One of the most salient features of modern antisemitism is its utter lack of consistency. It applies standards to Israel that are never applied to Israel's enemies; it demands of Jews things it doesn't demand from anyone else. When the hypocrisy is pointed out, the response is "whataboutism" or the critic is attacked as "Zionist" which ends the discussion right there.
The best way to discredit any form of antisemitism is to argue from within the same ideological framework as the antisemites themselves.
Miller’s claims of a Zionist/Israeli conspiracy to take over the world are 24-carat 21st-century antisemitism: His claims are a revamped version of the world Jewish conspiracy promoted by the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and the Nazis.Although Miller talks of Zionists rather than Jews, the actors in his imaginary conspiracy are all Jewish: the Jewish national state, Jewish organisations, and Jewish individuals.Miller endows them with the attributes of Jews in more traditional antisemitic conspiracy theories. They “penetrate” power structures, they run campaigns of “subversion”, they are unpatriotic cosmopolitans, they take orders from a foreign power, they bring down political leaders, they “dictate” the outcome of elections, they are all-powerful, and they use bogus allegations of antisemitism to silence their opponents.
The site cannot be regarded as Zionist, but it does appear to be consistent in its worldview, and as such it brings up viewpoints that are simply never heard in most places.
At the onset of the current war, the site published a backgrounder on Zionism and the history of the conflict that succinctly demolishes most anti-Israel arguments from a progressive, Marxist perspective:
Socialists must side with the oppressed against their oppressors. In general, we side with the Palestinian Arabs against Israeli oppression. However, to side with an oppressed people should not mean that we adopt all the views of every group within it, or even of its majority. Those views may be one-sided or even chauvinist....The Jewish state is no longer a scheme for the future. It is a fact over 75 years old. Most Israelis live there because they were born there. The meaning of “Zionism” is not so clear. Usually it is taken to mean any sort of sympathy or identification with Israel, however critical — in other words, the reflex response of most Jews worldwide.Then “Zionism” is denounced as something akin to racism. This is ideological terrorism, used to prevent any consideration of the issues that does not start with root-and-branch condemnation of Israel.The “absolute anti-Zionist” demand that “Zionism” should be undone — i.e. that the Israeli Jewish state should cease to exist, and that the Jewish nation should instead dissolve into an Arab state — is not necessarily racist, but it is inescapably antisemitic. It implies hostility to the Israeli Jews, and hostility to that big majority of Jews worldwide, the “Zionists”, who instinctively identify with Israel.
The voices of the sane Left have been shouted down by the antisemitic Left. But they exist.
No Pasaran Media is a publishing house featuring "Left Wing authors in the fight against Left antisemitism, racism and conspiracy theories." The blurb for its latest book is a breath of fresh air from the Left:
Outcast is an explanation of how Jewish people’s experiences of racism have been cast out of the anti-racist imagination, as the very possibility of recognising anti-Jewish racism has been displaced by the commonplace leftist belief that when Jewish people cry ‘antisemitism!’, their surreptitious intent is to cover up the real racism propagated by Israel against the Palestinians.How this has happened lies both in an academic framework for the study of racism that confines racism to a colonial phenomenon of ‘white over black’ domination, and in the antisemitic idea of ‘the Jewish question’: that something must be done about the harm which Jews pose to humanity. Outcast shows that when both are translated into an understanding of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Zionism and all associated Jews become the representation of racism incarnate demanding the unprecedented wipe out of Israel.Camila Bassi says “Outcast is the product of my search for the reasons why sections of the Left are so singularly obsessed by Israel and are disposed to cast out those who identify as Jewish as unworthy of solidarity. This book elucidates how Jews have been banished as victims of racism by their demotion as the Left’s racist pariahs, while offering a more comprehensive and inclusive approach to the study of racism and to emancipatory politics”
Too much of the discussion of Israel devolves into a Right vs. Left argument. This turns Israel into a political and ideological football, with actual debate suppressed.
The fact is that Israel upholds the best ideals of both sides and rejects the extremism and bigotry that is sadly seen on both sides as well. Antisemitism poisons the debate and it must be identified, uprooted and shamed.
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Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. Read all about it here! |
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