This article briefly examines the pre-history of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, and how a combination of domestic and international challenges to Zionism in the late 1960s and early 1970s led to a concerted effort to redefine antisemitism in a way that prioritized the defense of Israel while identifying the political Left as the primary antagonist. It positions the IHRA definition not as a grassroots response to antisemitism, but rather as a coordinated, institutional form of counterinsurgency aimed at snuffing out transnational solidarity with Palestine....Where, how, and why does this shifting definition of antisemitism originate? While attempts to establish Zionism as a core component of Jewish identity have a long history, it was during the late 1960s and early 1970s that we first see a sustained campaign by Zionist intellectuals and activists to codify this link through an expanded definition of antisemitism focused specifically on Israel and combatting criticism from the Left. In 1969, Austrian intellectual Jean Améry published an essay entitled “Virtuous Antisemitism” in which he argued that “today’s anti-Israelism and anti-Zionism and the antisemitism of yesteryear find themselves in absolute agreement. . . . What certainly is new, however, is that this form of antisemitism, now dressed up as anti-Israelism, is located firmly on the left.” By the early 1970s, American Zionist organizations and even elements of the Israeli government had begun to embrace this revised definition. In 1971, David A. Rose, chair of the ADL’s national executive committee, warned that “the anti-Israel hate campaign by these extremists not only poses a serious threat to Israel’s survival, but is, in its broadest sense, anti-Jewish.”7 The following year, at a gathering sponsored by the American Jewish Committee (AJC), Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban identified this phenomenon as the “new anti-Semitism” aimed at Israel, one specifically associated with “the rise of the new left.” Staking a claim that would define the shape of Zionist efforts to silence criticism of Israel for the next 50 years, Eban asserted that “the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all. Anti-Zionism is merely the new anti-Semitism.”
Time to go down memory lane.
Did the idea that anti-Zionism is antisemitism arise only in the late 1960s? Not at all. Before that, everyone knew that anti-Zionism was a form of antisemitism.
For example, the Westralian Judean, Dec 01, 1953:
However, the main protagonists who conflated anti-Zionism and antisemitism were the countries behind the Iron Curtain. The Communist far-left always were antisemitic - and they, along with the Arabs they were advising, were the first ones to try to hide their antisemitism behind "anti-Zionism."
From the Oakland Tribune, Jan 25, 1959:
Do we really have to convince people that the Soviets had been virulently antisemitic?
It is true that while the Communists were antisemitic throughout the 20th century, the Left in the West was not generally antisemitic, nor was it anti-Israel, before the Six Day War. Mondoweiss doesn't want you to know that so it whitewashes that part of history and begins it conveniently to 1969.
This August 23, 1967 article by syndicated columnist John Chamberlain explains the sudden change perfectly:
Suddenly, the Left Turns Anti-SemiticBy JOHN CHAMBERLAINKing Features ColumnistNEW YORK — It does beat all. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee has been around for a long time. Before the advent of Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown and the rest of the "black power" boys, it never had it in for Jews. Indeed, it gladly accepted the help of such sensitive young Jewish people as Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who were murdered in Mississippi on a SNCC mission.
That was just the day before yesterday, as time runs in our benighted age. Today's SNCC has gone anti-Semitic. Nineteen years after the founding of Israel, it has chosen to denounce those "famous European Jews, the Rothschilds," for "conspiracy with the British to create the 'state of Israel.'" Query: if SNCC was truly perturbed about the 1948 Israeli-Arab confrontation, why didn't it say so long ago?
Curiously — or maybe it is not so curious — the explosion of SNCC's new anti-Jewish racism was timed to the very week to coincide with the eruption of an openly virulent anti-Semitism in Soviet Russia. The Soviet press is all "turned on" about alleged Israeli atrocities in the recent Mideast war. There have been anti-Jewish riots in Tashkent. And a dispatch from London tells about the murder of the rabbi of Sukhumi, a town in the Caucasus, who was hanged by his feet like Mussolini.
SNCC would naturally deny getting any "line" from Moscow, where cultural and racial anti-Semitism, long a part of the Soviet climate, has suddenly become political anti-Semitism. In a lame attempt to clarify himself, Ralph Featherstone, the program head of SNCC, has tried to differentiate between Jews in general and "Jewish oppressors" in particular. But he jumps right back to a blanket indictment when he says "it is the Jews who are doing the exploiting of black people in the ghettos. They own the little corner groceries that gouge our people... And there is a parallel between this and the oppression of Arabs by the Israelis."
Okay, if "parallels" are to be invoked, there is a "parallel" between SNCC's "line" on the Jews and Moscow's "line" on the same. There is a "parallel," too, between SNCC's and the Kremlin's newly emergent political anti-Semitism and that of Red China. There is even a further startling parallel with the arguments expressed by the National States Rights party, a white supremacist organization which is now pro-Arab as well as anti-Semitic.
The "new antisemitism" is the Western Left choosing to side with the Arabs in concert with the Soviets' framing of Israel as the aggressor in 1967. As you can see from their quotes in 1967, they had not quite gotten the hang of separating Israel from Jews....This column doesn't believe in secret conspiracies under the bed. But there is obviously an "open conspiracy," to use H. G. Wells's old phrase, among many Leftists today to gang up on the Jews. The Nazi practice turns out to be the Communist practice. This is hardly surprising when you consider the 50 members of the Communist East German parliament, as of the most recent available count made by the foreign editor of the Jewish Chronicle in England, were once members of the Nazi party. Communists will do anything to gain their ends, and what's a little genocide among Commie friends? As for SNCC, we can take the word of its Ralph Featherstone that it isn't following a "Soviet line." But Featherstone can't say that his organization isn't running a "parallel" course on the Jews to that of both Moscow and Peking.
It isn't the Jews who conflated Leftist anti-Zionism with antisemitism. It was the Leftists themselves.
|
"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
 |
Buy