Mick Hartley

An extract from Dave Rich’s new book – From Be’eri to Bondi: Global Antisemitism After October 7 – at Fathom:

Star Wars tells the story of a heroic resistance struggling against a fascistic empire that commits genocide at the push of a button via its planet-sized weapon, the Death Star. But this Death Star has a fatal flaw: a small hole in the side, and if you can fire a rocket into that hole then you blow up the entire Death Star, you avert impending genocide, and you lift the imperial jackboot from the necks of free peoples everywhere.

This is the metaphor that Irish actress Denise Gough, who is starring in a recent Star Wars TV spin off, reached for a few weeks ago, when she wanted to explain why defeating Israel is the key to ending all global suffering. “The Death Star is like all of it”, she said: Sudan, Congo, Nigeria, “all of it, everywhere”, and Palestine is like that small hole, the weak point of the entire imperial system. “If we can free Palestine,” she said, “it explodes everything” and ends imperial oppression for all.

It’s also very much the position of Sally Rooney, currently making a martyr of herself over her support for Palestine Action.

The novelist Pankaj Mishra made a similar argument, albeit in more highbrow terms, in his recent book, The World After Gaza, in which Mishra argued that the war in Israel and Gaza is of a different quality and significance than any other on earth, not because of the scale of death and destruction, the depth of Western involvement, or its sheer longevity, but simply and solely because Israel is Jewish. Only the Jews, he wrote, straddle humanity’s deepest fault lines: in the last century, “between religious tradition and secular modernity, capitalism and socialism, democracy and totalitarianism”; and now, in the form of Israel, “between Arabs and Jews, Global North and Global South, and white and non-white peoples”. Therefore the “Jewish State”, he wrote, is “of great and ominous significance” for all of humanity; and it is Israel, not Trump’s America, Putin’s Russia, or Xi’s China, which is causing a “collapse of the free world”.

One more example: in August last year, Michael Fakhri, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food and a professor at the University of Oregon School of Law, published a report titled “Palestine and the Right to Food”, which argued that “the tools and techniques that will free the Palestinian people from occupation, oppression, and exploitation will ultimately be the same ones that can free us all.” Fakhri was writing about hunger and the global food industry, and it’s that same claim, that same belief, that freeing Palestine frees the world; in this case, it promises liberation from the harms done by industrialised agriculture and processed foods. Even this, it seems, could be overcome if only Gaza were free. “Most of the world’s population”, Fakhri explained, “suffer under food systems that harm or kill them through slower forms of violence than in Gaza today”; “By fighting Israel’s starvation campaign against the Palestinians, people are in effect also fighting for their own freedom from hunger.”

I think we can see the connections here. It’s Israel – aka the Jews – who stand in the way of our path to a better, freer, cleaner future.

I have no idea what the people making these arguments think is the material basis for their claims. It strikes me as implausible, to say the least, that the IDF lifting restrictions on Gazan fishermen would somehow bring an end to agricultural deforestation in Brazil. But these aren’t really material claims at all, but modern expressions of a persistent and enduring belief that Jews, in one form or another, are the keystone in the arch that holds up civilisation, and that if you want to bring the existing order crashing down and replace it with something radically transformative, you have to first remove this Jewish influence; or at least take away its power.

It’s the return of the old Jewish Question, which obsessed so many European intellectuals in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Why are the Jews such a problem? – or rather, so different, and such a malign influence?

Let’s start with Zohran Mamdani, the mayor-elect of New York City, who said in 2023 “that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF.” Or Tucker Carlson, who, after Charlie Kirk was assassinated in September, gave a eulogy at the memorial service in which he compared Kirk’s assassination to the crucifixion. Or Louis Theroux, who, when interviewing Bobby Vylan, mused on how Jewish identity “has become almost like an acceptable way of understanding ethno-nationalism”, and that “they” are “prototyping an aggressive, militarised form of ethno-nationalism”. According to Theroux, it is “post-Holocaust Jewish exceptionalism or Zionist exceptionalism” that has become a “role model” for Orbán, Trump, and similar political figures elsewhere.

You don’t have to be from any particular background to do this. Tucker Carlson is a right wing Christian nationalist. Zohran Mamdani is a left wing secular Muslim. Louis Theroux is a British liberal. The theory that “Zionists” were to blame for the post-Southport riots in the UK was shared by, amongst others, David Miller, CAGE International, Matt Kennard of the left wing Declassified TV, the Islamic Human Rights Commission, and American white supremacist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.

On one level this is just regular conspiracy mongering. Find something bad that is happening and blame Jews, or Zionists, or Israel, and move along. But I think there are deeper patterns at play. Louis Theroux blamed Israel and “Jewish exceptionalism” for the fact that Viktor Orbán champions a narrow, ethnically exclusive nationalism in Hungary; and that Trump’s America has seen a resurgence of white identity politics. But Hungary does not need the Jews to teach it ethnonationalism. The Hungarian nation state that emerged from the Austro-Hungarian empire between the two World Wars was constructed through legalised ethnonationalism. Laws were passed to restrict access to higher education and key professions for Jews and other non-Magyar minorities. Indeed, the entire map of central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans is the result of a century of ethnonationalist wars, ethnic cleansing, and nation building. If Viktor Orbán wants inspiration for an ethnonationalist approach to government, Europe has its own authentic, native traditions for him to draw on.

Much of this is forgotten now, and instead there is a need for collective amnesia, so that borders feel permanent and peaceful relations can develop. But all that supressed guilt must go somewhere, so it is “Jewish exceptionalism” that gets the blame for East European ethnonationalism, as if Europe needs the Jews to teach it such a thing. Similarly, when Donald Trump talks of ‘America First’, it is an indigenous American tradition that he is harking back to. Neither Orbán nor Trump need Israel to teach them these ideas. As for Mamdani’s claim “that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF”: the idea that US police forces need to learn racist brutality from the IDF, that without Israel such abuses would not happen in the United States, is grotesque. This is scapegoating in its fullest sense: rather than confront the dark past and guilty secrets of Western societies, far better to load all those sins onto the traditional scapegoat and cast it out into the wilderness.

It isn’t hard to see how suggesting to people in the West that the problems in their lives are caused, one way or another, by Zionist meddling, encourages the idea that there is a hidden Jewish hand pulling the strings, and lacing the boots, that oppress you, ordinary person, in New York, or Leeds, or wherever. We’ve seen this before, and it even acquired a name, from that same period when The Jewish Question became a meaningful part of European politics. The idea that antisemitism can be leveraged to bring people to left wing politics became known as the Socialism of Fools, and it is just as foolish – and just as dangerous – in the twenty-first century as it was in the nineteenth….