Jonathan Judaken. Patterns of Prejudice. Volume 42, Issue 4-5, 2008.
In February 2006 a young French Jew, Ilan Halimi, was kidnapped and tortured to death by ‘les barbares’ (the Barbarians), a gang of West-African Muslim racketeers operating in Paris. They believed that because he was Jewish he had to be rich, and that, by abducting and tormenting him, they would get paid off. In August that year, a twelve-year-old girl on a bus in London was kicked unconscious and robbed after her attackers asked if she was Jewish or English. In December, the so-called ‘International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust’ was convened in Teheran, where President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad predicted that ‘the Zionist regime will be wiped out soon’. In May 2007 arsonists heavily damaged Hekhal Haness, Geneva’s largest synagogue. These incidents illustrate what the statistics make plain: the troubling rise of global antisemitism in the new millennium.
In this essay, which has two parts, our task is to assess critically the phenomenon dubbed by many the ‘new antisemitism’. There are seven main points that I will develop. First, I insist that the so-called ‘new antisemitism’ is not new in two senses. Notably, following every crisis that has marked the Arab-Israeli conflict since the Six Day War, there have been books or articles by activists or scholars with similar titles and basically the same arguments, insisting on what Abraham Foxman called in the subtitle of his 2003 work ‘The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism’. Indeed, not only Foxman’s title but also his assessment drew heavily on work by the former heads of the Anti-Defamation League, Arnold Forster and Benjamin Epstein, published in 1973 and called simply The New Anti-Semitism. Foster and Epstein’s book itself rested on scholarship that was already being published in 1968. Moreover, none of the strands said to characterize the new antisemitism—Holocaust denial, the antisemitism of the extreme left, antisemitism in the Islamic world, anti-Zionism as antisemitism, even anti-racism as antisemitism—are new. Each goes back at least as far as June 1967, if not to the Holocaust itself, and several of these vectors of transmission have much deeper roots.
Second, this article is animated by a frustration at the fact that both critics and defenders of the state of Israel are so infused by their respective partisan divisions that every intellectual resource is mobilized to suffocate the voices of their enemies with the result that the truths of each side cannot be heard. With that said, the paper does not seek to take a middle ground. Rather, as Senator Patrick Daniel Moynihan is supposed to have said, while everyone is entitled to their own opinions, they are not entitled to their own facts. In this spirit, I draw on the analysis of a wide variety of scholars and interlocutors in the discussion across the political spectrum in order that the positions on all sides are articulated even as my own authorial stamp will clearly demarcate where I stand in the various sub-debates within the clamour on the new antisemitism.
Third, the paper is a reaction against the homogenizing, hyperbolic, sometimes paranoid construction of what discussants of the new antisemitism have described as a new set of coalitions that are said to be emerging. Roger Cukierman, the former president of the Conseil représentatif des institutions juives de France (CRIF), put this most famously when he indicated that a new ‘red-green-brown alliance’ was now animating anti-Jewish hostility. The suggestion of many commentators is that a political alignment is coalescing made up of leftists, greens and jihadists all working in tandem, for which there is little evidence. As part of this homogenizing discourse, an undifferentiated ‘left’ or an undifferentiated ‘Europe’ as monolithically antisemitic or anti-Israel is often invoked. To the extent that such constructs emerge in the fight against antisemitism, they are phantasms. As such, we need to assess the political agenda behind their construction. We also need to evaluate the extent to which this helps to feed the new Judaeophobia rather than serve the fight against it. Since, without properly describing and evaluating what we seek to curtail, we cannot satisfactorily hope to oppose it.
Fourth, I maintain that while there is no direct causal correlation between the social facts producing antisemites and the social acts of antisemitism, they cannot be separated wholesale. There is a relation between the Arab-Israeli conflict and the experience of Muslims in Europe and a relationship between the history of western incursions into the Middle East and the rise of antisemitism in the Arab and Islamic world. To analyse antisemitic acts, we must take the social conditions that give rise to them into account and do so within a global optic. Today this entails comprehending how what happens in Palestine becomes a symbolic filter through which the concrete experience of Muslims in Europe and elsewhere is given meaning and internalized, and also how the Palestinian intifada has become a globalized symbol for the throwing off of the shackles of oppression elsewhere.
Fifth, the formula that ‘anti-Zionism is antisemitism’ is too simplistic. It is an analytically blunt tool that often only serves the political ends of those who sympathize with the canard that ‘Zionism is racism’. These charges are mirror-images of each other. As we will see, one motor of the new Judaeophobia is the rhetorical polemics that reduce the contemporary situation to sound-bites and symbols. It is not only those who disseminate Judaeophobic notions, but also the warriors combatting them, who engage in such reduction. Polemics (etymologically from polemikos) are the discourse of war: they are about defining enemies. Those interested in dampening down antisemitism have got to consider the ways in which rhetorical warfare feeds the very phenomenon it seeks to ‘combat’.
Sixth, definitional approaches like those pursued by Natan Sharansky or analytic assessments like the one undertaken by Bernard Harrison in The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism prove facile in their effort to interpret a phenomenon that requires more nuanced interpretations. I find more penetrating resources in the dialectical approaches of Jean-Paul Sartre and the Frankfurt School or in the historical investigations of Léon Poliakov.
Finally, I want in this essay to contribute to a better delineation of what is truly new. To this end, Pierre-André Taguieff’s notion of a ‘new Judaeophobia’ makes more sense because anti-Jewish sentiments and actions are no longer based on racialized arguments akin to those deployed during the Dreyfus Affair or by the Nazis. They are based on cultural and religious and political claims, often articulated in a specifically anti-racist idiom.
So we begin by interrogating what’s new in ‘la nouvelle judéophobie’, as Taguieff has most fittingly called it. In the first part of the paper, ‘Old news’, I maintain that the often-homogenizing account of the new Judaeophobia needs to be understood in terms of the varied traditions that animate it, and that none of these traditions are new. Here, I dissect the five key vectors in the transmission of the new Judaeophobia and provide a brief historical overview of their origins and development. My point in outlining them is not to provide a comprehensive overview of each, but to make clear that none of these vectors are new. At the same time, I highlight what is novel in each area. In the second part, ‘Reflections on the new Judaeophobia’, I draw on the work of Judith Butler, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the Frankfurt School to reflect on antisemitism in the age of globalization. With Butler, I wrestle with the necessity and difficulty of distinguishing between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. If we can conceptually pull these terms apart, I show, following Sartre, how anti-racist anti-Zionism can nonetheless reinscribe the logic of racism. I conclude on a dissonant note from the Frankfurt School, explaining why antisemitism might be on the rise in an era when there are supposedly no more antisemites.
Old news
As has been the case throughout the life of what Robert Wistrich has dubbed ‘the longest hatred’, there are continuities and breaks over the course of the history of antisemitism. When scholars and analysts discuss the new antisemitism, they often point to a burgeoning alliance that is said to cohere in producing the new wave of rhetorical outbursts, violent acts and vicious incidents that make the period from September 2000 (the beginning of the Second Intifada) to the present unprecedented in terms of post-Holocaust hostility towards Jews and Judaism. A ‘frightening coalition of anti-Jewish sentiment is forming on a global scale’, writes Abraham Foxman. ‘The new anti-Semitism’, warns Phyllis Chesler, ‘is being waged on many fronts—military, propaganda, political, and economic—throughout the world’.
The troops amassed in this war against the Jews come from very different armies, however. As Leon Wieseltier puts it:
The taxonomy of present-day anti-Semitism is ominously large. There are religious varieties and secular varieties; theological varieties; political varieties and cultural varieties; old varieties and new varieties. There is the anti-Semitism of Christians, which comes in many forms, and the anti-Semitism of Muslims, which comes in many forms. There is the anti-Semitism of the Right, in Europe and in the United States, still stubbornly blaming the Jews for modernity … and there is the anti-Semitism of the Left, most recently seeking shelter (and finding it) in the antiglobalization movement, which has presided over a revival of the New Left’s dogmas about capitalism and liberalism and Americanism. And there is the anti-Semitism that manifests itself as anti-Zionism.
Omer Bartov adds to this long list by suggesting that there are antisemitic voices among a diversity of social groups, including ‘the rabble and the leaders … terrorists and intellectuals, students and peasants, pacifists and militants, expansionists and antiglobalization activists’. Indeed, the claim that there is a new modality of anti-Jewish hatred—a new epoch in the long history of antisemitism—depends on the notion that these very different groups are coalescing around antisemitism, and that this is what is causing the undeniable rise in antisemitic violence and attacks globally.
But, to begin with, as a label, the term the ‘new antisemitism’ is flawed in several ways. Even if one grants some shared discourse among these very different actors, Taguieff is right to insist on calling this a new ‘Judaeophobia’ as opposed to ‘antisemitism’ for several reasons. In the first place, as he says:
Post-Nazi Judeophobia is grounded not upon the vulgar racialist theories of the late nineteenth century, with their myth of a ‘race war’ between two imaginary constructs, ‘Semites’ and ‘Aryans,’ but upon a set of cultural and political elements quite different from those characterizing the anti-Semitism of the Dreyfus Affair or the state racism of the National Socialists.
The new Judaeophobia, unlike antisemitism, is not premised on the Aryan myth or biological racism, white supremacy or ultra-populist ethno-nationalism. Indeed, it is often explicitly articulated in terms of an anti-racist agenda. Secondarily, there are some Muslims who sometimes defend their hostile defamation of Jews, their denigration of Judaism or their demonization of Israel with a standard sophism that claims that they cannot be antisemites since Arabs are ‘Semites’ too. This is patently nonsense since, of course, while there are Semitic languages, there is no such entity as a Semitic people and ‘Semitism’ is itself the illusory construct on which racial antisemitism was established. So to make the assertion that there are ‘Semites’ or a Semitic people is to buy into the racism on which antisemitism was grounded.
As Paul Iganski and Barry Kosmin point out, therefore, there is a ‘semantic flaw’ within in the very notion of antisemitism. Consequently, in our discussion of antisemitism, we cannot afford to be anti-semantic. This flaw is compounded by the ways in which ‘antisemitism’ is currently used as a term to cover everything from prejudices, biases or stereotypes about Jews and Judaism to a causal factor in the genocide of European Jewry. ‘Antisemitism’ also occludes the distinctions between different epistemic configurations and the differing social forces that were and are at work in ancient Judaeophobia, what Zygmunt Bauman calls the ‘contestant enmity’ of the adversos Judaeos tradition of the early Christian church, the diabolical anti-Judaism of the mediaeval church, the secularization of Jew-hatred that created antisemitism per se and the current neo-Judaeophobia. The use of the single term ‘antisemitism’, therefore, often stifles discussion, skews conversations and leads to misunderstandings of the issue.
The new Judaeophobia is racialist, but not racist, rooted in cultural and religious arguments that are nonetheless sometimes as dogmatically essentialist as their racist predecessors and that often characterize Jews and Judaism in paranoid or diabolical terms. The new Judaeophobia refers more clearly to the mixture of fascination with and demonization of Jews and Judaism today. For, as Bartov put it, the constellation of the fellow-travellers of the new Judaeophobia are those ‘whose fears and phobias about present conditions, utopian dreams of a better future, and nostalgic fantasies of a mythical past all converge in a bizarre and increasingly frightening way on a single figure, a single cause: “the Jew”’.
But even the notion of a ‘new Judaeophobia’ as a label for this compulsive obsession with ‘the Jew’ runs the risk of conflating the five major vectors of transmission that are sometimes identified as new threats, or their confluence as a new convergence, none of which proves distinctive of the new millennium. Each of these vectors have a longer history that needs to be understood in terms of its specifics and in terms of its transformations in the post-Second World War period: 1) Holocaust denial, 2) Judaeophobia in the Islamic world, 3) the anti-Israel bias of the extreme left, 4) anti-Israel anti-racism, and 5) anti-Zionism as antisemitism. Anti-Zionism or anti-Israelism is the key point of contact between these different strands that otherwise are largely differentiated by crosscutting cleavages. Part of what needs to be understood, therefore, is when anti-Zionism becomes Judaeophobic. For, as Walter Laqueur sums it up, the issue of the new antisemitism ‘boils down to the question of whether antisemitism and anti-Zionism are two entirely distinct phenomena or whether anti-Zionism can turn into, in certain circumstances, antisemitism’.
Denying the Holocaust
Holocaust denial has operated in different guises from the end of the Second World War. The bedrock of claims that the Holocaust was a hoax perpetrated by Jews in order to secure funding and legitimacy for the Jewish state was put in place in a series of works published from 1948, first by the prominent French fascist Maurice Bardèche, and then by the Buchenwald survivor of the Resistance and former Communist Paul Rassinier. ‘Holocaust denial [then] found a receptive welcome in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s’, writes Deborah Lipstadt, ‘particularly among individuals known to have strong connections with antisemitic publications and extremist groups’. The assault on historical reality by the deniers was compounded by an assault on the memory of the Holocaust following the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe: the official Communist version of the Second World War contended that all perpetrators of the Holocaust were ‘fascists’ and its victims were ‘anti-fascists’, while the remnant of surviving Eastern European Jews were suffering from discrimination and defamation often as ‘Zionists’.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the radical right in Western and Central Europe began its resurrection. These groups were racist, nationalist and not only anti-Jewish, but anti-black, anti-Asian, anti-Arab and hostile to non-European immigrants in an era of rising immigration. Holocaust denial or diminution became one plank in their ideological platforms, as when the leader of the French Front National, Jean-Marie Le Pen, said of the gas chambers that they were ‘a minute detail of Second World War history’. Arthur Butz’s The Hoax of the Twentieth Century (1976) created a controversy that made Holocaust denial much more visible, and the Institute for Historical Review in California convened the first Revisionist Convention in the summer of 1979, treating and promoting denial as a respectable scholarly pursuit. Those who attended were ‘a conglomeration of Holocaust deniers, neo-Nazis, philo-Germans, right-wing extremists, antisemites, racists, and conspiracy theorists’. In the 1980s the Canadian Ernst Zundel, aided infamously by David Irving and Robert Faurisson, began to focus on the technical challenges of the Nazis’ use of gas chambers and zyklon-B as their method of industrialized extermination. When famed American intellectual Noam Chomsky penned a defence of Faurisson’s right to free speech in his book The Rumor of Auschwitz, he lent denial the veneer of his cultural acclaim, to his discredit. By the 1990s deniers sought to open a front on college campuses by taking out ads in college newspapers entitled ‘The Holocaust Story: How Much is False? The Case for Open Debate’. And, by the new millennium, the global web of the marginalized Holocaust denial community could be linked, and denial literature and arguments were easily disseminated via the Internet.
The activists who deny the Holocaust are zealous warriors in a crusade. Their denial might, in fact, be regarded as the final stage of genocide. They are the bureaucrats of the next solution to the Jewish Question, the ‘paper Eichmann’, as Pierre Vidal-Naquet has appropriately tagged them. The geography of denial is worldwide, with key nodal points in Orange County and Lyons, and its banner has been exported to diverse locations in the Arab and Islamic world, including, of course, Iran. Its linchpin is a certain irrefutability, since denial is a closed system. As Nadine Fresco explains:
A document dating from the war is inadmissible because it dates from those years. The deposition of a Nazi at his trial is inadmissible because it is a deposition from a trial. This is applicable to all Nazis who were tried. If, as is the case, not one of them denied the existence of gas chambers, it is not because the gas chambers existed … but because the witnesses believed that if they assisted the victors, the judges would reward them with clemency. As for the testimonies and depositions of some hundreds of thousands of Jews who pretended to be survivors of the genocide, they are inadmissible because given by people who could only be instigators or, at best, accomplices in the rumor that led to the swindle from which they benefited.
Like the epicentres of denial, its ideology is multiple, underpinned by diverse motives: 1) neo-fascist and neo-Nazi antisemitism; 2) German and East European nationalisms; 3) far-right anti-communism since, for both ethno-nationalists and anti-communists, ‘Judaeo-Bolshevism’ remains a vivid spectre still haunting Europe; 4) fringe groups of the extreme left; and 5) absolute anti-Zionists, including those in the Islamic world. Whatever the expression or the motive, however, this form of Judaeophobia is not new, although its dissemination on websites and, more recently, in Iran through a state actor is novel.
Islamist Judaeophobia
The second vector, Islamist Judaeophobia, has a much longer history. In an era of rampant Islamophobia, it is important to say that the Islamic world is obviously complex and highly variegated. There are forty-six countries with a Muslim majority and approximately 1.3 billion adherents to Islam (one in five humans is a Muslim). While there are many Islams across this landscape and even variants of Islamism—the political mobilization of Islam—it is the anti-Jewish strand within this mixed Islamic tapestry that we need briefly to outline. While unquestionably historically less malicious than traditional Christian anti-Judaism, in which Jews are represented as the murderers of God and the spawn of the devil, there are textual roots of contemporary Islamist Judaeophobia in the Qur’an and the Hadith. Jews are depicted in the Qur’an as ‘corrupters of Scriptures’ (3:63), and accused of falsehood (3:71), distortion (5:85), as well as cowardice, greed and chicanery. Jews are even accursed by God and metamorphose into apes. Some recent Islamist interpreters, such as Sayyid Qutb, as central to their theology, have developed this series of epithets into the heart of an anti-Jewish world-view.
Since Jews and Christians are both described as Ahl al-Kitab (People of the Book), in the pre-modern era they were legally defined as dhimmis (protected people), whose religious freedom in the Muslim world was tolerated as long as they—adherents of substandard and distorted religions—maintained a clear sense of their subjection. A series of measures, symbolic for the most part, were instituted: dhimmis were required to pay a jizya (poll tax), to wear distinctive clothing, to live and worship in inferior places, and were prohibited from riding on horses or camels, though not donkeys. ‘A social framework of discrimination and disabilities that constantly emphasized the superiority of Muslims’ was instituted. As Bernard Lewis explains, the most vociferous anti-Judaic calumnies, like the blood libel, entered the Islamic world ‘during the reign of the Ottoman sultan Mehmed the Conqueror, and it [the blood libel] almost certainly originated among the large Greek-Christian population under Ottoman rule’. In the period in which Nicholas II (1868-1894) called the Ottoman Empire ‘the sick man of Europe’, antisemitic literature began to enter the Middle East. By the 1930s and the Second World War, fascists in Europe inspired a number of parties and movements in the Arab world. The most famous figure to emerge from the nexus of Nazi ideas and the Arab world was Haj Muhammad Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who orchestrated anti-Jewish riots in mandate Palestine to oppose Jewish settlement and then, to aid his opposition to the Vishuv, he allied with Hitler, who became a financial patron. The Mufti in turn broadcast pro-Axis propaganda to the Arab world from Berlin in the period of the Final Solution.
But clearly the establishment of the state of Israel in the heart of what was previously Dar al-Islam (Islamic lands) marked a major turning-point. For some Muslims, the victories of the Israelis in the wars since 1948 have become, in Gabriel Shoenfeld’s words, a
wellspring from which to draw conclusions about the ‘Satanic’ nature of the Zionist victories. Wicked unseen forces were the only conceivable explanation for such an inexplicable outcome, in which the noble and courageous Arabs were defeated by those whom the Qur’an itself taught were ‘inferior and wretched’.
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s influence in the region began to supplant the lexicon of the right with the phraseology of the left. The Zionist movement, using Yasser Arafat’s words as a quintessential example, was depicted as ‘racist and fanatic in its nature, aggressive, expansionist, and colonial in its aims, and fascist in its methods’.
If 1948 and its aftermath was an open wound in which anti-Jewish motifs festered, the lesions have not healed due to the massive inequalities of wealth and gender, institutionalized underdevelopment and political unfreedom throughout much of the Muslim world. As the two United Nations Development Prorgamme reports authored by Arab social scientists in 2002 and 2003 make clear, this is compounded by ongoing strife between sects and ethnic groups, secularists and religious adherents, between Shi‘ites and Sunnis, and by stagnant economic growth in the Middle East. Throughout the Islamic world, there is an effort to achieve rapid modernization and industrialization, which inevitably entails enormous social dislocation. Accordingly, in Shoenfeld’s formulation: ‘If the Jew in a modernizing Europe became, in the words of one historian, “the symbol of modernization and modern society, and was hated as such,” in the modernizing Arab world the state of Israel plays an equivalent role.’
The decisive crossroad for this was, of course, June 1967. The overwhelming victory of Israel in the Six Day War marked the decline of pan-Arab nationalism and Islamism began to emerge as an alternative ideology both to the corruption and failures of Arab leaders and to the hypocrisy of the West. But the cultural, historical and political Arabism that, in Olivier Carré’s characterization, ‘has haunted [Arab public opinion] since the earliest days of the independence struggle against the Ottomans and then against the British, the French, the Zionist movement, Israel, and finally “American imperialism”’ has endured. Militant Islamism from the Muslim Brotherhood to al-Qa‘ida seized on this cluster of factors to make Judaeophobia a central strand of its platform. In parts of the Islamic world, Israel has been transformed, as Fiamma Nirenstein put it,
into little more than a diabolical abstraction, not a country at all but a malignant force embodying every possible negative attribute—aggressor, usurper, sinner, occupier, corrupter, infidel, murderer, barbarian. As for Israelis themselves, they are seen not as citizens, workers, students, or parents but as the uniformed foot soldiers of that same dark force.
This representation of Israel is disseminated in sermons in mosques and shared on tape recordings, on television, on the Internet, in newspapers and broadsheets, and via graffiti that adorns the walls of some of the Islamic enclaves of European cities. There has clearly been a rise in the number of assaults on Jews and Jewish property, including the firebombing of synagogues, the desecration of cemeteries and attacks on identifiable Jewish establishments in Western and Central Europe committed not by neo-Nazis or the extreme right but by Muslim youth. These young men, who often suffer from institutionalized discrimination, identify with the struggles of Palestinians or other insurgent Muslims around the world.
In the case of France, for example, both Jews and Muslims emigrated from the Maghreb and West Africa in the period of decolonization, often to the same neighbourhoods. Both communities have similar patterns of religious observance (20 per cent pray regularly) and active communal affiliation (20 per cent belong to community organizations). The Jewish experience in the metropole, however, has been characterized by educational and economic success, while that of their African counterparts has been marked by vastly higher rates of educational failure, unemployment, jobs in low-paying, low-prestige enterprises and higher rates of incarceration. These social facts help to explain why some French Muslims displace and misplace their frustration and anger on to Jews and Jewish sites that symbolically express the iniquities they daily experience. So an Islamic anti-Jewish streak is hardly new, but Israeli independence and especially the Six Day War, combined with the movement of Muslims back to the metropole and the rise of radical jihadism, has supercharged this anti-Jewish element.
The extreme left in the age of globalization
If the Six Day war indicated a shift in some Islamic discourses, then June 1967 marked a categorical rupture between many on the radical left and Israel. To avoid homogenizing a phantasmic ‘left’ that runs through many works on the ‘new antisemitism’, it is important to distinguish between the streams on the extreme left and the socialist and social-democratic left in Europe and elsewhere, and the progressive and liberal left in the United States that makes up the mainstream of leftist opinion. For some on the extreme left, as Taguieff explains:
Judeophobia answer[s] with remarkable symbolic efficiency, the demand for meaning and the mobilization of causes felt by … those orphans of ‘revolution’ who continue to think and find guidance in the traditional Communist element of revolutionary myth, in one of its many Marxist (Leninist, Trotskyist, Third Worldist) or anarchist (neoleftist, ‘neoradical’) variants. For these ‘radical’ milieux … Israel is the devil incarnate, ‘Zionism’ is the absolute enemy.
Anti-Zionism began to creep into the core values of the revolutionary left during the Cold War and the various struggles for decolonization. This was exacerbated as the Palestinian struggle began to replace the national liberation movements of the 1950s and 1960s in the postcolonial era as the central front in the struggle against the inequities of the neo-colonial order, especially after the apartheid regime in South Africa ended in the 1990s.
Anti-Zionism was also wedded to a vociferous anti-Americanism in the Cold War, during which, in the struggle against the Soviet Union and as a result of its anti-Communist alliances, the United States often supported authoritarian and repressive regimes clinging to power, in addition to its slow response to dealing with its own 350-year racist past during the civil rights struggles. The confluence of anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism reached a new peak with George Bush and Ariel Sharon at the helms of state. Beginning with Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount in September 2000, the fallout from 9/11 and then the incursion into Iraq in March 2003, American and Israeli unilateralism and unbridled mutual support has led to the exacerbated co-opting of images culled from the antisemitic past to portray both regimes.
In the process, the rhetoric of ‘Judaeo-Bolshevism’ as the paragon of far-right antisemitism following the First World War has morphed into what we might call ‘Judaeo-Americanism’ as the archetype of what many on the extreme left oppose. A paradigmatic example of this: a demonstrator at the 2003 World Economic Forum in Davos wore a mask of Donald Rumsfeld with a large yellow star and ‘Sheriff’ inscribed on it, and was driven forward by a cudgel-wielding likeness of Ariel Sharon, both being followed by a huge model of the Golden Calf. ‘The message’, as Josef Joffe commented, was that
America is in thrall to the Jews/Israelis, and both are the acolytes of Mammon and the avant-garde of pernicious global capitalism. … Having captured the ‘hyperpower,’ Jews qua Israelis finally do rule the world. It is Israel as the Über-Jew, and America as its slave.
Indeed, the iconography of globalized antisemitism is no longer carried by static entities like the cathedral but by ephemeral markers like the cartoon, since, as Joffe points out, ‘cartoons are drawn editorials. Surely they are also the shortest road to the subconscious.’ One might elaborate on Joffe’s point by suggesting that the television melodramas in the Arab world that re-enact the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a mini-series are little more than animated cartoons played by real actors.
Television, and especially the Internet, have thus become the global vehicles for the dissemination of age-old anti-Jewish motifs in the post-industrial era, often reworked around the nexus of Judaeo-American world domination. Within this nexus, there are two key motifs. First, the ‘cabal’ of neo-conservatives dominated by Jews, including Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Elliott Abrams, Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby and William Kristol, among others, who have turned the United States into a client-state serving the interests of Israel. Second is ‘the Jewish lobby’ or ‘the Zionist lobby’, which is said to dominate American foreign policy. For some within the left who parrot these stereotypes and prejudices, anti-Zionism has become a central site encapsulating the harmful institutional forces at work in the age of globalization.
Shulamit Volkov has persuasively argued that antisemitism is a cultural code and that anti-Zionism is the recalibration of this code to fit the present. By arguing that antisemitism is a cultural code, Volkov meant two things:
The first is that cultural as well as social and political views come in packages, in the form of ideational syndromes; the second, that only relatively minor issues, though of the kind that are common enough in public discourse, can serve as codes, signifying larger, more important syndromes.
Antisemitic codes thus serve as a short cut to explain the operational forces of anxiety in people’s lives, when they do not have the language or analytic sophistication to name them properly. While most of the signs and signifiers that make up the ideational syndrome of the new Judaeophobia are not new, the cultural code has readjusted to new geo-global circumstances. ‘Anti-Semitism has become a signal, an indication, a yellow flag’, Fiamma Nirenstein maintains, ‘signaling a pestilence spreading in the very heart of the phenomenon of globalization itself, [and] in its institutions (the UN, the NGOs, the European Union, the media)’. As Daniel Jonah Goldhagen puts it: ‘Always protean in quality, always changing to take on the idiom of its day, anti-Semitism in our globalized era has been globalized.’
Indeed, antisemitism per se arose alongside globalized capitalism from the late eighteenth century. Antisemitism on the right defined itself against the dark, satanic mills of modernity. But antisemitism on the left also tracked alongside the rise of globalization: from the English Deists to the philosophes and through the thinkers of the Aufklärung, from the so-called utopian socialists through the early Marx and into the writings of Ferdinand Tönnies and Werner Sombart, the threats of global modernization were projected on to Jews and Judaism. Postmodern globalization, including ‘the opening of borders to the greater movement of ideas, people, and money’, Mark Strauss avers, ‘has stirred familiar anxieties about ill-defined “outside forces”’. The result has on occasion produced strange bedfellows among some ultra-nationalists, parts of the populist green movement and various segments of the orphans of the revolution.
This alliance is hardly one of an elective affinity, since there have been vicious turf battles, both literal and virtual, among these differing contenders within the anti-globalization movement. But there have also been overlaps between their visions about who is responsible for the dark side of globalization. These conjunctures are, paradoxically, a function of the disjunctures within the global cultural economy. Arjun Appadurai has compellingly argued that ‘the new global cultural economy has to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order that cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models’. Rather than any linear configuration of the flow of Judaeophobia from Europe to the Islamic world and back again, Appadurai’s model of the five dimensions of global cultural flows is useful in accounting for the global forces contributing to the dissemination of the new Judaeophobia since, as Goldhagen rightly states, today ‘there are many anti-Semitic centers and multidirectional flows’. What shapes global cultural processes today, Appadurai maintains, are the intersections of ethnoscapes (the flow of people, refugees, immigrants, exiles), technoscapes (the flow of technology), financescapes (the flow of money and currency markets), mediascapes (the flow of images from newspapers, magazines, television stations, films and the Internet) and ideoscapes (the flow of ideas). The forces that generate these cultural flows condition global cultural formations, a quintessential example of which is the syndrome of the new Judaeophobia.
Anti-Israel anti-racism
Among the paradoxes of these flows is the way in which the new Judaeophobia has marshalled anti-racism to underpin criticism of Israel. As Alain Finkielkraut put it, ‘it is born of this … anti-racist exuberance that recodes all dramas—current or ancient—into the terms of one of only two alternatives: tolerance and stigmatization’, reducing the complexities of the world into ‘Nazis’ and ‘victims’. Here, its origins go back to the 1975 campaign to pass UN Resolution 3379, which declared ‘Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination’. The resolution was passed with the sponsorship of the Soviet Union in alliance with Arab states. It was rescinded in December 1991, through Resolution 4686. But, at the UN-sponsored World Conference against Racism, which took place in Durban, South Africa in 2001, Israel was once again singled out with charges of ethnic cleansing, racism, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The agenda of establishing international standards to combat racism was hijacked by the Non-Governmental Organization Forum and Youth Summit whose activists consistently disrupted the conference with Israel-bashing. ‘At a deeper level, the charge of “racism” (and therefore of “apartheid,” “genocide,” etc.)’, Taguieff writes, ‘turns against Jews-Zionists-Israelis the old negative interpretation of the election of Israel: that is, the denunciation of the “chosen people” as a people giving itself every right to dominate, conquer, oppress, and destroy’.
But it is not only the new demonization of Israel and Zionism in the name of anti-racism, but also the fight against it that benefits from the multidirectionality of globalized media technologies. Today, as instantly as an antisemitic canard enters the flow of mediascapes, an army of Jewish and democratic institutions, media and campus watchdogs, journalists and academics combat it, including groups mobilized by the state of Israel. ‘For the first time in history’, Fiamma Nirenstein affirms, ‘a Jewish state can fight anti-Semitism in the international arena, and this has made things very different’. Each side marshals the discourse of racism to advance their perspective on Jews-Israel-Zionism and the complex of charges that are ascribed to these signifiers.
Anti-Zionism versus antisemitism
But if, as we have seen, none of the factors that constitute the so-called ‘new antisemitism’ are new to the new millennium, then alarm about the new antisemitism is not new either. In the immediate aftermath of the Six Day War, publications appeared by several writers that explicitly argued that the new code for antisemitism was anti-Zionism. For example, Jacques Givet’s examination of the left’s opposition to Israel, published in 1968, was subtitled Essai sur le néo-antisémitisme. The Yom Kippur War in 1973 once again gave rise to books warning of The New Anti-Semitism, the title of Foster and Epstein’s rebuke, for example. Again, after the Israeli incursion into Lebanon in 1982, volumes were produced signalling a rise in antisemitic rhetoric hiding behind the shield of anti-Zionism, like Alain Finkielkraut’s La Réprobation d’Israël. Moreover, all these works raised the alarm about a confluence of anti-Zionism within part of the radical left and within the Islamic world, which is what many observers signal as the most significant new danger of the new antisemitism.
Léon Poliakov, the doyen of historians of antisemitism, was among the first to locate and historicize the emergence of a new epistemic and political configuration that materialized in the aftermath of the period between June 1967 and May 1968, and that indicated shifts in the index of Judaeophobia. Poliakov narrated, with his inimitable clarity, the emerging crystallization of anti-Zionism as antisemitism. In De l’antisionisme à l’antisémitisme, he was concerned with establishing the distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism by tracing the history of the myth of the ‘Zionist plot’, fabricated first in Prague in 1952, that from its beginnings absorbed the antisemitic myths that preceded it. August Bebel’s quotation about antisemitism as ‘the socialism of fools’ aside, Poliakov shows that—within Marxist theory, from its genesis, and explicitly developed as policy within the Soviet Union from October 1918—a principled anti-Zionism was perfectly reconciled with a strong stance opposing antisemitism.
But, beginning with Stalin’s persecution of Jews from 1949-53, which continued after his death ‘under the pretext of a critical attitude toward the Jewish State and its partisans’, the discourse of anti-Zionism within the Soviet sphere of influence was slowly infused by an ancient hatred. Concomitantly, in the Middle East, from the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948, anti-Zionism was animated by a desire to destroy the Jewish state. After 1968 Poliakov maintains that the revolutionary left, committed to the radical transformation of all existing structures, began to share the Arab perspective of eliminating the structures of the Jewish state. Zionism began to be treated as coterminous with colonialism, racism, apartheid and crimes against humanity. Associated with these evils, it was deemed illegitimate and merited destruction. As he always did, Poliakov situated this position within the longue durée, arguing that from Voltaire and Fichte, through Fourier, Proudhon, Marx and Stalin, there has been a long tradition of anti-racist anti-Israelism that opposed Jewish particularity to universality, the carnal Jew to the spiritual humanist, Jewish materialism, legalism and anachronistic superstition to the true faith and reason of humanity.
However, Poliakov was not always careful to avoid collapsing all forms of critique of Israel or Zionism into antisemitism. A vociferous debate within and outside Israel has included, and does still, numerous voices that decry the occupation of the West Bank, the ongoing building of settlements, the injustices by the Israeli military and the violation of human rights without ever casting opprobrium on Jews as a group and without recycling classical anti-Jewish stereotypes. ‘If Israel does not treat its non-Jewish citizens equally and humanely’, Walter Laqueur maintains,
if it persists in holding on to territories occupied in 1967 against the will of the local population, if it illegally seizes land elsewhere, if a racialist-chauvinist fringe inside Israel defies the law and elementary human rights and to considerable degree dictates its outrageous behavior to a government, if some people in Israel are unwilling to accept the rights of others, such behavior invites condemnation.
Condemnation of Israel includes lots of groups and individuals that are critical of Likud or Kadima’s unilateralism or the specifics of Israeli state policies regardless of which political party holds power. These include many Jewish critics and organizations such as Jewish Voices for Peace, Jews against the Occupation, Jews for Peace in the Middle East, Brit Tzedek, Tikkun, Women in Black, B’Tselem, Gush Shalom and Yesh Gvul. Such vigorous debate is the sign of a healthy democracy and at the heart of both the prophetic and talmudic traditions of Judaism.
Moreover, as David Myers has shown, there is also a long tradition of ‘principled Jewish anti-Zionism’ that has shadowed Zionism from its origins. Before the Holocaust, he notes, ‘the Bund, the Autonomists, Reform Judaism, the Agude (i.e. Agudat Yisrael)—all saw Zionism as a competitor whose underlying rationale and territorial ambition were fundamentally flawed’. Leading Jewish thinkers, including Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig, opposed both Zionism and assimilation in insisting on exile for Jews, in Rosenzweig’s words, to steel them for ‘battle on behalf of the exalted life and against descent into the contingency of land and time’. Following the Holocaust, the groups and figures opposing political Zionism dwindled but among those who continued the pre-war tradition of insisting on diaspora Judaism were Jakob Petuchowski, Steven Schwarzschild, George Steiner and Richard Marienstras, who founded Le Cercle Gaston Crémieux, which was an important influence on several contemporary French-Jewish intellectuals. Along with these Jewish intellectuals, there are also a ‘diverse array of Jewish critics in the diaspora ranging from Simon Rawidowicz to Michael Selzer to groups such as the American Council for Judaism and Breira’. Their mantle has been taken up most recently by the likes of Tony Judt and in edited collections like Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon’s Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, or Seth Farber’s Radicals, Rabbis and Peacemakers: Conversations with Jewish Critics of Israel. There has always also been a strain of Jewish ultra-orthodox anti-Zionism, the most famous representatives being Neturei Karta and the Satmar Rebbe.
There were also vigorous debates beginning in the 1980s about a group of Israeli intellectuals collected under the rubric of post-Zionism, including Baruch Kimmerling, Adi Ophir, Uri Ram, Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin and Ilan Pappé. So there is clearly a long and respectable tradition of anti-Zionism and post-Zionism that has no animus against Jews and Judaism. To the contrary, they are ‘principled anti-Zionists’ in precisely the sense of forging their position on the basis of what they hold to be good for Jews and Judaism. Moreover, on the basis of the many strands within Zionism that have opposed political Zionism, like those affiliated with Brit Shalom and the Ihud faction, and those who argued for binationalism, like Martin Buber, Judah Magnes and Hannah Arendt, many of the policies of the state of Israel would be considered reprehensible to their ethical and political principles. Zionism is hardly monolithic, and it cannot be conflated with the policies of the state of Israel, which themselves have to be appreciated in a historically nuanced fashion.
It is therefore clear that not every critique of Israel is antisemitic and that not all forms of anti-Zionism are animated by Jew-hatred whether advanced by non-Jews or Jews. In fact, numerous Jewish traditions have insisted that preservation of what is most precious about Judaism and Jewishness demands a principled anti-Zionism or post-Zionism. Indeed, the platitude that criticism of Israel per se is not the problem is readily acknowledged. Even those who do not subscribe to it fully—like many on the right side of the spectrum who have engaged in a wholesale condemnation of ‘the left’ as antisemitic if not in intention then at least in giving support to those who are antisemitic when they find fault with Israel—readily utter it before they go on to condemn all those who criticize the policies of Israel.
Reflections on the new Judaeophobia: Butler, Sartre and the Frankfurt School
Judith Butler has explicitly critiqued those who claim that critics of Israel ‘are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent’, as former Harvard University President Lawrence Summers famously put it. For Butler, this claim has the effect of censorship ‘in effect if not intent’. In developing her argument, she makes several salient points about the use of the charge of antisemitism to disarm critics of Israel or Zionism. First and most evident is that it dilutes the claim when incidents like the torching of synagogues or the desecration of Jewish cemeteries or attacks on individuals as Jews occur, since all accusations of antisemitism are flattened. Second, it contributes to conditions in which all criticisms of Israel are deemed as hate speech. Third, and most problematically for Butler, it forecloses any distinction between Jews and Israel, Jewishness and Zionism.
This failure to discriminate capitulates to the antisemitic fantasy that all Jews act together in a worldwide conspiracy, and it disables any critical distance between members of the heterogeneous Jewish community as well as between Jews and the state of Israel. ‘In holding out for a distinction to be made between Israel and Jews’, Butler insists she is ‘calling for a space for dissent for Jews, and non-Jews, who have criticisms of Israel to articulate’ while ‘also opposing anti-Semitic reductions of Jewishness to Israeli interests’. In making this case, Butler rightfully calls for criteria that can delimit the difference between antisemitism and anti-Zionism.
When does criticism of Israel become antisemitism?
The criteria for distinguishing legitimate criticism of Israel from anti-Zionism that masks Judaeophobia are hardly self-evident and present philosophical and political quandaries. Efforts to delineate some standards focus on the language used to describe Israel and the selectivity with which Israel is constituted within the new world order. The most well known of these is Natan Sharansky’s ‘3-D test’ in which he stipulates that double standards applied to Israel, delegitimization of the state of Israel and demonization of Israel each contain the kernel of antisemitism. These criteria are still somewhat loose, but are clarified through examples, and they were incorporated into international juridical forums like the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (now the FRA).
Double standards are a form of what Zygmunt Bauman calls ‘allosemitism’, the singling out of Jews and Judaism as so special, different, unique and exemplary that they merit different standards of normative assessment. This, Bauman asserts, is the fountainhead of antisemitism. ‘When criticism of Israel is applied selectively’, writes Sharansky, or ‘when Israel is singled out … for human rights abuses while the behavior of known and major abusers, such as China, Iran, Cuba, and Syria, is ignored’, then this is Judaeophobia. But the criteria of ‘double standards’ has its own double standards. Supporters of Israel often argue that Israel is unique in the region of the Middle East in many ways: it is the sole democracy (they forget Turkey when they make this argument); it is a lone island of Jewishness in a sea of Islam; and it is the only true western ally in a region dominated by non-western mores and political institutions. Israel’s supporters, therefore, claim time and again that it is different, unique, singular, and that, as a result, it ought to be singled out in the region. Indeed, precisely because of these singularities and the ways in which Israel functions in practice and symbolically in the Middle East, it is not a state like any other. For religious, political and geo-strategic reasons, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is over-determined, and therefore magnified attention on it is partly warranted.
Likewise, the criteria concerning the delegitimization of Israel have merit, especially when Israel is the only Jewish state and almost half the world’s Jews are Israelis. But they can also serve to delegitimize certain arguments. On the one hand, the claim that Israel is not a legitimate state, for example because it is a lever of neo-colonialism in the Middle East, is tantamount to a rhetorical justification for the claim that Israel ought not to exist. This is a step towards what Raymond Aron famously called étatcide—the wholesale elimination of the people of Israel—when de Gaulle uttered his famous ‘sermon to the Hebrews’ on 27 November 1967, calling them ‘un peuple d’elite, sur de soi-meme et dominateur’ (an elite people, sure of itself, and dominators). De Gaulle’s pithy rebuke of Israel is a good example of group stigmatization, whereby the actions of Israel’s political leaders are conflated with the character of Jews in general in a way that reiterates antisemitic calumnies in the context of the acts or actions of the Israeli government. In fact, when de Gaulle invoked the images of Jewish arrogance, superiority, power and domination, removing the protective shield that he symbolically represented as head of the Resistance, in Aron’s words, he ‘authorized a new antisemitism’. Delegitimization overlaps with double standards when the Jewish national liberation struggle or Jew’s rights to national self-determination are denied at the same time that they are supposedly accorded to all other groups. But, on the other hand, what about the argument of Israel’s delegitimacy that is coupled to a larger critique of the form of the nation-state and the inherent pathologies of nationalism? For many on the radical left, this is central to their position and, if one takes this stance consistently then there can be nothing antisemitic about the claim that Israel is an illegitimate state since all nation-states would be deemed illegitimate.
Demonization as the third test of anti-Zionist Judaeophobia takes many forms. Its most oft-cited modes are the claim that Israel is a racial state (encapsulated in the so-called ‘Zionism is racism’ UN resolution), the contention that Israel is an apartheid state, the assertion that Israel’s dispossession of Palestinian territory in the West Bank is akin to the colonial American expropriation of native land, or instances of Holocaust banalization, instrumentalization or even Holocaust inversion that suggest that ‘Israel has become like the Nazis’ in its persecution of the Palestinians, the Jews of the Middle East. When Manfred Gerstenfeld writes that ‘Holocaust inversion manifests itself in many ways’, including ‘speech, writing, and visual media’, as well as ‘cartoons, graffiti and placards’, he could be addressing any of the central tropes for the demonization of Israel. In the case of Holocaust inversion, ‘it employs sinister characterization of Israel and Israelis, Nazi symbols, and sometimes takes the form of Nazi genocidal terminology to describe Israel’s actions’. Robert Wistrich acutely explains why Holocaust inversion is a pernicious form of the new Judaeophobia:
‘anti-Zionists’ who insist on comparing Zionism and the Jews with Hitler and the Third Reich appear unmistakably to be de facto anti-Semites, even if they vehemently deny the fact! This is largely because they knowingly exploit the reality that Nazism in the postwar world has become the defining metaphor of absolute evil. For if Zionists are ‘Nazis’ and if Sharon really is Hitler, then it becomes a moral obligation to wage war against Israel. That is the bottom line of much contemporary anti-Zionism. In practice, this has become the most potent form of contemporary anti-Semitism.
In each modality of the demonization of Israel, one can make the same arguments that Wistrich does about what is insidious about the nazification of Israel. In each case, the claim is a shorthand identification of Israel with the most grievous instances of political evil and the only morally defensible response is to wage a campaign fired by moral indignation against Israel, if the analogy holds. For each of these arguments that demonize Israel depend on making an analogy between practices in Israel today and other historical incidents of oppression, persecution, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity or even genocide. And analogic thinking is inherently fallacious when it does not consider how these historical comparisons differ. In each case—Nazi Germany, apartheid South Africa, the colonial United States—the circumstances and situations were very different from Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, instituted by processes, ideologies and practices very different than those of Zionism, and producing conditions of horror on a very different scale.
But, at the same time, all comparative accounts depend on drawing out analogies, and making comparisons is intrinsic to thinking about the moral and political significance of events. There is a paradoxical logic at work here, for it is only on the basis of understanding what is unique about a historical event that one has the basis of comparison. And when one makes comparisons without attention to these singularities, there is a risk that the political mobilization made possible by such comparisons (boycotts, divestment, anticolonial struggles) themselves become unethical. This is no different when it comes to Israel, which means that all forms of comparison ought to be open for discussion but in a way attenuated to the specific circumstances of life in Israel and Palestine and without making the analogies so facile that their only purpose is to serve as a good sound-bite.
Consequently, the criteria of demonization, delegitimization and double standards for demarcating when criticism of Israel becomes Judaeophobia are a useful beginning, but they are still tenuous and pose problems. We need a more rigorous set of criteria that will enable interlocutors to argue about the issues without each side slinging arrows and epithets at the other. As Butler pointed out, it is imperative that we conceptually pull apart anti-Zionism and antisemitism, but it proves a difficult task for philosophical and political reasons.
Jean-Paul Sartre on anti-racist ‘neo-antisemitism’
But, presuming that we can distinguish anti-Israel attitudes from antisemitism, what matters in terms of the new Judaeophobia is how such criticisms of Israel are mobilized politically and in what circumstances they become antisemitic. Jean-Paul Sartre, for his part, provided a powerful analysis of why the formula that ‘Zionism is racism’ proves to be antisemitic. When he accepted a degree honoris causa in philosophy from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on 7 November 1976, his remarks that evening indicted those who asserted that ‘Zionism is racism’ as racists themselves. Those who advocate this position, he sternly suggested, align themselves with the nefarious politics of racial antisemitism by implying that ‘the Jews are in their eyes a race’. In the second volume of his Critique de la raison dialectique, he had already analysed how Stalinist anti-Zionism, which was avowedly anti-racist, ultimately reinscribed racism, a phenomenon Sartre already called at the time ‘neo-antisemitism’. While ‘anti-Semitism in its basic form as racism … was obviously condemned by Marxist ideology (as indeed by mere democratic liberalism)’, Sartre made the case that Stalinist anti-Zionism nonetheless ‘became racist anti-Semitism through an inexorable dialectic’. Sartre’s dialectical analysis proves more compelling than definitional approaches in assessing the politics of anti-Zionism.
Stalin’s anti-racist antisemitism was animated by political exigencies, specifically the problem of integrating Jews into ‘socialism in one country’. According to Sartre, there were three main circumstances that aroused Stalin’s concern. First, there were Jews dispersed across the Soviet Union and the capitalist world, and the establishment of Israel compounded this fear of the existence of a global Jewish diaspora. Second, Stalin imagined that ‘the emergence of a Jewish state under the particular control of American capitalism (via the mediation of Jews in the United States), the activities of the Zionist League, etc.’ constituted a threat of ‘traitors within’. Third, ‘any specificity had to be denied them [Jews]’ in the name of socialism. The result was to position Jews within the inherent contradictions of Soviet Communism: ‘they were denied any cultural autonomy, because it prevented integration; but they were denied integration, because their historical past already designated them as traitors and they had to be kept under constant surveillance.’ The antinomies between de-Jewification and integration led, according to Sartre, to extermination as ‘the inescapable solution’. ‘We shall recognize in his policy towards the Jews’, Sartre concluded, ‘a neo-anti-Semitism of political rather than ethnic origin’.
As he had suggested was the case with the sound-bite ‘Zionism is racism’, Sartre explicitly argued that neo-antisemitism sprang from ‘the old anti-Semitic racism’, whence it derived its virulence. A circularity reinforced the Soviet regime’s antisemitism, which was animated by populist fear and dislike of Jews. Popular antisemitism, Sartre maintained, had an economic foundation. But ‘the campaign against the Jews once more took on that diversionary aspect that it had always had, under all governments. By reinforcing racism, political anti-Semitism ended up dissolving into it.’ For political antisemitism ultimately was premised on the fact that ‘the Jewish group was dangerous by its nature’ and this was true both for the masses and for the leaders who exploited this ‘petrified web of traditions’. The logic of Stalin’s political anti-Zionism also reiterated bourgeois antisemitism, whose ‘universalism of Reason’ began with the assumption that ‘Jews are countryless’. For Stalinists, however, their ‘cosmopolitanism’ was a degraded form of internationalism that was lambasted as the ‘Jewish International’. Ultimately, therefore, Sartre reasoned that the assault on Zionism ‘seeks to preserve racism while claiming to transcend it’. Consequently, Sartre demonstrated that ‘Stalin and his collaborators were retotalized as racists by the masses’ and this transformation of ‘neo-anti-Semitism into racism’ was ‘at once free and inevitable’. Sartre’s analysis could largely be applied mutatis mutandis to much of the unprincipled anti-Zionist Judaeophobia today.
The Frankfurt School and ‘ticket thinking’
As was the case with Sartre’s analysis of Stalinist anti-racist neo-antisemitism, Max Horkeimer and Theodor Adorno had already sketched the contours of what they also later pointed to as being ‘neo-antisemitism’. In the last section added in 1947 of their ‘Elements of Antisemitism’, which concluded Dialectic of Enlightenment, they laid down their critique. The seventh set of theorems they explored opens with a stunning line considering that it was written just after the Holocaust: ‘But there are no more antisemites.’ In developing this point, Horkheimer and Adorno argue that antisemitism as such is no longer necessary when the logic of globalized capitalism replaces all thinking with stereotypes, clichés, jargon, stock phrases, dogmatic adherence to ideology and, generally, to the petrification of thought, which they call ‘ticket thinking’. ‘In the world of mass series production’, they claim, ‘stereotypes replace individual categories’.
In a world governed by instrumental rationality, where there is only homo economicus, they contend that individual decisions are taken over by corporate interests: large capital, trade unions, political parties and mass culture. Modern means of communication colonize all differences and mankind is divided into power blocs. All mediations are eliminated by the ‘cogwheel mechanism of industry’. ‘Ticket thinking’, they continue, ‘is a product of industrialization and its advertising machine, [and] extends to international relations’. Antisemitism, they argue, is itself a symptom of the mass production of ‘ticket thinking’ by the culture industry. Since this is the case, the Jews could be replaced as victims, as is evident by the rampant globalized Islamophobia today. And Jews themselves can easily get caught up in the cogwheels of ‘ticket thinking’. Horkheimer and Adorno thus suggest how a frenetic, paranoid and delusional neo-conservative philosemitism serves as the reverse of Islamism’s Judaeophobia, each a symptom of ‘ticket thinking’ in the age of digital communication in which stereotypes stand in the place of critical thought.
Their analysis also indicates the ways in which the struggle against antisemitism can paradoxically feed the symptoms it seeks to alleviate. Horkheimer and Adorno suggest that the globalized marketplace defines the production, dissemination and consumption of ideas whose logic is governed by commodification and fetishization. This ‘ticket thinking’ has also infused political struggles. This means that those who seek to gain publicity to promote their positions can do so by referencing the pre-packaged reservoir of anti-Jewish images and, in so doing, provoke an immediate response from the army of NGOs who combat antisemitism.
Since their fundraising depends on using the Internet constantly to show their supporters that they are marshalling resources in the struggle, they disseminate petitions against petitions, for example, those calling for boycotts against Israel. They ostracize books and articles that they claim cross the line between criticism of Israel and antisemitism by publicizing books and articles that respond point by point to the charges, which often helps to spur sales or leads to the wider circulation of what they oppose (through alternative Internet media and the blogosphere). Two good examples here are the campaign against Jimmy Carter’s Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid and John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (and the London Review of Books article that preceded it). In the media-driven frenzied war of words, the medium is often the only message, since in many discussions in the public sphere the only thing that people often have read are the emails or blogs that have pre-scripted their response. The global flow thus helps to publicize political causes, draws together—albeit largely only virtually—unlikely alliances, and helps to generate funding for the next skirmish. All this leads to little more than the propagation of the ‘ticket thinking’ that is the very source of the Judaeophobic imagination.
So what’s new?
In these glosses on the work of the Frankfurt School, Sartre, Butler and Poliakov, therefore, it becomes apparent that not only is the so-called ‘new antisemitism’ not very new, but its outlines had already been identified and discussed by some of the leading theorists of antisemitism. What they discerned was a shift in the epistemic and political configuration of Judaeophobia from biological towards cultural arguments, or even explicitly anti-racist positions that nonetheless reinscribed the logic of racism in castigating the inherently malevolent tendencies of ‘the Jewish character’ and in defaming Judaism and Jewishness. But at the same time, the code of anti-Zionism and its antithesis—anti-anti-Zionism—has come to replace the need for antisemitism per se in the age of ‘ticket thinking’, when political mobilization, whether by the left or the right, often depends on the reduction of a critical perspective to a sound-bite or a visual image. The spectacle of the Jewish body within the programmes outlined for the body politic draw on a litany of figures and clichés that are sometimes irresistible to those whose political exigencies seek a shortcut to achieving utopian solutions to the dark side of globalization. And the conflicts of the Middle East and the Arab-Israeli struggle—for this is often the imaginary, symbolic and real site where the tensions of globalized capitalism play out—are the perennial reference points. But this should hardly be surprising, since visions of political salvation have focused on this site for two thousand years.