Mick Hartley

Here’s a sophisticated analysis: an assistant professor at Columbia University, Joseph Massad, argues that the real anti-semites are the Israelis (via Solomonia):

Mr. Massad in his writings and teaching has articulated the view that Zionists have adopted the identity of the anti-Semite and Palestinians have taken on a Jewish identity. In one of his latest essays, in the Winter 2005 issue of the scholarly journal Cultural Critique, Mr. Massad argues that Palestinian resistance is a struggle against anti-Semitism and that Israel as a Jewish state represents the most vicious form of anti-Semitism.

“The irony of an anti-Semitic Zionism depicting the Palestinians as the real anti-Semites is not a simply rhetorical move, but instead is crucial to Zionism’s fashioning of Jewish public opinion, both in Israel and on a global scale,” Mr. Massad writes in the essay, “The Persistence of the Palestinian Question.”.

Or rather: an anti-Zionist academic depicting the Israelis as the real anti-Semites is not in any way ironic, but is simply a crude rhetorical move, reflecting a cheapening of discourse in certain fashionable sections of Western public opinion.

In the essay, Mr. Massad also compares Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews. After Israel’s founding, he writes, Zionism “transformed those who remained inside Israel into foreigners in their own land and, from 1948 until 1966, subjected them to life under a military, racialist system of rule that was reminiscent of the life of European Jews under the worst types of anti-Semitic rule.” The Nazis, he argues, serve as “pedagogical model” for the Israeli army.

I suppose it’s a familiar theme: Israelis as the new Nazis. It’s such an easy thing to say – and so ironic.