Is it anti-Semitic to criticise Israel? Of course not. No nation on Earth should be shielded from the brickbats or even the ridicule of the world’s citizens.
Is it anti-Semitic to rage day in, day out against Israel? To think of little else? To let this tiny state occupy your every waking thought? To call it uniquely barbarous, borderline demonic, a nation that lusts after blood like no other? To dream of its destruction? To traipse through the streets every week hollering for its obliteration? To call its citizens genocidal freaks and lunatics? To taunt them with memories of their ancestors’ extermination by branding them ‘Nazis’? To devote yourself so singularly to this one nation’s erasure that you come to define your entire political personality by that warped goal and proudly declare yourself an ‘anti-Zionist’?
Yes. Yes, that is anti-Semitic. If you maniacally obsess over the Jewish homeland, and detest Jewish nationalism more than any other nationalism, and gleefully chant for the death of the Jewish nation’s soldiers, and fantasise about the violent excision of the Jewish State ‘from the river to the sea’, then you have a problem with Jews. And more of us need to say so.
The anti-Zionism vs anti-Semitism debate is one of the most infuriating of our times. It reared its head again this week following an interview Zarah Sultana gave to the New Left Review. She’s the former Labour MP, now independent MP, who is setting up a new political party with the Magic Grandpa of Britain’s knackered left, Jeremy Corbyn. She praised Corbyn’s tenure as leader of the Labour Party from 2015 to 2020, but she made some digs, too. He too meekly ‘capitulated’ to the definition of anti-Semitism put forward by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, she said. And that was bad because the IHRA ‘equates [anti-Semitism] with anti-Zionism’.
She is presumably referring to the IHRA’s insistence that some forms of Israel-bashing cross the line from political critique into something darker and dodgier. For example, using ‘symbols and images associated with classic anti-Semitism’, such as ‘claims of Jews killing Jesus’, to ‘characterise Israel or Israelis’. That seems reasonable to me. I once saw a placard on a ‘pro-Palestine’ demo that said ‘They killed Jesus and now they’re killing Palestinians’ – anyone denying the virulent Jew hatred in such a crude cry is either a fool or a liar.
The IHRA also says it is suspect to make comparisons between ‘contemporary Israeli policy’ and the policies of the Nazis. Again, that’s reasonable. I don’t want anyone cancelled or censored for drawing pitiless and historically illiterate links between the Nazis’ industrialised burning of the Jews and Israel’s wars against the armies of anti-Semites that surround it. But it is unquestionably bigoted. The gross fashion for referring to Gaza as a new Warsaw Ghetto, or to Israel’s war on Hamas as a new holocaust, or to Benjamin Netanyahu as the new Hitler, has one aim and one aim only: to wound Jews with reminders of their people’s near destruction; to shame them by likening them to the very monsters they were once gassed by.
Ms Sultana got some flak on X. Some people even called her anti-Semitic. She fired back. Your ‘smears won’t work this time’, she said. And then, definitively: ‘Anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism.’ She warned those accusing her of being anti-Jewish to ‘lawyer up’. I am more than happy to accept that Ms Sultana is not an anti-Semite. I hope she and her new party extend that courtesy to others and hold back from branding them ‘Islamophobes’. Otherwise, who knows, they might have to ‘lawyer up’, too. But on anti-Zionism, she is plain wrong. To some of us, it is patently clear that this strange and feverish ideology that has such a brutish grip on the minds of our young and our intellectuals is often anti-Semitism in wokeface.
Let’s leave to one side Ms Sultana and take a look at the broader Israelophobic animus that has swept the West like a fever since Hamas’s fascistic pogrom of 7 October 2023. There is nothing more disingenuous than when leftist hotheads or liberal scribes say, ‘It isn’t anti-Semitic to criticise Israel’, because we are not talking about criticism of Israel. We are talking blind hatred for Israel. Hysteria about Israel. The fantasy of Israel’s death. The wild and demented conviction that Israel is the most murderous state in existence, if not the most murderous state ever, and that it wields staggering power over the obsequious nations of the West. That’s not criticism – it’s a species of madness, built on the foul belief that the Jewish State is the most nefarious, most bloody and most sneakily powerful state on Earth.
Show me one other anti-war movement that called not only for an end to war but for the end of an entire nation. ‘We don’t want two states / We want ’48!’, cry the keffiyeh-adorned bigots of America’s Ivy League to signal their desire to return to 1948 before the modern State of Israel existed. Shorter version: obliterate that filthy country. Which other nation is referred to as ‘the pigs of the Earth’, as ‘uniquely murderous’, as a ‘scum state’, as ‘the new Nazi state’? Name another country whose annihilation is feverishly envisioned by that unholiest alliance of radical Islamists calling for the army of Muhammad to return to slaughter every last Jew and Israel-sick leftists screaming ‘From the river to the sea’.
And name one nation – just one – that is not only lambasted for its actions but also finds its entire right to nationhood ceaselessly called into question. ‘Fuck Zionism’, protesters cry. Zionism is ‘a cancer to the planet’, they say. Destroy the ‘Zionist entity’, mobs wail, like that’s normal; like it’s normal to pine publicly for the erasure of a nation of nine million souls. Until someone shows me footage of hundreds of thousands of fuming Westerners hitting the streets to say ‘Fuck Turkish statehood’ or ‘Destroy the Pakistani entity’, I will entertain not one single protestation that anti-Zionism is just ‘criticism of Israel’. No, if you have sworn yourself solely to the upending and elimination of the project of Jewish nationhood, then you can’t be too surprised if someone calls you a Jew hater.
Criticism? Please. We’ve now reached a point where I struggle to envision what ‘criticism of Israel’ would even look like. We never see it. We only see a savage and violence-tinged loathing for Israel that long ago left the plane of geopolitical critique and now exists entirely in the realm of bigotry. Everything they once said about the Jews – they love to let blood, they love to kill children, they’re all-powerful, they’re a cancer on humanity – they now say about the Jewish nation. Some people might accept that this is entirely coincidental – I am not one of those people.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy
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