BLAMING THE JEWS
The progressive left now sees antisemitism as an ‘acceptable’ racism
IN May, there was renewed violence at the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip. Even though I am Jewish, this would not especially concern me any more than the many other awful things going on 4,000 miles away from London, where I live.
This may confuse some who think that Jews and Israel are basically the same thing. They aren’t, and to assume so is racist.
The conversation around the Middle East and antisemitism has changed of late, and disturbingly so. During the conflict, I saw a placard at a Free Palestine march in London. It displayed an image of Jesus at one of the stations of the cross. Underneath it were the words: “Don’t Let Them Do It Again Today.”
The word “Them” on that placard can mean only one thing: Jews. Not Israel. Jews. It expresses the oldest negative myth about the Jewish people, older even than the notion of blood libel or Jews secretly controlling the world: that Jews are Christ-killers. Now, you may want to criticize the Israeli government and its policies. But that sign perpetuates not a modern, but an eternal sense of the wickedness of the Jewish people. It must do, as Benjamin Netanyahu and Naftali Bennett were not around in AD 33 cheering for #TeamBarabas.
As I describe in my new book, “Jews Don’t Count,” antisemitism is elusive: It often unfolds in unconscious codes and tropes and assumptions. One of my readers on Twitter said he was surprised by how much he had fallen into some of the traps my book outlines, commenting, “It’s the racism that sneaks past you.” But that placard doesn’t sneak past you. There is much debate these days about how to separate antisemitism from antizionism. But in this case, it’s simple. The use of ancient tropes — the ones that existed long before the state of Israel — is antisemitic. Criticizing the actions of the state of Israel whilst avoiding those tropes is not.
Lately, though, there has been a weakening of the moral and intellectual border between antisemitism and antizionism. In Los Angeles in May, diners at a sushi restaurant were interrupted by protestors demanding to know which ones were Jewish. A woman on the subway in Germany was assaulted for reading a book called “The Jews In The Modern World,” and the police played down the assault, describing the victim’s actions as “provocative.” In London, within earshot of my house, a convoy of men brandishing Palestinian flags and loudspeakers called for the rape of “Jewish wives and daughters.” Note in all cases the words Jews or Jewish,
rather than Israel or Israelis. Also note the lack of any real social media outrage — no hashtags, no virality — about any of this.
Progressive activist Tariq Ali, speaking at the same march where the Jesus placard was held aloft, said: “Stop the occupation, stop the bombing and casual antisemitism will soon disappear.”
This notion that antisemitism only stems from the actions of the Israeli government is ahistorical in the extreme. But antisemitism has this particular spin in some progressive quarters: that the hatred doesn’t arise, as with all other racisms, from scapegoating by the majority culture, but from something perpetrated by the minority itself. When bad things happen to Jews, Jews are always, in some way, responsible.
In all other contexts, but not this one, the left calls this “victim-blaming.”
Thus, huge increases in hate crimes against Jews during the period of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict — a 600 percent rise in incidents in the UK alone — have been met with a shrugging sense that there’s something appropriate about that. Attacks on Jews
during these conflicts are seen not just as understandable, but excusable.
Somewhere in the hive mind, certainly as you can hear it buzzing on Twitter, is the sense that Jews experiencing violent pushback, wherever they are, whatever their views, is fitting.
This is obviously bad for Jews, but it is also bad for the many, many people who sympathize with the plight of the Palestinians whilst wanting to have no truck with racism against Jews. Don’t let that racism sneak past you.