What Do People Panic About When They Panic About Anti-Semitism?

‘We have become the Gaza of Europe.’

– Geert Wilders, Amsterdam, 8 November 2024

We know that in so many words – ‘terror’, ‘peace’, ‘hate’, ‘safety’ – redefinition and redescription are key tools in the colonial arsenal^[1]This text originated as a talk delivered at the conference, ‘The Struggle for Palestine and the Architectures of Settler Colonialism’, hosted by Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths University, … Continue reading. Not just ‘anti-Semitism’ but also ‘Jews’ are words subject to that process now. And if Palestine is a site of crystallisation for a global emancipatory politics for many millions in solidarity movements around the world, I want to offer some preliminary suggestions about why an idea of ‘Israel’ is a similar site of crystallisation for the politics of empire.

Getting the questions right

Why the panic across the West today about Jews? The question might seem to be: various groups suffer racial discrimination, why does the ruling class proclaim sympathy for Jews more than others? In Britain, when the Board of Deputies of British Jews proposes the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism, the Conservative Party says ‘yes’ and great pressure is put on the Labour Party until they do the same, along with countless institutions from local government to universities. When the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) tries the same strategy, their proposed definition of Islamophobia is rubbished after, importantly, the police worry openly that adopting it would interfere in police work. The Conservative and Labour Parties both share coffee with the Board of Deputies but boycott the MCB. This predicament is sometimes discussed today as a dreaded ‘hierarchy of racisms’. That language presupposes that we all agree racism is bad, so that critique ought to illuminate and to explain the different levels of hostile attention paid by power to different prejudiced views. This will not do. Shifting from what Arun Kundnani has recently called the ‘liberal’ to the ‘radical’ conception of racism, from seeing racism as a psychology of the ignorant to seeing it as (also) a structure of material power, we might ask instead: why does the state racialise Muslims as security threats, migrants as economic threats, black men as criminal threats, but Jews as subjects for its protection, along ostensibly passionate anti-racist lines discovered and aggressively championed in this one case only? Protecting Jews is now a prominent claim deployed against leftwing politics, often in defence of overt bigots on the right, in Britain, France, Germany, the United States, Chile and elsewhere. What explains that ostensibly sympathetic construction of Jews by racist forces?

Two bad answers prevail today, which are in turn philo-Semitic and anti-Semitic, and are not mutually exclusive. The philo-Semitism explanation holds that the ruling class genuinely like Jews more than they like Muslims, which only begs the question. This gap has to be explained historically. Why did we move in Britain from a position where the monarch was a friend of Hitler in 1936 to one where the monarch lobbies the BBC to demand they refer to Palestinian resistance fighters as terrorists, in support of a campaign launched by the Board of Deputies? There is today a New Anti-Anti-Semitism where defenders of ‘Christian civilisation’ – a phrase invented to send chills down Jewish spines, since we killed their god – now talk instead of ‘Judeo-Christian civilisation’. Even if the change of opinion is genuine, why now?

Here we come to the second bad answer, the anti-Semitic one: the rightwing media maligns every other minority in Britain but celebrates Jews because Jews control it. It is worth stressing that a softer version of this claim (‘surely the wildly different treatment meted out to Jews is a product simply of Jews being wealthier and better connected to power than other minorities’) is, as Barbara and Karen Fields say of racism in a different case, intuitive. In the absence of a theory capable of explaining why power claims to like x group, the simplest answer is that x group holds power.

Consider a better question. What do people panic about when they panic about Jews? In formulating the question this way, treating debates about minorities as also sites where the society works through its other problems, two influences stand out.

First: Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks treats different racisms as projections of different anxieties. A sexually aggressive patriarchy reads black men as voracious threats to women, Fanon says, and a capitalist society reads greed as the property of Jews. Racism projects facts about the society onto a debased Other who concentrates all that we dislike in ourselves, a kind of inversion of Feuerbach on gods as idealised projections. Indeed, in 1843 Marx already approached debates about Jewish emancipation by asking what broad social and political work was being done by images of ‘the Jews’ in those debates (to endless misinterpretation since). Like Marx and Fanon, we might ask: what content gets projected onto the two fantasies ‘anti-Semite’ and ‘Jew’ in the New Anti-Anti-Semitism?

Secondly: in the richest intellectual tradition bequeathed to Marxism in Britain, Cultural Studies, moral panics are deflected expressions of real anxieties at a moment of epochal transition. Moral panics work by fixing responsibility for the dislocations experienced during epochal transitions onto outsiders who are themselves changed by the transition. Reading symptoms as causes, Mods and rockers are imagined causing the decline of deference in 1950s Britain rather than being produced by it (in Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics), and black unemployment and crime is thought to cause the crisis of Fordist stabilities rather than being produced by it (in Hall et al., Policing the Crisis). Extending Fanon, the question here is not just what projections are involved in the moral panic but also what processes of social change are narrated in it. In one of the great insights of Policing the Crisis, moral panics work to constitute hegemonic blocs to smooth epochal transitions. On my reading, the moral panic about anti-Semitism narrates crises of postcolonial neoliberalism through anxious images of the wretched of the earth, a spectre now redescribed as anti-Semitic, the better to cohere alliances against it.

In the remainder of this essay, I will sketch hypotheses about three things: first, the psychic and social needs answered by the New Anti-Anti-Semitism, second, the troubling theory of anti-Semitism implied by it, and third: what alternative starting points for a different anti-anti-Semitism could look like, through some thoughts on diaspora and identity.

1.

The New Anti-Anti-Semitism offers an explanatory framework for addressing connected economic, geopolitical and demographic angsts.

First, the economic, in the long crisis of neoliberal technocracy since 2008 and the return of anti-elitist politics in various forms. An image of anti-Semitism as the unique prejudice that punches up, imagining Rothschild bankers controlling the world, sees the Labour MP Siobhan McDonagh warn that anti-capitalism is intrinsically anti-Semitic. This is the old claim about a ‘socialism of fools’, deployed now to cast suspicion on socialism in toto. A nebulous ‘populism’, spanning left and right and everywhere but the technocratic centre, often sees anti-Semitism soon invoked. Anti-Semites see politics as ‘a battle between the virtuous masses and a nefarious, corrupt elite’, says the Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland. Lest we be in any doubt about how widely the anti-Semitic rot spreads, Freedland clarifies that ‘plenty of Jews have themselves internalised it – including no less than Karl Marx.’ Internalising the anti-Semitic picture of power as Jewish, this view defends power by recoding hostility to elites as racist. It reads anti-Semites as something like Nietzsche’s revolt of the lambs against the birds of prey. Following Foucault’s provocative link between genealogies of ‘class struggle’ and ‘race struggle’, this reading discredits the former by redescribing it as the latter. This makes anti-anti-Semitism a convenient anti-politics, a compelling way for those who mourn Peter Mair’s ‘void’ of 1990s consensus to experience and to express their angst about the return of antagonism by associating it with spectres everyone agrees are frightening – like Kristallnacht. This image of Jew-baiting forgets why Trotsky was once as important as Rothschild to anti-Semitism, and why a liberal billionaire (George Soros) now occupies much rightwing attention for his supposed border-spanning attempts to bring down the West. It is an image that misses the conservative core of anti-Semitism, on which more later. But the image of anti-Semitism as a brand of radical politics does its work in communicating a particular feeling of unease or panic.

Second, capital lives in national and imperial shells. We might trace a line from Ronald Storrs, Britain’s colonial governor of Jerusalem, favouring a Zionist state in the 1920s as a ‘little Jewish Ulster’ to police Britain’s regional interests; to 1956, when Britain and France launched their neo-colonial invasion of Egypt from the Zionist state; to today, and the IHRA banning as anti-Semitic the diagnosis of that settler-colonial state as racist, mobilising the memory of the Holocaust by appending a pre-existing text to the name International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. Here we see the use of proclaimed anti-anti-Semitism, claims to protect Jews, as a direct tool of colonial power: imperial, then settler-colonial. Its effect is to discredit anti-colonial politics. In David Baddiel’s telling argument, the left disgraces its anti-racism when it fails to defend Jews on the terms demanded by the IHRA, which means defending a racist state. While the philo-Nazi Freedom Party in Austria calls for bans on kosher slaughter, they happily adopt the IHRA, pleased at the chance to attack the colonised. Meanwhile, consistent anti-colonialism is tarred with insinuations (or worse) of racism.

By consequence, the New Anti-Anti-Semitism legitimates colonial power by depicting the colonised as unenlightened savages (racists). It is a logic of projection: when the Palestinian writer Mohammed El-Kurd misspoke at a rally – missing out the word ‘not’ in ‘We must not normalise massacres’ – he was accused of genocidal intent precisely at the moment that he was naming and opposing a live genocide. Colonial power knows only violence. It reads the colonised as incurably violent in order to defend its violent repression of them. Palestinians are recast as racists when they object to their racist colonisation, and anti-colonial politics in general – sympathy with the West’s victims at a moment of fear and decline for the West – is recast as racist by positioning Jews as the canary in the coalmine for the impending collapse of that civilisation. Tony Blair warns that Jeremy Corbyn is, of course, an anti-Semite, because his ‘anti-West’ worldview demands it. While Liz Truss threatens ‘ten years to save the West’, the New Anti-Anti-Semitism offers a vernacular at once anxious and proud for communicating the peripheralisation of the old imperial core within the world system. The spectre of global South solidarity with Palestine works to vindicate an old claim, that the West’s rising Others are savages. The British state commissions a former head of Labour Friends of Israel, John Woodcock, to write a report calling to ban both Palestine Action and Just Stop Oil, repressing nonviolent civil disobedience where it challenges the colonial and ecological violence that constitute this civilisation. When Palestine Action responds that he palpably represents the Israel lobby, he says that is evidence they are anti-Semitic and should be banned. The colonised and their supporters are savages. In the post-Holocaust, postcolonial, post-Civil Rights order, racialised savagery is a harder claim to make so it is today recovered, in a moment of ironic genius, by accusing the savages of racism. That meets our strange times, when racist power endures while everyone claims to be anti-racist. Accusing racial Others of racism is thereby thinkable as a strategy for defining the un-Enlightened savage, which is a relief to those looking for ways of narrating the crisis of the West, and a view of anti-Semitism as prejudice against power and against a Western ally makes it perfect to those ends.

Capital’s imperial shells are defended ideologically through racialised framings of social conflicts. That brings us to the third, more local anxiety.

While I was canvassing near a barracks during the 2019 election, a veteran in union jack tattoos opened the door to tell me he would never vote for Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn, he said, loves IRA terrorists and hates Jews. What image of ‘Jews’ was involved for him here? Why was it intuitively compelling to him that someone disloyal to British imperialism in Ireland would also hate Jews? Over the last year, far-right counter-protestors have on several occasions targeted Palestine marches, talking of great replacement theory: a conspiracy theory originally oriented around Jews, here used nominally to defend Jews from replacement by Muslims. These anxieties appear too in the mainstream of the civilisation. The former immigration minister Robert Jenrick, seeking the Tory leadership by opining on television that multiculturalism has failed, was asked to evidence the claim. He pointed to the Palestine marches in London. Jews, he said, were now at risk because of multiculturalism – because of migrants and their children and grandchildren, whom he accused of ‘clearly not sharing British values’.

An image of Jews is therefore mobilised, as a vulnerable group threatened by the savage hordes, to defend both colonial and metropolitan racial hierarchies by redescribing the dominant power in those hierarchies as protective over the vulnerable. That presentation works to legitimate horror at class politics and anti-colonial politics in the twin crises of neoliberalism and American unipolarity. It also offers a frame for narrating the ascendant theme of right-wing politics. The New Anti-Anti-Semitism is a subset of that more general anti-migrant politics which increasingly provides the core purpose of the right in the global North, such that this anti-anti-Semitism ambivalently self-presents as anti-racism but in truth it now constitutes an important element of European racism.

These last two dynamics, the global and the local scales, were united in November 2024 in the Netherlands. When far-right Israeli football hooligans ripped down Palestinian flags and shouted genocidal abuse on the streets of Amsterdam, they were confronted furiously by locals. Not only the Zionist state but European governments, too, reacted with horror at Arab immigrants disturbing European serenity through their barbarian inhospitality to genocidal guests. Amsterdam’s mayor, nominally of the Green Left, said the Israeli fans had been victims of a ‘pogrom’. A Sky News report clarifying the responsibility of the Israeli fans was quickly deleted and replaced with one depicting them as victims: the logic of the panic is like a wave that engulfs, insisting on its significations of the world. The mayor awkwardly retracted her pogrom comment. But Geert Wilders, the far-right leader fresh from topping the polls in the last Dutch election, quickly called for the deportation of ‘Moroccans’. He said: ‘Muslims hunted Jews on the streets of Amsterdam.’ Then, crucially, he said this dynamic was at work in Gaza too; he claimed the Netherlands was now Gaza. Imperial alliances, colonial hierarchies and metropolitan prejudices are all today defended by a binary between a protected minority – whose protection legitimates Western power – on one hand, and on the other hand a horde of brutes eager to tear chunks out of that vulnerable group. In Amsterdam’s city council, only those commonly termed the ‘migrant parties’ spoke out against the pogrom framing; this is a harbinger of the politics to come, of its new dividing lines with immigrants cast as radical political subjects, threats to white society and its Jews.

This emerges from a familiar strategy, wherein powerful actors legitimate their power by painting it as protective over vulnerable people. The word patriarch ostensibly denotes the protection of women and children by men whose violence is described as necessary to ward off threats; in fact, that position and the structure of male violence it governs constitutes the threat. In America’s Jim Crow South, lynchings frequently followed rape charges, with racial power justifying its violence as necessary to protect vulnerable white women from aggressive black men. Jews are treated in the New Anti-Anti-Semitism like white women in that American experience. A particular fantasy of our vulnerability is necessary to the defence of racial power. In Europe today, Islamophobia is sometimes wrapped up in LGBT advocacy – a strategy pioneered by the far-right former Marxist Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands, and now reaching Britain, too, with the Prevent agenda enforcing ‘British values’ on the rest of us, starting in the school classroom, preaching LGBT equality to Muslim students as a test of their integration: supposing improbably that homophobia is not a ‘British value’. Racism is thereby constructed as an Enlightened necessity to police a backward and homophobic Other. Finally, Sai Englert has shown in Spectre how a logic just like the one I am describing was used by the French state in Algeria to present Jews as its protected minority who would be harmed if Algerians won their freedom: again, an ‘anti-racist’ racism requiring a protected minority for its legitimation.

The protected minority can kill and maim and taunt the savages endlessly and still be depicted as the victim, since the structure of racialisation codes victim status on the basis of one’s perceived essence, not one’s acts. The coding assumes the language of essentialism. But in truth, it is not our fictitious racial essence but our usefulness to power that dictates our racialisation. Eastern Europeans were ‘stealing British jobs’ two decades ago, but now Putin bombs them and so British ministers find it convenient to invite Ukrainian families into their spare bedrooms. Likewise, the apparent whitening of Jews, such that we become worthy of protection, really represents our deployment as an alibi for three angsts (economic, geopolitical, demographic) of white society. Jews are human shields for the other agendas of imperial power. We are a double shield, in fact. We are thrown into the line of fire to defend Western civilisation in Asia, and then thrown into the line of fire all over the world by the settler state’s explicit and constant insistence that it represents world Jewry. That insistence does precisely what human shielding always does: it says, ‘you want to attack me. I think I’ll be safer and look nobler if I strap him to me and encourage you to attack him instead.’ Jews may often participate enthusiastically in it, but as a wider politics the New Anti-Anti-Semitism is not really about keeping Jews safe, any more than the moral panic about supposed ‘Muslim paedo gangs’ is really about protecting children. Other hungers are satiated by the panic. Racialising Western power defends Jews only contingently, only insofar as we play the role it wants of us; hence secular leftwingers and Hasidim, two groups that usually imagine they have little in common, both sometimes find themselves outside the offer of protection and are read through old-fashioned anti-Semitism instead, since both offer awkward reminders of Jewish worlds before and beyond embourgeoisement and Zionism. These are Jews who slip, to use Judith Butler’s metaphor for gender, in enacting the scripts assigned to us. If the offer of protection can be revoked from those who fail to play their assigned role, then the real story here is not just a whitening one.

Shifting from a theory of racism to one of racialisation means registering both that logics of racialisation shift, and that they use complex racial codings to launder and to divide us in ways not limited to open hatred. Hence the importance of treating this category, the protected minority, critically rather than credulously.

I have suggested so far that the first great achievement of the New Anti-Anti-Semitism is in offering a discourse for answering three anxieties of power at once, along class, imperial and locally racial lines. The contemporary anti-Semitism panic narrates conjoined economic, geopolitical and identitarian anxieties as the Washington consensus falters, fixing some of the dizzying dislocations produced in that crisis onto a neat image: the anti-Semite adorned in a keffiyeh, who can be imagined as the image of the crisis so that the crisis can be expressed in terms consistent with the ideology of the crisis-ridden racial and class order. Explicitly in the statements of Robert Jenrick and Geert Wilders, the keffiyeh stands for the horrors at the gates, which would run free if the West fell. In the USA, the Anti-Defamation League rushes to the defence of Elon Musk’s Roman salute (nothing to see here from the far-right white South African; just a chance similarity to a Sieg Heil) while their Director states explicitly that the keffiyeh is the contemporary swastika. I am suggesting there is a logic to this madness. This is a moral panic because it expresses social crises as moral breakdown; the reactionary temporality of moral panic is always the catastrophe of degeneration and lost innocence, where our problems are caused by a moral stain affecting part of the civilisation, a moral failing in some of its populations. In this case, the Enlightened civility of the West since 1945 is broken by invading hordes from overseas, who bring back the worst of ourselves, the bastards, after we had done so well to cleanse ourselves! The moral idiom views political life as a contest between good and bad people. This is how Europe sees anti-Semitism today, in self-righteous tones that performatively reproduce the shedding of Holocaust guilt by passing that parcel of guilt to the barbarians. The novelty since the 2010s has been the growth of proclaimed anti-anti-Semitism from a local, Zionist function to a general one, in the opposition to leftwing and anti-imperialist politics across the global North. A particular view of anti-Semitism works alongside shifts in Jews’ geopolitical and class locations, all coming together in a moment of crisis for Western imperial hegemony, neoliberal technocracy and South to North migration flows to form a complex conjuncture in which attacks on emancipatory politics frequently take on the alibi of protecting Jews. This was the dynamic with Corbyn in Britain and it is now repeated aggressively against Mélenchon in France, who is depicted (including by the Nazi-descended far-right) as the voice of the banlieues against the Jews.

We turn now to a brief overview of the theory of anti-Semitism that sustains this panic. We begin with the Holocaust, which presents a more awkward case for the New Anti-Anti-Semitism than it cares to admit, and so we find the repressed in this discourse, its two symptomatic silences.

2.

Diagnoses of a ‘New Anti-Semitism’ began in the late 1960s, proliferating in the 1970s primarily as a strategy for countering allegations of racism levelled at the Zionist state. As Tony Lerman has shown in his Whatever Happened to Antisemitism? the 1975 United Nations General Assembly vote (made possible by newly independent, formerly colonised states) to designate Zionism as a form of racism was a crucial event in mobilising a campaign, in which the State of Israel was thus directly invested, to counter prevalent leftwing and anti-colonial renditions of anti-fascism and anti-racism. More broadly, today’s New Anti-Anti-Semitism first emerged against the backdrop of Cold War attempts to reckon with the facts of the Holocaust, the actuality of anti-colonial revolution and the shifting class and geopolitical position of Jews in the West amid embourgeoisement and Zionism, such that claims to defend Jews became thinkable even as the racialising logics underpinning the Holocaust remained active in the West and globally. This history matters in our changed present, laying the groundwork for an understanding of anti-Semitism that removes Western civilisation from the ambit of critique.

In the Cold War, ‘anti-totalitarianism’ offered Western civilisation a desperately needed alternative to Soviet anti-fascism and to Adorno: ‘those who do not wish to speak of capitalism must remain silent about fascism.’ In depicting an apolitical tyrannical impulse common on extremes of left and right, anti-totalitarianism fit with a picture of anti-Semitism as ‘the oldest hatred’, the nasty and rebellious poison in common souls that explained the Nazi genocide. As a reading of the Holocaust this required great historical distortion, and not only in passing over the millions of non-Jewish victims. Contrast the presently hegemonic story of the Holocaust as the product of a singular and eternal hatred for Jews with Père Lachaise in Paris, the cemetery where memorials to the dead of the camps appear alongside the graves of French Communists and Vietnamese anti-colonial leaders. They all stand in the shadow of the Mur des Federées, where the leaders of the Paris Commune were lined up and shot. Those Holocaust memorials were built in the 1950s, when a section of popular common sense still treated the Holocaust as a grotesque instance of Western civilisation. That is how Aimé Césaire, George Padmore and other anti-colonial figures read Nazism in its moment, and it is what permitted a Nazi police chief to round up the Jews of Paris and then shoot down Algerians protesting in the same city after 1945. Far from the anti-colonial left, Hannah Arendt’s classic account treated centuries of Christian power targeting Jews enabling, in modernity and with the rise of the nation state and race science, the reimagining of religious Others as racial and national Others, such that anti-Semitism is a tool in the arsenal of conservative power.

Recent historical scholarship offers many resources for extending the point: Isabel Hull’s work on links between perpetrators of the Herero and Nama genocides and the Holocaust; Mark Mazower’s stress on the British Empire as Hitler’s conscious model; James Whitman’s reconstruction of Jim Crow laws in America shaping Nazi racial laws; Robert Gerwarth’s history of the post-1918 moment of anti-Semitism across Central and Eastern Europe as the racialised rendition of anti-Communism (hence Isaac Deutscher’s comment that when the Freikorps murdered Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht and threw their bodies into a canal, ‘Hohenzollern Germany celebrated its last victory and Nazi Germany celebrated its first’). In all of this, we find resources for an account of the Holocaust as the progeny of this civilisation rather than a revolt against it by untrammelled subaltern rage – to say nothing of Gramsci’s treatment of fascism as the politics of hegemonic blocs against proletarian revolution, or Frankfurt School accounts of factories of death as the end point of the instrumental rationality of bourgeois society.

But in liberal anti-racism, with its focus on attitudes whose wrongness is unaffected by the social power of the bigot, anti-Semitism is instead a raving bigotry, a jealous loathing of Jewish success. Holocaust education means guarding against everyday prejudice (hence the American classroom experiment where children learn not to discriminate on the basis of eye colour), and so identifying prejudiced individuals means completing a trajectory of historical progress in the vanquishing of racism: all the better if those bigots are relatively powerless demographics you didn’t like anyway. There was an anti-elitist claim in Nazism, an ambivalent discursive relationship to class just as to modernity. But this is an account of anti-Semitism that cuts it from its social role and its two most central associated commitments in Nazism: to anti-communism and to European nationalism. Such is the ground zero for a more general project in eliding the conservative function of anti-Semitic politics, its bid to purify the social order of a supposedly alien virus.

Closely entangled with conservatism, there is a second central feature of the Nazi genocide strikingly absent from contemporary thinking about anti-Semitism. An erudite Marxist account, from Moishe Postone, offers a useful example. Postone concentrates on the personalising of power involved in anti-Semites targeting Rothschild or Soros rather than capital itself. That risks reading all politics from Bernie Sanders to Occupy as anti-Semitism, since they talk of nefarious agents, and since this account misses the importance of racialisation: anti-Semitism reading power struggles as racial struggles. The anti-Semitic claim is that Jews distort the world by virtue of our racial essence, loyal intrinsically to others with that essence and seeking to persecute those racially unlike us. Even though the prevalent codings of Jews might have changed so much that they no longer imagine us as Semites, contemporary Jewophobia still imagines powerful Jews distorting the social world in order to serve racially cohered Jewish interests. The racial imaginary defines the line between anti-colonial opposition to Zionism and hatred of Jews; the fight against anti-Semitism is a fight against imagining the world as ultimately determined by race. For this very reason, race is nowhere in dominant accounts of anti-Semitism today.

Bringing racialisation back into our account of Jewophobia reveals some of its contemporary motors. The racialising view of politics that fuels Jewophobia is aggressively encouraged by the post-9/11 politics of the War on Terror (where fundamental conflict was back after the end of History, not as social conflict over social power but as cultural and racial conflict: burgers facing off against burqas). That racialising view of politics is then directly encouraged by the hegemonic view of Jewophobia, the New Anti-Anti-Semitism. One could scarcely find a sharper example than a Zionist activist, Gideon Falter, approaching a pro-Palestine march full of Jews and agreeing with the police that he is not safe there as a Jew; or Leeds University, where the Jewish chaplain travels to commit war crimes in Gaza and then the Jewish Society sees its building defaced; or the state covering up the Holocaust Memorial in Hyde Park before Palestine marchers travel past, implying that we would deface it; or the Metropolitan Police seeking to ban a major national demonstration for Gaza from assembling outside BBC headquarters, because a synagogue is nearby, then arresting the head steward of the demonstration and interviewing Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell under police caution. The New Anti-Anti-Semitism reinscribes the existing Jewophobic frame that reads social conflicts as conflicts between the world and the Jews, and it does so quite consciously in order to bolster its case for the necessity of the Zionist state and crackdowns on Muslims in the West, among other causes. This agenda impedes the work of confronting and displacing anti-Semitic attitudes, including where they claim to speak for the colonised and the exploited. It prefers to muddy than to clear the water between anti-Semitism and emancipatory politics, boosting the former by association to help tar the latter.

These two silences, conservatism and race, fundamentally impede the New Anti-Anti-Semitism’s account of the phenomenon it claims to describe and oppose. The ‘New’ in the supposed ‘New Anti-Semitism’ is partly an attempt to evade conservatism by suggesting a prejudice transferred from Junker aristocrats to Arab fedayeen, repositioning anti-Semitism as a radical assault on Western civilisation. But the enduring power of Jewophobia at the end of History is its ability to code social conflicts that generate an experience of powerlessness in racial terms, which suggests answers other than the unthinkable, impossible work of comprehensive social transformation. This is a conservative discourse for racialising the experience of powerlessness by imagining that social power is hoarded by a group of essential outsiders, a view which militates against a politics of social transformation. Jewophobia either treats the problems of capitalism or imperialism as a racial cancer to be removed while leaving the broader social order intact; or else it makes the intractability of racial conflict the basis for a deep pessimism, suggesting social transformation is impossible in the face of an omnipotent conspiracy of Jews. As I suggested in Salvage 6, this pessimistic implication might be crucial to understanding Jewophobia’s contemporary attraction. When more bullish rightwing figures who reach many millions on social media begin to challenge Israeli violence, ideological purveyors of anti-wokeism (Candace Owens) and masculinity (Dan Bilzerian), blaming the Jews and Jewishness is part and parcel of their bid to isolate Israel as a violent phenomenon alien to the wider civilisation they defend.

A triumvirate of events – 1989, 9/11, 2008 – now combine to demand a politics of the economy and of civilisational crisis amid the apparent impossibility of emancipation and the negotiation of social antagonism through cultural and racial fields. The same triumvirate is experienced by the defenders of Western, capitalist power as the crisis of their recently triumphant world order, and they seek stories for narrating that crisis in terms that make them feel good (or let them enjoy their pain) amid the aggressively restated centrality of Arabs as objects of contemporary imperial violence since 2001. Thus the conditions are today present for two, co-dependent panics about Jews amid the slow end of the West: overt Jewophobia, and a moral panic that claims to be about said Jewophobia but really satisfies other hungers. The left missteps by assuming the moral panic overstates the prevalence of Jewophobia, which is like homophobia in its ubiquity; the panic does not exaggerate but misreads that prejudice, to nefarious ends. People dislike Jews, mistrust Jews and conjure imaginary Jews all the time, and the New Anti-Anti-Semitism is worse than useless as an instrument for understanding and opposing that reality. In the New Anti-Anti-Semitism, Jewophobia’s entanglement in racialisation and its conservatism have to be elided to produce an Anti-Anti-Semitism in the conservative defence of racist power. But these two elements are crucial to designating the specificity of Jewophobic thinking and combatting it.

The theory of anti-Semitism that sustains the New Anti-Anti-Semitism is a thin one oriented around four things: a liberal, attitudinal reading of racism as prejudice and ignorance; the punching up claim for the uniqueness of anti-Semitism; internalising the anti-Semitic image of Jewish power; and the eclipse of race and racialisation in the account of anti-Semitism. Together, these four build an image of society as constituted by powerful Jews facing off against idiots and bigots who froth at the mouth in the face of power and so hate Jews. This hampers the work of specifying and tackling the conservative and racialising ideological pressures sustaining Jewophobia, since the goal of the discourse is less the defence of Jews than the defence of Western civilisation.

3.

The sharp irony is that the New Anti-Anti-Semitism constructs ‘anti-Semites’ as it once constructed ‘Jews’. Jews were named as Semites by the German publisher Wilhelm Marr in 1870. Hence in Edward Said’s high moment of Orientalism, Jews were racially identified with Arabs (‘Turks’ and ‘Moors’ were also common terms for Jews) as people liminal to Europe, lurking at its physical or metaphorical borders. Jews were not cast in the same role as Africans or native Americans, people (to Kant and Hegel) without history, with space read as time so that their spatial distance from Europe figured them as analogous to Europe’s distant, primaeval past. Rather, Jews were located within Europe’s pores, in its cities and ghettos. Jews were – as Isaac Deutscher said of us, and as CLR James said of Caribbean immigrants in Britain – here but not of here, connected to others like them across borders and overseas, with loyalties other than to the particular flag and monarch under whom they might happen to live, a dangerous fifth column. At their most radical, shorn of ties to nation, these rootless people might tear down that whole world of nations. This is the ‘Semitism’ that anti-Semites identified, and which is worth recovering and defending. This is how Hitler spoke of Jews in Mein Kampf, where centuries of stable local and national economy were broken by a race whose transnational status saw them benefit from the weakness and dissolution of nation states and empires. In 1920, Winston Churchill put the point forcefully when he wrote that anti-Semitism was appropriate against bad ‘international Jews’ – naming Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg – but, through Zionism, Jews could become allies and policemen in the order of Western civilisation instead.

So, we might wonder, who carries this treatment today, the anti-Semitism of old and the radical possibilities of Semitism? In 1974 Huey Newton celebrated black internationalism in just these terms in his classic essay on ‘Intercommunalism’, championing a people without loyalty to the American state that kidnapped them, seeing in that existence outside national belonging the possible subjective basis for radical politicisation. Paul Gilroy ended The Black Atlantic by noting this parallel between blacks and Jews, people of hybrid border-defying identities. More recently, is this not exactly how Robert Jenrick spoke of the Palestine protestors? A frightening fifth column, not loyal to ‘British values’ but to transnational communities of the colonised instead: communities fashioned and refashioned by histories of domination and uprootedness. In the streets for Palestine, today’s hated Semites are found. They are the children and grandchildren of Asia and Africa and Ireland and the Caribbean. In the multiracial city, they meet and forge new traditions. These diasporas terrify because they threaten to destabilise existing identities; this has long been the fear animated by the rootless cosmopolitan Jew, shuffling from place to place and making revolutions there, turning all that is solid into air.

Reflecting on the tragedy of Zionism as a negation of the diasporic standpoint, Stuart Hall celebrated that standpoint as the enemy of all ‘identity politics’, since ‘no identities survive the diasporic process intact and unchanged, or maintain their connections with their past undisturbed.’ The late nineteenth and early twentieth century image of the Jew-as-Semite was a pure diasporic image: diasporic everywhere, unable to point to a map and comfort ourselves with thoughts of home, where we were not the Other. Semitism, then, might name forms of identity and of politics that celebrate that experience, making new homes in places we share with others.

Hall’s words also involve a claim about a relationship between identity and time. Diasporic communities are always in a process of becoming. Radical politics entails a giddy openness to that which destabilises. And though all the violence of the world can make forms of conservatism preferable instead, Semitism says that path is an illusion. We have nothing really to go back to, and the communities we build now – communities that others terrorise – are always processes in motion. For those of us who are diasporic, community cannot stably name a fixed or a pure ideal. It is notable, then, that Zionists frequently claim the language of indigeneity in Palestine quite differently from some diasporic protagonists of the Palestinian liberation struggle. Rightwing Zionists summon a distant history to claim an exclusive relationship to the land, denoting the purity of an essential subject, whereas the call to liberate that piece of the world from processes of colonial domination is uttered by the colonised but often in the knowledge, as Ghassan Kanafani’s Returning to Haifa long ago dramatised, that nothing in the future will be the same as the past.

This embrace of fungibility is not to denigrate and certainly not to cast aside traditions. It is to cherish the traditions that develop when one stands outside the order of land and then nation state, including the emancipatory universalist hope born at the edges of that exclusion: that the world should be turned upside down until nobody is a preyed upon Other. In Jewish Messianism, the yearning for a totally different future is built into identity in the present. We pray three times a day for that rupture, where the lion will lie down with the lamb. Semitic revolutionaries ask: what futures might we envisage, we who have never been national insiders anywhere, never wanted to be? What visions emerge out of the mess and the beauty that we all inhabit, but which none of us claims to own? Jewish anarchists, socialists and Communists have sometimes been good at posing that question, as have many other itinerant revolutionaries with different skins and different faiths. This is why the Jewish anti-Zionism that says, “I’m not Israeli, I’m a good Brit/Frenchman/American!” was always at some level the bourgeois kind. Nostalgia means the longing for a home; Marx’s Semitism was nostalgic for the future, which is the only homeland Semites have. Rightwing politicians in Britain who talk today of ‘British values’ and then proceed to praise Jews do so precisely because they imagine anti-Semites as Semites^[2]This point has wider geographical scope. When a major American publisher commissions a book titled Why the Left Left the Jews, arguing that ‘identity politics’ have replaced ‘labor politics’ … Continue reading.

These are confusing contortions. The discursive problematic Western anti-Semitism emerged to police anxieties including the instability of identities, and since those anxieties have not gone away, the discourse remains: it is occluded, though, by a switch to constructing Jews as protected minorities, so that not Jews but supposedly those who attack Jews become the enemy, redescribed in the same way as Jews once were. For our part, Jews are redescribed by the panic away from being liminal outsiders to whiteness and are imagined instead as the purest exemplars of whiteness.

The result is an anti-anti-Semitism that still seeks to negate Semitism. When the State of Israel says, as in Netanyahu’s 2024 address to the US Congress, that it acts in defence of Western civilisation, it insists on a recategorisation, a redescription of Jews. Its destructive effect has been comprehensive. It has uprooted, dispossessed, expropriated, ghettoised, beseiged and bombed the Palestinian people to such a point of desperate violence that one strip of Palestine has been turned to scorched earth. What of those it claimed to protect? Zionism aided in obliterating in a few short years a vast and storied Arab Jewish civilisation, as Avi Shlaim’s recent memoir confirms with a calm fury. Zionism built a safe space for Jews where Jews are less safe than anywhere else in the world – and Zionism has made Jews less safe all over the world. That balance sheet ought to give us pause in defining Zionism on its own terms, as a strategy for Jewish safety; its rise is incomprehensible outside the context of imperial sponsorship, and its imperial sponsors hoped to protect their own investments (real and figurative) by the use of the Jews. Zionists need not be naive about this. Embracing the tragic orientation, Zionism looks at a mountain of Jewish corpses and says of Western civilisation, ‘if you can’t beat it, join it’.

We all lose from racialisation by reactionary power, just as we all do from patriarchy. These are hierarchies that make us less than we could be, that fix us into roles useful only in the reproduction of hierarchy. Revolutionaries want, romantically, to free all of us from all those roles. The revolutionary Semitic conclusion now, seeing Jews cast as human shields for the civilisation of the gas chamber, is that the victory of the Palestinian resistance and the end of Western civilisation offer the only, slim hope for utterly breaking a structure of racialisation that today suffocates Jews under a mountain of praise. The New Anti-Anti-Semitism is a discourse that conflates Jews everywhere with genocide in order to shield the latter, appended to a Western project for materially transforming Jewish life: to make us their bulldogs. As Yahya Sinwar told an interviewer in 2018: ‘They (the Jewish people) were people like Freud, Einstein, Kafka. Experts of maths and philosophy. Now they are experts of drones, of extrajudicial executions.’ He should know. The Semitic, the diasporic point is not that we want to go back entirely to being whatever we imagine we were before. We want the freedom to become something new, in the creative refashioning of traditions that nourish us and in dialogue with the different people among whom we live as equals. We want to shape our identities under the impulse of a shared and heterogenous freedom, whose culture is that creation which flourishes where everyone controls everything. Racialisation by power, contrastingly, is a kind of division of labour with roles as miserable as they are necessary to keep empires afloat and to keep us from one another. It produces violent cultures.

Like love, radical politics rearranges us. The global solidarity movement resurgent since October 7, 2023 has involved the untangling and remaking of diasporic community, as some Jews exit Zionism and find our people instead among others resisting racialisation. I want to finish with a great twentieth century novel of oppression and revolution relevant, I think, to us now: Mikhail Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don.

It is a saga of the Cossacks and it begins in imperial, Tsarist Russia on the eve of the First World War. All I ever heard about Cossacks growing up was of their brutality and terror. These were armed bands who attacked Jewish life across Russia’s Pale of Settlement. I knew nothing about their background; I knew only that my family’s encounter with them may eventually have forced some to leave their homes and come to Britain. It was never demanded of me that I knew, still less that I showed sufficient sympathy for, the stories of the Cossacks who murdered my people. Nobody ever asked me to prove my regret for their suffering before earning the right to speak about mine. Of course, racism is the name for the difference between that experience and the experience of the Palestinian people today.

Who were the Cossacks? Many were runaway serfs. They had fled a condition of agricultural slavery and the Tsar permitted them to live free so long as they did his dirty work, including fighting his wars and carrying out pogroms to scapegoat Jews for social problems. My ancestors encountered Cossacks as murderers, and they were right to, but Cossacks were not themselves possessed of much power. They were tied into a repressive function, mercenaries for the Tsar, as the guarantee of their measure of safety from him. This is not to deny Cossack responsibility for massacres. In Sholokhov’s prose, Cossacks are hit by the Russian Revolution. The Bolsheviks make them an offer: abandon the Tsar and take a leap into freedom, without the guarantees of imperial power behind you but without its whip too – it was only ever really protecting you from itself, it was the real cause of the violence in your world. Very few Cossacks took up the offer, but there was at least one regiment in the Bolshevik Red Army, fighting the forces of the old power, led by Cossacks. They abandoned the safety of a home they had furnished, a form of life that was theirs. That was no easy or smooth thing; it was like the end of one lifetime and the start of the next. In refusing to be the Tsar’s protected minority, they refused to be his tools for the violent subjugation of others. In so doing, they freed themselves.

Barnaby Raine studies social and political thought at Columbia University, where he is writing his PhD on the decline of visions of ending capitalism. He is a member of the Salvage editorial collective.