No, Criticizing George Soros and Globalization Isn’t “Antisemitic”

Originally established as a free-trade and travel zone (the Common Market), the E.U. has expanded into an enormous bureaucracy, yet has long been recognized to suffer a “democratic deficit,” meaning that despite the pretense of being run by an elected assembly, it is actually operated by effectively unaccountable bureaucrats.

As for the U.N., the problem is even more obvious: how could a General Assembly consisting of nearly 200 member nations, each having a single vote (from tiny Nauru to populous India, China, and the U.S.), most of them governed in an authoritarian manner, possibly “represent” the world’s people? Nor is the Security Council, let alone the U.N.’s enormous bureaucracy, in any way representative or subject to worldwide popular control, whatever that might mean.

The hypocrisy of the U.N. is signified by its assigning membership and even leadership of its Human Rights Council to tyrannies like Iran, Syria, and Russia –along with the frequency with which its Assembly passes resolutions condemning alleged human rights violations in the Middle East’s only constitutional democracy, Israel.

Perhaps worst of all is the heavily biased International Criminal Court of Justice, which the U.S. has wisely refrained from joining, but which is currently considering charges of “war crimes” against Israel. Nonetheless, self-styled “liberals” persist in urging that the U.S. defer to the authority of U.N. agencies, and mock those (like British citizens who voted for Brexit, removing their country from the E.U.) who resist ceding national sovereignty in this manner.

For present purposes, we need not explore Soros’s relation to globalization in this broader sense. But those who denounce the negative use of the term “globalization” as a “dog whistle” for antisemitism rely on the fact that in the past, antisemites did indeed denounce the Jews as “rootless cosmopolitans” who secretly conspired to rule the world through their banking interests (e.g. the Rothschilds) and connections to their coreligionists abroad.

The apex of such nonsense, prior to the rise of Nazism, was the Russian Tsarist forgery, “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which still circulates among lunatic political groups on both the extreme right and left. Historically, Jews seemed “rootless” because in most nations, they were denied the rights of citizenship, but were allowed to reside in particular countries only at the rulers’ pleasure. They were historically subject to royal extortions and mass expulsions (from England in the 11th century, Spain and Portugal in the 15th, for instance) and were often victimized by vicious popular pogroms, during the Crusades, and in Tsarist Russia.

None of this, however, has anything to do with denunciations of globalization in contemporary America. The United States was founded on the principle of religious toleration, expressed not only in the First Amendment, but even earlier by George Washington’s famous Letter to the Jewish Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island. While significant vestiges of antisemitism indeed remained in our society until well into the twentieth century, Jews have enjoyed a greater degree of liberty and security under our Constitution than in any other nation, since the Diaspora, outside of Israel itself.

Although a large majority of Jewish voters came to affiliate with the Democrat Party through most of the twentieth century – regarding the Republicans as more of a nativist party – that perception has begun to change, as the Democrats have increasingly welcomed antisemitic factions into their midst.

What is really at stake in the contemporary debate about globalization is not religious prejudice, but rather the assault on national sovereignty by partisans of the U.N. and other international bodies, favored in this country by politicians and intellectuals who despise the “narrow” patriotism displayed by those whom Hillary Clinton labeled the “deplorables.” (Remember Barack Obama’s dismissive response to the question of whether he regarded the U.S. as an “exceptional” nation.)

The globalists in this sense, almost exclusively members of the Democrat Party, are particularly offended not only by Americans’ failure to adopt a sufficiently “cosmopolitan” point of view, but also – as Israeli-American political scientist Yoram Hazony has documented in his book The Virtue of Nationalism – by the stubborn attachment of Israelis to their national independence, and their refusal to forsake their sovereignty in return for guarantees by international bodies to protect them.

Ever since Israelis achieved remarkable prosperity and successful self-government in the tiny plot of land they inhabit, they have lost the sympathy of American and European academics and activists who now prefer to favor the cause of ostensibly oppressed Palestinians. In the words of the American Jewish writer Dara Horn, “people love dead Jews.” They purport to mourn victims of the Holocaust, but fall short of caring for Jews when they’re still alive.

Yet Palestinian representatives have repeatedly rejected Israeli peace proposals, culminating in Yasser Arafat’s spurning in 2001, during the last days of the Clinton Administration, of the offer of sovereignty over almost all of the West Bank and Gaza. Although President Clinton blamed Arafat for the failure of the 2001 peace talks, had the PLO leader agreed to the offer, he undoubtedly would have been assassinated shortly thereafter by Palestinian radicals, like those who launched the Intifadas and the October 7 attack, and who won’t be satisfied until all the land “from the river to the sea” has been freed of Jews – realizing Hitler’s dream for Europe.

Palestinians’ resentment of the success Israelis have attained through hard work and inventiveness – earning the country the title “Startup Nation” – mirrors the irrational envy that generated the abuse Jews suffered from their non-Jewish neighbors during the two millennia of the Diaspora.

It is worth noting that while George Soros has thrown the weight of his influence and his money behind the pro-Hamas demonstrators (having disclaimed any Zionist sympathies), Hazony is the founder of the National Conservative movement in the U.S., which has attracted the support of such mainstream conservatives as Christopher DeMuth, former president of the American Enterprise Institute. Regardless of how far one agrees with the NatCon program, their example demonstrates that there is no incompatibility between loyalty to America and full support of its ally Israel.

If there are any Americans who merit the charge of divided loyalties (at best), it is the politicians and activists openly backing Hamas and their philanthropic and academic supporters. Those who stand for the fundamental principles of American constitutionalism and criticize individuals like Soros for their moral confusion have nothing to be ashamed of.

David Lewis Schaefer is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at College of the Holy Cross.