EVERY ACCUSATION A PROJECTION

I WAS ACCUSED OF “CONFLATING” ANTISEMITISM WITH ANTI-ZIONISM. POT, MEET KETTLE.

“I’m rubber, you’re glue — whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you!”

It was almost a quarter-century ago. I was having the kind of “debate” I mostly don’t bother with anymore, standing outside Vancouver’s Jewish Community Centre arguing with a couple of protestors who had shown up in what would become routine but, at the time, was still novel enough to attract me. I must have been there for an hour.

I can place the date fairly accurately because it was shortly after the Durban Conference, in the summer of 2001.

Formally called the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, this was a turning point in the history of antisemitism. The conference, but especially its related parallel events including a forum of non-governmental organizations, exploded into an unprecedented festival of Jew-hatred.

At this United Nations-organized conference ostensibly against racism …

· Israel was repeatedly singled out as a racist, apartheid state — this is where the “apartheid” libel was first test-launched (it went over fabulously).

· The NGO Forum’s final declaration labeled Zionism as racism, echoing the discredited 1975 UN resolution.

· Calls were made for the total international isolation of Israel — the early version of the boycott, divestment, sanction (BDS) movement.

· Flyers were distributed praising Hitler and denying the Holocaust.

· Posters equated Jews with Nazis.

· Delegates handed out The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and other explicitly antisemitic hate literature.

· Jewish and Israeli delegates were verbally harassed and physically threatened.

· Some Jewish participants had to leave the conference due to safety concerns.

· A planned Jewish event was shut down by an aggressive mob chanting anti-Israel slogans.

· Israel was accused of genocide and ethnic cleansing. (Sound familiar? It’s already a quarter-century old.)

The conference was a turning point in how antisemitism would be treated by ostensibly antiracist people and groups.

The subversion of a conference dedicated to fighting racism being turned into an orgy of antisemitism should have been an eye-opener for the world.

Instead, in what Durban would also presage, we were treated to a world that didn’t seem to care.

It was (at least) the second massive leap into the abyss for 21st-century antisemitism. As I have written repeatedly, I believe we entered a new era of global antisemitism 11 months earlier, on September 28, 2000. That was the moment the Palestinian leadership murdered the peace process and began the Second Intifada. But it was what happened globally that was the turning point.

The Palestinian leaders — Arafat, at the time, but all the rest of them of course — have always been terrorists. We expect terror and violence from them. But it was the global left, and a bunch of others, who jumped on the bandwagon immediately after September 28, 2000, thereby siding with violence and terror and against peace, negotiated settlements and coexistence. That set the stage for the past 25 years of global anti-Israel activism. (Sometimes speciously called “pro-Palestinian” activism.)

It was also the first time I was accused of “conflation.”

In that “debate” outside the JCC, I railed against the antisemitism we were seeing in the so-called “pro-Palestinian” movement. My sparring partners — I would get to know one of them much better a few years later when he was the campaign manager and I was the communications manager on a political campaign; talk about strange bedfellows — told me I was “conflating antisemitism with anti-Zionism.”

I had not yet heard the term “gaslighting,” but this was a perfect example of it.

The axiomatic assertion that I was conflating two unrelated things has been typical of the anti-Israel strategy for at least 25 years. “Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” is their favorite slogan after, you know, the ones like “From the River to the Sea,” “Globalize the Intifada” and “Go back to the ovens.”

The lack of self-reflection was jawdropping, of course. For these “antiracist” activists, there was not an ounce of interrogation around whether or how prejudices about Jews played a role in their worldview. Just absolute denial.

But imagine another gobsmacking aspect of the comment.

Although the term “conflation” never really caught on (it’s not as catchy as “apartheid” or howling about a fake “genocide”) it is the subtext of the whole “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” extravaganza.

The idea is that the antisemitism we so clearly see in the hate-Israel movement is all just a figment of our imagination, almost some sort of psychological disorder. It even has a medical ring to it, doesn’t it? (Doctor: “I’m afraid your mandibular whoozle is conflating around your jibber node.”)

This is where the gaslighting comes in. We’re the ones with the problem. Anyone with the slightest knowledge of anti-Jewish racism sees the blatantly glaring antisemitism — but we are dismissed as hallucinatory kooks.

But here, finally, is my point: They are accusing us of conflation?

Carl Jung is often credited with a sentiment to the effect that “Every accusation is a projection.” (Apparently he sort of, kind of said something like this but not exactly.) I can’t think of anywhere this seems more true than in the anti-Israel narrative. Everything they sling at Israel is a projection of which their side (either the basement-dwelling activists in the West or the Arab and Muslim dictators and racist streets of the Middle East and North Africa) are guilty.

Israel is accused of mistreating Palestinians, women, religious minorities, desecrating human rights and blah blah blah. In its region, Israel is the exemplar of best practices in treatment of Palestinians, women, religious minorities and every value progressives worldwide claim to esteem. The overseas activists who trot out these allegations are aligned with the most misogynistic, homophobic, violent and hateful extremists on the planet. But we’re the baddies.

The idea that we are falsely alleging that anti-Zionism is drenched in antisemitism is a real knee-slapper when they are conflating Zionism with every sin under the sun.

When American cops shoot African-American civilians, “pro-Palestinian” activists accuse them of doing so deliberately, based on training from Israeli military partners, conflating domestic police violence with Jews.

The climate change problem, in the eyes of activists, is not because of our own cars and jet travel or Chinese industrial pollution, but because of Israeli bombs in Gaza, conflating the global climate crisis with Jews.

The surveillance tools used by authoritarian governments worldwide to monitor and suppress dissent are alleged to have emerged from Israel, they argue, conflating authoritarianism globally with Jews.

The war against which these people rally and rail was launched by their partner-in-crime, Hamas, and would end today if Hamas surrendered — but they project their guilt at supporting the perps by painting pro-Israel people as warmongers. They project their own sins of endorsing war and violence onto Israel, conflating humankind’s — and their own — bloodthirst with medieval ideas about Jews.

The examples go on and on. Probably every accusation against Israel is a mirror image of a sin of which the accusers are culpable.

Just as everything in an antisemitic culture comes back to Jews, everything in the progressive movement today comes back to Israel.

That’s how anti-Zionism dovetails with antisemitism. It’s a little more complex — though, really, not much more — than “You hate Israel, so you must hate Jews.” It’s the totalizing worldview in which everything wrong in the world points back to one particular people.

The Jews.

Or, as the worldview today has it, the Jewish state.

This is particularly on the nose when we are accused of conflation — of effectively seeing antisemitism under every bed. The allegation is rich coming from people who see Jews (Israelis, whatever) behind every problem in the world today.

But, sure. We’re ones conflating things.