How a distorted reality leads to a tragic phobia

An anti-war protest march through the streets of Sydney CBD. Picture: Jeremy Piper

In the year since Jews faced the most murderous assault since the Holocaust, the opponents of Israel have denied charges of racism by insisting: “I am not anti-Semitic; I am anti-Zionist. I don’t hate Jews; I hate their state.”

Historian Deborah Lipstadt, President Joe Biden’s anti-Semitism tsar, has mocked this distinction as the difference between contracting dysentery in Kyiv and cholera in Odesa. Either way, Jews are threatened.

To be opposed to the world’s only Jewish state while being mostly sanguine about Muslim regimes with much worse human rights records at least flirts with anti-Semitism – a prejudice bizarrely given latitude in Western cultures consumed with anti-racism. Indeed, hating Israelis as settler colonialists is no longer just an acceptable prejudice but, in too many elite circles, a positive moral virtue. It puts its holder on the right side of history.

Why is the only liberal democracy in the Middle East so hated by people living in other liberal democracies? We can see how the existence of Israel offends its Muslim-Arab neighbours. In its 76-year existence, the world’s only Jewish state has outperformed all of them. Sitting atop zero crude oil, Israel had produced one of the wealthiest, healthiest, freest and happiest nations in world history. A grim axis of failed states is currently launching missiles into it.

Israel is the exclusive home of LGBT rights in the Middle East; the right to love who you love is guaranteed by Israeli law. No Arab regime comes close. Shia Iran even denies the existence of gay men and women, so can’t be homophobic towards them. Israel, conversely, runs amnesty programs for Muslims fleeing homophobia. Yet Queers for Palestine really is a thing. Its advocates have played small but loud roles in the tentifada on university campuses this year.

If charges of anti-Semitism have done little to arrest its legitimacy and the cognitive dissonance it obliges, how about a different label? How about Israelophobia? It has the virtue of joining the other phobias (such as Islamophobia and homophobia) that the modern left claims as deadly sins of Western society. We kind of instinctively get what the word means.

There was even a 2023 book – Israelophobia: The Newest Version of the Oldest Hatred and What to Do About It – by Jake Wallis Simons.

“Israelophobia,” he says, “is a form of anti-Semitism that fixates on the Jewish state, rather than the Jewish race or religion.”

An anti-war protest march through the streets of Sydney CBD. Picture: Jeremy Piper

Simons outlines its three characteristics: demonisation of Israel as a threat; weaponisation of a social justice movement as a Trojan horse for the hatred of Jews and their national home; and the falsification of Israeli behaviour as exclusively malign.

Let me suggest five corollary steps for the budding Israelophobe. They need not be sequential, and the disposition can prosper by taking only one.

First, Israeli history and politics must be distorted so that seven million Israeli Jews (about half those in the world today) are responsible for what ails 1.9 billion Muslims. When the ummah is depleted by the depredation of Muslim regimes (as in Syria, Afghanistan, Iran …) the fault will be found in some Israeli conspiracy.

Second, use the university campus as a frontline to organise and legitimatise hatred of Israel. When Israeli universities seek research collaborations on medicine and computing with their Australian or American peers, claim this will advance the state’s military-industrial complex. Encourage students with no skin in the game to adopt luxury beliefs and performative outrage to make the work of Israeli academics harder.

Third, find in the US the vocabulary of critical race theory. Use it. Make pro-Israeli sentiment subject to no-platforming and cancellation. View everything Israel does through the warped lens of identity politics. Make Tel Aviv the perennial oppressor and the brave rapists of Hamas the oppressed. Recruit a few progressive Jews as alibis for this trendy Israelophobia.

Fourth, for Australians especially, wrap the history of Israel-Palestine into Indigenous struggle and reconciliation. Insist that Palestinian victimhood is as morally pristine as that of the First Nations. Join their disparate struggles into an omni-cause against Western colonialism. Brand dissenters as racists.

Finally, the Israelophobe must abhor every attempt by Israel to protect its population, Jews and Arabs alike. When Hezbollah fires Qassam rockets into Jewish neighbourhoods, call this justified and exhilarating resistance. When Iran follows suit, make clear how this brave nation is acting to correct the sins of the West.

Most unforgivable, of course, is Israel’s success as a liberal democratic project. This is to be dismissed as the exclusive legacy of dispossession and theft. At every turn, the genius of Israel, its restraint in the face of existential challenge, its ability to prosper in a region dedicated to its destruction, must be denied.

Do all this, and you can be an Israelophobe, my son.

Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.