A Non-Zionist Reflects on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

In his essay “‘Progressive’ Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism” (first released by the American Jewish Committee in 2006 and reported to a wide readership in the New York Times in 2007), Alvin H. Rosenfeld takes to task liberal Jewish intellectuals whose anti-Zionist hostility to the very existence of the State of Israel amounts, in his view, to a new kind of anti-Semitism. He has no quarrel with criticism of Israel’s policies and actions. Anti-Semitism enters the picture with “the singling out of the Jewish state, and the Jewish state alone, as a political entity unworthy of a secure and sovereign existence.” And he provides numerous examples of vehement hostility to the State of Israel, for example, by Jacqueline Rose of the University of London: “Her lexicon of descriptive terms for Zionism and its errant ways is overwhelmingly negative: ‘agony,’ ‘anguished,’ ‘belligerent,’ ‘bloody,’ ‘brutal,’ ‘cataclysmic,’ ‘corrupt,’ ‘c...