Anti-Israel rhetoric has always been about the Jews - opinion
The fact that anti-Israel antisemitism is embedded in the halls of power should come as no surprise. When reason abandons the debate, the crazies on all sides feel empowered. Hatred for the Jewish people and Israel is the one thing that the alt-right and the woke Left agree on.The Biden administration’s half-hearted fight against antisemitism
Gaza was just a convenient tripwire for this most recent explosion of rancor. The anti-Israel and antisemitic propaganda that has exploded on the allegedly monitored platforms of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube recalls the most horrific expressions of hate not seen since the pages of Nazi Germany’s Der Stürmer, or sadly, the type of educational incitement that can be found in a Palestinian Authority first-grade textbook. Social media has spread the three Ds of anti-Israel antisemitism faster than a radioactive release from the burning Chernobyl nuclear reactor. According to the Anti-Defamation League, the words “Hitler was right” were posted more than 17,000 times in just seven days in May. Extremist hashtags against Israel and Jews were trending wildly. The vile knows no bound. Even Lily Ebert, a 97-year-old Holocaust survivor who educates the world about the horrors of hate on social media, was overwhelmed on her TikTok account by the most disgusting messages, including countless posts that praised Hitler.
Minimizing the horrors of the past promises that they’ll become part of our future. Synagogues were desecrated last month, and Jewish businesses vandalized. Jews around the world now think twice before wearing a kippah in public or having a mezuzah on their front door. But let’s not kid ourselves: Facebook and Twitter are monopolist businesses, and they’ve made billions off of this latest round of malignant incitement. The social media platforms did not stop designated anti-Israel terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah from recruiting and fund-raising online, so why should calling for the extermination of the Jewish people be any different? As the founder of an NGO that battles terrorists in court and who warned anyone who would listen that hatred on social media would lead to bloodshed, this handwriting was hash-tagged on the wall years ago.
In the hate business, antisemitism was always an easy sell and business is really good now. If hatred can’t be stopped and decency won’t win out over wokeness, perhaps legal liability – even criminal culpability – might be one way of getting the social media behemoths of Silicon Valley to stop their detestable practices. It isn’t a vaccine for the hatred, of course, but it will limit the spread of the contagion. Until then, it’s a certainty that social media will promote more anti-Israel and antisemitic hate. Terrorists will be emboldened and, in the process, many more innocent Jews will have to pay the price in broken bones and shattered lives.
Sometimes, what leaders don’t say, or do, echoes loudest. President Joe Biden’s response to May’s upsurge in antisemitic incidents is a prime example.The progressive imperialism of Keir Starmer’s Palestine policy
The president has been widely praised by major Jewish organizations and many individuals concerned about antisemitism for his May 28 statement, which said, among other things, “These attacks are despicable, unconscionable, un-American, and they must stop.” That was a good sentence.
However, the widely ignored thorn relates to the next sentence: “I will not allow our fellow Americans to be intimidated or attacked because of who they are or the faith they practice.” What matters here is the follow-up. And that’s where people would be wise to pause the cheering until there’s proof that this administration is committed to backing up that promise.
For starters, we’re past the point where lofty words are sufficient. The time to try beating back antisemitism with statements alone was early 2019. At that point, the still new Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, had three antisemitism scandals in quick succession, as she repeatedly violated the taboo against open antisemitism and brazened out censure. Biden chose to remain silent, as did many congressional Democrats. Now, more than two years of shattered norms later, American Jews are living with the very real and dangerous consequences of that collective shrug.
During May, American Jews were assaulted for walking while wearing a kippah in Manhattan and being Jewish while eating sushi in Los Angeles, among numerous nationwide attacks on synagogues and Jewish individuals. Notably, Biden announced no acts of solidarity against this anti-Jewish discrimination.
Consider, for example, that when Germany’s antisemitism commissioner announced in 2019 that he couldn’t recommend Jews always wear a kippah, a German newspaper printed a cut-out kippah that non-Jews could wear in solidarity with Germany’s Jews. In that spirit, Biden could have announced he would wear a kippah for a week and encouraged other Americans to do likewise. Biden could have invited Jewish hate crime victims to the White House for an event. The president could have publicly urged Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to send him antisemitic hate crime legislation to sign. As the head of his party, Biden also could have declared that Jew hate has no home in the Democratic Party. He has done none of those things.
Sir Keir’s motives are probably an amalgam of cynicism and idealism, but the latter is where the trouble comes in. Progressives may see unilateral British recognition of a Palestinian state as a century-late penance for the Balfour Declaration — Emily Thornberry said as much in 2017 — but it is in fact a continuation of the same map-carving mindset. Britain knows best and if the natives can’t see it’s for their own good, they will eventually come round. It is progressive imperialism, but imperialism all the same.
There is an enduring myth, fashioned by Arabist historians and naively echoed by Zionist advocates, that Britain has always been the great champion and protector of Zionism. There have been aspects of Zionism to British governments, policies and intellectual traditions but for the most part Britain has been either uninterested in or hostile to Zionism. Even when philo-semitism and proto-Zionism were at their height in Britain in the 19th century, arguments made for Jewish self-governance in the Land of Israel were utilitarian or patrician.
The Spectator was advocating Jewish settlement of Palestine 15 years before Theodor Herzl was born, advising the Ottoman Empire that it would be ‘a gainer in every way were it to invite the immigration of such colonists’ because ‘the Jews would form the nucleus of an industrious, orderly population; consisting of men who have been trained to live as citizens — who know the value of domestic peace assured by laws’. Yet Palestine, it argued, was not to revert to being a sovereign Jewish polity; the settlers would merely be granted ‘considerable immunities’ by the Ottomans and England.
Thirteen years after Herzl’s death, the magazine was still at it, with a 1917 editorial titled ‘Palestine for the Jews’ predicting ‘a little Jewish State in Palestine would serve as a rallying-point for Jews all over the world, and it would confer a benefit also on the Christian and the Moslem worlds, which are equally interested in the Holy Land and its undying religious memories’. Again, even as The Spectator spoke of ‘the revival of Palestine as a Jewish land’, it was at pains to say Jewish settlement must be ‘under the supervision Great Britain, our Allies, and America’ with order ‘maintained by some form of international control’. Far from Zionism, the motive was more strategic:
“‘From the British standpoint, it is essential that Palestine should no longer be in Turkish or German hands; but it is neither necessary nor desirable that we should become solely responsible for the administration of the country.’
Palestine needed a little Jewish state not because it was the homeland of the Jews but because it was a headache for the Brits.
I don’t draw attention to these articles to scold The Spectator for espousing the attitudes of the day, or for advocating exactly the sort of protectorate early Zionists envisioned. That the magazine editorialised, and editorialised so early on, for a Jewish return to Eretz Yisrael is to its immense credit. I simply observe — marvel, really — at how little has changed in the intervening years. Then as now, right as left, Britain speaks about Israel in a proprietorial tone.