Racist, moi?
Antisemitism is gentrifying. We should be alarmed.
A few weeks ago a clearly marked ambulance belonging to an international NGO was shot at while operating in a war zone. A paramedic was killed. Following repeated attacks, the NGO has been forced to scale back its operations, including critical aid for malnourished children.
I’m talking about Sudan, obviously, though I could just as easily be talking about Myanmar or Ukraine. No doubt you’ve heard about all these incidents as your friends posted outraged reactions on social media, accusing the perpetrators of war crimes.
I’m sure those same friends post frequently about the “genocide” in Xinjiang, where perhaps a million people are held in concentration camps for the crime of being Muslim and there are reports of torture and forced sterilisation.
And they must surely spare a thought for Yemen, where nearly 20 million people are dependent on aid following the Saudi invasion in 2015 and its subsequent decade-long blockade. No doubt on weekends they march through the streets demanding Western powers stop arming Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest buyer of American weapons.
I’m being facetious; your friends don’t give a fuck about any of that. All their empathy is for the Palestinians, and all their rage for Israel.
They would never admit to antisemitism, nor even believe it possible. They call themselves antiracist, carry an air of moral superiority, and insist – perhaps truly believe – that their furious hatred of the world’s only Jewish state has absolutely nothing to do with Jews or Judaism.
That’s what makes them so dangerous.
Criticism of Israel is not automatically antisemitic; but sometimes it is. For me, the line is crossed when somebody obsesses over Israel/Palestine to the exclusion of all other conflicts; when they hold Israelis to impossible standards while downplaying attacks upon them; or when they jump to conclusions about Israeli behaviour in a way they wouldn’t do about anyone else.
Neither is antisemitism any more acceptable just because Israel is strong or some Jews are light-skinned. Take it from eminent historian Simon Schama: “I just want the world to acknowledge that when you utter an antisemitic phrase, you are a racist. If you are calling for the elimination of the Jewish nation, you are racist.”
Ignorance is no excuse. Jewish NGOs have been sounding the alarm for some time about the emergence of antisemitic tropes within pro-Palestine activism. The Islamic supremacism of Hamas and other Palestinian groups such as the PLO is a matter of public record. If you haven’t read any of these materials or talked in depth to any Jews, you’re not in any position to be posting clips from Al-Jazeera on Instagram.[1]
High-status racism
Last week, an acquaintance who works at the European Commission posted a story from Al-Jazeera about an apparent Israeli attack on a Palestinian aid convoy that killed several medics. Above it she had written: “War crime”.
We don’t know what happened. It’s possible that a war crime took place. Like soldiers everywhere, members of the IDF have at times broken their rules of engagement (and have consistently been held to account). But it’s equally possible, as the IDF claims, that operational Hamas fighters had hidden themselves in the convoy, which would be a war crime on the Palestinian side – and not the first time Hamas would have used civilians and NGO workers as human shields.
This came from an intelligent, thoughtful person who wouldn’t normally spread inflammatory accusations before knowing the facts, but in this case she did so. When I challenged her, suggesting that her post could contribute to antisemitism, she doubled down: “Of course, a war crime can only be established by a court. Which will unfortunately never happen. So even if I used a shortcut, as a humanitarian I believe it is important to call out those killing aid workers.”
Witness the signposts of gentrified racism. The antisemitic trope, implied but carefully not stated, that Jews control international organisations and thereby get away with murder. The staking of moral superiority “as a humanitarian”. The language of activism in “calling out” rather than “slandering”.
At that point the mask slipped, and she continued: “And sorry but if you should blame someone about the rise of antisemitism, it is Netanyahu, not my post.” Of course, the root cause of antisemitism is the behaviour of the Jews!
To reiterate, this is somebody with a high-status job in the European Commission. Friends in the EU institutions tell me that anti-Israeli activism there is rife, much of it crossing the line into antisemitism. The top leadership is still sound, more or less, but the wholesale arrival of racism in the aspirational class is a dangerous new development.
Similar lapses of judgement have emerged in establishment media channels which ought to have gold-plated standards. In October 2023, in the early stages of the war, the BBC wrongly blamed Israel for a deadly explosion at a Gazan hospital before the facts were known; it later emerged that a rocket misfired by a Palestinian militant group was the most likely cause.
This year the BBC had to pull a documentary after it emerged that its teenage narrator was the son of a senior Hamas official. The public broadcaster had somehow failed to conduct this due diligence at any point before screening the film; it took an independent journalist to finally demonstrate that it had been hoodwinked by a terrorist group.
In another corner of the British establishment, a group of lawyers is seeking to have Hamas delisted as a terrorist group,[2] less than two years after it carried out the October 7 attack. Two of them had earlier celebrated that attack in social media posts.
And in academia, where the next generation of lawyers and officials and journalists is being incubated, Jewish students on both sides of the Atlantic have been subjected to antisemitic attacks through an ever-thinner veil of “anti-Zionism”. Some activists have tried to prevent “Zionists” from accessing university premises, echoing the 1930s.
This should concern us greatly. Racism always exists but there’s a limit to the harm it can do when it’s confined to cranks and losers. Its arrival in polite society brings the potential for systemic discrimination and, in the longer term, state-sanctioned violence.
Polite people may never themselves take part in violence. But somebody who today excuses a Islamist pogrom in Israel may tomorrow look the other way when one takes place in Europe.
See no evil
To understand how some of the most avowedly antiracist people in our antiracist society have become racist, look no further than the rise of post-colonial theory.
This is part of a simplistic narrative on the left of the culture war which holds that people belong to a set of identity groups that are either oppressor or oppressed. Men oppress women, white people oppress people of colour, and so on.
In this worldview, any wrongdoing by oppressed people must be “put in the context of their oppression”, which in practice means it is downplayed, excused or justified.[3] Hence the October 7 terrorist attack was an act of “resistance”, the rapes and murders an inconvenient detail.
Israel, in this narrative, is a “settler-colonial” project – never mind that Jews are indigenous to the land and that those who moved there in 1948 were fleeing the worst genocide in history. They’re richer and whiter than the other lot, so they must be the bad guys in this particular oppression contest.
If you read about the history of antisemitism, this all makes perfect sense. Antisemitism has always managed to cast Jews as whatever a particular group of people most hates. To the Nazis, Jews were Bolsheviks. To the Bolsheviks, they were capitalists. To the woke, they are colonisers.[4]
This poison is spreading through our society at an alarming rate. I previously advocated for people who weren’t expert in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to keep quiet and avoid inflaming the discourse further.
I have changed my mind. All good citizens need to start challenging antisemitism wherever we see it, including – especially – when it comes from people who think they’re too virtuous to be racist.
[1] I actually have read widely and even lived in the West Bank for six months, and I still don’t post about the conflict because it’s too complex for social media. I have written about it here.
[2] They do so by choice; the action is not subject to the ‘cab-rank rule’ that obliges barristers in England to take on all prospective clients in certain circumstances.
[4] I have written at length about how the simplistic politics of post-colonialism are vulnerable to antisemitism, here.
Perfectly put. It "should" be obvious, but it's eloquently spelled out in your column for all to see.
"For me, the line is crossed when somebody obsesses over Israel/Palestine to the exclusion of all other conflicts" wouldn't this apply to you, however? would you comment on other people's indifference if it did not conflict with your own views in question? while all those conflicts are worthy of our attention, it is puzzling to me that some seem to only think of them when they are an opportunity to downplay criticism against other specific actors. also, RE charge of "holding Israelis to impossible standards": first, assessing the actions of IDF or the Israeli government is not quite the same as assessing the behavior of "Israelis" at large. second, would you say this about other actors in other conflicts? Would you interpret criticism at other armies as "holding them to impossible standards while downplaying attacks on them"? Rwandan aggression in neighboring countries is informed and justified publicly by the trauma of the genocide and the stated need to protect groups from minorities that were slaughtered in the genocide. Would you say the same about the Rwandan armed forces, as well as the other armed groups backed by them? If you cannot rule on this comparison for lack of information about Rwanda I am sorry, but it feels like you pay attention to Israel to the exclusion of all other conflicts. Furthermore, you hold other people and their choice of attention to impossible standards. On top of that, you downplay aggression when committed by Israel in a way you would not downplay if it was committed by other actions.
The IDF lying blatantly is extensively recorded in reports of serious human rights organisations that are far from being left wing (if you think Human Rights Watch or the Amnesty International work under "left-wing" frameworks, please go study political theory). And she did not say that jews control international organisations, you interpreted that - she said that Israel is able to evade even investigations of responsibility for crimes, which is absolutely true. This has been less true in the past, it is more true now. More than that, the international right backing Israel now because it is more convenient to them for a number of reasons regularly uses antisemitic tropes and can be overtly antisemitic. How much time do you dedicate to criticize them - or is antisemitism only useful if you want to downplay IDF actions?