Of Campus Protests and Virtuous Antisemitism

On what cultural soil is the radical condemnation of Israel based? Eva Illouz applies the principle of deconstruction of representations so beloved of part of the Left to the question of antisemitism. She sheds light on the old trope that feeds militant passion, and allows it to clear its conscience: the idea that Jews represent a danger to humanity.

 

 

The left that calls itself “woke” is demonstrating in the streets and on campuses around the world to demand a “free Palestine,” which means, in many cases, the simple elimination of Israel. These protests, it should be stressed, are very different from the demand for a political solution to the agonizing conflict that divides Israelis and Palestinians.

The protesters have often embraced and celebrated Hamas, a fundamentalist terrorist organization; they advocate severing ties with Israel, a very imperfect democracy, but a democracy nonetheless. They dub Israel an apartheid state and call for it to be dismantled, a call never heard before, not even for aggressively imperialist Russia, genocidal Rwanda, or for that matter, South Africa itself.

A fierce military response facing unprecedented challenges in the history of warfare – because of a highly densely populated urban area, an underground city built below a civilian population – has become, in the eyes of many, a bona fide genocide. Protesters have also often kindly invited Israelis to go back to Brooklyn and Poland. To complete the picture, Israel – a state born out of the ashes of the Holocaust – is now equated with Nazism; that is, the ultimate human evil.

These students are very far from the anti-Vietnam War movement and its authentic revolutionary spirit. A conflict that has been dubbed by many as the most intractable and complex on the planet is treated as if it were another version of American imperialism.

Jews, Zionists and moderate people from all political parties and religions have watched the campus protests unfold in amazement, unable to believe the unselfconscious double standards, the baselessness of the historical parallels, the unprecedented intensity of the animus for far-away events. (Remind me, when was the last time anyone protested with the same intensity against Iran’s oppressive regime, against China’s genocide of the Uyghurs?)  Despite the students’ desperate attempts to depict themselves as similar to the 1968 protests, they are very far from the anti-Vietnam War movement and its authentic revolutionary spirit. A conflict that has been dubbed by many as the most intractable and complex on the planet is treated as if it were another version of American imperialism. Faced with the demonstrators’ disarticulation of words and the reality of this century-old conflict, these protests give me no choice but to ask myself if, after all, something like the phantasmagoric irrationality of antisemitism is not at work here.

There has been a lively debate on whether these protests are antisemitic. Three arguments have been mobilized against the accusation – that many of the demonstrators are Jews, that this accusation aims to silence legitimate political dissent, and that anti-Zionism is legitimate (a matter of opinion toward a state), while antisemitism is not (a negative attitude toward a group). None of these arguments hold water.

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One of the woke left’s most precious contributions to our political landscape has been its claim that sexism and racism do not only exist in the conscious mind and in the intentions of sexists and racists, but in unconscious cultural layers we all bathe in. This is the reason why “giving a compliment” to a woman about her figure is considered sexist today, despite the good intentions of the compliment giver (“I just wanted to be nice!”). The woke left has consistently argued that racism and sexism deposit themselves in images, in words’ connotations, in mental associations, all of which perpetuate domination, exclusion, hierarchy. This is why the woke left wants to police speech, precisely because language and culture contain these sedimented layers hiding diverse forms of domination beyond conscious intentions. If that is true of women, Muslims and Black people, it is all the more true of the group that has been the object of the oldest hatred of Western culture, the Jews. Let us then apply to antisemitism the tenets of the woke left and ask if these demonstrators are bathing in profoundly antisemitic cultural meanings.

This is why the woke left wants to police speech, precisely because language and culture contain these sedimented layers hiding diverse forms of domination beyond conscious intentions. If that is true of women, Muslims and Black people, it is all the more true of the group that has been the object of the oldest hatred of Western culture, the Jews.

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What does the strange irrational hatred called antisemitism consist of? I am not a historian of this vast topic, but personally I define it as the theory that holds Jews responsible for the spilling of the blood of non-Jews. Thus, I do not think Christian anti-Judaism stems from a competition between two faiths claiming their theological primacy. (Christians call this verus Israel or supercessionism.) Belief systems and religions have no problem discarding whoever preceded them and viewing their version as the first and only true theology. Antisemitism much more likely stems from one key Christian belief – that Jews were guilty of the worst crime of all, the deicide: killing God himself. The Book of Matthew says as much. Pilate, the Roman governor who had been mandated by the Jews to execute Jesus, claims: “I am innocent of this man’s blood.” The Jewish crowd responds: “His blood be on us and our children,” known in Christian theology as the blood curse.  Christian iconography abundantly represented Jesus’ blood on the cross. The image of blood, when associated with the sacrificial death of a compassionate son of God, is likely to have struck the imagination of Christians all the more because this image widely reverberated throughout the centuries. In a world where Christian paintings were the only visuals and were accompanied by the shocking narrative of God’s murder, Jews could only appear as a group conspiring to throw the world into chaos and suffering. It is therefore unsurprising that in the 12th century, especially in France and England, Jews were accused of killing Christian children in order to use their blood for baking Passover matza.

The drawing of blood was not their only crime. Jews were said to poison wells and desecrate the host, the Communion bread, one of the gravest offenses for Catholics. Jews fared even worse with Luther’s Protestantism. The title of his book “On the Jews and Their Lies” gives it away. He viewed Jews as liars, idolaters, thieves and robbers. He recommended that they be expelled, their homes razed, their schools and synagogues burned. Thus the idea that dominated Christian culture, at least until the Enlightenment, is that Jews are criminals, outside the law and intent on destroying whatever is worthwhile. This is so much the case that 18th-century philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing wrote “Die Juden” to make the (then radical) point that Jews could be as moral as any other person. Twentieth-century anti-modern and antidemocratic ideologies amplified the view of Jews as a fundamentally criminal group. In Russia, the 1903 “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” warned that Jews were plotting to control the world in order to destroy it, the secular equivalent of the deicide. 

As historian Michael Berkowitz has further argued, the view that Jews were criminals constituted a significant dimension of Nazi antisemitism.^[1] Communists and anarchists were viewed as dangerous criminals and threats to the social order, with Jews the most dangerous among them. Jews were also parasites and leeches, animals that suck blood. French writer Louis-Ferdinand Celine, an enthusiastic Nazi sympathizer, called the Jews the most ferocious and corrosive parasites.

No other state violence elicits the moral outrage that Israel does. No other country triggers such an urge among well-meaning people defending morality for that country to be eliminated.

In the Soviet Union the 1953 “doctors’ plot” – a conspiracy theory in which doctors, most of them Jewish, were accused of planning to kill top Soviet leaders – made the link with Zionism. Doctors – who spill blood as part of their profession – were accused of poisoning Soviet leaders. As Pravda put it, “The filthy face of this Zionist spy organization, covering up their [the Jewish doctors’] vicious actions under the mask of charity, is now completely revealed.” One year earlier, in 1952, the antisemitic Slansky trial in Czechoslovakia against Jewish members of the Communist Party also called the defendants “Zionist-imperialist.” These carefully crafted words were enough to send them to their execution. The connection between Jewish criminality and Zionism, antisemitism and anti-Zionism was made by the Soviet Union and slowly penetrated the rest of the world. (It is exactly this tactic that Vladimir Putin used when he called the Ukrainians “Nazis.”) This would be amplified by Arab propaganda, which opposed Jewish nationalism (Zionism) by using the same antisemitic tropes. The Soviets’ involvement in the Middle East after World War II consolidated the amalgam that Muslims drew between antisemitism and anti-Zionism. A 1948 Arab League report submitted to the United Nations was called “Jewish Atrocities in the Holy Land.” The title aimed to evoke Christian sentiment, and its content was a compendium of the most virulent antisemitic tropes: Jews were not fighting a war but were barbaric murderers of innocent women and children. And these Jews were now called “Zionists.”

A number of important points derive from all of the above. Antisemites nourish a hatred of Jews, who are depicted as threats to the moral order. Antisemitism does not feel primarily like hatred of a group. Once Jews are portrayed as a dangerous entity that spills blood, ignores laws and wreaks carnage, antisemitism becomes the ideology of humanity, morality, order and law, what the great Austrian essayist Jean Amery called virtuous antisemitism. Antisemitism elicits intense moral fervor and passion precisely because Jews are viewed as a danger to humanity. It’s no surprise then that the young people who all over the world are calling for the dismantling of the State of Israel do not consider  themselves antisemites. They can deny Israelis their right to existence (a right not denied any other people on Earth) because they are passionately defending the survival of the world threatened by a thug state whose criminality is viewed as unique and uniquely threatening. No other state violence elicits the moral outrage that Israel does. No other country triggers such an urge among well-meaning people defending morality for that country to be eliminated.

When Zionism is made synonymous with radical evil, it is because cognitively and emotionally we cannot disconnect Israelis and Jews.

The idea that Jews threaten the world is deeply embedded in Western culture, so deeply in fact, that this category is automatically evoked when the Israeli state sometimes breaks the law, as many states around the world do. There is no doubt that in recent decades, Israel has acted in defiance of international law (and its own as well) and that its military response in Gaza has been disproportionate. But I have trouble believing that under the same circumstances other countries would have acted differently. In light of its history, I am betting that the response of the United States, for example, would have been far more devastating (just remember the horrifying response of Americans to their October 7th, Pearl Harbor). Israel has not proved worse than humanity’s dismal historical record. Perhaps it has even been better. Yet Israelis are held to a different standard because it is almost impossible to separate them from the old category of Jews as criminally threatening the world order. When Zionism is made synonymous with radical evil, it is because cognitively and emotionally we cannot disconnect Israelis and Jews, Israeli crimes (ordinary in humanity’s sad history) and the deep cultural sense that Jews are dangerous for the world. Let me provide an analogy. It would be difficult to disconnect the concept of “skirt” or “dress” from the concept of “woman.” Even if we know that Scottish men sometimes wear skirts or that Muslim men wear robes that resemble long dresses, “skirt” and “dress” inevitably invoke femininity, not masculinity.  Zionists and Jews are inextricably linked following a similar cognitive logic. It is very difficult to disentangle the two even if we know that not all Jews are Zionists and not all Zionists are Jews. (A 2021 Pew poll found that a majority of Jews view Israel as a part of their identity, suggesting that the two are deeply intertwined.) While empirically “Jews” and “Zionists” can sometimes be distinct, they cannot be separated in mental representations and are connected in a quasi-automatic way. When the young protesters express their wish to eliminate Israel, they also express the wish to annihilate the Jews living in Israel.

All of the above is catastrophic not only for us Jews or us Israelis, but for the Palestinians as well.

As for the claim that if Jews participate in a movement, that movement is exempted from the accusation of antisemitism, this is also an old trope cultivated by the Soviets. (Some Jewish  communists in the Soviet Union persecuted other Jews.) As feminists or African Americans will surely tell you, some women and  African Americans hold sexist or racist ideas. Since the 18th century, Jews have tried to belong to their culture and society, and anti-Zionism has been one route for membership, whether in the Soviet Union or the West. Early 20th-century Jewish anti-Zionism was a legitimate opinion in debates on the role nationalism should play in Jewish existence. But the meaning of anti-Zionism today has vastly shifted and is no longer a theoretical discussion on the best strategy for survival. Anti-Zionism has been appropriated by a variety of political actors who use it to legitimize their intent to eliminate the state of the Jews.

All of the above is catastrophic not only for us Jews or us Israelis, but for the Palestinians as well. Israelis were gruesomely attacked on October 7, and they interpret the protests around the world as deeply antisemitic. This reinforces in them the feeling that the world intends to destroy them and that they can count only on military force to protect themselves. The military race to deterrence diverts Israelis further from a political path that offers Palestinians dignity and sovereignty. It makes Israelis acquiesce more easily to the decisions by a horrific government bent on destroying every shred of democracy in Israel. Instead of helping create broad coalitions to demand a just peace for Israelis and Palestinians, instead of uniting Palestinians and dovish Zionists to search for sanity, the protests around the world create unprecedented divisions, mistrust and enmity between people who should otherwise have been allies. The result will be to erase an already very weak peace camp. Never has morality been such an enemy of the good.

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Eva Illouz

 

This article appeared in German on May 17 under the title “Antisemitismus an den Universitäten: Euer Hass auf Juden” in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung