Mick Hartley

Dave Rich, from a lecture he gave at the Holocaust Museum Houston earlier this month, on the subject of ‘Antisemitism Today’. There's a video in the link. It's a long speech, starting off with the important point that the surge in antisemitism after October 7th started before Israel made any move in response. But here, for me, is the key part:

If you think about it, colonialism, racism, genocide: these are all troubling and difficult aspects of the West's own history. They are the cause, for some people, of immense guilt; for others, of very deep and difficult divisions. Now, Jews have always served a role as a useful scapegoat for sidestepping those kind of things in history. So perhaps it is not a coincidence that Israel today is treated as the symbol of all of the things that many people consider to be the West's most egregious sins. Jews have always been blamed for society's ills, held up as the exemplar of everything that is considered immoral or inhumane and unjust. In the Middle Ages, this meant Jews were thought to be literally satanic, blood-drinking demons in human form; in modern times, the right-wing myth of Judeo-Communism and the left’s imaginings about Jewish capitalism served this purpose. This was not only about Jews being an unwanted minority; it was a more profound imagining of Jews as a representation of the evils that need to be purged to make the world pure.

This is why it is so striking that Israel, the most visible global expression of Jewish life today, is treated by some as the absolute archetype of a human rights transgressor in a world in which human rights are the highest measure of moral good. Israel does things that are deserving of censure, but Israel’s actions alone do not explain why it gets this unique treatment, different from all other states and nations. This discrepancy, this unique standard applied to Israel, is a reflection of something much deeper. Just as Jews, in history, were feared and hated as a dangerous presence in society, representing all of humanity’s worst and most harmful features, so today the same applies to the Jewish State. There was even an article in the Guardian in May blaming Israel for climate change. Anything can be made to fit.

This all finds it purest expression now in the accusation of "settler colonialism" as an indictment of Israel as an illegitimate state, with those "from the river to the sea" calls for its destruction. Settler colonialism was originally coined with reference to Australia, Canada, the US, where it had no doubt more than a grain of truth. Obviously, though, no one really believed these countries would be abandoned, given back to the original inhabitants. But Israel fit the bill perfectly – provided you ignore the fact that Israel is the Jews' ancestral home, that they were there thousands of years before the Arabs, and that a good half of the Jews now in Israel are Mizrahi Jews thrown out of their homes across the Middle East and North Africa in a wave of antisemitic violence after Israel's founding. And of course the Left and the Israel-haters are very happy to ignore that – or waste their time pretending it's not true.

So the guilt felt by these inhabitants of settler colonialist countries – not coincidentally now where the protestors seem most vocal in their hatred of Israel – is turned on that old scapegoat, the Jew. History repeats itself.