The enigma of ‘cosmopolitan anti-Semitism’
Hamas hates Jews. That much is no secret. So when protestors in London and other Western capitals, or on Ivy League campuses, chant, ‘We are all Hamas’ and celebrate a ‘resistance movement’ committed to wiping Israel off the map, it’s understandable that many worry about a rising tide of anti-Semitism. Unlike Hamas, however, those protestors aligned with the left (as opposed to the avowed Islamists on the same demonstrations) do not consider themselves to be anti-Semitic. They are anti-Zionist, they say. And the difference is profound.
Indeed, it is possible to be vehemently opposed to Zionism – in principle and in practice – without being anti-Jewish. Many on the left, and many fair-minded observers, bristle at what they perceive as a deliberate attempt to conflate the two things. Perhaps it’s true that the charge of anti-Semitism is unfairly held over even those who criticise Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza without disputing the country’s right to defend itself. If people say they are not anti-Semitic, we should be glad. But we should also expect them to take reasonable steps to distinguish themselves from those who are. And that’s where many on the left ‘protest too much’ (and distinguish themselves too little).
Of course, it’s possible and even likely that many protestors chanting, ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ have in mind an inclusive, secular state shared by Arabs and Jews (and even construct fantasies about ‘a socialist federation of the Middle East’). But they must know the slogan means something very different to others, and specifically to the movement that actually represents the Palestinian people. The one that is actually ‘resisting’ Israel in their name. For Hamas and similar groups, the slogan means the annihilation of the Jewish state and the removal (this is the most charitable understanding) of the Jewish people in favour of an Islamist caliphate straddling the region.
So why don’t left-wing anti-Zionists make an effort to differentiate their own message? Given that some protestors have been embarrassed by the awkward question of which river and which sea, there is even an opportunity to clarify the geographical terms. As a sometime copywriter, I propose, free of charge: ‘From the Jordan to the Med – no more hate, love instead!’?
Is it missing a certain je ne sais quoi? A frisson of radical chic? It seems that, for at least some Western leftists, sharing a slogan with Islamists is not only not embarrassing, but positively appealing. ‘If these people are hated and feared by the Western establishment, we’re on their side! We are all Hamas/Hezbollah/the Iranian mullahs!’ If the association comes with a risk of being called anti-Semitic – something that would put off woolly liberals – that only adds an edge to one’s radicalism. Because, of course, you can’t really be a racist.
Their racism and ours
For the radical left, racism is part of an ideological package that includes national chauvinism and disparages a foreign ‘other’. British or American students draped in keffiyehs and waving Palestinian flags are explicitly identifying with the people they are convinced real racists really hate. The enemy they chant slogans against is an outpost of ‘white settler colonialism’; Israelis (even the non-white, Mizrahi plurality) are apparently not foreign enough to be the victims of racism. Much less, presumably, are the Jews who are so well integrated into our own societies.
It should be noted, though, that the rhetorical charge of anti-Semitism has not been altogether abandoned to defenders of Israel. Progressives still level it against critics of ‘globalism’, especially when they criticise a prominent Jewish philanthropist like George Soros. Indeed, the idea of rootless Jewish financiers manipulating world affairs is a classic anti-Semitic trope. But is it possible to be anti-globalist – in the sense of objecting to the influence of unaccountable transnational bodies over sovereign states – without being anti-Semitic? Yes, just as surely as one can be anti-Zionist. The test is your attitude to actual Jews.
If anti-Zionism is not by definition anti-Semitic, then, can we also agree that Zionism itself is not by definition racist? The problem is that, for many opponents, that is precisely the issue. They argue that Zionism is an intrinsically racist, imperialist and colonialist project. Which means its supporters are not only politically wrong but morally tainted. So it’s an awkward fact that two out of every three British Jews describe themselves as Zionist, while 73% say they feel very or somewhat attached to Israel. Meanwhile, 83% of American Jews say an attachment to Israel is part of what it means to be Jewish.
Can we really label millions of Jews as racist on the basis of a belief that is intimately bound up with their identity as Jews? Does this not make anti-Zionism intrinsically hostile to Jews? Logically, perhaps, it is not in itself racist to claim that most Jews happen to be racist by virtue of their political convictions rather than their race. (It’s bizarre and disturbing, but not illogical.) Jews can redeem themselves by rejecting Zionism, and will be lauded for doing so. But, as a matter of fact, this position sets the anti-Zionist against the majority of Jews. This will not deter a dogmatist. It ought to deter anyone more thoughtful.
It is anti-Zionist dogmatism that underpins the anti-Semitism that has plagued the far left in recent years. Not least in the British Labour Party. For many observers, the crisis of anti-Semitism in the party, peaking when veteran left-winger Jeremy Corbyn was party leader, has been perplexing. The Labour Party? Racist? It just doesn’t sound right. It’s true that there’s an historic tradition of national chauvinism in the unions and wider Labour movement, but that is not where the current controversy emerged from. Corbyn represents the far left, the internationalist left. The anti-racist left.
Anti-Semitism beyond borders
It did not help clarify matters that Labour’s defenders often admitted there were a few unfortunate cases of anti-Semitism, but suggested they were no more than was to be expected in any large organisation – as if there are simply a certain amount of anti-Semites in society and every party should be expected to have its fair share. That’s not how these things work. If allegations had emerged of anti-Semitism in the Tory party – and especially a generation or more ago – most observers would have found it easy to believe that some Colonel Blimp type had been spouting old-fashioned, xenophobic slurs about Jews not being British. But someone like that would not join Corbyn’s Labour party.
It also did not help, then, that one of the most talked-about incidents involving Corbyn himself appeared to follow this template. When he was Labour leader, footage emerged of a meeting some years earlier in 2013, when Corbyn had said of certain ‘Zionists’ that, ‘having lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives, they don’t understand English irony’. This was widely condemned as suggesting Jewish people are not properly English or British. According to the leading lawyer Anthony Julius: ‘It was as if the political requirement to humiliate the “Zionists” found its words in the anti-Semitic subconscious of an English middle-class man.’
On the face of it, this was certainly an archetypally anti-Semitic quip, almost too perfect, in fact, in its evocation of old-fashioned ‘golf club racism’. But consider the audience: not an audience of ‘English middle-class men’, but of left-wing activists assembled at the Palestinian Return Centre in London. Corbyn was in fact praising the Palestinian Authority representative to the UK for his ‘effective’ use of ‘English irony’ at a meeting in Parliament, which apparently had not been appreciated by some in the audience. For those who found Corbyn’s joke funny, I suspect the humour was in the comedy of reversal. It’s precisely because English Jews are less likely than other minorities to have their Englishness questioned that it’s funny to suggest they could be out-Englished by an actual foreigner. Boom, tish!
I make this point not to defend Corbyn, but to home in on what’s distinctive about the radical left’s view of the world, and what animates its dogmatic anti-Zionism. For all his faults, Corbyn has never in any other context been accused of an excess of British patriotism. In his milieu, Englishness and Britishness are not qualities to aspire to, but if anything to be ashamed of. Corbyn never expected to become Labour leader, and it’s been suggested he would rather have been foreign secretary than prime minister. Palestine is his comfort zone.
The same seems to be true of those attracted to Islamist chic: the fact that ‘the river and the sea’ are both thousands of miles away only adds to their allure. And cosmopolitan morality demands that, in any given conflict, we take the side of those who are least like us. In this case, the marginalised, subaltern and demonised Hamas over the wealthy, modern, Western-backed Israel.
For Tom Holland and others, woke moralism of this sort represents a triumph of Christianity, but perhaps this is an illustration of how particular elements of our Christian inheritance can be distorted beyond recognition. Jesus famously warns us against becoming so preoccupied with the mote in someone else’s eye that we miss the beam in our own (Matthew 7). But what happens when we let someone else stand in for ‘us’ so we can enjoy the moral thrill of ‘self-criticism’ at the expense of a scapegoat? Perhaps cosmopolitan anti-Semitism is what happens.
Again, none of this is to conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, still less to delegitimise all protests against the killing of civilians in Gaza. But when protestors ignore the murderous racism and strategic callousness of Hamas to insist that Zionism is the problem, and that the very idea of a Jewish state is inherently racist and malevolent, what else are we supposed to call it?
Most forms of racism are prejudices attached to particular peoples. The Jews have the misfortune of being a people attached to a particular but very fluid prejudice, the idea that the world’s problems can be blamed on them. Historically, Jews have been both disparaged as racially inferior and accused of using their superior intellect to control the world. They have been demonised as Bolsheviks and as arch-capitalists. They have been despised as rootless, the perennial other to gentile nations, and are now reviled as nationalists, the ultra-white torch-bearers of colonialism. What torch is borne by their cosmopolitan accusers?