The Inadvertent Antisemites

How have so many of my friends become unintentionally captured by the oldest hatred?

Over the past year, there have been broadly two types of people on anti-Israel marches every weekend across global cities in the Western world: those explicitly calling for the expulsion of all Jews from the Middle East, and those unwittingly calling for the expulsion of all Jews from the Middle East. My concern is with this latter group - the cultural force that legitimises the former.

While to them chanting for a “Free Palestine” may feel like a demand for peace, facilitated by some loosely conceived secular state encompassing everyone from the region, to the political and religious leaders who seek to control such a state, a “Free Palestine” is a Palestine that is free of Jews - from the river to the sea. 

This is not to say that Palestinian self-determination is an unworthy cause, nor that one shouldn’t feel horror at the plight of civilians in Gaza and Lebanon. There are also many aspects of Israeli culture, politics, and war strategy that can and should be robustly criticised.

I know most protestors feel they are standing up for peace, equality and justice.

But if you support policies that would lead to the murder or eviction of seven million people from their own country on ethnic or religious grounds, then, I’m afraid, to put it mildly, you are guilty of bigotry.

If you oppose Jewish ethnonationalism but take to the streets of London, Melbourne, or New York for the cause of Arab ethnonationalism, alongside those openly inciting pogroms against Jews at home and abroad, unable or unwilling to look in the mirror and ask “Are we the baddies?” then you have been rendered oblivious by tribalism.

If you think that the only reasonable response from Israel following repeated attacks from its neighbours, over generations, is continually to turn the other cheek, then you have bought into a motif ingrained into Western culture for almost two thousand years – that the problem with Jews is that they are insufficiently Christian. 

And if you baulk at accusations of antisemitism with “I’m not antisemitic, I’m anti-zionist”, yet hold in your mind a definition of Zionism that is a pastiche of Arafat-era tropes around expansionism, unmoored from the way it is understood by most of the Jewish community within Israel and across the diaspora, then intentionally or otherwise, yes, you are an antisemite.

The essence of antisemitism has always been the double standard. At this point in history, it manifests in those who support the need to interrogate unconscious bias as a broad principle, but flatly refuse to consider the idea that they may have an underlying prejudice against Jews or the Jewish state. 

The great former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks described antisemitism as “an ever-mutating virus”. The curious quirk of our age is that most of those infected with the current strain of the pathogen don’t know they are carrying it.

How has this happened?

As it has been brilliantly observed by the journalist Haviv Rettig Gur, antisemitism is misunderstood as hatred of Jews. It’s not a hatred, per se, but rather the belief that “the Jews stand in the way of the redemption of the world.”

The indicators of profound moral confusion were evident in the reaction of many on the Left in the immediate aftermath of October 7th 2023.

Upon witnessing the proudly live-streamed mass rape and murder of Israeli civilians, perpetrated by people who sincerely believed they were enacting a moral good, those who have previously argued that Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups are not primarily motivated by violent religious totalitarianism should have had a moment of reflection.

Instead, there was a mixture of denial, deflection, and attempts to place these actions in a context where they can be justified on the grounds of a political struggle for self-determination, such that any impending retaliatory action by Israel could be swiftly condemned.

Israel must have provoked it - somehow. The precise provocation? None could agree. Perhaps it could be ineffective attempts to control the borders of Gaza after removing all the Jews from it in 2005. Perhaps it could be Israeli government support for illegal settlements in the West Bank. Perhaps it could be the quality of economic and living conditions in Gaza since the 1978 Camp David Accords (for which Egypt is curiously afforded no culpability). Perhaps it could be the enduring legacy of the outcome of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Perhaps it could just be the bellicose, unprincipled leadership of Binyamin Netanyahu. 

Whatever the reason, “Operation Al-Aqsa flood” couldn’t be what Hamas says it was - a religiously inspired ethno-nationalistic quest to rid the holy land of Jews. 

As the conflict inevitably moved to other Iranian-supported militias and eventually the Islamic Republic itself, this too had to be seen as “Israeli escalation”, rather than the consequence of repeated attacks from a powerful enemy, openly intent on the destruction of the Jewish state.

In a bewildering and patronising inversion of the truth - those who openly state their goals of achieving peace and security were accused of enacting a genocide, while those who openly state their goals of enacting a genocide were accused of wanting peace and security.

At the root of this confusion, and the means by which it has metastasized into the oldest prejudice in the world, is the denial of reality to protect the comfort blanket of a defunct moral worldview.  

It has happened because the ideas that motivate much of the political Left, developed centuries ago by thinkers most have not read, cannot be reconciled with the messy, complex reality that is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and Jewish history more broadly. 

When faced with integrating empirical information that runs counter to their understanding of the world, many have resolved these contradictions by accepting antisemitic fiction - believing that the Jews stand in the way of the redemption of the world - rather than doing the hard work of unpicking flawed philosophical premises. Thereby the Western Left’s anti-Israel bias is grounded in antisemitic tropes they do not realise they hold.

Throughout history, Jews have always been the scapegoats for those whose grand narratives fall short. Sadly, this remains true today, fostering a susceptibility to believe Iranian propaganda imbibed via TikTok and Instagram, then regurgitated onto The Guardian opinion pages.

Thus the streets are repeatedly filled with mobs demanding, with abject fury, that reality conforms to their ideas; lest they are challenged with uncomfortable introspection, and become a rudderless ship on a stormy sea. 

Hatred is fomented by that which forces us to confront our demons, and there are many demons on the Left that need confronting.

1. The Lens of Materialistic Determinism

It’s a curious paradox that those who are the most ideologically driven in the West today are those who denigrate the impact of ideas on human affairs and suggest motivations and actions are largely consequences of what an individual or group has, not what an individual or group thinks.

For this, we can blame the Germans. Specifically - Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Karl Marx. 

Kant redefined objectivity as a shared subjectivism - such that truth is a matter of collective opinion, rather than grounded in facts in relationship to cognition. Hegel determined that freedom of thought and action was therefore only available to the powerful who could create those shared narratives. Marx was inspired to then define power as material in nature - such that economic class defines political power, and only through that can individual autonomy be expressed.

Knowingly or otherwise accepting the premises above, the modern Left holds that the economically powerful subjugate the economically powerless, and it is by going “from each according to his ability to each according to his need” (a secularised version of the Sermon on the Mount) that harmonious and successful civilizations may occur. 

In the Middle East, the impoverished Palestinians, with a narrative of perennial historical grievance, serve as a vessel to support the legitimacy of these ideas. The Israelis have ability; the Palestinians have need. 

Therefore any attack by the Palestinians on the Israelis can reasonably be seen as a form of class struggle, and a bid for freedom against a subjugating force via the only means available to them. The seemingly irrational behaviour of the downtrodden is excused as entirely the fault of the powerful, who are corrupted by their greed and might into subjugating the powerless. Until there is the movement of power and wealth from the ruling class to the proletariat, they cannot be held accountable for their own actions. And given the horrifying nature of the actions undertaken, how appalling the external force precipitating those actions must be.

The prevalence and influence of this viewpoint has had a marked effect on Palestinian politics. For those who see the destruction of Israel as their primary concern but lack the military means to achieve it, keeping the Palestinian people mired in the narrative of perpetual victimisation is a rational strategy - which is precisely what successive Palestinian leaders have done.

Israel’s relative economic success also serves as an uncomfortable empirical example for those who wish to claim the validity of historical materialism.

If you believe that material prosperity comes primarily through the exploitation of resources and people, then you have no rational means to explain the wealth of Israel and diasporic Jews across the world, and are stuck with irrational means: suspicion, conspiracy, distrust. Antisemitism may be the socialism of fools, but Jewish success also demonstrates the folly of socialism.

Much of anticapitalism is also just reconstituted Christian antisemitism. Do you think capitalism works by the greedy rich hoarding wealth and putting their interests above the needs of the poor, while they manipulate the media to their will? Then you have bought into a false narrative far older than Marx and far older than capitalism - one that simply replaces “The Jews” with “The Capitalists” (of which a large number, not coincidentally, are Jews).

Many in the Muslim world cannot accurately comprehend how the most successful and prosperous state in the Middle East has been created by those who have rejected the final word of Allah, since to do so would be to question the veracity of Islam.

Correspondingly, many on the political Left cannot accurately comprehend how the most prosperous state in the Middle East has been created by a historically persecuted minority with no natural resources unless it was done at someone else's expense, because to understand the truth is to invalidate Marx. 

October 7th 2023 demonstrated incontrovertibly that a lack of material resources and self-rule are not the main cause of Palestinian violence. After Hamas used increased political autonomy and billions in international aid to prepare for a sacrificial holy war while enriching an elite few, it takes a special sort of wilful blindness to imagine that with just a bit more money and freedom, they would suddenly decide to value life over death.

The deterministic lens on power and economics creates a false and warping perspective. Marx was wrong. The means of production are not material, but the individual human mind creatively applied. Hegel was also wrong. Freedom is the choice to think and act in line with one’s own volition, absent the threat of force. And Kant was wrong. Objective reality exists independent of consciousness, and truth is there to be discovered, not created. Ideas are the primary force that moves the world, not things.

But to accept this, one must undergo uncomfortable introspection to unpick tribal shibboleths that are hundreds of years old. It’s much easier to view the Middle East through a conventional lens where the rich exploit the poor for power, and the bulwark against this is to always side with the underdog. It’s much easier to simply adopt the newest version of the oldest hatred. It’s much easier to believe that the Jews stand in the way of the redemption of the world.

2. The Postmodern Rubric of Oppressor vs Oppressed

The blame goes beyond the Germans. There’s plenty to apportion to the French as well, and latterly the Americans. Notably, among others: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Michel Foucault, Franz Fanon, Edward Said and Judith Butler.

Rousseau proposed that private property corrupts humans from their noble state, leading to inequality and conflict. Foucault took Hegel’s Master-Slave dialectic further and attributed notions of power and oppression to every social dynamic. Fanon saw everything in the context of colonised and coloniser, where the colonised’s only tool of resistance is violence. Said insisted that European perspectives applied to the Middle East were harmful by their very application, and demanded that the Arab - Israeli conflict be seen as a form of Western imperialism and colonialism. Modern Queer and Critical theorists prescribed that all social categories from race, religion and sexuality and gender be seen as dynamics of struggle between the dominating majority and the deviating minority, with reason and logic as tools by which the powerful oppress the powerless. All of history is then explained as a story of the dominance of the strong over the weak and the heroism of “resistance”. It’s deeply Christian: Blessed are the meek weak, for they shall inherit the earth. 

Bring this all together, and you have the motherlode of stupefying ideas, which has found its home in Western universities. Inspired by America’s Puritan roots, it demands of adherents that they do not think, but only feel guilty for what they have and aggrieved at what they have not, then project that guilt and sense of persecution onto others wherever possible, however possible. 

Through this valorisation of victimhood, the world can be neatly divided into “oppressors”—lighter-skinned, anglophone, enlightenment-orientated, rational, wealthy, straight, male, etc.—and “oppressed” —darker-skinned, ‘indigenous’, primitive, superstitious, poor, queer, female, etc.

Cultural imposition by oppressed classes is seen as liberation, while cultural imposition by oppressor classes is seen as colonization. Any double standard gives space for antisemitism to emerge, and a reflexive anti-Westernism positively encourages it.

Morality in this framework demands support for the oppressed underclass against the oppressive hegemon—to determine who is the David and who is the Goliath in any situation, and then root for David.

But this doesn’t work when you try to apply it to the tribe of David. Historically, Jews are the most vilified and persecuted ethnic group; expelled throughout history from the societies they were part of; religious but without clear dogma; carrying the most recent generational trauma of any group and yet becoming economically and socially successful despite the hardship. Israel itself is even harder to parse -Western yet Middle Eastern; a multi-racial, religiously tolerant ethnostate; militarily strong but tiny and fragile.

So what’s the answer—that the dominant intellectual discourse of our age, inculcated at university through great financial and emotional investment is pernicious asinine bunkum, or there’s something a bit suspicious about the Jews?

Since the 1970s the Palestinian cause has consciously framed itself to the West in the terms Edward Said set out, relying on old antisemitic tropes in an attempt to apply the analogy of Algerian resistance to French occupation, such that any violent uprising can be seen as a form of “decolonization” to engender sympathy in the West. In this narrative the Zionists are colonizers (outsiders), on stolen land (thieves), killing babies (blood libel), and seeking to expand their control (world domination). Thereby the liberation of Palestine is intellectually tied to the destruction of the state of Israel.

That this contemptible misrepresentation should be accepted as uncontested fact by so many of the educated classes fifty years later is a horrifying testament to the power of these enduring memes and the tragic stupidity of our age.

There is a masochistic narcissism in believing that all the world’s problems are born of Western (and especially Jewish) culture, as it grants permission for a sense of moral superiority to one’s peers, where an inner state of guilt can be assuaged through pious puritanical fury at those who have heard but rejected your gospel. The power of its prevalence is in the weaponisation of shame.

3. Christian Altruism as an Intrinsic Moral Standard

While Christian metaphysics may have been abandoned by the secular West over the past century, the ethical foundations of Christianity remain largely intact. Of these, it is the belief in a subjectively expressed, intrinsic universal morality that bends inexorably in an antisemitic direction.

This is primarily due to the influence of Immanuel Kant and the categorical imperative, but blame can be partially shared with Arthur Schopenhauer and the notion of compassion as the basis of morality. Further back, codifications of original sin, pacifism, and self-sacrificial virtue can be largely laid at the feet of Saint Augustine.

What is the good? We just know. How do we know? Through what we feel. How can we be sure it’s valid? Through the strength of our feelings. 

Emotionalism in ethics permits avoidance of interrogating where one’s moral ideas come from and gives no credence to the obvious - that emotions can be misaligned with the truth.

Unsurprisingly, one’s feelings tend to align with the moral ideas picked up as a child through culture, education and upbringing. The core premise underpinning today's views on ethics, taken from Christianity, is that virtue is defined by selflessness. The good is: abstaining from using energy for the sake of the climate, turning the other cheek in the face of violence, giving money to the poor, sacrificing oneself for others and prostrating for a higher cause. The battle between good and evil is seen as a choice between the false dichotomies of abnegation or egotism—Paul or Nero, Augustine or Nietzsche.

The curious and superficially paradoxical thing here is this ethical foundation often sits alongside a belief in cultural relativism - the upshot of which is that those from a Western, Christian background can be criticized for not living up to the virtues professed, but those with a different cultural heritage cannot. 

Jews, of course, sit at an awkward intersection in this calculation. Persecuted historically as those who refused to accept the message of their own messiah, they can be held especially accountable for not living by Christian values. If Israel, as the Jewish state, reacts to violence with violence in return, it is seen not as self-defence - but because the Jews believe in an eye for an eye. 

Yet, a proper understanding of the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict shows that every time Israel has turned the other cheek, compromised with or given succour to those who profess to want its destruction, it has been met with increased violence. In 2000 Israel had arguably the most left-wing government in its history, determined to make concessions to achieve a lasting peace. These concessions were met with the second intifada.

October 7th 2023 was an extraordinary case in point in this regard. The targets of the pogrom were not the military, but young festival goers, peace campaigners, and kibbutzniks—the easiest and most vulnerable targets, chosen at a time when Israel had its guard down and moved two battalions away from guarding Gaza over Yom Kippur. 

The logic of Christian altruism insists that the only reason this horror was visited upon the Israelis is because Israel just wasn’t altruistic enough in the face of wanton violence, and if only the state would turn the other cheek more, the violence would end.

If only there was more kindness, more compassion. more giving and more sacrifice—the Palestinians, and by extension the Houthis, Hezbollah and the Iranian regime would lose their motivation to rid the world of the Zionist entity.

Israelis don’t have the luxury of this ignorance. 

Post-World War II, Christian altruism has taken on a particularly Gandhi-esque character, with a view that the war to end wars meant no wars needed to be fought again, and fights for justice could instead be replaced by peaceful demonstration and civil disobedience.

The prevailing view was that after the tyranny of Nazism was defeated, progress was achieved inexorably. New conflicts shouldn’t be seen through the dichotomy of freedom versus authoritarianism, but instead through a new lens—the sides of peace and the sides of war. 

Having dispensed with the services of Churchill, Atatürk and de Gaulle, the new world required only an army of John Lennons and Yoko Onos to maintain a peaceful order. Catchphrases like “cycle of violence” started to enter mainstream parlance, suggesting that war was an end in itself, and that once it started, it would never end until one side turned the other cheek. Long and disastrous war efforts in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq served as evidence to back this up for the next generation.

Today this viewpoint manifests with opaque terms like “de-escalation”, where the great sin is to respond in kind to threats of violence against you. Acts of war need to be met with an act of peace. Defence can involve only deflecting enemy fire, but no form of pre-emptive strike, and ideally no retaliatory action. It is not the initiation of force that is evil, but force itself, and if this means sacrificing yourself in the face of an existential threat, at least in so doing you will be able to claim the moral high ground, and through that save others.

And so to go to war in response to a terrorist attack and the capture of a couple of hundred hostages, knowing it will cause thousands of innocent deaths, is deemed beyond the pale. The perversion of this utilitarian view is that if the Iron Dome worked just a little bit less well, Israeli responses against Hezbollah, Hamas and Iran would be seen as a bit more justified.

A slightly softer version of this attitude holds that it’s acceptable for Israel to attack Hamas in retaliation for October 7th, but only IF they can do so without causing significant civilian casualties. It’s on this basis that Hamas has rationally decided to ensure Israel can only achieve military victory by going through Gazan civilians, and in the process become a pariah in the eyes of the liberal West.

The moral logic of altruism has been played out by international actors in the region for at least the last twenty years—trying to win the peace before winning the war. UNRWA provided humanitarian support and services for the local population while allowing the elected government to put all their efforts into building a tunnel network and procuring weapons. Instead of enforcing Resolution 1701, UNIFIL shrugged as Hezbollah built up armaments that dwarf all but a few European countries, and Iran filled the void left by the collapse of a functional Lebanese government. 

Unlike those who sit in relative security in Europe and the United States, comfortably ignorant of the horrors of war, Israelis can’t afford to be this unserious. All too aware of the threat posed to their very existence by barbarians at the gates and thousands of years of Jewish history, they are determined to fight for survival. So the Jewish state becomes the Jew of states, lambasted for deviating from the dogmatic orthodoxy of the day. It was ever thus.

4. An Unwillingness to Confront the Realities of Islamic Totalitarianism

If a universal innate moral standard exists, then how can one explain the desire for erstwhile psychologically healthy people to murder civilians in the most violent and vicious ways possible, believing that in doing so they are enacting divine will?

It’s hard for secular Westerners to comprehend that more than a flourishing life for themselves and their families, a considerable minority of people are primarily motivated by the prospect of establishing theocratic order across the globe. To most of us, it feels (rightly) completely insane to see holy war as more important than earthly prosperity.

This is partially a failure of imagination—It’s difficult for non-believers to confront the horror of desiring death over life in the belief that existence is simply a departure lounge to paradise.

It’s also a bewildering affront to anyone who doesn’t quite understand the roots of their own views on what is right and what is wrong.

Islamism is self-confident, dogmatic, sure of itself and consistent—wildly contradictory to the insubstantial repackaged Christianity animating many on the “progressive” Left. What if the fundamentalists are onto something?

It’s therefore very appealing to consider this pragmatistically, and to imagine that because one doesn’t take religion metaphysically seriously, nobody else does either. It’s less challenging to imagine that ‘Generational Trauma’, ‘Western Imperialism’, or other opaque external forces are responsible for the rise in violence committed in the name of the prophet.

This explains the tendency to see the current conflict, incorrectly, as primarily about the conditions of the Palestinians rather than as a regional war between Israel and Iran. 

It’s cognitively soothing to think that this war could be resolved via sufficient compassion towards the theocrats—that by simply talking and breaking bread, the consequences of the 1979 Islamic revolution on Shia Islam, and the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Sunni world could be undone. It would be far less complicated if this were another Northern Ireland, where practical political compromises from both sides could reduce the religious zealotry.

Yet if one understands that Hamas, Hezbollah and other Islamist militias take their ideology very seriously, and have a deep comprehension of the ideas that animate the West—the desire to sacrifice their own people becomes entirely logical. If beyond this mortal coil is a far better existence for the martyrs in heaven, hastening their death becomes a favour. It is the foundational premises behind today’s strains of Islamic totalitarianism that are irrational, not the conclusions derived from them.

There’s a more visceral reason to hope religious fundamentalism isn’t the animating concern as well - fear.

If it’s true that the Iranian regime sees destroying the “Little Satan” (Israel) as only a stepping stone on the eventual goal of destroying the “Great Satan” (America) and achieving regional hegemony under an Islamic Caliphate, then Western liberals are also a target.

And if that is the case, it requires Western observers to recognize that this is their war too, and to truly consider how they might act when placed in the invidious position in which the Israelis currently find themselves. 

Would they, consistent with their moral principles, turn the other cheek? Would they submit to political Islam? Would they flee? Or would they fight, knowing that many innocents on the other side will die if they do? And how might they respond to growing Islamist sympathies on their doorstep? How many of those they walk alongside with keffiyehs and watermelon pins would protect their rights if threatened?

These are difficult questions. It’s much more comforting to close your eyes, to sit in safety, and to rail against those who guard you in your sleep for the crime of showing you that you need guarding.

It’s easier to believe that the reason so many Palestinians are dying is because Israel is committing genocide than to contend with the truth of the logic behind the actions of Hamas to try and get as many of their civilians “martyred” as possible. It’s easy to see the most appalling suffering on a screen, look to the immediate proximate cause and loudly proclaim “This must stop”.

In so doing, one can integrate a deep sense of horror with masochistic moralism by assessing one’s status in a power hierarchy, rather than contend with the much scarier task of grappling with the nature of evil in the world of ideas.

And that’s how Iran has skilfully played the populations of Western nations in its attempts to delegitimize Israel.

“The Right Side of History”

“Evil comes from a failure to think” - Hannah Arendt

If you truly and deeply care about the plight of the Palestinians, then you should wish for a world where they are not controlled by violent religious militias who see their deaths as useful PR material in service of a higher religious cause. You should wish for a world where Palestinian culture can be more like Israeli culture, and more Palestinians have the opportunity to become patriotic Israelis. In such a world both a two-state and a single-state solution would be possible.

This is not to say there are not also messianic zealots in Israel. Indeed, some of them are in the current Israeli government. But there’s a vast difference between a state that functions primarily to protect the individual rights of its citizens and an aspiring state that functions to destroy its neighbour at the cost of the individual rights of its own citizens. While it’s true that Muslim Arab Israelis do not have full equal rights, and that this is an injustice, they also have the most rights of any Arabs in the Middle East.

If you really care about the Lebanese, then you should wish for Lebanon to have a functioning non-sectarian state, with a military that protects its institutions from capture by a violent eschatological mafia who are engaged in human trafficking and controlled by a malicious foreign power.

And if you really care about the plight of the Iranians, then you should wish for a second revolution that topples the Ayatollahs.

What you shouldn’t do, is demand a ceasefire so the status quo can be maintained.

What you definitely shouldn’t do, is demand “the end of the occupation of Palestine” - a barely concealed demand for Israel to be destroyed, for all Jews to be kicked out of the Middle East, and for an Islamist dictatorship to be planted in its stead.

Some will claim to be innocent of any prejudice, animated only by concern for the scale of civilian deaths.

But are there weekly demonstrations over the half a million killed in the Syrian civil war or the hundreds of thousands killed in Yemen (a conflict in which the UK and the US also supply arms)? Is there commensurate horror regarding the ongoing genocides in South Sudan, Myanmar and Xinjiang? Or does such anger boil only when individuals are killed by Western, and particularly Jewish, hands? Is there not a belief at the root of this, that the Jews are the barrier to peace and prosperity; that the Jews stand in the way of the redemption of the world?

To those who I speak of here, I ask:

Is your fury a reaction to the discovery of where years of international denial and prevarication have led? Is your sense of emptiness and helplessness a response to the discovery of the extent of your moral confusion? Is your strength of feeling a self-righteous demand that reality conforms to your mental picture? Beneath the surface, are the demands for peace not truly a plea to have your cognitive dissonance maintained by others?

And the most challenging question of all—how will you react when this war comes to your shores?

How will you react when synagogues and Jewish community centres are attacked? When politicians are threatened with death for representing Jewish constituents? How will you respond when Jewish property is wantonly destroyed, when Jewish people are beaten, assaulted and kidnapped because of their ethnicity?

Will you speak up? Will you take to the streets to protest against it? Or will you respond with denial, deflection, and attempts to place it into a political context where Israel can be blamed for its rise?

You already know. All those things are happening.

A consequence of a culture whose only real point of historical reference is the Second World War is that most understand antisemitism only in its racialized Nazi form. They therefore assume that because they do not think of Jewish people as an “Untermensch”, they cannot be antisemitic; hence the often touted “…and all forms of racism”.

But this is indefensibly ignorant and a deliberate evasion. While Nazism may have been the worst form of antisemitism to exist, it was not the first and it will not be the last. The history of antisemitism is a history where an attack on the Jews is always followed by blaming the Jews for their suffering. ‘They assassinated the Tsar’, ‘They desecrated the communion’, ‘They crashed the German economy’, and ‘They stole Arab land’.

It’s also indefensible, in the twenty-first century, to evade the knowledge of where antisemitism leads.

The majority of the population of Germany in the 1930s didn’t say they wanted the systematic murder of Jews, but in supporting the principle of Lebensraum, voted for and allowed the conditions whereby it could happen, fashionably going along with what felt like the cause of the greater good. If your prescriptions for peace are the conditions whereby a second holocaust is likely to occur, then it’s not good enough to say you wanted differently after the fact.

It was the ideas distilled in the German Enlightenment that enabled the rise of Hitler, and it is these ideas again, with some new additions, that are enabling antisemitism today.

The fear felt so acutely by many in the Jewish community is not that a significant proportion of Western gentiles explicitly want Jews to be killed, but that when faced with the facts, and forced either to accept a scapegoat or change their outlook on the world, these people would—like their forebears in countless past centuries—allow the Jews to be sacrificed. If not for the bravery and competence of the IDF, they would already have done so. 

The “ceasefire now” demand—that Israel surrender to theocratic Islamist autocracy—is the demand that the ignorant masses in the West continue to be able to evade the truth unencumbered, with the lives of Jews an acceptable price to be paid for doing so. It is an act of profound intellectual cowardice.

So to those who claim the mantle of antifascism, whose animating political energy is to put themselves in the shoes of the wartime generation and wonder whether they would have the courage of their ancestors to stand up to the greatest evil when it arose - now you know who you would have been.