Blaming the Jews. Bernard Harrison

INTRODUCTION

Left-wing anti-racists should think more about the fact that anti-Semitism is both a form of racism and a prejudice with its own specific characteristics.

      —Dave Rich, The Left’s Jewish Problem

      I

      In recent years, Western countries have seen a sharp increase in both the incidence of antisemitic material on the web, social media, and elsewhere, and in actual attacks on Jews. In 2015, according to the Guardian newspaper, antisemitic incidents doubled over the previous year, reaching the highest level ever recorded in Britain. One of the incidents reported by the paper concerns a leaflet found among Israeli produce in a supermarket. It showed an image of the Israeli flag with the caption “The flag of Zionist racist scum,” and it read, “Deny the Holocaust? Of course there was a holocaust. What a pity Adolf and Co didn’t manage to finish the job properly!” Another involved an “identifiably Jewish man, cycling to synagogue, knocked off his bicycle, and when on the ground kicked, by a group of youths.”¹

      Also in Britain, 2016 saw a series of accusations of antisemitism in the Labour Party. This began with a highly publicized row among members of the Oxford University Labour Club, with allegations of a “poisonous” atmosphere, including constant reference to Jewish students as “Zionists” or “Zios.” In the words of the Independent newspaper, the club

      became embroiled in an anti-Semitism row following the resignation of one of its chairs after the club decided to endorse Israel Apartheid Week in February.

      Co-chair Alex Chalmers, a student at Oxford’s Oriel College, issued a strongly-worded statement on his Facebook page at the time in which he said he was stepping down from his position because a large proportion of both OULC and the student left in Oxford “have some kind of problem with Jews.”

      Despite highlighting the benefits he received during his time with the OULC over the past two terms, Mr Chalmers said the club was becoming “increasingly riven by factional splits.” He added: “Despite its avowed commitment to liberation, the attitudes of certain members of the club towards certain disadvantaged groups was becoming poisonous.”²

      In due course, as a result of the dependence of modern political life on social media, which lend extraordinary volume and publicity to the kind of remark formerly confined to sympathetic ears in smoke-filled rooms, the row spread to the Labour Party itself. By the middle of 2016, “up to twenty Labour members, including one MP [Member of Parliament] had been suspended or expelled due to alleged anti-Semitism and the party had conducted three different enquiries into anti-Semitism within its ranks.”³

      In the United States, concerns about campus antisemitism echoing those voiced at Oxford have been heard for a number of years in connection with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, aimed at “delegitimizing” Israel, that unites left-wing faculty with left and pro-Palestinian student groups. “In the U.S. more than 1,000 scholars on more than 300 college and university campuses across the country have endorsed an academic boycott of Israel.”⁴ In faculty members’ hands, the debate remains largely academic. But in the hands of students, the debate often becomes angry, violent, and threatening to Jews, as we shall see at more length in chapter 14.

      Professors who use their university positions and university resources to promote campaigns to harm or dismantle the Jewish state and who encourage students to do the same, can contribute to the creation of a hostile and threatening environment for many Jewish students, who report feeling emotionally harassed and intimidated by their professors and isolated from their fellow students. Moreover, in light of the fact that no other racial, ethnic or religious group is currently being subjected by faculty to such pervasive harassment and intimidation, Jewish students experience this flagrant double standard as a kind of institutional discrimination that is antisemitic in effect if not in intent.⁵

      Worse has occurred in France. The most newsworthy event of this kind in 2015 took place in early January when, coincidentally with the Charlie Hebdo massacres, an Islamist terrorist killed four shoppers—Yoav Hattab, Yohan Cohen, Philippe Braham, and François-Michel Saada—at a kosher supermarket in Paris. But that event, even then, formed part of a general pattern. According to the watchdog Service de Protection de la Communauté Juive (SPCJ), as reported in the International Business Times, 508 antisemitic incidents took place between January and May of that year. Almost a quarter of these were violent; the bulk of the rest took the form of death threats.

      The same article reports the Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France (CRIF) as having issued a statement to the effect that the SPCJ findings represent a small fraction of actual attacks in France, which, according to it, have reached “appalling levels.”⁶

      The rise of attacks on Jews to these levels, moreover, has occurred very recently and very rapidly. “In France, for example, there had only been one recorded incident of anti-Semitic violence in 1998, but there were nine in 1999 accelerating to 116 in 2000 and 725 in 2002 (when 80% of all racist violence in France was directed against Jews).”⁷

      Unsurprisingly, emigration has reached correspondingly high levels among France’s five hundred thousand Jews, many of whom are already refugees from persecution in the Near East. The number of French Jews emigrating to Israel between January and August 2015 was 5,100—25 percent more than the number (4,000) doing so in the same period in 2014.⁸

      In Germany also, antisemitism has been growing again. In late 2019 Cardinal Reinhard Marx, archbishop of Munich and Freising, pledging that “Jews and Christians will never separate again,” warned against the renewed rise of anti-Jewish feeling. “He stressed that he was ‘very worried’ about the direction society is heading because there are ‘more and more blogs and ideologies from people that cannot be taught, who indulge in conspiracy theories and soon unite as a sounding board for … slogans of antisemitism.’ Marx went on to explain that the religious component of antisemitism is also playing a role in its rise.”⁹

      The Jew hatred of the 1930s, apparently, is up and running again. It appears that Europe and—to an admittedly lesser degree—the United States, are once again frightening places, and at times dangerous ones, in which to be a Jew.

      II

      These developments have made it fashionable since the turn of the century to talk and write of a “new antisemitism.” Four things are “new” about it. First, it is not coming exclusively from the far-right websites and political groups across the Western world that continue to promote, and to glory in, antisemitism of highly traditional kinds. In addition, it now comes from groups on the political left and liberal left. Second, it is almost wholly motivated by hostility to the State of Israel. Third, those accused of it, unlike traditional antisemites of the political right, are generally extremely concerned to deny the justice of the accusation. They wish it to be understood that they are not hostile to Jews as such but merely to Zionism, and to Jews merely to the extent that the latter are Zionists—or in the terminology of Labour’s young ladies and gentlemen at Oxford, “Zios”—Jewish supporters, that is to say, of the right of the State of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. For the most part, they also argue that the accusation itself is politically disingenuous: a mere diversionary tactic designed to silence criticism of the evils perpetrated by Israel in the context of its long war with the Palestinians.