[ABSTRACT: Two types of prejudice can be distinguished. Social prejudice (“racism”) targets individuals as identifiable members of despised groups, is driven emotionally by contempt, and cognitively by belief in stereotypes. Political prejudice targets groups considered as collectivities, is driven emotionally by fear, and cognitively by pseudo-explanatory theories purporting to show why the group in question is to be feared. Antisemitic prejudice can occur in either or both of these forms. Present-day “anti-Zionism” can easily be shown to have no necessary connection with social antisemitism. On the other hand its characteristic modes of discourse can equally easily be shown to embody, in new versions, all of the main cognitive and emotional structures of political antisemitism.]
This paper offers a very brief summary of the main arguments of two chapters (2 &3) of a book I am working on at present. Its title is Blaming the Jews: the Persistence of a Delusion. It is under contract to Indiana University Press, and should, I hope, appear in 2018.
When the American Studies Association (ASA) endorsed a boycott of Israeli academic institutions, scores of institutions, including over two hundred and fifty university presidents, distanced themselves from the ASA’s actions. Some did so in strong language. But almost all framed their argument in terms of the ASA’s encroachment upon the sphere protected by the doctrine of academic freedom. [. . . ] Nevertheless, if BDS is anti-Semitic, then criticising it for its violations of academic freedom have something of a busting-Al-Capone-for-tax-evasion quality to them.
–Kenneth L. Marcus, The Definition of Anti-Semitism
I
Before the Second World War it would have seemed incomprehensible to give the above title to an essay of this type. In those days Zionism was the name of a controversial, mainly Jewish movement aiming at the creation of a national home for the Jewish People. Its arguments were widely debated in Jewish circles, within which it numbered, in those days, more dissenters than supporters. The former would certainly have been amazed at the suggestion that their opposition to Zionism in any way exposed them to a charge of antisemitism. Since 1948, however, a self-governing Jewish National State, Israel, has existed. “Anti-Zionist” is nowadays a term of political self-description brandished by those, mainly on the extreme Left of Western politics1, who hold that Israel should never have been allowed to come into existence in the first place, and that it remains an “illegitimate” state. These views, and in particular the second, commit the “anti-Zionist”, in turn, to denying the possibility of addressing the alleged “crimes” of Israel by any process of reform short of terminating its existence as a state. Such people therefore bend their efforts to the cause of “delegitimizing” Israel, in the hope of bringing to an end its history as a Jewish state, and replacing it with a larger, putatively Arab-majority successor-state, in which Jews would be merely one of a number of ethnic and religious minorities.
II
It is arguable that this project is hostile to the interests of the vast majority of Israeli citizens, around between 25% and 30% of whom are not, as it happens, Jews. But is it, as many of its critics are inclined to think, antisemitic? Media commentators, on the rare occasions when they confront this question, are apt to dismiss it from serious consideration on the ground that, since, arguably, little consensus is available on the meaning of ‘antisemitism,’ such accusations can safely be dismissed as political rather than moral in intention: in other words as attempts to silence “anti-Zionist” criticism of Israel by undermining the moral credentials of its spokesmen.
The suggestion floating behind such media disclaimers is that the definition of terms as contested as this one, and possibly of terms per se, is at bottom a matter of arbitrary stipulation.2
Is that in fact so? Who, or what, determines the meaning of terms: human stipulation or, to put it grandly, The Nature of Things? Philosophers have frequently tended to opt for one or other of these stories to the exclusion of the other. There is a case to be made, however, for regarding the fabrication of meaning as a joint enterprise in which both play a part. Consider, for example, the biological term of art “species”. A species is a group of individual organisms capable of mating to produce fertile offspring. So much is stipulation: the term “species” means that because that is what biologists have collectively decreed that it should mean. “Knowing the meaning” of “species” in that sense is, in effect, a matter of knowing what language-game (Sprachspiel: Wittgenstein’s term) we human beings have chosen to play with the word: in this case the “game” of sorting organisms into groups satisfying that (stipulative) requirement. However, “knowing the meaning” of a term can also mean knowing how to single out instances of the kinds of thing the term applies to. And at this point Nature enters the picture. We can’t, in other words, just stipulate that this or that collection of organisms shall be held to constitute a species. It only constitutes a species if all its members are capable of interacting sexually to produce fertile offspring. And whether a particular group of organisms meets that specification is clearly a factual question: something, in other words, to be determined, not by arbitrary stipulation, but by empirical enquiry.
III
Is something of the sort also true of that other abstract term “antisemitism”? I think that it is. But to see what, precisely, we need to go back a step and consider a more fundamental term, “prejudice”. Let’s adopt Gordon Allport’s3 shrewd definition:
D1. Prejudice is thinking ill of others without sufficient warrant.
So far, everything is indeed “just a matter of arbitrary stipulation”. D1 just records how we English speakers have decided to use (or better, fallen into the habit of using) the term “prejudice.” But now, by analogy with the question, “Which collections of organisms as a matter of fact satisfy the definition of a species?” we can ask, “Which human phenomena turn out as a matter of fact to satisfy D1?” At this point, just as in the other case, we pass abruptly from stipulation to empirical enquiry. And a very little reflection on the passing scene is enough to dislodge the thought that there are two general kinds of phenomena (no doubt among others) that do so. I shall label them, respectively, social prejudice and political prejudice. These differ from one another in three respects:
R1. Social prejudice targets individuals; political prejudice targets collectivities.
R2. Social prejudice is driven, emotionally, by contempt, political prejudice by fear.
R3. Social prejudice justifies itself merely by appeal to a range of contemptuous stereotypes, to which individuals of the despised group are held to conform Political prejudice, by contrast, embodies some complex, theoretically elaborated narrative explaining why the targeted group considered as an organised whole is to be feared.
These distinctions can readily be exemplified in common life; for instance, in the differing forms taken by the anti-Catholic prejudice that used to be not uncommon in England. Social prejudice against Catholics involves dislike of individual Catholics as superstitious, idol-worshipping, Jesuitical and priest-ridden hypocrites, incapable of thinking for themselves; and for all these reasons not at all the sort of person one finds it pleasant to be forced into contact with in daily life or to have brought home to the house by one’s less fastidious children4. Someone politically prejudiced against Catholics, on the other hand, may find individual Catholics amusing, enjoy playing chess with a Jesuit friend, and so forth, but entertain a holy fear of the hidden power of the Catholic Church, and of such organizations as Opus Dei, concerning whose sinister machinations he or she will be prepared to inform, in some detail, anyone prepared to listen.
IV
Prejudice against Jews can also come in either, or both, of these two forms. Social prejudice against Jews – social antisemitism — sees individual Jews as, inter alia, greasy, hook-nosed, money-grubbing, noisy, over-familiar and over-emotional alien vulgarians, too clever, moreover, for their own good: as thoroughly disgusting types, that is to say, with whom no English gentleman, however sadly short of the money that sticks so miraculously to Jewish fingers, would wish to associate either himself or his family. Such an evocation of the mind of the social antisemite is, like my earlier evocation of anti-catholic animus, to some extent parodic, but does to a degree serve to capture both the content and the essential silliness of the thing. English literature and letters offer plenty of actual examples no less startling in their inanity.5
Political antisemitism on the other hand, can in principle cohabit easily with friendship towards, and even a high moral regard for, individual Jews (the cant phrase, “Some of my best friends are Jews”, uttered by a political antisemite, may at times express no more than the truth, that is to say). This is the case because political antisemitism is driven, not by contempt for Jews as individuals, but by fear concerning the supposed “threat” posed by the Jewish people considered as an organised community. Like other forms of political prejudice, political antisemitism disposes of a complex, theoretically elaborated explanatory account of what is to be feared from “the Jews”, and why it is to be feared. The detailed contents of this account have varied greatly over the centuries, but can in the bulk of its variants be assimilated to the following four claims:
PA1. The obsessive concern of Jews with their own interests, and their indifference or contempt for the interests of non-Jews, make them directly and solely responsible for human suffering on a scale far exceeding anything that can be alleged against any other human group, and in particular for whatever specific evil or evils (SE) most concern this or that concrete version of political antisemitism.
PA2. The Jewish community is conspiratorially organised in the pursuit of its self-seeking and heinous goals to such an extent that, through its semi-miraculous ability to acquire and manage money, it has been able to acquire secret control over most of the main social, commercial, political and governmental institutions of non-Jewish society.
PA3. Because of the secret control exercised by the Jewish Conspiracy, and also because of the obsessive concern of the Jewish community with its own interests to the exclusion of those of others, it is simply not feasible to remedy the evils occasioned by the presence of the Jews in non-Jewish society (and in particular Evil SE) by any means short of the total elimination of the Jews.
PA4. Once the elimination of the Jews has been achieved, all those social evils for whose existence they are wholly and alone responsible (including, and especially, Evil SE) will simply cease to exist, without the need for any further action on the part of non-Jews, whose world will, in the nature of things, return forthwith to the perfect state of order natural to it, from which it would never have lapsed had it not been for the mischievous interventions of the Jews.
Two things (no doubt among many others) are worth noting at the outset concerning this type of antisemitism. The four beliefs central to it are not logically independent, but mutually entail and “confirm” one another, composing, in effect, an hermetically self-enclosed and internally defended vision of reality. PA3,, for instance, follows necessarily from the conjunction of PA1 and PA2, as does PA4 from PA1. Any doubts that the convert to political antisemitism may entertain concerning the difficulty of finding evidence of Jewish wickedness outside specifically antisemitic websites or newspapers of the type of the Nazi Der Stürmer can be countered by appeal to PA2. In Kenneth Marcus’s words, “As an ideology it [antisemitism] provides a way to make sense of the entire world and all of history, not just the relatively small territory occupied by the descendants of Jacob”.6
The second thing worthy of note is that it is political antisemitism — antisemitism masquerading as a universally explanatory world-view — and not social antisemitism, that is the potentially lethal form of Judeophobia. Social antisemitism, consisting as it does merely in contempt, nourished by more or less feeble stereotypes, for Jews as individuals, is not essentially eliminationist in character; can provide no motive, either rational or quasi-rational, for getting rid of the Jews once and for all; any more than related kinds of contempt for Blacks or the Irish necessarily impel those who feel them, however rootedly and stubbornly, to set in train a genocide against either group. It is only acute fear that moves us to great efforts to destroy or remove, at all costs, what we understand as occasioning it. And contempt drives out fear. We precisely do not fear, in other words, those we despise.
Political antisemitism, on the other hand, is, by its nature, essentially eliminationist. If one genuinely believes something along the lines of PA1-PA2, then the threat presented by the Jews will appear so serious, and so impossible to combat by other means, that elimination must appear the only possible response to it.
V
Back now to our opening question. Is present-day “anti-Zionism” a version of antisemitism, and if so, why? The usual response to such accusations on the part of “anti-Zionists” is that their purpose is, as the late Tony Judt put it in a telephone interview with the New York Times in 2007, “to stifle harsh criticism of Israel”.7 Such responses have become standard. The equally standard response of opponents of “anti Zionism” has been to reply, reasonably enough, that one does not show the falsity of an accusation by impugning its motivation. From time to time, however, in the now massive archive of debate over “Anti-Zionism” and the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) Movement, a better argument than Judt’s makes its appearance. In summary it goes like this:
(AZA). Antisemitism is a form of racism. Racism is, essentially, hatred of and/or contempt for, individual members of some despised human group, coupled with the desire to exclude such people from the society of, and the advantages enjoyed by, a dominant group. As such, it is logically distinct from, and hence in no way necessarily entailed by, opposition – however violent and rancorous – towards a political entity: towards a state, say, or towards a mode of political organization. Hence, anti-Zionist opposition to the State of Israel in no way entails antisemitism; that is to say, racial hostility to individual Jews as Jews. It may in fact be accompanied by antisemitism in aberrant individual cases, but it need not be, and for the most part is not, since the bulk of present–day anti-Zionists, like others on the Left of politics, are staunch opponents of racism in any shape or form.”
To all appearances AZA demonstrates the independence of opposition to Israel from “racism”, with the term “racism” understood, as it virtually exclusively is in contemporary debate, as equivalent to the sort of thing we have here defined as social prejudice. If the terms “antisemitism” and “social prejudice (racism) directed against individual Jews as such” were conterminous, then AZA would indeed be sufficient to demonstrate the logical independence of “anti-Zionism” from antisemitism. But, as we have seen, the two terms are by no means conterminous. Antisemitism can indeed manifest itself as a form of social prejudice. But it can also manifest itself as a form of political prejudice. It follows that showing “anti-Zionism” to be logically independent of Judeophobic racism (of prejudice against individual Jews as Jews, that is to say) is insufficient to show it to be logically independent of antisemitism tout court. To show that, it would be necessary to show “anti-Zionism” to be logically independent, not merely of social antisemitism, but also of political antisemitism.
VI
That is a much harder requirement for present-day “anti-Zionism” to meet. On the face of it, “anti-Zionist” and BDS discourse standardly exhibits versions of all four of the standard dogmas of political antisemitism, and does so in ways that are by no means merely accidental but, rather, essential to its coherence.
For a start, the bulk of “anti-Zionist’ and BDS writing, in tune with PA3, is eliminationist in character. The aim is not to intervene critically, with this or that political end in view, in the politics of an independent, self-governing Jewish-majority state, but to bring about the destruction of that state and its replacement with an Arab Muslim-majority state.
The main ground given by “anti-Zionist” individuals and groups for urging the elimination of Jewish political autonomy is, in line with PA1, that the Jewish state is guilty of iniquity on a scale that beggars description and dwarfs comparison. Two examples will suffice. Here is the “video-journalist” Anthony Lawson, writing in 2013 on the blog Intifada: Voice of Palestine:
I get incensed when so many people – even intelligent commentators like Paul Craig Roberts and Man of the People Roger Waters – insist on comparing Israel to Nazi Germany, when the comparison is quite absurd. Israel’s policies are far worse than Nazi Germany’s ever were.
And, lest one should think that this kind of thing is confined to the blogosphere, here is the leader of the British Labour Party, speaking in 2016 at the launch of a report into alleged antisemitism in his party, and bracketing Israel, on the moral spectrum, with such groups as Isil.
Our Jewish friends are no more responsible for the actions of Israel or the Netanyahu government than our Muslim friends are for those of various self-styled Islamic states or organisations.8
On a more concrete level, Israel is accused of a range of abuses in connection with the its treatment of the Palestinians, including colonialism, the forcible theft of Arab land, running, or in some political narratives being about to run9, an Apartheid state, turning Gaza into a ghetto and of using excessive force in response to attacks from the Hamas and the other jihadist groups based in Gaza and Lebanon
If these and the like charges were simply and incontestably correct, then “anti-Zionism” would not be antisemitic since (by D1) it would not be a form of prejudice. But they are not. Comparisons with Nazi Germany or Daesh are easily shown to be absurd. The charge that Israel is an Apartheid state ignores the multicultural character of Israeli society, both Jewish and non-Jewish, and the extent to which Israel at present offers almost the only safe space in the Middle East for religious and ethnic minorities suffering, elsewhere in the region, acute persecution. (I learned recently, for instance, from Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali, that Israel is the only Middle Eastern state in which Christians are actually increasing in number.)
The bulk of these charges, of colonialism, theft of Arab land, the occupation of the West Bank, the building of the security wall, &c., can furthermore be protected entirely from troublesome contestation only at the cost of circularity. The obvious counter-argument against them is that both the Nakhba and its subsequent consequences for the Palestinians were and remain in part the result of decisions by neighbouring states, and by successive Palestinian political movements, against which the Jewish population has had no recourse but to defend itself. These include the decision on the part of the neighbouring Arab states to refuse partition, and instead to embark on a war of extermination against Jews in Palestine, and the subsequent determination on the part of Palestinian groups to wage permanent low-level war against the Jewish state with the same end in view.
To this “anti-Zionists” are apt to reply that neither the Arab world nor the Palestinians can be held to bear any moral responsibility for these decisions, which are not only fully explicable but fully justified as responses to the “crimes” of the Jews.
This is, plainly, to argue in circles. Moreover, it is to do so in a way that directly invokes a version of the third traditional element of political antisemitism: PA4. If, in the Arab-Israel conflict the Arabs are wholly the innocent parties, and Jewish Israelis the only guilty ones, then it follows necessarily that the elimination of Jewish political autonomy must bring in its train an immediate return to peace, mutual respect and mutual accommodation between all the communities involved. Given the actual state of Arab politics at present, the tide of bloody persecution against Christians and Yazidis and for that matter Shia and Sunni, now engulfing the region, no conclusion could, realistically, be less plausible. But this, it seems, is what the bulk of “anti-Zionists” believe, and build into their utopian accounts of the “one-State solution”.10
The only remaining element of traditional political antisemitism is PA3, the doctrine of Jewish Conspiracy. But a version of that doctrine, in the shape of constantly paraded assertions to the effect that Jews control United States foreign policy, endeavour to suppress all “criticism” of Israel through their control of the media, and so on, has been a central element of “anti-Zionist” and BDS propaganda for at least the past twenty years.
VII
I conclude, therefore, that “anti-Zionism” and the BDS movement are antisemitic in character. Moreover their antisemitism is of the worst kind. They promote, that is to say, a version of political antisemitism indistinguishable, both in its defining elements and their structural inter-relations, from the pre-War Nazi version that led to the Holocaust.
VIII
By way of postscript, I want to suggest two respects in which this conclusion might usefully promote further discussion.
(1) The first concerns the understanding of the nature of antisemitism current in the law. In the case of Frazer v. University and College Union (2013), Ronald Fraser, an academic, charged the University and College Union (UCU) with creating an environment of antisemitic harassment, hostile to himself and other Jewish members, through its decision to support the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement. The issue raised by the case was, that is to say, precisely whether the criticism/demonization of Israel characteristic of BDS and of contemporary “anti-Zionism” in general, is in fact antisemitic. The employment tribunal that heard the case, though it refused to rule on the meaning of “antisemitism”, ruled that, since criticism of Israel, of whatever kind, falls within the gamut of political free speech, and hence cannot legitimately be regarded as antisemitic, the Fraser action therefore merely represented an attempt to restrain free speech for political ends.11
If the arguments presented here are sound, then the conclusion of the tribunal seem, at the very least, to have been questionable. If we have argued correctly, that is to say, the bulk of “anti-Zionist” and BDS activity is “political” only in the sense that Mein Kampf was a political text and Der Stürmer a political broadsheet.
(2) My second suggestion for further discussion concerns the capacity of political antisemitism to harm, not only Jews, but also non-Jews. The threat it poses to non-Jews is not, at least in the first instance, a threat to life and property, but it is a serious threat nonetheless.
The main advantage offered to non-Jews by political antisemitism, along with the exhilarating but delusive sense of having penetrated to the heart of things afforded by any competently concocted version of PA1-PA4, is that it explains perceived social evils as the fault of forces external to non-Jewish society. In effect, it allows great and powerful nations, political and social movements and ideologies to avoid responsibility for whatever failures of achievement or expectation happen to haunt them at a given moment, by representing themselves as victims. That the alleged victimiser is a small, scattered and intensely vulnerable minority matters little, since belief in PA2 allows it to be invested with secret powers of a demonic and unsearchable nature.
The advantages of this ignoble manoeuvre are, however, purchased at a price that in part consists in the encouragement of kinds of collective over-confidence that can quite easily prove fatal. The failures and inadequacies exported to the shoulders of World Jewry, that is to say, invariably have causes far closer to home, blindness to which may threaten deeply dangerous consequences. German political antisemitism between the wars no doubt owed much of its attraction for ordinary Germans to the fact that it seemed to explain the German defeat in WWI otherwise than by reference to any defect in German arms or strategy. On this account Germany should, and would, have won that war, had the German Army and the nation not been “stabbed in the back” by World Jewry. It is arguable that one effect of this belief was to encourage a degree of over-confidence and blindness to German shortcomings, political military and strategic, twenty years later, that in the event proved fatal. It seems likely that Hitler and the Nazi High command were confirmed in a range of delusions on all three levels by the idea that, this time around, the success of the War Against the Jews could be relied upon to remove the main threat to ultimate German military success. Of course, as we know, the Jewish “threat” was a fantasy threat: the real threat to German arms was the one presented by Russia and America. But that is not how the Germans chose, or were compelled to see things. In the same way, the widespread belief in Western Europe, prior to the unfolding of the “Arab Spring” and its unexpected consequences, that “the Jews”, this time in the shape of the Israelis, represented the only serious threat to peace in the Middle East, was no doubt not without its role in the series of major political miscalculations that led to the present appalling situation. And the same could be said of the role of Arab political antisemitism in facilitating one political and military miscalculation after another on the part of an Islamic world that seems less and less capable of avoiding total internal collapse with each year that passes. A political Weltanschauung founded in antisemitic fantasy, that is to say, is — albeit in more indirect ways — quite as dangerous in the long run to its non-Jewish fabricators, and for that matter to non-Jews with neither belief in nor responsibility for its hallucinatory fantasies, as it is to the Jews.
- Represented in Britain at present by such semi-respectable figures, among others, as Mr Ken Livingstone and Mr George Galloway. ↩︎
- “Some readers may be inclined to dismiss definitional questions as a matter of arbitrary linguistic conventions that may be selected, revised, or replaced at will, and with little consequence. . .” –Kenneth L Marcus, The Definition of Anti-Semitism. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2015), p.6 ↩︎
- Gordon Allport, The Nature of Prejudice, NY: Basic Books (1954), cited in Marcus, The Definition of Antisemitism. ↩︎
- I should explain, perhaps, for the benefit of the nervous reader who may feel his or her “safe space” to be infringed by these words, that I was baptised and brought up a Catholic. ↩︎
- Many of them collected in Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of “the Jew” in English Literature of Society: Racial representations, 1875-1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1993) ↩︎
- Marcus, 193 ↩︎
- New York Times, January 21, 2007 ↩︎
- As reported in the London Daily Telegraph, July 1, 2016, p.9: “Corbyn savaged after remarks that suggest Israel on par with Isil.” ↩︎
- John Mearsheimer, for instance in, “The Future of Palestine”, Anthony Loewenstein and Ahmed Moor, eds., After Zionism, London: Saqui (2012), 135-153, argues that Israel must in due course necessarily become a “fully-fledged Apartheid state” (p.151), and thus by implication, presumably, that it is not one at present. ↩︎
- See, for instance, the essays in Lowenstein and Moor (n.10 above), or Azoulay and Ophir, The One-State Condition: Occupation and Democracy in Israel/Palestine. Stanford: Stanford University Press (2013). ↩︎
- I am grateful to Lesley Klaff for correcting the deficiencies of an earlier version of this paragraph. ↩︎