Double Exposure
How antisemitism echoes through talk of Zionism
Who decreed that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are permanent strangers, never even splitting the fare, with one filed under ‘mere politics’ and the other under civilisation’s oldest poison, and why does the evidence keep hitching a lift across that border with a grin?
Antisemitism is the hardy perennial of human credulity. It survives regime change by raiding the dressing-up box: yesterday’s pulpit thunder, then the craniometer’s chart, now the late-night podcast with its recycled catechism. The Jew as contaminant, financier, wire-puller, omnipresent culprit. Its chief technology is unfalsifiability, the absence of evidence is briskly promoted to evidence itself. Hence the superstition never exits, it merely executes a costume change and takes another bow.
Zionism, by contrast, is a political deduction from a record that does not lack entries, expulsions, quotas, locked ports, and the industrial murder of European Jewry while the guardians of virtue discovered the limits of their sympathy. From this syllabus of helplessness came the proposition that Jews are a people and entitled, as others are, to national self-determination. In the modern world that proposition acquired an address. Anti-Zionism, in its strict sense, denies the legitimacy of that address, for ever, or until some cartographic miracle satisfies the pure of heart.
One can imagine the austere anti-statist who opposes every nation-state with even-handed rigour. This species exists, chiefly in manifestos and faculty lounges, and is almost endearing in its futility. The dominant genus is different, the selective universalist. Here the air grows interesting. Israel alone is invited to un-exist. Jewish self-determination alone is painted a sulphurous hue. Boycotts, cultural quarantines, and academic purges are proposed for one small country, while neighbouring tyrannies enjoy the diplomatic spa of euphemism. Presently the rhetoric reacquires its old props by muscle memory, occult power, blood guilt, the world-striding cabal, and ‘Zionist’ performs as the respectable stand-in for ‘Jew’. The fig leaf is new, the choreography is antique.
The season’s favourite label, ‘settler colony’, achieves its neatness by vandalism. It must airbrush a several-millennia archive, text, law, liturgy, a locally obstinate vocabulary of place, and it must treat the twentieth century’s refugee boats as a mere continuity error. This is not analysis so much as prestidigitation, history palmed, then triumphantly declared absent. The trick would be funnier if it were not performed with such unctuous moral vanity.
None of this turns Israel into an angel. States with armies, budgets, and occupations generate sins and paperwork in abundance, and the Israeli file is not slender. Yet the asymmetry is striking. The fiercest guardians of minority rights develop, at critical moments, a philological doubt that Jews are a people at all. The most fastidious foes of ethnic nationalism make cordial exceptions in every adjacent capital. Enemies of collective punishment become expansive when the collectivity is Israelis, or, with thrifty efficiency, Jews abroad. Principle here behaves like a tourist visa, valid everywhere until it meets the wrong passport.
The phenomenon is not confined to rhetoric. It is a mood, a migration of standards. A small state is asked to carry the symbolic freight of every grievance from Algeria to the the age we have made, and a very old hostility is granted a new ethical label. Hume’s brisk injunction, ‘what is asserted without evidence may be dismissed without ceremony’, would clear a great many throats. Yet the ceremony persists, heavy with cant and meretricious uplift, because it flatters the performers.
So the categories remain distinct on paper while their dossiers keep sharing fingerprints. Anti-Zionism can be a political thesis. Antisemitism is a passion masquerading as one. When the former recruits the latter’s music, the ancient ostinato of the hidden hand and the tainted tribe, the duet is not difficult to recognise. The script is familiar, the scenery repainted, the chorus upgraded, but the plot refuses to retire.
