Mick Hartley

A couple of interesting pieces in the latest Fathom…

Richard Landes on Anti-Zionism: 21st Century Avatar of the Longest Hatred:

From a religious point of view, this conflict revolves around competing supersessionist grand narratives: ‘Who are the true chosen people?’ Early on, Christians claimed to supersede the Jews, and Muslims claimed to supersede them both. Each supersessionist claim relies on a ‘replacement narrative’ in which the newcomer at once replaces the previous claimant as ‘chosen,’ and deprives that previous claimant of the coveted status. Replacement narratives claim a monopoly on salvation.

The syndrome today is starkest among global Jihadis: their millennial plan is to conquer the world and subject all harbis who don’t convert or die, to the subaltern status of dhimmi. The Jews, the most obdurate of all people, especially in the modern world, must be eliminated in order for Islam to triumph and flourish. Jihadis have no problem with Nazi anti-Semitic discourse because they share the paranoid genocidal version of supersessionism: exterminate the rival ‘chosen people’ or die.

It’s harder to spot the secular supersessionism of the Jihadis’s allies on the global progressive left. Most progressives insist they’re not anti-Semitic: Jews as global, diasporic citizens are okay, even great! The erratic behavior begins, however, as soon as 21st century progressives turn their attention to one of the modern world’s more remarkable creations, ‘sovereign Jews’. Here we find that, for progressives today, as for the Vatican in the 20th century, and Muslim and Christian triumphalists for more the 1400 years, sovereign Jews – i.e. currently, Israelis – are definitely not okay. Since 2000, Israelis have become the new, legitimate object of widespread contempt and hatred among Western cultural elites.

The supersessionism among progressives rests on a morally sadistic ‘secular’ replacement narrative: Israel has replaced the Nazis while the Palestinians have replaced the Holocaust-era Jews. As pleasing an historical irony as such moral inversions may seem to Nobel Prize winners, it would be dangerous to mistake it for the reality on the ground, where Israel does everything it can to avoid behaving like Nazis, while some of its enemies openly admire Nazis.

This replacement narrative offers not only freedom from Holocaust guilt; it also offers moral elevation, the chance to tower over Israel and judge her harshly. ‘Israel has lost all moral high ground,’ pronounced UN envoy Terje Roed-Larsen in response to the Jenin ‘massacre,’ when in fact, he was looking at the lowest score for civilian casualty ratios in the history of urban warfare. Deep moral disorientation ensues: a mainstream news commentator claims that the picture of 12-year-old Muhammad al Durah, caught in a crossfire, ‘symbolically replaces, erases the image of the boy in the Warsaw Ghetto.’

From these heights, European moral superpowers like Sweden, and individuals like Jostein Gaarder, sit in judgment on Israel, despising these sovereign Jews, feeding their supersessionist fantasies at the price of becoming untethered from reality. It is a small step to transforming Holocaust Commemorations into platforms for attacking Israel as the new genocidal force on the planet.

And a comprehensive critique of BDS from Michael Yudkin – Lies, Damned Lies and the Academic Boycott of Israel:

These days the phrase ‘academic boycott’ seems to have acquired a thoroughly restricted meaning. It has nothing to do with China, which has been in occupation of Tibet since 1949 and which routinely imprisons or ‘disappears’ human-rights lawyers; nothing to do with the US or the UK, which invaded Iraq in 2003 without the authorisation of the UN Security Council; and nothing to do with Russia, which seized 27,000 square kilometres of Ukrainian territory two years ago and has (with the enthusiastic support of Iran) been helping the government in Damascus to bomb Syrian civilians. Instead, ‘academic boycott’ is a term of art to describe a means of punishing Israeli academics for the actions of a government over which they have little or no power.

Supporters of the boycott say that their aims are to support Palestinian universities and to oppose the occupation of Palestinian territories, but I show here that their true purpose is much more radical than these stated aims suggest. In addition, I illustrate the way in which the academic and cultural boycotters of Israel disrupt the work of individual scholars and artists – disruptions that belie the moderate and peaceable language the boycotters use to describe their tactics….

To be read in full.