Mick Hartley

But if you are attacking Jews for being 'Zionists' or 'Zios' or 'Global Zionism' crack on?

I think Mehdi – who has been a perfect gentleman to me when he invited me on his shows – does not see that contemporary antisemitism, antisemitic anti-Zionism, bends the meaning of Israel… https://t.co/d694nc11KO

— Alan Johnson (@Fathom_Editor) April 23, 2024

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I think Mehdi – who has been a perfect gentleman to me when he invited me on his shows – does not see that contemporary antisemitism, antisemitic anti-Zionism, bends the meaning of Israel and Zionism out of shape until both become fit receptacles for the tropes, images and ideas of classical antisemitism.

In short, that which the demonised Jew once was, demonised Israel now is: uniquely malevolent, full of blood lust, all-controlling, the hidden hand, tricksy, always acting in bad faith, the obstacle to a better, purer, more spiritual world, uniquely deserving of punishment, and so on.

Antisemitic anti-Zionism has three components: a programme, a discourse, and a movement.

The programme is not two states for two peoples, but the abolition of the Jewish homeland; not Palestine alongside Israel, but Palestine instead of Israel.

The discourse is a distorting, demonising and dehumanising system of concepts: ‘Zionism is racism’; Israel is a ‘settler-colonialist state’ for 'White' Europeans which ‘ethnically cleansed’ the ‘indigenous’ people, went on to build an ‘apartheid state’ and is now engaged in an ‘incremental genocide’ against the Palestinians.

Add in the ugly phenomenon of Holocaust Inversion – the deliberate and systematic Nazification of Israel in street placards depicting Netanyahu as Hitler, in posters equating the IDF and the SS, in cartoons portraying Israelis as Nazis, and even in the language of intellectuals.

The global social movement seeks to exclude one state – and only one state – from the economic, cultural and educational life of humanity: the little Jewish one.

So, while it's good to oppose old school Nazi racial antisemitism, it is better still to also realise that antisemitism existed long before and long after the Nazis. And that it has always been a shape-shifter.

Antisemitism has taken on radically different forms and supposed ‘rationales’ in different cultures at different times.

Medieval priests made one claim about ‘the Jews’, Enlightenment philosophers made another. The Nazi SS officer had his claim, as did the Stalinist Central Committee Member.

Each told a different story about the alien, powerful, malevolent and tricksy Jew. Each story has served to justify a murderous attack upon the Jews who have been indicted as:
• the betrayer and killer of the universal God, drainer of gentile blood, poisoner of the wells, etc (Christian antisemitism);
• the tribal anachronism, the enemy of the Age of Reason (Enlightenment antisemitism);
• the rootless cosmopolitan, everywhere the enemy of and fifth column within organic nations (Counter-Enlightenment antisemitism);
• the biologically programmed threat to all races, to be eliminated to the last child (Nazi antisemitism);
• the sons of apes and pigs who will be killed on a Day of Judgment (some forms of Islam and modern Islamic antisemitism);
• the arch-capitalist exploiter – to be hung from the lampposts as German Communist Ruth Fischer put it, latterly the arch-colonialist (Left antisemitism);

Today, in addition to all of the above (each of which is still with us), there is a new form of antisemitism which has been the consequence of the development of a Jewish State – Israel – and the demonisation of it.

‘Zionism’, properly understood, is a movement of national liberation for the Jewish people. But it is demonised today through the antisemitic ideas of the ‘The Zios’, ‘The Zionists’, ‘Global Zionism’ and ‘the all-powerful Jewish Lobby’.

Once it was ‘the Jew’ now it is ‘the Zionist’ that is – for the contemporary antisemite – malign, still controlling the world for Jewish purposes, and still string-pulling. The ‘Zionists’ power is still seen by the antisemite as virtually unlimited, still exercised through their hidden control of global media, political parties and governments, and global finance. 'They' are still uniquely evil, the modern-day Nazis.

And that world view – for that is what it is – is antisemitism ‘dressed up’ as anti-Zionism.