IT’S THE INFIDELS, STUPID

IF WE DO NOT ACKNOWLEDGE MUSLIM ANTISEMITISM, WE WON’T UNDERSTAND ANTI-ZIONISM.

It’s not about the “occupation.”

You may have noticed I don’t talk a whole lot about Muslim antisemitism. My niche is calling out the sometimes more subtle anti-Jewish bias, as well as the problems in my own communities — the antisemitism and anti-Zionism on the left, in the gay community, in trade unions, liberal churches and so forth. These are the places I am familiar with.

More than this, though, it is almost impossible to talk about Muslim antisemitism without being accused of Islamophobia. Let me take that a step further: it seems almost impossible for people to talk about Muslim antisemitism without being Islamophobic. It is not an imaginary problem. We should be able to talk about antisemitism in Muslim communities without (A) being accused of Islamophobia, or (B) being Islamophobic. (Please — please — keep this in mind if you choose to comment.)

I am assuming you are aware that antisemitism is rampant among Arab and Muslim populations. Many or most of the violent attacks on Jews in the West happen when people come from societies where there are no Jews but plenty of Jew-hatred and they encounter a Jew for the first time and BAM.

Is every Arab and every Muslim an antisemite? No. But a huge proportion of Muslims are. And it is not in any way racist or otherwise problematic to acknowledge this. It is not an innate characteristic of being born Arab or into a Muslim family. It is simple rote learning, inculcated in many societies through education, religion, politics, news, weather and sports. It is problematic not to acknowledge this, which is a topic for another time. But anyways.

Antisemitic ideas are endemic to Arab and Muslim majority societies. There are several reasons for this including, obviously, fundamentalist religious teachings that are intolerant of diversity generally and Judaism and Jews specifically. Put mildly.

As they almost always seem to do, erstwhile antiracists, when confronted with evidence of rampant antisemitism, make excuses. The gobsmackingly high proportion of Arabs and Muslims who (apparently unabashedly) express antisemitic ideas are, we are often assured, not demonstrating actual racism, but really just political commentary. It is not an expression of Jew-hatred, but rather an entirely rational response to Israel’s decades of “occupation” and “apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide” and blah blah blah.

This gets things exactly wrong. Muslim antisemitism is not a disordered byproduct of anti-Zionism. Anti-Zionism is Muslim antisemitism operationalized.

The idea of Jewish national self-determination in the homeland of the Jewish people was anathema to many or most Muslims even when the idea was merely a wild-eyed dream for most Jews.

Anti-Jewish uprisings — in places like Hebron, in 1929, and Baghdad, in 1941 — obviously had nothing to do with the behavior of Israel. Israel did not exist then.

These violent pogroms were symptoms of rampant Muslim antisemitism, sparked partly by the very idea that Jews would be so uppity as to believe that they had a right to their own country.

If you do not understand the Islamic concepts of Dar al-Islam (“abode of Islam”) and Dar al-Harb (“abode of war”; lands outside Muslim governance), you cannot understand what is happening there.

A key principle of Islamic thought is that land once governed by Muslims must never be relinquished to the infidel. And ain’t no bigger infidel than the despised Jew.

Some religious fundies take this principle quite seriously. So much so that they raise their kids to kill and die for the idea. They have spent the better part of eight decades feeding the fires of religious conflict rather than compromising and seeing their kids grow up in peace (not pieces). So the idea that we can have a chatty sit-down and make nice is ignorant and racist in a very particular, ethnocentric way.

Let’s put a finer point on it: Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq were all carved out of whole cloth in roughly the same era Israel was born. No one has an existential problem with those countries — even though three of the four are basically failed states. Why the existential problem with Israel, which is the exemplar of postcolonial statecraft?

Jews.

It’s a Jewish country.

That’s the problem.

That’s why all the kerfuffle.

No one says Syria, Lebanon or Iraq shouldn’t exist — no matter how catastrophic their attempts at nation-building. Because they are not Jewish.

There is only one reason why Israel has inspired the hostility it has since it was created, in 1948.

It’s not “the occupation,” settlements, refugees or any of the other red herrings. It is the fact that Israel is a Jewish state.

More to the point: It is the embodiment of Jews who refuse to recognize Muslim supremacy. And that is not just a geopolitical problem for many of the world’s 1.7 billion Muslims. It’s a theological problem. It is an existential, doctrinal burr under the saddle for which a significant proportion of Muslims are prepared to fight and die.

When Western activists bleat “Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” they demonstrate next level obliviousness.

Antisemitism — Muslim antisemitism — is the progenitor, wellspring, seed, genesis and nucleus of anti-Zionism.

The brain donors who chant the supposed tautology that “Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” are telling us that they are not antisemites. And maybe they’re not. But they are standing on the shoulders of antisemites, advancing a global movement that has antisemitism as its source and its accelerant. So the differentiation is largely moot. Their self-righteous umbrage is performance art-level hypocrisy.

To bring this discussion back to my niche, which is the deeply problematic association of Western left-wing, “progressive” antiracist activists and one of the most misogynistic, homophobic, violent and intolerant movements on the planet: If we do not understand the antisemitic roots of anti-Zionism, we cannot understand why this comparatively small conflict has seized and monopolized global attention for eight decades. Moreover, if we refuse to acknowledge its root, we will never get to its resolution.

You don’t have to be an antisemite to be an anti-Zionist. But the anti-Zionist movement was born from Muslim antisemitism. The Islamic idea that Jews are inferior and must remain subordinate to Muslims is the foundational premise of the movement against Israel and the reason anti-Zionism is the world’s favorite crusade — because a good chunk of 1.7 billion Muslims say it is.

By comparison, you can, for example, call for immigration reform without being a racist. But when you join a march with hooded klansmen calling for death to refugees, you kind of cross the line from a reasonable person whose position on the topic is guided by logic.to one who is fanning the flames of hatred. You don’t have to put on the hood to be part of the mob. You just need to march alongside.

And that is what the global “pro-Palestinian” movement has signed on to. These are erstwhile “progressive,” feminist, queer, nonviolent, antiracist peace activists who have let religiously fundamentalist Islamic intolerance and Jew-hatred define their worldview.

So next time someone barks in your face that “Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism,” tell them to go back to the history books. Or, rather, crack them open for the first time. Because, if you don’t understand the antisemitic roots of anti-Zionism, you understand nothing.

In my next post, I’ll explain how we Zionists have screwed up by letting the other side get away with the ludicrous idea that “Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism.”