“In the Middle Ages, they said, we don’t hate the Jews, we just hate their religion. In the 19th and 20th centuries, they said, we don’t hate the Jews, we just hate their race. Today, they say, we don’t hate the Jews, we just hate their nation-state. It’s the same antisemitism dressed up in a different gown.” Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, the late former Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom
Clearly, not all criticism of Israel is antisemitic. As the late American sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset explained, no democratic state should consider itself immune to rebuke. “Israel is a liberal democratic state,” he said, recalling that, “in ancient Israel, the Biblical prophets devised the art of self-criticism.”
A useful key in determining whether the criticism in question is legitimate or just antisemitism disguised as such was offered by journalist Edward Rothstein, who suggested examining the “standards of justice.” When they are “applied in profoundly distorted fashion, when those distortions put the literal survival of a society at stake, and when murders are taking place and explicitly encouraged declarations are being made that may even fit university standards for ‘hate speech,’ it is safe to say the rhetoric is no longer honest criticism, but, rather, antisemitism,” he said.
Recognizing What It Is
Like pornography, antisemitism is recognized as such by those who know what it looks like.
The late-Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. did not hesitate to label anti-Zionist remarks as antisemitic. On one occasion when speaking to African-American students at Harvard, he heard an anti-Zionist remark from one of them. According to reports of the incident, Dr. King “snapped at him” and said, “Don’t talk like that! When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking about antisemitism.”
The late leftist literary scholar Hans Meyer understood this as well, writing that “whoever attacks Zionism, but by no means wishes to say anything against the Jews, is fooling himself and others.” “The State of Israel is a Jewish state. Whoever wants to destroy it, openly or through politics that can affect nothing else but such destruction, is practicing the Jew-hatred of yesterday and time immemorial,” he said.
Ironic Antisemitism
Josef Joffe, former editor of the German weekly Die Zeit and a former visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, saw the irony in the fact that many fine people see it as beneath their dignity “in decorous western society” to acknowledge they hate Jews, yet see nothing wrong with the open avowal of hatred “with impunity” of an Israeli prime minister or any other Israeli leader.
“Lashing out at an Israeli leader does not risk the raised eyebrows that demonizing his people, let alone Jews as such, would do in a post-racist age. The irony in such a statement is the current worldwide imperative to deem everything in racial jargon, meaning that we are clearly not in a ‘post-racist age.’ Israel is constantly the focus of outrage in the media, while other countries who repress their minority populations or engage in widespread human rights violations are rarely condemned or become front-page news,” he said.
Joffe saw this clearly when haters of Israel engage in the “fleeting” denunciation of Palestinian-Arab terrorism, which they then justify by condemning Israel’s alleged “occupation” and tyranny.
Calling this an “obsessive need for moral denigration,” Joffe said it indicates that, for people who engage in this rhetoric, “Israel has assumed a special place in contemporary demonology,” one in which facts do not determine judgment, but, rather, are selected based on prejudices.
Hatred “Only” Towards the Jewish State
Often anti-Zionists argue that they harbor no ill will towards Jews, but “only” against the Jewish state. New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman, a well-known harsh critic of Israel, termed the effort to equate criticizing Israel with antisemitism “vile.”
However, he said, “singling out Israel for opprobrium and international sanction—out of all proportion to any other party in the Middle East—is antisemitic, and not saying so is dishonest.”
Per Ahlmark, the late deputy prime minister of Sweden and a renowned writer, compared this approach to an individual who says he is “only” against the existence of Great Britain but is not anti-British, or really loves the Swedes but believes Sweden should be eliminated. Anyone who would make such remarks would not be believed, said Ahlmark, because “you cannot love or respect a people and hate their state.” The logic in Ahlmark’s explanation is lost on those who imagine they can separate the two feelings when it comes to Israel.
“I Support the Right of Britain to Exist?”
Even some seemingly banal statements of support for Israel may betray more sinister undercurrents. Daniel Taub, a former Israeli ambassador to Great Britain, admitted he frequently heard people say, “I’m a friend of Israel and I support its right to exist.”
It made the ambassador wonder: “Can you imagine anyone saying that in relation to any other country? I support Australia’s right to exist, or Guatemala’s right to exist—as though that somehow makes me a friend of Guatemala. In relation to what other country does a discussion or policy descend into a question mark over the very existence of that state?”
Former Canadian Minister of Justice and Chair of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, Law Professor Irwin Cotler has frequently spoken about the enduring threats to Israel. He said he finds “the silence, the indifference, and sometimes even the indulgence” the most disturbing in the face of such genocidal antisemitism.
Fooling No One
The only glimmer of light is that those who are crossing the line from criticizing Israel into blatant antisemitism are increasingly no longer allowed to do so with equanimity.
In an address to Parliament shortly before he died, the late former Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, pointed out that antisemites rarely admit to hating Jews. On the contrary, he said, throughout history, many antisemites insisted they liked or even loved Jews.
“In the Middle Ages, they said, we don’t hate the Jews, we just hate their religion. In the 19th and 20th centuries, they said, we don’t hate the Jews, we just hate their race. Today, they say, we don’t hate the Jews, we just hate their nation-state. It’s the same antisemitism dressed up in a different gown,” he said.
And this time, they are fooling no one.
*Dr. Alex Grobman is the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society, a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and on the advisory board of the National Christian Leadership Conference of Israel (NCLCI). He has an MA and PhD in contemporary Jewish history from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
** Israel National News first published this article on February 20, 2023.