New antisemitism and Israelophobia in Europe
Speech for the international symposium “Anti-Judaism, Antisemitism and the Delegitimization of Israel”, organized by the Vidal Sassoon Center for the Study of Antisemitism
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 27 May 2014
By Fiamma Nirenstein
The dictionary of contemporary antisemitism, a plague that is part of the history of the Jewish people since its beginning, was formulated by Ahmadinejad in Geneva in 2009, at the so-called Durban 2 conference. Israel was a "totally racist state"; the Jewish suffering “an excuse for establishing a totally racist state in occupied Palestine”; the Zionists are "racist perpetrators of genocide"; there is an incredible "economic and political influence of Zionism and their control of the media". Just yesterday, shame on my region, Toscana, in Florence, the regional council approved a resolution calling for the liberation of Barghouti and sending threats to the existence of the State of Israel.
This dictionary on the new antisemitism can be enriched using the map of the entire world, and in particular the European countries’: in Holland this May, during the Shoah Remembrance Day, a Muslim group planned its own memorial day to commemorate the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians; in Hungary, a rally of prayers called for the end of Zionism and, as you know, Jobbik asked for the resignation of all the Jewish members of parliament; in England I can't forget the victory in the comics contest of the cartoon of Sharon eating Palestinian children, all of his naked monstrous body dirty with blood; in Norway a cartoon on Dagbladet shows Palestinians prisoners coming out in the exchange with Gilad Shalit from a lager with the Buchenwald inscription: Jedem das seine, “to each according to what he deserves”. I could continue hours.
The anti-Zionist antisemitism grew enormously since Arafat was able to transfer all the characteristics of classical antisemitism on it. Under the abused banner of human rights grows the imagination that the Israelis (like the Jews of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and of the blood libel) are liars Holocaust inventors, blood thirsty, abusers, colonialists, ethnic cleansers, apartheid promoters, naturally violent subjects. The Jews lie on two basic facts: the Holocaust, that either never existed or is highly exaggerated, and their Israeli origin, as they have never lived in the Land of Israel before the cruel colonialist war of conquest that destroyed the state of Palestine. We will not understand the antisemitism of today if we don't understand that it is mostly nourished by these popular, extremely diffused opinions,, who stick widely to the European popular culture.
The new Jews are the Israelis and their friends in the Diaspora: they are almost Israeli as you can see from the fact that they are on the side of this criminal country. Therefore, the Diaspora Jews are criminals themselves. This is the ratio of antisemitism today. A Jew is an Israeli today; the fantastic inventions about the Jews have become part of the public fantasy about Israel. Israel poisons the water of the Palestinians (Suha Araft officially told so to a very surprised Hillary Clinton), the Jews are blood thirsty as in the ancient blood libel, and particularly they kill, they want to kill, Palestinian children. Baroness Ashton implicitly said that when she compared the children killed by a terrorist in Toulouse to the children accidentally and certainly unintentionally killed in Gaza. How can a Jew, any Jew, agree with the criminal attitudes of Israel? Only because he is a wicked Jew, namely, an Israeli.
According to the last ADL poll, one billion people are "highly infected" by antisemitism. One on four people that you meet on the street has deep prejudice about the Jews. If you want to take a quiet walk, only in Laos you can do it, only there the antisemites are less than one per cent; while even if you are a peace activist in Gaza and in the West Bank, the 93 per cent of the people you meet in the streets think that the Jews are despicable from any point of view.
This highest figures show that modern antisemitism is connected only partly with the growth of the extreme right in Europe. This growth is more connected with the failure of the European institutions, with the economic crisis and the lack of any response from the liberals to the challenges of globalization, such as immigration and social problems, which have always been incredibly ignored by liberals as a false problem. Considering the question politically incorrect, the liberal side has never listened to the complaint of the popular classes, which have therefore voted for the euro-skeptic right. Now the left wing parties pay the price. The right wing European victory certainly brings to a growth of a hateful racist attitude toward the strangers and the different. We will have to fight it strongly. But antisemitism is not the direct result of it. And if we try to keep fighting it in its old form, attributing it to neo-fascism or neo-nazi comeback, we will make a mistake that will not help.
Traditionally to heal the anti-Semitic plague we made a big effort to spread educative programs, on an historical and emotional level, on the Holocaust. We can say, in a certain sense, that notwithstanding the results of the polls, we succeeded in many fields: TV and school programs, books, studies, articles, films, journeys to Auschwitz of members of parliaments, intellectuals, journalists, the formula "never again" has created a widely accepted politically correct even among Prime Ministers and, in general, elite members.
Nobody will admit to be an antisemite in the old way, but a few lunatics. It's not fit to modern Europe, even when it comes to the right side of the politic arena, to blame the Jews because they killed Jesus; very few profess an anti-Judaic prejudice in its religious form, and even in its nationalist form, fascist or communist, that imagine that the Jews are a damage to the nation. We can find it in some European states as Hungary, Ukraine, Grece... Generally speaking, nevertheless, emphasizing right wing antisemitism as a major reason of intellectual and moral scandal, gives the liberal side of the European political spectrum the possibility of avoiding its own very serious problems and responsibilities with antisemitism. The liberals believe to be the best fighters against antisemitism, and this is simply not true. On the opposite, antisemitism, as professor Wistrich shows brilliantly in his last book, is very deeply rooted in the left wing tradition, and today it is just there, denied, yes, but quite evident in the form of Israelophobia.
Israelophobia has been finely developed and elaborated in the UN and in its agencies as the Human Rights Council, Unesco, among the NGO, in the EU institutions, and very much in the media. It's almost unbelievable how much work has been dedicated to Israelophobia: its texts, books and newspapers. It's a million page library, as heavy as the classic anti-Jewish theological and secular essays. The obsession against Israel has a major expression in the “Zionism is racism” UN resolution of 1975. The tradition of the UN hate against Israel is very important, very heavy: in 2012, 23 motions against Israel were voted in one single day, in 2013, ten. Three thirds of all the condemnations are devoted to Israel. The major international organizations rooted in the UN, like the Unesco or the Commission for Human rights, put a great effort in delegitimizing Israel. And of course their influence is great, together with the influence of the church.
In our days, 63 per cent of the Poles, 48 of the Germans, 38 of the Italians are sure that Israel is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians; the comparison to the Nazis is continuous; there are so many totally crazy antisemite accusation, from the Aftonbladet newspaper writing that the Israeli soldiers kill young Palestinians to get their organs, to Rogers Waters that preaches that "what the Israeli do to the Palestinians is like what the Jews had to suffer in the 30's Germany" and suggest that "the Israelis think that anybody who is not a Jew is on this earth to serve them". Everybody remembers the "this little shitty country" of the French ambassador in London and the British mp David Ward MP that said that "Israel should have never be created".
This constant and insisting delegitimation of Israel has nothing to do with political criticism, it is a propaganda machine which throws on Israel the worst crimes against humanity accusations, like racial discrimination, to be an apartheid, ethnic cleansing state, whatever makes a State not worth living... The reasons why Israel created what they succeeded to call the apartheid wall is a supremacist reason, just a natural outcome of the bad nature of the State of the Jews, of the collective Jew.
I would like make it clear: there is no way to defeat completely contemporary antisemitism, but we can give a tough battle. We need courage and sense of innovation for our new fight: we must move, namely, our divisions from their traditional work of denounce of traditional antisemitism to attacking directly Israelophobia. BDS, guidelines, labeling, demonstrations, accusations of racism, threats denial of the history of the Jews and their birthright to Jerusalem, international antisemite attacks in the Diaspora, attempts to stop the right of self defense, they must be treated as one and as they are: attacks to the Jewish contemporary life, to Israel and to the Diaspora altogether.
We can count on large islands of sympathy among the intellectual, the scientific, the military, the business communities. The mobilization must not focus on the memory days, but must be a request of collective response against lies in the courageous style of Canada or Australia. I want to conclude remembering the “For the Truth, for Israel” day, a speaking marathon we held in Rome in 2010, where hundreds of intellectuals, politicians, journalists, authors came to speak up the truth on Israel against its delegitimization. That was a powerful moment of fight against anti-Semitism.