How the ‘fight against antisemitism’ became a shield for Israel's genocide
(substack.com)
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How the ‘fight against antisemitism’ became a shield for Israel's genocide
Jonathan Cook
Western capitals no longer treat Israel like a state, a political actor capable
of slaughtering children, but ra...
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How the ‘fight against antisemitism’ became a shield for Israel's genocide
Western capitals no longer treat Israel like a state, a political actor capable
of slaughtering children, but rather as a sacred cause. So any opposition has
to be a blasphemy.
If you read the establishment media, you might conclude that a serious battle
is being waged by Israel and its most ardent supporters to tackle an apparent
new wave of antisemitism in the West.
In article after article, we are told how Israel and western Jewish leadership
bodies are demanding our concern, and outrage, at a rise in anti-Jewish hate
incidents. Organisations such as the Community Security Trust in the UK and the
Anti-Defamation League in the US produce lengthy reports on the relentless
increase in antisemitism, especially since 7 October, and warn that action is
urgently required.
Undoubtedly, there is a real threat of antisemitism and, as ever, it comes
largely from the far right. Israel’s actions – and its false claim to be
representing all Jews – only help to stoke it.
This moral panic is transparently self-serving. It directs our attention away
from the pressing, all-too-concrete evidence that Israel is committing a
genocide in Gaza - one that has slaughtered and maimed many tens of thousands
of innocents.
It redirects our attention instead towards tenuous claims of a deepening
antisemitism crisis, one whose tangible effects appear limited and for which
the evidence is all too clearly exaggerated.
After all, a rise in “Jew hatred” is all but inevitable if you redefine
antisemitism, as western officials have recently done via the International
Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s new definition, to include antipathy towards
Israel – and at the moment when Israel appears, even to the World Court, to be
carrying out a genocide.
The logic of Israel and its supporters runs something like this:
Many more people than usual are expressing hatred of Israel, the self-declared
state of the Jewish people. There is no reason to hate Israel unless you hate
what it represents, which is Jews. Therefore, antisemitism is on the rise.
This argument makes sense to most Israelis, to its partisans, and to the
overwhelming majority of western politicians and career-minded establishment
journalists. That is: the very same people who interpret calls for equality in
historic Palestine – “from the river to the sea” – as a demand for a genocide
against Jews.
The singer Charlotte Church, for example, found herself accused of antisemitism
by the entire establishment media after a "pro-Palestinian chant" to raise
money for Gaza’s children being starved by an Israeli aid blockade. The
offending song had included the lyric “From the river to the sea”, calling for
the liberation of Palestinians from decades of Israeli oppression.
At the weekend, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt once again suggested marches calling for
a ceasefire were antisemitic because they supposedly "intimidated" Jews. In
fact, Jews are prominent at those marches. He was referring to Zionists who
excuse the slaughter in Gaza.
Similarly, in the wake of George Galloway’s overwhelming byelection win "for
Gaza" in Rochdale last week, a BBC reporter berated former Labour MP Chris
Williamson for using the word "genocide" to describe Israel’s actions.
The reporter was worried that the term “might offend some people”, despite the
World Court finding the accusation of genocide plausible.
A ghoulish phenomenonBut the ambition of these Israel zealots runs much deeper
than mere deflection. Israel’s leaders and most of its citizens are not ashamed
of their genocide, it seems, and neither are their overseas backers.
If my social media feeds are any guide, the slaughter in Gaza is not
discomfiting these apologists, or even giving them pause for thought. They
appear to revel in their support for Israel as the world looks on in horror.
Every Palestinian child’s bloodied body, and the outrage it provokes from
onlookers, fuels their self-righteousness. They entrench, they do not retreat.
They appear to be finding a strange reassurance – comfort even – in the wider
public’s anger and indignation at the extinguishing of so many young lives.
It mirrors very precisely Israeli officials’ own reaction to the International
Court of Justice's verdict that there is a plausible case Israel is committing
genocide in Gaza.
Many observers assumed that Israel would seek to placate the judges and world
opinion by toning down its atrocities. They could not have been more wrong. In
defying the court, Israel became even more brazen, as attested to by its
horrifying assault on the Nasser hospital last month and its lethal attack on
Palestinians scrambling to reach an aid convoy last week.
Israel’s war crimes – broadcast on every social media platform, including by
its own soldiers – are even more in our faces than before the World Court
ruling.
This phenomenon needs explaining. It looks ghoulish. But it has an internal
logic that shines a light on why Israel has become an emotional crutch for many
Jewish people, both inside the country and abroad, as well as for others.
It is not just that Jews and non-Jews who strongly subscribe to the ideology of
Zionism identify with Israel. It runs deeper still. They are utterly dependent
on a worldview – long cultivated in them by Israel and by their own community
leaders, as well as by oil-grabbing western establishments – that places Israel
at the centre of the moral universe.
They have been drawn into what looks more like a cult – and a very dangerous
one at that, as the horrors of Gaza are revealing.
Albatross, not sanctuaryThe claim they have internalised – that Israel is a
necessary sanctuary in a future time of trouble from the supposedly innate,
genocidal impulses of non-Jews – should have come crashing down on their heads
over the past five months.
If the price of reassurance – of having a “just-in-case” bolthole – is the
slaughter and maiming of many tens of thousands of Palestinian children, and
the slow starvation of hundreds of thousands more, then that bolthole is not
worth preserving.
It is not a sanctuary; it is an albatross. It is a stain. It must go, to be
replaced by something better for Jews and Palestinians in the region – “from
the river to the sea”.
So why have these Israel partisans not been able to reach a conclusion so
morally self-evident to everyone else – or at least those not suborned to the
interests of western establishments?
Because like all cults, hardcore Zionists are immune to self-reflection. Not
only that, but their reasoning is inherently circular.
Israel, Zionism’s creation, is not in the least concerned with providing a
solution to antisemitism, as it professes. Quite the reverse. It feeds on
antisemitism and needs it.
Antisemitism is its lifeblood, the very reason for Israel’s existence. Without
antisemitism, Israel would be redundant, there would be no need for it as a
sanctuary.
The cult would be over, and so would the endless military aid, the special
trading status with the West, the jobs, the land grabs, the privileges and the
sense of importance and ultimate victimhood that allows for the dehumanisation
of others, not least the Palestinians.
Like all true believers, Israel’s partisans overseas – who proudly call
themselves “Zionists” but are now pressuring social media platforms to ban the
term as antisemitic, as the movement’s goals become more transparent – have too
much to lose from self- and communal doubt.
The fight against antisemitism means nothing else can take priority – not even
genocide. Which, in turn, means no greater evil can be acknowledged, not even
the mass murder of children. No bigger threat, however pressing, however
urgent, can be allowed to come to the fore.
And to keep the doubt at bay, more antisemitism – more supposed existential
threats – must be generated.
Racism in new garbIn recent years, the biggest difficulty facing Zionism has
been that the true racists – on the right, often in power in western capitals –
have also served as Israel’s strongest allies. They have dressed up their
traditional racist ideologies – that once fed antisemitism, and could again –
in new garb: as Islamophobia.
In Europe and the United States, Muslims are the new Jews.
Which is ideal for Israel and its partisans. A supposed “global, civilisational
war” – ideological cover to justify continuing western domination of the
oil-rich Middle East – always places Israel, the regional attack dog, on the
side of the angels, firmly alongside the white nationalists.
Because Israel and its apologists cannot expose the true racists and
antisemites in power, they must create new ones. And that has required changing
antisemitism’s definition beyond recognition, to refer to those who oppose the
colonial domination project into which Israel is profoundly integrated.
In this upside-down worldview, one that prevails not only among Israel
partisans but in western capitals, we have arrived at a nonsense: to reject
Israel’s oppression of Palestinians – and now even its genocide of them – is
supposedly to reveal oneself as antisemitic.
Palestinians dehumanisedThis was precisely the position in which Francesca
Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the situation of human
rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, found herself last month after
she criticised French President Emmanuel Macron.
Israel has, as a consequence, declared it is banning her from entry to the
occupied territories to record its human rights abuses.
But notably, as Albanese pointed out, nothing has changed in practice. Israel
has excluded all UN rapporteurs from the occupied territories for the past 16
years, during its siege of Gaza, so they cannot witness the crimes that
foregrounded the attack on 7 October.
Last month, Macron made a patently preposterous statement, though one promoted
by Israel and treated seriously by the western media. He described Hamas’
attack on Israel as the “biggest antisemitic massacre of our century” – that
is, he claimed it was driven by hatred of Jews.
One can criticise Hamas for how it carried out its attack, as Albanese has
done: undoubtedly, its fighters committed many violations of international law
that day in killing civilians and taking them hostage.
Exactly the same kind of violations, we should note in the interests of
balance, that Israel has committed day in, day out for decades against the
Palestinians forced to live under its military occupation.
Palestinian prisoners, seized by an occupying Israeli army in the middle of the
night, held in military jails and denied proper trials, are no less hostages.
But to ascribe antisemitism as Hamas’ motivation is intended to scrub out those
many decades of oppression. It airbrushes out the very abuses faced by the
Palestinians that Hamas and the other Palestinian militant factions were
established to resist.
That right of resistance to belligerent military occupation is enshrined in
international law, even if the West rarely acknowledges the fact.
Or as Albanese put it: "The victims in the October 7 massacre were not killed
because of their Judaism, but in response to Israeli oppression.”
Macron’s ridiculous remark also wiped out the past 17 years of the siege of
Gaza – a slow-motion genocide that Israel has now put on steroids.
And he did so precisely because western colonial interests – just like Israel’s
interests – must rationalise the dehumanisation of Palestinians and their
supporters as racists and barbarians, in the West’s pursuit of domination and
old-fashioned resource control in the Middle East.
But it is Albanese, not Macron, now fighting to save her reputation. She is the
one being smeared as a racist and antisemite. By whom? By Israel and the
genocide-supporting leaders of Europe.
Sacred causeIsrael needs antisemitism. And armed with a ludicrous redefinition
adopted by western allies that classifies as Jew hatred any opposition to its
crimes – any rejection of its bogus claims of “self-defence” as it crushes
resistance to its occupation and its oppression of Palestinians – Israel has
every incentive to commit more crimes.
Every atrocity produces more outrage, more resentment, more “antisemitism”. And
the more resentment, the more outrage, the more “antisemitism”, the more Israel
and its supporters can present the self-declared Jewish state as a sanctuary
from that “antisemitism”.
Israel is no longer treated as a state, as a political actor capable of
committing crimes and slaughtering children, but as an article of faith. It is
transformed into a belief system, one immune to criticism or scrutiny. It
transcends politics to become a sacred cause. And any opposition must be damned
as wicked, as blasphemy.
Which is precisely the state to which western politics has devolved.
This battle against “antisemitism” – or rather, the battle being waged by
Israel and its partisans – is to turn the meaning of words, and the values they
represent, on their head. It is a fight to crush solidarity with the
Palestinian people, and leave them friendless and naked before Israel’s
campaign of genocide.
It is a moral duty to defeat these “antisemitism” warriors and assert our
shared humanity – and the right of all to live in peace and dignity – before
Israel and its apologists pave the way to an even greater slaughter.
Jonathan Cook
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