"Antisemitism is always a means rather than an end; it is a measure of the contradictions yet to be resolved. It is a mirror for the failings of individuals, social structures, and State systems. Tell me what you accuse Jews of—I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of." - Vasily Grossman
Vasily Grossman was a Soviet Jewish writer and journalist. He was the first correspondent to report on the Nazi death camps in any language.
Grossman wrote Life and Fate, his masterpiece, in 1959. It was considered such a threat to the Soviet regime that Grossman was told there was no chance it would be published for another 200 years.
ANTISEMITISM IS A MIRROR
Antisemitism is an ancient bigotry, of course, but even more than just a bigotry, antisemitism is a conspiratorial worldview that pins whatever problems exist in any given society on the Jewish people.
For this reason, antisemites will often project whatever they most dislike — about themselves, about others —onto the Jewish people or whatever they perceive to be the Jewish “collective.” Today, that perceived Jewish collectivity is generally the State of Israel.
SOME HISTORICAL EXAMPLES
- At the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union launched a covert intelligence subversion operation titled “Sionistskiye Gosudarstva,” or Zionist Governments, which disseminated propaganda to Arab and African nations that pejoratively equated Zionism with imperialism. Ironically, the Soviet Union itself was a massive empire, suppressing ethnic and national minorities with an iron fist. In fact, some historians have compared the Russian conquest of Siberia to the colonization of the United States.
"We had only to keep repeating our themes—that the United States and Israel were ‘fascist, imperial-Zionist countries’ bankrolled by rich Jews." - Yuri Andropov, KGB chairman
-
Surely you’ve heard the charge that Israel is an “apartheid state.” What you probably haven’t heard is who made that accusation first.
In 1961, Israel voted against South Africa’s policies of apartheid at the United Nations. The South African prime minister and architect of South Africa’s apartheid policies, Hendrik Verwoerd, rebuked Israel’s vote by charging Israel with apartheid.
- In the 1960s, the Algerian minister of information, Mhamed Yazid, encouraged Yasser Arafat to pursue a propaganda campaign that depicted the Arabs in the Middle East as the underdog in the fight against the Jewish state. In reality, the Jews were (and are) a tiny minority in the region surrounded by hostile Arab countries.
SOME CONTEMPORARY EXAMPLES
- Supporters of the Palestinian cause often accuse Israel of being an “ethnostate,” but it’s the Palestinian National Authority that describes itself in its covenant as an Arab-only state and has insisted that not a single Jew will be a citizen of a future Palestinian state.
- Anti-Zionists charge Zionism of being a “religious supremacist” cause — ignoring that the early political Zionists were largely irreligious and for many Jews, Zionism isn’t primarily about religion — but it’s the Palestinian cause that started as an Islamist cause and it’s Hamas that carries out massacres in the name of Al Aqsa Mosque.
- Many anti-Zionists accuse Israel of appropriating its food — food that Jews have been eating for thousands of years — but it’s actually the vast majority of the world that appropriated the Jewish foundational national charter, the Tanakh [Hebrew Bible].
- Western anti-Zionists charge Israel with settler-colonialism and imperialism, demanding that the Jews “go back to Poland,” instead of grappling with their own legacies of colonialism and imperialism from their lofts in Brooklyn (would they go back to “where they came from”?) or London.
CONTRADICTIONS
Antisemitism doesn’t just project guilt; it also projects hatreds and fears. Time and time again in history, societies project what they hate the most— or what they fear the most — onto the Jewish people. Because different societies hate and fear different things, oftentimes these accusations are contradictory.
- The Nazis, who valued the purity of the “Aryan race” above all else, persecuted Jews on the basis that we were racially inferior and foreign to Europe. Today, so-called human rights activists, who despise colonization, tell us that we are white European settler-colonizers in the Middle East.
- With the rise of Nazism in the 1930s, the Germans associated Zionism with British imperialism. But at the same time, the British Foreign Office in Palestine accused Zionists of Nazism.
- Countries that have opposed communism, like the United States and Nazi Germany, have historically accused Jews of Judeo-Bolshevism; that is, of being behind communism. But propaganda in the Soviet Union, a communist country, charged Jews with capitalism.
ANOTHER FORM OF PROJECTION
Antisemitism is a bigotry that is not only directed at Jewish individuals, or at individuals perceived to be Jewish, but at the idea of the Jewish “collective.” Antisemitism perceives Jews as though we are all in cahoots with each other, nefariously plotting to advance our interests. Whether we like it or not, today, the State of Israel represents the idea of the Jewish collective, both because the State of Israel is the only majority-Jewish country in the world and because Israel calls itself the national homeland of the Jewish people.
For this reason, where before antisemites would project antisemitic tropes onto groups of Jews or groups perceived to be Jewish (e.g. the conspiracy of Judeo-Bolshevism sees “communists” as Jewish), today many antisemites project antisemitic tropes onto the Jewish state.
To be clear: actual criticism of Israeli policy, Israeli individuals (including politicians), or Israeli actions is not inherently antisemitic. What is antisemitic, however, is projecting antisemitic conspiracies, tropes, and language onto the State of Israel, in the same vein that using anti-Black rhetoric to criticize a government in an African country is racist.
For a full bibliography of my sources, please head over to my Instagram and Patreon.