ARTISANAL ANTISEMITISM

ANTI-ZIONISM MAKES ANTISEMITISM COOL. BUT IT’S STILL THE SAME OLD THING.

Right. You get to decide.

Antisemitism has always been a bit fancy.

Actually, it is difficult to generalize about antisemitism because it transforms itself like a cancer to survive and spread. What I am going to say here may be true. But 100 other, different things may also be true.

In North America, it may be safe to say, antisemitism has generally had a slightly more high-end whiff than other forms of racism.

The “social antisemitism” or “polite antisemitism” of 20th-century North America — the restrictions from private clubs and certain resorts, the barriers to socializing across lines, the less “polite” exclusion or quotas on Jews in colleges — was a form of snobbery.

Of course, racism is almost always a form of snobbery, in that the perpetrator presumes they are better than the object of their bigotry.

Antisemitism tends to flip this.

One of the (many) tropes of antisemitism is that the perpetrators often believe that Jews think they are superior to the antisemite (and everyone else). We see this most evidently in the obsession that antisemites have with the Jewish theological concept of the “Chosen People.” This really drives bigots up the wall. See what I wrote about that here.

This has specific implications for the hater. Instead of feeling better about themselves through a sense of superiority, they may feel inferior and worse about themselves.

Or maybe I’ve got that exactly wrong.

Maybe the antisemite feels extra-superior, because they actually do feel superior to the people the antisemite thinks think they are superior. (Are you with me so far?)

As I say repeatedly, frequent reader, reasoning and good sense will not get you out of a problem that reason and good sense didn’t get you into. Trying to rationally explain an irrational prejudice is hopeless. Still, we need to try to make some sense here.

In the late 20th century, antisemitism became socially unacceptable in North America. I’m talking here, again, about the “polite antisemitism” of golf clubs and dinner parties. Far-right, fascistic antisemitism actually had a renaissance in the last decades of the century. But this proves my point. All decent people condemned the emergence of neo-Nazism.

Someone once said, “An antisemite is someone who hates Jews even more than necessary.” This witty sendup of bigotry speaks to the ubiquity of antisemitism. I think the subtext is that, in the time and place it was stated, all ordinary people were expected to carry certain negative ideas about Jews, but that to over-accentuate this presumably universal trait was to overdo it, to have too much of a good thing, as it were.

By the 1990s, at the latest, my recollection is that antisemitism seemed like history. Since I’m not Jewish, I have limited experience here. I also was almost completely unconnected to the Jewish community then and knew very few Jews. I’m sure Jewish people were experiencing incidental antisemitism, but as a major societal force, I believe it was limited.

It is not unrelated that, at this same time, many of us assumed that the ongoing conflict between Israel and its neighbors was on a path to resolution. The Oslo Process seemed to be heading to a two-state solution.

Then along came the Second Intifada.

Suddenly the Jewish state — which the emerging narrative would take some pains to differentiate from the Jewish people — became the object of hatred as “pro-Palestinian” activism skyrocketed around the world.

For 23 years after September 28, 2000, there was a wave of anti-Zionism worldwide. At the same time, a low simmer of antisemitism in Canada and other Western countries emerged.

An ongoing debate raged in certain circles over the relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. (I’ve written about this intersection of anti-Zionism and antisemitism here and here, among other places.)

I was smack-dab in the middle of these discussions as an activist on the left who had, in the 1990s, more or less accidentally stumbled into British Columbia’s Jewish community, where I became a reporter for a Jewish newspaper and would go on to work with all sorts of Jewish organizations.

Then October 7, 2023, happened. The debate around whether anti-Zionism was or was not antisemitism became, for anyone not completely blinkered, conclusively resolved.

People in my city were actually celebrating October 7. That’s not anti-Zionism. I’m not sure it’s even antisemitism exactly. But it is a form of inhumanity almost unprecedented in our lifetimes.

What is far, far worse is that even this resulted in almost total silence from decent people.

The mask came off. A movement that had at least pretended to believe in a two-state solution and the right of Jewish people to national self-determination adopted as its core messages “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” “Intifada! Revolution!” and “By any means necessary.” This is effectively the maximalist, exterminationist language of the most extreme anti-Zionist and antisemitic terrorists. Even a few months ago, I would have included a more thorough disclaimer that not all anti-Zionism is antisemitism. But since anti-Zionists don’t make much effort to disguise their antisemitism anymore, my inclination to include disclaimers seems a lot less urgent.

If there is a “moderate” “pro-Palestinian” movement anymore, they are being extraordinarily quiet.

The anti-Israel (erm, “pro-Palestinian”) movement, which had simmered along quite nicely thank you for the previous 23 years, exploded into a global conflagration in response to Israel’s defense of itself in the war that followed that terrible pogrom.

I am not debating here the legitimacy of Israel’s military response. That is irrelevant to the fact that antisemitism is exploding around the world. Anyone who blames antisemitism in Canada or anywhere else on Israel’s military actions is either an antisemite or an apologist for them. Let’s make that crystal clear. Few other overseas conflicts cause of this level of hatred and violence toward cultural groups domestically. Why does this one? One guess.

But this brings me back to the point. Oh yes, I do have one.

Antisemitism in North America in the last century went from almost universal to almost invisible.

But antisemitism, as I said, perhaps more than any other form of bigotry or discrimination, morphs as necessary to propagate itself.

To understand where we are now, we have to understand that a “pro-Palestinian” movement, for all intents, does not exist. There is effectively no movement for a genuinely “free Palestine.”

There is a reason why the chants you hear at these rallies are all about Israel, not about Palestinians. Because this is not a movement about Palestinians or their rights. It is about Jews and erasing their national self-determination.

For all the unprecedented energy and resources that have gone into the so-called “pro-Palestinian” movement, there is almost no concern for what might happen the day after Palestine becomes “free.” Unlike Zionism, which inspired volumes of utopian visions for national redemption, Palestinianism is almost entirely a negative phenomenon. It seeks to destroy Israel, but has no plans for a constructive, peaceable, progressive Palestinian state.

There is a reason why the Palestinian movement attracts hundreds of thousands of street activists, billions of social media posts, entire wings of the United Nations and unprecedented obsession by NGOs while other causes wither in the shadows.

It is because this cause has an accelerant with a 2000-year head-start.

A bigotry that went from polite and accepted to impolite and scorned would face an uphill battle to regain its former stature. But antisemitism is a powerful and creative force. It transmogrified again — as it always does — into something that makes it palatable to large numbers of people.

But we needed to fancy it up. It’s not acceptable now to say we condemn the Jews for being Jews. So now we hate the Jewish state. And we insist that it is always acceptable to criticize a country. That’s not racism.

To overcome whatever stigma still might exist around overt antisemitism, we had to make it something new. We had to make it cool.

Anti-Zionism did the trick.

Anti-Zionism is antisemitism with flair. People who know nothing about foreign affairs or international relations can sound as if they are worldly and engaged. Social misfits who might otherwise become incels have a more socially acceptable outlet for their frustrations. (Not that the Venn diagram of incels and “pro-Palestinian” activists are entirely separate spheres.)

Anti-Zionism is cool. Everyone wants in on it, it seems. And yet most do not see that it is part of a much older phenomenon. (Some do — let’s not kid ourselves!)

Antisemitism always makes sense to the antisemite. So anti-Zionism, which is premised at its core on antisemitism and has this ancient force as its greatest asset and accelerant, is just delicious old wine in new bottles. This is true whether or not individual anti-Zionists are antisemites. They stand on the shoulders of bigots.

Anti-Zionism is antisemitism made cool. It’s artisanal antisemitism.