The antizionist contagion

Over the past few days, antisemitism has exploded as an issue in Britain.

It was a reaction to two developments. Last week, two Jews were stabbed in separate attacks on the streets of Golders Green, London’s largely Jewish suburb. This week, the insurgent Green Party very publicly descended into a sewer of Jew-hatred during the run-up to Britain’s local government elections.

Dozens of Green Party candidates, whose supposed environmental concerns have given way to a hard-left, anti-Israel agenda, were revealed over the past few days to have a record of blood-curdling Jew-hatred.

Their party leader, Zack Polanski, who is himself Jewish, had asked whether British Jews were really unsafe or merely had “a perception of unsafety”. After the Golders Green attacks, he provoked outrage by criticising the police for kicking the attacker in order to disarm him.

British Jews are under increasingly aggressive siege from abuse, intimidation, discrimination, arson attacks on their institutions, street violence and terrorism that has left two Jews dead in a synagogue on Yom Kippur.

 

The Golders Green stabbings last week provoked a huge outpouring of revulsion and concern. There was a fusillade of bromides about there being “no place for antisemitism in Britain” from the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, and other Labour Party politicians.

The media suddenly started publishing accounts by deeply distressed British Jews about the state of fear in which they are being forced to live. Commentators produced outraged and horrified diatribes against a society that is forcing its Jews to consider emigrating.

Yet some of those voices had previously produced outraged and horrified diatribes against the State of Israel, recycling defamatory falsehoods about the behaviour of the Israel Defense Forces in the Gaza Strip.

This discrepancy alone should have sounded a warning that, for all the public breast-beating, the real point was still being missed.

This is because attacks on Jews are still deemed to be in a separate category from attacks on Israel or Zionism. The assumption is that attacks on Jews are very bad indeed because they are directed against people, but attacks on Israel or Zionism are considered entirely acceptable because they are directed against a country or an ideology.

The distinction is false and itself helps fuel hatred of both Israel and Jews.

The point was illustrated this week in Manhattan. At Park East Synagogue on New York City’s Upper East Side, where an event marketing Israeli real estate was taking place, hundreds of masked Islamists and their supporters chanted from behind a police barricade: “We don’t want two states. We want ’48!”

The mob, which flew a Hezbollah flag, was spearheaded by a branch of Al-Awda, which is linked to Samidoun, a US-designated terrorist organisation.

The police thankfully prevented a repeat of what happened last November at Park East, when anti-Israel demonstrators blocked people from entering and leaving the synagogue. That intimidation helped prompt city legislators to tell the police to establish a protest-free “buffer zone” around houses of worship.

The city’s Islamist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, is ruthlessly exploiting the false distinction between attacking Israel and attacking Jews.

“There is no tolerance for hatred of Jewish New Yorkers,” he said about the Park East demonstration. Yet at the same time, he registered his opposition to the synagogue event, which was promoting the sale of land “in occupied West Bank settlements that are a violation of international law”.

Condemning Jew-hatred while simultaneously inciting it through incendiary distortions is the mind-twisting stock-in-trade of the anti-Israel left.

In Britain, Starmer’s government is now talking about banning the “hate marches” that have taken place almost every week since the Hamas-led atrocities in Israel on October 7, 2023. The belated realisation is beginning to dawn that the chants on these marches calling for the murder of Jews may help inspire actual attacks on Jews.

Despite this, Starmer and many others are still failing to connect the necessary dots. The rampant Jew-hatred that has so shocked them is the result of something they refuse to acknowledge.

It is antizionism that is poisoning Western society, spreading a mind virus that targets both the Jewish world and Western civilisation itself. This contagion is spread principally by Islamists, who are gleefully tapping into the antizionism that has captured the non-Muslim progressive classes, including vast swathes of the young.

The question that is constantly asked, whether antizionism is really antisemitism or something different, fails to encompass the sickening enormity of what has happened.

Antizionism is an evil in itself because it launders antisemitism. It singles out the Jewish state for a verbal pogrom of wild blood libels drawn straight from mediaeval Christian, Soviet and Nazi demonology.

Accusations against Israel of “genocide”, starving innocent Gazans to death or wanton “baby killing” are not merely defamatory lies. They present Israelis as positively evil and as a uniquely demonic force in the world that therefore needs to be removed.

This murderous hatred does not merely fuel the aim of eliminating Israel. It has also awakened that lightest of sleepers in the West, the secret wish of millions to remove the Jews from their world altogether.

The “hate marches” have attracted people who may think they are supporting poor, oppressed Palestinians against cruel and oppressive Israelis who have occupied their land. Nevertheless, these marches are themselves an attack on Jews because they are an attack on Zionism, a denial of the right of the Jewish people alone to have their own nation-state in their ancestral homeland.

Led, organised and funded by Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran, these marches are not organised principally to protest against Israel or in support of “Palestine”. They are instead an expression of near-delirious Islamist triumphalism and a statement that Muslims now control the streets.

For the Islamists, the October 7 atrocities signalled the beginning of the end of the Zionist entity, itself a stepping stone to the conquest of the West.

The Islamists believe they are on course to victory because there has been no pushback against them, only against Israel. Hamas thanked Starmer for rewarding them after October 7 by recognising a “State of Palestine”. They also gloat that US President Donald Trump is being outwitted by the regime in Tehran.

In America, the Democratic Party is hurtling down the antizionist rabbit hole. This has given permission to the Tucker Carlson faction of MAGA Republicans to parade their vicious conspiracy theories about Jews and Israel.

Meanwhile, Britain and Europe are rapidly losing their historic cultural identity to Islamisation.

It is also now clear that the threat to the West from communism did not disappear with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. Communism merely shifted strategy, waging a culture war that has colonised the Western intelligentsia with anti-West hatred and using the Palestinian cause as a Trojan horse to destroy the West’s moral compass altogether.

In the 1960s, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, with Soviet support, promoted a distinct Palestinian national identity.

In 1975, the KGB helped orchestrate the United Nations resolution declaring that Zionism was racism.

In the 1980s, as scholar Izabella Tabarovsky has documented, the Soviet Union promoted the “genocide” libel against Israel.

Fighting the menace of Islamist and communist-backed antizionism is hardly helped when Diaspora Jews protest that attacks on them are unjustified because they have nothing to do with Israel. This merely reinforces the impression that Israel is too awful to be identified with.

Diaspora Jews should instead state clearly that Palestinian identity was shaped in part as a political instrument to undermine Israel and appropriate Jewish history in the ancestral homeland. They should say that Israel acts in accordance with international law. They should call out Muslim antisemitism as a scourge that extends well beyond Islamist extremists.

Many do not do so, either through fear or because too many themselves believe the lies or support the poisonous ideologies that underwrite them.

Antizionism is a weapon of mass destruction, not only against Israel and the Jews but against the West. It is high time that Diaspora Jewish leaders acknowledged this and started fighting it forcefully in public. They would gain many allies if they rose to the occasion and did so.