Brendan O'Neill
Brendan O'Neill is editor of the online magazine spiked and is a columnist for the Big Issue in London and The Australian in, er, Australia. His satire on environmentalism, Can I Recycle My Granny and 39 Other Eco-Dilemmas, is published by Hodder & Stoughton. He doesn't tweet.
Anti-Zionists claim to be completely different to anti- Semites. But there's one key thing they have in common
David Ward, the Lib Dem MP who has had the whip withdrawn after comments about Zionists and Jews
Nick Clegg’s withdrawal of the party whip from his Bradford East MP David Ward will reignite the debate over whether there’s a difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. In January this year, Mr Ward found himself at the centre of a media storm when, on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day, he lambasted “the Jews” for their cruelty towards the Palestinians. But it is for his more recent comments about Zionism that Mr Ward has had his knuckles rapped by Clegg. Mr Ward tweeted on Saturday night: “Am I wrong or am I right? At long last the #Zionists are losing the battle – how long can the #apartheid State of #Israel last?” Some argue that criticising Zionism or Israel is an entirely legitimate thing to do and is not remotely comparable to expressing disdain or disgust for “the Jews”, and so if Mr Ward was to be punished for anything it should have been for his earlier, very dodgy comments about “the Jews”, not for his blathering about Zionism.
I have some sympathy with this viewpoint – but not nearly as much as I might have had in the past. I think the line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is getting thinner all the time. These two worldviews are, if obviously not the exact same thing, then at least very close cousins. There is one inescapable thing that they share in common: a tendency to trace all global problems and instabilities back to the behaviour and beliefs of a Jewish thing, whether the Jewish people or the Jewish State. Modern-day anti-Zionism, particularly as practised by left-leaning, trendy Europeans, among whom it is highly fashionable, is the heir to old-style anti-Semitism in one very important way: it has a scary habit of treating Jewish stuff or Jewish people as the source of the world’s ills.
What is most striking about modern-day Israel-bashers is their conviction that Israel is not only a state that sometimes fights wars, like, say, America and Britain does, but more importantly is a state which corrupts global politics. It is commonplace to hear radical leftists argue that Israel is the secret instigator of most of the wars in the world, particularly those in Iraq and Afghanistan, which, we’re told, were launched by Washington and London at Israel’s behest. In the words of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, if it wasn’t for the insidious influence of Israel’s agents in the US capital, “America would not be in Iraq today”. Anti-Zionists always talk about an “Israel lobby”, which apparently didn’t only spearhead the entire War on Terror but is now “cowboying up for war with Iran”. So widespread is the idea that Israel is to blame for everything rotten in the world that a few years ago a poll of Europeans found that a majority think Israel is “the greatest threat to world peace”. Arabs also believe Israel is the greatest threat to world peace. Israel is now regularly referred to as a “rogue”, “criminal” or “insane” state which is becoming “dangerously erratic”, threatening both more regional war and also global tensions. It's treated as the well of global poison.
The obsessive Israel-bashers will say: “Ah, but we are criticising a state, not a people. We’re attacking the Zionist entity, not the Jews.” Fine. Except that their criticisms of Zionism have eerie echoes of earlier expressions of hatred for Jews in the sense that both are about finding one thing, normally a Jewish thing, which can be blamed for all sorts of very complex global problems. In modern public debate, “Zionism” seems simply to have replaced “the Jews” as the thing we can point at and say: “It’s their fault.” That is why modern-day depictions of Israel often closely resemble old-world depictions of the Jews, such as when the Guardian recently caricatured Israeli leaders as the puppetmasters of global affairs. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries in particular, some Europeans who felt threatened or thrown by the rapid pace of change and instability in emerging capitalist society visited their fury upon the Jews, irrationally treating them as the source of these modernising trends. “The Jews” became the catch-all explanation for bad or weird things that people couldn’t find other explanations for. A German Marxistreferred to this as “the socialism of fools”. Today, by the same token, the laying of blame for every global conflict and problem at the feet of Zionism or Israel is the anti-imperialism of fools.
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