Teaching memory and rise of anti-Judaism in Europe
The pathology of antisemitism persists, recurring stubbornly 80 years after the Nazi extermination. It revives old stereotypes such as the financial and political power exercised by Jews, the mystifying specter of a global conspiracy plotted by them. In 2017 Manuel Valls, then Prime Minister of France, published a J’accuse regarding the convergence of an antisemitic tradition of the far-right and an Islamist ideology ingrained in neighborhoods of cities inhabited by children of Muslim immigrants, where the preaching of hate by fundamentalist imams is strong. An ideology that imports, as a byproduct, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict onto European soil and distorts it into a sick opposition between Arabs and Jews, drawing on the one hand from old European anti-Jewish themes, such as the global conspiracy and political and economic domination of the Jews, and on the other hand glorifying community separatism against universal values of secular democracy.
In Italy as well as the CDEC Foundation’s Observatory on Antisemitism records, there has long been a worsening of sentiments and acts directed against Jewish individuals and institutions. The antisemitic beast is multifaceted: there is the one of Christian-religious origin, the racist or ethno-nationalist type in its modern variants; and finally, there is the one linked to the existence of a Jewish state – Israel. During the two years of the Gaza war, this has become massive, contaminating vast layers of society. In demonstrations organized at universities or on the streets of cities in Europe and the United States, there is a prevailing virulence against Israel that often degenerates into outright anti-Jewish sentiment, as if Jews around the world were unanimously in agreement, or worse, complicit, in the decisions and actions of Israeli governments. It is a virulence full of Manichean positions and crude distortions of history – August Bebel called this type of ideology in the late 19th century the ‘socialism of fools.’ Although it is the Jews who suffer directly from antisemitism and its long, painful, and horrible history, it represents an acute symptom of the malaise of a society, the deterioration of civil coexistence as well as of respect for minorities. Minorities like the Jewish one, for whom an open and plural society, in which multiple identities, cultures, and communities are recognized as legitimate and respected, is a vital condition for existence.
There is a logical, lexical, and philosophical shift, as often happens in the simplistic views that dominate the debate on the conflict between Israel and Hamas, in the worn-out stereotype of victims and perpetrators. It reflects an essentialist conception of human history whereby today’s Israelis, all indiscriminately, a people sick in their entirety, are seen as the children, grandchildren, and heirs of the Jews of 80 years ago, now turned into perpetrators. This is an evident falsehood, as demonstrated by the fraught debate that divides Israeli society regarding the ongoing conflict and the violence inflicted on Gazan civilians, as well as the easy tool of a self-exonerating mechanism for Europe, guilty for centuries of Christian anti-Judaism and antisemitic racism. A mechanism we have seen operating distinctly around Holocaust Remembrance Day in the past two years, a memory deliberately suppressed, yet conspicuously resurfacing in articles, opinion polls, and public demonstrations. In those contexts, Zionism has turned into an insult, and anti-Zionism proclaimed as a cover or defense against accusations of antisemitism. A blatant distortion of history. Zionism was born in the late nineteenth century with the aim of removing the exceptional condition of the Jewish people, a dispersed and persecuted people, by providing Jews with a place of refuge and the normalcy of a ‘nation-state.’
A Jewish state does not, in itself, guarantee, as the tragic news of recent years shows, physical security for its inhabitants nor the removal of that condition of precariousness: Israel’s right to a legitimate existence is still in doubt today. Not only in the murderous barbarity of Hamas, but also among those who advocate for a free and whole Palestine ‘from the river to the sea,’ thus denying the Jews the right to self-determination and the principle of dividing that contested land into ‘two states for two peoples.’
Giorgio Gomel
