How identity politics has fuelled hate towards Jews and Israel
When influencers talk about how ‘Zionists’ preserve ‘white supremacy and imperial power’, it frames a complex conflict into a battle between good and evil – with the Jewish state cast as the devil.
When identitarian social media influencers talk about how “Zionists” (Israel’s supporters) attempt to preserve “white supremacy and imperial power”, it’s framing that turns a complex conflict in the Middle East into a straightforward battle between good and evil – with the Jewish state cast as the devil.
Nevertheless their language is helpful in pointing to the role of identity politics, which is fuelling anti-Semitism today. This is a view that links Jews to the notion of white privilege and simultaneously casts Israel as a colonial power. It’s an outlook that often casts Jews as “hyper-white”, the supreme exponents of white privilege.
Identity politics is based on two core assumptions. First, that the key divisions in society are between identity groups rather than between social classes. Second, that there is a hierarchy of oppression. In this view white people in particular are deemed as oppressors of people of colour and other “oppressed minorities”.
THE NEW FACE OF HATE: HOW ANTI-ZIONISM BECAME ALL THE RAGE
Yahya Sinwar, the late leader of Hamas in the Gaza strip, played to this western activist tendency in an interview three years ago when he directly compared the killing of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis to what he called Israel’s racist ideology.
In fact, Jews are fitted into this oppressor/oppressed framework by various intellectual contortions. The main one is the peculiar view that Jews somehow “became white” after the Second World War. This allows the identitarians to concede that Jews were the victims of the discrimination up to 1945 while maintaining that they are privileged today.
This view of Jews was spelt out comprehensively in a 1998 book by social anthropologist and anti-Israel campaigner Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folk. Her claim was that Jews have used their economic success and connections with the state to take on a privileged role.
More recently, Rachel Shabi, a British writer and leftist activist, in her book Off White, posited the view that in the aftermath of the Second World War, “Jews in the West were by and large absorbed into whiteness and its corresponding power structures” and, furthermore, European powers backed Israel as a way of furthering their colonial domination over indigenous people. Israel’s history is presented as a one-dimensional story in which it has become a prime agent of white supremacy. Complexities, such as the fact that most Jews who ended up in Israel fled persecution, are either played down or ignored.
The debate about settler-colonialism resonates in Australia given its history. Max Kaiser, executive officer of the Jewish Council of Australia, a marginal Jewish group which defines itself as a non-Zionist organisation and is used to provide “balance” and the so-called Jewish perspective by organisations such as the ABC and the Guardian, gave this take in an interview with Jacobin, an American left-wing magazine. “The issue that led us up to today is settler colonialism. The aim of Zionism – as with other versions of settler colonialism in countries like Australia – is to replace the indigenous people on their land with settlers,” Kaiser said. “A lot of early Zionist ideologues were very open about this fact: the point was to conquer the land.”
Of course it is possible to cherrypick quotes from the vast literature on Zionism to portray it crudely as a land-grab. But such a view overlooks many other factors. These include the forces driving Jews to flee the diaspora, the Arab regimes’ virulent hostility to Israel and the often conflicted positions of the western powers.
For some campaigners and celebrities, demonising “evil” Israel has become an ideal way of proclaiming all kinds of virtue. Greta Thunberg, known worldwide as an environmental activist, appeared at an anti-Israel rally in Milan around the time of the first anniversary of October 7 attacks where she proclaimed: “If you, as a climate activist, don’t also fight for a free Palestine and an end to colonialism and oppression all over the world, then you should not be able to call yourself a climate activist.” Naturally she wore a keffiyeh, an Arab headscarf, as an ostentatious symbol of her virtue.
The same mentality has gripped students on University campuses around the world – as shown in the recent documentary October 8, which focused on the targeting of Jewish students at US academic institutions since October 7, 2023.
A-List stars of stage and screen, aligning with the Palestinian cause, have fed an anti-Israel social media blitz that periodically spills over into real life. At Cannes, jury members came under pressure to condem Israel at this year’s film festival. Singers such as Dua Lipa and models like Bella Hadid (who is part Palestinian) have pushed the anti-Israel narrative – and their social posts are recirulated by Australian Instagrammers and podcasters with mainstream media ambitions.
Of course, everyone is entitled to their views but taking sides on a straightforward narrative of good and evil provides a perfect way of proclaiming “virtue”, within the oppression hierarchy framework.
A petition in Australia that claimed the support of 6,000 artists, producers and others called for the liberation of the Palestinians from “colonialism, apartheid & ethnic cleansing”. It ended with the slogan “from the river to the sea”: a demand that Israel should be abolished. It is hard to think of any other issue where activists call for the destruction of a nation they criticise. By casting the Jewish state as the epitome of evil, this kind of woke anti-Semitism perpetuates the hatred of Jews in a 21st-century form. From such an Orwellian perspective it becomes possible to cast physical attacks not just upon Israel, but upon Jewish schools, synagogues and people, as heroic blows for Palestinian freedom.
Holocaust Inversion: the ultimate anti-Israel slander
Often the allegation is depicted on protest placards as a Jewish Star of David integrated into the Nazi swastika. In public debates it is accusations that Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza. In all cases, the message is this: Israel is doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to the Jews.This is perhaps the ultimate anti-Israel slander – Holocaust inversion. Portraying Jews as perpetrators of a Holocaust rather than its victims.
There are many reasons why this charge is obscene. It was Hamas – an organisation whose 1988 covenant openly commits itself to slaughtering Jews – which led the pogrom against Israel on October 7, 2023, causing the biggest murder of Jews in a single day since the Holocaust. Yet it is Israel, rather than Hamas or any of its sister organisations, which is being accused of genocide.
Nor do Israel’s actions in Gaza conform to the definition of genocide in the UN’s 1951 convention on the subject which refers to “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. Even if the highly dubious but ubiquitously quoted official Hamas casualty figures in Gaza are accepted, Israel has come nowhere near matching this definition. This is on the basis of the proportion of the loss of life to the overall population, and the high number of Hamas fighters included in the tally (as opposed to civilians).
Hamas is literally hiding under Gaza’s civilian population. Rather than promoting economic development, the Hamas government spent years preparing a battlefield beneath schools, hospitals and refugee camps, for its intended conflict with Israel following the October 7 attacks.
When carefully examined, Israeli military campaigns such as the highly targeted mission to wipe out the tyrannical Hamas leader Muhummad Sinwar contradicts claims of indiscriminate bombing – another war crime accusation against which Israel is forced to defend itself.
The Gaza conflict is a war between the Jewish state and an Islamist movement bent on its destruction. Israel has stated that its strategy is to eliminate the organisation that terrorises Israel and the Palestinian people (Hamas carried out violent reprisals against Gazans after a recent wave of protests). And yet many Israelis fiercely disagree with the war given the ghastly loss of life on both sides – another point lost on those who claim Zionists are the new Nazis.
Daniel Ben-Ami is editor of the website Radicalism of Fools: Rethinking anti-Semitism
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