Mick Hartley

Matthew Bolton at Fathom on the latest findings from the Decoding Antisemitism project:

In previous studies related to the Arab-Israeli conflict, classic antisemitic distortions (e.g. that Israel is inherently evil or controls the world), history-distorting analogies (that Israel is a colonial, apartheid or even a Nazi state) have frequently combined with a more or less open denial of Israel’s right to exist. However, explicit affirmation, glorification or celebration of violent killings of Jews have hitherto been relatively rare. The preliminary findings from this investigation indicate that this is no longer the case: the analysis found a substantial rise in the number of comments directly celebrating, affirming and glorifying the Hamas attacks, or calling for further attacks through the use of threats and death wishes. Furthermore, the number of direct affirmations of violence rose in threads responding to stories directly reporting, often in graphic details, on the attacks on Israelis, compared with those about the conflict more generally. In short, news stories where the commenters could have been in no doubt about the horrific nature of the violence on Israeli civilians stimulated a greater antisemitic response.

In the UK corpus, examples of clear affirmation and support for the attacks included comments such as: ‘Long overdue’ (BBC YouTube), ‘The Palestinians are finally fighting back’ (Guardian YouTube), ‘Good job Palestine,’ ‘Go on lads!’ (Time YouTube), ‘So happy to see justice finally ❤’ (Times YouTube). Other commenters celebrated the ‘Amazing scenes coming from Gaza long live Palestine’ (Independent Facebook), ‘Very Weldone Hamas…done great job…We fully support and Stand with Hamas… 👍❤👍❤👍❤👍’ (Telegraph Facebook), ‘more power to ham.as’ (BBC Facebook), ‘Joyful 🎉 About time they taste it’ (Telegraph Facebook). Additionally, comments affirmed violence in combination with other speech acts, such as curses and death wishes directed at Israel: ‘They deserve 60 years of this not only a day! Then we will have peace perhaps’ (Times YouTube). Comments also used puns or allusions to indiscriminately reject all Jews, rather than just Israelis or the territorial conflict: ‘JURN THE BEWS’ (Guardian YouTube); ‘The Palestinians will complete the job that the Austrian painter started’ (BBC YouTube).

Antisemitic reactions to reports of the massacre at the Tribe of Nova music festival were characterised by particular glee: ‘’we are terrified’ good, cry harder’ (BBC Facebook), ‘At a rave 🤣🤣🤣🤣 gtfo’ (Independent Facebook). These comments were often accompanied by analogies between Israel and the Nazi regime, with comparisons of Gaza to Auschwitz common: ‘Supernova festival a bit like raving next to Auschwitz Birkenau (Guardian Facebook), ‘Lol that’s like having a rave next to auschwitz. It shows a disgusting lack of basic moral’ (Guardian Facebook).

This pattern – with direct affirmations of the violence being the most common antisemitic response to reports of the atrocities – was replicated in both the German and French studies….

From these preliminary results, it seems as if public online discourse has moved from distorting projections onto the Jewish-Israeli out-group towards forms of self-positioning, through which web users justify, welcome and celebrate Hamas’ atrocities. Conceptually, this represents a stark contrast to all the corpus analyses conducted by the project so far, and suggests that a turning point has been reached in social media discourse about Israel. This study indicates that the Hamas attacks have been marked by a normalisation of explicit hate speech and a potential radicalisation of even politically moderate online milieus. The terrorist events of 7 October, which the Israeli public describes as the worst crime since the Holocaust, seem to have opened a new chapter for the articulation of antisemitism in ‘mainstream’ discourses on social media.

A corner has been turned.