A hatred that dwells alone? Antisemitism debate cuts to heart of Zionist vision
Left and rightDavid Collier: Twitter discriminates against me because I am a proud, unapologetic Jew
When the white supremacists marching in Charlottesville in 2017 chanted “Jews will not replace us,” they were deploying the same mechanism: Explain away real anxieties and fears by misdirecting them onto a nefarious Jewish power.
To European conservatives of the 19th century, Jews were the unwanted liberalizers or communist agitators. But they were no safer in the Soviet sphere in the 20th century, where they quickly became the regime’s favorite target.
Where conservatives and nationalists hated the Jews’ “cosmopolitanism,” communists depicted them as a capitalist vanguard and nationalist reactionaries whose clinging to their cultural distinctiveness threatened the global progressive revolution.
In hindsight, it might astonish us that Zionism could ever have believed the solution lay in changing the Jew. Antisemitism, then and now, was simply too useful to be abandoned just because the Jews of the eastern hemisphere had reorganized themselves into a nation-state.
Strident opposition to Israel’s existence on the ideological left has its intellectual roots in that Soviet antisemitism. In Soviet discourse, Jewish peoplehood was a very specific sort of threat: a retreat from the progressive project toward the old nationalisms that communism (and more to the point, Soviet imperialism) sought to eradicate. The USSR invested a great deal of effort in erasing Jewish distinctiveness, systematically persecuting and killing off the Jewish cultural elite and outlawing the study of Hebrew.
It was in Soviet ideology and its response to Jewish nonconformity that antisemitism became anti-Zionist — Israel was the epitome of the distinctiveness they sought to uproot. The Soviet intertwining of antisemitism and anti-Zionism swept through the Arab world to become a dominant paradigm of Arab politics for generations.
In March 1945, as Adolf Hitler hid in his Berlin bunker awaiting the Soviet advance on Berlin, Arab leaders met in Cairo to declare the founding of the Arab League. “It was organized around one principle unifying idea: being anti-Israel, the prevention of the creation of the State of Israel, and then after 1948, war against the State of Israel,” said Wisse.
Resisting Israel wasn’t one of the Arab League’s policies, it was its raison d’etre, the organizing principle of pan-Arab politics from that moment on.
“Why did they need to do that? They could have organized in 1945 against any other thing. It was a marvelous time for the Arabs. All their imperial overlords had been involved in this devastating war. Britain was crawling home. So suddenly the whole Arab world was free. They could have done anything,” Wisse said.
“But they couldn’t, because their leaders were worried about democracy, modernization. So the handiest thing was to organize [their politics] against the emergence of the State of Israel. This was their organizing tool. They used opposition to Israel as a unifying element among all these disparate and politically dysfunctional countries and leaderships.
“The more dysfunctional you are, the handier it is to point to Israel, to make Israel the target, to make Israel and the Jews” — and not your domestic troubles and failings — “the subject.”
Twitter discriminates against me because I am a proud, unapologetic Jew. If you are Jewish and active on the platform – Twitter probably discriminates against you too.
Twitter is a biased platform. We all know that. But their ability to influence goes a lot further than simply not banning antisemites. They also decide who to legitimise and who to refuse to give that credit to. As an example, Twitter have just turned me down as a candidate for verification for the third time.
Last year there was a Jewish boycott of Twitter because of the platform’s unwillingness to take antisemitism seriously. Twitter provides a blatantly visible example of open discrimination – in which anti-Jewish racism is treated very differently. You can say almost anything about Jews on Twitter- yet Twitter rarely responds to complaints of antisemitism the way they would if the target was a different minority group. This blindness explains why antisemitism is so rampant on the platform.
When their own ‘partners’ point out their failings, Twitter cuts all contact – just as they did recently with the Campaign against Antisemitism. Through their inactivity and unwillingness to act, Twitter permit daily racist abuse against people like me.
But the non-banning or suspending of anti-Jewish racists is only one element of Twitter’s multi-faceted discriminatory environment. ‘Zionists’ are errantly seen as ‘right wing’ and the Twittersphere leans ‘progressive’ left – which means openly unapologetic Zionists are disfavoured on the platform. It is a shifting Overton window. As right-wing voices are cut more frequently, and for lesser crimes, than left-wing voices – what constitutes the middle ground, slowly, but consistently moves further left. Eventually what was once a centrist opinion becomes right-wing, and what was centre-right is then viewed as an extremist position- and those promoting it become vulnerable to censorship or expulsion. In such a manipulated test-tube, everyone who does not conform to the progressive mindset – is standing in quicksand.
I’ve been active against antisemitism and extremism for over two decades – but only turned to publicly associating with my own research with the start of this blog in 2014.
Within a year my research saw an MP disciplined (Guardian, Independent). I was the one there – reporting on Gerald Kaufman when he made his antisemitic comments about ‘Jewish money’. My research also played a large part in the fight against the one-sided conference scheduled to take place in 2015 at Southampton University. My analysis of the participating academics was used as the evidence with which to expose the hypocrisy and bias, and thus delegitimise the delegitimisers.
The Enigma of Colonel Richard Kemp CBE explained in his own Words
“Why?” was the question I asked Colonel Richard Kemp CBE during our recent meeting in Jerusalem. Why is the former head of the British military in Afghanistan, who is neither Jewish or Israeli, such an outspoken, eloquent and effective defender of the IDF and the Jewish State? He began his answer with this statement,
I was taught when I was a child to know right from wrong. And when I hear some of the lies, the propaganda and the malice that’s churned out in the international media, in universities, in high schools and so-called “human rights” groups, I know it’s wrong. I know it’s wrong what’s being said in relation to the IDF (Israel Defense Force).
Colonel Kemp then went on to explain that he served as the Commander of British Forces in Afghanistan, and was a veteran of thirty years-service, and that he had fought in combat zones around the world including Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Macedonia and Iraq, and that he was also present throughout the conflicts in Gaza in 2014 and the most recent “Operation Guardian of the Walls” in May this year, when the Iranian-backed Hamas Terror organization fired thousands of rockets into Israel.
He added that based on his experience and on his personal observations: the IDF does more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare. He gave three main reasons for this. Firstly, Israel is a decent country with Western values, run on democratic principles. Israel has no more interest in war than Belgium does. In fact, Israel has never started a war. The only reason it ever goes to war is to defend itself. And it has to defend itself because, unlike Belgium, it is surrounded by countries and armed groups that want to destroy it. Secondly, Judaism, with its unsurpassed moral standards, remains a major influence on the citizens of Israel. “I say this as a non-Jew.” Thirdly, the army is composed overwhelmingly of citizen soldiers. Israel is a small country with a small professional army.
He also went on to express admiration for “Lone Soldiers” from abroad. During his visit he met with Harriet and Mark Levin, the parents of fallen Lone Soldier Michael Levin z”l (whose 15th Jahrzeit was commemorated by the Levins, IDF comrades and friends on Mt Herzl this month)
Peacemakers in the Holy Land https://t.co/iwrNxHswzd
— Israel Advocacy Movement (@israel_advocacy) July 25, 2021