{"id":115462,"date":"2024-09-02T17:05:07","date_gmt":"2024-09-02T15:05:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=115462"},"modified":"2024-09-02T12:13:16","modified_gmt":"2024-09-02T10:13:16","slug":"05-05-103","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=115462","title":{"rendered":"The Nazification of Anti-Zionism"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>The Nazification of Anti-Zionism<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/h5>\n

Ben Cohen \/ JNS.org<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Yellow Star of David Jews were forced to wear in Nazi Germany. Photo: Kjetil Ree\/Wikimedia Commons.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

In an interview<\/a> with The Jerusalem Post<\/em> on Aug. 28, Yonathan Arfi, the head of the French Jewish umbrella body Crif, complained that most of his fellow citizens have an understanding of antisemitism that is rooted in the memory of the Second World War. The indelible association of Nazism with Jew-hatred, Arfi argued, prevents today\u2019s generations from perceiving antisemitism as a live and current threat to the Jewish communities in their midst.<\/span><\/p>\n

Given that Arfi represents a community that has endured a 200% increase in antisemitic outrages since Jan. 1, his views on this matter deserve to be taken seriously. And on one level, he is right. Antisemitic skinheads are still out there, but right now, they don\u2019t represent the greatest threat to Jewish communities. Nonetheless, because they are seen as the true inheritors of the ideology behind the Holocaust, casual observers are blinded to the reality that today\u2019s antisemites aren\u2019t overly concerned with shaving their heads, wearing keffiyehs instead of swastikas and chanting \u201cFrom the River to the Sea\u201d instead of \u201cSieg Heil.\u201d As a result of these optics, the pro-Hamas solidarity movement that has mushroomed in Western countries since the Oct. 7 atrocities is not, in the eyes of many, targeting Jews per se, but rather ideas and symbols\u2014Zionism, the State of Israel\u2014that can be denounced in the language of anti-colonialism, and not for their connections to Judaism.<\/span><\/p>\n

If there is a logic here, it might perhaps be explained along these lines: Just as opposing the Vietnam War in the 1970s didn\u2019t necessarily mean opposition to the existence of America and Americans, so opposing Israel\u2019s defensive war in Gaza in the 2020s doesn\u2019t mean that you\u2019re an antisemite of the Nazi eliminationist variety. This view is bolstered by the fact that the pro-Hamas movement presents itself as a rainbow coalition of different ethnicities, religions and lifestyles that couches its rhetoric within general appeals to equality and human rights.<\/span><\/p>\n

Because of that perception, I think it\u2019s a mistake to focus this debate solely on the matter of presentation. The fact remains that we are dealing with an upsurge of antisemitism unprecedented in scale and venom since the Holocaust. And much of what we are witnessing echoes the Nazi period, particularly before the implementation of the mass extermination policy at the turn of the 1940s. Indeed, these echoes are a big part of the reason why there is so much ominous thinking among Jewish communities about where all this is heading.<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, there are significant differences between then and now, the most obvious being that during the Nazi era, antisemitism was a state-driven policy, whereas today it\u2019s a civil society phenomenon in Western countries. Still, there are two overlaps that are worth pointing out.<\/span><\/p>\n

Firstly, while Western governments aren\u2019t actively discriminating against their Jewish populations, many of them are feeding antisemitic sentiments. This is certainly true of those countries in the European Union, such as Spain and the Republic of Ireland, which have pushed for unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state and advocated for sanctions against members of the current Israeli government. These politicians have essentially blessed the notion that Israel is a rogue state committing war crimes and therefore deserving of anger\u2014anger that all too often gets directed at Jewish communities. As Arfi pointed out, \u201cWe all live with the idea that some people consider Jews to be legitimate targets for a battle happening 4,000 kilometers away.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Secondly, many of the tactics and methods supported by the Hamas acolytes mirror the anti-Jewish measures introduced by the Nazi regime. A particularly shocking example emerged last week when the ultra-left New Communist Party in Italy published<\/a> a blacklist of institutions and individuals who \u201csupport or promote the Zionist state in Italy.\u201d In essence, this was an electronic version of the Nazi boycott campaign of Jewish-owned stores and businesses in Germany during the 1930s that helped give rise to the Holocaust a few years later.<\/span><\/p>\n

In tandem with that is the rewriting of Jewish history and the caricaturing of Jewish theology. Social-media platforms like X (Twitter) and Instagram have been flooded with content that mocks the link between the land of Israel and the Jewish people, casting Israelis as Ashkenazi colonists who have willfully stolen Arab territories. The feed of Richard Medhurst\u2014an Anglo-Syrian propagandist whose unhinged ravings are published by Iran\u2019s Press TV and Russia\u2019s RT\u2014is replete with disparaging references to Ashkenazi Jews, to give one example. Medhurst\u2019s co-thinkers, like Scott Ritter, an American former U.N. weapons inspector and convicted pedophile, and Mary Kostakidis, an Australian reporter who has enthusiastically embraced Medhurst\u2019s own hatred of Zionism, form a reliable echo chamber for this theme and others, such as the slander that Jewish \u201cchosenness\u201d\u2014a purely religious notion about the Jewish relationship with God\u2014is actually an ideology of racial and national superiority. All these outpourings are designed to make their audiences despise all Jews, everywhere; in Israel, where they occupy and persecute the \u201cindigenous\u201d Palestinian Arabs, and outside, where the vast majority of Jews who support Israel, and have family and friends there, are framed as inherently suspect.<\/span><\/p>\n

As I\u2019ve argued before<\/a>\u2014and here is the link between the antisemitism of the last century and that in this one\u2014anti-Zionism has morphed into \u201cantizionism.\u201d Freed from its hyphen, what remains is an ornate, multi-layered conspiracy theory with pretensions to be a revelatory, liberating and compelling explanation for why the world is in a rotten state.<\/span><\/p>\n

For that reason, I think we can now reasonably speak of the \u201cNazification\u201d of anti-Zionism. As the Nazi newspaper Der St\u00fcrmer<\/em>, citing the German historian Heinrich von Treitschke, declared from its masthead: \u201cThe Jews are our misfortune.\u201d For their inheritors, it\u2019s the \u201cZionists\u201d who play the same nefarious role, but for all intents and purposes, there is no practical distinction between these two categories. If we are to educate non-Jews about the evils of antisemitism, we are obliged to demonstrate its consistencies across different historical periods. The core message is, after all, evolving in the same way as the trajectory of antisemitism through the ages: You have no right to live among us as Zionists; you have no right to live among us; you have no right to live.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n

Zawarto\u015b\u0107 publikowanych artyku\u0142\u00f3w i materia\u0142\u00f3w nie reprezentuje pogl\u0105d\u00f3w ani opinii Reunion’68,<\/em>
\nani te\u017c webmastera Blogu Reunion’68, chyba ze jest to wyra\u017anie zaznaczone.
\nTwoje uwagi, linki, w\u0142asne artyku\u0142y lub wiadomo\u015bci prze\u015blij na adres:
\n<\/em>webmaster@reunion68.com<\/span><\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Nazification of Anti-Zionism Ben Cohen \/ JNS.org Yellow Star of David Jews were forced to wear in Nazi Germany. Photo: Kjetil Ree\/Wikimedia Commons. In an interview with The Jerusalem Post on Aug. 28, Yonathan Arfi, the head of the French Jewish umbrella body Crif, complained that most of his fellow citizens have an understanding of antisemitism that is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115462"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=115462"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115462\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":115477,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115462\/revisions\/115477"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=115462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=115462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=115462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}