A chapter I wrote for in Tatour, L. and Lentin, R. (eds.) Race, Israel and the Colonization of Palestine. Palo Alto CA: Stanford University Press.
Introduction
For many years I didn’t want to write about antisemitism. When I brought out my short primer, Racism in 2008, my editor asked me to include a chapter on antisemitism, so I did but I linked it to Islamophobia. In 2019, when I was writing my latest book, Why Race Still Matters, the original plan did not include anything on antisemitism, but during the writing process, I decided to focus the fourth and final chapter on antisemitism and its political usages which had been brought to the fore by various events including the ‘antisemitism crisis’ engulfing the British Labour Party at the time (Renton forthcoming). I ended up finding the discussion of antisemitism useful for thinking through race as relational, and racisms in their various guises as co-dependent:
‘Zoning in on antisemitism draws together the various components of this book: the resurgent fusion of race and genetics, the redrawing of the definitional boundaries of racism, and the dismissal of the “merely cultural” as “factionalizing, identitarian and particularistic” (Butler 1998: 33). It opens questions that are imbricated in the racial; questions of nation, belonging and loyalty, of the inextricability of race from the colonial, of what constitutes whiteness and white supremacy, and of solidarity and its absence.’ (Lentin 2020, 136).
Earlier, I had also written about antisemitism for a chapter on its role in the interpretation of the meaning of race after the murderous attacks on the French satirical newspaper, Charlie Hebdo (Lentin 2017). Until Why Race Still Matters, what I had written on antisemitism expressed my ambivalence about doing so. In 2017 I wrote,
‘The route to talking about antisemitism is necessarily paved with caveats: both the impossibility of decoupling from actions carried out in the name of all Jews and the relative inconsequentiality of antisemitism when confronted with the unbearable magnitude of racism faced by Black people, Muslims, migrants and refugees in the societies I have lived in and studied’ (ibid., 264).
However, I also wrote that I felt that the rise in antisemitism, now exponential in the wake of Trumpism, had given me license to reflect on my own position vis-a-vis race as a white European Jewish woman with a past and present as a settler on occupied lands, first Palestine and now Gadigal.[1] How do I speak about antisemitism in a way that, both takes it seriously as an increasingly threatening form of political violence – both physical and discursive – and as the form of racism that, as I shall argue, often shapes and defines how and in what terms we can speak of other racisms? I want to write here, and to continue to write about antisemitism, not only because I am threatened by it, but because I want to show how according antisemitism the status of the master key of hate is detrimental to the fight to undo racisms.
My task is difficult because discussions of antisemitism lurch between this position and its opposite: that any talk of antisemitism today, particularly on the left, is manipulative and a weapon to disarm activism on behalf of Palestine. In this atmosphere, the opposition to antisemitism has become a proxy for real antiracist commitments: states actively engaged in repressing racialized people both at home and internationally can declare themselves antiracist via opposition to antisemitism. Groups on the far-right of the political spectrum with fascist roots and connections also position themselves against antisemitism via their support for Israel and a shared Islamophobia. Among leftists, too, concerns about antisemitism are dismissed when the left promotes itself as inherently antiracist, allowing for at times careless, at times dangerous amalgamations to be made between Jews and the global capitalist elite, and of all Jews as agents of the Zionist state.
In what follows I begin by arguing that we must go beyond pointing out the hypocritical double standards that accompany discussions of racism in general and antisemitism in particular. I then widen the perspective on these urgent problems first by looking at the role the exceptionalization of antisemitism via the ‘event’ of the Shoah has had for the constitution of antiracism. I examine the dead-end of philosemitism as an effective challenge to antisemitism before explaining how dominant anti-antisemitism acts as a proxy for antiracism in ways that are deeply damaging to anticolonialist and antiracist thought and practice. I conclude by arguing that we need to resist the moralist tone of most declarative challenges to antisemitism and place the struggle instead within an anticolonial framework that relates antisemitism to other forms of racism, centres the material over the affective, and is adamant about the possibility of defying both antisemitism and Zionism. This is urgent because, as Valentina Pisanty writes, today it has become normalized for right-wing actors to declare support for Israel and for this to stand in for a form of opposition to antisemitism while at the same time ‘rehabilit[ating] the ancient calumny of the Jewish plot to take over the world’ (Pisanty 2019, 21). On the other hand, the generalized failure on what we can broadly term the antiracist left to pay close attention to how antisemitism relates to other forms of racism and how it may be possible to build alliances with Jews in ways that take our concerns about antisemitism seriously, while staying firmly opposed to Zionism, means that we are poorly equipped to challenge this increasingly dominant right-wing line. Today, it has become urgent to theorize antisemitism as mutually constitutive of other forms of racism, and as a key feature of the architecture of the racial-colonial, not only for Jews, who come increasingly under attack, but in the general aim of attacking racism, beyond empty speech acts.
Beyond hypocrisy
On 5 February 2021, the International Criminal Court announced that it has jurisdiction to start a criminal investigation against Israel for war crimes. Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu responded with a staged video message. Staring down the camera and gesturing emphatically with his hands, he declares, ‘when the ICC investigates Israel for fake war crimes, this is pure antisemitism.’ He goes on to assert that ‘the court established to prevent atrocities like the Nazi Holocaust against the Jewish people is now targeting the one state of the Jewish people’ (TOI Staff 2021).
By this logic, one which Netanyahu who has declared himself leader of world Jewry constantly reiterates, an attack on Israel is an attack on all Jews. From the opposing perspective, of course, all Jews wherever they may be in the world and whatever their connection to Israel, if at all, are responsible for its war crimes. Speaking soon after the ICC’s announcement, the French decolonial intellectual, Houria Bouteldja, remarked that this is how antisemitism is created, by giving the false impression that Jews and Israel are one and the same (La Perm 2021). A similar point was made by the Jewish philanthropist, George Soros, when he remarked in 2003 that ‘the policies of the Bush administration and the Sharon administration’ had contributed to the resurgence of antisemitism in Europe. For this, and for his support for organisations ‘permeated by antisemitism’ such as Black Lives Matter, today Soros has become the target of increasingly shrill right-wing, including Zionist, opprobrium (Gerstenfeld 2020).
Herein lies the hypocrisy. Not only does Netanyahu openly mock the victims of the Shoah by cynically using their death to protect Israel against investigation for its own practices of state murder, land theft and exploitation of Indigenous Palestinians. He, and other prominent Zionists join forces with antisemites such as the Hungarian Prime Minister, Victor Orbán, whose campaign of state-sanctioned antisemitism fixates on Soros as the prototypical figure of the all-powerful, maleficent Jewish banker. For Netanyahu, Orbán is an ally in the fight against antisemitism and against the ‘threat of radical Islam’ which ‘could endanger the world’ (Zion 2018). As the history of antisemitism is written out of that of Europe and transposed onto Arabs and Muslims, Netanyahu can say that it was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who was responsible for the extermination of the Jews of Europe, not Hitler (Haaretz 2015). The comfort Israel and its allies have with the Euro-American extreme right in Poland, Hungary, and during his time in office Donald Trump, cheapens their performatively reverent speech evoking the Shoah. For both these hard-line actors, and for many of their liberal critics also,[2] the purported antisemitism of both the Arab states and of Muslim people around the world, excuses that of their far-right bedfellows: political leaders, fringe parties, and right-wing pundits alike. The fact that Jews were torn from their homes in North Africa and West Asia, first by European colonists and then by Israel in the aim of demographic Jewish hegemony, is rarely introduced to complicate the official origin story of Arab and Muslim antisemitism (Azoulay 2021).
Protests in the dying days of the Trump presidency, against what he and his supporters believed was a rigged election result, often included participants waving Israeli flags. Despite the antisemitic conspiracy theories to which many Trump supporters subscribe, white nationalist visions align strongly with those of Israel as a state which ‘embodies the strong arm of xenophobic nationalism and militarized masculinity, unapologetically pushing back invading ethno-religious Others, expanding its territory, and protecting its heritage in bold defiance of a chorus of liberal outcry’ (Lorber 2021). As the right-wing Jewish pundit Ben Shapiro tweeted with regards Ann Coulter, her antisemitic remarks are ‘awful, nonsensical [but she] is also super pro-Israel, and has always been so, so I won’t lose sleep.’[3]
In addition to the obvious hypocrisy of the selective anti-antisemitism of the Israeli state and its supporters, public conversations about the place accorded antisemitism in comparison for example to antiblackness or Islamophobia also emphasise a pick-and-choose attitude to antiracism. For example, following the publication of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission report on antisemitism in the British Labour Party in October 2020, it was remarked that a higher prevalence of Islamophobia and anti-Black racism within both major political parties in the UK had not received proportionate attention (Richmond 2020). The Board of Deputies of British Jews among others responded to allegations of antisemitism in the Labour Party by repeating that ‘this wouldn’t happen to any other minority’. However, a report by the Labour Muslim Network found that a quarter of the 422 Muslim Labour Party members surveyed had experienced Islamophobia firsthand (Sarkar 2020).
Obviously, hypocrisy and selective antiracism were in play and those criticizing the double standards of both Israel’s racism and the disproportionate attention given to antisemitism in the public discourse are correct. It would be a mistake to conclude that performative attention to antisemitism translates into actual concern. However, homing in on hypocrisy is a distraction from a closer examination of what this means about how we interpret and challenge both antisemitism itself and racism and ongoing coloniality more broadly, as well as the links between them. In general, racism is imbued with double standards, but it increasingly seems there is no other language in which to talk about it. Of course, it is true that placing different expectations on differently racialized groups and individuals is a key way in which racism functions to discriminate and degrade. But I am dissatisfied with the assumption that drives the exposure of hypocrisy: that the mere laying bare of the patent unfairness of the application of different rules and norms to people on the basis of race, will bring about a change. As Gavan Titley has said in relation to racism and freedom of speech, ‘of course [the right’s] politics is absolutely riven with hypocrisy, but it doesn’t work because of hypocrisy’ (Lewis, Regis and Titley 2021) Rather, the hypocrisy is beside the point because of the valence of particular understandings of what constitutes democratic exchange in Titley’s account, and definitions of racism in my discussion here. Only once we have relented to dwell on the hypocrisy and understood the particular political function of a, far from new but particularly heightened, fixation with Jews and antisemitism, then we can start to undo the harm done by this philosemitism to the Palestinian cause and to the broader antiracist struggle more broadly.
The exceptionalization of antisemitism and the (re)definition of racism
Shoah remembrance as a public ritual and civic duty has eclipsed knowledge of the history of antisemitism which itself has been reduced to a unique and aberrant event (Pisanty 2021). The detachment of the Shoah from the longer durée of antisemitism and the function ‘The Jew’ had for the racial formation of Europe (Anidjar 2003) strongly informs the idea of the Shoah, and by extension, antisemitism, as anomalous to the story of European, and thus world, progress. The severing of the Shoah from the racializing logics that came to define Europe in opposition both to its internal ‘others’ and to the global majority in the colonial era makes it available to dominant narratives of racism as exception. As I have previously written, Europe’s silence about race and its treatment as a taboo subject has contributed to the lack of a public language for talking about its significance for European self-understandings (Lentin 2008). The construction of the Shoah as exceptional played a significant role in creating this taboo. The gravity of the genocide, often construed as a mass experiment in eugenics decoupled from the structurally colonial conditions that birthed and nurtured racial ‘science’, made it untouchable. Michael Rothberg reminds us that the treatment of the Shoah as exceptional grew in part out of the relative silence that surrounded it in the early years that followed, the Shoah taking several decades to become enshrined in public memory in Europe or beyond. However, the insistence on the Shoah’s uniqueness did serve to ‘separat[e] it off from other histories of collective violence’. The struggle to connect these, not only to oppose ‘a hierarchy of suffering’ (Rothberg 2009: 9) but to place the Shoah within the history of coloniality, continues to define public and scholarly treatment of its legacies.
The Shoah’s growth in significance in Europe’s telling of history to itself necessitated the narrative of exception and uniqueness. To see it otherwise and to place it in the context of a past and continuous present of race as intrinsic to the formation of colonial modernity and white, European supremacy would entail a reckoning with its meaning with which neither Europe nor its offshoots in the settler colonies were willing to contend. Instead, the Shoah – firmly secured in the past – along with other ‘exceptional’ examples, most frequently slavery and Apartheid, become the prototype for racism as states gradually folded the maxim of ‘never again’ into their public pronouncements without considering what this really implies.
The exceptionalization of the Shoah, and consequently antisemitism sits within this landscape: racism is ‘frozen’ in ‘past events’ to which all other instances can be compared (Lentin 2016). This pastness of ‘real racism’ sits uncomfortably with the undeniable presence of systemic racialized exploitation and discrimination across the Global North as well as the proliferation of increasingly extremist ideological stances on both the fringes and the mainstream of discourse and politics. This racism is open to what Titley calls debatability, its legitimacy to be named as such constantly subject to question (Titley 2019). One of the main ways in which racism is made debatable is through its comparison to the events of the ‘real racism’ of the past, allowing the experiences of racialized people today to be scrutinized in perpetual comparison. As I have argued, on this basis the public discourse is shaped by a narrative of ‘not racism’, a form of discursive racist violence in which, not only is the existence of structurally racist conditions and effects under constant question, but racism is redefined from a hegemonically white perspective that construes it as exceptional and irrational (Lentin 2020). The tactic of separating so-called ‘real racism’ from what are portrayed as the exaggerated complaints of those who face racism in a time that many have decided is ‘postrace’ is a familiar one. For example, the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 were met with dismissals of antiracism and even of critical race theory as extremist ideologies (Harris 2020). This rhetoric often refers, as the British writer David Goodhart did in 2017, to the ‘normal definition’ of racism from which current versions are said to have drifted. For Goodhart, this ‘normal definition’ refers to ‘irrational hatred, fear or contempt for another group’ severing these attitudes from anti-immigrant sentiment which he sees as justifiable, from institutional racism, and most certainly from colonialism which is deemed long past (Goodhart, in Kaufmann 2017). Likewise, the theme of irrationality often accompanies the public discourse on antisemitism and the Shoah which are treated as incomprehensible hatreds, expunged of politics.
The narrowing of racism to select prototypes, therefore, and its characterisation as an irrational attitude held by individuals frees it from what Miri Song has called its ‘historical basis, severity and power’ (Song 2014: 125). Rather than seeing race and racism as central to the history of Europe (Goldberg 2006), as imbricated in the development and spread of capitalism (Robinson 1983), and as a central technology of colonial rule that continues to shape the relationship, both conceptual and material, of Europeanness and non-Europeanness (Hesse 2014), racism is seen as the bad attitude of irrational, morally repugnant people. Hence, racism has been dislodged from these roots and attached to those it has historically subjugated; the new racists are Black and Brown, and particularly, Muslim (Younes 2020). Their racism, we are told, is apparent in their ungratefulness as migrants, their failure to integrate into the societies of their ‘hosts’, and their temerity to protest in the ‘wrong way’ against the discrimination and exploitation they face. Specifically, their racism is manifested through antisemitism which, being the main prototype for ‘real racism’, is seen as dragging it back to the present from a dormant past for which Europeans have atoned and from which they have moved on.
Hence, in variants on what the French political theorist, Pierre-André Taguieff called the ‘new Judeophobia’, an alliance of Muslims and anti-Zionists are said to have displaced European elites to become the real antisemites of today (Taguieff 2002). My argument is not that antisemitism is never to be found among these groups. Indeed, while it is important to clearly delineate the differences between antisemitism and criticism of Israel in order to oppose the manipulation of their amalgamation in instruments such as the IHRA definition of antisemitism, this does not negate the fact that many opponents of Israel interchange anti-Zionism and antisemitism. However, these antisemitic statements are not made exclusively by members of racialized minority groups and are often just as likely to be found among the ‘white left’ as it is in majority white organisations in general. However, while we must not deresponsibilize those who express antisemitism, we should acknowledge the role played by Zionism in making Jews and Israel interchangeable. We should also pay close attention to the hierarchies of racism, at the pinnacle of which antisemitism has been placed, and how this serves a hegemonic account which displaces the origins of racism and transposes responsibility for it onto the shoulders of its current victims. Not only does the detachment of antisemitism from its European roots serve the agenda of the European states in the face of Black and Brown resistance to ongoing racism (Bouteldja 2016), it also has the effect of tethering Jewishness to whiteness and obscuring the existence of Jews of colour, and the harms done against them under colonialism and ongoing racist structures as I now turn to demonstrating in the case of France (Azoulay 2021).
The political utility of philosemitism in the advance of state racism: the case of France
Antisemitism, I have suggested, represents the pinnacle on the hierarchy of racisms because it is both exceptional and of the past. The dominant strategy of Euro-America in response to antisemitism after the Shoah was to reduce its long history to the Nazi genocide as a singular event, to detach it from racial-colonial rule past and continuing, and with the dominance of pro-Zionism and Islamophobia, to locate it as primarily the preserve of Arabs, Muslims, anti-Zionists, and often via the looming caricatures of Elijah Muhammad or the more recent case of the Black British grime artist, Wiley, of Black people (Richmond 2020). As I have remarked, this characterization of antisemitism is accompanied by a general recalibration of racism as not, or no longer, a European or a white problem, but one that increasingly holds white people in its sights, including in this vision of things, Jews, thus obscuring the different experiences of Black and Arab Jews with regards everyday and systemic racism (Gordon 2016). For example, in an article on the ‘Observatory on Decolonialism’, a French website set up to track the activities of decolonial and race critical intellectuals, Yana Grinshpun argues that to be anti-white is to be antisemitic, anti-western and anti-Zionist, thus erasing white Christian antisemitism as well as racism against Jews of colour (Grinshpun 2020). By the same token, the Licra, one of the oldest French antiracist organizations, originally set up to campaign against anti-Jewish pogroms, sees ‘anti-white racism’ as a problem on a par with racism against those racialized as Black, Brown, Muslim, Roma, etc. This deracination and universalization of racism serves to delegitimate the struggle of racialized people against state violence, and systemic exploitation and discrimination.
In the French case in particular, the elevation of antisemitism above other forms of racism and the cementing together of ‘anti-whiteness’ with attacks on Jews is part of a general campaign against antiracist thought and action which has become acute under President Emmanuel Macron, and which manipulates antisemitism in its service. It is important to note that it was not always concern for antisemitism that motivated the folding of Jews into the nation and into whiteness. It was the expansion of the nation-state, liberal ideology, and colonial rule that undergirded the post-revolutionary French state’s need to domesticate the Jews through an emancipation that was experienced by the Orthodox Ashkenazi as an imposition from above (Traverso 1996; Katz 2018). This need was further evident in the 1870 Crémieux Decree that granted French citizenship to colonized Algerian Jews but not to Muslims, the first step in the de-Arabization of non-European Jews, later completed by Zionism (Azoulay 2021). Neither the emancipation of the Jews nor their becoming French erased the political antisemitism of the late nineteenth century which mapped onto older forms of Christian Judeophobia (Judaken 2018). Bkouche notes that it was the Holocaust that made white people out of Jews, reminding us of Catholic monarchist Georges Bernanos’ ‘terrible words’ that ‘after the massacre it was no longer possible to be antisemitic,’ as though if it were not for the Holocaust, antisemitism could have continued as usual (Bkouche 2015).
What Bouteldja calls ‘state philosemitism’ emerged when Europe realized that it had applied colonialist procedures on its own soil and, as Aimé Césaire put it, no longer ‘merely’ against ‘Arabs, the Coolies of India, or the Blacks of Africa’ (Césaire et al. 2000). It does not denote actual love of Jews or concern with antisemitism against all Jews. If that were the case, the antisemitism waged against anti-Zionist Jews, Black Jews, Jews of colour, and all those who do not fit into a template of what the modern Jewish subject of the post-Holocaust looks like would be equally protected. The philosemitic defence of Jews and Israel relies on the tacit acceptance of the idea of Jews as perennial foreigners so that even while Jews are being defended, French citizens and Jews are always talked about as separate in official discourse. This reveals how ‘“Jews” as a category are still not a fully legitimate part of the nation and its identity’ (Bouteldja 2015). For example, in 2004, President Jacques Chirac noted the rise in racist attacks against ‘our Jewish or Muslim compatriots, or sometimes quite simply against the French’ (ibid. emphasis added). The defence of Jews, then, takes on the most antisemitic of characteristics, the assumption that Jewish loyalty always lies beyond the nation. Arguably, official protection of Israel at all costs is not detached from the antisemitic will for Jews to leave the diaspora, this certainly being a major driver in the rise of Christian Zionism (O’Donnell 2020).
State philosemitism thus takes independent agency away from Jews and ‘unilaterally squeezes us between the forces of power and the popular masses’ (Assoun 2019). This positioning is what permits Jews in France to become what Bouteldja has referred to as the ‘dhimmis of the Republic,’ the dhimmis being those Jews and Christians who were accorded protected status under Arab rule in the past (Bouteldja 2016: 51). Positioned as such, Jews become aligned with the needs of the state and whiteness and are, to evoke Frantz Fanon, stripped of the capacity for ‘ontological resistance’ (Fanon 1967). It is not that Jews (particularly white, western Jews), like colonized Africans, are denied permission to independently define ourselves. Rather, just as the white man needs the Black man to define himself, so too the Jew becomes someone for others.
This could be seen in the context of the French National Assembly’s passage of the so-called ‘Samuel Paty’ article of the Anti-Separatism law in February 2021, which drew on the association of antisemitism with the purported separatism from French society and its values of mainly Muslim minorities. Paty, a school teacher, was murdered in a heinous act by a young man of Chechen origin in October 2020. The law allows for anyone who disrespects the ‘values of the French republic’, naming ‘radical Islamism’ in particular, to be imprisoned for three years or face a fine of 45,000 Euros. The almost unanimous vote in favour of the law came after a campaign targeting what are portrayed as ‘indigenist teachings’ imported into France from North America and infiltrating French schools and universities. The Education Minister, Jean Michel Blanquer, accused academics who have, as President Macron put it, ‘encouraged the ethnicization of social issues’, of ‘intellectual complicity with terrorism’ (Pietrandrea 2020). This view is supported by the over one hundred signatories of a Manifesto who claimed in October 2020 that ‘indigenist, racialist, and “decolonial” ideologies,’ imported from North America, were responsible for ‘conditioning’ the violent extremist who murdered Paty. For the representatives of the dominant culture in France, the law against separatism is necessary, to cite Macron, due to the insufficiencies of integration and of ‘our fight against discrimination, and racism, such as antisemitism’ which have bred ‘our enemy’. Here, Macron singles antisemitism out among racisms, and claims that it was the failure to act against it which created the conditions for the murder of Samuel Paty (himself not Jewish). Within the conservative Jewish milieu, the murder of Paty was interpreted as a natural culmination of the ‘war on Jews’ which has now spread to all spheres of French life (Israel Valley 2020). The Anti-Separatism law, which as the Frantz Fanon Foundation has said, is a ‘new demonstration of the coloniality of power’ targeting racialized communities already disproportionately policed and punished, participates in driving a further wedge between Jews and other racialized people with whom we should be in solidarity against the incursions of both state and popular racism (Frantz Fanon Foundation 2021).
Creating antiracist proxies
As the French case makes clear, the state, as well as a whole host of civil society actors including some of the oldest antiracist organisations, use concern with antisemitism, seen as equivalent to anti-Zionism and as a problem, not of European elites but of Muslim minorities and decolonial activists and thinkers, to justify repressive state action against racialized communities. The fight against antisemitism acts as a proxy for a real opposition to racism with even right-wing actors able to portray themselves as the ‘real antiracists’ because of their performative opposition to antisemitism. In this vision of things, opposition to Muslims and Islamism – the two often being interchanged – and support for repressive laws and policies against them, is presented as antiracist because it is said to protect Jews. Whether or not Jews participate in such calls for repressive measures, and many do, is immaterial to the fact that official opposition to antisemitism acts to whitewash state racism. Clearly then, this hegemonic anti-antisemitism can also target Jews, either as Black or Brown and thus coming within the sights of the repressive and discriminatory forces of the state, or for engaging in thought that goes counter to the dominant ideological frame. In a different setting, such has been the case for Jews, including Israelis, in Germany in recent years. In one example, a closed discussion group organized by Israeli Jewish women in Berlin, the ‘School for Unlearning Zionism’, came under public attack as promoting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement categorized as antisemitic by the Bundestag in 2019 (Dische-Becker et al 2020).
The tightening of restrictions on critics of Israel should be seen as consistent with the broader repression of antiracist expression which theorizes race in terms of ongoing coloniality and white supremacy, rather than as individual moral wrongdoing. This has wider implications for progressive movements writ large. For example, in 2019, France’s National Assembly adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism which includes ‘denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination’ among other criticisms of Israel as examples of antisemitism. The catalyst for adopting the definition came after ‘new philosopher’, Alain Finkielkraut, was verbally abused by protestors aligned with the Gilets jaunes grassroots movement for economic justice who were identified as pro-Palestine supporters, an event that was hegemonically interpreted as an antisemitic attack (Bouteldja and Lentin 2019).
Pointing out the role played by antisemitism in delegitimizing antiracism and other liberationist politics, however, has to be approached with care. From the antisemitic viewpoint, Jews, as Gavin Langmuir writes, are given the quality of a chimera, or a ‘fabulous monster… which, although dressed syntactically in the clothes of real humans, have never been seen and are projections of mental processes unconnected with the real people of the outgroup’ (Langmuir 1987: 109-10). But antisemitism too has a chimeric quality in the way it is discussed today, readily lending itself to the needs of those who mobilize it as either ubiquitous or a strawman. On the one hand, antisemitism has become a tool with which to disarm political opposition from the left. On the other, antisemitism is a mere weapon whose mention automatically triggers distrust. This was the simplistic binary cleaved in the case of the ‘antisemitism crisis’ that engulfed the British Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn. As David Renton rightly argues, because supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, who was alternately accused of abetting or excusing antisemitism, were disproportionately concerned with the affairs of the party over the principles of antiracism, any existence of antisemitism was automatically dismissed as rightist weaponization (Renton forthcoming). From the other side, those who manipulated the existence of antisemitism in order to attack Corbyn, be it from within or outside the Labour Party, often did not have the concerns of actual Jews at heart. Jews, both for antisemites and for those who manipulate antisemitism for other than antiracist ends, are what David Smith calls ‘ghostly, walking tropes. They are representations of people, not people per se’ (Smith 1996: 221).
The swing then between the outright dismissal of antisemitism and its manipulation in the interests of states or political actors is of no service in the struggle against it. Antisemitic conspiracy fantasies have grown in the digital media age (Allington et al 2020), exploding exponentially in the midst of the global Coronavirus pandemic (Detzler 2020). Yet, as I have shown, the allegiances between outright conspiratorial antisemites and pro-Zionists, including many Conservative Jews, thwarts our ability to mount an antiracist challenge to this newly energized antisemitism. Opponents of antisemitism, Jewish or otherwise, are faced with poorly articulated definitions of antisemitism that see it as fixed in time. As Renton argues, the leftist vision of antisemitism as unchanged since the 1920s and restricted to the furthest corners of the right-wing (Renton forthcoming) does not recognise that this was never the case, nor that antisemitism, like racism, changes ‘shape, size, contours, purpose, function – with changes in the economy, the social structure, the system and, above all, the challenges, the resistances of that system’ (Sivanandan 1990: 64). So, defenders of Jeremy Corbyn, rather than using the opportunity to examine how racisms of all kinds manifest within the Labour Party as a structurally white institution, repeatedly stated that it was the most ‘anti-racist party’, and that accusations of antisemitism were nothing but right-wing smears (Goodfellow 2019).
The official opposition to antisemitism which, as we have seen, ties it to anti-Zionism, race critical and decolonial thought, and the right of racialized people, particularly Muslims, to oppose state racism, becomes a proxy for real engagement with an antiracist politics. As a consequence, there is a failure at both ends of the political spectrum to engage antisemitism as a real political force. Rather, whether antisemitism is real or an imaginary weapon becomes the conflict that organises the debate to the detriment of both Jews ourselves and of the potential to build solidarities with other racialized subjects. This debate is not about antisemitism or racism at all. Rather these topics are proxies through which those within institutions struggle over power. The question should not be, does antisemitism exist, or is it more or less threatening than other forms of racism. Antisemitism exists because the extent to which it is a core ideology at the heart of Euromodernity has not been confronted, just as there is a refusal to confront race in general as a political force. The very posing of such questions, from either side of the political divide, serves as a means to avoid confronting the effects of race, coloniality and racism on both local and global scales.
Conclusion: getting beyond moralism
Appealing to the morality of abhorring antisemitism is appealing to those faced with what can at times be career-ending accusations from Zionists and philosemites against those who criticize Israel. Such was the response of the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe, around whom controversy erupted in 2020 when a right-wing German politician accused him of relativizing the Holocaust after he was announced as an opening speaker for a regional cultural festival. The criticisms of Achille Mbembe focused on his essay, ‘The Society of Enmity’ (Mbembe 2016). In it, Mbembe draws comparisons between apartheid South Africa and both the Israeli occupation and the Shoah; though he heavily qualifies this latter comparison, saying it took place “in an extreme fashion and within a quite different setting.” Yet merely placing apartheid and the Shoah side-by-side – never does he equate them – was enough for Mbembe to be accused of antisemitism in Germany.
In a subsequent interview, Mbembe said in response, ‘the idea that I might harbour hatred and prejudice against any other human being, or any constituted state as such, is totally repugnant’ (Aguigah 2020). The impulse to appeal to morals – even to people who cynically and selectively deploy antiracism – is understandable; of course, where we stand on racial injustice is bound up with our personal morality. However, to question the effectiveness of this approach in a landscape which has reduced the discussion of racism and antisemitism to one of personal morality rather than politics, it is useful to contrast it with the case of Houria Bouteldja. Bouteldja has continuously faced accusations of antisemitism in her role as the former spokesperson for the Party of the Indigenous of the Republic, from which she has now resigned, and after the publication of her book, Whites, Jews and Us: Towards a politics of revolutionary love (Bouteldja 2016).
In a recent case, an article which Bouteldja published on the leftwing French website Médiapart was removed after a public outcry accused her of antisemitism. Bouteldja wrote about the antisemitism directed towards April Benayoum, a French beauty queen crowned Miss Provence, whose father is from Israel. She denounced the antisemitic attacks on Benayoum in no uncertain terms. However, she also used the case to distinguish between antisemitism and criticism of Israel, which had been amalgamated in most accounts of the attacks. Inviting Miss Provence to take a position against the state, rather than her Israeli origins necessitating she defend it, Bouteldja wrote:
‘[O]ne can be the daughter of an Israeli and position oneself against the colonial reality of Israel. One cannot be Israeli innocently [Here Bouteldja paraphrases the great anticolonial writer and leader Aimé Césaire, who wrote: “No one colonizes innocently, and no one can colonize without impunity” (Césaire 2017)]. However, by making the choice to stand with the anticolonial struggle, [Benayoum] can be sure that the decolonial movement would welcome her with open arms’ (Bouteldja 2020).
Here, Bouteldja rejects a Zionist discourse that sees only one possible fate for Jews: to be inexorably tied to a racist, colonial state that occupies another people in our name, even as we deny or even attempt to dismantle it. To be an anticolonial Jew is anathema, not only to the communal gatekeepers who stand steadfast with the racial colony of Israel, but to those gentiles who use our tragedy to exculpate their own continuing complicity with racism and colonialism at home and abroad. This binding of Jewishness to Israel works antisemitically to deny Jews the capacity to defy this destiny.
But in insisting on the non-innocence of Miss Provence, Houria Bouteldja reminds that she also accuses herself (Bouteldja 2021):
‘[N]o French person is innocent, starting with me…. Not only am I not innocent – because I am French – but I am also a criminal. Therefore, I allowed myself to judge Miss Provence not innocent because I had already conducted my own trial and had already been served my sentence … My crime rests on one tangible fact: the share of imperialist revenues between the Western ruling classes and the white, and to a lesser extent non-white, working classes’ (Bouteldja 2016).
Yet this materialist conception of race, that emphasizes its structural nature and its exploitative effects, does not register with those who hear racism only in one key: the moral one. This moralistic antiracism focuses on the attitudes of individuals detached from the structures that produce them. This dominant understanding of racism couches it in terms of personal wrongdoing, of unsavoury and outdated attitudes, refusing to see race as bound up with colonialism such as that of the Zionist state. Only in this moral conception is it possible to conflate anti-Zionism – a form of opposition to colonial domination – with antisemitism – a form of racism which, like all racisms, is inextricable from colonialism. Responding to accusations of antisemitism using the language of morality therefore runs the risk of being unable to disentangle antisemitism and anti-Zionism and, more broadly, can recompound the anti-materialist view of racism, rather than unsettling it.
What the contrast between the cases of Bouteldja and Mbembe shows is that appeals to morals have little effect on those who view antisemitism and its epitome, the Shoah, as purely moral matters, decoupled from the coloniality of race. Decontextualised and depoliticized, antisemitism and the Shoah have been recast as a trauma at the heart of whiteness. From this perspective, there are two types of antisemitism: good and bad, just as there are good and bad Jews. Bad antisemitism is presented as ‘real’; it exists among the far-right, the far left and Muslims. In contrast, ‘good antisemitism’ which treats Jews as a racialized subaltern group in service to the state, is left intact. Bad Jews are those who refuse to allow antisemitism to be instrumentalized in the service of racial rule. We are anti-Zionist and struggle against racism in all its forms (Bouteldja and Lentin 2019). The bad Jew who refuses to sit in her accorded place is the thorn in the side of the racial state. Therefore, although as Cohen rightly remarks, white Jews are not external to Euro-American states and elites (Cohen 2021), it is possible for anticolonialist Jews acting collectively to undermine the role we are assigned under globalized racial rule. For Jews to participate in the top-down project to quell anticolonial resistance and race critical and decolonial thought, in what is suggested to be Jewish interest, is a ruse. Instead, we must oppose the alignment of opposition to antisemitism with structural white interests, including those of the State of Israel, by reconnecting with what Santiago Slabodsky calls our ‘barbarian history’, the history which ties us to the other subjects of racial rule (Slabodsky 2015).
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[1] Gadigal names the people whose land I reside in. The Gadigal people are part of the Eora Nation (Sydney, Australia).
[2] For example, critics of Israel’s hard-line politics such as Tikkun magazine editor Rabbi Michael Lerner, are also able to cast Palestinians as actors in the Holocaust. Lerner wrote: ‘However much we may legitimately criticize Israeli policy toward the Palestinians, we must first acknowledge that the historic oppression of Jews helped create in them a pain so deep that many were unable to notice that, as they leapt from the burning building of Europe, they’d unintentionally landed on the back of another people. Surrounded by a world whose hostility has produced 2000 years of homelessness and oppression, and by a Palestinian people whose pain they are unable to acknowledge because of their own, Jews may find it hard to recognize that the existence of Israel renders them beneficiaries of great privilege or power. The terrible errors being made by Israel today are a consequence of sensitivity-dulling genocide — compounded by decades of implacable Arab hostility when it was the Jews who were stateless and living in displaced-persons camps and it was the Palestinians who were denying the Jews the right to enter Palestine’ (Lerner 2019).
[3] Tweet by @benshapiro 17 September 2015. https://twitter.com/benshapiro/status/644505141299671041