Mick Hartley

Eva Illouz at Fathom – Time to Unmask the Imposture of anti-Zionism:

Since 7 October, many liberal and left leaning Zionist Jews have become increasingly uncomfortable about the uses of anti-Zionism. Why is the movement of emancipation of the Jews the only one to be contested and vilified 120 years after its birth? Why is Israel the only state in the world whose existence is up for question, even a matter for debate at dinner tables? Why is the spurning rejection of Zionism so central to progressive political identity? In a world rife with persecutions, wars, genocides, massacres, civil wars, the obsession with which Israel’s crimes are singled out for opprobrium cannot fail to raise the suspicion that more is at stake than Israel’s own sins. To address this suspicion, we need a method which should address two questions: Does anti-Zionism discriminate against Jews (that is, treat them differently from other groups) and does it dehumanise them?

In trying to arbitrate whether a word, behaviour, or idea is discriminatory, sexist, racist or Islamophobic, the progressive Left has, by and large, deferred to members of minority groups. This is the only logical way to proceed, for, if discrimination or racial hatred profits one group to the detriment of another, we cannot let the profiting group judge how harmful its own behaviour is. Whether men ‘only’ pay a compliment or harass women in the workplace when they comment on their appearance can be decided only by the latter, not the former. This assumption has become universally accepted, except in one case: the Jews….

Why then is there such jarring asymmetry between Jewish and non-Jewish voices in their capacity to use their historical memory and be able to designate what constitutes an offence to their group? Assuming progressives are not animated by an explicit and conscious hatred of Jews, I believe there is only one plausible answer: Even though Muslims (to continue with the same example) are demographically, territorially, and economically (in total accumulated wealth) far superior to the Jews, they are viewed as a vulnerable and persecuted minority, while Jews – especially when associated with Israel – are denied this status. If Muslims constitute two billion people in the world, or close to 30 per cent of world population, and the Jews barely 15 millions, or 0.2 per cent of the people who inhabit this planet, the latter clearly better qualify to the status of vulnerable minority in global terms. But in western democracies, Jews are treated as a dominant (and ‘white’) group, a perception buttressed by the fact they are mentally associated to Israel, a military state victorious in numerous wars. Survey after survey, in Europe and in the USA, it was found that a third or more of the population believed Jews have too much power. More interestingly, young people, more likely to be progressive than older people, are also more likely to think Jews control too much of the economy and the media.

This asymmetry between the leftist treatment of Muslims and Jews betrays a double form of discrimination: It views Islam as in need of protection, despite its territorial reach and religious power, revealing an Orientalist condescension (protecting Islam differs from protecting from real and present discrimination the Muslim minorities who live in Western countries). And it cancels the minority status of Jews, because they are implicitly associated with power and domination.

More than that: when forced to legitimise the existence of Israel, Jews usually invoke the argument of persistent antisemitism, and this argument, in the progressive moral grammar, ipso facto cancels itself. It is discounted and recoded as an ‘instrumentalisation’ or ‘weaponisation’ (to use the fashionable word) of a tragic history to Jew-wash Israel’s crimes. The fear or denunciation of antisemitism by Jews is tautologically transformed into a ‘proof’ or sign of cunning manipulativeness, thereby automatically disqualifying it. Note that the wily manoeuvres of Iran and other Muslim countries to discard and disqualify any critique of political Islam as Islamophobic has never met with a similar a priori suspicion by the progressive Left.

Worth reading in full.