“The Oldest Disease”: the charge of antisemitism as a weapon

This is exactly what the new antisemitism looks like, it has moved from the campuses in the West to the court in The Hague. What a shame.

Such was Benjamin Netanyahu’s response to the ICC Chief Prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants against him and Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant. By foregrounding antisemitism in this way, Netanyahu claimed that the application against him is a shameful attack on all Jews and on Jewishness as such.^[1]

Importantly, antisemitism is elsewhere figured by Netanyahu as almost archetypal — “the oldest disease.” By invoking an age-old Jew-hatred in the present, the Israeli Prime Minister seeks to rebuke all legal, political and moral reproaches of Israel. He does so with the righteous outrage of the victim who is being blamed for finally defending themself: things may have changed, but of course they will always stay the same — only now we are fighting back.

Netanyahu has been consistently pushing this line in chorus with other Israeli leaders. For instance, both he and other Israeli officials have been resolute in labelling the order of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) from January 26 as antisemitic. This is a striking claim given that Amnesty International has found that Israel “has failed to take even the bare minimum steps to comply” with the orders of the court. Doubtless, the reaffirmation of the ICJ orders on May 24 would elicit the same response from figures such as Netanyahu, as would revelations about persistent Israeli attempts to manipulate the ICC.

This strategy has continued to be deployed with ever greater absurdity in Australia as much as in Israel, even as antisemitism remains a dangerous and corrosive force here and in many parts of the world.^[2]

Netanyahu is not original in binding the modern Israeli nation-state to an ancient and global religious and cultural tradition. This is a dominant strain of the Zionist tradition that can be traced back at least to former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Nor is Netanyahu alone in presenting antisemitism as a special form of racism: this is but one iteration of the Zionist tradition, and it has become the hegemonic one in our current context.

Unsurprisingly, this view obscures many disputes in modern Jewish history about the relationship between Jewish identity, Jewish religion, Zionism and antisemitism. Given this, and the longstanding silencing of Palestinian voices in Australian public life, there is value in tracing the history and features of antisemitism and Zionism — both as political realities and political tools.

What is antisemitism?

Antisemitism is a form of racism with its own unique history, stereotypes and forms of expression. The fight against antisemitism requires us to understand these unique characteristics, just as the fight against islamophobia, anti-Arab racism or anti-Indigenous racism requires us to understand the characteristics of each. Without this, we are not able to fight racism effectively.

There have been two prominent international attempts to define antisemitism. The first is the definition offered by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). Its “working definition” is as follows

Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.

In order to provide context to the unique form of racism against Jews, the IHRA elaborates:

Manifestations might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic. Antisemitism frequently charges Jews with conspiring to harm humanity, and it is often used to blame Jews for “why things go wrong.” It is expressed in speech, writing, visual forms and action, and employs sinister stereotypes and negative character traits.

A range of Israeli and international civil society organisations have expressed concerns about the adoption of the IHRA by many governments and institutions, due to the examples that are provided alongside this definition. These examples allow for the conflation of Israel with Jewishness as such, thereby stifling legitimate political debate on the grounds of fighting antisemitism. It is significant that even the author of the IHRA definition shares this view.

This point is clearly made by the alternative definition, the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA), which has been signed by 350 Jewish studies scholars from across the world. The stated purpose of this document is to overcome a lack of clarity in key aspects of the IHRA. The JDA accepts and elaborates upon the IHRA’s characterisation of the forms of antisemitism that emerged in Europe, fed Nazi ideology and lead to the Holocaust. The JDA is, however, more critical of how the IHRA presents the relationship between antisemitism and the state of Israel:

The IHRA Definition includes 11 “examples” of antisemitism, 7 of which focus on the State of Israel. While this puts undue emphasis on one arena, there is a widely-felt need for clarity on the limits of legitimate political speech and action concerning Zionism, Israel, and Palestine. Our aim is twofold: (1) to strengthen the fight against antisemitism by clarifying what it is and how it is manifested, (2) to protect a space for an open debate about the vexed question of the future of Israel/Palestine.

The important thing to take away from the JDA is the claim that criticism of Israel or Zionism is not, “on the face of it”, antisemitic. The JDA uses this phrase in order to affirm that the context of statements must be considered when making these judgements. Furthermore, the JDA asserts that

It is not antisemitic to support arrangements that accord full equality to all inhabitants “between the river and the sea,” whether in two states, a binational state, unitary democratic state, federal state, or in whatever form.

In other words, there is nothing inherently antisemitic about questioning the “right of Israel to exist” as a Jewish majority state which discriminates against the Palestinian people.

At the same time, the JDA is careful to state that it is “on the face of it” antisemitic to assume that a Jewish person is supportive of Israel or of the idea of an exclusively Jewish state.

There is disagreement within Victoria’s Jewish community about the definition of antisemitism. It is fair to say that the majority of Jewish organisations in Australia are broadly supportive of the IHRA definition. That said, a great many Australian Jews are supportive of the clarifications provided by the JDA.

Just as there is debate between proponents of the IHRA and the JDA, there is debate amongst the signatories of the JDA:

We do not all share the same political views and we are not seeking to promote a partisan political agenda. Determining that a controversial view or action is not antisemitic implies neither that we endorse it nor that we do not.

This diversity is reflected amongst the Australian Jews who are supportive of the JDA.

The term antisemitism was invented in 1860 by the Austrian Jewish writer Moritz Steinschneider, who used it to describe the racism that he was experiencing. However, the word was soon appropriated by the antisemite Wilhelm Marr, in 1879. For Marr, it was a mark of pride to be an antisemite.

This alone tells us very little. In order to understand how antisemitism emerged and continues to manifest, we need to go further back and further forward.

The origins of European antisemitism can be traced back to the Medieval period. Until the tenth century, Jewish people were mainly distributed across the Muslim world, and connected across distances by their communal bonds. A range of factors lead them to bring their artisanal and commercial skills, as well as their geographic connections, to Europe. As they settled, Jews were prevented from owning land, meaning that agriculture was not an accessible profession. All these factors, alongside comparatively high literacy levels, positioned Jews within a commercial and literate urban niche. This position was consolidated as Medieval economic structures developed, and it is one source of the ‘philosemitic’ and dangerous idea that Jews are more intelligent than others.

The social position of these European Jews was further reified when they were forced into the maligned profession of usury, as a result of the twelfth-century Papal prohibition against moneylending at a time in which there was a growing economic necessity for this role. This is one source of the stereotype that Jews are pathologically obsessed with money. Coupled with the idea of exceptional Jewish intelligence, it is easy to see how Jews were figured in the popular imagination as highly capable and ruthless in the accumulation of wealth.

Jews were also denigrated due to the theological idea that they were responsible for the death of Jesus, and this fed stereotypes that Jews were untrustworthy and wicked, as well as the cause of harm to Christians. For example, Jews were attacked in pogroms associated with blood libels (allegations that Jews ritually murdered Christian children). Another example is the slaughter of Jews blamed for the Black Death pandemic.

The economic and theological positioning of Jewish people meant that they were held apart from the feudal system while being integral to it. This sometimes allowed Jews to gain a place within royal courts, whereas at other times it became a reason for many and regular antisemitic attacks and expulsions, particularly in periods of discontent (sometimes, all of these things happened at once).

It is important to recognise that this particular form of hatred was unique to Medieval Europe. This is not to say that there were no acts of violence committed against Jewish people in the Medieval Muslim world — only that the violence of Europe was more systemic, and that it had its own unique causes and manifestations. As Shelomo Goitein finds in his extensive study of the Cairo Geniza documents, violence and hatred against Jews in this other context was “local and sporadic, rather than general and endemic.” Furthermore, he explains that “Christians and Jews suffered alike” from such discrimination when it did arise.

Significant developments during the European Enlightenment created new conditions for Jewish people. For the Enlightenment thinkers and the French Revolution, it was a matter of principle that all “men” held equal rights and responsibilities as citizens of the place in which they live. We know that this principle was not consistently lived up to in Europe, and the old hatred of Jews re-emerged and even took on new forms. We also know that these Enlightenment principles were never lived up to in the colonies of the European empires, where immense violence, expropriation and even genocide was enacted upon colonised peoples.

More than this, European powers invented new and even more violent ideas as they took new and even more violent actions. One significant new idea was the now debunked race science, which was to become central to the European colonial project as much as to the Nazis. It is now clear to scientists that humans are not genetically differentiated along racial lines, just as it is clear to historians that race science was a tool that was used to justify colonisation and genocide. Nonetheless, this idea still feeds antisemitism and other forms of racism even today.

The old European hatred of Jews received new impetus with the 1903 publication of a forged document purporting to record Jewish plans for controlling the world and harming its people. This document, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was a key inspiration for Nazi conspiracy theories about Jewish global domination that would lead to the massacre of six million Jews during the Holocaust.

The idea of a global Jewish conspiracy found in the Protocols is alive and well today, as we see in the prominent Great Replacement Theory. This theory expresses a range of old antisemitic notions, as well as many other forms of hatred directed at Muslims, asylum seekers, Black people and LGBTQIA+ people. It has inspired many violent crimes across the world. Examples include the violent “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017, in which attendees chanted “Jews will not replace us”; the Christchurch massacre of fifty-one Muslim worshippers in 2019; and the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre of eleven worshippers in 2018.

Antisemitism continues to exist in Australia today, as regularly documented by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry. It is important to note, however, that some of the cases cited by ECAJ can be categorised as anti-Zionist rather than antisemitic — a distinction that ECAJ uncritically collapses (and in doing this, it dangerously invites others to collapse the distinction between Jews and Israel as well).

The origins of Zionism

Zionism is a political ideology that emerged in Europe in the early twentieth century, in response to the rampant antisemitism that Jews had historically experienced and were continuing to experience across the continent.

Theodor Herzl, the founding father of Zionism, considered antisemitism to be the unavoidable consequence of the fact that Jewish people were outsiders in every country where they lived. This idea was most famously formulated in Herzl’s 1896 book The Jewish State:

The Jewish question exists wherever Jews live in perceptible numbers. Where it does not exist, it is carried by Jews in the course of their migrations. We naturally move to those places where we are not persecuted, and there our presence produces persecution. This is the case in every country.^[3]

For Herzl, the only solution to the problem of antisemitism was the creation of a Jewish nation-state. Once Jews had their own country — or so the argument went — there would no longer be a reason for them to be hated as outsiders in foreign lands.

More than this — insofar as he took antisemitic stereotypes about Jews to be true, and a consequence of a diasporic existence — Herzl believed that such a nation-state was the only way to save the Jewish people from themselves. In other words, he thought of Jews as a nation, like the Germans or the Russians, and took their “degeneracy” to be a result of not having a homeland.

As a part of this argument, Herzl distinguished between two types of Jew. On the one hand, he denigrated the unassimilated Eastern European Jew, which he referred to by the derogatory name Mauschel (translated into English as ‘Yid’). On the other hand, he celebrated the assimilated cosmopolitan Jew whose complete self-actualisation was only possible through the realisation of a Jewish nation state:

We’ve known him for a long time, and just merely to look at him, let alone approach or, heaven forbid, touch him was enough to make us feel sick. But our disgust, until now, was moderated by pity; we sought extenuating, historical explanations for his being so crooked, sleazy, and shabby a specimen. Moreover, we told ourselves that he was, after all, our fellow tribesman, though we had no cause to be proud of his fellowship … who is this Yid [Mauschel], anyway? A type, my dear friends, a figure that pops up time and again, the dreadful companion of the Jew, and so inseparable from him that they have always been mistaken for one for the other. The Jew is a human being like any other, no better and no worse … The Yid, on the other hand, is a hideous distortion of the human character, something unspeakably low and repulsive.^[4]

As we can see in this passage, for Herzl the civilising force of Zionism was the solution to overcoming antisemitism because it would “rid” the world of the barbarian Yid, the type of Jew that deserves to be hated:

In our own day, even a flight from religion can no longer rid the Jew of the Yid. Race is now the issue — as if the Jew and the Yid belonged to the same race. But go and prove that to the antisemite. To him, the two are always and inextricably linked … And then came Zionism! … We’ll breathe more easily, having got rid once and for all of these people whom, with furtive shame, we were obliged to treat as our fellow tribesmen … Watch out, Yid. Zionism might proceed like Wilhelm Tell … and keep a second arrow in reserve. Should the first shot miss, the second will serve the cause of vengeance. Friends, Zionism’s second arrow will pierce the Yid’s chest.

There were fierce criticisms of Herzl’s antisemitic explanation for antisemitism from within the European Jewish community, most notably from the Eastern European Jewish Labour Bund. The Bundists were a large and well organised group of Jewish socialists who celebrated the Jewish community that had developed in Europe. These activists argued that the best way in which to protect Jews from antisemitism was to stay in the places that they were, and to build relationships with the other workers alongside whom they lived and laboured. They called this principle doykeit, a Yiddish word that translates as “hereness”.

The Bund was crushed by the overwhelming violence of World War II, but the criticism of Herzl’s strategy for fighting antisemitism has been validated by historical circumstances: an exclusively Jewish state has come into existence, and yet antisemitism continues to surface.

There were debates within the pre-state Zionist movement about where a Jewish state should exist, and how it should be organised — but the basic belief of the vast majority of Zionists was that Jewish people would only be safe and retain their dignity if they achieved a demographic majority in a piece of land over which they had territorial control. This was their debt to Herzl.

The World Zionist Congress quickly arrived at the consensus that the British mandate of Palestine was to be the location of their proposed new state. This agreement was reached due to the religious connection of Jewish people to that land, and was informed by the twentieth-century German nationalist idea that a piece of land has an inherent connection to a particular people and language.

In making this resolution, Zionists understood very clearly that there was already a large population of Palestinian people living in Palestine. It was just as clear to them that the Palestinians could not form a part of their new state. This was articulated by the Zionist leader and first Prime Minister of Israel David Ben-Gurion, when he wrote:

The right to independent national existence, to national autonomy…means above all: independent national existence on the basis of an independent national economy.^[5]

Ben-Gurion’s call for national autonomy clearly entailed a demographic majority, territorial integrity and economic independence for Jewish people. This was understood by the early Zionist settlers, and is clearly reflected by their economic activity.

Ben Gurion articulated the consequences of this position in a meeting of the Zionist group the Jewish agency in 1938

I am for compulsory transfer; I do not see anything immoral in it.^[6]

The extremist Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky, who claimed to take inspiration from Herzl, expressed this position even more clearly in his essay “The Iron Wall”:

There can be no voluntary agreement between ourselves and the Palestine Arabs. Not now, nor in the prospective future…it is utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs for converting ‘Palestine’ from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority …

My readers have a general idea of the history of colonisation in other countries. I suggest that they consider all the precedents with which they are acquainted, and see whether there is one solitary instance of any colonisation being carried on with the consent of the native population. There is no such precedent.

The native populations, civilised or uncivilised, have always stubbornly resisted the colonists, irrespective of whether they were civilised or savage. And it made no difference whatever whether the colonists behaved decently or not …

We cannot offer any adequate compensation to the Palestinian Arabs in return for Palestine. And therefore, there is no likelihood of any voluntary agreement being reached. So that all those who regard such an agreement as a condition sine qua non for Zionism may as well say “non” and withdraw from Zionism.

Statements such as these make it clear that the Zionist leaders knew they would need to expel Palestinians from their homes in order to make room for an exclusively Jewish state. It could be argued that Jabotinsky was a marginal figure, however many of his followers went on to take key positions in Israeli leadership, and they continue to do so to this day. For instance, Benjamin Netanyahu calls himself a “student of Jabotinsky” and focuses on the importance of “holding as sacrosanct majority rule.”

There was, however, criticism of the ideas of leaders like Jabotinsky and Ben-Gurion. A small minority of Zionists publicly balked at the possibility of colonial ethnic cleansing, and they instead called for Jews to live on the land alongside the Palestinians — without creating an exclusively Jewish state. The contrast between these two positions is perhaps most clearly expressed by Hugo Bergman of the dissenting minority Zionist group Brit-Shalom (“pact of peace”):

The contradiction between the political outlook of Brit-Shalom and that of its opponents is not anchored in our stand on the Arabs alone. It is much more fundamental and deep-rooted. Our political convictions stem from the perceptions of Judaism. We want Palestine to be ours in that the moral and political beliefs of Judaism will leave their stamp on the way of life in this country, and we will carry into execution here that faith which has endured in our hearts for two thousand years. And our opponents hold different views. When they speak of Palestine, of our country, they mean ‘our country,’ that is to say ‘not their country.’ This viewpoint is borrowed from Europe at the time of its decline. It is based on the concept of a state which is the property of one people. … Thus several European States today believe that the existence of a State implies that one people, among the peoples residing there, should be granted priority right …^[7]

Bergman’s concerns about Zionism came to pass in the wake of the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust against the Jewish people. What followed was the 1947 UN resolution to create two states in the former British Mandate of Palestine, and the war of 1947-1949, which the Palestinians remember as al-nakba, the catastrophe. In this event at least 750000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes and never allowed to return, and many thousands were killed. The nakba and its aftermath have been thoroughly documented by scholars, and efforts to tell more of the story continue to be made by the Israeli-Palestinian organisation Zochrot. Its consequences are suffered in ever increasing intensity by Palestinians to this day, even as Zionism has transformed and diverged from its early self.

The consequences of dehumanisation: intra-Jewish racism and racism against Palestinians

Herzl’s brand of Zionism has a parallel within Israel itself. In particular, his racism against the “backwards” “Yid” of Eastern Europe was mirrored by racism towards the non-European Jews who migrated in the early days of the new state. Indeed, Ben-Gurion echoed Herzl when he claimed that the newly arrived Arab Jews “were without a trace of Jewish or human education” and that the Moroccans were “savages.” Golda Meir, another early Israeli Prime Minister, was just as indebted to Herzl when she asked:

Shall we be able to elevate these immigrants to a suitable level of civilisation?

The contempt of the European Zionist leadership for the Arab Jewish migrants was also tinged by fear, as evidenced in Zionist leader Abba Eban’s statement that there was a

danger that the predominance of immigrants of Oriental origin force Israel to equalise its cultural level with that of the neighbouring world.

This perceived danger was, however, a necessary one for the Zionist leadership. It was very clear to them that they required new arrivals for state building activities such as agriculture and the military, but this was not all. They also needed these migrants to be Jewish, so that they could establish a Jewish demographic majority over and against the Palestinian population.^[8]

The dehumanising rhetoric of the Zionist leaders had a range of practical correlates. The Arab Jews, including members of my own Moroccan family, were denigrated and humiliated while being pitted against Palestinians in the social hierarchy. In addition, there were efforts to eradicate their cultural heritage and replace it with the Zionist culture that was being formed. Many new arrivals were sprayed with DDT upon arrival, discouraged from speaking Arabic, put to work and offered little state support.^[9] Soon after this, Israel enacted the forced removal of Yemini Jewish children from their families, and there was a regime of unconsented sterilisation of Ethiopian Jewish women.

In short, this intra-Jewish racism was a direct continuation of Herzl’s dehumanisation of “savage” Jews and his celebration of “assimilated” and “civilised” ones.

The dehumanisation of Palestinians also took place during this period, and it is easy to hear echoes of Herzl’s Mauschel (his ‘Yid’) in this racism, too. One influential (and historically inaccurate) piece of dehumanising work is Moshe Aumann’s early pamphlet Land Ownership in Palestine 1880-1948.^[10] Aumann writes of the Palestinians as follows:

This, then, was the picture of Palestine in the closing decades of the 19th century and up to the First World War: a land that was overwhelmingly desert, with nomads continually encroaching on the settled areas and its farmers; a lack of elementary facilities and equipment; peasants wallowing in poverty, ignorance and disease, saddled with debts (interest rates at times were as high as 60 per cent) and threatened by warlike nomads or neighbouring clans. The result was a growing neglect of the soil and a flight from the villages, with a mounting concentration of lands in the hands of a small number of large landowners, frequently residing in such distant Arab capitals as Beirut and Damascus, Cairo and Kuwait. Here, in other words, was a social and economic order that had all the earmarks of a medieval feudal society.

This negative description of an “uncivilised” and crumbling “medieval feudal society” is immediately juxtaposed to Herzl’s other figure, the “civilised” and “civilising” Zionist Jewish settler:

This was the “normal” course of events in 19th-century Palestine. It was disrupted by the advent of the Jewish pioneering enterprise, which sounded the death-knell of this medieval feudal system. In this way the Jews played an objective revolutionary role. Small wonder that it aroused the ire and active opposition of the Arab sheikhs, absentee landowners, money-lenders and Bedouin bandits.

The message is clear, as is the debt to Herzl. On the one hand, Aumann argues that Zionist European Jews were justified in taking the land because they had the ingenuity and pioneering spirit to prosper on it (much like Herzl’s ideal Jew). On the other hand, he presents a small population of “uncivilised” locals who had no title or rights, and who wasted what they did have (much like Herzl’s Mauschel). There is clearly something racist and dehumanising about this construction of a “revolutionary” European Jewish spirit alongside a degenerate Arab society. More than this, Aumann’s text was designed and used to justify the Zionist project and the political decisions of the early Israeli leadership.^[11]

It is entirely consistent, then, that Israel uses dehumanising language to justify its current violence against the Palestinians. As the South African genocide case at the ICJ has shown, such language has been used to dehumanise all Palestinians in the aftermath of the atrocities committed by Hamas fighters on October 7. Indeed, these acts of dehumanisation have served to justify atrocities of an entirely different order against the Palestinian people as a whole (and such atrocities have occurred on a regular basis even in recent history, as shown, for example, by the UN Goldstone Report on Operation Cast Lead, or the UN report on The Great March of Return).

The principal victims of these atrocities are, of course, the Palestinian people. Nonetheless, Israeli Jews are also harmed by the dehumanisation and slaughter of the Palestinians. This insight can be discerned in a fundamental injunction of Jewish theology, one which the Ancient Rabbi Hillel identifies with our entire Torah:

that which is hateful to you, do not do unto another; that is the entire Torah, the rest is interpretation. Go study.

In this injunction, perhaps Hillel is recognising that we are ourselves wounded when we wound another. A massacre traumatises and corrupts those who enact it, and even the strong will end up grieving their own losses or being made to suffer themselves, as we saw once again on October 7. The philosopher Simone Weil describes this point about universal perils of violent force in her beautiful essay on The Iliad:

Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it…Perhaps all men, by the very act of being born, are destined to suffer violence; yet this is a truth to which circumstance shuts men’s eyes. The strong are, as a matter of fact, never absolutely strong, nor are the weak absolutely weak, but neither is aware of this. They have in common a refusal to believe that they both belong to the same species: the weak see no relation between themselves and the strong, and vice versa. The man who is the possessor of force seems to walk through a non-resistant element; in the human substance that surrounds him nothing has the power to interpose, between the impulse and the act, the tiny interval that is reflection.

Where there is no room for reflection, there is none either for justice or prudence. Hence we see men in arms behaving harshly and madly … Such is the nature of force. Its power of converting a man into a thing is a double one, and in its application double-edged. To the same degree, though in different fashions, those who use it and those who endure it are turned to stone.

Conflating antisemitism and anti-Zionism

The Executive Council of Australian Jewry asserts that anti-Zionism is by definition antisemitic. For the ECAJ, anti-Zionism is not a criticism of a political entity, but “hostility and discrimination against the State of Israel, as the embodiment of the Jewish People.” (The emphasis is mine.) Such a view is clearly aligned to the IHRA definition of antisemitism.

The ECAJ goes on to head off an obvious rebuttal to this position, namely that anti-Zionism is a response to the political configuration of a nation-state and not to Jewish people as such. It names such a position as

political antisemitism… [one which is] disguised as anti-Zionism and the denial of Jewish peoplehood, history, rights and dignity, emanating from both the far Left and the far Right.

By presenting anti-Zionism as a disguise for antisemitism, however, the ECAJ recognises that anti-Zionism is “on the face of it” not antisemitic. Otherwise, it would not need a disguise at all. Furthermore, the ECAJ claims to be able to remove this disguise and show all anti-Zionism as antisemitic. It does this by asserting that “Jewish peoplehood, history, rights and identity” are identical to an institutional state with a Jewish demographic majority and territorial hegemony. Denigration of the latter is presented as denigration of the former — without qualification.

This perspective owes a deep debt to Herzl, who, as previously explained, understood Jewishness as a nationality (entailing an essential relation between “a people”, a land and a language). At the same time, the persistence of antisemitism despite the existence of a self-proclaimed Jewish state has required a modification of Herzl’s view. One response has been to draw on an old explanation of antisemitism — namely the idea that antisemitism is a persistent and eternal form of racism that cannot be successfully fought by political activity and political institutions. This almost theological idea, identified in its modern form by Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt in 1950, is buttressed by the claim, well-documented and debunked, that the oppression of Jewish people is exemplary and incomparable to the oppression of other groups.^[12]

One can discern this message of “eternal antisemitism” in Netanyahu’s invocation of the biblical nation of Amalek as he seeks to justify the Israeli campaign of collective punishment against the Palestinians. Many commentators have rightly discerned that this is a call for the mass murder of the Palestinians, because God promises to destroy all the Amalekites.

God’s reason for this promise is just as important, however, even though it has been less remarked upon. As the narrative goes, God’s promise to destroy the Amalekites is justified by the Amalekites surprise attack on the Hebrews, undertaken for no reason other than hatred for God’s chosen people. This aspect of the story allows Netanyahu to suggest that an identical form of unjustified and perfidious hatred exists between the religious story of the Ancient Hebrews and any attacks against the modern ethnocratic nation-state of Israel.

By drawing this link into the present, Netanyahu is saying that there is only one antisemitism throughout history, and that this antisemitism therefore exists outside of historical context. Like Amalek, Hamas and the Palestinians as a whole are presented as enacting an unjustified surprise attack on October 7, and the attack can only be explained by an immovable and eternal antisemitism. In other words, antisemitism is figured once again as “the oldest disease”.

Such a reading of Jewish history and antisemitism is present in Israeli popular culture too, as evidenced by the invocation of Amalek in the chart-topping post October 7 hip-hop song Charbu Darbu. A contemporary non-Israeli iteration of this idea can be found in the reflections of Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin, who claim that “throughout their history, Jews have regarded Jew-hatred as an inevitable consequence of their Jewishness,” understood as “God, Torah, Israel and Chosenness”^[13] (my emphasis). This conception of an “inevitable” form of racism deftly connects a long religious heritage with the recent invention of a modern ethnocratic nation-state, and it stitches the two phenomena together into a single historical truth — Jews and Israel are one another same, so hatred of one is identical to hatred for the other.

It should be noted that the ECAJ does not explicitly make this strong claim about an eternal antisemitism. It does, however, suggest that antisemitism continues to exist as an unavoidable function of numerical minority status:

Given their relatively small numbers, the Jewish people have always been vulnerable, and for a long interval of 1800 years, were stateless, and could usually be victimised with impunity. Much of the rage directed against the modern State of Israel and the Jewish people arises from the fact that this is no longer possible. Some antisemites see Jewish powerlessness and vulnerability as the natural order of things which they seek to restore. Thus, it is precisely when Jews defend themselves successfully that the rage against them is at its most intense.

Irrespective of whether antisemitism is eternal, inevitable or an unavoidable result of being a numerical minority, important consequences are made to follow: Jews will only be safe if they can achieve demographic majority and territorial hegemony through a state apparatus. In achieving this, they will be able to form and use a military to defend themselves. As Alan Dershowitz writes in The Case for Israel:

Both the Christians of Europe and the Muslims of the Arab nations treated their Jewish minorities so horribly that the need for Jewish self-government, in a Jewish state with a Jewish majority, where Jews could be treated as equals and defend themselves from persecution, became evident to most of the world at the close of the Second World War.

Those who accept this line of argument adopt Herzl’s end goal, even as they accept that he was wrong to presume that a Jewish state will end antisemitism. For them, a state is not a tool to end antisemitism as it is for Herzl, because this is taken to be impossible. Instead, the state and its army exist to protect Jews from an “inevitable” hatred (for Netanyahu’s more extreme version, that hatred is called Amalek, and mass murder is a legitimate form of self-defence). In other words, this iteration of Zionism holds that Jewish safety can only be guaranteed by a Jewish majority state that is capable of using its military to protect Jews against inevitable attacks.

Such a position avoids critical reflection about present conditions. It does not consider how Israeli violence, committed against Palestinians and in the name of Jewish people as a whole, has provided fertile ground for European antisemitic ideas to take root across the world. In addition, it does not consider how ongoing, disproportionate and unjustified violence and apartheid has led many Palestinians to hate Israel. (Injustice in Gaza and the West Bank has been clearly established by Israeli and Palestinian Human Rights organisations such as B’Tselem, Breaking the Silence, Adalah, Yesh Gvul, Yesh Din, Gisha, al-Haq, Addameer, and the Public Committee against Torture in Israel). Indeed, without considering the lived experience of Palestinians, it is impossible to understand that such hatred can “on the face of it” be directed at an oppressive ethnocratic state, rather than at Jews as such.

Paradoxically, the hatred that a Palestinian might feel for Israelis was clearly understood by Moshe Dayan, who would go on to become an Israeli Prime Minister. These are his words at the Eulogy of an Israel guard who had been killed by Palestinians in 1956:

Let us not cast the blame on the murderers today. Why should we declare their burning hatred for us? For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and the villages, where they and their fathers dwelt, into our estate.

What is clear from this passage is that Dayan did not think that the Palestinians who hated, attacked and killed an Israeli guard were antisemitic. Their hatred was not directed in an unfounded way at scapegoats who represented the European stereotype of the Jew. Rather it was a visceral response to the group of people who had violently expelled them from their land and colonised it for themselves.

It was only in the 1961-62 trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann that antisemitism became a political concern for the Israeli state as we see it deployed by figures like Netanyahu today. That said, Netanyahu also harnesses a very different iteration of Zionism, one that emerged around the same time, soon after the 1967 conquest of Gaza, Sinai, the West Bank and the Golan Heights. This movement — radical messianic Zionism — has become increasingly prominent in Israel, and its Jewish supremacist ideology inspires the program of illegal West Bank settlements. The political power of this movement is illustrated by the fact that it is led by dangerous members of Netanyahu’s government, such as Betzalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. Today, politicians such as these advocate explicitly and shamelessly for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the colonisation of their land, and they use the state to enact these goals in ever greater intensity.

Clearly, criticism of such a regime should not be construed as an antisemitic attack on “the embodiment of the Jewish people” as such. Instead, it should be understood as a rebuke of the Israeli state apparatus and its animating ideologies.

Imagining a future

It has always been clear that there is no future in the oppressive Israeli occupation — not for Jews, Muslims, Christians, Israelis or Palestinians. It is just as obvious that antisemitism, islamophobia and anti-Arab racism cannot be defeated by a standing army. Furthermore, no complex analysis is necessary to see that ethnic supremacism and weaponised accusations of antisemitism exacerbate harm rather than preventing it.

If there is a path forward for “all of Abraham’s children,” it must be paved with the conviction that human dignity is universal and irreducible, as is the dignity of the land and its creatures.^[14] We should expect this conviction from our political, cultural and religious leaders, even as they continue to fall short of it. But even as they fail us, we must keep demanding it. The alternative is to passively bear witness to the brutalisation, dehumanisation, dispossession, starvation and murder of the people of Palestine. Such inaction is unacceptable in the face of horrors that will likely, in time but all too late, be legally recognised as genocide.

^[1] Netanyahu’s other grievance, or the salt in his wound, is that Hamas leaders were incorporated into the announcement. He views this as an antisemitic act because it groups Israel alongside Hamas, even though they are alleged to have committed different war crimes and crimes against humanity. Doubtless he would respond in the same way to the June 12th UN report which has found Israeli authorities to be responsible of war crimes and crimes against humanity, while Palestinian armed groups have been found to be responsible of war crimes.

^[2] In addition to the article by Tom Tanuki linked above, a compelling commentary on this topic has been written by Sarah Schwartz, an Executive Officer of the Jewish Council of Australia: Schwartz, S., (2024) ‘Political Opportunism in Full Flight’, The Politics

^[4] Bowman, Glenn W. (2011) A Place for the Palestinians in the Altneuland: Herzl, Anti-Semitism, and the Jewish State.
For another translation, see Herzl, “Mauschel” in Die Welt, 15 October 1897 in Herzl, T., (1973), Zionist Writings. Essays and Addresses Volume I: January 1896 — June 1898 (Zohn, H., trans.), Herzl Press, NY

^[5] Finkelstein, N., (2003) Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (second edition), Verso, p 9

^[6] Pappe , I., (2006), The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Oneworld, Preface
See also Masalha, N., (2023), ‘The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Thinking and Practice: Historical Roots and Contemporary Challenges,’ Institute for Palestine Studies

^[7] Finkelstein, N., (2003) Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (second edition), Verso, p 12

^[8] Shohat, E., (1998), ‘Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims. Social Text No. 19/20 (Autumn, 1988)

^[9] Shohat, E., (1999), ‘The Invention of the Mizrahim’, Opening essay, The Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 29, No. 1, Issue 113, Autumn 1999

^[10] For more rigorous accounts of pre-48 Palestine, see, for instance,
Khalidi, R., (2020), The Hundred Years War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017, Macmillan, Chapter 1.
Finkelstein, N., (2003) Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (second edition), Verso, Chapter 2
Pappe, I., (2022), A History of Modern Palestine, Third Edition, Cambridge University Press, Chapters 1-3
Shafir, G., (1996) Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914, Gershon Shafir University of California Press