Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs

ISSN: 2373-9770 (Print) 2373-9789 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rifa20

Anti-Judaism, Antisemitism, and Delegitimizing

Israel

Dave Rich

To cite this article: Dave Rich (2017) Anti-Judaism, Antisemitism, and Delegitimizing Israel, Israel
Journal of Foreign Affairs, 11:1, 101-104, DOI: 10.1080/23739770.2017.1315682

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23739770.2017.1315682

Published online: 25 Apr 2017.

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 Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, 2017
Vol. 11, No. 1, 101–104, https://doi.org/10.1080/23739770.2017.1315682

Reviews
Anti-Judaism, Antisemitism, and Delegitimizing Israel
Edited by Robert S. Wistrich
(Omaha: University of Nebraska Press, 2016), 330 pages

Reviewed by Dave Rich

Deputy Director of Communications, Community Security Trust
Associate Research Fellow, Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism,
Birkbeck College, University of London
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Few academics have contributed more to the study of antisemitism, anti-Zionism,

and the tangled connections between them than Robert S. Wistrich, of blessed
memory. This book, the last he edited before his sudden passing in May 2015, is
a collection of twenty-five essays by twenty-four different authors. It emerged
from a conference held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in May 2014, orga-
nized by the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism,
which Wistrich led for thirteen years.

There is much to admire in this volume. Ben Cohen’s thoughtful introduction

sets the scene by laying out the paradox of the Jewish condition in today’s
world: The Jewish people have been empowered by the creation and flourishing
of the State of Israel, a transformative opportunity that was tragically denied to
earlier generations, yet Jewish national self-determination has also attracted and
energized a new generation of antisemites. Other chapters focus on specific sub-
jects, often with insight and illumination. Matthias Küntzel details how Ayatollah
Khomeini incorporated antisemitic conspiracy theories into Iran’s political phil-
osophy, a feature often ignored by Western politicians even when they
condemn the foreign policy consequences of this prejudice. Maurice Samuels
places France at the epicentre of the new types of antisemitism faced by West
European Jewish communities, and explores the roles played by Tariq
Ramadan, Alain Segré, and Alain Badiou in successive assaults on Jewish iden-
tity. Giovanni Matteo Quer traces the journey of Christian liberation theology
from Marxist movements of Latin America to Palestinian Christian anti-
Zionism today. An essay by Efraim Sicher examines the ambivalent position
of Jews in postcolonial theory, while Nelly Las looks at the interplay between
antisemitism and feminism.

© Community Security Trust (2017) 101

 Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs

Whereas some texts make valuable contributions to our understanding of complex

political and sociological phenomena, others read more as activist material: stirring
and heartfelt, perhaps, but less likely to stand up to close analysis. This might be
expected in a collection that includes contributions by academics, journalists, and
activists, but the variation in quality is nonetheless a weakness. It is striking, for
example, to compare Lesley Klaff’s painstaking dissection of the use of “Holocaust
inversion” (p. 189) by David Ward, a former British MP, with Guy Millière’s
sloppy inaccuracies in his history of Israel’s diplomatic relations with the US,
Europe, and Arab states. Millière claims that more Israelis were killed by terrorists
during the Clinton presidency than under all US presidents from Truman to Bush
(Senior) combined; then he states that fewer were killed under Bush (Junior) than
under Clinton. Neither claim is even close to being true, but both are conveniently
useful for Millière’s broader political argument against the Oslo Accords that
Clinton championed.
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Several authors discuss the outbreak of antisemitism in Europe during the 2014
Israel–Gaza war; the politics of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and how it
affects both antisemitism and the study of it, is also a subject of much discussion
throughout this book. This produces a certain tension between the different
essays regarding the place Israel advocacy should play in combating antisemitism.
Sometimes this is explicit: Fiamma Nirenstein makes a direct plea to “move our
efforts from denouncing traditional antisemitism to directly attacking Israelopho-
bia” (p. 45). It is impossible to understand contemporary antisemitism, she argues,
without understanding the depth of hatred of Israel in Europe and the danger this
poses. Elsewhere, this tension is felt in the relative emphasis given by different
authors to antisemitism in the Diaspora or to attacks on Israel. The extreme hos-
tility to Israel in radical movements, and, at times, on Europe’s streets, plays an
important role in contemporary antisemitism and requires detailed and careful
study, but carrying out such research also entails certain responsibilities. Those
who believe that the struggle against antisemitism must be fought primarily on
the battlefield of Israel advocacy are entitled to their view, but they need to
explain what kind of pro-Palestinian activism they view as legitimate. It is not
good enough to simply state, as Nirenstein does, that “by portraying the Palesti-
nian cause as one of justice and human rights, international pro-Palestinian acti-
vists endorsed the anti-Zionist discourse together with its antisemitic
components” (p. 43). Alvin Rosenfeld’s essay explaining the difference between
the language of eliminationist anti-Zionism and normative political criticism
offers a useful route out of this fog.

The book under review here was published before the election of President Donald
Trump, and his victory has brought a political focus and urgency to resolving this
tension. His administration, and the right-wing populist movements in Europe that
now look to him as a global figurehead, demonstrate markedly different attitudes
to Israel and to Diaspora Jewry, which is reflected in the discourse that now

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 Reviews

dominates this question. Is support (whether rhetorical or concrete) for Israel suf-
ficient to prove that a politician is firmly opposed to antisemitism? Or is the
response of governments to antisemitism within their own borders the true
measure of this commitment? Various contributors to this volume are likely to
have different answers to these questions.

Yet the two positions should not be so separate. As some of the authors demon-
strate, enmity for Israel can often be traced back to traditional antisemitic attitudes,
while antisemitic movements are usually also hostile to Israel. Two of the more sti-
mulating essays, by Stephen Norwood and Samuel Barnai, discuss these inter-
relations in the US and Russia respectively. Norwood identifies similarities in
the language of American far-right and far-left anti-Zionism and argues that
both draw on Christian anti-Judaism. They both portray Zionism as “a plutocratic
movement,” comparable to Nazism, which was “sponsored by wealthy Jewish
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financiers who coveted Palestine for its unparalleled riches,” he explains

(p. 130). Barnai juxtaposes the anti-Zionism of three Russian thinkers, Alexander
Dugin, Geydar Dzhemal, and Maxim Shevchenko, and demonstrates how their
fundamentally different philosophies—Eurasian, Islamist and Orthodox Chris-
tian—all lead them to the conclusion that Israel must be eliminated.

One unwelcome phenomenon that has crept into the “anti-antisemitism” world is
that of mimicking the egregious behaviour of some of our opponents. Joel Fish-
man’s sweeping assertion that “Nazism and Islam have a true affinity” is bad
enough; that he relies on Hajj Amin al-Husseini, a vicious antisemite and Nazi col-
laborator, as an “authoritative source” for this claim is startling (p. 101). Nor is
there any value in complaining, as Millière does, that the Palestinians are an arti-
ficial people “invented” as a “weapon of war against Israelis and even Jews.”
(p. 276). Anti-Zionists play the same game by claiming that the Jewish people
were invented and that few modern Jews have a genetic link to ancient Israel.
The only question that arises from this argument is: so what? All nations and
peoples are invented to varying degrees and at different points in history, and
sometimes they disappear too; but just as Shlomo Sand cannot persuade millions
of Jews that they are not really Jews, so Millière will fail to persuade millions
of Palestinians that they are not really Palestinians. Trying to argue a self-con-
scious nation out of existence is at best futile, at worst sinister.

The doyenne of this particular school is Bat Ye’or, whose essay here is devoted to
her Eurabia thesis. According to Ye’or, a coterie of ex-Nazis and their former col-
laborators, in contact with Nazi war criminals in the Middle East, have colluded
with Arab states to Islamize Europe through mass Muslim immigration, multicul-
turalism, the erosion of national identities, and the promotion of anti-Zionism and
antisemitism. The outcome, according to Ye’or, is that “Europe has been Palesti-
nized just as it had been Nazified some seventy years ago” (p. 36). Why
Europe’s far right would promote immigration and multiculturalism—two policies

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 Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs

that are contrary to their political agenda—and in so doing undermine national

identity is not explained, but then conspiracy theories rarely make much sense.
Ye’or’s thesis is not just nonsense; it is offensive nonsense that debases this
mostly serious book.

Rather than feeding the prejudices of Europe’s Islamophobic far right, it would be
better for those who dedicate their time to researching and combating antisemitism
to heed the warning set out by Robert Wistrich in the book’s final essay. “Euro-
pean Jews, especially in France,” he cautions, “find themselves caught between
the Islamist wave and the rise of far-right populist-nationalists.” Marine Le
Pen’s efforts to distance herself from her father’s overt antisemitism should not dis-
tract us from the “ultra-nationalists, racists, and fundamentalist Catholics” in the
Front National’s ranks, nor from the FN’s innate hostility to organized Jewish pol-
itical activism (p. 298). It is better to rely on Jewish empowerment, both in Israel
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and in the Diaspora, in confronting this latest incarnation of an old hatred.

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