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Search ‘antisemitism’ in this week’s news and you’ll find yourself in a matrix of allegations and counter-allegations that signal something everywhere and nowhere at all: from a Manchester manhunt following a violent attack, to false accusations against a respected academic.
Antisemitism shouldn’t be a contested issue. It’s racist hate and it’s on the rise, logged at varying steepness by police, Jewish charities and anti-hate groups.
Absolutely, antisemitism infects the Islamist militia now parading Israeli hostages, darkening the pained ideology of rejecting decades of oppression. But theirs is not the psychology characterising the antisemites at large in our mostly secular society.
The key cause of rising antisemitism in the West today is its political weaponisation by powerful racist parties, whose ascendence ultimately normalises the hate they claim to combat. On the one hand, the far right; on the other, Banjamin Netanyahu’s tinge of extremist Zionism.
“When antisemitism is weaponised, the idea of antisemitism loses its meaning,” said Andrew Feinstein on today’s episode of Media Storm. “There’s no need to try and make complex what is a very simple concept: antisemitism is a hatred of Jews as Jews.”
Feinstein — a second-generation Holocaust survivor who fought Apartheid alongside Mandela, tabled South Africa’s first motion on the Holocaust, and lectured at Auschwitz on genocide prevention — is no stranger to antisemitism.
Not a week goes by where someone doesn’t either call me a self-hating antisemitic Jew or describe my mother, because she survived the Holocaust hidden in a coal cellar for three years, as a ‘Kapo’, which is a Nazi collaborator
Andrew Feinstein, second-generation Holocaust survivor
Among his attackers are not just those who damn his Jewishness, but rabbis who condemn his criticisms of Israel.
There is no stronger evidence of the corruption of the term ‘antisemitism’ today, than the fact it forms the rhetorical glue in a strategic alliance between Netanyahu’s government and such deeply antisemitic far-right parties as Modi’s, Orban’s, Meloni’s, the AfD, and the Proud Boys–backed Trump.
The ideological factor that unites Netanyahu and historical fascists is not caring for Jewish lives, but using genocidal means to pursue their respective goals.
In other words, they are united by the shared need for a noble flag behind which to hide ignoble acts. But antisemitism is no one’s flag. Using it as such is an incredibly dangerous thing to do, as the current spike in antisemitic hate crimes testifies.
“Anti Zionism and antisemitism: they are one,” insists Netanyahu, the Israeli ruler to have singularly presided over the most Palestinian deaths and displacements in history. “This is the first and most essential point.”
Therein lies the problem—Alex Kane, senior reporter at Jewish Currents, explained on Media Storm. “It is often the case that when Israeli military operations occur, incidents of antisemitism spike, because people, in doing so, are conflating Zionism with Judaism.” Antizionist and antisemitic incidents are logged as one, just as antizionist criticisms are directed prejudicially against innocent Jewish individuals.
Perhaps the most confusing part is that Anti-Zionism originated as a Jewish political movement, developed by intellectuals around the same time as Zionism to reject its logic that the creation of a Jewish state is the only way to protect Jewish people.
The Anti-Zionist Jewish movement feared, by contrast, this could undermine Jewish people’s safety by making them more of a target.
Anti-Zionist views are held not just by millions of Jewish people worldwide, but thousands within Israel, who reject the idea of a Jewish state on the basis it would be inherently undemocratic and apartheid, in disenfranchising the millions of Palestinians and non-Jews with whom they share borders.
“Conflating Anti-Zionism with antisemitism is therefore not just an absurdity,” said Andrew Feinstein, “but very, very dangerous for Jewish people.”
Much of our media has facilitated this false equivalence. From