10/09/2024
this has been sitting in my In-box for a while.
Antisemitism exists by Dru Oja Jay on FB
Antisemitism exists. And this fact has been used frequently—of late, to the point of absurdity—in unfounded ways to attack people who believe that Palestinians are human beings. Thanks in part to this prominent and pernicious use of the concept, it is not well understood.
Here are a few words about my considered but still tentative understanding of antisemitism. *I welcome factual corrections and substantive disagreements with the following.*
Every structurally significant form of racism comes from a material imperative that goes beyond mere ignorance. Structural racism and oppression are something more than prejudice founded on ignorance of people who look different. (See, for example, Republicans' confusion about whether making fun of "white guy tacos" is racist or not.)
Anti-black racism, for example, has its origins in the institution of slavery and the colonization of Africa for the purposes of large-scale resource theft. Anti-Indigenous racism usually stems from colonial processes of land theft. Contemporary examples of these forms of racism, when they are not directly in service of those violent policies, echo and invoke the unspeakable violence of the past, which is part of why it's important to avoid saying some words—they don't just hurt feelings, they create a re-living of the violence they were associated with.
Dehumanization is the common denominator, but the goal of the dehumanization differs.
Antisemitism seeks to dehumanize Jewish people. But the material outcomes it serves are different.
Judaism was seen by early Christians as a rival religion. Theologically and politically, Christian churches were never Judaism's biggest fan, to say the least. Jews were blamed, among other things, for Jesus's death. As Christianity became the religion of the rulers, Jewish people made a point of maintaining their religion. For this, they were mostly excluded from government, the military, many craft guilds, and a number of professions, Obviously the clergy and monasteries—key institutions of the time—were off limits as well.
In Europe in the middle ages, Christians were prohibited from lending money (usury). So Jewish people, because they were excluded from so many other professions, were disproportionately channeled into moneylending, while others took up shopkeeping and peddling and other trades they were allowed in to.
While these occupations were filled by just a minority of Jewish families, most Christians would nonetheless, in their day to day, associate Jewish people with these more public-facing roles. The majority of Jewish people were likely peasants, workers or tradespeople much like the non-Jewish majority, but those roles did attach themselves as closely to the ethnic identity and cultural representations.
Economic elites found the association between Jewish people and moneylending and public-facing retail to be very useful. Blaming the Jews became a sort of pressure valve for economic malaise, natural disasters or anything else that might cause prices to rise or people to run up debt.
Let's say the price of bread goes up. In feudal societies, landed gentry *could* offer an explanation based on recent growing conditions, take accountability for military failures, own diplomatic debacles, and lower taxes to provide relief. *Or* they could blame the people who were disproportionately visible in the places where most people experienced financial pressures—buying things in shops or borrowing money.
Guess which one they increasingly picked?
As Christianity settled into its second millennium—its social control and repression era—antisemitism became institutionalized. Blaming the Jews had become a big part of the ruling class’s modus operandi. Soon, elites discovered that they could acquire land and other property by expelling Jews or encouraging violence against them. In 1290, England simply made it illegal for Jewish people to live there. This kicked off a wave of expulsions (France, Austria, Spain, Italian cities) that sent Jewish people ever eastward in the century or so that followed.
This long, sordid history is the crucible for the tropes that persist about Jewish people as conniving, greedy, and so on. Blood libels—which I will not detail here—also emerged in Christianity's second millennium, building on the foundation of anti-Jewish theology.
These beliefs drove violent mobs to attack Jews (often killing masses of people) throughout Christianity's second thousand years. Often encouraged by authorities, pogroms became institutionalized as a way to channel discontent among Christian populations away from the feudal lords, clergy, merchant class or other actually-responsible parties.
Faced with the threat of communism in the early 20th century, elite weaponization of antisemitism would reach world-historic proportions with the industrial slaughter of millions of Jews and other minorities. Germany's national socialism, or Na**sm, appropriated the progressive rhetoric of socialism, but when it came to proposing "solutions," pivoted primarily to violence against Jewish people. The human cost was orders of magnitude higher than any historical precedent, but the social function of anti-semitism that it relied was familiar and well-worn.
One of Na**sm's contributions was to more thoroughly fuse antisemitism and anti-communism. European elites far beyond Germany’s borders trafficked in fearmongering about communism as a Jewish plot, and the euphemisms of "rootless cosmopolitanism" and the more contemporary "globalism" and their associated conspiracy theories have their beginning in this stream.
Anti-semites in the anti-communist era were not fazed by the apparent contradictions of attacking communist agitators and the shadowy agenda of conniving financiers. In fact, blurring the distinction between the two was, if anything, a source of strength.
Elite antisemites would come to see antisemitic violence itself as an opportunity. Lord Balfour, previously notable for his antisemitic views and opposition to allowing Jews fleeing pogroms in Russia to enter Britain, teamed up with Zionists to give credence to the idea of a Jewish state in the Middle East. At the time, this idea was supported by a minority of Jews. But during and after the holocaust, anti-semites in positions of power in Canada, the US and Britain put strict limits on the number of Jewish refugees they would accept, while backing the creation of the state of Israel.
At key moments, the state of Israel—which quickly became a satellite of US interests and a tool to smash secular Arab nationalism and socialism—benefitted from, and even relied on, anti-semitism.
Zionist agents working in concert with the Israeli state spread effective propaganda in places like Morocco (where Jews had lived for 2000 years) to convince Jewish communities that they were in danger of antisemitic violence, provoking large-scale emigration. In Iraq, they went further, planting bombs in synagogues and businesses to provoke a mass exodus of Iraqi Jews to Israel. the larger pattern that equated Jewish safety with Israel while emphasizing (and occasionally being complicit in) the threats to Jewish people people everywhere else.
Current Prime Minister Netanyahu, for example, created strong ties with Trump and the Republican Party, and doesn't appear to be disturbed by Trump's flirtations and friendly conversations with prominent figures who blame "Jews" for America's ills, deny the holocaust, and admire Hi**er. (Pretty safe to call them N***s.)
That obvious (yet consistent) hypocrisy has a larger backdrop. The biggest supporters of Israel in the US are the Christian Zionists, who are notably not concerned at all with the safety of Jewish people, but see the state of Israel as a harbinger of the end times and the second coming. Of course, the ties between Christian Zionists and Israel go far deeper than Netanyahu's personal preferences. There is are constant exchanges, visits and political coordination going back decades.
And whatever the wacky theological underpinnings might be, the structural relationship between the US and Israel are reminiscent of the links between the landed gentry and the Jewish moneylender they set up—and knocked down—in the middle ages. The financial backers of Christian Zionism benefit from using Jewish people as a buffer for a grotesque policy of mass murder in Gaza. Anyone who opposes that policy can be called an anti-semite (and thus associated with the unthinkable crimes of the holocaust) but Jewish people living in Israel will bear a disproportionate share of the unfolding backlash.
The reasons for governments like the US and UK's diplomatic and military backing of Israel go far beyond any of the above. The creation of the state has been tightly intertwined with its role in power projection in west Asia, especially as oil began to flow during the post-war boom.
Israel has always been a cornerstone of US efforts to disrupt Arab nationalism. It has long operated as a cat's paw for the US, through its extensive intelligence network, covert operations and arms dealing. The state of Israel has backed some truly grim US allies (notably, apartheid South Africa) and reinforced the paper-thin legitimacy of the Gulf Monarchies as they suppress their populations' popular aspirations.
Beyond simply being a Middle Eastern outpost, it occupies a key geo-strategic location: Israel's current borders neatly cover the land that joins Asia to Africa, a key trade route. Incidentally, this trade route historically ran through Gaza and was a key part of that region’s historical development during the thousands of years discussed above.
In all of these roles, Israel is regularly the most active, aggressive and violent force in the maintenance of US interests in the region. Long before the current assault, it carried out assassinations (of Iranian scientists, for example) and other violent intrigues. It regularly bombs its neighbours (including Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq).
For these and many other reasons, Israel is widely perceived in the Middle East as one of the key impediments to democracy and self-determination. Millions of people who live in the region see it as an obstacle to their collective advancement—and not without reason.
Lily Greenberg, the Biden staffer who most recently quit in protest of the administration's support of Israel's ongoing starvation and bombing of Gaza, accused Biden of "making Jews the face of the American war machine." A correct assessment in my view. But for people observing Israel outside of the US media's heavy filtering, Israel has been the face of the US war machine for the better part of a century.
Did American and European elites intentionally funnel Jewish people this buffer/scapegoat role or was it a kind of anti-semitic muscle memory? Regardless, the parallels between the material roots of anti-semitism and the parameters of the state of Israel are hard to miss.
In medieval Europe, Jewish people were prevented from participating in society except a few roles where they became the visible face of policies they didn't decide, and were subsequently blamed for them.
The usual reflex is to apply the category of European anti-semitism to any negative reaction to Israel. This isn't helped by the imprecision of a lot of language: "zionist" is used as a proxy for "Jews" in some cases, and most pro-Israel organizations go to great lengths to make Israel and its military activities inseparable from Jewish identity.
There is a generation of children in Gaza whose only experience of Jewish people is planes and drones that dole out death, or soldiers who humiliate their family members for fun. As the world turns its attention to their voices, this can be another source of imprecise language, although most Gazans I’ve heard or read are quite precise indeed.
The distinction between Jews and the role in imperial violence that has been chosen for them is nonetheless crucial—even if many Jewish people reject it.
The joining of things that have the appearance of separateness is also important. Biden may or may not be personally frustrated with the intransigence of the Israeli leadership, but institutionally, the US and Israel are part of a contiguous ruling class that has a common set of economic interests, and presides over a military and intelligence apparatus that benefits them—even if only in superficial and shortsighted ways.
Within that elite, anti-semitism lives on. Unmoored from its theological origins, it takes on perverse new forms: conspiracy theories, Soros-hatred, "globalists." The right loves to tie together anxieties about the left, shadowy finance capital and warmongering into one messy ball of conspiracism. This outwardly bizarre elision is a direct echo of N**i rhetoric, and serves the same function.
Anti-semitism-inspired rhetoric that doesn't explicitly name or target Jews is far from harmless. Invocations of a shadowy cabal of elites who engage in ritual horrors (e.g. Pizzagate) has the direct outcome of deflecting people away from how the world works, and directing violence at whoever is associated with the shadowy cabal. That target group, statistically, will tend to end up being Jewish people.
As we speak, the state of Israel appears to be in an ultra-violent death spiral. They have likely slaughtered well over 100,000 Gazans (viz The Lancet's recent study) at this point, fuelled by non-stop genocidal rhetoric from the most powerful ministers in the government. Foreign investors are pulling out, the economy is in decline, and mobs are rioting to uphold the right of soldiers to r**e prisoners. Israel’s Prime Minister, refusing to report to the Hague for war crimes charges, is attempting to provoke a regional war. Hundreds of thousands of slightly more moderate (and wealthy) Israelis are leaving the country, all but guaranteeing an electoral lock for the fanatics currently in power.
To some, it can feel like the qualitative end is near, and it’s tempting to see the present juncture as a break from historical trends. All that remains to be seen.
But if two millennia of Christian history show us anything, it’s that elites are probably not done using Jewish people in a buffer/scapegoat role. They are certainly not done with the constellation of analytically derailing concepts like “globalist” that protect elites and sow the seeds of antisemitism anew. If we don’t understand that, we may well be fated for more grim repetitions of this well-worn pattern. History is clear about the outcomes that has for Jewish people—to say nothing of everyone else.
