Anti-zionism Seen As Mask for Anti-semitism; Berrigan Rapped As Anti-semite

Leading Jewish and Christian theologians declared today that “anti-Zionism is a guise for anti-Semitism” and one of them, Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, president of the American Jewish Congress, assailed Father Daniel Berrigan who had recently castigated Israel. The comments were made at an all-day Conference on Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism sponsored by the Commission on Inter-Religious Affairs of the American Zionist Federation. In assailing Berrigan, Rabbi Hertzberg told the more than 100 Christian and Jewish leaders attending the conclave that he was referring to a speech by Berrigan delivered at a meeting of the Association of Arab University Graduates on Oct. 19 in Washington when the anti-Vietnam War priest castigated Israel for “domestic repression, deception, cruelty, militarism,” for having turned the “settler ethos” into the “imperial adventure,” for having failed “to create new forms of political life for her own citizens” for having created “one and a half million refugees.”

Rabbi Hertzberg said that “Berrigan would have us believe as he wrote that ‘many American Jewish leaders were capable of ignoring the Asian holocaust in favor of economic and military aid to Israel. Those of us who had resisted the war had to live with that fact. The fate of the Vietnamese was as unimportant to the Zionists in our midst as was the fate of the Palestinians.’ After this ringing denunciation, Berrigan asserts that the great majority of the American Jewish community ‘refused the bait offered by Nixon and peddled by their own leaders’–that is, they resisted Zionism.”

Rabbi Hertzberg said that “this distinction of his has absolutely nothing to do with the truth. Israel is supported by the overwhelming majority of the American Jews; that includes the majority which Berrigan praises as remaining firmly on the side of the angels and uninfluenced by the Zionists. More of the major organizations of the American Jewish community pronounced formally against the Vietnam War than were to be found anywhere else in America. This included not only such bodies as the Union of American Hebrew Congregations and the American Jewish Congress, but also the Labor Zionist Alliance, the group in America closest to the Labor Zionist Party in Israel, the essence of the governing coalition that Daniel Berrigan denounces so assiduously.” Rabbi Hertzberg termed Berrigan’s views “old-fashioned theological anti-Semitism.”

Dr. Franklin H. Littell, of the Department of Religion of Temple University in Philadelphia, a well-known theologian and professor of religion, said that “anti-Zionism is an easy way of self-deception; you can no more by an anti-Zionist and a friend of the Jewish people than you can be a constant and carping enemy of Christianity and be a friend of the Christians.” Anti-Zionism is, he added, “the new form of anti-Semitism.” Abraham H. Foxman, an attorney and director of leadership development for the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, declared that “more recently the enemies and opponents of Israel and the Jewish people have adopted anti-Zionism as a leitmotif of their ideological and propaganda attacks on Israel. The anti-Zionism of Arab propaganda is simply a mask for anti-Israelism and for anti-Semitism.”