Is Israel Using Anti-Semitism to Silence Critics?
Many believe anti-Semitism is weaponised by Israel to silence its critics. But that shouldnt make the Palestinian solidarity movement blind to anti-Semitism when it rears its head, say progressive Jewish voices. In a CNN interview that went viral last month after he attended a special UN General Assembly session on Palestine, Pakistans top diplomat Shah Mahmoud Qureshi found himself in a bind after comments he made about Israel were condemned as anti-Semitic. The controversy erupted when Qureshi told anchor Bianna Golodryga that Israel was losing the media war, despite their connections, to which Golodryga asked the Pakistani foreign minister what he meant by connections.  Qureshi laughed, then said: Deep pockets. When pushed again, he replied, Well they [Israel] are very influential people. I mean, they control media.  Golodryga responded saying, I would call that an antisemitic remark.  Critics took to social media to denounce Qureshis statements, while others defended him for highlighting Israels lobby and its influence on US foreign policy. As Alexander Reid Ross points out, tropes around Jews controlling the media are part of a long standing antisemitic tradition that claims Jews are controlling the minds of gentiles [non-Jews].  Antisemitism is not just a simple case of prejudice against Jews. Its rooted in an entire worldview, says Ross, fellow at the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right and author of Against the Fascist Creep. The debate around anti-Semitism and how it relates to Israel is one that has been fraught ever since its inception in 1948. And in 2021, it remains contested between the pro-Israel side who charge their detractors as being overt or covert anti-Semites, and those supporting the Palestinian cause who often see it used as an opportunistic tactic to silence criticism. Weaponising anti-Semitism  Indeed, there is ample evidence for how assertions of anti-Semitism are deployed to attack any form of solidarity and organising around Palestine. 31 US states have legislation in effect that are designed to curb the speech of Palestinian rights activists. The controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism, which conflates any criticism of Israel and anti-Zionism as de facto anti-Semitic, has been adopted by six governments and calls have been made for social media companies to adopt the definition as well. As leading figures of the Palestinian movement have pointed out, the conflation of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is a deliberate attempt to intimidate and silence the movement for Palestinian rights around the world. It is built on the false assumption that Zionism is synonymous with Judaism, and that Israels occupation of Palestine is a religious movement, as opposed to a settler-colonial project. With recent interventions like The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, scholars have worked to illuminate these distinctions between what language constitutes criticism of Israel and what ends up veering into anti-Semitism. To be anti-Zionist is not anti-Semitic, says Alon-Lee Green, who is the director of Standing Together, a grassroots movement in Israel that organises Jews and Arabs around campaigns of social justice and peace. It is perfectly legitimate to criticise the Israeli government and the actions of a political movement, he told TRT World. Green added it would be unwise to ignore the joint struggle of Jews and Palestinians in Israel to change their political reality, and blur the lines between the Israeli people and its government. We should not identify all Jews and Israelis with the occupation. Thats what the [Israeli] right-wing wants.  We were back in Sheikh Jarrah today  Arabs and Jews, Palestinians and Israelis  and well be back every week until we stop the displacement and dispossession of Palestinian families that settler organizations are trying to achieve.#SaveSheikhJarrah #SaveSilwan pic.twitter.com/meP1JMIq7d      Standing Together (@omdimbeyachad) May 28, 2021  Much like there has been a dissenting tradition within Judaism constituted by heretical thinkers like Baruch Spinoza, Karl Marx and Sigmond Freud who forwarded powerful critiques of society, there has been a robust Jewish tradition when it comes to criticism of Israel. Ideological opposition to Zionism as a movement emanated from four sources: Reform and Orthodox Jews on religious grounds; Jews who feared it would contradict their citizenship rights in existing homelands; liberal assimilated Jews who viewed it as separating them from non-Jews; and Jewish socialists who opposed it as a reactionary diversion from fighting anti-Semitism and defending the Jewish diaspora. In recent times, among the strongest critics have been left-wing Jews like Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein and Illan Pappe, who have regularly called out Israeli crimes against Palestinians by framing it as a political issue related to human rights, not religion. And in the face of a long running campaign to cast the struggle against Israeli apartheid as a threat to Jews worldwide, a growing number in the diaspora are refusing to accept Israeli oppression against Palestinians in their name. The Jewish community has an inherited trauma of persecution, and anti-Semitism is on the rise globally, and both of these truths are played on to construct a discourse that suggests one must choose either Palestinian or Jewish freedom, Em Hilton, a Jewish leftist activist, wrote last month. While Hilton says there will be some who weaponise the Palestinian solidarity movement for anti-Semitic means, we cannot let concern about hatred among a small minority overshadow this important opportunity for resistance and mobilization for Palestinian liberation.  For Palestinians, Zionism is seen as an ongoing history of dispossession and cleansing from their land. Calling out Israels project of settler colonialism and apartheid, as described by international and Israeli human rights organisations alike, have given an even stronger legitimacy to the Palestinian movement. However, calls by some to label Israel a white supremacist settler-colonial state falls short of being analytically useful. While it is true that white racists have long made common cause with Zionism, particularly the Christian-Zionist bloc in the US, this does not mean that Israel is a white supremacist state. As Palestine Solidarity Campaign founding member Tony Greenstein countered, the major division within Israeli society is not between black and white, but between Jewish and non-Jewish. Seeing Israel as a white colony in the Middle East is equally a reductive view, according to Yair Wallach, Senior Lecturer in Israeli Studies at SOAS, University of London. Settler colonialism is important to the analysis, but it is not the same as Canada or New Zealand. Over half the Israeli population does not come from Europe.  Green observes attempts to paint Israels existence as illegitimate and that its citizens should go back to Europe, as counterproductive in the fight for equality between Israelis and Palestinians. My family doesnt come from Poland or Ukraine, he says. I am not going anywhere, and neither are my friends and family. We were born in Israel; this is our only home. Palestinians are not going anywhere either.  This is not to say there were no historical injustices that took place against Palestinians. But we are here now to correct them.  Green supports boycotting products from the illegal settlements, which the right-wing Israeli government has branded anti-Semitic. He believes the correct approach is to separate the issue of settlements from being connected with the whole Israeli population  which is what the ultranationalists want. Its not a Jewish interest to occupy Palestine. Not all Jews think the same.  Speaking to TRT World, Wallach makes it clear that it's absolutely legitimate to be critical of Zionism as a historical and political movement in terms of its justification and how it unfolded, and stand against it on that basis. But he also questions whether applying that historic lens of anti-Zionism is useful moving forward. As the ideology underpinning the Israeli state, Zionism today can appear convoluted and lacking in specificity, Wallach notes. For example, right-wing orthodox Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank dont refer to themselves as Zionists, and Israels Nation State law  which codifies Jewish supremacy  doesnt mention Zionism either. Right vs Left anti-Semitism  For many Jews who advocate for Palestinian rights, the question of anti-Semitism is historically and politically complex, and a failure to adequately grapple with that complexity can end up being detrimental to the Palestinian cause. It then becomes important to grasp the historic incarnations of anti-Semitism, what makes it different from other forms of racism, and how it continues to manifest in contemporary social and political life. While there is overlap with other forms of bigotry like anti-Blackness or Islamophobia, anti-Semitism possesses a distinctive historical expression and functions in fundamentally different ways. For centuries, (European) anti-Semitism has demonised the Jew as a conspiratorial and manipulative outsider, one primed with amorphous powers and posing a civilisational threat. Its a complex geopolitical assumption where the Jews have connived a leading role in the destruction of the world, Ross told TRT World. 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion', a fabricated text printed in Russia in the early 1900s that became a key part of Nazi propaganda, purports to document a meeting of Jewish leaders hatching plans for world domination through control over the media and subjugation of non-Jews. It is how you get the trope of a single Jewish banking family, the Rothschilds, managing to exert power to control world events; one which finds new-age currency in the figure of billionaire Hungarian philanthropist George Soros, who is intertwined with racist discourses around refugees as the central figure orchestrating a great replacement of the white race. Tonight hundreds of British Jews rallied across the country to demand Freedom from Occupation and Freedom from Violence for all in Israel-Palestine. This is unprecedented. Change is coming. #EndTheOccupation    Check out our nationwide protests  pic.twitter.com/uyDcZ7iGrc  Na'amod: British Jews Against Occupation  (@NaamodUK) May 19, 2021  Right-wing expressions of anti-Semitism are the most recognisable strain in global consciousness. For the far-right, Jews function as a racial and religious outsider, a parasite leaching on the national body politic; in the case of the Nazis, a problem that necessitated a final solution leading to a project of industrial extermination. While the scapegoating of Jews to redirect popular anger by offering a simple explanation to a range of social or political phenomena is most organically rooted in far-right nationalism, parallel conspiratorial worldviews can appear across the political spectrum. On the left, anti-Semitism has historically taken two forms. The first is linked to early critiques of capitalism, where Jews were associated with finance. During the tectonic economic and social transformations brought about by industrialisation in 19th century Europe, the abstract yet disruptive forces of modern capitalist society became personified as the Jew, as argued by the Marxist theorist Moishe Postone. This sort of fetishisation generated what Postone referred to as a pseudo-emancipatory form of anti-capitalism, which blamed the problems of capitalism not on its structure but on a shadowy Jewish plot instead. A more contemporaneous strain of anti-Semitism on the left can also be expressed through a professed anti-Zionism. As writer and filmmaker Shane Burley argues in his essay Socialism of Fools, while anti-Zionism itself is not inherently anti-Semitic, the way in which anti-Zionism often plays out, the types of strategies it utilizes, the language it is comprised of, and the way it can place double standards on Jews, can certainly be.  Its a history that goes back to the USSR after the creation of Israel, which the Soviets saw as an imperialist beachhead in the Levant. Absorbed under a Stalinist geopolitical framework, any form of opposition to Israel was then affirmed as progressive. Ross views it as a complicated matter, and one which can end up having questionable strategic outcomes like allying with regimes that peddle in Holocaust denial like Iran, or the Assad regime which pays lip service to the Palestinian cause while depopulating 160,000 Palestinians from its Yarmouk Camp in Damascus. You sometimes see anti-Semites will go a step further and claim that Israel is running an Anglo-imperialist alliance and is at the heart of a Jewish cabal bent on global domination, and we must be in solidarity with the so-called Axis of Resistance of Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas, he says. It is this crude anti-imperialism that is a red flag for Ross and can compromise anti-Zionism by leaving it open to charges of anti-Semitism. If people are one-sided on an issue insofar as they decry human rights violations by Israel, but refuse to decry human rights violations in Iran or Syria, then there is something unique about that worldview which makes it damning.  Fundamentally, Ross says, it comes down to a question of solidarity. Does solidarity with Palestinians mean solidarity with regimes that claim solidarity with Palestinians?  Burley argues that anti-Semitism is often difficult to identify because it can get wrapped up with political narratives that are common within anti-Zionist discourse, where caricatures, assertions and conspiracy theories all compete for oxygen alongside legitimate criticism of the Israeli state. Wallach refers to it as a reservoir; an underlying cultural heritage of anti-Semitism is particularly written into European societies, and so hardly surprising when it resurfaces even in progressive and liberation movements.