21st Century Antisemitism
How Hostility to Zionism is Fueling Hatred for Jews in Canada and Around the World
On this difficult Yom Hazikaron (Israeli Remembrance Day), we pause to remember over 1600 Israelis who have died in terrorist attacks and in combat in the past 12 months. With war in Gaza heating up again and no clear end in sight, both Israelis and those who care about them feel a heavy burden of sadness.
The Times of Israel has compiled an Archive called Those We have Lost. Today might be a good day to visit there and learn the individual stories of Israelis who have been taken from us by the actions of our enemies.
As we approach Yom Ha’atzmaut (Israel’s Independence Day) we likewise struggle to know how to celebrate at a time of such difficulty and loss for the people of Israel. Let’s remember the many reasons for joy that the restoration of the Jewish State has provided to us. Even as we continue to experience the pain, both of the losses on the battlefield and the incomprehensible rage on the college campuses and in the streets, let us not forget the manifold blessings which Israel has brought and continues to bring to the Jewish people and indeed to the whole world. Chag ha’atzmaut sameah!
Image: Israelis in Hostage Square prepare to mark Israel’s 76th Independence Day —- Source: Times of Israel
The Rebirth of Antisemitism
I finished reading an important new book over the weekend. It is called “The Rebirth of Antisemitism in the 21st Century.” The book is edited by David Hirsh. In a review of the book by Chad Allan Goldberg of University of Wisconsin Madison, David Hirsh is described as a leading sociologist of contemporary antisemitism. He is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is also a founder and Academic Director of the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism.
Image: Scholar and Author David Hirsh — Source The Jewish Chronicle
The book contains 13 essays which address the upsurge of antisemitism within the academic and political left, primarily in Britain. Although the British context provides the case studies, the issues it addresses are pertinent to events we are experiencing now in Canada and the US. The contributors to the book are themselves scholars from the academic left and they speak the language and draw on the political theory of leftwing scholarship.
I have not spent a lot of time reading the literature of the political left and the essays include ways of looking at the world that I have personally rejected or resisted in the past. The book is of interest in showing that whether or not one is comfortable with left wing thought generally, it is by no means a given that such scholarship will lead to views hostile to Israel and to Zionism. Indeed, much of the strength of the collection is the way that it identifies hostility to Zionism and to Jews as a deviation and betrayal of the humanizing mission that is supposed to be at the core of progressive ideology, at least in the opinion of its proponents.
The articles in the collection cover a wide range of topics, from the use of critical theory to show the pitfalls of treating antisemitism as a kind of mystical force, rather than one rooted in real social relationships, to an examination of how the original meaning of intersectionality is completely distorted when it is used to exclude Jews and brand them as oppressors. There is a review of the play 7 Jewish Children, which examines the arguments of critics of the play (who say the play is antisemitic) and defenders (who say it is not), only to reveal that there exists a third group who admire the play precisely because it is antisemitic.
The tenth chapter, “Climate Catastrophe, the Zionist Entity and the German Guy”, by Matthew Bolton, describes a public discussion in May of 2021 in Seattle, organized by a far left group called “Red May Collective” to discuss an academic paper on the topic of states response to COVID and climate change. The discussion was derailed because one of the participants, insisted on talking about events going on in Palestine and praising the leaders of Hamas, rather than addressing the ostensible topic of the evening. His interlocutor, a German leftist who resisted the demonization of Israel, insisted on returning to the topic at hand and when the other participant refused to do so, walked out. Bolton uses this incident to highlight the way left antisemitism has become intertwined with climate activism.
The book is well worth the hard work necessary to get through some of its denser and more unfamiliar sections as it provides insight into the mind-set of the people we are increasingly likely to encounter in the public debate around Israel’s right to self-defense and its attempts to achieve its legitimate goals in the present war in Gaza.
Reckoning with the Genocide Libel and What it Teaches Us
Yossi Klein Halevi published a heartfelt column in the Times of Israel Blogs last week. It’s called “The War Against the Jewish Story”. He remarks on the ease with which Israel’s actions are being characterized as genocide, and identifies a failure of Holocaust education. If what’s happening in Gaza is thought to be genocide, he is saying, then the world has utterly failed to understand the evil of the Shoah.
How has it come to this? How is it possible that Israel, rather than radical Islamism, would become the villain on liberal campuses? That thousands of students would be chanting “from the river to the sea” even as the Hamas massacre revealed that slogan’s genocidal implications? That the most passionate outbreak of student activism since the 1960s would be devoted to delegitimizing the Jewish people’s story of triumph over annihilation?
He identifies the ways in which the core elements of Israel’s story have been erased by the propaganda of anti-Zionism. This has been done in three stages. The first is the erasure of the restoration of Israeli independence and the profound Jewish connection to the land of Israel. Today it is dismissed as unreal and the Zionist enterprise as just an example of European Imperialism. Israel’s story of triumph is replaced by a story of dispossession and land theft: the Nakba.
Image: Author and activist Yossi Klein Halevi —- Source: Shalom Hartman Institute
The second stage turns the conflict between Israel and its neighbours into a story of Israeli aggression. The relentless hundred year war of Israel’s neighbours against it is erased from history.
The third stage is the erasure of the many peace offers which Israel made to its neighbours, all of which have been turned down.
With everything Israel has done to try to make things better erased from view, we are left with a hateful apparition in which all Israeli violence is driven by malice alone. Thus is Israel accused of genocide to wide agreement from the global public.
Yossi Klein Halevi reminds us of the feature that distinguishes antisemitism from other forms of hatred.
Antisemitism is not merely the hatred of Jews as other but the symbolization of The Jew – that is, turning the Jews into the symbol for whatever a given civilization defines as its most loathsome qualities. For Christianity until the Holocaust, The Jew was Christ-killer; for Marxism, the ultimate capitalist; for Nazism, the defiler of race. And now, in the era of anti-racism, the Jewish state is the embodiment of racism.
Venturing into the Bat Cave
When we published our previous article on the Flag Raising in Ottawa, we shared it to a number of Facebook groups for people who might be interested. We also shared it to a group meant for discussion about Canadian politics generally, since the subject of the article is a Canadian political issue, with implications beyond the Jewish and pro-Israel community. The reaction to the article was rather intense.
Someone called “The Batcave” posted this thoughtful comment.
The grotesque hypocricy being displayed by the government of Benjamin Netanyahu is matched only by the innocent blood spilled in this genocide. Check the UN definition, as derived by the term that was originally created by Raphael Lemkin. This is a genocide and the government of Israel is defecating on the legacy of The Holocaust.
Interestingly given the article reference above, he appears to be someone who teaches about climate change. This also highlights Yossi Klein Halevi’s point about the profound failure of Holocaust education, given that this comment is apparently the opinion of an educator.
A contributor asked a reasonable question in response to Batcave’s post
The Batcave I have a question. Why aren't any protests aimed at Hamas? Did Hamas not know, when they attacked Israel and murdered, raped and kidnapped some Israeli citizens, that Israel would hit back, and hit back hard? Did Hamas not know (which means the leadership is grossly inept) or did Hamas know and not care (which means Hamas is okay with what's happened.) Either way, why are not Palestinians and everyone else not directing their protests against Hamas?
To which Batcave responded
Yes, Hamas is bad, and should be dealt with, but not by locking civilians into a narrow confine and bombing them. It's like shooting fish in a barrel, and children don't deserve to die for this so no, your "whataboutism" means less than nothing in this circumstance. On the contrary, I have no doubt that the aiding and abetting of this genocide will be discussed, in the future, after Netanyahu has finished exterminating the Palestinian people, rounded up and slaughtered as "Hamas."
So this educator responded to a perfectly reasonable question by calling it “whataboutism”, which doesn’t address the question at all. Instead he shifts the attention back to Israel and adds the claim that Israel is “exterminating the Palestinian people, rounded up and slaughtered as “Hamas””.
He then adds another false statement:
Hamas has agreed to a peace deal that was brokered by Egypt, Qatar and the UN. The world is waiting on Netanyahu's response, but he seems to be preoccupied at the moment.
So in the course of a few lines, the story of Israeli perfidy is hammered home, supported by the at best careless deployment of lying propaganda which is currently what passes for news.
Another poster responded to the article by writing that what Hamas did was wrong but that it wasn’t right “to kill 36,000 people who had nothing to do with the attack” in response.
In response to that, we wrote a short essay on the question of Gaza casualties.
Author
Top contributor
In response to the claim that Israel has killed 36,000 civilians in Gaza:
Hamas has reported 36,000 deaths in Gaza. This number is based on the daily total released by the Gaza Health Ministry which is controlled by Hamas.
Hamas are the folks who broke the ceasefire on October 7 by invading Israel and killing approximately 1200 people. Some of these people were tortured. Some of them were raped. Children were killed in front of their parents. Parents were killed in front of their children. The people who committed these crimes have their own agenda and that agenda is the elimination of the state of Israel and its replacement with an Islamic State. They are not trustworthy and any claim or announcement they make must be understood in the light of who they are and their goals in attacking Israel.
The number killed in Gaza is not known for certain. If our news media were careful about the truth, that is what we would see every day, rather than the tally released by the Hamas controlled Gaza Health Ministry. Certainly thousands of people have died in Gaza since Hamas broke the ceasefire. Not all of the people who have died are civilians. According to Israel, 13,000 of those who have died are Hamas fighters. So if we believe both sides, even if the figure of 36,000 total deaths is correct, the number of civilians is at most 23,000.
Not all of those who have died in Gaza have been killed by Israel. In the second week of the war, the Gaza Health Ministry announced that the Al Ahli hospital in Gaza City had been destroyed by Israel and that 500 were dead. Subsequently, journalists arriving at the scene reported that 1) the hospital had not been destroyed 2) the number dead was less than 50 3) the cause of the tragic deaths was a misfired missile fired by Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
According to Israeli observers, about 15% of the missiles that are fired from Gaza at Israel fall short of the border and land in Gaza. With 15,000 missiles fired so far by Hamas and PIJ, this means that at least 2000 rockets fired by Palestinian militias have landed in Gaza. So an unknown, but significant number of the deaths in Gaza are due to "friendly fire" and cannot be blamed on Israel.
You may be aware that the total number of deaths reported by the Gaza Health Ministry has consistently shown that 70% of those killed have been women and children. Daily totals vary, but the percentage of women and children is always 70%. Statistical analysis of these numbers has suggested that this fixed percentage of 70% every day is much too uniform for real data and therefore unlikely to be accurate.
Without fanfare, the proportion of the dead who are women and children was suddenly lowered in the official numbers being put out by the UN Office for the Communication of Humanitarian Affairs. On May 3, OCHA reported 34,622 dead in Gaza including more than 9500 women and more than 14,500 children. On the 8th of May, the same report from the OCHA shows 34,844 dead including 7797 children and 4959 women.
These are still appalling numbers, but if accurate, this reveals that the numbers that the world has been relying on to understand the scale of the disaster in Gaza have been very unreliable. Therefore it behooves everyone to be circumspect when making claims that "Israel has been slaughtering civilians".
What seems more likely is that Israel is pursuing and killing Hamas militants who perpetrated atrocities on October 7. Israel does its best to avoid killing civilians while doing that. In spite of Israel's best efforts, some innocent civilians are being killed by Israeli fire. It is also highly likely that innocent civilians are being killed by Hamas fire.
So is it reasonable to characterize what's happening in Gaza as Israel slaughtering civilians? Not so much. Unless you think Israel is guilty no matter what they do and that Palestinian militants are innocent no matter what they do.
It is more accurate to say that there is a war in Gaza in a densely populated area. That war was initiated by an atrocious surprise attack on Israel on October 7. Israel has responded by coming into Gaza in pursuit of the perpetrators of the October 7 attack. As a result, innocents in Gaza have died in large numbers, which is terrible. The blame for this rests at least to some extent on the Palestinian militants who perpetrated the atrocities on October 7. Some of the blame may well lie with Israel for being insufficiently careful in pursuing its just goal of defeating Hamas and liberating the hostages.
If we were reading that in our news, there would be a lot less one sided commentary by misinformed people here and there would be fewer attacks on Jews all over Canada. It would also be clear to most that shutting down the celebration of Israel's independence day when the national day of 192 other countries is observed in Ottawa is completely unwarranted. The fact that so many people don't see that is both enraging and terrifying to Canadian Jews.
In response to this analysis I heard again from Batcave:
David Roytenberg That's a whole lotta "whataboutism." Stop supporting the murder of babies. Full stop.
The Limits of Argument
This rather depressing attempt to communicate leads me to a closing quotation from Jean-Paul Sartre’s work called Antisemite and Jew. I’ve seen this quote circulating recently on Facebook. It reminds us that there are limits to what can be achieved by rational argument:
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past."1
As we mark the 76th anniversary of Israeli independence, we are reminded that it was not just the persuasive power of the tongue, but the power of Israeli arms that won us back our country. Today too, we are faced with situations in which words are not sufficient. Hamas will never respond to persuasion, threats or bribes. In the end it is only the power of Israeli arms that stand between Israelis and Hamas’ maniacal jihadist vision of a world without Israel.
Therefore let us celebrate and thank the Master of the Universe that Israel has the means to defend itself and pray that its leaders will have the wisdom to use those means wisely, so that we will see victory on the battlefield and a sustainable peace when the fighting is over.
Canadian Zionist Forum is published two or three times a week. A paid subscription casts $100 Canadian for a year or $10 per month. If you live in Canada HST will be added. If you live outside of Canada you will be charged the equivalent in your local currency and tax will not be added.
If you are a paid subscriber you can leave a comment.
If you are not a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one today to support our work. To everyone, thank you for reading Canadian Zionist Forum.
You have said it all.
So I remain silent on Yom Hazikaron, to remember and honour all the victims.
An interesting set of comments and replies. Of course, one knows well that one cannot have any rational discussion with folks like The Batcave as their minds are closed and not willing to listen to cogent arguments over facts that are distorted in their minds...