Whatever Happened to Antisemitism?
By
Antony Lerman,
Pluto Press,
317 Pages,
$23.95
The world used to understand the meaning of the term antisemitism. In recent years, however, there has been an effort to redefine it to include not simply contempt for Jews and Judaism, but criticism of Israel and Zionism as well. In May, 2022, Jason Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) declared that, “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism.” He argued that groups calling for equal rights for Palestinians in Israel are “extremists” and equated liberal critics of Israel with white supremacists.
On May 26, 2016, the 31 member states of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), of which the U.S. is a member, adopted a non-legally binding “working definition” of antisemitism at its plenary in Bucharest. It declared that, “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish institutions and religious facilities.”
Its provisions about rhetoric dealing with Israel has sparked growing debate. It provides a number of examples of what it calls antisemitism, including:
*Accusing Jews of being more loyal to Israel or to a global Jewish agenda than to their home countries.
*Denying Jews the right to self-determination or calling Israel “a racist endeavor.”
*Applying a double standard to Israel that isn’t applied to other countries.
*Applying classic antisemitic smears, like the blood libel, to Israel.
*comparing Israel to the Nazis.
*Holding Jews collectively responsible for Israel’s actions.
Chilling Effect On Debate
The Council of the European Union has invited the bloc’s 27 member states to adopt this definition. Twenty eight countries, mostly in Europe, have already done so. Opponents say its clauses on Israel will have a chilling effect on debate about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A coalition of American Jewish groups committed to Palestinian rights declared that, “The effort to combat antisemitism is being misused and exploited to suppress free speech, criticism of Israeli government actions and advocacy for Palestinian rights.”
Israel itself has welcomed this redefinition of antisemitism. It has for many years used the term to characterize its critics, including its Jewish critics. Some Israelis admit that this is a tactic to silence criticism. Shulamit Aloni, a former Minister of education and a winner of the Israel Prize, describes how this works: “It’s a trick. We always use it. When from Europe, somebody criticizes Israel, we bring up the Holocaust. When, in the United States, people are critical of Israel, then they are antisemitic.”
Early Israeli leaders promoted this idea even before the state was established. Abba Eban, who served as Israeli ambassador to the U.S. and the U.N. from 1949 to 1959, expanded the definition of antisemitism when he said that, “One of the chief tasks of any dialogue with the Gentile world is to prove that the distinction between antisemitism and anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all.”
Important New Book
In an important new book, “Whatever Happened to Antisemitism?” All of this is examined by Antony Lerman, a British specialist on Jewish affairs who has served as director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research and a founding member of the Jewish Forum for Justice and Human Rights. He is now Senior Fellow at the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue in Vienna and Honorary Fellow of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/Non-Jewish Relations at Southampton University. He is the author of “The Making and Unmaking of a Zionist: A Personal and PoliticalJourney.”
Discussing his background, Lerman notes that he is “…a Jew who has experienced antisemitism since childhood and whose commitment to Zionism in the 1960s led me to emigrate to Israel and become an Israeli citizen (I returned to the UK in 1972)…Antisemitism is a highly emotive subject and there is a close relationship between the personal and the political…I bring more than my Jewish identity to the table. I have worked in the field of contemporary antisemitism and racism studies for over 40 years, witnessing and charting the significant developments and changes over this period…In 1985, I wrote an editorial entitled ‘The Politics of Antisemitism,’ which criticized communal policy and the growing tendency to treat Arab opposition to Israel as antisemitic. The editorial sparked a furore…I was vilified as an anti-Zionist and ‘a self-hating Jew.’..the affair marked for me the beginning of a more critical approach to the study of contemporary antisemitism which I have followed to this day.”
Israel As The “Collective Jew”
At the core of the so-called “new antisemitism,” Lerman points out, “…is the claim that Israel is the persecuted) ‘collective Jew among the nations.’ In other words, it is argued, that the classic or pre-Israel anti-Semitism was hatred, discrimination, ostracization from society and ultimately mass murder directed at Jews. Since the establishment of the Jewish state, antisemitism has taken the form of hatred, discrimination, ostracization from the community of nations and, ultimately, plans for the destruction of Israel. Expressions of this are said to include the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement; accusations that Israel, as a Jewish state, is a racist endeavor; arguing that Israel has no right to exist; proposing that the entire area of what was Mandate Palestine from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River should become one single, democratic, secular state; charging Israel with responsibility for the naqba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homes in the 1948 war and subsequent wars; singling out Israel for criticism in a manner that would never apply to other states; and holding all Jews responsible for acts of military aggression undertaken by Israel.”
It is Lerman’s view that referring to Israel as, somehow, the “collective Jew” is without any basis in reality: “…a state cannot have the attributes of a human being. Second, it is a heretical corruption of Judaism because it entails an idolatrous deification and worship of the state. Third, it is an antisemitic construct because it treats being Jewish as a singular: ‘all Jews are the same.’”
More than a decade ago, Irwin Cotler, a leading Zionist and former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, developed the concept of Israel as the “collective Jew” among the nations. This formulation was given further public exposure when in November 2002, the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute published a pamphlet by Cotler titled “The New Anti-Jewishness” with this text on the front cover: “The new anti-Jewishness consists of the discrimination against, or denial of, the right of the Jewish people to live as equal members of the family of nations.”
“Substituting hate for the Jewish Person With Hate for the Jewish State”
In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 2012, Cotler declared: “since the start of the 21st century, the world has been witnessing a new and escalating, globalizing, virulent and even lethal antisemitism…one which substitutes hate for the Jewish person with hate for the Jewish state. We had moved from the discrimination against Jews as individuals, to the discrimination against Jews as a people, to Israel as the targeted collective ‘Jew among the nations.’”
As criticism of Israel’s policies toward Palestinians grew on the part of groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which characterized it as “apartheid,” Israel and its supporters became increasingly comfortable using the term “antisemitism” to characterize such critics. “This,” writes Lerman, “brought more solace to Israel advocacy groups, Israel lobbying organizations and an Israeli government that was increasingly convinced of the usefulness of antisemitism accusations as a shield against external criticism of its actions.”
Israeli historian Neve Gordon said that, “The Israeli government needs the ‘new antisemitism’ to justify its actions and to protect it from international and domestic condemnation. Antisemitism is effectively weaponized, not only to stifle free speech…but also to suppress a politics of liberation.” Gordon is professor of international law and human rights at Queen Mary University in London and was formerly on the faculty of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel.
Redefinition of Anti-Zionism as Antisemitism
Israel’s use of the new definition of antisemitism is increasingly understood by observers of developments in the Middle East. Joshua Leifer, an editor of Dissent, provided this assessment in 2019: “The Jsraeli government long ago adjusted its public relations strategy for the post-two-state reality…so that today, the Israeli hasbara apparatus’s most active front is the attempted redefinition of anti-Zionism as antisemitism, with the goal of rendering any opposition to the occupation or Zionism —-or even simply Israeli policies themselves—-beyond the pale of mainstream sensibility.”
Lerman shows that, “In recent years, Israeli officials have enthusiastically embraced the ‘new antisemitism’ framework in their attacks on Palestine solidarity activism.” He cites an interview with Ayelet Shaked, a member of the Knesset who served as Minister of Interior, who told the Washington Post in 2016, “In the past, we saw European leaders speaking against the Jews. Now, we see them speaking against Israel. It is the same antisemitism of blood libels…brainwashing people into hating Israel and the Jews.” Of supporters of BDS, she said, “They are using the same kind of antisemitism but instead of saying they are against the Jews, they say they are against Israel.”
It is Lerman’s view that attempting to redefine antisemitism in this way has had unexpected ramifications: “By making Israel ever more central to what is defined as hatred of Jews and legitimizing the corollary that support or ‘love’ of Israel has become the test of what being pro-Jewish means, it could be said that the definition of an antisemite has been transformed from someone who hates Jews to someone whom Jews hate. Or another way of characterizing this is that (some) Jews are saying ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’—-where the principal enemy is not just anyone who is judged to have criticized Israel unfairly, but also anyone who advocates for the national and human rights of the Palestinians, for redress and justice for the ethnic cleansing they suffered, for the end of the occupation of Palestinian land, for full equality for all who live in the Palestine-Israel area. So, what has become central to the ‘war’ on antisemitism is not a set of anti-racist principles, a fundamental belief in the inherent ethical and moral wrong of racism, of which antisemitism is an integral part—-in short, the full panoply of human rights—-but rather the defense of a powerful state on the grounds that it confers special protected status on itself by virtue of self-defining as ‘the Jewish state.’”
Attack on Human Rights Advocacy
Human rights advocacy has, Lerman shows us, become the major adversary of those who are engaged in fighting what they call “the new antisemitism.” He cites a book by Jonathan Neumann, “To Heal The World: How the Jewish Left Corrupts Judaism and Endangers Israel.” Neumann, a prominent Zionist advocate, attacks the concept of tikkun Olam (repair the world), which has been for many Jews the inspiration for their commitment to the cause of human rights. It is Neumann’s view that tikkun olam has no basis in Judaism and is harmful to it because it stresses universal values rather than what he calls “Jewish particularism.” This is a view that is shared by many Zionists. British columnist Melanie Phillips has called Jews who are critical of Israel “Jews for genocide.”
The Israeli government, Lerman notes, “…continues to present itself as isolated and under threat. At the fifth gathering of the Global Forum for Combating Antisemitism in 2015, Netanyahu spoke of the current ‘treatment of Israel as no different from that of our forebears . The Jewish state is being treated among the nations the way the Jewish people were treated for generations’—-a repetition of the eternalist ‘new antisemitism’ mantra.”
Israel and its advocates continue to characterize the country as the only true democracy in the region, an open and tolerant society. In reality, Lerman argues, “…it occupies a place closely aligned with the states driven by perpetual striving to realize an ethno-nationalist, illiberal agenda…this is a zero-sum game in which the Palestinians are the perpetual losers…There is precious little sympathy in Jewish Israeli society for the plight of the Palestinians. Zionism saw Arabs as ambiguous figures: at best, capable of being ‘civilized’ by the ‘new Jew’…Many centuries of Palestine as their home undermined Jews’ exclusive, biblically based claim to the land…As Palestinians increasingly developed their ability to tell their own national story…and…demonstrated that they would not accept their dispossession, Jewish Israelis came to explain Palestinian stubbornness by branding it a form of antisemitism. With the development of the ‘new antisemitism’ theory it was easy to slot Palestinian ‘hatred’ of Jews into the eternalist understanding of antisemitism—-their total opposition to Zionism and a Jewish state was simply a form of delegitimization…denial of the right of the ‘collective Jew’ to self-determination and national self-_expression_ —-just as the individual Jew was demonized and persecuted throughout Jewish history.”
Not Judaism But Idolatry
The “new antisemitism” definition, Lerman believes, represents not any sort of Judaism but, instead, a form of idolatry, replacing God with the State of Israel as a virtual object of worship. He writes: “The central tenet of ‘new antisemitism,’ that Israel is the ‘collective Jew among the nations,’ is a myth. A state cannot possibly have the attributes of a living person. Moreover, there are no grounds in Judaism for deifying the state. It is a form of idolatry. And by reducing Jews to a singularity, it validates the antisemitic construct of ‘the Jew.’ Zionism is a political movement that was originally in conflict with religious Judaism.”
Lerman shows that the redefinition of antisemitism flies the face of traditional Jewish thinking. He points to Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the distinguished theologian who marched for civil rights with the Rev. Martin Luther King,Jr., in Selma, Alabama in 1965, who warned against worshipping the two fundamentals of Zionism. Heschel declared: “Judaism is not a religion of space and does not worship the soil. So, too, the state of Israel is not the climax of Jewish history.”
The European Union Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) in 2005 produced a working definition of antisemitism which largely consisted of deeming as antisemitism a whole range of critical speech about Israel and Zionism. At the same time, Lerman points out, “The Israeli government…was allocating increasing resources to combat what they defined as antisemitism but was in fact political action and speech opposing Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians . Hundreds of millions of shekels were being devoted to fighting BDS campaigns, supporting attempts to introduce laws outlawing boycott actions and apartheid weeks on campuses, as well as strengthening Jewish support and lobbying for Israel in communities worldwide…”
Attacking Jews Who Oppose Zionism
Attacking Jews who oppose Zionism has become a key feature of the campaign against the “new antisemitism.” An example Lerman points to is a history of antisemitism written by the prominent British Jewish lawyer Anthony Julius. Entitled “Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Antisemitism in England,” in which Julius devoted over a quarter of his history since the medieval period to contemporary anti-Zionism, dedicating more pages to his critique of Jewish opposition to Zionism than to either the Muslim or Christian variants. Julius describes these Jews as “fellow travelers of antisemitism.”
It saddens Lerman that the “new antisemitism” is “predicated on the notion that the state can do no wrong.” But, he points out, “…the deification of the Jewish state is a heresy, tantamount to idolatry. This does not seem to disturb religious Jews who increasingly see the state doing God’s work by ‘repossessing’ the ‘land of Israel,’ working to formally annex the West Bank, denying equal rights to Palestinians and making them strangers in their own land in order to secure a Jewish majority in perpetuity and hasten the coming of the Messiah.”
For Lerman, “…this fetishization of the state” is “a corruption of Judaism.” He points out that antisemitism, in reality, nurtured and empowered Zionism: “It was mobilized for the sake of the Zionist project. Herzl wrote in his diary: ‘The antisemites will become our most loyal friends, the antisemitic nations will become our allies.’…The affinity in the outlook of antsemites and Zionists is undoubtedly disturbing , and the fact that it is not just historical but has contemporary relevance through the antisemitic resonances of the myth of ‘Israel as the collective Jew among the nations’ does not bode well for the future. This is a stark conclusion. Challenging the promotion of the concept of ‘new antisemitism’ and revealing the bankruptcy of the myth of Israel being the ‘collective Jew among the nations’ is an uphill struggle…But things never stay the same and resistance is not just an option but is a necessity. This book is intended as a contribution to that resistance and to encourage others to do the same.”
Affinity Between Israel and Illiberal States
At the present time there seems to be a growing affinity between Israel and a number of European states which seem to be moving in an increasingly illiberal direction, includingPoland, Hungary and Turkey, as well as Israel’s improved relations with such non-democracies as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Lerman writes: “As politics in many countries took a turn towards illiberal populism, some governments, in Europe particularly, but not only, were openly encouraging the spread of classic antisemitic propaganda. This did not prevent the Israeli government from developing close relations with these governments and turning a blind eye to their tolerance of antisemitism on the grounds of close affinity as regards illiberal domestic policies, opposition to migration (except from their ethno-national diaspora communities), Islamophobic, denigration of human rights organizations and general authoritarian governance. And particularly because these governments never offered more than token criticism of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and barely raised any objection to the creeping annexation of Palestinian land in the occupied Palestinian territories. The Palestinian issue was parked in the lot marked ‘Two state solution at some unspecified date in the future.’”
Since Antony Lerman completed his book, there has been increasing discussion of the so-called “new antisemitism.” In a widely discussed article in The New York Times (Aug. 26, 2022), Peter Beinart, an editor of Jewish Currents and professor of journalism and political science at the City University of New York, headlined his piece, “Has Antisemitism Lost Its Way?”
He writes: “Over the past 18 months, America’s most prominent Jewish organizations have done something extraordinary. They have accused the world’s leading human rights organizations of promoting hatred of Jews. Last April, after Human Rights Watch issued a report accusing Israel of ‘the crimes of apartheid and persecution,’ the American Jewish Committee (AJC) claimed the report’s arguments ‘sometimes border on antisemitism.’ In January, after Amnesty International issued its own study alleging that Israel practiced apartheid and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) predicted that it will ‘likely lead to intensified antisemitism.’ The AJC and ADL also published a statement with four other well-known American Jewish groups that didn’t just accuse the report of being biased and inaccurate, but also claimed that Amnesty’s report ‘fuels those antisemites around the world who seek to undermine the only Jewish country on earth.’”
Those Who Defend Oppressive Regimes
Beinart points out that those who defend repressive regimes often try to discredit human rights organizations. A month before the AJC accused Human Rights Watch of flirting with antisemitism, the Chinese Communist Party newspaper, Global Times, accused it of being “anti-China.” In 2019, a spokesman for Iran accused Amnesty International of being “biased” against that country. In the past, American Jewish groups argued that opposing antisemitism and the struggle for universal human rights were intertwined. When the ADL was founded in 1913 it declared that its “ultimate purpose is to secure justice and fair treatment for all citizens.”
In the past, Beinart notes, the AJC repeatedly criticized Israel for discriminating against its Palestinian citizens. In 1960, the head of its Israel committee said that it hoped to eliminate “anti-democratic practices and attitudes” in Israel so that the group could be more credible in advocating “principles of human rights and practices in our country and abroad.” This began to change after the 1967 war and Israel’s conquest of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with a population of over a million stateless Palestinians.
The result, Beinart writes, “…was an ideological transformation. In 1974, two ADL leaders wrote a book arguing that Jews were increasingly menaced by a ‘new antisemitism,’ directed not against individual Jews but against the Jewish state. Almost a half-century later, that premise now dominates mainstream organized American Jewish life. Largely as a result of lobbying by Jewish organizations, the American government has embraced the proposition too.”
The Fight Against Antisemitism Has Lost Its Way
The fight against antisemitism has lost its way, in Beinart’s view. He concludes: “In a terrible irony, the campaign against ‘antisemitism’ as waged by influential Jewish groups and the U.S. Government has become a threat to freedom. It is wielded as a weapon against the world’s most respected human rights organizations and as a shield for some of the world’s most repressive regimes. We need a different struggle against antisemitism. It should pursue Jewish equality, not Jewish supremacy, and embed the cause of Jewish rights in a movement for the rights of all. In its effort to defend the indefensible in Israel, the American Jewish establishment has abandoned these principles. It’s time to affirm them again.”
The effort to redefine antisemitism has a long history. In 1974, Benjamin Epstein , the national director of the ADL co-authored “The New Antisemitism,” a book whose argument was repeated in 1982 by his successor at ADL, Nathan Perlmutter, in a book entitled “The Real Antisemitism in America.” After World War ll, Epstein argued, guilt over the Holocaust kept antisemitism at bay. But as memories of the Holocaust faded, antisemitism had returned—-this time in the form of hostility to Israel. The reason: Israel represented Jewish power. “Jews are tolerable, acceptable in their particularity , only as victims,” wrote Epstein and his ADL colleague Arnold Forster, “and when their situation changes so that they are no longer victims, or appear not to be, the non-Jewish world finds this so hard to take that the effort is begun to render them victims anew.”
Nathan Perlmutter embarked upon a campaign to redefine antisemitism. He declared: “The search for peace in the Middle East is littered with minefields for Jewish interests…Jewish concerns are confronted by the Semitically neutral postures of those who believe that if only Israel would yield this or that, the Middle East would become tranquil and the West’s highway to its strategic interests and profits in the Persian Gulf would be secure. But at what cost to Israel’s security? Israel’s security, plainly said, means more to Jews today than their standing in the opinion polls.”
Substituting “Jewish interests” For “Israeli Interests”
Perlmutter substituted the term “Jewish interests” for what were, in reality, “Israeli interests.” By changing the terms of the debate, he helped create a situation in which anyone who is critical of Israel becomes, ipso facto, “anti-Semitic.”
The tactic of using the term “antisemitism” as a weapon against dissenters from Israeli policies is not new. Dorothy Thompson, the distinguished American journalist recently highlighted in the Ken Burns documentary about the U.S. and the Holocaust, is an example. Thompson interviewed Hitler, became the first American journalist expelled from Nazi Germany, and became one of the earliest enemies of Nazism. Later, she was critical of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians, and became an associate of Rabbi Elmer Berger of the American Council for Judaism. Despite her valiant crusade against Hitler, she, too, was subject to the charge of antisemitism.
In a letter to the Jewish Newsletter (April 6, 1951) she wrote: “Really, I think continued emphasis should be put upon the extreme damage to the Jewish community of branding people like myself as antisemitic…The State of Israel has got to learn to live in the same atmosphere of free criticism which every other state in the world must endure…There are many subjects on which writers in this country are, because of these pressures, becoming craven and mealy-mouthed. But people don’t like to be craven and mealy-mouthed. every time one yields to such pressure, one is filled with self-contempt and this self-contempt works itself out in resentment of those who caused it.”
Attack On John Kerry
A list of those who have been falsely accused of antisemitism because of their criticism of Israel would be a long one. In 2014, Jerusalem Post columnist Caroline Glick declared that Secretary of State John Kerry is “antisemitic.” According to Glick, “Kerry is obsessed with Israel’s economic success…The antisemitic undertones of Kerry’s constant chatter about Jews and money are obvious.” At the same time, Moti Yogev, a Knesset member in the governing coalition, said that Kerry’s efforts at achieving a peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians had “an undertone of antisemitism.”
Writing in the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot, Cameron Kerry, brother of the then-Secretary of State and formerly general counsel to the U.S. Department of Commerce, declared that charges of “antisemitism” against his brother “would be ridiculous if they were not so vile.” Cameron Kerry, a convert to Judaism, recalled relatives who died in the Holocaust. The Kerry paternal grandparents were Jewish.
Professor David Feldman, director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism at London University, began a lecture on “The Meaning of Antisemitism” saying: “The starting point…is our present confusion over what antisemitism is…When it comes to antisemitism many of us literally don’t know what we’re talking about…And as for the rest of us, who think we do know what antisemitism is, we are congenitally unable to agree among ourselves.”
30 Year Process of Redefining Antisemitism
In his thoughtful and thoroughly documented book, Antony Lerman examines a 30-year process of redefining the meaning of the term antisemitism and redefining the phenomenon by casting Israel as the persecuted “collective Jew” and the main victim of antisemitism. The redefinition of antisemitism by the IHRA has empowered a diverse international network, including the Israeli government, Israel advocacy groups, Zionist organizations, Jewish communal and defense bodies, governments and university administrations in fighting a war that principally targets those who are critical of Israel.
Professor Neve Gordon, the respected Israeli historian, says that, “This is the best book I have read on why anti-Zionism has been equated with antisemitism and how the ‘new antisemitism’ has been mobilized for political gain in a variety of arenas.” Rebecca Vilkomerson, former executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace, says that, “We desperately need this book…An essential tool to understand the weaponization of antisemitism and its dangerous impact on free speech, Palestinian rights, and the very real threat of actual antisemitism.”
The consequences of this redefinition of antisemitism, Lerman argues persuasively, are alarming. They include suppressing free speech on Israel/Palestine , legitimizing Islamophobic forces, and making Jews more, not less, vulnerable. Hopefully, this book will help lead to a widespread examination of the real nature of antisemitism and a careful consideration of what it is and what it is not.