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The world will denounce historical antisemitism but will engage in contemporary antisemitic conspiracy theories.
By JULIO LEVIT KOLDORF DECEMBER 11, 2024 05:03
FRENCH PRESIDENT Emmanuel Macron walks through the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, as German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier follows, earlier this year. Yet, when it comes to protecting the rights of Jewish communities today, moral clarity evaporates, the writer charges.
(photo credit: Markus Schreiber/Reuters)
The world seems to have mastered the art of honoring Jews as historical martyrs while vilifying them as contemporary villains.
How is it that a near-universal consensus exists – shared even by their adversaries – that Jews have been perennial victims throughout history? Across epochs and geographies, from Europe to the Middle East and North Africa, Jews have faced relentless persecution, whether under the guise of religious, racial, or ethnic-national antagonism.
The narrative of Jewish victimhood is affirmed by academia, intellectuals, and leaders across political, religious, and social spheres. It is even acknowledged that Jews, despite being subjected to the most inhumane tortures, humiliations, and slander, have disproportionately contributed to the advancement of human civilization relative to their numbers.
Paradoxically, this recognition disintegrates when Jews reside in their own state. There, they magically become all the antisemitic tropes from the past: When Jews live in Israel, all the conspiracies become true. This authorizes an ancient, visceral hatred with renewed vigor.
How is it possible that the world, which decries historical defamations against Jews, now tolerates contemporary misrepresentations and conspiracies targeting them? These narratives proliferate not only in fringe discourse but are propagated by international organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and even institutions like the United Nations. Such bias also permeate the foreign policy stances of ostensibly progressive nations, including Spain and Ireland.
Ignored evidence
Meanwhile, overt and unrelenting antisemitism emanating from the Islamic world persists, rooted in cultural and historical animosity toward Jews and the Jewish state. This deep-seated hostility remains an undeniable factor in the perpetuation of anti-Jewish sentiment on the global stage.
THE ABSURDITY of it all. History provides irrefutable evidence of Jewish suffering and victimhood. Scholars universally agree on the horrors inflicted on Jewish communities during the Middle Ages, the Inquisition, the pogroms, and, of course, the Holocaust. Yet, when it comes to the plight of Jews in the 20th-century Middle East or their fight for survival in the wars of 1948, 1967, or 1973, suddenly the jury is still out. The same intellectual rigor applied to condemning historic antisemitism vanishes in the face of modern events.
What’s worse, this selective memory has paved the way for a grotesque inversion of history. Somehow, the wars of annihilation launched by five Arab nations in 1948 are forgotten. The genocidal ambitions of the PLO and Hamas are sanitized. And the Nakba, [catastrophe} the term Palestinians use to describe the 1948 War of Independence] – unquestionably born out of the Arab aggression – is reframed as a Jewish crime.
In this rewritten reality, Jews are not survivors of systemic persecution but perpetrators of ethnic cleansing. Gaza and the West Bank are imagined as long-standing bastions of an ancient Palestinian nation, rather than territories occupied by Egypt and Jordan, whose governments ethnically cleansed their once existent Jewish populations.
This distortion extends throughout the Islamic world in such a way that antisemitism is not merely tolerated but institutionalized. Consider the recent incident in the Maldives, where the government sought to ban all Israeli passport holders. Only when it was realized that this would inadvertently affect Arab-Israeli Muslims did it backpedal. The message could not be clearer: The boycott wasn’t against Israelis; it was against Jews.
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Such blatant hostility is mirrored in Western academia and media. The BBC, for example, refuses to connect the dots between historical antisemitism and the current demonization of Israeli academics eagerly deconstructs colonialism, racism, and systemic oppression but seems incapable of acknowledging the same forces of history when manifested against Jews. Antisemitism gets a free pass when cloaked in the language of “anti-Zionism.”
The hypocrisy is galling. In Europe, Jewish communities lament how their governments “respect dead Jews more than living ones.” Memorial plaques, concentration camp visits, and solemn speeches about “learning from history” abound. But when it comes to safeguarding the rights and dignity of Jewish communities today, this moral clarity evaporates. Dead Jews are revered as tragic symbols; living Jews are treated as inconvenient reminders of society’s dysfunctional failures.
This twisted logic permits international organizations, political leaders, and the media to embrace narratives that were once confined to the fringes of extremist ideologies. When Amnesty International labels Israel an “apartheid state,” it conveniently ignores the Arab-Israeli citizens who serve in the Knesset, the judiciary, and even the military. When the UN obsessively condemns Israel while ignoring genocides elsewhere in the world, it sends a chilling message: Jewish sovereignty is uniquely illegitimate. Moreover, its disintegration is morally legitimized.
WE ARE NOT witnessing a new phenomenon but rather the latest iteration of an ancient social pathology. Antisemitism always thrives in emotional contradiction and irrationality. Jews were vilified as both capitalists and communists, as both powerless parasites and dangerous overlords. Now, they are both the ultimate victims of history and the ultimate perpetrators of modern injustice, at the same time.
To those who gladly consume these contradictions: Who still cannot connect the dots? Who fails to see the link between these centuries’ old tropes and the modern demonization of Israel?
It is not ignorance that fuels this hypocrisy. It is willful blindness. It is far easier to condemn the sins of the past than to confront the prejudices of the present. It is more convenient to mourn dead Jews than to stand up for living ones. And it is politically expedient to single out Israel for criticism while ignoring the atrocities of its neighbors.
The dots are there for anyone willing to see them. But as long as society continues to indulge in selective morality, as long as it tolerates antisemitism disguised as political critique, the cycle of hypocrisy and hatred will persist.
The question remains: Who still cannot connect the dots?
The writer holds a double PhD in communication and politics and is a post-doc researcher on political antisemitism at the University of Valencia and University of Zaragoza, Spain. He is a former vice president of Sepharad Aragon NG and has lectured around Europe, briefing Spain’s Justice Ministry and the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance on antisemitism.
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