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The ‘New Anti-Semitism’


Neve Gordon
Not long after the eruption of the Second Intifada in September 2000, I became active in a
Jewish-Palestinian political movement called Ta’ayush, which conducts non-violent direct action
against Israel’s military siege of the West Bank and Gaza. Its objective isn’t merely to protest
against Israel’s violation of human rights but to join the Palestinian people in their struggle for
self-determination. For a number of years, I spent most weekends with Ta’ayush in the West
Bank; during the week I would write about our activities for the local and international press. My
pieces caught the eye of a professor from Haifa University, who wrote a series of articles
accusing me first of being a traitor and a supporter of terrorism, then later a ‘Judenrat wannabe’
and an anti-Semite. The charges began to circulate on right-wing websites; I received death
threats and scores of hate messages by email; administrators at my university received letters,
some from big donors, demanding that I be fired.

I mention this personal experience because although people within Israel and abroad have
expressed concern for my wellbeing and offered their support, my feeling is that in their genuine
alarm about my safety, they have missed something very important about the charge of the
‘new anti-Semitism’ and whom, ultimately, its target is.

The ‘new anti-Semitism’, we are told, takes the form of criticism of Zionism and of the actions
and policies of Israel, and is often manifested in campaigns holding the Israeli government
accountable to international law, a recent instance being the Boycott, Divestment and
Sanctions (BDS) movement. In this it is different from ‘traditional’ anti-Semitism, understood as
hatred of Jews per se, the idea that Jews are naturally inferior, belief in a worldwide Jewish
conspiracy or in the Jewish control of capitalism etc. The ‘new anti-Semitism’ also differs from
the traditional form in the political affinities of its alleged culprits: where we are used to thinking
that anti-Semites come from the political right, the new anti-Semites are, in the eyes of the
accusers, primarily on the political left.

The logic of the ‘new anti-Semitism’ can be formulated as a syllogism: i) anti-Semitism is hatred
of Jews; ii) to be Jewish is to be Zionist; iii) therefore anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic. The error has

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to do with the second proposition. The claims that Zionism is identical to Jewishness, or that a
seamless equation can be made between the State of Israel and the Jewish people, are false.
Many Jews are not Zionists. And Zionism has numerous traits that are in no way embedded in
or characteristic of Jewishness, but rather emerged from nationalist and settler colonial
ideologies over the last three hundred years. Criticism of Zionism or of Israel is not necessarily
the product of an animus towards Jews; conversely, hatred of Jews does not necessarily entail
anti-Zionism.

Not only that, but it is possible to be both a Zionist and an anti-Semite. Evidence of this is
supplied by the statements of white supremacists in the US and extreme right-wing politicians
across Europe. Richard Spencer, a leading figure in the American alt-right, has no trouble
characterising himself as a ‘white Zionist’ (‘As an Israeli citizen,’ he explained to his interviewer
on Israel’s Channel 2 News, ‘who has a sense of nationhood and peoplehood, and the history
and experience of the Jewish people, you should respect someone like me, who has analogous
feelings about whites … I want us to have a secure homeland for us and ourselves. Just like
you want a secure homeland in Israel’), while also believing that ‘Jews are vastly
over-represented in what you could call “the establishment”.’ Gianfranco Fini of the Italian
National Alliance and Geert Wilders, leader of the Dutch Party for Freedom, have also
professed their admiration of Zionism and the ‘white’ ethnocracy of the state of Israel, while on
other occasions making their anti-Semitic views plain. Three things that draw these
anti-Semites towards Israel are, first, the state’s ethnocratic character; second, an
Islamophobia they assume Israel shares with them; and, third, Israel’s unapologetically harsh
policies towards black migrants from Africa (in the latest of a series of measures designed to
coerce Eritrean and Sudanese migrants to leave Israel, rules were introduced earlier this year
requiring asylum seekers to deposit 20 per cent of their earnings in a fund, to be repaid to them
only if, and when, they leave the country).

If Zionism and anti-Semitism can coincide, then – according to the law of contradiction –
anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are not reducible one to the other. Of course it’s true that in
certain instances anti-Zionism can and does overlap with anti-Semitism, but this in itself doesn’t
tell us much, since a variety of views and ideologies can coincide with anti-Semitism. You can
be a capitalist, or a socialist or a libertarian, and still be an anti-Semite, but the fact that
anti-Semitism can be aligned with such diverse ideologies as well as with anti-Zionism tells us
practically nothing about it or them. Yet, despite the clear distinction between anti-Semitism and
anti-Zionism, several governments, as well as think tanks and non-governmental organisations,
now insist on the notion that anti-Zionism is necessarily a form of anti-Semitism. The definition
adopted by the current UK government offers 11 examples of anti-Semitism, seven of which
involve criticism of Israel – a concrete manifestation of the way in which the new understanding
of anti-Semitism has become the accepted view. Any reproach directed towards the state of

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Israel now assumes the taint of anti-Semitism.

One idiosyncratic but telling instance of the ‘new anti-Semitism’ took place in 2005 during
Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza. When soldiers came to evacuate the eight thousand Jewish
settlers who lived in the region, some of the settlers protested by wearing yellow stars and
insisting they would not ‘go like sheep to the slaughter’. Shaul Magid, the chair of Jewish
Studies at Indiana University, points out that by doing so, the settlers cast the Israeli
government and the Israeli military as anti-Semitic. In their eyes, the government and soldiers
deserved to be called anti-Semites not because they hate Jews, but because they were
implementing an anti-Zionist policy, undermining the project of settling the so-called greater
Israel. This representation of decolonialisation as anti-Semitic is the key to a proper
understanding of what is at stake when people are accused of the ‘new anti-Semitism’. When
the professor from Haifa University branded me an anti-Semite, I wasn’t his real target. People
like me are attacked on a regular basis, but we are considered human shields by the ‘new
anti-Semitism’ machine. Its real target is the Palestinians.

There is an irony here. Historically, the fight against anti-Semitism has sought to advance the
equal rights and emancipation of Jews. Those who denounce the ‘new anti-Semitism’ seek to
legitimate the discrimination against and subjugation of Palestinians. In the first case, someone
who wishes to oppress, dominate and exterminate Jews is branded an anti-Semite; in the
second, someone who wishes to take part in the struggle for liberation from colonial rule is
branded an anti-Semite. In this way, Judith Butler has observed, ‘a passion for justice’ is
‘renamed as anti-Semitism’.[*]

The Israeli government needs the ‘new anti-Semitism’ to justify its actions and to protect it from
international and domestic condemnation. Anti-Semitism is effectively weaponised, not only to
stifle speech – ‘It does not matter if the accusation is true,’ Butler writes; its purpose is ‘to cause
pain, to produce shame, and to reduce the accused to silence’ – but also to suppress a politics
of liberation. The non-violent BDS campaign against Israel’s colonial project and rights abuses
is labelled anti-Semitic not because the proponents of BDS hate Jews, but because it
denounces the subjugation of the Palestinian people. This highlights a further disturbing aspect
of the ‘new anti-Semitism’. Conventionally, to call someone ‘anti-Semitic’ is to expose and
condemn their racism; in the new case, the charge ‘anti-Semite’ is used to defend racism, and
to sustain a regime that implements racist policies.

The question today is how to preserve a notion of anti-anti-Semitism that rejects the hatred of
Jews, but does not promote injustice and dispossession in Palestinian territories or anywhere
else. There is a way out of the quandary. We can oppose two injustices at once. We can
condemn hate speech and crimes against Jews, like the ones witnessed recently in the US, or
the anti-Semitism of far-right European political parties, at the same time as we denounce

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Israel’s colonial project and support Palestinians in their struggle for self-determination. But in
order to carry out these tasks concurrently, the equation between anti-Semitism and
anti-Zionism must first be rejected.

[*] This quotation is from Judith Butler’s foreword to On Anti-Semitism: Solidarity and the
Struggle for Justice, a collection of essays assembled by Jewish Voices for Peace (Haymarket,
271 pp., £17.99, April 2017, 978 1 60846 761 7). Butler wrote about the difference between
anti-Semitism and criticism of Israel in the LRB of 21 August 2003.

Vol. 40 No. 01 · 4 January 2018 » Neve Gordon » The ‘New Anti-Semitism’


page 18 | 1521 words

Letters
Vol. 40 No. 3 · 8 February 2018

Neve Gordon mentions the definition of anti-Semitism ‘adopted by the current UK


government’ and its accompanying list of examples (LRB, 4 January). I’d like to add a
word about its origins.

In 2005 a working party of the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and


Xenophobia, an EU institution, produced a forty-word ‘working definition’:

Anti-Semitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred


towards Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are directed
towards Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, towards Jewish
community institutions and religious facilities.

It was followed by a series of examples, of unknown authorship, which, depending on


their context, might constitute acts of anti-Semitism. Of the 11 examples, seven referred
to Israel rather than to Jews. But both the definition and the illustrations were rejected
by the EUMC, and in 2013 its successor, the Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA),
removed the entire text from its website as part of a clear-out of non-official documents.

In May 2016 the same text was adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance
Alliance (the IHRA), a Berlin-based association of 31 states, at its meeting in
Bucharest. To it were added, in the IHRA’s press release, the list of 11 examples. I
wrote about this composite text in the LRB of 4 May 2017, because the definition
seemed to me clumsy and open-ended, and a number of the illustrations, by seeking to
conflate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, slanted.

What I did not appreciate then was, first, that the IHRA text was not original but had
been retrieved from the files of two other bodies which had never adopted it; second,
that the ‘examples’ had been added to the adopted text; and, third, that the content of

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the versions adopted by UK institutions and bodies (and by governments such as those
of Austria and Romania) has itself been variable.

In December 2016, a press release from the Department for Communities and Local
Government and the prime minister’s office announced that the UK had ‘formally’
adopted the IHRA’s working definition of anti-Semitism, setting out the forty-word
definition without any of the associated examples. It is not known what ‘formal’ adoption
means in constitutional terms: either a text has to take legislative form, with all that this
entails, or it remains simply a policy. On the same day Jeremy Corbyn announced that
the Labour Party was adopting the definition.

In neither of these announcements were the tendentious illustrations included. But


central government has cited them as grounds for rejecting the advice of the Home
Affairs Committee that the ‘definition’ should be qualified by spelling out that in the
absence of additional evidence of anti-Semitic intent, it is not anti-Semitic to criticise
Israel’s government, to hold it to the same standards as other liberal democracies or to
take a particular interest in its policies or actions. A number of municipalities, including
London, Manchester and Birmingham, have adopted the list wholesale – London,
among others, using a version which omits the proviso that the listed examples depend
on their context.

What is at issue is suggested by the prime minister’s contemporaneous speech, quoted


in the government’s press release: ‘Israel guarantees the rights of people of all
religions, races and sexualities, and it wants to enable everyone to flourish.’ From this it
isn’t far to the first of the ‘examples’ of anti-Semitism: ‘Manifestations could also target
the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity.’ Leaving aside the difference
between targeting and criticism, one asks: conceived by whom? The world at large,
millions of Jews included, conceives of Israel as a state with the same rights and
obligations as any other state, including an obligation not to extend its territory by
incremental colonisation or to occupy and administer the land of others under military
law. It is hardline Zionism and hardline jihadism which coincide, as extremes tend to do,
in regarding Israel as a ‘Jewish collectivity’ – jihadism by seeking to identify Israel with
all Jews (making every Jew a legitimate terrorist target), Zionism by seeking to identify
all Jews with Israel (whence the description of Israel’s Jewish critics as ‘self-hating’).

None of this is addressed by a definition which sets the bar needlessly high by
stipulating hatred rather than simple hostility as the defining characteristic of
anti-Semitism, nor by tendentious examples which look to immunise Israel from sharp
criticism. Those who seek to make use of such material in the UK should perhaps
remember that public authorities are bound by the Human Rights Act to give effect to
Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the right of
free expression subject only to restrictions prescribed by law – which the IHRA

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definition is not.

Stephen Sedley
London WC1

Neve Gordon, instead of going to such lengths to prove the separability of anti-Zionism
and anti-Semitism, might have considered how anti-Zionism can be used as cover for
more sinister beliefs. One way this happens is through what David Hirsh calls the
‘Livingstone formulation’, named after the former London mayor, whereby anti-Semitic
remarks unconnected with Israel are justified as legitimate anti-Zionism. To take just
one example, a representative of the Islamic Human Rights Commission, reacting to
the Grenfell Tower fire, blamed the ‘murder’ on ‘Zionist supporters of the Tory Party’.

Another way in which anti-Zionism is used to conceal anti-Semitism is through the


Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which Gordon favours. Jackie
Walker, who in autumn 2016 was suspended from the Labour Party and removed from
her position as vice-chair of Momentum after making critical remarks about Holocaust
Memorial Day, is now boycotting moisturiser made by a US company because an
Israeli actress is used to promote it. An American Jewish musician had a gig cancelled
by a Spanish promoter when he failed to produce a politically acceptable statement on
Palestine (he was ‘seen to represent Israel’). Meanwhile, as a pro-Palestinian
academic, I am constantly enjoined to boycott like-minded Israeli colleagues. It is
unclear what any of this has to do with a ‘passion for justice’ or the ‘struggle for
self-determination’.

I would be more inclined to respect the bona fides of the BDS movement if it were
equally exercised about China, Morocco, Turkey or any other country engaged in
long-term illegal occupations – or, for that matter, war in Syria, torture in Egypt or
suppression of dissent in Iran. But the Jewish state is judged by a different standard,
which is precisely the phenomenon described by the concept of the ‘new
anti-Semitism’.

Richard Carver
Oxford Brookes University

Vol. 40 No. 4 · 22 February 2018

Richard Carver’s strictures against the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement
demand a response (Letters, 8 February). He writes that Jackie Walker – a black
Jewish woman – is ‘boycotting moisturiser made by a US company because an Israeli
actress is used to promote it’. That actress is also an enthusiastic member and
supporter of the IDF and has promoted its support of the illegal occupation. Carver also

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mentions an American Jewish musician who had a gig cancelled ‘when he failed to
produce a politically acceptable statement on Palestine’. That musician is a proud and
vocal apologist for the Israeli army and its illegal activities; he declined to support
Palestinian human rights when the promoters put the question to him. Neither instance
had anything to do with anti-Semitism; both were responses to Israel’s flagrant
violations of human rights.

BDS is a campaign directed at institutions, not individuals, unless an individual is


representing the state of Israel or a complicit Israeli institution, or has been
commissioned or recruited to participate in Israel’s efforts to ‘rebrand’ itself. BDS
originated in a call from Palestinian civil society to address the violence, terror and
racism intrinsic to Israel’s pursuit of hegemony in the territory it occupies. Carver
demands to know why BDS supporters aren’t ‘equally exercised about China, Morocco,
Turkey or any other country engaged in long-term illegal occupations’. If other
oppressed groups made the demand, as the blacks of apartheid South Africa once did,
there would indeed be an argument for boycotts elsewhere.

Diana Neslen
Ilford, Essex

ISSN 0260-9592 Copyright © LRB Limited 2018 ^ Top

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