https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/israelophobia-newest-form-of-the?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Antisemitism is a rotten term for the “longest hatred” that targets the Jewish people. For a start, there is no such thing as “semitism” to be “anti”.
The word “antisemitism” was invented by a 19th-century Jew-hater, Wilhelm Marr, who wanted to invest this prejudice with the spurious characteristic of race in order to appeal to a society that increasingly defined itself in scientific terms.
Today, with Jew-hatred having reached unprecedented global levels, the inadequacies of “antisemitism” are becoming ever more manifest. Many wrongly believe that it’s just another form of racism. Few understand that it’s a uniquely paranoid, deranged and murderous mindset.
Because Judaism and the Jews are so poorly understood, few recognise that this unique people is victimised by a unique prejudice. And few acknowledge that the prejudice changes shape as societies change.
Used for the sake of convenience, “antisemitism” fosters further misunderstanding over the issue of Israel. People assume that prejudice against the Jewish people is against Jews as people. Few understand that Judaism isn’t a private confessional faith as the west understands religion to be.
They don’t realise that Jewish religious identity is rooted in the land of Israel, where the Jews were historically the only people for whom it was ever their national kingdom. So they fail to grasp that Israel is at the very heart of Judaism. Denouncing the right of the Jews to the land is to attack Judaism itself.
But because “antisemitism” is associated with bigotry against Jews as people — and specifically with genocidal Nazism — individuals bridle when it’s used to describe their hostility to the State of Israel.
In other words, demonising Jews and wishing they would disappear from the world may be beyond the pale, but demonising Israel and wishing it would disappear from the world is just fine.
In his new book Israelophobia, published next week, Jake Wallis Simons takes this false distinction apart. The Jew-hatred that is now at epidemic levels throughout the west focuses overwhelmingly on the Jewish homeland
Simons, the editor of Britain’s Jewish Chronicle for which I write, does an outstanding job detailing the astounding tsunami of falsehoods, distortions, double standards and vilification engulfing Israel. Although atrocities and human rights abuses are taking place all over the world, this obsessional campaign is directed only at Israel, the sole democracy in the Middle East.
