Untangling Anti-Semitism from Anti-Zionism

At this moment there is a crucial need to understand the complex, but not inexplicable, difference among anti-semitism, anti-zionism, and criticism of Israeli policies and politics.

Anti-Semitism is hated of the Jews. This takes many forms. Historically it has come from Christianity and, in the 20th century, through a pseudo-scientifistic racism inspired by, if not grounded in, theories of evolution.

Christianity has a problem with the Jews. For one, the Jews are the parent religion that never came around to accepting the claims of the offspring. As Milton Steinberg explained in Basic Judaism (1947), Jews believe that everything Jesus preached was already part of Judaism and where he made up ideas of his own, to quote Steinberg, "he blundered." He blundered by positioning the afterlife as a higher concern than this one. He blundered by saying we should turn the other cheek to evil rather than engage it immediately. And the list goes on. Whether or not one agrees, the Church was not amused.

Likewise, for Jesus and Christianity to be distinct from Judaism and a "correction," it is necessary to find Judaism to be incomplete, insufficient, or otherwise inferior. Tolerable, to be sure, but not up to snuff. A common approach is to point to something egregious in the "Old Testament" and explain how Jesus solved it. An old chestnut here is "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" being an example of "Biblical justice" (i.e. Jewish justice) and it was Jesus who raised us all up to a more humanistic understanding and practice (i.e. beyond the base Jewish view of the world).

Now, as it happens, in three thousand years no one has ever started a joke with, "A one-eyed Jew walked into a bar looking for a dentist…" though perhaps after this piece they will. Why? Because Jews — in the Talmud — concluded that the sentence cannot be taken literally. Why? Because "no two eyes are the same." Therefore, it was read to be an aspiration for proportionality not a literal best practice. Further it was a repudiation of the idea that justice can be, ever, merely mechanical. That is, the Jewish reading is 180 degrees from what the Christians say it is.

Anti-Semitism is a product of the West and Christendom. For centuries Jews lived better, and flourished, in the Muslim world from Moorish Spain to Baghdad and into Persia. Jews were not treated as equal to Muslims, but the nature of the objections were different and did not lead to purges, ghettos, pogroms and more.

Anti-Zionism is a political position against the idea of Jews returning to the Land of Israel and rebuilding their state. Anti-Zionism comes in many varieties, from those who deny the facts of Jewish origins in Judea and ancient Palestine, to Arabs and Muslims who do not want to given up control of land, to ultra-Orthodox Jews who say there can be no Israel until the coming of the Messiah (Jesus didn't count). They believe there should be no Jewish state, that Israel either should never have existed, should not exist, or should be wiped off the map and the Jews driven into the sea. That includes Hamas and Iran.

Criticism of Israel, finally, is the normal ebb and flow of political discourse about policy decisions and politics. The Jewish State's right to exist is not discussed because it beyond the range of discussion, and the topics are how it should perform as a permanent entity. Israelis have recently been protesting against their PM, Benjamin Netanyahu. They are not Anti-Semitic or Anti-Zionist. They are protesting to save and improve their country, not destroy it. Whether or not one agrees with the protests is a matter of political analysis and preferences.

So how do we make sense of scenes outside the Sydney opera house where pro-Palestinians gather to chant "gas the Jews"? Or the outpouring of support for Hamas in London and Montreal? What are we seeing?

We are seeing the merger of three anti-Jewish cultural systems finding each other, developing common ground, and merging their discourses about the Jews. It is a new phenomenon and it is hard to understand so bear with me:

On the one hand we have old-fashioned Jew haters. These are the conspiracy theorists, the Aryans, the Nazis (Neo or Paleo). Some of these people are inspired by the Christian theories about Jews that mutated into conspiracy theories about Jewish power, catalyzed by The Protocols of the Elders of Zion which I have still seen for sale (!) in Spain. They believe Jews are both in charge of everything from the shadows and are also evolutionarily inferior to the white race. I cannot explain this, but there it is.

Then we have the "progressive" Jew haters. These are people who have found one theory of morality to unify all their thoughts and ideas and philosophies and thereby simplify the expanse of human thought. Anchored in Marxism, inspired by French post-modernism, and then reduced and redacted through the American anti-intellectual meat grinder, they believe that the oppressed are always morally superior. The more oppressed, the more moral. The more angles you can claim victimhood, the more saintly. The more inter-sectionally oppressed, the closer to Godliness.

Except for the Jews. Their oppression doesn't count because they are secretly oppressing us all.

How did this come about? Well … I think it was a misapplication of Karl Marx. Marx believed that the laborers were oppressed by the industrialists. They were "in the right" because they did all the work but did not benefit from the gains. The nature of their moral value was in the functional benefits they gave to the world through their efforts, whereas the industrialists were tyrannical and greedy (even if they did create the jobs). But this idea mutated so that anyone who was oppressed by anyone else for whatever reason was also in the right. This was popularized by Marxist-educated anti-Colonial theorists (Franz Fanon, the Négritude movement in France, Gramsci in Italy, etc.). The colonized people were not responsible for their oppression, and anything they did to fight it was morally good. The algorithm was remarkably simplistic but, written in French, it sounded complicated.

Finally, we have the Arabs. The Muslim Middle East is not a product of Greece, Christendom, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Romantic Movement, or Humanism. While Bernard Lewis has fallen out of fashion with liberals, he's still the scholar to read on this as is Adda B. Bozeman whose work is less primary and more about the synthesis of other primary sources. In any event, the Muslim Middle East was not anti-Jewish in the ways described above. Rather, when the Jews migrated to (or back to) the Ottoman Empire's Palestine, and then to the British Empire's Palestine, or else to newly Independent (by UN vote) Israel in or after 1948, the Arabs became angry that a foreign tribe was gaining power over Arab land and they didn't like it. The Jews were a tribe, not an ethnographic-religious people with local roots, and that tribe was to be resisted. Their anti-Jewishness was tribal, not rooted in religious tensions or racial theories.

Today, however, we in the West have pluralism and freedom of speech and porous or even open borders (at least within Schengen). Twitter and social media and the news; airplanes and trains and automobiles; and telephones and Youtube and TokToc create spaces where discourses that were once distinct and separate now co-mingle and find common cause.

The anti-Jewishness seen in London and Montreal and Sydney among other Western cities is where an orgy of shared sentiment — though often coming from desperate causes – can find common expression. We hate the Jews because of what they did to Jesus. We hate the Jews because they secretly run the world. We hate the Jews because they are the oppressors of us all, and also the Palestinians and the Palestinians are the "subalterns" and colonized (ignore the obvious history of the Jews) and so must be morally right in all they do; we hate the Jews because they are a foreign tribe that stole our land and drink from our wells.

We just hate the Jews. Join us and celebrate our shared revulsion.

It once made sense to say the Palestinians are anti-Zionist (obviously) but not ant-Semitic because they were not raised in the West and were not influenced by Western and Christian anti-semitism. But now … when they shout "gas the Jews" in Sydney one has to pause and recognize that today, young people are reaching out to find new ways and forms to express and experience their generic hatred of Jews and can now freely select and employ different rhetorical models. In short, it is becoming impossible to distinguish — in many, but not all cases — anti-semitism from anti-Zionism. Criticism of Israel, however, is still simple to separate out because the litmus test is whether the nature of the criticism is about Israeli practices or Israeli existence. I am very critical of the American government and that is because I love my country and want to improve it. Others may want to destroy it. That's the line.

So as we watch the world explode in anti-Jewish sentiment; celebrate the murder of hundreds of teenagers and young people at a music concert; rape and murder and dismember women and then parade their corpses through the world to the chants and celebration of the onlookers, we can start to see where is comes from, why these worlds are joining together and how – and why — we must fight back.

Dr. Derek B. Miller, Barcelona, 10 October, 2023

(Sorry about the typos. The world is moving pretty fast …)