The border dividing legitimate criticism of the policies of the state of Israel from anti-Semitism in the days after the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel and the subsequent Israeli military offensive on Gaza has become one of the key points of contention in America and throughout the Western world, writes Voice of America.
And that is nothing new. On the one hand, Israel's military action in the Gaza Strip is an excellent excuse and gives free rein to anti-Semites to attack Jews around the world under the guise of criticizing Israel's war operations.
On the other hand, the Israeli authorities have also in the past tended to dismiss criticism of their policies in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, where the apartheid system largely rules, as "anti-Semitic".
At the same time, a considerable number of Israelis believe and speak publicly (at the moment, which is understandable, such criticisms within Israel have fallen silent) that the Palestinian policy, which has been implemented for decades, is deeply wrong. Among them was the great writer Amos Oz, who advocated a "two-state" solution and co-founded the "Peace Now" organization.
But what a Jew may say, he may not goyim, which is the Hebrew name for all "Gentiles", those who are not Jews.
The case of Gunter Grass
That's the "prose poem" of the German Nobel laureate Gunther Grass published in 2012 in the Easter three-number of "Jewish Zeitung" called "What must be said" caused an avalanche of outrage in Israel.
The German social democrat and humanist, one of the icons of German contemporary culture, then accused Israel that, based on unproven indications that Tehran is building an atomic bomb, it is preparing a nuclear attack on Iran, that it wants to "wipe out the Iranian people" on the basis of suspicion, and that it represents a threat to the fragile peace in the world. "Vreme" wrote about it in an article What must be said.
Israel summarily declared Grass an "anti-Semite," an "enemy of the Jewish people," and a law that normally applies to former Nazis as "persona non grata."
The then Israeli Minister of the Interior, Eli Yishai, even asked for the Nobel Prize to be taken away from him, and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Avigdor Lieberman, said that some Western intellectuals were ready "for the sake of their own promotion to sacrifice the Jews for the second time on the altar of crazy anti-Semites."
Attacked from all sides, Grass declared that he should not have written "Israel", but "the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu". Just enough, and it was too late.
Gras, admittedly as a minor, was briefly in the SS-units, but to accuse him of anti-Semitism or any kind of racism was completely unfounded.
The dark spirit of the Holocaust
For Jewish communities, the past two months have awakened the darkest ghosts of the Holocaust, while pro-Palestinian voices speak of "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity," not the least of Israel's "grossly excessive use of force" in the Gaza Strip.
In the last two months, the number of reported anti-Semitic incidents in the United States has increased by 388 percent, data show. Anti-Defamation Leagues (ADL). In the same period, the number of cases of Islamophobia in the US increased by 216 percent, according to the data Council on Islamic-American Relations (CAIR), writes Voice of America.
The latest conflict in the Middle East began on October 7 with a Hamas attack on Israel in which 1.200 people were killed and 240 kidnapped. In response, Israel launched an offensive on the Gaza Strip, in which more than 18.000 people have been killed so far, a huge number of residential areas have been razed to the ground, and almost all 2,3 million inhabitants have been internally displaced, fleeing the war.
There is a humanitarian disaster in Gaza, and the fact that Hamas has been declared a terrorist organization by the majority of Western countries cannot be a justification for such a situation.
After the bestial attack by Hamas on "Black Shabbat", the voices of criticism of Israel's policy towards the Palestinians were temporarily completely silenced in the Jewish state.
What is antisemitism?
Manhattan College professor Mehnaz Afridi, who, among other things, teaches the course Muslims and the Holocaust, explains to Voice of America that anti-Semitism is basically a certain perception of Jews, "which can be expressed as hatred of Jews, rhetorical or physical, towards religious institutions, using stereotypes about Jews , and also a manifestation of violence against Jews".
And sociologist from the Spanish National Research Council and associate member of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Research at the University of Minnesota Alejandro Baer states for Voice of America that "anti-Semitism includes discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews simply because they are Jews (or against Jewish institutions because they are Jewish)".
Therefore, criticism of the policies of the Jewish state should not be lumped together with anti-Semitism. And when it does, Benjamin Netanyahu's government downplays the ominous weight of the term.
And vice versa: those who believe that Israel in the West Bank conducts an apartheid policy, and in the Gaza Strip does not care for civilian Palestinian victims and destroys the part of the world that was granted to the Palestinians, should not say that "Jews" do it.
By the same principle, it was not "Serbs" who were killed in Srebrenica, but Ratko Mladić and his criminal team, without any desire to make inappropriate comparisons, but to point out the inadmissibility of generalizations.
Nothing new
A similar situation with the explosion of anti-Semitism in the world was during and after Israel's attack on Gaza in July 2014, which was caused by the murder of three Israeli students.
Hamas and other Palestinian militant organizations in the conflict, which lasted for about two months, fired about 1000 missiles at Israel, and according to the United Nations, the Israeli army killed over 1400 Palestinians and completely destroyed 6761 buildings during the operation called "Protective Edge". , and damaged over 10.000. Nearly 70 Israelis, mostly soldiers, died.
At that time, the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Dieter Graumann, told the British "Guardian" that for Jews "the worst time since the Nazi era has arrived" and explained that the slogans "Jews should be gassed!" and "Jews" were being shouted on the streets of German cities. should be burned!" as well as the lyrics which in free translation read: "Jew, Jew, cowardly pig, come out of your hole and fight live."
A bomb was thrown at a synagogue in Wuppertal, Germany. After the anti-Jewish riots, the then Minister of the Interior, Bernard Kazev, came to the French city of Sarcel and threatened: "Everyone in our republic can protest, but whoever damages a synagogue or sets fire to a bakery just because it belongs to a Jew is committing an anti-Semitic act." There were also anti-Semitic outbursts. then throughout Europe and in the USA.
Anti-Semitism should not include criticisms such as the one that Israel "rose on the wrong foundations", that the founder of Zionism, the Austrian journalist and writer Theodor Herzl, imagined the "Jewish State" differently, which is also the title of his most important book.
He envisioned Israel as a multinational, multi-confessional country, a joint state of Jews and Palestinians. "Vreme" wrote about it in the text Don't say Jews when you mean Israel. Monuments to Theodor Herzl have sprung up all over Israel, but the policies being implemented are at odds with his visions.
Latent anti-Semitism is deeply embedded in the essence of Europe. The skillful idea of the Nazi ideology to portray Jews as bearers of capitalism, powerful people who play with fate for their own profit, guilty of the misery of others, lives on even today, "Vreme" wrote.
At that time, attention was diverted from large German capital, but that seems to have been forgotten. Latent Russian and above all Ukrainian anti-Semitism was transferred to Stalin as well. The Nazi mass extermination of Jews overshadowed the earlier pogroms, and afterwards it was no longer possible to manifest anti-Semitism in such a public manner.
Holocaust and Shoah
The Jews use the Hebrew word for the act of German industrial killing shoah, which originally means disaster.
The problem is that the public mixed up two topics that should not be connected, but they are: on the one hand, Jews are Jews regardless of how and where they live, and on the other, the policies and actions of the State of Israel. Israel is not innocent in this regard, it does not behave like any other, normal state, but, still referring to show, considers that he speaks and acts on behalf of all Jews, and calls any criticism of the Israeli state and its leadership anti-Semitism.
Chosen or cursed people
Religious Jews consider themselves the chosen people of God. There is an old joke according to which a Jew turns to God and prays: Lord, may you be blessed, how about you choose another nation for yourself, and finally leave us alone for a while?
Repulsion and hostility towards the Jews dates back to the Christian belief that "they" rejected, rejected and killed Christ. However, according to Christian belief, the God-man Jesus was born as a Jew from a Jewish mother. That is why once a Jew could get rid of the old curse by converting to Christianity and thereby remove all threats.
Only later does the pseudo-scientific, pseudo-Darwinist belief about the uniqueness of Jewishness arise due to a negative genetic inheritance, which cannot be overcome by assimilation or Christianization, "Vreme" wrote.
At the very least, anti-Semitism was facilitated by the fact that religious Jews considered themselves different, better, the "chosen people", and emphasized this with special costumes, men with their zulufs, beards, caps, and marked their habitats with a special sign, the mezuzah, all of which made it easier that, especially in more primitive environments, they are easily recognized as "special", as different. Whenever the masses are frightened, they fix their fear and hatred on those who are "different", because everything that is different is "hostile".
Based on the extermination of the European Jews, Israel was created as a "Jewish state" that defended its existence in numerous wars, and there is no doubt that it will continue to be so in the future.
Is it about "new" or "old" or "eternal" anti-Semitism these days? The question can be asked differently: what specifically caused new waves, not only criticism, but insults against Jews and deadly threats that were publicly expressed in many Western democratic countries, where it was least expected?
These questions have been asked for over two millennia. There is no universal answer acceptable to everyone.
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