Mick Hartley

Izabelle Tabarovsky, scholar of Soviet anti-Zionism, writes in Tablet Magazine about our current antisemitic moment:

Two and a half years after Oct. 7, conspiracist anti-Zionism—the belief that Israel is a superpowerful state driven by a malevolent ideology—is spreading through elite American discourse like an accelerant-fed blaze.

For years, it was the hard left that carried the banner of this ideology. But today, the “woke” right, represented most prominently by Tucker Carlson, is speaking in strikingly similar terms. Like its progressive counterparts, the woke right largely avoids railing against Jews, attacking Zionists and Israel instead. Like them, it insists that it is not antisemitic: It is simply criticizing Israel and Zionism….

This lens is both seductive and familiar. Democratic Socialists couch “Zionist” power and evil in the language of anti-imperialism and liberation for the oppressed. The right evokes the same imagery under the banner of patriotism and religious conviction. But the underlying message is the same: It reduces complex political realities to a single, all-explaining narrative driven by an omnipotent, corrupting global force of international Jewry.

Yes, we’ve been here before.

While American progressives continue to insist that they are “simply being anti-Zionist and not antisemitic,” America’s neo-Nazis and white supremacists have long understood the true nature of this framework. In 2019, as Ilhan Omar faced repeated accusations of antisemitism for invoking conspiratorial tropes about Israel controlling American politicians, former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke praised her as “the most important member of the U.S. Congress” for defying the “Z.O.G.”—a neo-Nazi acronym for “Zionist Occupied Government.”

A similar convergence was visible in the United Kingdom, where Holocaust denier David Irving described Jeremy Corbyn as “impressive” and “a fine man,” as his Labour Party turned conspiracist anti-Zionism into a flagship element of its political outlook.

Except I don’t think we have the same strength of far right antisemitism here as in the US. There’s no figure comparable to Tucker Carlson. David Irving hardly counts. Here, where we have a larger Muslim representation, it’s almost exclusively the left allied with Islamism that peddles this new antisemitism/anti-zionism.

It should be clear by now that what is taking shape in American public discourse is in no way a conventional political disagreement over the rightness or real-world effectiveness or this or that Israeli policy. It is the normalization of a way of thinking that flattens reality into a single, self-confirming narrative that has always led to the same place: the mental and political unraveling of the societies that embrace it.

What makes this moment particularly dangerous is that it no longer belongs to the fringes. It has moved fully into mainstream and, having crossed the aisle from left to right, creates the impression of a shared, bipartisan consensus around a modern American version of “the Jewish question.”

Societies that have gone down this path—the USSR, Arab states, Iran—do not emerge stronger, more confident, or more just. They become more paranoid, more dysfunctional, and more prone to turning against themselves. America has not been such a society until now. The question is whether it still has the power to stop.

Worth reading in full.