Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on May 27, 2021

All reasonable people agree that anti-Semitism is bad, but when they say this they usually refer to anti-Semitism in its past forms, particularly of the 1930s. Anti-Semitism, however, is always evolving: it adopts new language and imagery, often to disguise its real meaning. If one understands the mechanism by which it subtly implants itself into a society, we can identify and expose anti-Semitic meaning even where it has been expertly disguised.

It begins, always,by creating a collective designation for the Jewish people, which distinguishes them from the general population. In Christian Europe, the group was simply known as Jews. In secular 19th and 20th century Europe, the same group became known as Semites (and that designation was never intended for anyone but Jews). In the Soviet Union, which could not afford to be associated with the Nazi version of anti-Semitism, the group became designated at once as Zionists and rootless cosmopolitans. Today, in the West, the same group is designated as pro-Israel Jews and Zionists.

The mechanism then projects onto this designated group the qualities that society finds most loathsome at the specific time. In Christian Europe, Jews collectively bore the sin of killing Christ. For Nazis, the Semites were an impure race. For Soviets, Zionists were capitalists and imperialists. And today, Israel is described as born in sin and Zionists and the State of Israel as the ultimate violators of human rights.

The vilification and subsequent persecution is justified by appealing to the respected authority of the given era. In Christian Europe it was the Church. For secular Europe it was science. For the Soviets it was the Communist Party, and in our own era it is human rights.

The appeal to the power of the highest authority bestows an aura of rationality and respectability on the presentation of Jews or Semites or Zionists as uniquely evil. Today, while it is socially unacceptable to be overtly or obviously anti-Semitic, many in the West are deeply convinced that Israel, pro-Israel Jews, and Zionists are the greatest violators of the sacred values of human rights. Jews again are cast as uniquely evil and a threat to the well-being of humankind.

Yet, when Jews sense the looming danger, the anti-Semitic mechanism lures them into dropping their own defences by convincing them that, by opting out of the collective, they will be spared. In Nazi Germany, Jews were told initially that if they were the good kind of Jew for example, those who fought for Germany in World War One they would be spared. They were not.

Today, in the West, Jews are being told that they will be spared if they join the anti-Zionist accusations. Jews are lured into giving up their own defences, which includes the state of Israel itself, in favour of a binational state, which in short order would become a Palestine From the River to the Sea where Jews are the minority.

So-called human rights advocates demand to know why Jews cannot simply co-exist with the Arabs even in the face of the simple fact that binational states, everywhere and certainly in the Middle East, ultimately and inevitably descend into bloody mayhem. All that is needed for this beautiful utopia to be realised is for the Jews to forgo their bizarre insistence on having their own state where they control their destiny and defences.

Anti-Zionists try to convince the world that the fact that the targets of this latest form of virulent hatred Jews bear a striking resemblance to those who were targets in previous times also Jews is sheer coincidence. Also sheer coincidence is that the charges against Zionist Jews appear strikingly like variations on the ancient themes of anti-Semitism cosmic evil, bloodthirst, conspiracies of money operating behind the scenes.

Even as anti-Zionists relentlessly campaign against Israel, they will claim to fight anti-Semitism. But it will be the old, easy to identify kind, that comes from neo-Nazis and Right-wing nationalists, which is already commonly acknowledged as bad.

Anti-Zionism is merely the new, shiny, innocent-looking, incarnation of the ancient Jew hatred, anti-Semitism. And if the anti-Semitic mechanism is allowed to reach its full scope, what will happen is that which has happened repeatedly in the past.

If Israel is somehow eliminated in favour of a Palestine from the River to the Sea, and Jews rendered defenceless, the world will look back once more on its actions in horror, hang its head and wring its hands and ask itself how this could have happened, and will vow Never Again. Again.

Dr Einat Wilf is a former Labor Party and Independence member of the Israeli Knesset and co-author of The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream has Obstructed the Path to Peace

Continue reading here:
Anti-Zionism is just the new, innocent-sounding incarnation of an ancient Jew hatred - Telegraph.co.uk

Category: Zionism
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