When the international criminal court in November last year issued arrest warrants for Israeli officials, the response from the country’s government was all too familiar. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected outright the warrants for alleged war crimes in Gaza against him and former Israeli minister of defense Yoav Gallant, calling them “an anti-Semitic decision.” Israeli Minister of National Security declared that the court had shown “once again that it is anti-Semitic through and through.” Israeli Minister of Transport and Road Safety Miri Regev also chimed in, calling it “modern anti-Semitism in the guise of justice.”
Bleakly, none of it was a surprise. Over a year into Israel’s assault on Gaza, which some experts have described as genocide, accusations of anti-Semitism raised to counter criticism of Israel have gone into overdrive. Such claims have been made against protesters crying out for an end to the bloodshed in Gaza and against the UN and aid agencies warning of a humanitarian catastrophe. They have been leveled at global news channels and the international court of justice, and against actors, artists, pop stars and even British-Jewish filmmakers. Such claims from Israel’s die-hard defenders are so sweeping and speech-chilling that the term “anti-Semitism” is losing its meaning.
It is exactly as the British-Jewish philosopher Brian Klug warned 20 years ago: “When anti-Semitism is everywhere, it is nowhere.”
Blanket misuse has, troublingly, turned the term into a feature on an Israeli politician’s lingo-bingo scorecard, and all this is happening precisely as true anti-Semitism is increasing globally, with the UK’s Jewish community experiencing verbal and physical attacks, while Jewish schools and synagogues have been dealing with death threats and desecrations.
In the past 18 months, a Jewish woman was stabbed in her home in France, there have been shootings at schools in Canada and a full-blown anti-Semitic riot broke out in Russia’s Dagestan region.
Meanwhile, the far right is taking advantage of the political crisis brought about by Israel’s world-changing war, alternately using actual anti-Semitism and a pretense of caring about anti-Semitism to advance its bigoted ideology. For some sections of the far right, anti-Semitism is the active ingredient powering a racist, migrant and Muslim-bashing agenda.
It echoes the anti-Semitism that has always been at the core of white supremacism and has made a comeback with the “great replacement” theory — the conspiracy that Jews are secretly plotting to flood western countries with people of color.
On the other hand, for resurgent far-right parties across Europe, a performative fight against anti-Semitism has provided a path to political rehabilitation. Extremist leaders from Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban to Dutch politician Geert Wilders present as self-declared champions of Jewish minorities in a supposed clash of civilizations against Islam.
All of these factors — and a few more besides, just to add to the confusion — have collided to turn the conversation on anti-Semitism into one characterized by accusations and rebuttals, contortions and misunderstandings, bad faith interpretations and endless blind spots. It is the sort of dissonant mess from which any reasonable person might quietly step away from, because what is the uninvolved onlooker supposed to make of it all?
While researching a book on the subject, several people I spoke with told me they were afraid to even ask about anti-Semitism, for fear that this might itself be construed as anti-Semitism. This is another clear sign, if any other were needed, that something has gone badly wrong in the way the issue is talked about.
To untangle these confusions, I identified distinct themes so that the moving parts of the chaos came into focus.
For starters, there is the way that racism is commonly understood as a color line. While the invention of “black” and “white” is key to understanding the racism that enabled slavery and colonialism and that still inflicts daily harms today, this does not help to fully address the roots of anti-Semitism.
Studying the histories of racism and anti-Semitism shows that one has always influenced the other. The persecution of Jews in the Middle Ages helped create the architecture of racism that underpinned colonization and enslavement in the Americas, and reveals how the category of “whiteness” is a fundamentally unstable invention. It is why Jews have in the past fallen in and out of it, confusing and intensely irritating racists through the ages.
Then there is the grim hypocrisy of the political conversation on anti-Semitism, which remains hyper-focused on the left. While media cycles spin out over whether the chanting of long-used Palestinian slogans constitutes anti-Semitism, examples of anti-Palestinian hatred from supporters of Israel get waved along.
This is not just about the silencing of voices protesting against Israel’s carnage in Gaza — although that is bad enough. If anti-Semitism is so blatantly wielded as a political weapon, it creates the impression of a fundamental unseriousness about the subject. Dedicating endless column inches to campus protests over Gaza is shifting the spotlight, not just away from the devastation in the Palestinian strip, but away from the dangerous anti-Semitism coming from the far right.
In her latest book, Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World, Naomi Klein writes about the important political issues that have been discarded by the left, only to be opportunistically seized and twisted by the right. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, people’s reasonable fears about pharma monopolies were commandeered to spew out vaccine conspiracies. The same dynamic applies to the fight against anti-Semitism, where the right has strategically filled a space vacated over decades by the left.
However, far from raising awareness of this ancient prejudice, the right has instead turned the issue into a wedge with which to clobber political opponents: those protesting against Israel’s multiple aggressions and violations of international law, the Black Lives Matter movement, diversity and equity programs, or those grouped together under that catch-all irritant “wokeism.”
The effect has been to sow division, derailing progressive movements, thwarting efforts at social, economic and climate justice and helping an increasingly extreme right wing win elections around the world.
A true understanding of what has gone so wrong with the discussion of anti-Semitism — and how to put it right — would not just fortify the left in this urgent political moment. It would also consolidate anti-racist endeavors. It would yield inclusiveness, moral clarity and cohesion. Most of all, it would help to make sense of the alarming, divisive and destructive rightward shift of the world — because only then do we stand a chance of changing it.
Rachel Shabi is the author of Off-White: The Truth About Antisemitism.
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