Four recent books on antisemitism

By Dale Street

“Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East”, “Three Faces of Antisemitism: Right, Left and Islamist”, “The Rebirth of Antisemitism in the 21st Century” and “Mapping the New Left Antisemitism” are four collections of articles and essays published at the close of 2023 by the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism.

The purpose of the book series is to assist in “understanding and opposing the presence and ascendancy of contemporary antisemitism in both its theoretical and empirical manifestations.” This requires placing contemporary antisemitism in its historical context:

“The antisemitism which exists in world politics in 2023 contains no ideas that were not expressed … first in Nazi Germany, then in the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc, and finally in the Islamist organisations and Arab states.”

“Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East”, by Matthias Küntzel, is a chronological work. It deals with a new form of Islamic antisemitism – a fusing of “the degrading Anti-Judaism of early Islam and the conspiratorial antisemitism of modern times” – from its emergence in the late 1930s through to the Arab-Israeli War of 1948.

Like Nazi antisemitism, this Islamic antisemitism was inherently genocidal. For the Nazis, the very existence of Jews was a threat to the German people. For Islamic antisemitism, their existence was a threat to the future of Islam.

Nazi wartime broadcasts to the Middle East, in which Haj Amin el-Husseini (the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, resident in Berlin during the war) enthusiastically collaborated, amplified this theme:

“According to the Muslim religion, the defence of your life is a duty which can only be fulfilled by annihilating the Jews. Your sole hope of salvation lies in annihilating the Jews before they annihilate you.”

The collaboration between the Nazis and Husseini was therefore not a transient marriage of convenience. It was based on “an ideological commonality”. Küntzel quotes Husseini himself:

“Our friendship with Germany is not at all one of opportunism that rests only on contemporary circumstances. Rather, it is the result of common interests of both nations and of their unified stance towards a common enemy in battle.”

The “common enemy” was the global Jewish population. The “unified stance” was the shared commitment to their extermination. In the immediate post-war years this genocidal antisemitism found further expression in opposition to the creation of Israel. Küntzel writes:

“There is an ideological link between the Nazi war against the Jews and the Arab war against Israel three years later. The latter can be interpreted as a kind of aftershock of the great catastrophe of 1939-45. … [It was] a continuation of the anti-Jewish war of extermination that had begun under Hitler.”

Husseini set for the tone on his return to Egypt in 1946. He defined a war with the future Israel in the same way as Hitler had defined the Second World War: “Our battle with World Jewry is a question of life and death, a battle between two conflicting faiths, each of which can exist only on the ruins of the other.”

Husseini was backed up by the Muslim Brotherhood. With 500,000 members by 1945, thanks in part to Nazi patronage during the war, the Brotherhood was the world’s largest antisemitic organisation. (Tony Cliff, founder of what is now the British Socialist Workers Party, rightly characterised the Brotherhood as “clerical fascists.”)

Islamic antisemitism in its modern form, concludes Küntzel, was not a mistaken but ‘understandable’ response to the creation of Israel. It was the driving force behind the attempt to destroy the country – and its population – at the time of its creation.

“Three Faces of Antisemitism: Right, Left and Islamist”, by Jeffrey Herf, is also a chronological work, covering some key themes of antisemitism from the 1920s through to the present.

It begins with a focus on the genocidal nature of “Nazi Germany’s core antisemitic conspiracy theory”, according to which “international Jewry” had launched the Second World War in order to “exterminate” the German people:

“In response to this attempted mass murder, Hitler promised to turn the tables and kill the Jews before they could kill the Germans. Hitler and other Nazi leaders presented the Final Solution as a massive act of German self-defence.”

Herf also covers Nazi antizionism: “Antagonism to Zionism was a continuing theme of Nazism from the publication of Hitler’s Mein Kampf in 1924 to the last days of the Nazi regime in 1945.” In the course of the war, “the idea of the murderous and powerful Jew evolved into attacks on the murderous and aggressive Zionist.”

Overlapping with Küntzel’s writings, Herf moves on to look at the interaction between Nazi wartime propaganda and Islamist antisemitism – Herf uses that expression rather than Küntzel’s “Islamic antisemitism” – and reaches the same general conclusions:

“Islamist antisemitism was not primarily due to the idea transfer of Nazi ideology into a previously benign context. Rather, the Nazi regime used its power to amplify a tradition of Islamic antisemitism that had already emerged in the 1930s.”

In the following sections of his book Herf analyses post-war antisemitism in the Stalinist-ruled German Democratic Republic (GDR).

This was exemplified by the persecution of the purged Communist Party leader Paul Merker as an alleged agent of American imperialism and Zionism, and by what Herf calls the GDR’s “undeclared wars with Israel”.

Herf uses the expression “wars” because the policies to which he refers “would, if successful, have led to the destruction of the state of Israel by force of arms. Nouns such as ‘criticism’ or ‘hostility’ do not capture [the substance of the panoply of the GDR’s policies].”

Perhaps more importantly, Herf locates the GDR’s state-antisemitism within the broader context of the post-war antisemitism of the Stalinist bloc as a whole, and the crucial role which this played as a bridge between Nazi antisemitism and more modern forms of antisemitism:

“The advocates [of this antisemitism] indignantly rejected the idea that efforts to destroy the state of Israel had anything at all to do with antisemitism. They insisted that they were advocates of anti-racist and even anti-fascist principles.
This shift of the tradition of leftist antifascism from support to opposition to Zionism and then Israel … made antizionism a defining aspect of global Communist and radical leftist politics. Communist and leftist antizionism became the primary vehicle through which pejorative views previously applied to the Jews in the Western tradition came to be applied round the world to the state of Israel.”

In the closing sections of his book Herf returns to the themes of right-wing antisemitism (in Trumpist America) and the Islamist antisemitism of the Iranian regime, al Qaeda, and Hamas and its “too-little-known fascist Charter”.

Although such organisations “know how to speak the language of leftist anti-imperialism of the past century”, writes Herf, their actual political affinities lie “closer to fascist and Nazi philosophy”. They share “an ideological rationale that facilitates murdering the innocent with a clean conscience.”

In an article dating from 2014 Herf asks the question: “Why was all that concrete poured into the ground [to build tunnels under the Gaza Strip] as part of the offensive [by Hamas against Israel] instead of above ground as the foundation of schools, factories and homes?”

He finds the answer in the Hamas Charter. It combines the Islamist and Nazi genocidal antisemitism of the 1930s and 1940s and the conspiracy theories of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion with a death-cult celebration of ‘martyrdom’. It is the charter of an organisation which has no rationale for existence other than that of killing of Jews.

“The Rebirth of Antisemitism in the 21st Century” and “Mapping the New Left Antisemitism” are collections of a total of 42 essays and articles.

Despite the difference in the titles of the two works, the contents of both are concerned almost entirely with left antisemitism. This takes the form of antisemitic antizionism, defined as:

“Bending the meaning of Israel and Zionism out of shape until both become fit receptacles for the tropes, images and ideas of classical antisemitism. In short, that which the demonological Jew once was, demonological Israel now is: uniquely malevolent, full of blood lust, all-controlling, the hidden hand, … the obstacle to a better, purer, more spiritual world.”

This antizionism has become “a totalising ideology that promotes Israel to the role of a demonic historical actor. Anyone who is associated with it by recognising it as a Jewish homeland, or, increasingly, simply through endorsing its right to exist, inherits its essential criminality.”

In its manifestations and expressions, antizionism “ceases to be a political view. It becomes an instrument for encrypting hostility to Jews by embedding reference to them in an ideological proxy term. It is a variant of the coding technique that racists have used against people of colour for decades.”

Not all contributors to the two books agree entirely with this approach. Simon Gansinger, for example, argues:

“When antisemitism appears as anti-Zionism, it is not merely replicated in a different language. Rather, it undergoes a profound transformation. The displacement of ‘Jews’ by ‘Zionists’ modifies the ideological structure of antisemitism. Instead of being a disingenuous version of antisemitism, anti-Zionism [is] one of its inflections.”

Leftist antisemitic antizionism is an antisemitism fit for the twenty-first century:

“It has matured in the twenty-first century because it fulfils twenty-first-century functions that relate to twenty-first-century society. Just as twentieth-century-totalitarian antisemitism portrayed the ‘enemy of the people’ as having a Jewish face, so too antizionism portrays racism and oppression as having an Israeli face.”

Some of the contributions to the two collections cover topics and events which activists who have been involved in challenging left antisemitism over the past two decades will already be familiar with.

These include: The notorious Durban Jewish-hatefest Conference of 2001, the campaign in the UCU trade union and its predecessors for a boycott of the Israeli academic community, Caryl Churchill’s play Seven Jewish Children, and the legal construction of Jewish identity, especially in the case of Fraser v UCU.

More recent issues are also covered: The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition and examples of antisemitism, Ken Livingstone’s ‘insights’ into Nazi Germany and Zionism, Labour and antisemitism under Corbyn, and Bristol University’s dismissal of David Miller.

The articles and essays in the two collections are too many and too diverse in scope to cover in a review. But there are some contributions which merit particular mention:

– Simon Gansinger’s article on the Polish Communist Party’s antisemitic ‘anti-Zionist’ campaign of 1968, organised under the slogan “Antisemitism – No! Anti-Zionism -Yes!” Virtually all of the thousands of people expelled from the Communist Party, sacked from their jobs, evicted from their accommodation, and driven to suicide were Jews.

– David Seymour’s critique of the concept of antisemitism as “a reservoir of negative attitudes, myths and tropes about Jews.” This, argues Seymour, amounts to a mystification: It fails to root antisemitism in the social world and social relations. Putting it crudely, it fails to explain “why people would think of accessing them [the contents of the ‘reservoir’] in the first place.”

– Karin Stögner’s analysis of mainstream intersectionality’s failure to understand antisemitism. By “reducing racism to the dichotomy of White and Black, with Jews implicitly or explicitly identified with Whiteness,” it places Jews – victims of centuries of racial persecution – in the camp of White power and privilege. Even worse, it can “actually result in the confirmation of antisemitic stereotypes, such as the excessive influence of Jews in business, politics and the media.”

– Sarah Annes Brown’s critique of an article by the anti-Zionist Oren Ben-Dor: “Although framed as an academic piece, reads more like one of H.P. Lovecraft’s brooding tales of cosmic horror … seems more interested in dark suggestion than in argument or proof … just when one feels his article cannot get any more abhorrent, new depths are plumbed … an almost hypnotic compulsion to repeat certain words and ideas.”

– On a more positive note, “Mapping the New Left Antisemitism” concludes with a lengthy interview with Philip Spencer on the theme of (historical and contemporary) “left alternatives to left antisemitism”, even if the overall tenor of the interview is not entirely optimistic:

“The universalism of some on the left today is both highly selective and toxic, because it excludes Jews and casts them out as the criminal other. It legitimates a particularly revolting argument, that Jews are now the perpetrators of the very crime committed against them – genocide.”

There is, inevitably, some degree of overlap between the contents of the four books in the series. Some of the articles are too short to allow for a fuller development of their arguments. And the antisemitic currents within the anti-globalisation movement in the early 2000s and the subsequent Occupy movement could usefully have been covered in more detail.

The four books also have a certain orientation towards academia. They define themselves as being of interest to “scholars researching antisemitism”, “those researching antisemitism”, “scholars and activists with an interest in antisemitism”, and “scholars and students researching antizionism”.

The price of the books is also rather scholarly.

But there is a much more basic criterion by which to assess and judge the political value of the books. Although published only at the close of last year, after 7th October, the series had already been completed for printing before that date.

With 7th October, the ‘debate’ (for want of a better word) about left antisemitism moved on from earlier arguments about whether the IHRA definition of antisemitism was a Zionist conspiracy to silence criticism of Israel, and whether Jeremy Corbyn had been the victim of another Zionist conspiracy.

7th October was the biggest mass murder of the Jews since the Holocaust. It was the worst antisemitic pogrom since the pogroms in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus in 1918-21. And sections of the left rejoiced in it.

“Rejoice as Palestinian resistance humiliates racist Israel” read a headline in Socialist Worker, paper of the British Socialist Workers Party, the week after the pogrom. This was not simply an appeal to rejoice in the mass murder, mutilation, rape and kidnapping of Jews. It was far worse.

It transformed an antisemitic pogrom into an anti-racist act. The word “racist” is not applied to the pogrom. It is applied to Israel. As an attack on the racist entity of Israel, the pogrom is thereby endowed with the status of anti-racist act. Killing Jews is the new anti-racism.

The headline writer also understands that an antisemitic pogrom is not just about killing Jews. Integral to a ‘proper’ pogrom, as Trotsky noted in his description of a Tsarist antisemitic pogrom, is the humiliation of the victims before their murder.

The headline writer understands this. Hence the definition of the pogrom as an act of humiliation. The headline writer does not merely rejoice in an antisemitic pogrom at a distance. He/she has the mindset of a pogromist.

Four weeks later Socialist Worker had the front-page headline “Blood on Their Hands”, accompanied by pictures of Sunak, Biden, Netanyahu and Starmer. But there was no picture of Yahya Sinwar, the architect of the 7th October pogrom. He has no blood on his hands?

When Jean-Marie Le Pen, the then leader of the French National Front, dismissed the Holocaust as “a detail of history” in 1987 he was roundly denounced (and prosecuted) for doing so. But in dismissing the Holocaust as a historical detail, at least Le Pen acknowledged that it happened. Socialist Worker, by contrast, writes 7th October out of history completely.

Socialist Worker knows that there is a market for those kind of headlines (and repetitive headlines calling for “Smash Israeli Terror State (11/10/23), “Smash Israeli Terror State” (18/10/23) and “Smash Israeli Terror State” (25/10/23) – hardly consistent with calls for a ceasefire).

That market is to be found in the kind of people who spend their Saturday mornings hanging around outside Marks and Spencer, Waitrose, McDonald’s, Starbucks, Tesco, Zara and any other business outlet which, in their antisemitic imagination, is an agent and ally of the Zionist entity. (Twix and Snickers are also enemy agents.)

The market targeted by Socialist Worker can also be found in the kind of people who swoon when speakers at Saturday afternoon ‘Stop the War’ rallies manage to encapsulate two thousand years of antisemitism in fifty words:

“This is our moment to transform the world. We must reject Zionism in all of our institutions, because to be anti-racist is to be anti-Zionist. Zionism is apartheid, it’s genocide, it’s murder, rooted in settler expansion and colonial domination, and we must root it out of the world. We must be de-Zionised because Zionism is a death cult.”

Mohammed el-Kurd, the speaker, successfully combines the Judeophobia of the Roman historian Tacitus of two thousand years ago – Jews are the enemy of mankind (“odium humani generis”) – with the antisemitic antizionism of the Polish Communist Party of the 1950s, which demanded:

“The complete removal of Zionist elements and other enemies of our socialist reality from the political, state, administrative, educational and cultural apparatus, and also from social organisations. Those who in their nihilism and cosmopolitanism poison the spirit and heart of youth should lose their influence on it.”

And the crowd at the rally loved it.

So, how well does the book series provide pre-emptive explanations of the upsurge of antisemitism, especially in its leftist forms, which has been unleashed by the Hamas pogrom of 7th October? The answer is: Pretty well.

The ‘big picture’ context of that upsurge is a constant theme of the four books: The willing failure by sections of the left to understand the politics of Hamas, rooted in a perverted form of ‘anti-imperialism’.

“Islamic antisemitism is an ideology of the extreme right, a fact obscured by the fog of anti-Western and anti-imperialist rhetoric that is also used,” writes Jeffrey Herf. “Along with blatant Jew-hatred,” its hallmarks are “inherent misogyny, threats to homosexuals, the celebration of terror, and religious fanaticism.”

The fact that Islamists are “so obviously reactionaries”, continues Herf, “makes those who present them as anti-imperialist heroes of the global left look like fools or worse – as apologists for Jew-hatred, misogyny, totalitarianism and mass murder.”

In the Gaza Strip, writes Matthew Bolton, Hamas has “ruthlessly suppressed political opposition, public protest and trade union organisation. … The deeply antisemitic nature of the organisation’s founding charter and of the material pumped out on its propaganda channels on a daily basis needs little explication here.”

And yet, for the past two decades, sections of the left have been cheerleaders for Hamas. As Philip Spencer writes:

“In important respects, they [Hizbollah and Hamas] can both be seen as fascist parties … and both are openly antisemitic. Support for these organisations for many on the radical left was open and manifest [in the early2000s]. Hamas is often portrayed on the contemporary Western left as a liberation movement.”

How did sections of the left come to back Hamas? As the Auschwitz survivor and writer Jean Amery, quoted by Marlene Gallner in her contribution, asked in 1969, in identifying the antisemitism of the antizionist anti-imperialism then exploding on the West German left:

“How has it come about that Marxist dialectical thinking now lends a hand to the preparation of a future genocide? … Today, whoever questions Israel’s right to exist is too stupid to understand that he is either contributing to, or intentionally promoting, an über-Auschwitz.”

The answer, outlined in a number of contributions to the book series, is that Hamas supposedly belongs in the camp of ‘anti-imperialism’. This overrides all other considerations. Israel is deemed to be the “key site of the imperialist system” and Hamas the vanguard of “the Resistance against imperialism”. Spencer writes:

“In the unbalanced and blind anti-imperialism adopted by the radical left these [antisemitic] tropes [of Soviet origin] were rearticulated above all in relation to Israel, the safe haven for Jews, and to people designated as its supporters. … An alliance with these supposedly inherently and objectively progressive forces [such as Hamas] was now the order of the day.”

Or, as Alan Johnson puts it: “To support Israel’s enemies – whatever these enemies stood for, however they behaved – was a left-wing ‘anti-imperialist’ duty. In other words: antisemitism went ‘progressive’.” The pro-Hamas left was unable to “distinguish the fascistic from the progressive.”

In the “Manichean form of ‘anti-imperialism’ that has dominated the Western left since the 1960s”, writes Bolton, “once a state or movement has been admitted to the side of the ‘anti-imperialists’, then everything is permitted.” And, as we now know, that includes antisemitic pogroms.

(Strictly speaking, there is nothing new about this. We have been here before – half a century ago. When the Palestinian organisation Black September kidnapped and murdered Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, the manifesto of the imprisoned leadership of the German leftist Red Army Fraction hailed their action:

“Israel cries crocodile tears. It used its athletes as the Nazis used the Jews – as fuel to be burned for its imperialist policy of extermination. They [Black September] took hostages from a people that has pursued a policy of extermination against them. … The action of Black September will not be extinguished from the memory of anti-imperialist struggle.”)

One might expect the sheer horror of 7th October to lead the leftist cheerleaders of Hamas to question their enthusiasm for antisemitic pogromists. On the contrary, they have doubled down in their enthusiasm.

Bu this is not a new phenomenon. In one of her contributions, Izabella Tabarovsky writes:

“It [Soviet-style conspiracist antizionism] contains seeds of anti-Jewish discrimination and violence, and they are bearing fruit. During the May 2021 confrontation between Israel and Hamas, Jews were beaten in the streets of American and European cities to the cheers and encouragement from celebrities whose social media following exceeded the total number of Jew on the planet.”

Going further back in recent history Herf recalls the response of sections of ‘progressive’ opinion in the West to the Islamist murders of Israeli civilians during the second Intifada:

“Then a very strange thing happened. Instead of sympathising with the Israelis [during the second Intifada] as suicide bombers attacked them on the campus of Hebrew University, in bus stations, and in restaurants, voices in the intellectual and academic worlds turned against them.”

As Herf subsequently puts it more succinctly: “Large numbers of people felt impelled to express their fury at the Israelis.” And that phenomenon, in which the greater the atrocities committed by Hamas, the louder the denunciations of Israel, is rooted in a certain form of what passes itself off as left-wing politics. Bolton writes:

“Expressing public support for (antisemitic) political violence targeted at (Jewish) civilians seems to generate a vicarious thrill for a certain kind of leftist: a frisson of narcissistic wonder at one’s own revolutionary toughness, pride at the cultivation of the hardened sensibility and ‘higher’ morality necessary to accept whatever death and destruction is required in pursuit of the cause.”

In her contribution Eve Gerrard writes:

“Antisemitism is fun, there’s no doubt about it. You can’t miss the relish with which some people compare Jews to the Nazis, or the fake sorrow, imperfectly masking deep satisfaction, with which they bemoan the supposed fact that Jews have brought hatred on themselves, especially by the actions of Israel and its Zionist supporters.”

For left antisemitism, the death and destruction referred to by Bolton are all the easier to accept when it is a matter of Jewish death and destruction, carried out in the name of ‘anti-imperialism’. And the slogans raised on the current round of Saturday-afternoon anti-Israel demonstrations demand more of the same.

Those slogans have not emerged from nowhere. They have a political and historical pedigree as inflections and expressions of antisemitism.

The supposedly complex and ambiguous slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is really quite straightforward. As Spencer puts it: “For those who know the code, it is a call for genocide.”

Spencer also explains the historical roots of the slogan “Stop the Genocide!”, which is solely, and ludicrously, directed at Israel, but never at Hamas on current demonstrations:

“The Nazis claimed that the Jews were going to commit genocide against them, when they were of course planning to do this themselves. This is quite a common strategy in the history of antisemitism.

Islamists today – and in this they are often excused or even supported by some on the left – claim that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians when it is obvious from their own words that Islamists themselves are the ones who harbour the genocidal ambitions.”

In other words, in the antisemitic imagination Jews are not genocidal because of their (alleged) actions. They are genocidal because it is in the nature of Jews as Jews to be genocidal. Nazi, Islamist and leftist antisemitism all agree on this point.

The equally popular slogan of “Globalise the Intifada” – or, in its current rhyming version “From [wherever you are] to Gaza, Globalise the Intifada” – is given equally short shrift. David Hirsh and Hilary Miller write:

“Recently, we have seen the appearance of the slogan ‘Globalise the Intifada’. It cements a fantasy of Israel as being symbolic of all evil and it raises a fantasy of the Palestinian struggle as a universal symbol of the innocence and courage of all those who suffer. Justice cannot prevail around the world until Israel is destroyed.”

The slogans are also another example of what Susie Linfield calls “toxic solidarity”: a solidarity which encourages people to believe that an impossible aim can be achieved – in this case, the destruction of Israel by Palestinian armed struggle – and which thereby makes their situation even worse:

“The left’s support for the delusions of the Palestinian movement has greatly contributed to the catastrophic situation of the Palestinians today. That’s what I mean by a toxic gift: Being in uncritical solidarity with programmes which are morally revolting and politically unviable.”

The response – in all its multiple manifestations – of sections of the left to 7th October is a tragic vindication of the warning-cum-prediction contained in the contribution to “Mapping the New Left Antisemitism” written by the late Norman Geras a decade ago:

“We now know that should a new calamity ever befall the Jewish people, there will be, again, not only the direct architects and executants but also those who collaborate, who collude, who look away and find the words to go with doing so. Some of these, dismayingly, shamefully, will be of the left.

https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2024-01-18/four-books-antisemitism

This article also appears on the Workers Liberty website.