The paradoxes of today’s antisemitism

How can we explain the disarray of the European conscience in the face of the rise of antisemitism it promised itself it would “never again” tolerate? In this text, historians Henriette Asséo and Claudia Moatti examine the paradoxes of a Europe faced with the temptation of identity.^[1]

 

 

Freud, Malaise in Civilization

 

These lines resonate strangely in our contemporary world. They echo the malaise that grips us today, for the same reasons. Both historians, we believe that this malaise does not prevent us from understanding the present, that after so much critical work on the extermination of the Jews in the twentieth century, we can do so without partisan spirit, refusing any assignment of identity. Our shared moral and intellectual despair does not stem from a “bad conscience”, as Freud also spoke of, which would render Westerners incapable of acting and defending themselves, but from a lucidity in the face of increasing antisemitic acts: Here, the burning of a synagogue in Montpellier; there, knife attacks in Germany and England; elsewhere, the decision by an American bookseller to cancel a literary event because one of the participants is a “Zionist”; or the barrage of insults hurled in Italy at Liliane Segre, a nonagenarian Auschwitz survivor.

Let’s be clear: we are shocked by what is happening in Gaza, and we believe that only a political solution can resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with dignity. But the current outbidding is a symptom that reveals three paradoxes, which have overturned our certainties: why has the antisemitic massacre of October 7 provoked such antisemitic hatred; why are left-wing political movements, whose vocation is to challenge the established order, pleading in favor of a terrorist, counter-revolutionary and reactionary group that oppresses its own people; why, finally, is Europe unable to clearly state the offensive it is being subjected to, and why does the “never again”, which has been the foundation of European consciousness since the Second World War, not hold up?

First paradox. October 7, 2023: a global antisemitic response to antisemitic massacres

First there was the explosion of antisemitism around the world following the massacres perpetrated on Israeli soil by Hamas and its affiliates, the wave of violence and hatred that spread day by day, until the deafening silence of the UN on August 21, 2024: not a word for the victims of Hamas on the day of support for the victims of global terrorism! We should no longer be surprised. A statement signed by thirty-four organizations and drafted by the Palestine Solidarity Committee at Harvard University began as follows: “We hold the Israeli regime fully responsible for all the violence taking place” […] ”The massacres in Gaza have already begun […]. The apartheid regime is solely to blame. Israeli violence has structured every aspect of Palestinian existence for seventy-five years […]. The days ahead will demand a firm stand against colonial retaliation. We call on the Harvard community to take action to end this annihilation of Palestinians.” This was on the very day of the massacre, October 7, 2023.^[2].

The Jews of the Diaspora are often treated as Israel’s accomplices , without any consideration of their nationality, and without any account being taken of their critical positions towards the current Israeli government.

Thus, Israelis who were assaulted according to a specific modus operandi, as civilians (men, women, children of all ages), who were raped, tortured, humiliated and taken hostage, would not be considered victims of terrorism! In the eyes of the UN, as of many others, they are the only ones responsible for their fate, the only ones guilty as an oppressive people, as a “colonial state”. As for the Jews of the Diaspora, they are often treated as Israel’s accomplices , without any consideration of their nationality, and without any account being taken of their critical positions towards the current Israeli government.

The UN’s silence revives memories of the Durban World Conference, which in 2001, after the second Intifada, denounced Israel as the only racist country in the world. In the name of anti-racism and the emancipation of humankind, many peoples, so different from one another, shouted “Death to the Jews” and “Death to Israel”, equating hatred of Jews around the world (antisemitism) with the fight against the State of Israel (anti-Zionism). Since October 7, social networks have resounded with cries of hatred, culminating in this neurotic video from Italian pen-pusher Cecilia Parodi, a pro-Palestinian activist and “Sinwar lover”: “I hate all the Jews in the world, and all Israelis and Zionists. Every last one of them. You disgust me, etc.”.

Second paradox. Student and radical left-wing mobilizations

In Western countries, students from the most prestigious universities and political leaders of a certain radical left were quick to adopt the same logic, long before Israel’s military response: they couldn’t see the moral problem of being indignant about the plight of the Palestinians without at the same time feeling compassion or solidarity towards the massacred Israelis, of supporting the population of Gaza without condemning the actions of Hamas, and of snatching photos of the hostages? This is the second paradox we need to explain: the radical choice made by students from a wide range of backgrounds in favor not of peace, but of the Palestinians, to the exclusion of any other oppressed group in the world (the Uighurs in China, the Rohingyas in Burma, the Sudanese, the Ukrainians), the plight of Afghan women, the struggle of Iranian women, if not even the question of women in Islam). This unambiguous, and therefore significant, choice has favored the infiltration of highly influential Islamist groups into places of learning: Students for Justice, so effective at Columbia, or Samidoun, which played a major role in the occupation of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. André Glucksman was right in 2004: “Why is Palestinian terrorism the only terrorism in the world not condemned? There’s only one explanation: their target is very specific: it’s Jews”.

In fact, these militants are part of an anti-Western movement that is widely shared throughout the world today, and has many roots. In Western countries, this movement is inspired both by militant anti-capitalism and by the scientific critique of European domination of the world, which, from the 1990s onwards, sought to restore to colonized peoples their role as authentic actors in history, and to denounce the destruction or recovery of local cultures by imperialism. This field of research has undeniably led to a better understanding of the colonization process and the role of culture in European domination, but it has often imposed a Manichean vision of the world (the colonist and the colonized becoming two mirrored “essences”), and has mainly focused criticism on Western countries, overlooking extra-European dominations. According to this logic, shared by all Middle Eastern countries in constant conflict with each other, the State of Israel concentrates all the abhorred characteristics of Westernism and colonialism – which “explains” the repeated denunciations before international bodies.

Since October 7, however, the nature of the denunciation of Israel has changed: from a colonialist state practicing oppression on occupied territories, it is now accused of being an inherently colonial state. Abolished, then, is any distinction between its territorial sovereignty, recognized by the international community in 1948, and the settlements established in the West Bank; abolished, too, is the memory of its foundation, which, as Albert Memmi forcefully reminded us, was the national response to the discrimination experienced by Jews throughout the world, including in Muslim countries, just as the formation of the Arab nation-states was a response to the oppression of the colonizers. This is how Israel’s existence is delegitimized today. And this judgment is without appeal: “To declare oneself pro-Palestinian,” wrote Israeli novelist Etgar Keret^[3], “[…] is to send the Jews back into the camp of the oppressors without any possibility of debate, it is to define the others as enemies.” The others: Israel, the West, the Jews. Indeed, anti-Westernism, anti-Zionism and antisemitism most often go hand in hand: the “New York Times” of August 19, 2024 reported that, in pro-Palestinian campus protests, “demonstrators tore down American flags and defaced a statue of George Washington with the word ‘genocide’”.

The paradox is that, in the name of the anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist struggle, these students and certain members of the far left conceal the reactionary, totalitarian, terrorist and antisemitic nature of Hamas.

The paradox is that, in the name of the anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist struggle, these students and certain members of the far left conceal the reactionary, totalitarian, terrorist and antisemitic nature of Hamas. This is certainly nothing new: after the Six-Day War, Edwy Plenel urged “revolutionaries” not to “disassociate themselves from Black September”, responsible for the assassination of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. And in 2005, philosopher Alain Badiou, in The Uses of the Word “Jew” (Éditions Lignes), while condemning antisemitism, made two radical proposals that have become commonplace today: 1) we must “denominate the Jews”, turning the “name Jew”, Nazified by Hitler, into a “common word” that would designate all the oppressed: the Palestinians would thus be the true Jews, while those of tradition would embody the decline of nation-states and liberal democracies; 2) we must denominate Israel, a brutal, capitalist and colonial state, and name the new state “Palestine”. Badiou is not a traditional antisemitism, but the antisemitism accomplished by this rhetorical sleight-of-hand that leads to the final dissolution of the Jews.

By designating Hamas as a party of resistance and denouncing its terrorist nature, the radical left has gone even further: it has agreed to endorse political Islamism, which it defends by accusing all its opponents of Islamophobia. In the name of the emancipation of the peoples of the Middle East and North Africa, this self-proclaimed progressive left thus finds itself associated with a protean movement whose ideology is in any case counter-revolutionary, and whose project is to establish “sharia” on every land, purified of all Christians and rid of the Jews. Realized in Iran, Afghanistan or in the Raqqa caliphate, this project is today claimed by Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, Islamic Jihad, Daesh, Boko Haram and by Islamist movements in Western countries (for example, the Islam en Belgique party, created in 2012 and now with representatives in the federal parliament in Brussels). All these movements are certainly competitors, but they agree on the need to Islamize the world, while the Gaza war offers them the opportunity to unite in their hatred of Israel. Yet all these movements are incompatible with the European conception of politics, which is non-theocratic and non-heteronomous.

But for members of this radical left, the most urgent issue is to appear as protectors of all immigrants, seen as the revolutionary proletarian succession at a time when workers have deserted their ranks. This is not an electoral strategy, as suggested in an article in Le Monde, but a militant one, based on the shameful syllogism that since most immigrants are Muslims and Muslims are antisemitic, it’s a good idea to cultivate ambiguity at best, antisemitism at worst. But this syllogism harms everyone: Western society, threatened with fragmentation by the logic of identity; Jews, because it stirs up hatred; and Muslims, who are all assigned an antisemitic identity and forced to take an unqualified stand for the Palestinians.

The contradictions of the Arab-Muslim world

Albert Memmi, Jews and Arabs, Paris, 1974, p. 152

It is true that Muslim antisemitism is well established in the West, where it combines traditional forms of Christian anti-Judaism (the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian conspiracy and antisemitic forgery published in 1903, is one of the most widely read texts in the Muslim world), with forms specific to Islam which regard the Jew as the absolute enemy. According to Gunther Jikeli, around 50% of antisemitic acts in France in recent months have been committed by Muslims, with no connection between social discrimination, poverty and these acts.

For their part, Muslim states have never ceased to feed the antisemitism of their diasporas, which they also share with their own peoples: oppressors and oppressed share the same hatred of the Jews; they have also never ceased to nurture an anti-colonialism against Europe, even though the Ottoman Empire was colonialist; today, finally, they show support for the Palestinians while refusing to welcome them on their soil. These are all strategies employed by local oligarchies to maintain power and exonerate themselves from their own failures. But the crisis of modern secular nationalism is very real; it explains the defeat of the “Arab Spring” and the emergence and subsequent spread on an unprecedented scale of the theocratic and totalitarian Islamist counter-revolution, which is at odds with all enlightened Muslim traditions and relies on a population predominantly under the age of thirty, whose religious upbringing was conducted according to principles opposed to the secular values carried by post-Ottoman nationalisms.

For Islamists, the main, distant enemy is the United States; the visible, immediate, closest enemy is Israel, the figurehead of the hated West, and with it, the Jews.

Certain Muslim governments have undoubtedly tried to prevent the Islamists from taking power: this was the case in Algeria in 1992, which provoked a murderous ten-year civil war – the modus operandi of the FIS Islamists being reminiscent of the October 7 massacres, proof that European colonialism is not needed to justify a purge! Generally speaking, however, in the Arab-Muslim world, political Islamism has become a key player, including in Algeria, as it promotes a return to conquering, religious Islam. The myth of the great Arab nation of the 1970s and the failure of pan-Arabism have been replaced by the myth of a pan-Islamism with a universal vocation: as in the past, the fierce competition between different Islams is overshadowed when it comes to attacking the West and Israel.

This project of reconquest, the declared aim of purifying this space of all that depraves and contaminates it, constructs a world henceforth divided between “them” and “us”. For Islamists, the main, distant enemy is the United States; the visible, immediate, closest enemy is Israel, the figurehead of the hated West, and with it, the Jews. If the land’s metahistorical vocation is to be Muslim, how can we tolerate Jews forming an independent state and winning military victories, when in the Ummah, the Muslim community, they are accepted only as dhimmis, a subordinate status shared with Christians?

Throughout the Middle East, the Islamists’ doctrinal project of rigorist re-Islamization represents a radical break with all previous projects of pan-Arabism. It imposes not only the rejection of Christians and Jews, a veritable amnesia with regard to the national or imperial past, but also the suffocation of open historical Muslim civilization: the liquidation of the Byzantine and Christian heritages of the East is one manifestation of this, the disappearance of the indigenous Sephardic Jewish communities another. The presence of the latter would have enabled the Arab-Muslim states of which they had been a part for so long to build non-ethnic political communities: unlike Western Jews, who were forced to seek a compromise between patriotic loyalty and cosmopolitan openness, the Sephardim could hope and imagine a transposition of their modes of operation within the framework of the modernization of the Muslim states in which they actively participated. But the opposite happened: they were forced to leave Muslim countries en masse after the Six-Day War, while the principle of nationality was transformed in the Muslim world by ethnic nationalism. Today, Islamist ethno-politics also implies the subjugation of indigenous minorities such as the Kabyles or the Kurds, or their extermination in the case of the Yezidis, led by Daesh.

European paradoxes

At a time when Western democracies are the object of the Islamist offensive, associated in this fight with many other totalitarian forces (Russia, Iran, extreme parties within democracies), Europe is showing itself incapable of politically defining the nature of this subversion, which handles both the murderous act aimed at destroying Western institutions and the specific antisemitic act. It is remarkable, for example, that the international political surge after the Charlie-hebdo attacks in 2015 was not followed by a precise policy and discourse on Islamist terrorism, which would have dispelled the current vagueness. The parallel choice made by Islamists to strike at random individuals, while reserving specifically Jewish targets for themselves, disarms reasoning. This practice of “a thousand cuts” – killing anyone, anytime, anywhere, with anything – endows attacks with an unpredictable temporality and renders the principal invisible, even if the sophisticated use of social networks, the existence of a new modus operandi – the knife has replaced suicide bombers or plane hijackings – and the continuation of mass attacks clearly show that the current sequence is the result of concerted decisions.

we can only observe intellectual disarmament in the face of, on the one hand, a coherent UN-type institutional offensive and, on the other, almost weekly terrorist acts, which are neutrally designated as those of “assailants” against “victims”.

This is our third paradox: how can we explain Europe’s inability to name the threat and defend what constitutes the foundation of its conscience, the “never again”? So it’s not enough to have pushed back the tide of Holocaust denial and placed Auschwitz at the heart of European consciousness, to put an end to this scourge and guarantee understanding of the present day?

Indeed, we can only observe intellectual disarmament in the face of, on the one hand, a coherent UN-type institutional offensive and, on the other, almost weekly terrorist acts, which are neutrally designated as those of “assailants” against “victims”. A telling and absurd example of this refusal to name names is Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s decision, in response to the attack in Solingen on August 24, 2024, to restrict the circulation of bladed weapons without naming the perpetrators – a response all the more comical given that Solingen has always been the country’s historic cutlery capital! This denial is perpetuated by some: the firebombing of the Grande Motte synagogue on August 26, 2024 by an Algerian wearing a Palestinian flag was described by Jean-Luc Mélenchon not as an antisemitic act, but – in a symptomatic evasion of the word Jew – as an attack on secularism and an assault on “believers”:

Arson attack on La Grande-Motte synagogue. An intolerable crime. Our thoughts go out to the faithful and believers attacked in this way. Secularism and freedom of conscience are the offspring of freedom of worship. We will never forget this.

The global information crisis only reinforces the tendency towards a selective and euphemistic vision of the facts: for example, the rape of a 12-year-old Jewish girl in Courbevoie on June 15, 2024 was indeed reported as an antisemitic act, but neither the press nor the politicians characterized the three rapists. Unfortunately, denial protects no one: European Muslims no more than anyone else.

There are two main reasons for Europe’s weakness. Firstly, Europe has been trapped by its own discourse on anti-colonialism and the self-determination of peoples, which has led to an inflation of reparatory grievances and fed endless guilt. However, certain left-wing parties – the Labour Party in Corbyn’s time, the LFI in France and many other left-wing formations (the NPA – New Anticapitalist Party of France) – by instilling antisemitic phraseology in the name of solidarity with formerly oppressed peoples, have made concerted mobilization against the attacks on liberal democracy difficult, if not impossible: in other times, however, this strategy and discourse would have been identified as frankly far-right.

“Nazis”, “genocide”, “Jew” have become abstract, trivial terms, operative concepts to designate other contexts – Israelis and Jews are thus described as Nazis, Palestinians as real Jews.

Secondly, the linguistic inflation of these anti-colonial parties has had the effect of disconnecting Europe from its history once and for all, and transforming it into an abstract entity responsible for all imperialist ills. But this process of de-historicization also affected the Second World War and the Shoah, as the scale of the genocide took root in European consciousness. This evolution, signaled, for example, by the shift from the notion of “German barbarism” to that of “Nazi violence”, favored the construction of a soothing discourse on democracy and the peaceful collaboration of nations, and isolated the phenomenon of the Holocaust from Hitler’s global project of a “war of extermination” aimed at the subjugation of all European peoples. From then on, the categories of that era were in turn dehistoricized: “Nazis”, ‘genocide’, ‘Jew’ became abstract, trivial terms, operative concepts to designate other contexts – Israelis and Jews are thus described as Nazis, Palestinians as real Jews – but also to put into effect effective political lines, such as the Russian campaign to ‘denazify’ the Ukraine, whose formulation was directly inspired by those of the Soviet Union in the 1970s-1980s. The inversion of historical conjunctures is one of the effects of this de-historicization of Europe.

This disconnected use of language weakens historical awareness and produces approximations, simplifications, distortions and confusion between facts and opinions. In January 2024, for example, the International Court of Justice issued a warning that there was “a real and imminent risk that irreparable harm will be caused” to the population of Gaza, and called on the Israeli government to “take all measures to avoid acts of genocide”; many movements, which had been making accusations of genocide from the outset, were quick to confuse this warning with a final judgment. Similarly, petitions filed by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, which had not retained the charge of genocide, were understood and claimed to be final judgments.

Last but not least, the lack of historicity aggravates the ideological oscillation of political parties in every country. By allowing antisemitic remarks to be instilled by its political staff, this part of the radical left joins and exonerates the identitarian populists of the extreme right, even though each camp considers itself the irreducible enemy of the other. In a timely fashion, it says out loud what many European far-right groups are quietly broadcasting. The aim of these extreme right-wing populisms is to subvert European institutions, the better to combat their spirit. Their “retracting nationalism”, particularly in middle Europe, consists not only in refusing extra-European immigration, but also in limiting intra-European circulation and cosmopolitanism, which for them, as for the heirs of Stalinism, have always been the expression of a deleterious “Jewish culture”. Where the two meet, it is indeed the European spirit itself that is being denied.

Today’s antisemitism is thus part of a European configuration that is the opposite of that of the interwar period. What’s even more serious is the fact that these fragmented and very minority discourses, produced by forces that claim to be antagonistic, can very well be aggregated in exceptional situations and favor offensive objective collusions, both inside and outside European states.

Assignment and self-assignment of identity

While totalitarian movements seek to make the Jew the sole enemy, antisemitism in Europe is neither systemic nor doctrinal. It is not part of national agendas, nor does it reflect people’s aspirations. The great French demonstration against antisemitism on November 12, 2023 was organized by the Presidents of the Senate and the National Assembly; European leaders are multiplying official declarations on the ignominy of antisemitic crimes; the heads of knowledge establishments have finally refused to give in to the “injunctions” of pro-Palestinian demonstrators to renounce scientific agreements with Israeli institutions.

Increasingly fragmented Western societies are faced with a fundamental threat: the temptation of identity, which seems to be the only answer to the limits of liberal democracy.

Yet European institutions are resisting: we’re a long way from the 1930s.

However, there are some alarming signs. London mayor Sadik Khan’s decision to open a Jewish-only bus route, at the request of the Orthodox, so that the latter “feel safe in their travels”, reveals the ambiguity of identity claims and politics. By demanding separation in the name of their own safety, religious Jews are reinscribing themselves in the continuum of an ancestral exclusion; their demand is as worrying as the response of the London Borough Council, which describes this “protection” as “positive segregation”! This is a way of disengaging the State from its duty to protect all its citizens equally; it was also to disengage the State from Muslim family affairs that, in 1982, Margaret Thatcher allowed the first Sharia court to be set up in the heart of London.

Increasingly fragmented Western societies are faced with a fundamental threat: the temptation of identity, which seems to be the only answer to the limits of liberal democracy. Ethno-politics, which encourages Islamist penetration and antisemitism in Europe, endangers the ideal of peaceful coexistence between individuals and communities, and leads to the negation of democratic pluralism and the destruction of the public sphere.

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Henriette Asséo and Claudia  Moatti