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Video: Anti-Zionism and antisemitism

February 7, 2024

AuthorsMichael Joiner
Multimedia Editor, 360info

Lachlan Guselli
360info, Sydney Commissioning Editor

Ilaria Walker
Asia Pacific Editor, 360info

ContributorsDavid Slucki

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MICHAEL JOINER: anti-semitism is surging once again, particularly online.
Using data from Jewish advocacy body the Anti-Defamation League, the New York Times reported that anti-Semitic content soared more than 919% on X and 28% on Facebook in the first month since the Hamas attacks of October seven.
It has been a growing trend over the past few years.
According to a European Commission report from 2021 there was considerable growth in the use of anti-Semitic phrases across French and German social media accounts during COVID.
It's a theme that has been replicated across the world echoing a centuries old narrative where racists use global events as an excuse to attack and scapegoat the Jewish people.
DAVID SLUCKI: anti-semitism is a historic phenomenon.
We call it the oldest hatred because it really goes back to antiquity.
MICHAEL JOINER: From Biblical times, history shows anti-semitism developed as Christianity grew with it.
It is seen in the artworks of the Renaissance where depictions of Christian dominance and Jewish persecution hung in galleries and palaces across Europe, time stamping the suffering.
How Jews were forced to convert to Christianity or be kicked out of their homes during the Spanish Inquisition, pushed into ghettos by the Popes of Rome or murdered in Germany for perceived conspiracies against Christianity.
These works reinforce racism through culture as a constant.
DAVID SLUCKI: the way we recognise anti-semitism today, really we can trace that back to the kind of early to middle 19th century where this pseudoscience emerges which really follows the revelations of Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species.
And Darwin's principles get misapplied to analysing human beings and humanity.
So what we get with the rise of these kind of ideas is th e notion that there are inherent traits linked to your racial makeup.
MICHAEL JOINER: It was around this period that a Jewish nationalist movement emerged: Zionism.
Its founder, a Hungarian journalist named Theodore Herzl, believed European anti-semitism had grown so bad that Jews would never be allowed to assimilate, meaning they needed a homeland of their own.
At the first Zionist Congress in 1897, he and his fellow members agreed that the movement's aim was to establish a home in Palestine for the Jewish people, secured under public law.
Around the time Herzl was developing his movement, a German named Wilhelm Marr had written a paper that Germans were losing out to Jews.
Along with founding the League of anti-Semites, Marr's attempt at intellectualising his racism established some of the tropes that endure to this day.
DAVID SLUCKI: So at the same time as the race science path, there also emerges this notion that Jews are taking over the world, this conspiratorial thinking around Jews and their power.
And it's nonsense, but it becomes quite popular in certain parts of the world. And so this kind of, this modern anti-semitism, which revolves around race science and around Jewish conspiratorial thinking, it brings Jew hatred into a kind of, into the modern world, like this transforms anti-semitism, and it persists to this day.
The biggest sort of flash point is the Holocaust. And really those, that first half of the 20th century when violence against Jews is almost nonstop.
MICHAEL JOINER: The violence in the early 20th century saw many Jewish people 'make Aliyah', a Hebrew term that describes Jewish people moving back to Israel.
Yet despite having just fought a war to depose the Nazis and decades later, the fall of the Soviet Union, anti-semitism remained entrenched, spiking around global events and harming new generations.
So why does this racist conspiracy hold such way?
DAVID SLUCKI: I think it stems back to the fact that anti-semitism is slippery.
Even though in the west anti-semitism became less acceptable after the Holocaust, it never went away. People still people have not stopped blaming the Jews for their problems.
The rise of social media has played a huge role in the spread of anti-semitism. You know, with the rise of YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, it's just much easier to be confronted with anti-semitism. You don't have to go looking for it.
MICHAEL JOINER: Recently anti-semitism has evolved again. Some people, like the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, are concerned that anti-semitism is behind criticism of the state of Israel and the political movement that created it, Zionism.
Zionism wasn't something dreamed up entirely by Theodore Herzel. The idea that God promised those lands to the followers of Abraham, called the Israelites, goes back to the Old Testament.
It took until 1948, when Israel was declared by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, who was then head of the World Zionist Organization, the Declaration meant there was now one Jewish nation in the world, along with the numerous established around Islamic and Christian beliefs.
However, since this point, the concept of what Zionism is and what it hopes to achieve has become heavily debated.
DAVID SLUCKI: Zionism isn't one thing, and it's never been one thing. It's been attached to a whole range of political worldviews.
There was rarely agreement on what that ought to look like, whether that took the form of a nation state which was the most kind of prevalent version of it, but you know Zionism was one of many political movements in the pre-Holocaust Jewish world. It wasn't even the dominant one.
But the Holocaust changed things for many Jews. The fact that there was nowhere to go, establishing a Jewish state in what was then Palestine came to a huge cost.
MICHAEL JOINER: As Israel developed, decades of war marked its foundational years, and this difficult relationship with its neighbours continues.
DAVID SLUCKI: It sparked war with not only Palestinians but also surrounding neighbors. It saw the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes, and it's been an intractable quagar I guess.
So there's this kind of in a way unsolvable problem between the notion that only Israel can shore up the Jews' existence, and if you don't have a Jewish State then that leaves Jews vulnerable, versus at what cost.
And I think that's really the position of many anti-Zionists, that the cost of statehood is too great.
MICHAEL JOINER: The intractable bargain accelerated both anti-semitism and questioning of Zionist ideals across the globe. But is criticism of Zionism criticism of all Jewish people?
DAVID SLUCKI: But I really think we should think about it more like a spectrum and there are people on all different positions along the spectrum.
Is anti-Zionism anti-semitism? It can be. And you know, this is part of the struggle to define anti-semitism.
MICHAEL JOINER: Many governments, universities and organisations use what is known as the IHRA definition, the international Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's working definition of anti-semitism.
It states that anti-semitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred towards Jews.
It goes on to say rhetorical and physical manifestation of anti-semitism are directed towards Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.
DAVID SLUCKI: And that was adopted by countries, by universities, as the definition, and one of the critiques that came out of that was it was a bit too rigid in some ways, that it would have a kind of chilling effect on particularly academic freedom and freedom of speech.
MICHAEL JOINER: in 2020, to alleviate these concerns, a range of Jewish academics convened the Jerusalem Declaration. This attempted to create space between the racism against Jewish people and the acts of the state of Israel.
On the face of it, it is not anti-semitic to support the Palestinian demand for justice, offer evidence-based criticism of Israel as a state, or boycott or divest from Israeli businesses.
The Quest for definitions has offered no confirmed position.
DAVID SLUCKI: you know we're in a heightened period right now as well when many Jews in places like Melbourne and Australia more broadly feel very vulnerable and very sensitive to anti-Zionism.
And when I say many Jews, I say that because there's also like a cohort of Jews that identify as anti-Zionist, so I don't want to generalise and say Jews feel this way or or another way, again, it's a spectrum.
MICHAEL JOINER: Instead, communities hurt and scared recede further from the difficult conversations needed to be had.
DAVID SLUCKI: One of the things that's concerned me locally, you know obviously I'm very concerned about the unfolding crisis in Israel, in particular in Gaza. But one of the things I've been concerned about vocally when I look around is the impact that it has on our social cohesion and our ability to connect with one another and our ability to have difficult conversations.
And these are difficult conversations, necessarily so.
And I think it starts from a place of empathy, you know, and that's our role at universities also is to teach how to teach and model how to have those discussions.
So I think it comes from a place of like understanding why people feel the ways in which they do and seeing them as fully human and imperfect.

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