitarianism, was in fact the initiator of an important, and perhaps the crucial, strand in German anti-Semitism may come as something of a shock. But for this and for a number of other, more comprehensive, propositions, Paul Lawrence Rose has assembled a powerful, if rather single-minded case. In twenty long chapters he presents the results of an enormous amount of reading in the primary and secondary literature of nineteenth-century German intellectual history, which is attested to by the luxuriant fringe of notes dangling at the bottom of nearly every one of the book’s 379 pages of text.

His main thesis is that the modern form of anti-Semitism in Germany started to acquire its peculiar virulence nearly a hundred years before Hitler was born; in 1793, to be precise. This was the year of publication of Kant’s Religion Within The Bounds of Reason, and of a defense of the French Revolution by Fichte, at a time when Fichte had not yet moved from Jacobinism to the emphatic nationalism of which he is best known as the prophet. Kant and Fichte were radicals who were convinced that the time had come for a moral transformation of mankind—or, at any rate; of Germany—through which all people should become truly free and rational moral agents, autonomous directors of their own lives, independent of the constraints of ossified custom and established authority. The Jews, to both of them, exemplified with the greatest intensity the kind of degraded moral existence to which they were opposed.

Rose’s second point is that this kind of fervently moral anti-Semitism is almost entirely the work of left-wing or, he thinks it is better to say, radical or revolutionary thinkers. (He reasonably holds that the terms “left” and “right” are not all that effectively discriminating when they are applied to revolutionaries.) Indeed he presents some evidence which supports his point with almost scientific purity. Those of his thinkers who drifted away from radicalism, either as they got older or through disappointment with the outcome of 1848, also muted or abandoned their anti-Semitism, unlike those who remained radical. Heine is one example. Then there are Karl Gutzkow and Heinrich Laube, members of the “Young German” movement of the 1830s and 1840s. Gutzkow was briefly jailed for his attack on marriage and religious orthodoxy. Although they retracted their anti-Semitism in later life they had made their mark by attacking Jews in their youth. Laube’s view that the Jewish interest in art was essentially commercial was the inspiration of Wagner’s Judaism in Music. Gutzkow, on a more comic level, seems to have been the first to say, or print, the familiar incantation: “Many of my best and dearest friends are Jews.” Marx is the most famous of Rose’s specimens who are conventionally regarded as men of the left. But he includes also Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer.

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Idealists Against the Jews

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