OPINION : Responses to antisemitism are shifting – this should concern us
Before 7 October many denied antisemitism. Now they inherently acknowledge it but dismiss it, citing Gaza
I recently joined Jewish News as deputy editor. Prior to that, I worked at the Board of the Deputies for more than half a decade and at the Jewish Chronicle for three and a half years before that.
The reason I am telling you this is not to regurgitate my LinkedIn profile. It’s to provide some background when I tell you that over the years I have received many hundreds, if not thousands, of online comments in response to articles I have written or statements I have made regarding antisemitism. Some of the comments have been positive and supportive. An overwhelming majority have not.
But I want to tell you about a shift in the type of negative response I have seen in the past 19 months – and why I think that it’s significant and deeply worrying.
For many years, a significant proportion of responses I have received – as have many other Jewish people – when calling out antisemitism have been in the form of what the academic David Hirsh first described as the “Livingstone formulation”. Named after the former mayor of London – who would later become famous for repeatedly appearing on TV to claim that Hitler had supported Zionism “before he went mad”, the formulation’s basic form is as follows:
An individual makes a comment which is considered by a Jewish person to be antisemitic and is called out as such. The person who made the original comment attacks the Jewish person for calling this out, accusing them of falsely labelling the comment as antisemitic as part of a concentrated effort to stifle any criticism of Israel.
Up to 7 October 2023, this formulation was the standard response Jewish people received when they called out anti-Jewish hate, no matter how egregious and obvious it was. A picture of a bug emblazoned with a star of David, wrapped around the face of the Statue of Liberty? The use of the epithets “Zio” or “ZOG” (Zionist Occupied Government), both of which originated from White Supremacists? Rants about supposed Jewish control over world finance or global media? Call any of these out, and as night follows day you would receive frothing responses about how you were attempting to stifle criticism of Israel or its government.
But things have changed since Hamas launched their mass-terror attack 19 months ago, in which more than 1,200 people were murdered and hundreds taken captive. Israel responded forcefully – as any country would initially have done after suffering such an attack – and has continued to do so over the last nineteen months, apart from a few weeks of agreed ceasefires. Even considering the 20,000 Hamas combatants which the IDF says it has eliminated, there have been many thousands of others – men, woman and children, who have been killed. You do not have to accept the exact figure provided by the Hamas-controlled Gazan Ministry of Health to know that this is true.
The loss of any innocent life is a tragedy; again, this should not be a remotely controversial statement.
The war between Israel and Hamas has had a variety of social and geopolitical international consequences. It has also seen a shift in the broad pattern of responses when Jews call out antisemitic comments, actions or incidents.
Nowadays, rather than the Livingstone formulation, the response is far more likely to be along the following lines: ‘how can you be concerned about a simple image or comments when people are literally dying in Gaza.’ This sentiment is not limited to the far-right or the far-left, but has been increasingly expressed even by people towards what might be described as the political centre.
The immediate answer to this is obvious – to take the American expression, ‘you can walk and chew gum at the same time’. It should be perfectly possible to deplore the terrible situation in Gaza while recognising that there are those who are seeking to capitalise on this tragedy to pump antisemitism into the mainstream body politic.
A whole host of far-right antisemitic social media personalities, for example, have successfully seized on the terrible situation in Gaza to significantly grow their reach.
People will watch and share videos deploring Israeli actions, then be introduced to further content which attempts to dissect Zionism and describe it as being similar to Nazism, and from there, for those who don’t know any better, it’s a simple sidestep into being introduced to the sentiments expressed in the notorious antisemitic forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Most Jewish people might be able to think of examples of people – whether former friends, random acquaintances or celebrities – who appear to be moving through such a radicalisation pipeline.
But take a step back and consider the change in approach that new response heralds – the response of ‘how can you complain about a social media post/ graffiti on a synagogue/ a march where people will inevitably chant deeply problematic slogans, when there are people dying in Gaza?’ Because that response is acknowledging that such examples may indeed be antisemitic but is simultaneously dismissing that as irrelevant due to a wider global context. In its most basic form, the stock response has gone from ‘you are lying, Jew’, to ‘so what, Jew? The actions of your co-religionists mean you deserve it – and indeed it’s insulting that you would even dare to complain.’
For years it has been an article of faith in progressive circles, popularised on ten thousand university campuses, that ‘words can be a form of violence’. Within the last year and a half, that maxim has quite simply been rewritten to exclude antisemitism – and has excited little more than a few shrugs. Indeed, there is a relatively small but highly vocal group of far-left Jewish activists who have vehemently supported this change.
It is unclear what will happen next geopolitically; for my part, I hope that a deal will emerge which will see the remaining hostages still in Hamas’s clutches released, the terrorist group made to leave Gaza, and reconstruction efforts which will allow innocent Palestinians and Israelis whose lives have been shattered and loved ones slain to rebuild as best they can. When the current ramshackle governing coalition in Jerusalem – held together by the right embracing the far-right – collapses, I will not mourn, and neither, I suspect, will a great many Israelis.
I am regretfully certain, however, that attitudes on antisemitism will not return to the way they were. The stock response from so-called ‘anti-Zionists’ when Jews call out Jew-hatred will no longer inherently acknowledge through their denials that antisemitism is bad, but will rather imply that antisemitism is justified.
This should worry us all – whether in Britain or elsewhere in the Diaspora.
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