Safety through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism by Shane Burley & Ben Lorber

Author:Shane Burley & Ben Lorber [Burley, Shane & Lorber, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2024-06-04T04:00:00+00:00

TEN

A SAFETY OF NATIONALISM? ANTISEMITISM AND THE HISTORY OF ZIONISM

The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” 1852[1]

The handful of detestable street attacks against Jews in the United States and United Kingdom during Israel’s bombardment of Gaza in 2021 were quickly condemned in the Palestine solidarity movement. A few voices, however, blamed Israel for what occurred. “Every time they bomb Gaza,” asserted Tariq Ali, a leading left-wing intellectual in the United Kingdom, “that is what creates antisemitism…Stop the occupation, stop the bombings, and the casual antisemitism will soon disappear.”[2]

At best, this flawed logic overlooks, as author Keith Kahn-Harris put it, that “no social phenomenon is simply ‘reversible.’ Racism has its own dynamic that persists beyond its origins.”[3] Even if it were true that Israel’s oppressive actions were the initial impetus for a spike in antisemitism, there’s no guarantee that ending Israel’s oppression would end the antisemitism, which takes on a life of its own.

At worst, however, it’s a perverse form of victim-blaming. While Israel’s oppression can inflame latent antisemitism, it does not cause antisemitism. Antisemitic scripts had been circulating for nearly two thousand years before Theodor Herzl put pen to paper. They remain deeply ingrained in societal consciousness, available as a reservoir that Israel’s critics can draw upon, knowingly or otherwise. Both phenomena—antisemitism, and Israel’s oppression of Palestinians—merit condemnation on their own terms, and neither “causes” the other.

This theme is familiar. A 2013 book by prominent Left theorists Alain Badiou, Éric Hazan, and Ivan Segré argued that attacks on Jews by Black and Arab French youth were not caused by antisemitism per se, but rather were misguided responses to Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. “The hostility of these young people toward Jews is fundamentally bound up with what is happening in Palestine,” the authors write, and when they see pro-Israel public interventions from leaders of French Jewish community institutions, it “can lead them to believe all the Jews in the world, here and elsewhere, are their enemies.”[4]

But just because anger at Israel’s actions is real and valid, does not make the actions, beliefs, or intentions that feed off that anger inherently justifiable. Holding all Jews worldwide collectively responsible for Israel’s actions, and attacking them on that basis, is antisemitic and this antisemitism must be condemned, not explained away. Israel is not the root cause of antisemitism, but Israel’s oppression of Palestinians does radicalize tensions, which more easily feed on existing antisemitic ideas. In many countries throughout the northern Africa and Southwest Asia region, antisemitism is espoused by opportunistic political leaders and circulated across broad social and class strata. These policies and rhetoric from above shape attitudes at the grassroots, as seen in Europe, where antisemitic attitudes are present in some immigrant communities.[5]

Where did this antisemitism come from? The assumption, championed by the Zionist Right, is that it reflects some foundational flaw within Islamic theology, or Muslim and/or Arab civilization, itself. This racist and Islamophobic view

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